Seven years removed from the reease of JoLLy TRouBLe, French DIY-pop trio GaBlé are back with a brand new album titled PiCK THe WeaK. Thomas Boullay, Gaëlle Jacqueline and Mathieu Hubert, who make up the band, composed and recorded the album over the last couple of years, upholding their singular, fun and unpredictable quirks. PiCK THe WeaK is set for release on February 2nd through Figures Libres and ahead of it GaBLé have shared the first single, ‘We LooK aWay’. The track is offered with an accompanying video directed by Johann Van Aerden and Mathieu Hubert, and you can watch it below.
Norwegian pianist and composer Kjetil Mulelid has announced the release of a new full length-album. Entitled Agoja, it will see the light of day in March 2024 through Odin Records. Speaking about his upcoming album, Mulelid comments:
“For a while, I’ve had a wish to step into the studio and create an album under my own name, where I can do exactly what I want without worrying about the end result and the musical expression the music should convey. In 2022, I had the plan as ready as it gets and asked many of my good friends and favorite musicians if they wanted to be part of this unfiltered journey. I booked the studio not knowing all the details, but in the subsequent days, a musical world took shape, becoming clearer with each recorded stanza. The result was on its way to becoming a melancholic reflection of life, mixed with a playful tribute to my upcoming next generation – parallel to the album process, I became a father for the first time. “Agoja” was the first approximate word I heard my son say, and I have therefore chosen to name the album just that.”
Ahead of the album’s release, Mulelid has shared the first single ‘A Prayer For Peace’. He shares some insight about the track:
“It was written in the early morning of February 24, 2022, just after Russia invaded Ukraine. It was never my intention to release this song as a single, as I feel it stands out a bit from the rest of the record, but today it feels more relevant than ever and giving it extra space felt like the only right contribution I could make amidst the world’s hopeless disagreements.
With me on this song I’ve got some incredible musicians. I first got to know Signe Emmeluth when we both studied at the somewhat legendary “jazzlinja” in Trondheim, and later through several musical projects. She has a completely raw energy and presence in the music, and an inspiring musical personality that is not afraid to take up space and push the boundaries. At the same time, I really wanted Trygve Seim’s big and melancholic sound to influence this song – a musician I have looked up to for several years. I concluded that a combination of these two very different players would result in a very interesting melodic interplay. Andreas Winther on drums and Bárður Reinert Poulsen on double bass make up the rest of the band on this song. They are two of my closest musical collaborators, with whom I have collaborated for several years, for example in Kjetil Mulelid Trio (Andreas) and Wako (Bárður).
As a band, we had never played the song together before, but a brief introduction to my thoughts and wishes for the song, led to the first run-through bringing a tear to my eye – this is the version you are about to hear.”
Club Copy, the latest album from Belgium born, Berlin based Manu Louis, hit shelves last September and we may be a little late picking this up but we were clearly missing out. With a humorous and satirical tone, throughout the album Louis describes “a futuristic world dominated by standardisation, in which, your place on Earth no longer matters”, and ” everything is the same”, before throwing in a twist in a photocopy shop.
To bring the album to life, Louis enlisted the vocal talents of Héctor Arnau (Las Victimas Civiles), Brussels experimental jazz vocalist Lynn Cassiers and performer Vicente Arlandis.
Zesty, danceable and entertaining in equal parts, Club Copy is out now through Igloo Records, and for a taste of what’s on offer, here’s a couple of tracks from the album, ‘Clone’ and ‘Economy’.
Incredibly ambitious and creative, and a mainstay in the Los Angeles’ contemporary jazz scene, Sam Gendel is both prolific and fluid in a variety of genres, constantly rolling out new solo and collaborative works. The multi-instrumentalist and producer’s latest venture saw him team up with LA-based Brazilian 7-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento and a 10-track instrumental album entitled The Room is the fruit of this union.
“In 2011 I was in a Latin jazz group called Triorganico,” do Nascimento explained. “We had a gig at a restaurant owned by Sam’s cousin, who invited him along. Sam brought his sax and sat in.” He continues, “We were making music that we had a real mutual appreciation for,I was always joking that Sam should play flute, and he tried multiple things before he got this unique [flute] sound out of his soprano. Most people don’t actually realise that it’s a saxophone.”
Each track on the upcoming The Room taps “into the rhythms and regions of a South America without borders”, as the press release describes, and some draw from indigenous melodies, and popular old Brazilian tunes.
We’ll have to wait until January 26th for The Room to be out through Real World Records but we can already hear the gorgeous and celestial first single, ‘Foi Boto’ . Here it is.
Following 2021’s In Love & Fracture, C. Diab (Caton Hower) has announced the release of a new album titled Imerro. The Canadian bowed guitarist and multi-instrumentalist recorded the album in a particularly hot summer in 2021 at Risque Disque Studio in Cedar, British Columbia. Speaking about the album, Caton comments:
“The idea behind this record was simply ecstatic improvisation, to place myself and engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart (Paul) in an area with minimal distraction and provide myself space for creation with little thematic pretence, with the belief that music “shows it’s face” as you move along, an instrument being a kind of lightning rod for sonics already existing, and any sonic subject in this session should present itself rather than composing upon hard preconceived notions.
That being said, we didn’t handcuff ourselves by disallowing old ideas, or throwing out melodic sketches from the past. Rather we made room for them to show themselves, or to lend themselves to anything happening in the moment. Over the six days in Cedar, we would work from early in the morning to late at night, with small breaks for food or to occasionally shower with a cold hose in an old chicken shed. The process was simple: I would pick up an instrument, whether I had experience playing it or not, and make a sound. If it wanted to be played, it would play, and we would go from there, laying down an idea and moving forward with more ideas and more instrumentation, until we felt the track was full.”
Imerro arrives on February 16th through Tonal Union and to get us enticed Caton has shared the first stunning and enveloping single, ‘Lunar Barge’. Of the track, he says:
“’Lunar Barge’ is a track for a dry, hot night in the forest (which it quite literally was). This was another case of “anything goes”, in that after the initial bass line was recorded, I roamed around the floors of the studio picking up any instrument standing out in the moment, and tried to see if it had anything to say. Some of the rhythm is played with a pair of chopsticks against a piece of wood, and some of the textures incorporate creaking noises from accidental movement. This track flowed easily and was recorded late at night, as we talked about the music of Huun-Huur-Tu, who became the inspiration for the rhythm. Most of our focus on this track was given to the wind instruments, of which we recorded far too much of, and had to whittle down to short, purposeful bursts in order to create the sound of a deep, open space. The title, ‘Lunar Barge’, is a combination of the 18th arcanum of the Tarot’s major arcana (which evokes desire and magical reality of the shadow world), and the Egyptian Solar Barge, on which the ancient sun god Ra was said to “travel through the sky…providing light to the world.”
‘Lunar Barge’ comes paired with a video by Ryan Gordon Flowers and you can watch it below.
LA-based producer, composer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Ben Lumsdaine is gearing up to release a new album later this year. Entitled Murmuration Without End, it arrives on December 8th through International Anthem and features guest contributions from saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi (Bon Iver, Bill Callahan), trumpeter John Raymond (S. Carey, Sara Bareilles), and guitarist Drake Ritter (Durand Jones, Diane Coffee). The album is “a collection of rhythmic studies that began as meditative synth drones recorded by Lumsdaine”, as the press release describes, which “grew into multi-textural, poly-rhythmic sound worlds as he disrupted the meters and pulses implied by the synths’ inherent modulations with each instrumental layer added.”
Along with album announcement, Lumsdaine has let loose the beautiful and absorbing lead single ‘Dallas’ and you can listen to it below.
