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.
Lateral by MAMMO (Short Span)
When a musician offers up an album as sprawling as this 3-disc, one hundred minute odyssey, they are asking a lot of the listener. The artist must provide more than the expected entry point of Side 1 Track 1, and if the ears find themselves willing to wander through the entire hour and forty minutes of music, the hope is that the musician will make this foray as painless as possible. All this is to say that the Amsterdam-based musician has provided an album that is as ambitious as it is expansive. Using the cycle of the day as a frame for the entire album, Mammo invites the user to drop the needle on the tracks that most closely match the energy to the hands on the clock.
God. This all seems rather daunting doesn’t it? Yes, absolutely. I found myself struggling to find the willpower — let alone the time, to stick with the album from beginning to end. The reward in seeing it through to the end is more about gleaning the subtle sonic nuggets that pop up along the way. The kick marks time, like columns passing at regular intervals down an endless corridor. Even still, the music manages to mirror the bizarre elasticity of time. The bass drum grows heavier as the tracks roll by. The larger this anchor, the more the surrounding sounds wander in digressive rhythmic and textural flourishes.
On “Vikare” a snare drum slowly sinks from the main stage into the periphery where the drum hits morph into an undulating squelch of feedback. Accompanying pads dissolve into noise, spiraling down a PVC pipe.
I can appreciate the ambition of this album, but I wouldn’t say it precisely mirrors the shape of the day as the artist suggests. As I listened I kept asking myself, “Ok. Is this still a ‘morning’ song or have we moved on to ‘afternoon’?” I firmly felt that “Tages” was written for the clubbing hours, but after arriving at “Very Near” I started to question if this was for a chill-out room or the post-club living room comedown. Or wait a minute! This sounds like music for breakfast, or is this dawn at the end of the night? Have I over conceptualized this record, or has the artist? Was the advertised arc of this record just an attempt to sell us on a lengthy excursion. I don’t know. It’s a solid set of songs, but rounding the home stretch I found myself let down—slightly annoyed that the artist insisted on this framing device.
Glorious Mahalia by Kronos Quartet (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)
I wasn’t prepared for this record to touch me as it did. Kronos Quartet and their undeniable skill aside, the most impressive thing about the record is its ability to cut through the noise of your inner life and grab you by the shirt. The Quartet along with Jackson’s singing and interviews form a dialogue across life and death to speak to our present moment. Each participant in this dialog seems to encourage one another along. The music underscoring the message of the orator. The conviction and wisdom of the storytellers guiding the emotive expression of the instruments. The music is so well matched, perfectly in pace with the arrangement of the vocal material that the listening experience inevitably becomes an emotional one.
The true experience of the oppressed has never been safe from the meddling hands of the oppressor. Stretching far beyond the pages of history, the American model of bigotry demands the constant recasting of its sins so that the present moment can further nurture these lies.
There’s plenty of room for reflection while listening to this record. Whether that occurs during the instrumental sections, alongside these historic interviews, or in readings of MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, it would take ears of willful deafness to ignore the sorrowful congruence between the struggle for civil rights and the world we are living in now. During the second movement “Stave in the ground”, Jackson herself recounts the ways in which white audiences were more than willing to listen to her music, pay her praise, and connect with the gospel. Away from the stage, she was just another black woman. Here her celebrity couldn’t be passed off as a form of equality. There’s heartbreakingly little change across these many decades. Happy to spend hours in front of football and basketball games, but incensed when a black player tries to bring a larger reality into the hallowed space of entertainment.
While the album deals with these spiritually heavy issues, the luminosity of Mahalia’s presence keeps it all from spiraling into cynicism and despair. “You’ve got to keep moving, and you’ve got to have heart. You’ve got to suffer but you’ve got to keep on moving.” The persistence of this inequality can only be matched by the resilience of the human spirit, and in service of this emotive journey Kronos Quartet play from one end of this spectrum to the other.
Honorable Mentions
Dream by Aleksi Perälä (self-released)
I can’t keep up with this guy. I’ve written about his music before, but it’s extremely difficult to get my ears to everything he releases. I tend to enjoy his ambient and atmospheric work the most. Dream has been a perfect fit for the day’s end. Its quietly restorative tones serve as a perfect foundation for meditation, drawing, reading, or sleep.
It’s astonishing the different places he’s capable of taking his music. Even though I’ve hastily lumped this in with his other ambient work, there’s a greater focus on progression and structure than on something like Waves—which is basically just undulating tones. Much of the music on Dreams is reminiscent of Eno’s early work. I’m reminded of Evening Star and Discreet Music, where his compositions contain a much more human touch, an organic element inhabiting or animating these sounds. The addition of voice on this record adds a natural and grounding aspect to his usual lush electronic soundscapes.
Perälä excels at shifting the central focus of the songs, panning across a spectrum of frequencies like a slight of hand. As on (good god, I hate these song names) “FI3AC2613607,” a heavy bass drone slowly fades into the mid-range to meet a vocal melody. The vocal melody rises, blending with a pad in the upper mid-range. The whole song seems to evaporate as everything shifts into these higher frequencies. There’s a slight pause at the peak before the bass drone reemerges like a surfacing leviathan.
He’s so wild about the magic of his Colundi Frequencies and their purported healing properties. Let’s go ahead and believe in it. For our health. It’s hard enough to fathom the awful truth of our current reality. Spend your money at the head shop, buy some crystals, and surrender to the power of sound.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Music in Continuous Motion by Bill Orcutt (Palilalia)
Libres Antes Del Final by Colleen (Thrill Jockey)
Trying Times by James Blake (self-released)
Hinterlands by Green-House (Ghostly International)
Temporal Rift by Orbe & Psyk (Orbe Records)
High Cube by Foote/Dickow (Geographic North)
Ceaseless Motion EP by Polygonia (Timedance)
Music for Intersecting Planes by Kali Malone & Leila Bordreuil (Ideologic Organ)