Five Star Review: Bessie Jones with the Georgia Island Singers - Get in Union: Recordings By Alan Lomax 1959-1966

Handclaps and vocals. You have real talent, real soul, and everything else is redundant. My opinion that gospel (traditional black gospel, according to RYM, which knows little about it and even less about any other kind) possessed (or possesses) an integrity and sublimity that very little other music can touch has recently been solidified by my (re)discovery that Mississippi Records' vintage gospel compilation In the Storm So Long simply might just hit me the hardest and take me furthest heavenwards of the I-don't-even-like-to-think-about-the-number records I've mostly wasted time with in my life. But we're not hear to talk about that unparalleled soul-scorcher.

So, Bessie Jones. This is some good music. Like it just is so self-evidently wholesome and worthwhile pointing that out seems redundant. One wants to call it "raw" but "raw" implies danger, potential for e. coli, and this music is so sweet and kind. One wants to call it "minimalist" but that brings to mind, unbidden, Glass' ass and Part's farts, and we don't need to taint this beautiful music with those images. The appeal of this compilation lies in great part with the fact that it honest-to-Goddess slaps: listen to "Moses Don't Get Lost." That's an unreserved, 100% true club banger as sure as Lil Jon says YEAH. Yeah. Handclaps and stomping? More like the world's first 808. It's literally too much for the microphones to take: blowed-out gospel folk. What a time to be alive.

Sometimes it's somberer than that: "Got to Lie Down (How Shall I Rise)" consists of one plaintive voice and a barely audible foot-tap that add up to an effect similar to the legendary triangle in Blind Mamie Forehand's "Honey in the Rock" (which'll scratch your Blind Willie J. and MazzaCath itches simultaneously.) Occasionally there's a banjo or penny whistle (both on "Beulah Land!") which just make the whole thing even more ebullient. And then there's the cultural angle! These are the children and grandchildren of the enslaved - these songs have provenance! And they can be so strange - I wish I had all the lyrics of "Uncle Ned" or "Turkle Dove" (not a typo) to post.

One thing I love about this music is how many songs are sung in a cadence reminiscent of my (racist white) nana singing while she hung wash or cooked Sunday dinner or sang me to sleep and coming just a few days after the first anniversary of her death, it's weirdly comforting to hear echoes of her from this radically different source.

If you wonder if two disks of this stuff might be too much, just sample "Sheep Sheep Don't You Know the Road" and if that makes you anything less than utterly giddy, then it will probably prove too much for you. Makes me giddy, though!

Five Star Review: Fe-Mail - Blixter Toad

First off, I want to say that, as far as albums with frogs with breasts on their covers go, this is way better than that Boris dronesnooze.

Also, if you were wondering, it sounds nothing like Phylomedusa and it isn't just uncomfortably weird like that, either, so no need to be worried. This album is weird, certainly, but to me at least, it isn't even slightly uncomfortable.

It's a noise album, sure (maybe), but it isn't harsh, it's just creative. Immensely, stupendously so, and exceptionally satisfying and listenable for such experimental music.

Perhaps it's because of their extensive backgrounds in free jazz and improv (and modern classical and drone...), or perhaps because they're neither Japanese dada nihil pranksters nor white supremacist proto-MRAs with a serial killer fetish, but Maja S. K. Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord approach noise from a totally different angle than virtually anyone I've heard in the scene. It's playful! It's colorful! It actually out-dadas the Japanese nihil pranksters because it sounds like these ladies would totally go around shouting irrational poetry while dressed as lobsters! The album follows a vaguely amphibian theme but it mostly exists as a loose framework on which to lovingly toss all sorts of unnatural sounds, be they produced by human voice, electronics, french horn maybe or a human voice through a french horn processed by electronics! 

If, in the late-70s and early-80s, noise and industrial seemed like a total refutation of everything music and art and society stood for, and thus meant total freedom, they rapidly got codified and impressed their own rigid sort of code, limiting and herding self-expression to a great extent (in)to certain acceptable modes. OF COURSE, I basically just described the entire concept of "genre" and it's not like I don't love and appreciate tons of "traditional" harsh noise and even HNW, but it's hard for me to see Blixter Toad, with its cheery green anthroamphibian cover and chiptune and music box elements as anything other than two bad-ass chicks trying to put a little of that freedom and even danger back into noise by daring to inject a little levity, some dynamics, and theatricality-in-a-NOT-punching-glass-with-your-face-or-wearing-plastic-bags-over-your-head-way, into noise, and maybe even a little danger, because serial killers and genocide are beyond banal by now and banal isn't dangerous, while being a woman in an overwhelming not just male but frequently violently hypermasculine field is, well, literally dangerous. This approach is not entirely unprecedented (lord knows we've all heard that Kazumoto Endo album by now) and maybe I'm a poseur, maybe I let my ghost y-chromosome get in the way of my thinking rationally, or/and maybe I'm just a sucker for a good double album, but I can't help but take Blixter Toad as a sort of living manifesta, as propaganda of the deed, as theory transmogrified into praxis, as showing the way by doing the thing that needs doing. It's both inspiring and awe-inspiring. It's also just a really fun, exciting, rewarding listen.    

Basically:
It drones, it clanks, it chops and dices sound into confetti and sprinkles it across the room, it frightens, it challenges, it teases, it pleases, it cheeses, it Jeezus, it plonks, it Blonks, it skronks, it wonks, it's divisive, it's insightsive, it's incredible, it's inedible, it's monstrous, it's weirdly human, it sometimes sounds like Pazuzu possessing Donald Duck and sometimes sounds like Tangerine Dream, it's bizarre as fuck, it's fun as shit, it doesn't care AT ALL what you think of it, but it's easy to love if you're so inclined, it's may even be the best double album of all time that isn't by Tantra, Beefheart or Betty Carter and it might be better than some of those! Yeah I went there!

Five Star Review: Various Artists - Musical Instruments 7 - Guitar 2

There's obviously an infinite number of things that have been or could be said about the power of music to erase boundaries and bring disparate peoples together, however briefly or facilely, and all that shit but fuck sometimes (to quote the Bard) you really can't kick that feeling when it hits and as bogus as the concept of "empowering" art may be, the right music can be a balm to the burns that life leaves us with, even on a massive scale. I have no idea what this has to do with anything.

One thing I like about this comp, unlike so many old "world (gag me with a spoon) music" releases (and too many of those today) is that even though Hugh Tracey gets the overall album artist nod the musicians are fully credited and not just "Village Elder of Whatever Tribe" or, christ, "A Young Girl," when it's clearly a grown woman fronting an entire orchestra. No, that's George Sibanda melting away all of your sadness with vox and guitar on "Guabi, Guabi," and don't you forget it.

You hear a lot of talk about "African blues" these days because white people are terrified of things that aren't directly analogous to things they're already familiar with, and while the accuracy of using that term to describe Tizita or Tishoumaren is highly debatable, that's exactly what is found on this utterly indispensable gem of a compilation published in 1972 on Kaleidophone.

The unwieldily and unmemorably titled Musical Instruments 7 - Guitars 2 collects 12 impeccable displays of unadorned melodic wizardry from across the mother continent, in an acoustic mode that should be mostly familiar to those on good terms with, idk, Blind Blake or, say, Josh White, but not without its own Afro-flourishes (oh and there's an 'ud solo tacked on the end for some reason, despite 'ud not... being... guitar?). One thing that sets it apart from American blues is that the majority of this, regardless of the lyrics, be they in Swahili or Luba-Kasai, at least SOUND happy - ebullient, even. There's tons of variety within the one-or-more-person-singing-with-one-guitar-and-sometimes-percussion milieu and honestly all 12 songs bang relentlessly and glide sweetly along. Well, maybe not the 'ud solo...

I honestly prefer the best tracks here, which is most of them, to virtually any of the American music they so obviously take queues from - its fresh, hypnotic, gorgeous, gentle grooves demand repeat listens and command smiles to appear on even the severest faces. What a force for good in the world.

Five Star Review: Ravindra Goswami - Live 2004.02.16

I don't rightfully know where I came across this. There are multiple spellings of our mystery-ish musician's name (Rabindra Goswami) and there's at least one much more famous person, an endocrinologist, with the same name. Multiple minutes spent googling this delectable treat in "raga" led me to the certainty that it's a bootleg (the audience coughing throughout initially pushed me in that direction, truthfully) and, if I wasn't listening to it right now, would also have led me to believe it didn't exist. This one's not on RYM, and they're not going to let it on RYM, guise.

As for the music, I'm pretty sure it's just solo sitar for the first half, with the addition of tabla for the second and I have no idea why it resonates with me this much. It's easily in the top three or so pieces of Hindustani or Carnatic music I've yet to hear, but I really lack the vocabulary and context to access why the fiddly-bits in this part make me ecstatic and those deep THWONKS later on make my bowels levitate. But then if one needs theory to appreciate music, then I'm almost equally at a loss to explain my love of Cecil Taylor or Carly Rae Jepsen (except I'm obviously not.)

The album (bootleg?) is one long live track, "Pancham-Malkauns," with a clear division between the two tunes, it's a minute over forty minutes, and it just rings my cells like bells. I hope this isn't Orientalist, but I imagine the music as some kind of Star Trek/Korra science-magic purification device being slowly drawn over my body and removing all the nasty build-ups and hang-ups and poison from my being, like instant auditory detox. I think basically the same thing about Baby Dee's music, but this doesn't have the inexhaustible well of infinite sorrows that her music draws from. The "Malkauns" half honestly bangs like a mofo - it's dancier than most dance and funkier than a lot of funk, but it still gives off gobs of goodwill and hope and stuff. Every zing! and fruuuum! and tot-tot! flies straight and true to your ears as messengers of both peace and kick-ass. FIVE STAR SHIT.

   

great southern jazzfart

hedvig mollestad is mary halvorson if she was a pupil of dimebag darrell rather than anthony braxton. music doesn't get much worse, probably.

e: it just dawned on me that this should've been titled "great NORTHERN jazzfart" whatevs