This Oakland trio has just released a video for their new single “Supermind”. Formed in 2017, the band’s music is strongly tinted with post-punk references from the late ’70s, Wire and The Fall most obviously, with a sound that is perhaps a little more muscular. The clip was shot and edited remotely during the lockdown using footage from video artist McHank and footage from the band members’ phones. Low Praise have two EPs to their credit, Expectation(s) and Tanning Beds, and plan to release another single later this summer.
What to watch
The Earth has circled the sun 20 times since the release of A Song for the Sun, the last full album from the Sun Ra Arkestra. Led by venerable saxophonist Marshall Allen since the death in 1993 of the godfather of cosmic jazz, the ensemble has kept the explosively exploratory spirit of Sun Ra alive, and in fact will release a full new album in the fall, on the funky Strut label. In the meantime, to whet the appetite, they’ve put out a new version of “Seductive Fantasy”, originally on 1979’s On Jupiter, and it is in deed both seductive and fantastic, especially as it’s accompanied by the amazing eye-candy of Chad VanGaalen, Canadian indie rocker and psychedelic illustrator/animator par excellence.
Post-Rock
Bravery in Battle: “Parmi des Millions”
Based between Paris and Nantes, the French sextet Bravery in Battle are specific about the battle they’re fighting. Their ambitious new project The House We Live In – Penser le monde de demain is a multimedia stage show, a DVD, a book, and of course an album, on which their lush post-rock emo-scapes are overlain with the words of a global array of voices worthy of attentive ears – activists, scientists, and cultural icons, all with important perspectives on the Anthropocene disaster, and how we might hope to counter its impact. Among these is Montreal-born astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, who lays out hard truths in a charming singsong voice, seen here (subtitled for the non-francophone) in “Parmi des Millions”.
Turning Jewels Into Water: “Our Reflection Adorned by Newly Formed Stars”
Brooklyn-based percussionists-plus Ravish Momin and Val Jeanty, the pair at the heart of Turning Jewels Into Water, are building their own supernational language of drums and electronics. In a reversal of their name, the duo and their guests transmute their flow of soundwaves into shiny gems (with occasional sharp edges), gathered on their forthcoming album Our Reflection Adorned by Newly Formed Stars, due out in late August. Here’s the video for the title track and lead single, for which director Art Jones has filtered the footage into jagged, flickering shards, a seductive conflagration of colours and bodies in motions.
Jazz
Suoni Per Il Popolo Cinema
Just a few more days to enjoy the cinema section of the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, presented in partnership with Cinéma Moderne. The programming contains some standout titles, starting with Ornette: Made in America, the 1985 documentary on saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman by filmmaker Shirley Clarke.
It will be remembered that Ms. Clarke – one of the few women directors at the time – had launched her first feature film, The Connection, in 1961. It was an adaptation of a play about a band of heroin-addicted jazz musicians who, like in the famous Velvet Underground tune “I’m Waiting for the Man”, anticipate a visit from their dealer. The soundtrack, by pianist Freddie Redd, was in the bop tradition in vogue at the time, and featured Jackie McLean’s alto saxophone. If this film is her best known, it’s because most of the other films she’s made since then have had all sorts of problems with censorship in the United States. Ornette: Made in America was her last production.
This portrait of the father of harmolodics is a complex mosaic of archival images, fictional sequences, concert footage, and interviews. Among those interviewed were musicians Don Cherry and Charlie Haden, who were longtime members of Coleman’s group, as well as composer and conductor George Russell, authors William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and even architect, designer and theorist Buckminster Fuller.
It’s preceded by a short film on the free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown, shot in 1967.
Another program worth mentioning is a retrospective of short films by Karl Lemieux. In addition to 16 of his experimental shorts – the oldest of which, with music by Lee Ranaldo, dates back to 1998 – are excerpts from multi-projection performances, with Jerusalem In My Heart at Suoni Per Il Popolo in 2007, Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Bataclan in Paris in 2015, BJ Nilssen at the 25 FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival in Zagreb in 2017, and Philip Jeck and Michaela Grill at the Foundation for Art and Technology in Liverpool in 2017.
Also noteworthy, in a program of various portraits and documentaries, is the 2018 film Pauline Julien, intime et politique, which filmmaker Pascale Ferland has devoted to the muse of the independence movement. Note that this film, like many from the National Film Board of Canada, can be viewed at any time and free of charge on the NFB site.
Psych-Rock
Khruangbin: “Pelota”
In just a couple of weeks, that Texan triad of trippiness Khruangbin will release their latest album, the eagerly anticipated Mordechai. In the meantime, they’ve just released a video for the tasty track “Pelota”, an extracorporeal journey through a dimension of geometric enigmas, animated by Glassworks Creative Studio. “A Texan band with a Thai name singing a song in Spanish, loosely based on a Japanese movie,” that’s how Khruangbin explain the song, but for the video, we’ll quote its lyrics as sung by bassist Laura Lee, “perdido en una casa surreal” – lost in a very strange house.
Ambient / Experimental / Contemporary
Solipsisme: “Outrage à la morale publique”
Guitarist in the excellent Montreal post-rock band Milanku, François Lemieux has made good use of the quarantine to devote himself to a new solo project, Solipsism. Also a visual artist, he himself illustrates his latest experimental ambient track “Outrage à la morale publique”, released on the drone compilation Memories of a Lost City by Japanese independent label Tokyo Jupiter Records, all proceeds of which will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. He questions existence with black-and-white, symmetrized extracts from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet, creating a graceful dance of geometric forms that awaken one’s sixth sense. Like a projective psychological test, the video invites us to observe the thoughts that our imagination can sometimes release from the subconscious. The music that accompanies it is deeply melancholic, refined, delicate, and intrinsically luminous.
Retorunose is the Japanese duo of saxophonist Ruby Nakamura and drummer #STDRUMS, who’ve just released a self-titled EP, loaded with two powerful, ten-minute episodes of seismic jazz-punk. Further material from their session at the indie art space Zengyo Z was captured by video director Taro Maruyama – see below. Shot from all angles, the pair go on a tear inside a concrete storage room/miniature skate park, its every surface soaked in the feverish artwork of Masato Okano. “This is the music venue in my hometown,” says Okano of the locale, in the Tokyo suburb of Fujisawa City. “I painted my monsters with the all my friends’ bands’ names on the walls. My image of art always comes from music.”
New Wave / North East Asian / Post-Punk
LeeNalchi: “Tiger’s Third Leg”
We recently heralded the release of Sugungga, the impressive debut album from Seoul’s LeeNalchi. The band has revitalized the old-fashioned, highly formalized musical storytelling tradition of pansori with an injection of avant-garde attitude and post-punk funkiness. They’ve just put out the video for one of the album’s more lighthearted tracks, “Tiger’s Third Leg”, featuring the freaky footwork of South Korean contemporary dance troupe Ambiguous Dance Company. Catch this tiger by its tail, below.
Hip Hop
RTJ + Zack de la Rocha
Police violence against African-Americans has been addressed by Killer Mike and El-P since the first offerings of Run the Jewels. Among their classic, here is Close Your Eyes (And Count To F**k) with Zack de la Rocha, renowned rap-rock speaker of the progressive opposition in the USA. Done in 2015, still relevant in 2020.
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, run them, fuck the slow mo
Fashion slave, you protestin’ to get in a fuckin’ look book
Everything I scribble’s like The Anarchist Cookbook
(Look good, posing in a centerfold of Crook Book)
Black on black on black with a ski mask, that is my crook look
How you like my stylin’, bruh? Ain’t nobody stylin’, bruh
‘Bout to turn this mothafucka up like Riker’s Island, bruh
Where my thuggers and my cripples and my blooders and my brothers?
When you niggas gon’ unite and kill the police, mothafuckas?
Or take over a jail, give those COs hell
The burnin’ of the sulfur, God damn I love the smell
Blankets and pillow torchin’, where the fuck the warden?
And when you find him, we don’t kill him, we just waterboard him
We killin’ ’em for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom
And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord’ll sort ’em
We out of order, your honor, you’re out of order
This whole court is unimportant, you fuckers are walkin’ corpses
I’m a flip wig synonym, livin’ within distortion
I’ll bite into a cyanide molar before you whores win
I’m a New Yorkian, I fuck for the jump
I wear my Yankee so tilted I actually walk with a hunch
Look at Mikey, I think he likey, we are sinister sons
(Aye, we the type to beat the preacher with a grin and a gun)
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
A wise man once said, (“We all dead, fuck it”)
Just spit it disgusting youngin’, and hold your nuts while you’re gunnin’
I listened, tatted a sentence on my dick last summer
Now I’ll never get that phrase off my brain, it’s no wonder
I’m here to buy hearts, I got hundreds, honey
The cheaper the parts, the better buy for the money
I’m trained in vagina whisperin’, glistenin’
Waitin’ for their christenin’, I know the neighbors can’t help but listen in
A dirty boy who come down on a side of dissonance
I can’t even relax without sirens off in the distances
Not shittin’ you, little buddy, this fuckin’ island’s a prison
The only solace I have is the act of conjugal visitin’
My solitary condition’s preventin’ conjugal visits
Go mane and missin’ my misses, they keepin’ me from my children
Conditions create a villain, the villain is givin’ vision
The vision becomes a vow to seek vengeance on all the vicious
Liars and politicians, profiteers of the prisons
The forehead engravers, enslavers of men and women
Includin’ members of clergy that rule on you through religion
(So strippin’ kids to the nude and then tell ’em God’ll forgive ’em)
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
It’s De La on the cut, liftin’ 6 on your stitchy crew
I’m miles ahead of you, you can sip my bitches brew
My battle status is burnin’ mansions from Dallas to Malibu
Check my résumé, your residence is residue
Call her a skin job and my honey dip’ll backflip for you
You playin’, God your eye sockets, she gon’ rip in two
We sick of bleedin’ out a trace, spray a victim, you
Done dyin’, Phillip AK Dickin’ you
With clips in the bottom, we dippin’ from Gotham
Yes eclipsed by the shadows, a dark dance to the coffin
I’m a fellow with melanin, suspect of a felony
Ripped like Rakim Allah, feds is checkin’ my melody
Yes aggressively tested we’ll bump stretchers and penalties
Dump cases with face and the cop pleas when we seizing a pump
With reason to dump on you global grand dragons
Still pilin’ fast, plus Afghani toe taggin’
Now they trackin’ me and we bustin’ back, see
The only thing that close quicker than our caskets be the factories
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
Run them jewels fast, run them, run them jewels fast
Run them, run them, r-run them, r-run them, run them, r-run them
Source : LyricFind
Paroliers : Jaime Meline / Michael Santigo Render / Zack De La Rocha
Paroles de Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck) © Royalty Network, Cypmp
Hip Hop
Terrace Martin feat. Denzel Curry, Daylyt, Kamasi Washington, & G Perico: “Pig Feet”
The Blackout Tuesday pause is over, but that doesn’t mean a return to distracting fun. Now’s not the time for that. It’s the time to pay attention to Terrace Martin, joined by tenorman Kamasi Washington (both have credits on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, 2015) as well as Denzel Curry, Daylyt, and G Perico. Says Martin: “Someone asked, how do I feel? I told them hurt, fearless, angry, aware and fully ready to protect me, my family and my people at all cost. I got together with Black men that felt the same way and created a work of truth.” When the music stops, stay and read the names to the end.
Soul/R&B
Face of An Artist: “Fucboii”
Chicago soul singer Face of An Artist dropped a rather sober video on Vevo today, for his very first song, “Fucboii”, released last March. Simplicity seems to be the best way for him to declare an honest and sincere love, and inhabit his vulnerability. He swathed in the violet hue of passion between memories of intimate moments, for a classic, aesthetically refined scenario ceding the floor to his lyrics.