Rapunzel & Sedayne - Outlaws

 

 

It’s no secret that I am partial to a bit of old time folk music: it’s the sound of many a campfire singalong, a narrative tradition of music that is participatory rather than merely made for an audience to consume. And I love to discover new folk that dwells on old time tunes but with new arrangements, new harmonies and new stories to tell. I fell for Rapunzel and Sedayne as soon as I heard them on Soundcloud, a gorgeous duo clammering away on a variety of exotic instruments to create subtly haunting tunes that sound as relevant and wonderful today as their influences.

Can you tell us a bit about your life up to now? It sounds most intriguing. For example how did you come to fall in love with folk music, and what other things have you done before this album?


Rapunzel: I’ve always loved singing since I was a child – influenced by my dad who is a great harmony singer himself, but not musically trained so he made sure my sister and I got music lessons early on. I started piano at six, but far from being a child prodigy I hated it and really only started understanding music in my late teens when I stopped trying to read it and started listening to what I was playing. There is an annual folk festival in my home town and I remember seeing the likes of Fred Jordan, Jim Eldon, Peter Bellamy and June Tabor who all had an influence on me as I was growing up. In my late teens and twenties I did the singer-songwriter thing with my guitar, but in recent years and by working with Sean I have got back in touch with the old folk songs.


Sedayne: Folk was part of the zeitgeist of my childhood. Everything from Dr. Who and Catweazle to Strawbs, Gentle Giant and the Third Ear Band and a shelf load of books on folksong and folklore most of which are now entirely discredited but still mean a lot to me. It was integral to the landscapes in which I grew up – ballads and legends and bagpipes – all of which informed my own approach and most crucially in the areas I explore with Rachel. We’ve done a number of projects over the years from experimental music with Martin Archer to neo-folk tracks on various compilation albums such as Infernal Proteus and three volumes of John Barleycorn Reborn. We’ve just done a song on the subject of Werewolves for a project in Sweden – it is an exquisite facsimile of a 19th century study of Werewolves in Swedish folklore with a disk of specially composed songs. Think Porcupine meets Being Human…

Sedayne, I understand that you are a specialist in ancient and traditional instruments, and on this album you play kemence, violin, crwth, flute and kaossilator. I don’t know what three of those are, can you tell us more about them and the sounds they make?


Sedayne: At the high end is the kemence from Turkey – also known as the Black Sea Fiddle. It’s small, extremely versatile and ideal for the music we do. At the bottom end is the crwth – a medieval bowed-lyre that was made for me in 1983 by Tim Hobrough (long before the current crwth revival I might add) so it’s a big part of my musical life and thinking. In the middle is the violin – which is an extension of both in a way, though people say I play the violin like a crwth and the crwth like a violin. I was playing crwth and kemence long before I got into the violin, which Rachel insisted upon when she got into the banjo some years ago. The banjo and violin make good bedfellows. The Kaossilator is a looping phrase synthesizer from Korg that replaces the tyranny of the keyboard with a X-Y pad because it’s primarily designed for DJs! it’s also the size of a decent slice of toast. Along with an electric Shruti box, we use it for loops, drones and washes.

You’re a couple – did the music or the romance come first and how does it inform the way that you work? 


Rapunzel:  We were friends for several years before we became a couple. We met at the Durham City Folk Club which at that time was at The Colpitts. It was a golden age for that club in terms of harmony singing and it’s true that Sean and I were communicating through singing together long before we had a conversation. 


Sedayne: Rachel’s musicality had always impressed me and she always did amazing things. It’s odd but the only time we really row together is when we’re working on music. Maybe that’s why we do it? It’s a natural catharsis that always gives rise to something because Rachel is invariably right anyway. We always record live – in real time, no multitracking, which is part of that energy too.

You have quite an old fashioned folk sound. What are your influences and how do you think you differ from those influences or include elements of them?


Rapunzel: Melodically and vocally my influences probably come from the artists I’ve listened to most: Jane Siberry, Judee Sill, Laura Nyro, Tori Amos, David Bowie. But the old songs are lyrically so much more straightforward, telling a story, reporting an event, simple but effective imagery, no hidden meanings, and that is what I love about them. 


Sedayne: The songs are the main influence. I keep saying that we’re not trying to breathe new life into them so much as draw new life from them. It’s a cultural communion as much as it is about doing something in our way, or being deliberately idiosyncratic, though people say we are, but we’re not conscious of that. It’s an old thing as you say, but so is language, baking bread and sex. Most of time we’re listening to pop or classical or early music or jazz or tuning into Tim Westwood but when it comes to doing our own thing it tends towards something pretty archaic to most ears – even folk ears, because we’re less interested in revival conventions than we are more ancient and traditional forms. It’s folk art basically; rugged, earthy and hand-crafted.

How important is the folk scene in Lancashire to your process? And are there any folk clubs or meet ups or festivals that you recommend a visitor should go to?


Rapunzel: Strangely enough I didn’t start performing until I left Lancashire, having neither the confidence nor the encouragement. But settling back home, and particularly singing and playing with the Preston Club has helped to make this album what it is.


Sedayne: The Preston Club is the Holy of Holies for us as far as the local Folk Scene goes. It’s very small though. Not select, just awkward as far as audiences or visitors go. I think of it more of a master-class where we can bask in the genius of musicians like Hugh O’Donnell, Tom Walsh, Neil Brook and Dave Peters although what we do is very different to what they do. We do things at the Fylde Folk Festival either just as ourselves or working on projects with other artists, like Ross Campbell and local song-writer Ron Baxter who has an approach we quite like. We’ve only been in Lancashire for four years though – so I don’t think we identify that much with the local scene which I get the impression hasn’t changed in fifty years, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing just Rachel and I are both essentially nomads with itchy feet. We’ve lived in Worth Abbey, Brancepeth Castle, Durham City, the Deerness Valley, Lytham Saint Annes, Lancaster… I’m amazed and disturbed that you can live in a place for over four years and still be regarded – and resented – as a newcomer. After four years I’m thinking – where next?


How did you choose the old songs that you covered? have they been much loved for years or were they specially sourced for the album?


Rapunzel: The Max Hunter archive – an online resource from Missouri State University – is particularly important. I love the songs of Ollie Gilbert that feature on there. Silver Dagger and Diver Boy are from her singing.


Sedayne: We spend a lot of time browsing old field recordings and archives. I always think it’s best that you let the songs choose you, that way they’re easier to learn, they don’t resist you. A lot of those songs we’ve been singing since we met, like Poor Old Horse which I got off Jim Eldon twenty years ago or more. That’s the thing I really remember Rachel singing on before we talked to each other. Her harmony was the most amazingly different thing in an otherwise normal Folk club chorus, so over the years we’ve kept evolving that feel in terms of how our voices work together. I don’t think anyone can own a song, but you have your own way of doing it which is what a song is – it becomes a vehicle to help you find your own voice, which is what you hear from the old singers anyway – a gladsome diversity of an infinity of approaches. Contrary to a lot of Folk thinking, there’s no right or wrong here, and what happens happens. We also improvise a lot, so things change, and always for the better. I must stress that, because we’re doing songs now that I used to do years ago but they’ve never sounded better than they do now even though to some people the old ones will always be best, which is absurd. New fruit is always best I find…

In Porcupine in October Sycamore there are all sorts of incidental sounds including ducks and a dog barking to the beat – what informed your choice to include these kind of sounds?


Rapunzel: What sounds like a dog is more likely a goose. The version with wildfowl is on the Soundcloud rather than the album version.


Sedayne: The field recordings are of diverse wild-fowl from Blackpool Zoo – where the Porcupines live who inspired us to make that song, which is an old-fashioned sounding song about the sorts of non-native elements we embrace as our cultural whole. I was born a multi-cultural UK – I’m a product of that, and I cherish it very dearly. In the local Folk Scene you routinely hear songs in which it is lamented that that the local fish & chip shop is now a Chinese takeaway. I despair at times, I really do. The best thing someone said about Porcupine was that they thought it was a Rudyard Kipling poem set to music by Peter Bellamy. Maybe they were confusing Porcupines with Armadillos?  

 

In real life you are known as Rachel McCarron and Sean Breadin. Where do your pseudonyms Rapunzel and Sedayne come from?


Sedayne: Rapunzel got her name from a song she sang when we first met. No one knew her name at the time and in the song she sings Call Me Rapunzel, so we did, and the name stuck, even with people who knew her anyway. Sedayne comes from Brian Sedane which is a very old anagram of my given name. I don’t know how or when it acquired the Y or at which point I lost the Brian. There’s no mystical thing here, it’s just random. The best anagram of Sean Breadin is Insane Beard.


Rapunzel: I think Rapunzel was the second song I wrote, when I was 19. Still sing it occasionally.


Sedayne: You can hear Rapunzel on Rachel’s myspace page, along with Sarah Sometimes, another song about naming. People always call Rachel ‘Sarah’; it’s one of these weird things that’s happened all her life, so she wrote a song about her imaginary alter-ego. You can also hear my folk:funk remix ‘Sarah Sometimes’ which reveals some of our other sensitivities. Someone even called her Sarah on the phone the other day! Maybe we’ll do Rapunzel on the next album as people have expressed bafflement over the name, or think it’s in some way contrived (in Folk? Heaven forefend!) but Rapunzel & Sedayne is what we call ourselves because that’s what people call us anyway, and no-one could pronounce Venereum Arvum, which is the name we use for our darker projects, without making it sound like a social disease. We did our last album Pentacle of Pips of Venereum Arvum (download it on bandcamp) and are releasing Fire and Hemlock as Venereum Arvum (on vinyl) in the new year. The name means Field of Pleasure – an erotic metaphor from Sir Richard Burton‘s translations of The Sportive Epigrams of Priapus from ancient Rome.

Your music is described as ‘haunting’ and I’ve certainly had it on repeat since I first received it. How do you hope that it will be enjoyed and what do you hope its effect might be on people?


Sedayne: The songs are haunting in themselves and the music we make comes from the songs. Some people see that as being weird and esoteric but we’re really just a husband and wife Folk ‘n’ Fun duo even though we like the spookier Gothic side of things which is there in spades in the old ballads and songs of ceremony. We love MR James and Diana Wynne Jones and Phil Rickman and HP Lovecraft but it’s essential to keep things in perspective regarding what they actually are, or what their actual function might be. People hearing us doing The Gower Wassail (for example) might think it’s a very occult or pagan song, but when you go to the source (the great Phil Tanner – check him out!) you’ll find it’s nothing of the sort. These things run pretty deep though and people relate to them on all sorts of levels, which is fine by us.


Will you be touring this album at all and what next in general for Rapunzel and Sedayne?


Rapunzel: We’re always finding and developing new old songs, and some new new ones, so we’re already trying to reduce the longlist for the next album.


Sedayne: We’ve been featuring a lot of those songs in our repertoire for a while now – as Rachel says we’re always evolving new songs and revisiting old ones, so our shows are always a mix of whatever it is we’re up to at any given time. We’ve got some gigs coming up in November & December which will feature a mix of things from the Barley Temple album as well certain inevitable Seasonal Material you’ll find on the Soundcloud site nearer the time. We’re playing at the Kit & Cutter club in London on 3rd December, the Kirkby Fleetham Folk Club on the 19th of November, and The Chase Folk Club in Staffordshire on the 2nd of December.  We’re also doing a session for Radio Shropshire on 23rd of October for Genevieve Tudor‘s folk programme. We have this thing of Singing the Calendar Round, but I like the fact that Songs from the Barley Temple has been called ‘The ideal October album‘ (by Stewart Lee in the Sunday Times no less) because one thing about the old songs is that they bring you home in a way – home to the hearth, the orchard, as the days get shorter and year darkens. These things are no longer literal – they’re part of a mythic idyll and that’s a very ancient which we still feel today, even if I do find notions of the viscera of pagan sacrificial victims living on in Christmas Tree decorations a little far-fetched, it still gives you a notion of continuity and of home, and belonging, which (getting back to the previous question) is maybe something we like to share with our audiences and listeners, but I bet (and hope) no one feels it in exactly the same way.

From: https://ameliasmagazine.com/music/an-interview-with-rapunzel-and-sedayne-on-the-release-of-new-album-songs-from-the-barley-temple/2011/10/05/

 

 

Lighthouse - Take It Slow (Out In The Country)

Recognized as one of the best performing acts of their time, Lighthouse toured 300 days a year including sold out performances at Carnegie Hall, the Fillmore East, Fillmore West, Expo ‘70 in Japan and the Isle of Wight Festival in England. Lighthouse caused such a stir at the Isle of Wight, that thy were the only act asked to perform twice among acts that included The Doors, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, The Who and Chicago. Back home, their free concerts at Toronto’s Nathan Philips Square attracted one hundred thousand people.  Indeed, it’s hard to find a person who lived in Canada through the 1970s who didn’t see the group live. They were Canada’s band.
The emergence of Cancon (Canadian  content regulations) influenced by Skip Prokop and Paul Hoffert’s historic appearances before Parliament, allowed the music of Canadians to be heard across the country. Riding the wave, Lighthouse originated the cross-Canada rock tour, playing every major and minor venue across the country. Devoted audiences from province to province took pride in seeing one of their own make it to the top. But let’s start at the beginning…
In the early sixties, drummer Skip Prokop, was a fixture of the Toronto Yorkville Village scene, with his band The Paupers.  Managed initially by Bernie Finkelstein, they soon attracted the attention of super-manager Albert Grossman  (Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band, Gordon Lightfoot) who landed them a lucrative recording deal that resulted in a top-10 hit in 1966. Skip left the band in ‘68 and became a renowned studio musician, recording with Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana, Peter, Paul & Mary, Mike Bloomfield and Ian & Sylvia among many others.
He was performing his last gig with the Paupers when he ran into Paul Hoffert, a hot young Canadian musician who was in New York working on his off-Broadway musical 'Get Thee to Canterbury'. Paul Hoffert was already an accomplished film composer, arranger and performer who had released his first jazz album at the age of sixteen. On the side, he helped develop one of the first synthesizers at the National Research Council while finishing his degree in Maths, Physics and Chemistry at the University of Toronto.
The next day, by remarkable coincidence, they were seated together on their flight back to Toronto. Skip told him about his idea of putting together a new rock band that combined a jazz quartet, string quartet and rock rhythm section. Intrigued, Paul replied, "If you're going to do it, and you're going to do it in Toronto, call me". And the rest is history.
Skip immediately recruited another musician, guitarist Ralph Cole, whose playing chops he'd admired while passing through Detroit with The Paupers. He convinced Ralph to quit his band, Thyme, pack up all his belongings and leave Kalamazoo, Michigan for Toronto. Ralph arrived  eager to play some dates. But Prokop hadn’t told him that the band was not yet assembled, that songs had not been written, and that there was no money available until the first gig. Ralph had to move in with Skip’s parents for several months before he could afford his own place.
As the weeks went by, the concept began to take shape. They assembled a group drawn from friends, studio musicians and Toronto Symphony Orchestra members - the long hairs met the longhairs - to record a six song demo.  Lush strings, jazzy horn lines and four-part vocal harmonies added to wailing guitar, funky B3 organ and a liberal dose of psychedelia made up the early Lighthouse sound.  The result was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before - a combination of driving rock rhythms, exciting jazz improvisational solos, and soaring orchestral arrangements. Hardly your average three-minute pop tune. 
On the advice of friend, folk legend Richie Havens, they took the demo to MGM Records in New York City.Twenty minutes later they had a record deal and a thirty thousand dollar advance. Two days later they had a manager – Vinnie Fusco from Albert Grossman’s office. Now all they had to do was put together a performing band. Lighthouse made its live debut at Toronto’s Rock Pile on May 14, 1969, introduced by none other than Duke Ellington who succinctly stated, "I'm beginning to see the Light…house." Their second gig  was at Carnegie Hall. Not a bad beginning!
Their Manager, Vinnie Fusco, brought them to New York to record their first album at the fabled Electric Ladyland Studios. They were in the middle of one of their sessions when Fusco cheerily popped in to announce that he had just signed the band to a hot deal with RCA records for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was a bit of a shock to Skip and Paul who had already signed with MGM. Fusco didn’t break a sweat as he brokered a backroom deal between the two companies. This was the sixties after all: shit happened!
The next year was magical as they continued to expand their horizons. They played with the Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and Philadelphia Symphonies as well as the Cincinnati Philharmonic. Based on this experience, Ralph Cole recommended the Edmonton Symphony to Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker who was interested in a similar project. The resulting recording led to the biggest selling album of that British band’s career (Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra). Another milestone of this period was the creation of Ballet High, the world's first rock ballet, a collaboration between Lighthouse and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It debuted at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre in July of 1970, then swept the nation with standing-room-only performances across Canada.
Lighthouse was riding high, performing to packed houses that greeted them with open-mouthed delight. The only thing they lacked was a hit single. These were the days before album rock and there was little room on the AM radio dial for eight-minute songs featuring violin and trombone solos. Despite the growing legion of fans and sold-out concerts, their first three albums had mediocre sales. They were at a crossroads and about to lose their recording contract with RCA.
Enter Bob McBride. His distinctive voice was the catalyst the band needed to enter its next phase. Jimmy Ienner, fresh from his success with Eric Carmen’s hits, signed on as producer, honing the band’s new commercial sound. Prokop took over the majority of the songwriting chores, simplifying the sound and making the songs more radio friendly. The result was the number one album and single, One Fine Morning.  From: http://www.lighthouserockson.com/history.html

Betty Moorer - It's My Thing

Singer originally from Birmingham, AL who rose to popularity while based in Milwaukee, WI and Chicago, IL. In 1957, she helped found the R&B vocal group, Betty Moorer and the Esquires--later shortened to The Esquires following Betty's departure.  From: https://www.discogs.com/artist/277273-Betty-Moorer

Jeavestone - Human Games

Jeavestone from Finland have made their fourth album, over five years since the previous one, 1+1=OK. The core line-up has come down to a quartet after the departure of the flautist Angelina Galactique (this band uses fancy pseudonyms) who however appears as one of the many guests here. The band's distinctive style has remained the same: it is eclectic and sometimes quite edgy approaching heavy elements, very extrovert and in a way happy, full of rock'n'roll spirit, which sharply separates it from those Finnish prog bands who favour influences from the 70's Finnish prog/jazz-rock (and perhaps also melancholic feelings if they feature any vocals). Discordia is perhaps the closest domestic comparison to Jeavestone; concerning also the vocal harmonies, their Eclectic Prog is easier to compare to modern American and Swedish prog bands from Spock's Beard to Beardfish or even Moon Safari.
The brief opener 'Another' is a piano-centred little song with those mentioned vocal harmonies. 'Repiphany' is one of the album's highlights. For the first 50 seconds one might think of vintage pop/rock such as The Kinks (Jim Goldworth's voice is slightly similar to Ray Davies') and then, a sudden in-your-face burst of adrenalin, and what you have is a gorgeously rolling prog rocker with a dose of Beach Boys. The slightly heavier title track is equally full of energy, and the guesting violin & viola give it a Kansas flavour while also the powerful vocals remind me of Steve Walsh.
'Aurora Borealis Man' is at first plain reggae music, which is an amusing change of direction, but the short rap section in the middle is less welcome (I personally hate rap music...). On the next song there's again a hint of the late 60's pop (Beatles, Kinks), the arriving vocal harmonies are like early Yes, but I dislike the aggressively sung chorus. There's also a tight electric guitar solo near the end. I associated the robot-like vocals in the beginning of 'Mean Words' to Yes' 90125 album ('Leave It' for example). Towards the end of the album Jeavestone's energetic "prog'n'roll" gets slightly tiresome to me and I begin to wish more sincere melodicism and calmness to balance the whole. 'Nuclear Superstar' is also among the best tracks. The last percussion-heavy track has a totally unnecessary tail repeating the pattern for two minutes.
All in all, the album's sound could have more of the opener's keyboard oriented brightness instead of being very guitar oriented. The songs are averagely better than on 1+1=OK. It's funny how many associations I got especially from the vocals: Kinks, Beach Boys, Kansas, Yes, plus Todd Rundgren and Ray Wilson (Genesis: Calling All Stations). Human Games won't let down anyone already liking this band, and it's worth recommending to listeners of modern Eclectic Prog with a rock'n'roll atmosphere and vocal harmonies.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=51162

Al Andaluz Project - Nawba Raml Maya, Ritmo Btayhi

In the Al Andaluz Project, the three cultures that defined the Middle Ages - Muslim, Jewish and Christian - come together, symbolised by the origins of the singers Mara Aranda (Spain), Iman Kandoussi (Morocco) and Sigrid Hausen (Germany). The cultural tension between these three religions has lost none of its explosiveness and fascination to this day.
The Al Andaluz Project is an extraordinary project that uses musical brilliance at the highest technical level to realise the vision of the peaceful coexistence of the three dominant cultures of our time. The Al Andaluz Project came about when the Munich group Estampie met the Spanish and Moroccan musicians from Aman Aman and L'Ham de Foc, who gave a concert in Munich in November 2005. Just one year after this encounter, the cross-border formation presented its contemporary, lively interpretations of traditional Jewish-Sephardic, Arabic and Christian music at the Landshut Court Music Days.
The ensemble has played numerous tours through Germany, Austria and Spain and has performed at international festivals in Belgium, Holland, England and Poland. In 2012, the Al Andaluz Project was honoured with the most important German folk prize, the "Global Ruth", at the renowned Dance & Folk Festival in Rudolstadt.  From: https://www.al-andaluz-project.de/al-andaluz-project-engl.html

Silly Wizard - Live Center Stage 1988

 Silly Wizard - Live Center Stage 1988 - Part 1

 Silly Wizard - Live Center Stage 1988 - Part 2

 

When friends, acquaintances or even perfect strangers ask my advice on starting a Celtic CD collection, there is invariably one album I will recommend buying first: Silly Wizard's Live Wizardry. A decade since its release and nearly a decade since I first heard it, Live Wizardry remains on the pinnacle of traditional Celtic releases. Originally issued as two live albums, Live in America and Golden, Golden, in 1985, Live Wizardry was released by Green Linnet Records in 1988 as a compilation of the two. The musicians, the tunes and the energy combine to make it an album which should hold a favored place in every music collection. The album features the sonorous tenor vocals of Andy M. Stewart, the blistering fiddle work of Johnny Cunningham and the amazing Phil Cunningham on accordion, whistles, mandola and keyboards. With Gordon Jones on guitar and bodhran and Martin Hadden on bass and guitar rounding out the band, it's about as good a set as you're ever going to find. Add to that the energy of a live performance in front of an enthusiastic audience in Cambridge, Mass., and you have an album which cannot be beat. Silly Wizard, from Scotland, put out several excellent albums during their all-too-brief tenure together, but none has this kind of staying power... likely because any good Celtic band feeds on the excitement of a live performance and grows stronger because of it.
On it, you'll find a host of instant classics, tunes which today are Celtic folk standards but got their start right here on the Sanders Theatre stage. How often have you heard a lusty rendition of "Ramblin' Rover" at a packed pub or Renaissance faire? It's a Silly Wizard original. So, too, is "The Queen of Argyll," still one of the best songs of unrequited, but still cheerful, love. Prefer your love requited? Another of Stewart's songs, "Golden, Golden," is a soothing, flowing anthem to romance.
Mix these and other originals with a solid core of traditionals arranged by these musical Wizards and you'll have an album worth playing 'til the laser burns through the disc and you have to buy another one. (I'm pretty sure that's what happened to my first copy.) Traditional tunes include the lively and silly "The Parish of Dunkeld," the melancholy "The Banks of the Lee," the martial "Donald McGillavry" and the sizzling set led off by "The Humors of Tulla" and "Toss the Feathers."
Stewart fronts the band with strong vocals, at times soulful and at times bursting with humor. Behind him, the band mixes up skillful harmonies and arrangements which accent, but never overshadow, the songs. Then turn the band loose on an instrumental number like "Scarce o' Tatties," "The Curlew," "Saint Anne's Reel" or "Jean's Reel" -- all cunningly blended into some very lively sets -- and step back and be amazed. The Cunningham brothers in particular put out some dazzling sounds, especially in "The Humors of Tulla" set, that must be heard to be believed. Can you tell I'm a fan? I won't deny it. If you haven't heard this one yet, if you don't own this one yet, get on the phone to Green Linnet tomorrow. You won't be sorry.  From: https://www.rambles.net/silly_wizard_live.html

 

XTC - Grass

Late one morning in 1986, Todd Rundgren awoke at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood to ominous news: A space shuttle had disintegrated in the stratosphere, killing the entire crew on live TV. The same morning, he received a message from the British wing of Virgin Records, concerning a wily pop band from rural England. In the label’s view, XTC were in dire need of a no-nonsense producer, arranger, and authority figure, preferably all in one—somebody with an American touch and a hint of the madcap and... well, how did his schedule look? Rundgren’s appointment secured the savvy pairing of two brilliant and doomed minds. Between the anglophile producer and songsmith Andy Partridge were a thousand common interests and one great chasm that would subsume egos and tear up the studio floorboards. The rift did not concern taste or etiquette so much as—how else to put it—vibe: In one corner, the shaggy-haired, acid-frazzled Philadelphian whose passive-aggression belies a loose, honky-tonk approach to life; in the other, a three-piece reputed for 1) turning down their record label’s cocaine and 2) crafting technically brilliant pop. It was a match made in some 5-star hotel-lobby hell, and the calamity of it all enriches every second of Skylarking.
Rundgren was optimistic about working with XTC. A few years earlier, he had caught the Swindon group in their element, twisting from off-brand punk toward whip-smart new wave. Soon after, in 1982, Partridge suddenly quit touring, suffering from valium withdrawal and on-stage panic attacks. He announced XTC would join the ranks of Steely Dan and late-phase Beatles as a studio outfit—a commercial disaster, to nobody’s surprise. Singles flopped, fans lost faith, and before the year was up, the group shrank to a trio when drummer Terry Chambers stormed out for good during a rehearsal.
But by 1985, Partridge, at least, believed XTC were in the form of their lives. Though recent LPs Mummer and The Big Express lacked a hit to follow 1982’s “Senses Working Overtime,” the frontman’s studio indulgence (and bossiness) finally had free rein, even as the band entered free-fall. A parachute opened when the Dukes of Stratosphear, their cartoonish side project, released a period-psychedelia EP that briskly outsold the previous XTC record.
Virgin hoped an American producer would collar the firebrand and hammer the new album into the transatlantic mold of U2 and Simple Minds—a notion that, like almost everything involving the label, Partridge found laughable. Consider the demos: Back-garden symphonies like “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Season Cycle,” among his ripest compositions to date. Fellow songwriter Colin Moulding, inspired by his move to the ancient Celtic settlement of Marlborough Downs, was clomping down the same path, composing pastorals like “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” from sampled lathes and thrums of pagan folk. If anything, Partridge reasoned, the album would be their most English ever. Caught between a quixotic artiste and a label tapping its watch, Rundgren was diplomatic. Who was he, a producer extraordinaire whose second home was a spacecraft-style recording bunker, to mock a studio fiend like Partridge? Hatching a plan, he accepted Virgin’s $150,000 fee and quickly discarded dozens of the band’s demos, assembling a tracklist around a concept of his own. The song cycle would plot a lifetime over the course of a day: daybreak in “Summer’s Cauldron,” then a suite of infatuation, heartbreak, marriage, temptation, and existential reckoning that concludes—on “Dying” and “Sacrificial Bonfire”—in the dead of night.
All this was news to the band. To Partridge, it was virtually treasonous. The 32-year-old was still on the mend from a 14-year addiction to valium prescribed for erratic school behavior, and had landed in an enlightenment phase, philosophizing over nature and “questioning things deeper: God, existence—the chewier questions,” he later said. The transformation in his lyrics was undeniable; and his voice, once a rabid yelp, had softened into serene hysteria, like a rescue puppy outgrowing its trauma. Despite their media portrayal as backwater bumpkins, XTC were brewing a new identity—something a star producer would surely dilute. Partridge’s bandmates felt differently. Guitarist Dave Gregory, a Rundgren superfan, was thrilled, and the docile Moulding—by now immune to Partridge’s arm-twisting—sided with Virgin, reasoning they all had mouths to feed. If only to humor them, Partridge held his nose and acquiesced.
At his Utopia studio in the Catskills, Rundgren insisted on recording the songs in order, so sessions commenced with “Summer’s Cauldron.” His fingerprints are instantly visible: Skylarking opens in the nervous charge of dawn amid dog barks and crickets. As Rundgren’s melodica smears sunlight across the horizon, Partridge swans in from the wings and belts out a Broadway-sized croon, duetting with the lazy arc of a Moulding bassline. Just as the song builds to fever pitch, the producer plays his ace, scooping you out of “Summer’s Cauldron” with the summer’s-breeze strings of “Grass,” Moulding’s ode to al-fresco romance. A dreamy riff plays off his West Country burr, fizzles and dies like something unsaid.
Beneath Skylarking’s twin sunrise, optimism was dimming. It’s hard to pinpoint when hell broke loose, but within a few days the studio had descended into extravagant pettiness. Partridge says Rundgren had sarcasm down to “an extremely cruel art,” mocking everything from his lyrics to his trousers; when the singer flubbed a vocal take, he impatiently offered to record him a guide track. Partridge, in turn, deemed Rundgren’s keyboard skills “incredibly primitive,” nicknaming him Old Banana Fingers. Whenever the producer hulked toward the studio, weary and long-faced, the band had taken to jamming the “Munsters” theme tune. One flustered night, Partridge gathered his bandmates. “I’m thinking of knocking the album on the head,” he confessed. “It’s like having two Hitlers in the same bunker.” As war raged, the sessions remained a spring of wonder. Moulding, a psych-pop reformist, came into his own with songs like “The Meeting Place,” reflecting Swindon’s rituals and industry in gorgeous stained glass. Partridge specialized in the melodic trapdoor, establishing awkward patterns and flooding your serotonin receptors at unexpected moments. The lyrics are just chewy enough to distract from each incoming sugar rush, creating endless replay value. (“Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” he quips wonderfully in “Season Cycle.”) Themes and images trespass between songs, from the vaudevillian pomp of “Ballet for a Rainy Day” into the melodramatic “1000 Umbrellas,” whose Dave Gregory string arrangement makes heartbreak seem an ancient, noble fate.
In all this, Skylarking expresses a comic, cosmic apprehension of the natural world—not the banal site of ready-made tranquility but the arena of psychedelia, godliness, and permanence. Partridge and Moulding grew up on the border between urban and rural Swindon, ever ready to abandon the cinema of smalltown life, hop a fence, and explore a fantasyland of wildlife. Their formative years account for two XTC archetypes: the put-upon breadwinner and the serene observer of nature. That contrast—as much as Partridge and Moulding’s divergence—is a crux of the band’s character.
Part of the tension with Rundgren was that his pastoral concept snubbed Partridge’s trademark social commentaries. Though his politics were fuzzy, the songwriter took pride in penning morality plays that skewered Middle England’s delusions of grandeur, sending up the bootlicking class that was then rallied behind Margaret Thatcher. Before parlaying that skill into songs like the anti-fascist operetta “No Thugs in Our House,” young Partridge had been famed for caricaturing schoolteachers, and it was this hobby that established creativity as his lifeline: initially to distract bullies, then simply to show off, drumming up attention he lacked at home. Though Partridge’s father played in a Navy skiffle band, his periods of absence and violence afforded little investment in his son’s artistic pursuits; his mother, whose mental health struggles led to electro-shock therapy, dished out verbal abuse and often sent Partridge to stay with other families, giving him “no sense of permanence about anything,” he explained in the book Complicated Game. Music and satire were pillars of Partridge’s identity that Rundgren would threaten to demolish.
The songwriter’s roots in social antagonism deepened in his teens, which he spent pottering between oddball bands in a tasseled suede jacket, observing Swindon’s social and cultural trends from afar. XTC missed the 1976 punk rush because he had a job as a window dresser in a Victorian emporium. While the band had contemporaries in Elvis Costello and Robyn Hitchcock, the late-’70s new wave stopped short of welcoming Leonard Bernstein nostalgists. Assembling the Skylarking tracklist, Rundgren had shot down all but one addition to the band’s catalog of smalltown vignettes. To his credit, it may be their very best. Grounded by a snare that sounds airlifted in from a quarry, “Earn Enough for Us” spins a power-pop yarn pitting love against the material restrictions of poverty: “So you’re saying that we’re gonna be three/Now, a father’s what I’ll be,” Partridge sings between snakes-and-ladders hooks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so proud, but the belt’s already tight/I’ll get another job at night...”
Despite rankling Partridge, Skylarking’s departure from sociology frees space for wildcards like “That’s Really Super, Supergirl,” a reject that Rundgren rescued, sped up, and made garish. His funhouse keys and a helter-skelter bassline lean into the lyrics’ comics-nerd pathos, Partridge sarcastically commending a girlfriend who presumes to ditch him for his own good. On tape, it came out as a burbling blast of Disneyfied pop. Partridge was horrified. “Could you play it a bit tighter?” he yelled, exasperated, as Rundgren perched behind the keyboard. “That was good enough!” the producer replied.
Rundgren was gallivanting about like a ludicrous child savant—one moment darkly inscrutable, the next digging out cobwebbed keyboards and swaggering into the light. While Partridge fumed, Moulding and Gregory wrestled with their own frustrations. A month into recording, relocating to San Francisco for overdubs failed to heal rifts cleaved between the trio years earlier. During bass sessions for “Earn Enough for Us,” Moulding briefly quit the band, collateral damage in a Rundgren-Partridge power struggle that was now crescendoing. At one point, says the producer, Partridge fantasized aloud about plunging an axe into his head.
Occasional stabs at communication worked miracles. Rundgren’s ability to brandish spectacular arrangements from his back pocket freed the band to reinvent songs on the spot. On a whim, he flipped a dirge called “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul” into something fancy and louche; the recorded version saunters like a Scott Walker Bond theme. Partridge was justifiably wary of Rundgren’s exhibitionism, but in the wonderland of Skylarking, where Moulding’s bucolic songs are right at home, it is Partridge’s—bedecked in half-drunk keys and Vegas suave—that astonish.
For a while, Partridge feared the completed album was ruined. He lambasted “Herr Rundgren” in the press and, as usual, fought bitterly with the label—but this time, with roles reversed, it was Virgin selling him on his music’s merit. As Skylarking awaited its fate, he and Moulding sulked in his Swindon loft and, on a giant board spread across the floor, set about re-enacting the great battles of 18th Century Europe.
Lead single “Grass” bombed in the UK, and the album stalled at No. 90—a death sentence even by their commercial standards, albeit grim vindication for Partridge. But in America, a one-time single contender demoted to a B-side was making hay. On college radio, “Dear God” had sparked a moral panic: its narrator, griping with an absent god, appalled Bible Belt Christians and prompted a bomb threat to a Florida radio station. Everyone else seemed to love it. In a sheepish U-turn, the band’s American label, Geffen, smuggled the track onto the U.S. release of Skylarking. Over six months, the album outsold XTC’s entire prior catalog three times over. For all “Dear God”’s histrionic conviction, Partridge remains skeptical of his biggest hit, a pedantic screed that itches with a trite, secular holiness of its own. As a college-rock time capsule, it’s delightful; as for its moral import, Partridge was spitballing more soulful takes with interviewers. “If you can create Heaven for yourself without creating Hell for somebody else, fine,” he told the fanzine Limelight. “Try and create Heaven for somebody else as well, but don’t create Hell for anyone, ’cos that’s less than animal.”
Partridge had finally earned the cachet to pursue a better contract with Virgin. But negotiations faltered and, after two more albums, the band went on strike, eventually winning the right to release elsewhere in 1997. Partridge never lost his air of thwarted ambition, drifting into the future for which he seemed destined: tinkering away in his home studio, mostly free of expectations and interlopers. (That includes Moulding, who stepped back from XTC in 2006, effectively ending the group.) Among his arsenal of guitars, Partridge now keeps company with a legion of toy soldiers, battle-prepped and awaiting its master’s command. In Skylarking’s immanent grace, you sense the perverse chemistry of warmongers relishing a battlefield bloodbath. A sweet photo from the sessions catches their repressed innocence: Gregory, Rundgren, and Partridge in fleeting unity, mouths agape, serenely piping out vowel sounds. Here you have Skylarking’s ideal form: three adult boys accidentally in their thirties, pooling harmonies for Partridge to plunge into, like something beautiful shot from the sky.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xtc-skylarking/

La Chica - Be Able

Things That Matter to... La Chica

Uniting Paris Belleville and Merida, Sophie Fustec was born in Paris to a French father and Venezuelan mother. Between visits to Merida, Sophie studied violin and then piano, for 13 years in the conservatory and then sound engineering at ESRA (France). In 2010, Sophie became a founding member of the all-female band 3SOMESISTERS before embarking on her solo project, La Chica, in 2013. Her music is the result from a melting-pot of musical influences ranging from Indie Pop, US Hip-Hop and America Latina (from La Fania All Stars or Juana Molina) to The Beatles and classical music (Debussy). Her first album ‘Cambio’ was released on 2019, and now she releases 'La Loba' dedicated to her late brother. Through these songs, she expresses a new learning of life in the absence of a loved one.

My earliest memory is switching the side of a vinyl and listening to the music with gigantic headphones.

I grew up between Paris, France and Merida, Venezuela in the 80s. We were 5: my parents, my sister, my brother and I. Loads of laughing and love. I listened to a lot of music, all the time. I roller skated and used to speak with the trees.

My mother gave me fire. My father gave me zen.

In life, everything happens when it's meant to happen. Françoise Azema, my piano teacher for 13 years told me that on the phone. Just before she died. She was my mentor.

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to overcome is the death of my brother Pablo.  
The album that most inspired me as a teenager was Rage against the Machine. It woke up in me the urge to fight the system and how powerful music is when it comes to ideas and ideology. And of course the unique playing of Tom Morello!

I wanna live in 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. That book where fantastic meets humour in a reality so close to perfection thanks to the characters

People are strange, and will always be strange. I loved the movie Arizona Dream by Emir Kusturica. So surreal, So funny, so human. It taught me tolerance because there is no normality. “Weird” people are more interesting.

All the people I met have shaped me. I swallowed all their stories and I grew up understanding many ways of seeing life. There are so many different centres.

I miss playing live. it always takes me to another dimension, as if I was in an alternate state of consciousness. It feels so good.

I Burned 2020. We made a sculpture of the old year with wood and we burned it.

Kindness is an undervalued virtue. Unfaithfulness is an overrated vice. It's in human nature, loyalty is more important.

I love M.I.A. She's a woman, in the music industry, saying out loud truths and denouncing the system through art. I admire her.

I’m inspired by Octopi. They fill me with love. Beautiful and smart creatures. If everyone would watch more octopus videos, the world would be more peaceful.

Everything matters and nothing is important.

A piece of advice I’d give my younger self. Trust yourself, everything is gonna be ok.

My favourite word is La plage, means the beach in french.

The motto I aspire to live by... Life is short. Live.

The inner demon I strive to conquer... Laziness. I want to evolve but sometimes I am lazy.

My favourite question... What's your name?

I believe in Art

What gives me hope are Activists. All the people you don't see, in the shadow, fighting against discriminations, for the right cause, for the evolution of humanity, who make a change.

From: https://www.latinolife.co.uk/articles/things-matter-tola-chica

Hot Tuna - Keep On Truckin' - Live 1973

The name Hot Tuna invokes as many different moods and reactions as there are Hot Tuna fans — millions of them. To some, Hot Tuna is a reminder of some wild and happy times. To others, that name will forever be linked to their own discovery of the power and depth of American blues and roots music. To newer fans, Hot Tuna is a tight, masterful duo that is on the cutting edge of great music.
All of those things are correct, and more. For more than four decades, Hot Tuna has played, toured, and recorded some of the best and most memorable acoustic and electric music ever. And Hot Tuna is still going strong — some would say stronger than ever.
The two kids from 1950s Washington, D.C. knew that they wanted to make music. Jorma Kaukonen, son of a State Department official, and Jack Casady, whose father was a dentist, discovered guitar when they were teenagers (Jack, four years younger, barely so). They played, and they took in the vast panorama of music available in the nation’s capital, but found a special love of the blues, country, and jazz played in small clubs. Jorma went off to college, while Jack sat in with professional bands and combos before he was even old enough to drive, first playing lead guitar, then electric bass.
In the mid-1960s, Jorma was invited to play in a rock‘n’roll band that was forming in San Francisco; he knew just the guy to play bass and summoned his old friend from back east. The striking signature guitar and bass riffs in the now-legendary songs by the Jefferson Airplane were the result.
The half-decade foray into 1960s San Francisco rock music was for Jack and Jorma an additional destination, not the final one. They continued to play their acoustic blues on the side, sometimes performing a mini-concert amid a Jefferson Airplane performance, sometimes finding a gig afterward in some local club. They were, as Jack says, “Scouting, always scouting, for places where we could play.”
The duo did not go unnoticed, and soon there was a record contract and not long afterward a tour. Thus began a career that would result in more than two-dozen albums, thousands of concerts around the world, and continued popularity.
Hot Tuna has gone through changes, certainly. A variety of other instruments, from harmonica to fiddle to keyboards, have been part of the band over the years, and continue to be, varying from project to project. The constant, the very definition of Hot Tuna, has always been Jorma and Jack.
The two are not joined at the hip, though; through the years, both Jorma and Jack have undertaken projects with other musicians and solo projects of their own. But Hot Tuna has never broken up, never ceased to exist, nor have the two boyhood pals ever wavered in one of the most enduring friendships in music.
Along the way, they have been joined by a succession of talented musicians: Drummers, harmonica players, keyboardists, backup singers, violinists and more, all fitting with Jorma and Jack’s current place in the musical spectrum. Jorma and Jack certainly could not have imagined, let alone predicted, where the playing would take them. It’s been a long and fascinating road to numerous, exciting destinations. Two things have never changed: They still love playing as much as they did as kids in Washington, D.C. and there are still many, many exciting miles yet to travel on their musical odyssey.  From: https://hottuna.com/about/

How To Destroy Angels - How Long

With nearly a quarter century of active music making and recording under his belt in one form or another, Trent Reznor could be forgiven for wanting to take an extended break at some point. But in recent years he seems to have moved into full overdrive, even as his flagship identity Nine Inch Nails has gone on an extended hiatus. One outlet is his new collaborative group How to Destroy Angels, featuring Rob Sheridan, his wife Mariqueen Maandig and another regular musical partner of recent years Atticus Ross, his Oscar co-winner for the soundtrack to David Fincher’s The Social Network. Their second EP, An Omen, features another understated, beautiful and tense group of songs, with vocals from both Reznor and Maandig but predominantly the latter, as on the striking featured single, ‘Ice Age’.
 
The thing that struck me about this EP, even more so than the first one from 2010, is that space, silence and deliberation felt key throughout, especially on the latter three tracks. Was it always intended to be that way or did that come together as recording progressed?

Trent Reznor: We went into it with this long-range goal of trying to see what develops, to let it present itself and to experiment with a lot of styles and messages and tracks, and how they came together. What we felt was the shortcoming of the first EP was the result of it being just a few weeks in the studio to see what happens. It was kind of demo-ish to me, it felt like you could see the DNA of where it came from, that it hadn’t really become its own thing yet, but it was fun to just to see it come out. In this day and age of music consumption, we felt that rather than letting it sit on the shelf and wait, we felt we should put it out just as a memento of where we were at that time.
Since then we’ve recorded a bulk of music that’s always been living as an album. The decision to sign with Columbia as a means of really reaching out to more people than just the Nine Inch Nails fanbase was really the main reason behind that. So the decision to put a record out meant – should we start with singles, should we put some tracks out? The idea of a strong EP came up, so we extracted some tracks that felt like they could fit together. They were meant to be on the album and some may remain. We spent a couple of months tinkering around with the sequencing and we wrote another track for it, there’s still a lot of glue keeping it all together and I’m pleased with the results. I think it’s an interesting EP that gelled together pretty nicely.

Asking a little more on the collaborative nature of the EP, now that you feel the group has transitioned more into its own thing. Do the four members meet in the middle, does one person present an idea that is then developed, or does it vary, song for song and impulse for impulse?

TR: It comes down to parallel tracks. One is primarily Atticus and myself starting with an idea – we were heavily inspired by old Cabaret Voltaire, starting with the sound of old analog sequencers and things, trying to sync up things in conception, and machines working together in concert but not quite able to do so. I think that concept led to experimentation as it proceeded. The other track would be Mariqueen coming up with melodic ideas – sometimes completely unrelated to what we’re doing – lyrical concepts and fragments of lyrics that were married to this music. It would often go in a direction that Atticus and I didn’t intend it to, and that marriage, that collision, would make it feel a lot different to how a Nine Inch Nails record would feel, or a soundtrack as it evolved.

Your specific work for How to Destroy Angels, as opposed to other activity and projects that you’re doing right now – do you find that working in a group form results in something where you’re challenging yourself, or is it more an extension of a certain part of yourself? Or is it a mix of both?

TR: Hmm, interesting! This is something that may or may not qualify as an answer for that – when Fincher asked me to work on The Social Network score, and I accepted because he was somebody I respected as a person and as an artist, it was a respectful environment but it was an environment where clearly I was working under him to serve what he wanted to make. That’s very different from how Nine Inch Nails operates, where at the end of the day I’m making all the decisions and in that pyramid of power I’m sitting at the top of that, vision-wise, direction-wise, final vote-wise. I found that I really enjoyed being in that respectful environment, not being at the top of the pyramid.
When working with like-minded people on a project that was very interesting, with respect going both ways, it was fun to be in that supporting role. I wasn’t thinking that way out of laziness, I was thinking more that it was interesting to be taking direction. That’s something I’ve learned later in life here, that there is something that I responded to in that. When he asked if I could do The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo right after that I said "Yes, I really enjoyed that!"
Coming out of a few years of doing that, I’ve started to fuck around a bit with Nine Inch Nails stuff, writing music that feels like it could belong in that category, and I found it very invigorating and inspiring because I hadn’t done it for a while, and it feels good to be taking the reins.
With How to Destroy Angels, it was more in that center column of working collectively, about realising that it’s not all my decision, that I think I would have done it this way, but okay, we’ve decided to go that way, and discovering that works, that basic collaboration. It’s the reason people collaborate in the first place. That had little impact on Nine Inch Nails evolved but now I’m enjoying collaborating in various different forms, while at the same time it’s reinvigorating my interest in autonomy as well.

From: https://thequietus.com/interviews/trent-reznor-interview-how-to-destroy-angels/

Cornelius - Music

The 1997 Matador release of the still-great Fantasma established Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) as the far-East posterboy for indie-rock globalization. As the most recognizable representative of downtown Tokyo's Shibuya-Kei movement (also responsible for Pizzicato Five, Buffalo Daughter and Fantastic Plastic Machine), Oyamada’s Beck-like star potential and wildly creative imagination led to a stateside buzz all-too-rare for Japanese musicians. But a release schedule that includes five-year windows between albums isn't the best way to maintain hype. It was 2002 before the follow-up Point boiled Fantasma down to its essence: a wonderful fusion of rubbery, acoustic micro-house rhythms. With another five years now having passed, Sensous represents yet another step forward for Oyamada’s unique headphone pop. It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.
Sensuous opens with Oyamada revisiting one of Point's main techniques: composing songs with the individual sounds kept clearly separate. His fascination with the hi-fi stereophonic demonstration records of the 1950s and 60s-- the ones that presented the full range of the stereo spectrum through whirring, buzzing sound experiments-- finds its full and rewarding realization here, but in function more than form. Often on Sensous, as on Point, it often feels as though Oyamada starts by writing normal songs, but then inserts sounds into the places where there are none, erases the original melody, and keeps the music's negative.
The title track is a meditative series of plucked guitar strings-- not completely unlike something you'd hear on Four Tet's Rounds-- phased between the left and right channels. But this initial sense of serenity quickly gives way to the more recognizable bustle of "Fit Song". It replaces the sonorous acoustic with the muted, clipped strum of an electric guitar, which provides the rhythmic bed for the first minute of the song, as bass drums and hi-hats bounce around with Oyamada’s single-word incantations ("just," "fit," "click"). The song feels like a stylized metropolitan soundtrack, but its video (which is included on the disc) suggests a more modest milieu that reflects the song's senses of humor and wonder. Syncing the movements of typically inanimate objects to the music, the video, like the album, is indulgent and geometric: sugarcubes form steps for a pair of spoons to climb, toothbrushes dance in a circle, the contents of a coin purse form a floating infinity symbol.
"Fit" also marks the record's first appearance of Oyamada's favorite instrument of late (and, it should be noted, a point of friction for many listeners): a spacy, sonorant synthesizer that provides a soft and windy counterpoint to the skipping stones all around it. Later on the irresistable "Beep It", the synth serves a new-wavier rhythmic purpose, with Oyamada's monosyllabic mojo more resembling the sounds of a retro-futuristic aerobics class, and "Music" gradually introduces the instrument into its melange of chirping guitars and melismatic vocals, lending the song a fluffy, space-age buoyancy.
Sequenced after the copy-machine-sampling "Toner", "Watadori" feels like an extended fever-dream from a nap under an office desk. Multiple layers of soft-jazz guitar tick off and ascend higher and higher, coalescing into busy-but-gentle treble-buzz, the equivalent of twenty different CTI-label records played at the same time. Oyamada's newfound predilection for the oft-criticized and elevatored music is most fully realized on Breezin'", an inventive interpolation of the jazz-pop standard made famous by Gabor Szabo and later, George Benson. The song feels like perfect source material for Oyamada to work with, and while he thoroughly launders it of its core melodic structure, he manages to maintain its, well, breeziness. Like an installation piece on a constant loop, ascending three-note synth runs and chimes provide a chilly melodicism as the song works its way, over and over, to a surprisingly lilting payoff. Its doppelganger, "Gum", emerges later, with his vocals ping-ponging over a punk-metal guitar drone previously explored on Point's "I Hate Hate".
Sensuous ends with a second, even less-expected cover: a faithful update of the Rat Pack standard "Sleep Warm", on which Oyamada augments Frankie and Dean’s maudlin sentimentality with his own vocodered vocals and loud, trilling synth flourishes. While this version certainly would be tough to fall asleep to, its album-closing position makes it feel more like a film-closing credit roll, similar to The White Album’s "Good Night". Now, apparently, we just have to wait five more years for the sequel.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10084-sensuous/

Bab L'Bluz - El Gamra

Emerging from the underground Afro-Arab music scene, Bab L’Bluz are reclaiming the blues of North Africa on their debut album, Nayda! Fronted by an African-Moroccan woman in a traditionally male role, Bab L'Bluz's music nods to the revolutionary attitude of the Moroccan "Nayda" youth movement. The album is rooted in traditions of the Maghreb and ancient Gnawa music, but incorporates modern influences of rock, funk, and psychedelic fusion. In this detailed three-part interview, we spoke with vocalist and multi-instrumentalists Yousra Mansour and Brice Bottin on the evolution of the Nayda movement, the instrumental and spiritual connection to Gnawa music, as well as the various lyrical themes expressed throughout the album.

I wanted to start by talking about the Nayda youth movement, which your album is named after. Can you briefly describe your impressions of the scene when it first began, and how you’ve seen it grow over the past decade?

First of all, we wanted to call our album "Nayda" for the primary meaning of the word, which is "partying", or intellectual or spiritual "awakening". We are musicians, and the first feeling that drives us is that of bringing people together, of breaking down the barriers that we ourselves or even society imposes on us. We must do this in order to reach out to others and come together, because we are all equal, and we all have to learn from each other. This is a basic philosophy of life that animates us, marked by respect. Nevertheless, it is useful to remember it, even in 2020.
We are also interested in this movement because we want to encourage creation on the part of young people, as well as older people. In Morocco, as everywhere else in the world, we want to encourage young people to advance mentalities, and not reproduce some of the mistakes of our predecessors. There is also a creative energy of many artists, rappers and rockers alike, who are mobilizing in recent years to push creation. This type of energy can only have a positive effect on the world. This type of Nayda mentality is also possible thanks to the people who organize cultural gatherings, such as music festivals. We had the chance to play at the L'Boulevard Festival in Casablanca, which for more than 20 years has been transmitting these notions of sharing through their eclectic programming. These type of festivals allow several styles and generations to rub shoulders. Overall, we encourage youth to believe in themselves in order to improve the global world in which we all live.

It seems like the scene is on a very progressive trajectory, but there are still setbacks here and there (i.e. a group of heavy metal singers were sentenced for playing “satanic” music back in ‘03.) How does the Nayda culture bounce back from these setbacks, and where do you see it leading in the future?

As it is everywhere, preconceived ideas are born from an ignorance of the other. Sometimes you can have a negative opinion about something you don't know well. We encourage respect for different styles of music, especially those that we have yet to understand and appreciate.
We have grown up in the era of globalization. We have had the chance to learn a lot from being interested in other styles of music and other cultures. For us, the beauty of life is a perpetual learning, a questioning. We think that there is no age you can stop learning, and we try to perpetuate a message of peace, love and global respect as well.

Whenever I read about the beginning of this movement, I always see all-male groups being credited as the forefront leaders. Yousra, could you comment on the female forces in the underground that have pushed this movement that we might not read about here in the West?

Unfortunately, it's like anything else, but we're here to change these precepts. Even in France, known as the "country of human rights", women are paid less than men for the same work. Nevertheless, including in the field of music, many women are active and are becoming major cultural players. We have many male and female role models, and have had them for a very long time, fortunately!

And how does this sentiment above relate to the song “Yemma”, where you sing about women and their sacrifices?

We wanted to pay tribute to mothers in general. We were lucky enough to be raised by strong mothers. We wanted to pay tribute to the one who carried us, fed us, and educated us in the best possible way. We are paying homage to the mothers that had to sacrifice themselves to allow their children to be good people.

I’ve read that reclaiming the use of Darija in songwriting has been an integral part of the movement, as beforehand many young musicians were pressured to believe that singing in English would make their music more “appealing” or “accessible” to a larger audience. Can you discuss the power of reclaiming the language within your music and in the scene overall?

We wanted to write songs in Darija, or classical Arabic, because that's what came naturally. We really appreciate the richness of the language and the beautiful sounds it offers, and we're proud of it. We also understand the choice that artists make when using English to be universal. Nevertheless, sometimes music provides a personal and intimate understanding of a song from a listener who does not understand the language, and we appreciate this level of understanding ourselves when we listen to music whose lyrics we do not understand.

The Nayda movement is not just about one sound, but encompasses a whole generation of musicians of all genres. So I'd like to hear your views on what you think is the common thread that connects all these varied styles within the movement, whether it's the overall message, the attitude, etc.

Above all, it is a message of peace, love, respect and tolerance that animates us. We would like each one of us to be able to transmit this to others, pulling ourselves upwards, and developing the right attitudes towards everything around us.

From: https://www.trialanderrorcollective.com/interviews/mahreb-traditions-meets-rock-n-roll-fusion-bab-lbluz-on-the-reclaiming-and-evolving-the-blues-of-north-africa

Myracle Brah - Too Many People (Paul McCartney cover)

Myracle Brah is the brainchild of Andy Bopp – front-man and songwriter for Interscope Records’ Lovenut. With the mega merger of Seagram’s, Polygram, and Universal, Andy dove into the Myracle Brah project full-time. Myracle Brah is now the primary vehicle for Andy’s expressive brand of guitar pop. Hailing from Baltimore, MD, Myracle Brah churns out pristine pop with plenty of jangly psychedelic references. Critics have compared the band to a broad spectrum of 60’s artists: from the Byrds and the Beatles to Badfinger and the 70’s Raspberries. The blistering melodic jangle of subsequent releases has hints of Teenage Fanclub, T. Rex, and David Bowie.  All Music Guide gave their debut album "Life on Planet Eartsnop" 4 1/2 stars saying: "Channelling the ghosts of late-period Beatles, Badfinger and Big Star with almost eerie accuracy, Myracle Brah's debut captures the sound and spirit of the classic power pop era to perfection. Where Andy Bopp's work with Love Nut absorbs the influences of hard rock and punk, this solo project feels directly beamed in from some time in 1972, as though the subsequent quarter-century never even happened. What the record lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in pure charm. A gifted songwriter, Bopp stuffs Life on Planet Eartsnop with no less than 20 tracks, each of them dead-on evocations of an era long gone by and rarely recalled quite so effectively or affectionately."  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Myracle+Brah/+wiki

TivaTiva - Re-Call

My name is Daniel de Jesús and I am an artist who works within the disciplines of painting and music. For many years I have separated both worlds and have always wanted to have the opportunity to create something that married my two passions into one project; Interior Castles is that project. In the midst of working on our album The Mask, my TivaTiva band mates have been very gracious to shift their attentions and instead focus on Interior Castles so that we may turn what would have been a solo effort into a collaborative project. Interior Castles is inspired by the life and writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, a Carmelite nun whose great confession “The Life” saved her from the wrath of the church that believed her to be demon possessed. Saint Teresa as a historical subject has given artists over the centuries the opportunity to try to understand the experience of divine intervention and the powers that exist beyond the physical. It is my hope that others will find my work to be a bridge that makes the supernatural experience of Saint Teresa accessible. Her story is remarkable because in 16th century Spain the catholic order ruled every facet of society, yet for Teresa sensuality and spirituality were inextricably linked. It is difficult to see religion as anything good in our time when its institutions are associated with stories of political crime, sexual abuse, and prejudice. Even though Teresa’s story of faith is specifically Christian, her story does not concern the God of Sunday school readings and church sermons but the universal human desire to understand and experience that which is divine. I found when reading her biography a great passion to desire all things that are good and I invite anyone through Interior Castles to follow me on this journey. I am hoping you will be inspired by our passion for this work and join us in the collaborative effort to bring this project to fruition. We have many unique incentives available to our supporters and I look forward to sharing this work with you, and in turn, the world at large.  From: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cedarstreet/tivativa-music-for-interior-castles

Balfa Toujours - Bernadette

Vocalist, and guitarist Christine Balfa comes from solid Cajun music ancestry. Her father, Dewey Balfa, made his name in the seminal Cajun band The Balfa Brothers and Christine cut her musical teeth while touring with him across the United States and Europe. Thus, Balfa Toujours are more than a band; they’re carrying on the tradition as cultural ambassadors. Before the band played a note, Christine Balfa made clear that Balfa Toujours planned on teaching the audience about Cajun French life as manifested in the language and culture of the group’s southwest Louisiana home. Equally qualified to assist, the rest of the band includes Christine’s husband, Dirk Powell, on accordion and second fiddle and Kim Wimmer, a former Dewey accompanist, on lead fiddle. The power trio began with a lively version of Powell’s self-penned “Le Two-Step de Bon Café (The Good Coffee Two-Step)”. Powell described the tune as typical “Home style Bayou Music”. The three projected a rather rustic appearance; their musical instruments showed signs of wear and the performers all wore blue jeans over their black footwear: no cuffs, hems or fancy stitching. They performed energetically, as if playing a hot Louisiana dance gig rather than a sit-down show in a former Czech Slovak social hall. That was the point of course — to show Eastern Iowans what it would be like if they ever went down to a Lafayette roadhouse on a sweaty Saturday night in the middle of summer. Balfa Toujours played more than a dozen numbers, mostly up beat two-steps, but also managed a few languid cuts. There were several musical highlights, including three swinging twin fiddle tunes that featured fast-paced dueling between Wimmer and Powell while Balfa rapidly struck a ringing brass triangle. Later Powell demonstrated the art of fiddle sticks. According to Powell, in the old days one didn’t just sit and listen to music, one participated. An easy way to do this was for a person to beat on the top of the fiddle strings with two pointy sticks that resembled fat shish kabob skewers while the other person played. Demonstrating, he and Wimmer created ebullient music together using just the single instrument. The band’s choice of selections nicely represented the sociological and ethnic diversity incorporated by Cajun culture. They included songs by American Indian and African American Cajuns as well as European and Canadian forebears. Balfa Toujours also played many of the good time tunes one would hear at gumbo festivals, Saturday night fish fries, and house parties. One such tune was a drinking song that went by two names, “My Dear Old Husband” and “The Drunk and His Wife”. Powell and Christine translated the lyrics to the audience and commented on the silly chauvinism expressed — the song is a call and response duet in which the husband commands his wife to prepare him a huge meal. The wife says he will die if he eats too much and he responds saying that he’d be better off dead, provided someone remembers to pour whiskey on his grave every now and then. The wife complies and cooks for him. Balfa noted that there was a saying that went, “a Cajun man is happy if he has a jug in one hand and a cup in the other”. A sentiment hardly reserved for Cajuns. Along this line Balfa spoke several times about Cajun humor. When Powell broke a string while borrowing Balfa’s guitar for a number, Balfa used the time to tell a shaggy dog story, one of the many Boudreaux and Thibodaux yarns that Cajuns tell about themselves in a self-deprecating manner. One day Thibodaux spotted Boudreaux heading back from the fishing hole. Thibodaux asked Boudreaux how many he caught. Boudreaux said, “If you can guess, I’ll give you both of them.” “Is it five?” asked Thibodaux. “You’re off by four,” Boudreaux replied. The comedy lay as much in the telling of the tale as its contents, as Balfa narrated the story in a corny, Bayou dialect. The band played the obligatory encore with an audience participation number, “My Madeline”. The crowd showed its appreciation by singing the title back to the trio in chorus. While Balfa Toujours didn’t burn the house down, they did an excellent job of providing some cross-cultural communication by bringing hot Cajun music and an informative, warm, and funny stage show to Cedar Rapids.  From: https://www.popmatters.com/balfa-toujours-041109-2496087628.html

The Book Of Knots - Microgravity

The Book of Knots begins with the birth of “7-pounds 11 ounces of sin” in “Microgravity” and, after posing the question, “Will they survive this microgravity?,” the band embarks on its third concept album; this one dedicated to the absence of expected hope in space travel. Garden of Fainting Stars closes the “By Sea, By Land, By Air” trilogy of concept albums begun with Book of Knots (2004) and continued on the 2007 release Traineater with tepid grace and fiery formidability.
The combination of the hazardous and the misinformed, the twilight of a good idea turning bad; these are the moments in which The Book of Knots shine a flashlight on a tormented orchestra exposing its weaknesses and exploiting its beauty. The core members, Joel Hamilton, Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, Tony Maimone., draw to them the fireflies of the music industry, the weird and imaginative; a combination of artists to form a band like Apocalyptica only darker and more misanthropic.
On Garden of Fainting Stars Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) opens a cocktail of flies with the tormented “Drosophila Melanogaster;” a song concerned with air travel on earth-grounded planes and the cocktail lounges of airports where fruit flies fill the glasses before the drinker can enjoy a second sip. This song captures the essence of the album in its frustrated attempt to endure exploration without ever reaping the rewards of success. “Planemo” easily amounts to a single if any of these tracks could be considered apart from the rest. Mike Patton’s zero-gravity lyrics and heightened moans affect in a similar fashion to Faith No More’s Angel Dust.
The collaboration of artists including Tom Waits, Mike Patton, David Thomas, Blixa Bargeld, Jon Langford, and Carla Bozulich should immediately win audience’s attention, but for the doomed travelers who turn up the tracks and feel their way along the darkened corridors of space ships and the hollowed caves of distant planets, this album can act as the soundtrack to a new generation of music and quietly bury any hope in the final frontier. The closing recorded announcement, “Obituary for the Future” feels like it comes from the future; a terrified voice calls out for companionship while the high-pitched chorus claims, “I’ll hold you close when this is over” as breaking guitars tear through ravaged drums. Wailing. Void. Over and out.  From: https://www.atlantamusicguide.com/cd-review-the-book-of-knots-garden-of-fainting-stars/

The Book of Knots‘ latest release, Garden of the Fainting Stars, is an unnerving exploration in experimental music. The Brooklyn-based group, comprised of members from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Skeleton Key, Pere Ubu, and Sparklehorse, are known for embracing themes with their albums (their previous releases explored nautical themes and America’s rust belt), and Garden is no exception. This time the quartet has tackled the often confusing but ultimately spellbinding prospects of space, and there to lend a hand to the experiment is a diverse group of guests including Mike Watt, Mike Patton, and Trey Spruance.
“Microgravity” and “Obituary for the Future” bookend the album, both tracks featuring Carla Kihlstedt’s airy vocals, with Spruance adding his skillful touches to “Future”. In between, you will find a range of songs that dazzle, befuddle, and sometimes creep you out (much like space itself). Some tracks touch more on rock, and others lean more towards celestial tinkering. On the latter, we have an eerie spoken-word narrative by the formidable-voiced Blixa Bargeld in “Drosophila Melanogaster” (which, by the way, is the scientific name for the fruit fly, a pest that plagues Bargeld during this Twilight Zone-primed song), the NASA-like samples of “All This Nothing”, and the planetary screams of “Nebula Rasa”.
On the rock end of things, we have the druggy and melodic qualities of “Garden of the Fainting Stars”, which features Elyas Khan’s blistering vocals. Patton fittingly contributes to album standout “Planemo”, which elevates the unconventional metal track to another level with his distinctive voice that starts low over haunting violins and builds beautifully to a raw, passionate scream at the end.  From: https://consequence.net/2011/07/album-review-the-book-of-knots-garden-of-the-fainting-stars/

Kansas - Closet Chronicles

IMHO - and I'm not alone at this - 'Point of Know Return' is Kansas' masterpiece. The sixsome manage to keep the cohesive sound and crucial energy they had already achieved in a level of perfection on its predecessor 'Leftoverture'. But as an issue of improvement, I find that Livgren's and Walsh's writing talents are not only intact, but at times even more inspired than ever before. Not only the compositions, but the arrangements are full of stunning creativity: it was actually the only way that the more concise tracks (all of them are under 8 minutes long, with only two surpassing the 6 minute mark) managed to keep up with and fulfill the pretentious demands of symph prog, while retaining that American flavour emanated from hard rock, country and electric blues that Kansas always was in touch with. The first two tracks are fine examples of how Kansas managed to create songs full of interesting surprises in their melody lines and rhythm patterns, without going for the extended opus format (Well, GG did the same in 'Octopus', right?, and so did JT in 'War Child'...). The namesake opener is both joyful and clever, making a true statement of pleasant prog-country rock; 'Paradox' is an exercise on "hardened Gentle Giant" with a pertinent American-style rocking dose. Then comes the ELP-ish two minute pyrotechnical instrumental 'The Spider', which is a fiery tour-de- force that burns at white hot level: Walsh reaches one of his undisputable peaks as a composer here, also performing wild progressions and leads on organ, piano and synth in alternating dialogues with the guitar and violin. The rhythm duo performs on a humanly impossible level as well. This track serves actually as an intro to 'Portrait', a catchy blues-oriented rock piece, that ends in a breathtaking climax (something that they would work out further on live renditions). Another burning track is the explosive 'Lightning's Hand' - a prog metal number "before its time" - while in contrast, the prize for the most compelling manifesto of melancholy goes to 'Nobody's Home', a symphonic ballad concerning the fate of humankind and the planet we live in. On this one, Steinhardt makes his violin literally mourn with all the amount of sadness that a human heart can hold. I've heard it many times since I first purchased this record, and I still cannot believe how a thing can sound so full of human grief (... but it's real). 'Hopelessly Human' is one of the two opuses, dealing with Livgren's spiritual quests for essential truths (he was on the brink of becoming a Christian, but not yet...); but my fave opus is the other one, 'Closet Chronicles', which is more somber and dynamic, and shows the band's cohesiveness at its tightest level in this album. 'Sparks of the Tempest' is another hard rock tune, with a slight funky twist a-la Bolin-era Deep Purple, while 'Dust in the Wind'... well, who doesn't know this timeless beautiful acoustic ballad? Their most relevant commercial hit has been consistently mentioned by recurrent Kansas revilers who label them as a mere AOR band who could play prog now and then. All in all, Kansas don't have to apologize for having a worldwide hit single in their career nor for emphasizing the rock aspect of prog, and I certainly am not in position of doing that job for them either. I just enjoy 'Dust in the Wind' as what it is, a beautiful acoustic ballad... and I as well enjoy 'Point of Know Return' as a North American top achievement in the prog genre.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=3205