My music on heavy rotation up to May 20

For the past six-hundred and seventy-two hours I’ve been spending major quality time with the following ausgezeichnet albums:

Talking Heads - ‘The Name of this Band is Talking Heads’ (CD 1) This half of Talking Heads’ first live album documents their lean and hungry days, and the songs are performed with a neurotic intensity that was rarely matched later (although later versions of their schtick have their own attractions). The precision of their performances and the quality of the recordings are pretty remarkable despite their inexperience, and the record is an exciting slice of oddball brilliance. 

Thelonious Monk - ‘Mysterioso’ This 1958 record showcases a version of Monk’s band that was only documented on live recordings, which is all to the good with music that’s meant to be made and heard ‘in the moment’. They play accessible hard bop in arrangements and performances shot through with Monk’s eccentric angularities, and animated by Johnny Griffin’s extraordinary free swinging tenor, perfectly bridging the supposed gap between the atavistic and the cerebral. Mind-expanding, nourishing and superb. 

Bird Paradigma - ‘The Archontic Principles’ Sounds are sounds, especially when they are found in ambient noise recordings, so it’s difficult to say what a record like this is ‘about’, but its song titles suggest that it is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s theory of the archive, something I’ve been digging into deeply over the past year or two. The ‘archontic principle’ is something we are all forced to respond to; Bird Paradigma does so with uncompromising intensity and textural finesse.

Stakka Lyrics - ‘I Still Think it’s the 90s’ Ruff ’n’ tuff sounding old school rap from my hometown Cambridge. There’s something both ludicrous and gratifying about bars that namecheck the streets I grew up hallucinating in, and the fact that this emcee strikes a nice balance between sincerity, humour and hard-hitting gruffness is just a bonus. Excellent boom-bap beats, excellent verbals, excellent mixtape.

Sonance - ‘Like Ghosts’ Ambient sludge doom? There isn’t really a term for this, although it belongs to a recognisable style. Chilling atmospheres, episodes of fragile quiescence, outbreaks of savage aural pumelling, unsettling lyrics, storming riffs… What’s unusual about this Bristolian band’s practice is that everything is carefully crafted, with a nuanced awareness of exactly what affective resonance each intervention will strike. Epic, terrifying, and wonderful.

And I’ve also been making repeated forays into some adderchog shorter releases from Nahima (atmospheric post-jazz), Wint & Kidd (electronic post-rock), Seek The Northerner ft. DJ Trauma (funky boom-bap rap) and Henbrain (grinding avant-rock).