Words by Sean Victory
When Sean Victory isn’t writing music or writing about music, it’s likely he’s listening to music. As a lifelong artist, his current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
“This microphone turns sound into electricity!” -Steve Albini (“The End of Radio” by Shellac)
From this miracle, the joy of my life is born again and again.
The world lost Steve Albini this week. He worked everyday at the studio he built just a couple blocks from my home. The day after his death, I dropped a bouquet of roses wrapped in gaff tape and a 1/4in cable in front of Electrical Audio, where it sat with some other weather-ravaged flora and candles filled with rain water.
It was music that brought me to Chicago, afterall. I found myself here because I needed a new context, and even though I never managed to locate the life I imagined, fleeing numb familiarity by chasing dreams through the abattoir of higher education, I am a completely different, improved, person because of my time here. From a homogeneous upbringing I’ve found beauty in all the variety and chaos the city has to offer.
Unfortunately, I’m a little tired of living in Chicago, but the magic of this city is undeniable (I’ve failed to follow through on plans to move away many times). It’s a liberal dystopia that’s a celebration of food, diversity, and the arts, but it’s crippled by the hearts of the same capitalist bastards that have run this place since the fire went out.
Despite the stranglehold the wealthy have on this city, real people of quality and character thrive. Albini was one such character. Another was Sonny Blount who came here to find himself and his sound, reborn as Sun Ra.
Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City by Red Hot Org and Meshell Ndegeocello (Red Hot Org)
One of the most powerful aspects of jazz music is the genre’s ability to push out in new directions while using a common and long established language. Sun Ra was one such artist, who used jazz to imagine an alternate future, a better reality, by reaching out of our atmosphere towards the infinite possibilities of the stars. He claimed to be an alien, born on Saturn and sent to our planet to preach peace and understanding, like our universe’s Kal-El who made much cooler costume choices—the man could wear a cape! His origin story is a perfect allegory for the black experience in America, where realities are drawn along lines of race.
Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City doesn’t feel like a tribute to the musician, but instead feels like an addition to his already prolific catalog. For those familiar with his work, there are tones and melodies from his work that are repeated here and expanded upon to new ends. Basslines, tones, and chants are joined by samples of Sun Ra speaking about his philosophy and view of the world. Some of the song names point vaguely in the direction of the source material.
Meshell Ndegeocello adds her power to the Arkestra (numerous members of the Sun Ra Arkestra play on these tracks), incorporating familiar riffs and melodies with fresh elaborations of Ra’s particular take on jazz. This album leans more toward the accessible, with some sprinkles of the avant-garde and dissonant throughout. It never goes full-blown Media Dreams, it lands much closer to the spirit of Lanquidity—even borrowing the bassline from “That’s How I Feel”. There’s more focus on rhythm and form than the freewheeling madness of Ra’s wildest outings. Vocal samples, chants, and the muted plucks of a Clavinet open a window to the past where Sonny gives a brief wave. The album’s aperture is still wide enough to allow fresh takes on arrangements that are still recognizably drawn from Ra’s discography.
Sun Ra is one of jazz’s greatest treasures. His influence looms large. He was such a prolific artist that not only do new works continue to surface years after his death, but artists are afforded many points of entry to his diverse catalog. From those connections new visions come into focus through the lens of afrofuturism, fresh facets to be explored thanks to the boundless light of the Sun.
Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos by Ka Baird (RVNG Intl.)
Holy shit. This is an album to be experienced, headphones on and in total darkness.
For those who don’t know, the bardos is the state between death and rebirth in certain eastern theologies. The music is otherworldly and completely enveloping. I struggle even to think of it as an album made up of songs. It feels more like the noise of narrative, told in a place without language. There are sounds identifiable from our world: breath, plosives, formants, a trumpet, flute, and drum. However, in this freely floating space they aren’t anchored to flesh, or even reminiscent of what we call reality. At the very most these elements sit like a word on the tip of your tongue, or like a dementia patient made to rummage through gray matter by the cursory comfort of a lost and familiar face.
Outside of these identifiable noises, the space of each “Gate”—as they’re called here, feels like a self-contained compartment of the same overall space. The listener tumbles through these rooms, visited by deities, tussling with karmic forces, and is alternately extruded into or shocked awake in the proceeding chambers.
It’s difficult to write about Bearings in the usual musical terms. This is the case not only because the music is alien in its tone and composition, but because the listener is much more a living part of the various torrents it whips up. The implicitly spiritual nature of the content makes the listener’s own frame of mind an active participant in these compositions. These songs are happening to you and with you. I know that sounds like some tambourine-banging hippy bullshit—and maybe it is, but by eschewing traditional notions of tone and structure, while offering only the faintest pepperings of human voice and terrestrial instrumentation, the music is permitted to live outside time and space. This is a stunning show of talent from Baird, and it is remarkable that they were able to create music that is both bizarre and compelling completely on its own terms.
Infinite Light by Not Waving & Romance (Ecstatic Recordings)
Not Waving returns with Romance after their first classically inspired album Eyes of Fate. It is a beautiful collection of pieces suited for ascending to heaven, or—the more easily available option, lost in half-sleep on a sunny patch of grass. The air of the album is truly angelic, drawing its inspiration from Boticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”
In this collaboration, both artists wear their hearts on their sleeves. Any person even vaguely familiar with this type of music will hear the heavy influence of GAS and William Basinski, and there is nothing wrong with that. The mood captured here relies on the treatment of the material, tape loops lightly hiss drowned in shimmering reverberance. These elements combine to fulfill the mission statement of the record, just like Eyes of Fate, to create music that emanates a sacred quality while eschewing religious connotations so that all may be offered equal opportunity to receive introspection and insight.
This album doesn’t chart any new musical territory, but it does what it does very well. Not Waving has been hit or miss for me of late, much preferring the older albums that hit hard and strange (Umwelt or Animals). The outings with Romance—along with his slew of other collaborations, show that Alessandro Natalizia is able to adapt his contributions to suit the needs of the various projects he undertakes.