Last month Issei Herr shared the stunning and poignant double single, ‘Aubade (The Farewell Is a Beginning)’ b/w ‘Prelude (An Eternity of Light)’, lifted from her upcoming debut album, Distant Intervals. With release day less than a month away, the Brooklyn based cellist and composer is enticing us again with a gorgeous and engrossing new single called ‘Aveu (The Beginning Is a Farewell)’ featuring Maria BC. The single comes accompanied by a deeplyemotive live video, filmed live at St. John’s in the Village last December. Watch it below.
Distant Intervals is out on April 7th through NNA Tapes
Snapped Ankles have revealed a brilliant second track off their upcoming Blurtations EP, which drops on April 22nd as a Record Store Day release through The Leaf Label. Titled ‘Planet You’, it is classic Snapped Ankles awesomeness and it comes with a wacky video accompaniment directed by Rob Daglish. Watch it below.
Incredibly prolific, versatile and visionary cellist Alison Chesley, who performs under the moniker Helen Money, has her hand in many projects and collaborations. For nearly three decades, she has composed for film, theatre and dance, as well playing, touring and working in albums from artists like Mono, Anthrax, Broken Social Scene, Russian Circles, Chris Connelly, Shellac, Neurosis, Earth and many more. Her latest project sees her joining forces with composer and producer Will Thomas, with whom she has frequently collaborated. They have announced the release of Trace, which marks their debut collaborative full-length album. The pair’s prowess for invokingemotion is palpable in the upcoming record, and according to the press release, “they each use their highly developed means of conveying emotion through sound and their collaborative natures to accentuate the emotional arc of the compositions”. On the upcoming album, Chesley and Thomas “utilize timbre, tone and dynamics as essential tools in crafting stunning emotive narratives. Together, the duo wield sound with inquisitive aplomb, burrowing into each other’s sonic aesthetics and unearthing irrefutable beauty.”
Trace is set for release on May 12th through Thrill Jockey and ahead of it the pair have shared the striking first single ‘Thieves’. Here it is.
We’re a little bit more than excited to hear about the upcoming double album from visionary and virtuosic South African drummer, composer, writer and activist Asher Gamedze. Entitled Turbulence and Pulse, it follows his extraordinarily staggering and powerful debut Dialectic Soul, which was one of our Album Picks of 2020. Slated for a May 5th release through International Anthem and Mushroom Hour Half Hour, Turbulence and Pulse already looks set to be one of the most compelling albums to bless our ears in 2023.
Gamedze’s forthcoming album saw him working with the same stellar quartet from Dialectic Soul, comprising Thembinkosi Mavimbela on bass, Buddy Wells on tenor saxophone, and Robbin Fassie on trumpet. “I chose these musicians specifically because I know that they’re open to understanding and interpreting the music from my perspective and my way of working.”
On Turbulence and Pulse, and as the press release explains, Gamedze “explores relationships of time between music and history”. He elaborates:
“Time in music is a metaphor for thinking about time in history and how time moves. The way we’re taught history is generally in a way that robs people of agency in imagining themselves as part of history and how it unfolds. It is something that happens to us. I think there’s a productive metaphor in that because the sense of time in music is created by musicians playing together. If we can use that to think about history and time in history, you can see that, actually, history is created by people in a whole range of ways. At the heart of it, historical motion is created by people organized and acting together, whether for progressive or reactionary ends.”
Gamedze also shared his thoughts on the album’s theme, stating that the underlying message is “to claim a form of historical agency and realize that the future is not a foregone conclusion. As people we can organize, to transform our world in small and big ways.” He continues:
“One of the ideas that I’ve had for a long time is to unsettle the way that people think about culture as something static or as something fixed. There’s this tension in Africa, because of the way that the colonists have constructed visions of African culture, where people speak about this need to conserve culture and document it. I think that’s important, but you also have to understand that these things are moving. And we are the people who have to participate in that movement.”
To bring the album to life, Gamedze has also enlisted guest vocalist Julian Otis on one of the tracks and the LP, CD, and digital versions feature three additional tracks, alternate versions of ‘Melancholia’, ‘If It Rains. To Pursue Truth’, and ‘Out Stepped Zim’, which Gamedze recorded on a rooftop in Cairo with his Another Time Ensemble featuring Maurice Louca (synthesizers), Adham Zidan (bass), Alan Bishop (alto saxophone, voice), and Chérif El-Masri (guitar).
It may seem like a long way away for the album to be out but we can already hear the stunning and celestial ‘Wynter Time’, which only heightens our anticipation for what is to come. ‘Wynter Time’ is dedicated to Black Caribbean radical intellectual, writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, in particular her book Black Metamorphosis. The single if offered with an accompanying video directed by Adrian Van Wyk and you can watch it below.
Beginning life in Belgium in 2018, Echoes of Zoo is the brainchild project of Nathan Daems, also comprising Bart Vervaeck, Lieven Van Pée and Falk Schrauwen. Following their 2021 debut album, BREAKOUT, they have announced the release of a new album titled Speech of Species. Slated for a May 12th release through W.E.R.F. Records, the new record remains true to the quartet’s heady fusion of psychedelic jazz, dub and rock with a punk edge, and the feel-good feel of a marching band. Continuing to pour out a relentlessly pulsing sonic energy, on the upcoming album, Echoes of Zoo “experiment with Eastern and Balkan sounds, microtonal guitars, animalistic sounds, and a host of new rhythmic observations based on Brazilian and West African grooves”, as the press release describes. Speech of Species centres on the theme of animal communication, as Daems explains:
“Messages are constantly being transmitted in the animal world by adopting body poses; there are more than 2,000 different poses or “words” in certain lizard species, by dancing in the most ingenious ways, by changing colours from geometric patterns (certain species of squids and chameleons do this), by causing vibrations in the ground, by smells, even by giving light and so on. How can we be so blind to that and say that animals cannot speak?”
With balkan inflections and tinged with oriental ebullience, ‘Bee Jive’ serves as the first exhilarating taste to emerge from the album. The track is inspired by a chaotic beehive and “based on a Senegalese Sabar rhythm, spiced with short Balkan riffs on saxophone and an energetic oriental guitar solo”. Take a listen below.
Following the transcendent ‘Glimmerings‘ and the majestic ‘Saturnine’, GoGo Penguin have now revealed ‘Friday Film Special’, the third sublime single from their forthcoming new album Everything Is Going to Be OK. A low-fi track, ‘Friday Film Special’ is inspired by DJ Shadow’s seminal album Entroducing….., and bassist Nick Blacka had this to say about it:
“Chris and I have been big fans of hip hop and instrumental hip hop albums for many years and it’s something that we haven’t had much chance to explore before with GoGo Penguin. Albums such as DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing were a huge influence on us when we were young and Friday Film Special really tips its cap to the hip hop instrumentals that we’d grown up loving. We were both into skateboarding as kids and I think we wanted to capture a nostalgic throwback to those times.
I remember being incredibly young and asking my older brother what he was watching one day, and he said, ‘Friday Film Special’. Friday Film Specials were a series of films made by the Children’s Film Foundation and were on TV every Friday in the mid to late 80s. Even at the time, they felt old because most of them were made in the 1970s, so all the kids were wearing flares. It’s one of the most retro and nostalgic things I could think of.”
Listen to ‘Friday Film Special’ below and grab the album when it’s out on April 14th through Sony Music/XXIM.
