What to watch
The Berlin-based but proudly South Korean DJ/producer Peggy Gou, whose discography includes the noted Once EP on Ninja Tune and a DJ Kicks compilation, released “I Go”, the second of her summer singles on her own Gudu label already in early July. The official video arrives a month later, but it’s worth wait. Created by Gou with animator Inji Seo, it’s a strange and sexy nautical adventure soaked in saturated lime and magentas.
The band’s name means “garbage music”, but it’s no reflection on the amazing, inventive sounds of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Fulu Miziki. Energetic avatars of eco-freakyAfro-punk, their instruments are built from scrap scavenged from Kinshasa’s trash yards, likewise their outlandish costumes, equal parts warriors of the wasteland and Japanese space monsters. Currently based in culturally supercharged Kampala, Uganda, the band made the best of the pandemic lockdown, as their forthcoming EP Ngbaka will surely confirm in November.
A concert by one of the pioneers of electro-noise, recorded on Wednesday, December 8.
A concert by Fennesz at Vienna’s Grill X, recorded for the general public on Wednesday, December 8 with a few cameras, one of which allows us to see what is displayed on his computer screens. A rather meditative performance during the first half, all in half-tones, but it becomes a little more animated afterwards, without ever falling into anything that would be overwhelming, even when he grabs his Fender Jazzmaster. Listen to it on headphones, with the volume turned up, to get a better taste of all the subtleties of its overlapping pointillist strata.
The French festival Banlieues bleues offers free webcasts of three concerts pairing musicians experienced in free improvisation.
Until December 18th, the Banlieues bleues festival (in the Seine-Saint-Denis area of the Parisian suburbs) is offering free webcasts of three concerts presented at the end of November under the theme The Bridge : les amis américains, with three duets pairing musicians experienced in free improvisation.
The first, lasting some 26 minutes, features veteran double bassist Joëlle Léandre and the double bassist, also French, Bernard Santacruz.
The second, lasting 35 minutes, pairs New York hip-hop MC and producer Mike Ladd with France’s Mathieu Sourisseau on guitar.
The third, 57:30 minutes, features pianist Benoît Delbecq on piano and virtuoso singer Claudia Solal, a duo that earlier this year released a highly successful album, Hopetown, on the Rogueart label.
Enjoy your shows!
The anti-Covid anime insanity of Battles’ “Sugar Foot” video is, shall we say, transformative.
The New York City band (a duo these days) that made math-rock sexy are back with a video for “Sugar Foot”, off their 2019 album Juice B Crypts. The track features extra weirdness, in the form of the distinctive alto-tenor vocals of prog-rock icon Jon Anderson of Yes, and input from Taiwanese electro-shamanists Prairie WWWW. The video is the creation of Japanese animation team AC-bu, contributors to the notoriously bizarre anime satire Pop Team Epic, and it portrays a Great Space Robot Festival, taking place to avenge all the concerts and festivals cut short by Covid-19 in the last year.
The synchronicity sparkles between Angèle David-Guillou’s new compositions and Maurice Béjart’s classic choreographies.
To accompany the release of her new album A Question of Angles, composer Angèle David-Guillou has cobbled together a couple of videos for the album’s first two tracks. They’re both with borrowed footage from celebrated choreographer Maurice Béjart’s 1971 ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. The haunting title track, below, attends an entirely feminine passage from the ballet, while the fierce “Valley of Detachment” accompanies its masculine counterpart. The synchronicity sparkles between David-Guillou’s new music and Béjart’s classic choreographies.
The annual music trade fair in France, Midem (Marché International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale), switched to virtual mode for its 2020 edition this past June, as have most music festivals and industry events. Japan’s Haru Nemuri was among the participating artists at Midem this year, and now shares her performance, a 15-minute melange of premium J-pop, skate-punk, dramatic electro, and passionate poetry, taken from her recent album Lovetheism. Created in solitude, Nemuri’s words and music – effusive pleas for empathy and connection – are nonetheless hypersocial, so there’s something especially poignant about her giving it her all, alone in a room with only cameras for company (and a microphone stand, for air-guitar purposes).
The game is on for Yellowknife electro-blues-rocker Digawolf, in the video for his new album’s title track.
While he works out of Yellowknife these days, electro-blues-rocker (and cartoonist!) Digawolf was born and bred in the community of Behchoko, capital of the Tlicho First Nation, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. His surroundings might be frosty but his songs have a smouldering heat, as well as sly wit and gritty beauty. They often draw on the wisdom his father passed down to him – but apparently, that never included that bit about discretion being the better part of valour.
“High Arctic” is the title track of Digawolf’s fifth record, the follow-up to the Juno-nominated Yellowknife. The video finds Digawolf, drummer David Dowe, and guitarist Greg Nasogaluak on their way to a gig when challenged to a game of street hockey. They figure their sheer size and old-school rules have the game already won. Pride goeth before a fall…
A video to whet the appetite for the forthcoming collection of Brian Eno’s best film music.
In anticipation of the release of his next album – an anthology of his best film soundtracks, scheduled for Friday – Brian Eno releases a first single and accompanying video, “Decline and Fall”, shot in Brazil by director Henrique Goldman.
The music for “Decline and Fall” was originally part of the soundtrack of the feature film O Nome da Morte, directed by Goldman in 2017, so some images from the movie can be found in the video, which takes the form of a meditation on the struggle between Man and Nature, water and fire, fiction and science, birth and death, making us aware of the fragility of the natural balance seriously compromised by our civilisation and its excesses.
Among other striking images are the climatic phenomenon, on a colossal scale, in which the trees of the Amazon rainforest continually expulse billions of gallons of water into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Brazilian by birth but now living in London, Goldman has been working in the film industry for the past two decades and has won numerous awards for his work.
How much fun is an amusement park, really? Arriola tries to answer with “Par mes paupières”.
A songwriter and a Doctor in philosophy, Arriola is currently one of the most interesting craftsmen in the French language in North America… but remains relatively confidential since his professional beginnings. His new video was filmed at an amusement park – it goes with the song “Par mes paupières”, which evokes a struggle somewhere deep inside oneself, in which an opponent must be dislodged. For this song at the crossroads of psychedelic rock and synth pop, Arriola hired sound engineer Pascal Shefteshy (Ariane Moffatt, Alex Nevsky, Alfa Rococo, Coeur de pirate, Peter Peter), who mixed the recording, and for the mastering, Matt Colton, from London, who also mastered the albums of Coldplay, Peter Gabriel, James Blake, Muse, and many others.
Boarding this Thursday at 8pm: fifth and final musical journey for the Nuits d’Afrique de Montréal’s Live African Nights series!
Montreal’s leading hip-hop group, Nomadic Massive, start the festivities. The Montreal group, expressing themselves in English, French, Creole, Spanish, and Arabic, celebrated its 15th anniversary last year and released the album Times. This collective, born from a whirlwind of influences and ideas, sums up the soul of the metropolis: a crossroads of cultures, a mix of languages, a fusion of colours and music. An explosive force!
The Ivorian reggaeman Dakka Dembélé performs the launch concert tonight for his first album, Petit bateau, on which he tackles, among other things, illegal immigration. He calls on African youth to refuse to get into makeshift boats at the risk of their lives. He presents his reggae with West African sounds and mixed influences, in the tradition of French and Mandingo reggae. Expect a performance of the entire album, plus three additional numbers from his repertoire. A cruise under the sun is in the offing!
As usual, the mix of the powerful, hushed voice of singer Emese Árvai-Illés and the dark music of Krisztián Árvai succeed in bewitching. This time, however, it is the aesthetic side of the band that surprises. The duo generally deliver flamboyant videos with crazy stories and eccentric costumes. With “My Casual God”, there’s instead a rural sobriety, in black and white, contrasting with everything they’ve produced visually before.
The charm operates once again, this time in a backwoods version, nevertheless marked by gravity.