Shortparis: “KoKoKo/Struktury Ne Vyhodyat Na Ulitsy”
by Geneviève Gendreau
A new politico-musical punch from the Russian quintet
If you don’t already know them, here is a very muscular introduction for the Russian group Shortparis with “Structures don’t go down in the streets”. This new clip does not depart from their habits: linking aesthetics and social criticism against a background of experimental music. We follow the group and a plethora of workers, young and old, in abandoned buildings, where a metaphor between working class and animality is staged. The one to which the authorities wants to reduce the weak, claimed here as a source of resistance.
The song is, as always, carried by the sulfurous and theatrical presence of the singer Nikolai Komyagin, blowing on the embers of a growing protest (no doubt in reference to the uprisings of the Belarusian people). The song follows the escalation and closes with a liberation, made possible by the solidarity of the oppressed. We cross our fingers that this single will be the first of an upcoming album.
A surrealist debut for the Toronto synthrock project.
Toronto’s David Bertrand is deeply involved with the independent cinema scene there, so it’s no surprise that his foray into music, The Great Octopus, should recall the great synthrock sci-fi soundtracks of the ’70s and ’80s. Cryptid, the first EP by The Great Octopus, arrive November 5. The first single is “Zenith”, out now, and the video is Bertrand’s own edit of the obscure 1972 short film The Cosmic Bicycle, director Les Goldman’s animated adaptation of Wilfred Satty’s book of surrealist collage.
There’s certainly something to the daegeum loops of South Korea’s Dasom Baek.
Leader of the avant-traditional ensemble Geori, Baek released her first solo album in August. Dedicated to discovering new paths for antiquated Korean music, the Seoul-based composer and performer is a specialist in woodwind instruments. Among them is the daegeum, a large transversal flute, which she breathes life into in this performance of the title track from Nothingness. Her contemporary approach to the instrument, looping fleeting phrases into a sort of storytelling without words, has a haunting, moonlit character that’s hard to shake.
Shanghai-based Scintii offers an elegant moodiness with her new track.
Echoing the velvety vibes of pre-millennial trip-hop and synth-soaked atmospherics, and her own early classical training, singer and producer Scintii (alias Stella Chung, born in Taipei, schooled in London, and now based in Shanghai) updates that elegant moodiness for the decade ahead with her new track, “Times New Roman”. Soft, sensuous, with a hint of the sinister, the track (now out, with an EP including four remixes out at the beginning of October, on Houndstooth) is accompanied by a video directed by Kynan Puru Watt, who’s done likewise for Arca and others.
Diplo offers only his new album MMXX for 2020 – and it’s more than enough to be grateful for, as uncharacteristic as it is.
L.A.’s legendary Diplo has found the pandemic shutdown as oppressive as anyone. Perpetually productive in normal times, the producer behind Major Lazer and many other crazy club sounds offers only his new album MMXX for 2020 – and it’s more than enough to grateful for, as uncharacteristic as it is.
“It’s all I had inside me,” he says. “I didn’t want to have Zoom sessions, I didn’t want to write pop songs. I was just stuck in my house with keyboards and a guitar I barely ever used. I would walk outside in Los Angeles and see empty streets and see nervous people and this is what I heard…”
What we hear is a patient, nourishing immersion into emotive ambient, an extended expression of hope and a need to heal. Give it a listen, and enjoy the luxuriant visuals.
Bassist, rapper, and trumpet-tooter Kim, and drummer/singer Midi, make up the Tokyo-based duo UHNELLYS. They’ve been concocting strange and amazing new variations of leftfield future funk for over a decade now, and have yet to run out of good ideas.
They’ve just released a new track, “Bridge”, quite noisy, dark, and furtive by their standards, but as always surprising the listener every few bars. The video, directed by Kim, is a front-seat ride on the city’s scenic Yurikamome monorail route. Get on board!
Two members of the exceptional jazz unit Irreversible Entanglements, whose album Who Sent You? impressed so many this past March, the drum-and-trumpet duo of Aquiles Navarro and Tcheser Holmes have their own release forthcoming on the International Anthem label, a cornerstone of the exploratory, socially conscious jazz revival of the last decade. Their work together is informed by Afro-Caribbean rhythms and refined electronics, and showcases Panamanian-American Navarro’s expressive trumpet (he trained under a veteran of Fania All-Stars, among others). The album Heritage of the Invisible IIis due out in October, but in the meantime, enjoy a first taste with “Pueblo”, its very title a salute to community and place (Brooklyn, in their case). The video is directed by Good Glass Films and features the sinuous gestures of dancers Cal Hunt and Quamaine “Virtuoso” Daniels.
Baltimore’s master of the perpetual crescendo, Dan Deacon, has a new original film score out today, August 20. He lends his explosively euphoric electronic music to Rebecca Stern’s new documentary feature Well Groomed, a strange, insightful – and intensely colourful – journey into the world of dog-grooming competitions. Deacon calls the canine stylists “folk artists”, and this video for one of the soundtrack’s highlights, “Adriane in Wonderland”, demonstrates his point well with clips from the film.
For several months now, the United States has been burning from within. Unfortunately, the man at the wheel can’t be bothered to put out the fire, and even takes a nasty pleasure in throwing gasoline on the fire. The intense noise band Uniform embraces the flames of this ambient chaos during a purely symbolic and cathartic immolation ritual, filmed at the full moon by Jacqueline Castel, with writer Mitch Horowitz officiating, on July 4. Inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s novel Below the Volcano and Alan Moore’s famous graphic novel The Killing Joke, singer Michael Berdan continues to explore the duality of the figure of the anti-hero, prisoner of a perpetual existential malaise in the image of the mythic Sisyphus. “Dispatches From the Gutter” is the second single from the album Shame, to be released on the label Sacred Bones on September 11. Listen at your own risk.
The dance is Javanese in the video for “En haut des cimes”, by singer-songwriter Lena Deluxe. This is the first single release from Santaï, her second album, to be released this winter (five years after Mirror for Heroes), recorded in Hudson, NY, with the much sought-after Henry Hirsch. The multi-instrumentalist from Lille met guitarist Ipin Nur Setiyo in Indonesia, who, like her, had a serious thing for the stunning sounds of the second half of the sixties, as well as traditional Javanese music. In this video directed by Fanny Caillibot, Lena wanders through the jungle to the intoxicating rhythms of Ipin Nur Setiyo’s guitar and Gagah Pacutantra’s kendang. At the two and half minute mark, the vigorous tempo is reduced to a torpid blues as the archer-princess Srikandi dances, and Lena prepares to succumb to the “python of memories”.
To announce the release of their next album, the crazed California band Frankie and the Witch Fingers are back with a single on Greenway Records (Moonwalks, L.A. Witch, Stonefield) and at the same time, they’ve put out a video for the A side, “Cavehead”. The track, which retains the same playful frenzy of the previous album ZAM, mixes Talking Heads’ frenzied percussion with guitar riffs in the garage style of the Oh Sees or King Gizzard. The clip features a primitive man who tastes everything he can get his hands on, relying solely on his survival instincts, with great humour. He discovers by chance some food a little different from the others: hallucinogenic mushrooms. Propelled into the fourth dimension, the caveman awakens in a mysterious, colourful parallel world where spirits lift the veil on a hitherto well-kept secret: that of being aware of his own mortality. The video deliriously illustrates a controversial theory by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna on the origin of human consciousness. According to him, the psilocybin molecule has had an impact on the evolution of the human brain, such as the development of language and visual thinking. For the moment impossible to verify, this theory is resurfacing at the same time as the revival of research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic molecules.
Anishinaabe folk-rocker Jacob Chegahno passed away in 2017, after living for many years with Ankylosing Spondylitis. He left a little legacy behind though, the tracks that make up Buffalo, his posthumous album and one of the first releases from Wiretone Records. The young indie label and studio operating out of humble but musically lively Owen Sound, Ontario, is run by David Chevalier, a former bandmate of Chegahno’s who felt the world needed to hear his stuff. One hears a lot of Neil Young in Chegahno, in the ramshackle raunchiness of his guitar in certain passages, as well as his weathered, vulnerable vocals – he’s almost at a whisper on his heartbreakingly effective cover of Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills”, a song that’s so much more potent from a First Nations artist. The quirky, poignant electro-folk number “Ookpik”, for which Chevalier made an affectionate video, is a salute to the iconic Inuit sealskin owl dolls, as well as a tip of the hat to Chegahno’s friend, the Cape Dorset sculptor Teetee Curley (and a gentle reminder of the very immediate concerns that face the creatures and communities of northern Canada).
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