My music on heavy rotation up to 2 February
My close companions since the middle of December have been these here excellent albums:
Ammar 808 - ‘Maghreb United’ This is a head-on collision between traditional musics of the Maghreb (northwest Africa) and some very non-traditional production methods. It’s not all made with a TR808, but it does honour its powerful kick drum with a very bass-heavy sound. Beautiful melodies and instrumental timbres sitting more naturally than you might imagine on some heavy, deep dancefloor beats. Superb.
VA - ‘Angola Soundtrack (The Unique Sound of Luanda (1968-1976))’ I’m guessing that (unless you’ve heard this album) you’re not overly familiar with Angolan pop music of the 60s and 70s; it’s worth fixing that. These eighteen cuts are mostly built around electric bass and guitar, with complex polyrhythmic grooves that sometimes reference Brazilian music, but in a unique way. The recordings are surprisingly clean, and the music is brilliant.
Max Tundra - ‘Mastered by Guy at the Exchange’ An unfeasibly creative record of electronically constructed songs and lyrics so direct that they sound utterly oblique. There are so many musical ideas flying about here that it’s a wonder the whole sounds creatively and stylistically coherent, but Ben Jacobs’s vision is so strong and his methods so particular that the result is unmistakeable. Off-kilter electro-op touched with the madness of genius.
North Sea Radio Orchestra - ‘North Sea Radio Orchestra’ The easy and inadequate label for this is ‘chamber pop’, although it is very much more ‘chamber’ than most of the ‘pop’ associated with that term. Most of these pieces (many of them settings of C.19 poems) have a strong sense of pop-song about them, despite their folk/classical orchestration, but they evince an English pastoral aesthetic, and are all exquisitely, shatteringly beautiful.
Vulfpeck - ‘The Beautiful Game’ I was introduced to Vulfpeck by a bass student, who described their music as ‘passive aggressive funk’. Some of this album is abandoned joyful funk, like EW&F (if edged with irony), but their stripped down instrumental tunes like ‘Dean Town’ fit that description very well. This is one of the most exciting hand-made, musicianly funk bands I’ve heard in a long time, and this is a top-whack album.
I’ve also been getting intimate with top-notch shorter releases from Paleface the Chef (chunky dissociative beats), The Domestics/Pizzatramp (intense hardcore split), Black Hay (beautifully dark covers), River of Gennargentu (gnarled shamanic blues), and Rael Jones and Peter Gregson (gorgeous post-classical).