Beautiful chaos from one of the free jazz greats: plenty of clashing notes, disjunct rhythms—everything’s broken as it should be.
Spectacular album title. Features traditional sounds and singing by Congo-based musicians mixed with modern production techniques. If you dig this, check out the Nihiloxica from #014. Lots of groovy, funky bits where I found myself practicing Rich Brown’s modal improvisation tips from #012.
Fikret Kızılok: Zaman Zaman (1993)
Chills me out, quiets me down—music to sway. This Turkish rock singer creates an old sentimental sound using acoustic instruments. My favourite is Oysa Ben with looping chord progressions, sounds of the shore, vinyl scratching, seagulls. Nice also to hear the warm piano on İki Parça Can.
Blood and Dust: Rites of Blood and Dust (2020)
So far away from what I normally listen to that I needed to look up the genre in Bandcamp (it says ‘ambient ritual ambient atmospheric horror dark ambient drone horror drone melodic dark ambient queer Montreal’). I often struggle when listening to music that calls itself ambient because I tend to find it sort of ‘empty’, but this was very clearly not the case here. Many tracks have this tasteful way of shifting the meter from a ‘three’ to ‘four’ feel, or gradually building intensity, or contrasting between arhythmic and groove, textural and instrumental. In the Hollow of a Hill somehow works in a flute and maybe a cello… This is not passive listening but a sound experience that’s well put-together: I recommend hearing from start to finish.