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).
Byg Ben Sukuya, MC Yallah & Jora MC: “Money Makes Money”
by Rupert Bottenberg
Countering the lowest of budgets with the highest levels of enthusiasm and resourcefulness, maverick Ugandan filmmaker Nabwana IGG and his compatriots in the Kampala slum Wakaliga made a massive splash in global cinema with the non-stop over-the-top 2015 action movie Who Killed Captain Alex? (production costs: $85 USD). Subsequent Ramon Film productions have sustained Wakaliwood as a cultural force to consider, and now they’ve made their first music video. In the same can-do community spirit as their film shoots, “Money Makes Money” is a fundraising appeal, looking to crowdsource a small but mighty economic stimulus for the village of Bulambuli. Produced by Baru, with musical direction by Bana Mutibwa, “Money Makes Money” drives the point home – well, more or less. Check it out, as much as anything, for the wicked verse by MC Yallah, who recently dropped the sharp EP Mama Waliwamanyii with Irish producer Eomac on the intensely eclectic label Phantom Limb.
Walking tall out of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and into a wide world that needs to hear them, Los Cogelones aren’t just Mexican, they’re Mexica, and they’re aggressively reclaiming their indigenous heritage. The four brothers have invested their sharp-edged, surf-flavoured garage punk with Nahuatl lyrics and fragments of First Nation culture, and tackle very current concerns like police brutality. Attending the release of their new album Hijos del Sol is their latest video, for the track “Danza de Sol”. Scraps of paper come to life most vividly in this animated effort from the talents at Mexico City’s Estudio Pneuma.
A new record from Californian dance-punk veterans !!! (alias “Chk Chk Chk”, for pronunciation purposes) is always something that merits three exclamation points. Following last year’s album Wallop, the band’s EP Certified Heavy Kats is due out on July 31. An early taste is available in the shape of the sparse, moody “Do the Dial Tone”, its video care of award-winning, Berlin-based animator Cheng-Hsu Chung. This is one phone call you don’t wanna miss.
Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School of Medicine: “Taliban USA”
by Patrick Baillargeon
The ineffable Jello Biafra and his Guantanamo School of Medicine have just released an unexpected new clip. “Taliban USA” is their first song in seven years. The song, vitriolic to the core, should be on the band’s next album, Tea Party Revenge Porn, expected towards the end of the summer, or in the fall, via Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label.
Jaz Coleman’s hasn’t lost his bite! With this video, the singer of Killing Joke presents Black & Red, his new project with didgeridoo master Ondrej Smeykal. Coleman, who travelled all the way to Australia to find a didgeridoo virtuoso, finally realized that one lives not far from his home in Prague! The pair unveil here their first track, the apocalyptic song “On The Day The Earth Went Mad”, which roughly touches on the same subjects that have preoccupied Killing Joke for over 40 years. It’s not Jaz Coleman who’s crazy, it’s the world that’s crazy…
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