Music Reviews

Lum, Chloe and Desranleau, Yannick – “The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum” – [No Hay Discos]

Thurston Hunger   4/23/2024   A Library, CD

Burlesque and brainy, picture a feather boa bookmark nestled in a copy of Clarice Lispector’s “Agua Viva.”
Lispector here is an imagined audience, to six sung letters. Each is sung by Sarah Albu, soprano-spanning a concert hall and jazz juke joint? Too swinging for the former, too stately for the latter? Just listen a little bit and you’ll get the flavor. The words from those letters are pinned like insect wings, pretty but they almost don’t hold together stretched over the clip-clop percussion and the high-stepping trombones and trumpets. It’s a creation/installation from Chloe Yum and Yannick Desranleau, who once upon a noisy time were 2/3 of AIDS Wolf…and if you predicted this album from that KFJC darling’s output, then you are Clarice Voyant! I think it’s a love letter of sorts to Lispector, someone forced out of Ukraine by malevolent forces (previous ones that is) and now she’s a statue seaside in Rio de Janeiro. Letter #4 swings, Letter #3
includes a dash of Brazilian spice via the cuica.
-Thurston Hunger

El Shazly, Nadah – “Damned Don’t Cry, The” – [Asadun Alay Records]

humana   4/20/2024   CD, Soundtrack

Egyptian El Shazly composes, arranges, and lends her lovely voice to this soundtrack that gets ever more melodic as the tracks go on. Contrebass and harp are the standout instruments, along with El Shazly’s voice, and by the end it is clear that Fyzal Boulifa knew what he was doing when he asked Nadah to score his film.

Inutili – “a Love Supreme” – [Aagoo Records]

humana   4/19/2024   12-inch, A Library

This psych band from Teramo, Italy offers two nice, long jams that build (“Queen Crimson” and “A Love Supreme”) interspersed with some shorter, peppier tunes (my favorite being “Walking on Your Lips”). The opener (“I’m on a Plane) has some great lyrics: “I complain I’m on a plane”, and DADADA is a nice addition to the album that verges on noisiness.

Mendoza Hoff Revels – “Echolocation” – [Aum Fidelity]

humana   4/19/2024   A Library, CD

This wonderful 2023 release of electric/avant-garde gems composed by Ava Mendoza (electric guitar) and Devin Hoff (electric bass) and performed by themselves along with James Brandon Lewis (tenor sax) and Ches Smith (drums) is fresh and skates between the jazz and rock genres. Mendoza was the driving force behind getting this experiment together, and these musicians collaborate and communicate the compositions in ways that are exciting and energetic. Read the sleeve notes as you listen so you can get the most out of how sonic communication is not just limited to bats, shrews, whales, and dolphins.

Village of Spaces – “That’s Understanding” – [Feeding Tube Records]

humana   4/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

This release from Dan Beckman with help from others (including Amy Moon and Caleb Mulkerin) is a pleasing creation of songs written in Big Sur and Santa Cruz and recorded during a pandemic quarantine. Beckman’s voice (as well as other voices) is mellow and backed by various field sounds like surf, birdsong, and other instruments like flute. My favorite tracks are “Agnes of Rainbows” and “Little Wind and Sea.” “Song for Moon” is the most active (rock-like) song on here, and it’s enjoyable, too.

SPF 1985 – “Sunburner” – [Don’t Look Down]

Cousin Mary   4/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

This fine new-to-me instrumental band from Petaluma plays around with surf sounds. Vocals are subtle and hardly noticeable. Interesting use of synths takes this music out of the usual reverb drenched tradition and gives it a full rich quality. Delighted to meet this NorCal band.

Grim, Wayne – “Electric Space Gardeners” – [Thee Obscurantist]

humana   4/14/2024   A Library, CD

Grim composed the music on this CD that is set to the text of “Electric Space Gardeners,” written by Jovi Schnell (who also drew the images on the CD cover). Majel Connery’s lovely voice takes us through the storyline on most of the tracks, which summon sparse images with cello, vibraphone, and other instruments. This is a fascinating listen.

Auditor – “Vernepator Cur” – [Black Horizons]

whngr   4/11/2024   A Library, Cassette

EPILEPTIC AURA EMULATOR

Brooding electronic ambience, intermittent percussive elements, self-harm meditations, intervals of monolithic drones, decaying digital signals, spurned canid therapy, seven horrifying angels with seven electronic trumpets heralding in this final chapter as Moloch feeds. We are drawn to these sounds like moths to flames. Looming and strange, we are a mote among colossi.

Auditor is one Brandon Elkins (Iron Forest, Emerge From The Womb Of The Earth, An Evening Redness) of Chicago, IL and has stated that Auditor was conceived as a method of exploring his depression.

Black Horizons / Sol Y Nieve – 2016

Rust Worship / Nu Sire [coll] – [Self Release]

whngr   4/11/2024   A Library, CD

ANODYNIC BIPOLAR DESTROYER 

Electronic manifestation of manic depression in two parts. The first track a hypnotic ambient bath with distant abstractions and later, a buried electronic pulse. In this pathologic analogy I bestow upon “Defeated / Intercommunicative” the role of the depressive cycle offering a stark contrast to the second track “Avoidant”, an unreasonably disjointed collapse of one’s neural network in real time; frenetic, menacing, varied and focused enough to be legitimately upsetting… unless you’re sick. 

Rust Worship is one Paul Haney of Los Angeles and operator of the Obsolete Units label.

Nu Sire is one Jason “Force Placement” James, also from L.A. Underground electronic producer, dj, and resident of The Black Lodge event collective.

Self release – 2021

Pénombre – “Grande Flamme” – [Forbidden Sonority]

whngr   4/11/2024   A Library, Cassette

CULTE DE L’OMBRE

A grim frontal assault in nine parts from northern three-piece bearing fierce countenances, a genuine underground inscrutability that maintains the proven black metal template (crust punk/d-beat lineage, rocking; not swinging) without feeling derivative. Exhibiting subtle but extremely catchy variation in sound despite moderate lack of production, their crude, emblematic, and medieval French aesthetic further drives home the clou diabolique. Trve, cvlt and wicked, this cassette is in its essence, a perfect North American black metal release from gnarled root to withered fruit.

They have recently found a new thematic direction, casting aside their former Judeo-Christian lyrical content and have further embraced the region of their birth. Including Québécois poet Émile Nelligan’s “Cœurs Blasés” (track 8/B4), a visceral perspective on the miserable fates of the frontiersman who succumbed to their own fears, we receive and understand the devotion to their home as slightly threatening.

Active in the Montréal area of Quebec, Pénombre have been sighted clad in hooded cloaks and are linked nefariously to local analog dominant label:

Forbidden Sonority – 2021