Weekend Listening
Deep roots music, jazz goes minimal, “trans-ethnic” Fourth World ritualism, neoclassical ambient, wobbly easy listening and trip hop poignancy.
I’m struggling to find time to read much about what’s going on in the world these days, and mainly because of my move to the country, coupled with my lack of free time, I have an increasingly narrow life and social focus, and that’s fine by me. It gives me more time to contemplate a permanent transition to rural, probably off-grid living, before taking the plunge.
My increasingly myopic world view has also been assisted by disengaging from social media - ditching TSMM’s Facebook and X accounts (Twitter’s remains) some years ago being particularly easy choices. I’m still clinging to Instagram, despite the fact that my steady organic follower gains are oddly resulting in steadily less engagement, as Meta tries to lure me into parting with cash to advertise TSMM’s independent and alternative music promoting passion project. Zuck, you can do one.
Saying that, if you still like a bit of social media, and I don’t judge, or you fancy downsizing and decentralising, you can find me over at Bluesky and Mastodon, where alongside my newsletter tips you’ll also find, and actually be notified about, ALL of my blog recommendations. I’m sorry to break it to my online “friends” on the platforms, but apart from posting my music finds there, I now rarely look at the “content” of others - and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I can assure you that life goes on and in fact improves in multiple ways, and your real friends are still only a phone call away, and lets face it if you haven’t got their number, they’re not your friend.
If you’re interested in exploring the intersection of tech and wellbeing, generally improving your mental health, and readjusting your initial tech choices now they’ve all become enshittified, then check out Bas Grasmayer’s Calm and Fluffy newsletter which is there to inform and assist on such matters, it’s always worth a peek.
I’m hopelessly behind on the music discovery and dissemination again this month after more quality time spent with my daughter the weekend just gone, and with longer custody periods on the summer horizon, my time pressure will be increasing, especially as I’ve just embarked on setting up a new music-related venture to try and earn some better money, and free myself from my basic yet comfortable, continually fraught, gig economy income, before it goes tits up at a moments notice, through no fault of my own.
So, and I know I’ve said this before, I’ll be transitioning to shorter reviews, but I mean it this time. With my painfully slow writing and editing speed, honed over many years of literary inactivity, and my consequent, and constant, struggle to translate my vibe-led music discovery into words, it’s just unsustainable. And although the newsletter has opened so many dusty corners of my brain, with my increasing commitments, something has to give. So I’m going to try and find a more succinct way of imparting artist info, personal thoughts, and encouraging you to hit play; which let’s face it, is when the magic happens.
Don’t sweat though, the music tips are integral to my plans moving forward.
Khôra & Mas Aya - Primordial Mind (Marionette)
In today’s AI accelerated music deluge you need all the filters you can to stay afloat and unearth the good stuff. Well curated record labels, despite becoming less necessary for artists, are still an avid music fan’s best friend. I’ve been a fan of Marionette since their monochrome inception twelve years back, and have discovered a load of, at the very least curious, and often amazing releases through them. Following them on Bandcamp is probably the way to go - you won’t regret it, it’s how I found this one.
Both artists are Toronto based: Mas Aya is the moniker of Brandon Miguel Valdivia, a Nicaraguan-Canadian composer, producer, and musician, and Khôra the pseudonym of multi-instrumentalist, producer, and writer Matthew Ramolo. On a cursory listen to their back catalogues, both have a predilection for blending outernational instrumentation, Eastern vibes and THC saturated electronica, and unsurprisingly they’ve turned up a collaborative treat.
This new album is a genre-melting tapestry, and as vivid an album as you’ll hear in a while. There’s a lot to unpick, especially for the attentive, preferably headphone clad listener, and is one of those rare albums that will keep surprising you. Polyrhythms abound - hand played, shaken and stirred, all interweaving to variously hypnotic, and imagination stirring ends. Wrapped around the “trans-ethnic”, Fourth World ritualism is just the sort of mind altering electroacoustic atmospheres to help us break free of capitalism’s shackles, and create the future we deserve. The soundscapes are dense and deviant, but pure in their message - tune in, turn on and drop out.
Masahiro Takahashi - In Another (Telephone Explosion)
We all need a bit of easy listening sometimes, obviously not that AI slop that is currently polluting the music industry, or the music-by-numbers elevator music that has steadily evolved over the decades, but, you know, an album that’s a little woozy, genuinely carefree, smooth but possibly a little parallel-dimensional, and maybe even a bit out-there on occasion. Perhaps something that gives you that feeling you had when you walked home from the pub on a summer’s night after a couple of impromptu, unexpectedly fun after-work beers in a pub garden. Remember that night? When you spotted someone across the tables, who smiled back and gave you their number? If it’s that sort of easy listening you crave, then it’s time to say hello to Japanese-born musician and producer Masahiro Takahashi.
For his latest album, he’s ditched the whimsical, new-age meets cosmic exotica that made me fall in love with his music, and called in a host of Toronto’s likely lads - including the TSMM-approved Nick Storring and Joseph Shabason, to help make all his more traditional-leaning arrangement and chamber pop dreams come true. OK, so it’s a touch schmaltzy at times, but in a perfectly acceptable, if a bit like your mum and dad’s music kinda way, and the imbued waywardness and wobblyness more than make up for any easy-listening guilt; and let’s face it, we all need a soundtrack to our wistful trips down memory lane.
Matt Gold & Dustin Laurenzi - Devotional Fade (We Jazz)
Matt Gold is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer based in Chicago, who first sprung to my attention on his great collaborative, summer-primed album with Resavoir (tip), that appeared in these pages last year. Dustin Laurenzi is a saxophonist, improviser and composer also from Chicago, and an unknown quantity to me, but he’s how firmly on my radar too. For this fresh and somewhat freaky album, they’ve found a good home on the ever-discerning We Jazz “jazz and creative music“ outlet from Finland, who are also well worth following if you are jazz-inclined.
Where to start with this album? Possibly by throwing your traditional notions of jazz out of the window and opening your mind. Stemming from a month of weekly, recorded improvised sessions and a promise that editing would be kept to a minimum, Gold handled rhythmic duties using a great-sounding vintage drum machine, a host of global percussion and an admirable dedication to bass-induced hypnosis. Laurenzi was kept equally busy on saxophone, clarinet and synths - free-blowing ditched in favour of a repetitive, mantric approach to better further the duo’s sacred minimal mission. It’s a great listen which somehow manages to encompass new-age stargazing, Afro-ritualism, spiritual jazz, skittering galactic transmissions, extra-terrestial enounters, cosmic wonderment and Ethio-homages. In that order.
Deaf Center - Through Time (Sonic Pieces)
Deaf Center are Norwegian duo Erik K Skodvin - now resident in Berlin, who apart from various monikers and collaborations, also composes soundtracks and finds time to run the reputable Miasmah label, plus a gallery, and Otto A Totland, a self-taught pianist with admirably wide influences that he somehow manages to squeeze into his dusky, minimal tendencies.
They’ve been floating around my radar for a while, which, being as they’ve been producing ambient music for over twenty years to great acclaim, is understandable. I never really took the bait though; perhaps it’s their tendency to plough a course through somewhat more traditional-sounding ambient avenues - by that I mean space-inspired and droning, and not the more delicate, fanciful, electroacoustic works I tend towards. But, after hitting play on their latest offering, they’ve finally won me round.
I’m still classing this album as “more traditional ambient” (discuss), but boy don’t they do it well, and this one in particular is a real exploration of the ambient condition. From stately, gravity-free, score-like pieces to piano showcasing minimalism via haunting, low-end rumbling modern compositions, string-infused navel gazing, glitching orchestral drama and cinematic grandeur. It’s quite the voyage.
Philippe Lamiral Poirier & Roméo Poirier - Images Parlées (Self Release)
Ooof, this is a poignant one. Obviously, there have been quite a few familial collaborations in musical history, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head credited to a son and his recently deceased father. Startling premise aside, the music jumped out at me as a great listen even before I’d read the liner notes, but now it’s taken on a whole new dimension.
Roméo Poirier will be familiar to early subscribers and is a widely recognised and rightly lauded drummer turned leftfield downtempo producer, but I wasn’t aware he was following in his father, Philippe Lamiral Poirier’s creative footsteps; who was a multi-disciplinary artistic soul who flitted between painting, filmmaking, set design, guitar and sax playing.
The album is a spoken word affair consisting of presumably Poirier Snr’s voice reading from his own texts, and oh, don’t those vocals sound good. It’s a a cliché, but there’s a truth that the French accent is one of the world’s most sensual, especially when spoken and intimately recorded, although, whisper it, a soft Welsh accent tops it.
Unsurprisingly, Roméo pulls out all the stops with the production - think your favourite nineties trip-hop album, then double the listenability and production values. It’s a future past treasure, samples of old recordings - perhaps from his dad’s collection or family favourites, get chopped and precision placed amongst low-lit basement bar electronica - the sort of place with comfortable mix-and-match furniture, no windows, candles on the table, an orange light behind the bar and whiskies you’ve never heard of. Unhurried beats usher the voice through the speakers, and sometimes on a whim go missing. Chanson gets a nod, and so does hip hop, jazz and the blues, whilst soundtrack moments from classic Parisian cinema flash into view, lighting the French proto-hipster heading to a gallery opening, as beatniks with more balls head to the absinthe bar. It’s as fine a farewell as a son could say to a father, and a celebration of a life that sounds like it was well-lived. A book of his paintings, Images traversées, will also be published simultaneously with the album.
”In this continual back and forth movement between text and image, music has always been present – sensitive and abstract, expressing nothing other than itself. It hollows out a place to tell us where we are. It is life without delay.”
Buffalo Kin - Vaquera (Self Release)
Buffalo Kin are a real deal folk duo comprising of composer and country-got-soul vocals of singer Katelyn Eisenhooth, alongside Seth Brewster’s gravely, real deal, weather-worn, stoic yet gentle bluesman tones; and you should also know that he plays a mean banjo and cello. They’re two old souls trapped in this forward marching, apparently progressive world, which they’re trying their best to ignore in rural Oregon, whilst creating folk-fluid homages which nod to the varied roots of American folk music: from the blues through to the Anglo influences that stemmed from Appalachia, and everything in between.
Vaquera is their first, home-recorded release of original material, and it’s a still undiscovered gold seam in the vast, wide-open folk landscape. There’s nothing new here, just how they, and now I, like it. This is timeless roots music that unashamedly draws from the “Old West and the sentiments of cowfolk from a bygone era.“, and even though there’s been two hundred and fifty years of American folk music, these two can hold their heads high during any of the periods they’re nodding to. This is deep roots music, with heart and soul.
Messages From the Blog:
Here’s a quick round-up of some of the single and EP gems that I’ve been fortunate to discover recently:
Anna Phoebe - Midnight Sessions (Eat The Peach)
Some artists can seemingly do it all, and the violin virtuoso, composer, producer, performer, and broadcaster Anna Phoebe is right up near the head of the table. Although, as with most classical musicians, she’s comfortable in somewhat stuffier orchestral realms, she seems more at home exploring the endless possibilities of her ancient instrument by collaborating with artists from different genres, exploring the modern condition via bowed strings, and pushing electroacoustic boundaries with some decidedly forward-looking, electronic and experimental fusions, that have seen her teaming up with fellow sonic seer Mary Anne Hobbs. If that wasn’t enough, she also composes music for screens of varying size, co-hosts a national radio show and tours all over the world.
Phoebe’s latest release, the Midnight Sessions EP, is a curiously Bandcamp-only release, with currently only Midnight Sessions II (Unravel) being widely available on streaming - all the more reason to tune in to the burgeoning Bandcamp underground, and sees her at her progressive best.
The EP leaves the classical tropes and tired homages to long-dead composers at the electronic studio door, ignores the musician’s union staffing advice, and instead dusts off the digital workstation to go on a solo mission to float her largely abstract string sounds into the world on a bed of graceful ambient creations. The aptly entitled “Between Worlds” eases us out of this tiring and tired world, into rarefied but still earthly connected ambient territory, the violin just beholden by gravity and in recognisable, if minimal and elongated, forms. The, again well-named, “Unravel” then continues to unwind the instrument’s more familiar sounds into fleeting nods to the past that initially spiral upwards and outwards in gaseous eruptions before assisting the electronic engines with some cinematic thrust, as the EP breaks through the atmosphere, revelling in the now gravity-free surrounds and gradually building in intensity.
“Divergence” is a melancholic affair, the strings seemingly homesick for friends, family, and familiarity, but the electronic brain gently reminding her that escaping the overheating planet was the only course of action. “Submerged” is the point of no return; our intrepid adventurer now immersed, quite possibly lost, in deep ambient space; the violin seemingly forgotten, or at least processed beyond recognition, replaced by a space-siren-like voice in the distance for social comfort. Finally, the EP arrives at a new “Dawn”: uncharted territory traversed and introspection, doubt and regret suddenly replaced with hope for the future, as a water and air-blessed, verdant planet, warmed by two suns, comes into view; a happy ending to this accomplished ambient neoclassical voyage.
Sophya - Malha (Self Release)
“But hold tight, the quartet somehow manage to nimbly slip into sedate jazz fusion territory, each player subtly stretching out within the song's astral soul shell, eschewing ego to maintain the song's velvety texture and tender tones, whilst nudging at the boundaries of ambient jazz.“
S. Salter - Sunday In Bloom (Plusha)
“It's as holistic and soothing a slice of ambient piano as you'll find this year“
Evan Crommett feat. LURO -Holding Gray (Self Release)
“Self sabotage never sounded so good.“
Nana Osei Twum Barima - Message to my Ancestors (Zephyrus)
“The first thing that strikes you on hitting play is the deeply soulful Ghanaian vocals with an ancestral echo that glide through the speakers, ushered by a distant throb and most surprisingly a guiding sitar light from Nicolas Mortelmans.“
Don’t Forget TSMM’s Playlists and Podcast.
From ambient sound baths and wellness imbuing new age vibes to underground house via jazz, neoclassical, folk, dub and more, the twenty one TSMM playlists and podcast cover a lot of ground, and are updated regularly.
They’re available on Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, Youtube Music, Youtube, Deezer, Soundcloud and Spotify (if you don’t worry about them not paying most of the artists on the playlists).
Thanks you for an interesting selection of tracks/artists I am new to- and your text is equally informative. You don’t have to love them all but that’s the joy of the unexpected. Great stuff.