What to watch
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.
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…
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
