There’s wonderful news from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién, who has announced the release of a new album entitled Unfamiliar Minds. The San Sebastian native composed the album during lockdown, after putting out Mirande, a collaborative album with composer Xabier Erikizia, sang in her Basque language.
On Unfamiliar Minds, and as the press release explains, “Setién reflects on isolation, confusion and harnesses uncertainty with optimism on ten ghostly wonders that capture ineffable feelings in radiant detail.” The album is further described as “a palatial guide through trial and exaltation, a meditation on disquiet and hope for uncovering what lies ahead.”
As captivating as ever, Setién continues to beguile us with her shimmering and beautiful melodies, as well as her rich and deep voice. We’ll have to wait until January 28th for the album to be out through Thrill Jockey but we can already wrap our ears around the celestial title track. Here it is.
Multifaceted musician Jeremiah Cymerman, who is a phenomenal clarinetist, composer and producer, has a new album on the way entitled Citadels & Sanctuaries. With an impressive career of nearly twenty years in New York’s avant-garde and improvised music scene, Cymerman’s upcoming album is dedicated and reflects the influence composers such as Alvin Lucier, Morton Feldman, Evan Parker, Tony Scott, and many others have had on him. “I feel these pieces are genuine offerings of love and respect to just a few of the artists who have had a huge impact on me”, Cymerman explains. He continues:
“I wanted to inhabit the sound worlds of these artists, participating with the music as a player like I have as a listener. Some pieces were very deliberate from the start, while others happened more organically after they were being shaped. With different people in mind, it helped me focus each piece to get it to completion.”
Slated for an August 20th release through his own 5049 Records, Citadels & Sanctuaries was recorded during a month-long residency at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works at the tail end 2020, and unlike previous works, most tracks were captured in a single take. “This album was recorded when playing lines and melodies were feeling really good for me,” Cymerman explains. “It feels good to be able to share my work with people who might not have all this context about the music. They can just enjoy it because it has an immediacy to it. There are abrasive, dissonant parts that might be off-putting, but for the most part I like showing another side of myself. I don’t want to just make abstract, dark music all the time.”
Following lead single ‘From the Metaphysical to the Transcendental (For Bill Smith)’, Cymerman is enticing us with a new sublime piece from his album called ‘For As Long As Grass Grows (for Tony Scott)’. “I was 21 the first time I heard Music for Yoga Meditation and Other Joys by Tony Scott and it was nothing short of an epiphany,” Cymerman says about the inspiration behind this piece. “Beautiful and elegant lines on the clarinet by a master improviser, played with a restraint and groundedness not commonly found — it changed the way I thought about my instrument.”
The single is offered with an accompanying video. Watch it below and listen to the previously released ‘From the Metaphysical to the Transcendental (For Bill Smith)’ straight after.
Attacca Quartet‘s stunner of a new album, Real Life, has hit shelves earlier this month. Real Life is an album of electronic music arrangements featuring reworks of tracks from electronic artists such as Anne Müller, Squarepusher, Daedelus, The Halluci Nation and Mid-Air Thief. After sharing the album’s title track, a rework of Louis Cole’s ‘Real Life’, Attacca Quartet are offering a video to accompany new single ‘Remind U’ featuring TOKiMONSTA, originally by Flying Lotus. Guest collaborator TOKiMONSTA had this to day about the Grammy Award-winning string ensemble:
“The Attacca Quartet reminds me why I love music. Even in their world, they break rules to further the boundaries of classical music. It was truly a pleasure to work with them and dabble in the genre that first introduced me to music as a child.”
Violist Nathan Schram also commented on this collaboration:
“I remember the first time I heard Flying Lotus’ music. It was a confusing combination of exhilaration, envy, and deep FOMO. His music is hyper-sophisticated, endlessly nuanced, and hits all the feels you didn’t know you had. It became one of my missions in life to find a way to bring this wild energy to our ever-growing Attacca universe. Of the three FlyLo tracks on the album, ‘Remind U’ is the most gentle and sentimental – getting deep into that bittersweet territory that is so hard to describe. Bringing TOKiMONSTA into the mix was the icing on the cake that brings the nostalgia all the way home.”
The music video for ‘Remind U’ was created by Calypo Spritz. Watch it now.
Bristolian adventurous drum-and-sax duo Run Logan Run will release their third album, For A Brief Moment We Could Smell The Flowers, on September 17th through Worm Discs. Recorded in lockdown, following a period of intense jamming, the eight-track record finds them embracing a new direction, with the collaboration of producer Riaan Vosloo (Nostalgia 77). For A Brief Moment We Could Smell The Flowers “bolsters the dynamic improvised sound of the group with expansive synth soundscapes that add depth, warmth and emotional heft to the duo’s uniquely committed style of spiritualised jazz”, as the press release describes.
Speaking about the album title, which refers to the pandemic, saxophonist Andrew Neil Hayes explained that “for the first time in quite some time, society was together inside a collective moment”. Hayes added, ‘It didn’t last for long, and it was definitely ugly, but it was also definitely beautiful. We’re working from our intuition and our music is a reflection of the world we inhabit. It’s ugly, but it’s also beautiful, and it’s beautiful, but it’s also ugly.”
Ahead of the album release, Run Logan Run have shared ‘Screaming With The Light On’, a buoyant and boisterous track, marked by a sense of visceral energy and pure joy. Take a listen below.
September 3rd will see the release of Suuns‘ new album, The Witness, through Joyful Noise. After teasing it with the lead single ‘Witness Protection’, the Canadian band are offering another glimpse into the album with new single ‘C-Thru’. “A lot of the slower and more delicate songs on this record required quite some finesse, and after all that careful work we needed a good romp,” explained the band’s Liam O’Neill. “SUUNS at our best is always secretly a little bit ‘fun,’ so when Ben writes an uncomplicated song with a good melody, we try not to overthink it – we try and get the sound of us having fun with it on tape.”
‘C-Thru’ comes with an accompanying video directed by Jared Raab and Luca Tarantini, who had this to say about it:
“‘C-Thru’ was a song that seemed to ask for an abstract and difficult image. Perhaps we were feeling exhausted from having to see everything on a screen, but the experience of making the video was a lot like viewing it. We were slowly burying ourselves under a layer after layer of static textures. We live in a world mediated more and more by screens and we started to see the song as representing something more meaningful, out of sight, under the surface. It’s quite literally a trick of the eyes. It’s an image underneath another image.”
The 12th edition of Le Guess Who? festival in 2018 was an absolute musical paradise filled with wondrous and unforgettable performances. One that stood out for us was that of Anoushka Shankar & Manu Delago with Metropole Orkest Strings, playing on the third day of the festival. True masters of their instruments, Shankar following in the footsteps of her father on the sitar, and Delago a pioneer of the hang, the pair enthralled the audiences at TivoliVredenburg’s Grotezaal, performing with the 27-member string section of the Metropole Orkest, under the direction of conductor Jules Buckley.
Le Guess Who? has today shared the full video recording so if you’ve missed it, fear not, we can now relive this beguiling performance as it happened. Nick Helderman directs.
The 14th edition of Le Guess Who? takes place 11-14 November throughout Utrecht and festival passes are now available on leguesswho.com, where you can also find more info.
