Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Lake Deep Memory by Pye Corner Audio (quiet details)
In 2024, Martin Jenkins traveled to Guatemala to play a music festival. While he was there he spent time connecting with the beautiful Lake Atitlán. The surrounding landscape is defined by its verdant hillsides, wide open skies, and three volcanic peaks pouring a kaleidoscope of color into the water below. This site is held in high regard by locals and visitors alike as a highly charged location for connecting with our spirit. The Mayans even believed that Lake Atitlán provided a portal to the divine realm where they could commune with their ancestors. It may be precisely this aspect that inspired the album title, Lake Deep Memory.
When we think about music inspired by locales, especially nature, we think of a pastoral stillness. There’s frequently an absence of sound that draws our ears towards the sonic events that flitter through the negative space. Jenkins, uses hazy dub textures, tape hiss, and other artifacts of production, to bring form to the air around the music. Combining this with the repetitious synth lines and looped melodies, changes slowly drift through the songs like the sun wandering through treetops, wind passing ripples on the water, and shushing the leaves. The proliferation of these elements translate into an exalted sense of space.
Pye Corner Audio has always been a project that revels in new forms, and bending a familiar toolset to the situation at hand. No different here, Martin Jenkins is happy to take his studio magic out into the wild where he can fully channel a landscape charged with such spiritual resonance.
Nuits de la Fondation Maeght by Sun Ra (Strut Records)
Ra’s not dead, man. If he was, 1) I wouldn’t be writing about him all the time because 2) he’s still releasing more records every year than most active artists manage across a decade of diligence. However, this is from the early years of Ra and his Arkestra, in 1970 at their first performances outside of North America. Recorded across two nights at a modern art festival in Southern France, and in good company with other artists on the bleeding edge of free jazz and consciousness expansion: Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Lamonte Young—and his cohort in the Theatre of Eternal Music, Marian Zazeela.
The performances capture the broad ambitions of Sun Ra, where wild excursions of noise and dissonance quarrel and dissolve into delicate melodies. In the albums from his early years it feels like most of the instruments in the band are approached as percussion instruments first, and whatever in-built mechanisms they possess for tone and melody are of secondary use to the songcraft. To be sure, this is exactly the Sun Ra many people can’t seem to get past, but in the canon of his work—and of this particular concert, it’s the Zero’d darkness of space for the twinkling One of stars to play upon. This contrast is painted over time, each night’s performance is two hours in length, creating a four hour album. I’m sorry if that’s a daunting prospect on paper, but it is the Arkestra at their most cinematic. Melodies give way to thunderous clashes of notes, Ra’s Farfisa set to either “Butterfly Kisses” or “Atomic Warfare”. Dozens of minutes pass where the horns remain silent, or subtly pop in for an accent here or there, but then a gorgeous fanfare will unfurl revealing the expanse of the power they possess.
I fully understand the difficulty that listeners can encounter with Sun Ra, I was there once as well. The parts of his music I was actually able to grok, led to the full-scale obsession I have with his art. Like a good and challenging book, you learn to understand and appreciate it by sitting with it, not by turning away when things get difficult. It is a perseverance required of the listener that seems philosophically entwined with the Afro-futurist vision of the artist. It’s the antithesis of the typical capitalist agenda, the type of palatable ubiquity that fires the starting-gun in the race to the bottom of the bargain bin.
GOLLIWOG by billy woods (backwoodz studioz)
I’ve found the overall genre of hip-hop reliably stale for years, with the occasional sparkle that might grab my attention, only to be lost in the carpet of everyday life. On first listen, I feel like I’ve heard the songs before, any number of times. Not so with the crew at backwoodz studioz. I don’t hold any contemporary hip-hop artist in higher regard than billy woods. I was first drawn to woods’ unique approach to songwriting on 2019’s Hiding Places(also featuring the supremely talented arrangements of Kenny Segal). The plurality in the title makes itself felt across the entirety of the record. Not just song to song, but in individual songs themselves, there is a sense of transience, a scoping out of territory, that leads to a traversal deep into the subject matter. Take “Crawlspace” for example. Sure, ignore the lyrics and just focus on the movement of the music. We start in one place and end up somewhere completely different. It’s not the typical looping of bars as the perfunctory but necessary foundation for an MC to scribble ideas across. The music bolsters and strengthens the storytelling.
So after another five or six years of experience and skill sharpening we have woods more capable than ever at steeping his album in a unifying concept. GOLLIWOG is a trip through darkness layered in horror samples, murk, and a gloomy ambience. From the autobiographical, to the broader bleak reality of the black experience, critiques of government in its familiar dysfunction. It’s riddled with pain, pessimism, regret, and a resilience teetering on exhaustion.
There are plenty of moments to laugh, like all good comedy the seeds of which sprout from tragedy. This trick is pulled off especially well in the song “Misery”: “Number one fan like misery, and misery love company/ And with them titties, she never unaccompanied/ And she not goin’ home in a pumpkin/ If it’s a tight squeeze, brodie, you the one thumbin’/ Please believe”. So, it’s quite unexpected when the song wraps up with a sample from the movie adaption of Toni Morrison’s haunting post-slavery novel Beloved, with Thandie Newton screaming “She’s the one I need! You can go! She’s the one I have to have!”
This is the real work that seems doable exclusively by hip-hop. In a time when the ruling class is making history safe for the fragile white ego, we have a voice that can weave together these different takes on possession and hauntings. Somehow these seemingly disparate themes are no more than a stone’s throw away; lusting after a gorgeous high maintenance woman and being pursued by the reincarnation of the infant daughter you killed to save her from a life in slavery. Not that we can expect these nuances to find traction in the slow-witted hearts of those that cosplay in nationalist machismo, but if you’re looking for some light beneath the rock you’ve found yourself under it’s exactly these kinds of artistic choices that begin to illuminate the world around you.
Honorable Mentions
Instant Holograms on Metal Film by Stereolab (Warp & Duophonic UHF Disks)
Stereolab are back, but did they ever really leave? It sure doesn’t seem like it. The band is able to shift their sound in new directions, but it always sounds exactly like Stereolab. They’re your fashionable friend who looks good in everything they try on. You have one of those, right?
The songs tend toward the mid-tempo, built primarily around the vocal melodies. Many of the arrangements are more delicate and spacious, as opposed to the hypnotically-packed rhythms on albums like Fab Four Suture. At the most energetic moments, the music still has that tell-tale arpeggiated bounce, warbling synths, and retro-futuristic horn lines. These moments are most-often featured as experimental excursions, set between the more traditional, straight forward songs. For all their pop leanings, their primary concern is nothing so vacuous as pure aesthetic. The band sticks to their usual gospel: casting stones at a ruling class that sharpens their knives on oppression, death, and insatiable greed.
Basho by Beatrice Dillon (Portraits GRM)
A handful of simple drum and synth sounds are all Beatrice Dillon needs to create a captivating piece of music. Her knowledge of rhythm is grafted over every square inch of her work. We don’t just hear this in the drums and percussive elements. In Basho we hear these pulses extend to the synth voices themselves, deep bass carrier waves rippling as the modulation wave pops through. It’s a 20 minute dance routine, each voice has its own unique body and style of movement.
Working with such a small and precise toolset has other advantages as well. Sonically, there’s space carved out in the mix by virtue of the instrumentation. No band of frequency feels muddy or overcrowded. There is room for every element to spread out and do what it needs to do without competing or clashing with its neighbors. This hyper-focused sensation is furthered by the fact that there aren’t multiple voices sounding at once, marking the trade offs in syncopation like tracking a conversation across a group of people huddled together.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
7 Piano Sketches by André 3000 (Epic Records)
Lux by Kirk Barley (Odda Recordings)
In the Comfort Of My Own Hands by Spirituals (self-released)
Sirius Syntoms by Lindstrøm (Feedelity)