“It’s like we can see the light again,” says baritone sax player Cuca Ferreira of São Paulo’s instrumental powerhouse Bixiga 70. He’s talking not only of the Covid pandemic, which hit his country especially hard, but the end of “four years of extreme rightwing government with a project to destroy aspects of Brazilian identity, from the Amazon to our own”.
The band played at the presidential inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and created this fifth album back home in Bixiga, São Paulo. Their reputation stands on a decade of Afrofunk variations – Fela Kuti’s shadow is long – and blistering live performances. Capturing stage energy in the studio has proved elusive, but their last album, 2018’s Quebra Cabeça, was a winner.
Tag Archive: Glitterbeat
That’s What Remained is the aural equivalent of being pulled into a maelstrom and then surrendering to this powerful natural force. Initially, it does not seem safe. But it soon becomes apparent that submission isn’t a problem. It will be fine. Emerging from this experience is accompanied by a shakiness. But that’s OK too.
It’s not necessary to know anything about Lucidvox to be knocked for six by That’s What Remained, their second album. Over its eight tracks and 33 minutes it effortlessly accommodates the hard edge of shoegazing – the sensibility sustaining My Bloody Valentine’s “You Made me Realise” – riff-driven metal, intimations of early Amon Düül II, Eastern European folk, liturgical chant, exotic and unfamiliar elements, and a penchant for…
Few records made this year will be as masterful as Dens, and even fewer will have been made from the unwanted tape detritus from Belgrade flea markets bought by the kilo. Vladimir Lenhart’s Ethno-Noise outfit Lenhart Tapes is a project that started life as Pamba with his brother Stevan around the time of NATO’s Yugoslavian bombing campaign in 1999, predicated on a pair of Sony Walkmans and an endless stream of discarded cassettes. To get to this point from those humble beginnings seems as unlikely and as counter-intuitive as the Big Bang, and yet here we are.
Dens is the culmination of a half-century of experimentation mashing together looped beats and submerged Balkan sounds. You probably won’t see it in many end of year lists, but make…
A project from Hidden Musics, an international music series of field-recorded albums produced by award-winning music producer Ian Brennan and his filmmaker wife, Marilena Delli, Taa! Our Language May Be Dying, But Our Voices Remain is a compilation of mantras and prayers in Taa, a Botswanian language with heavy click consonants, on the verge of extinction. This unique record, created by solo and layered voices, handclaps, stomps, found percussion and thumb piano is a documentation of a small population’s history and language. Without the polish found in commercial music, the album demands attention and respect for its raw, pure and authentic artistry.
Meaning is carried by soft environmental flutters, as well as the clicks of the language in each…
…A stalwart of the explosive Kampala electronic music scene producer, dancer and choreographer Faizal Mostrixx has collaborated with the Nyege Nyege collective appearing at both the African and European editions of their festival. Mutations is Faizal’s second full length album, following close on the heels of his acclaimed EP Transitions (2022).
The title of the record, Faizal Mostrixx’s first full-length release for Glitterbeat, is a good place to start, as it was with his debut release for the label, last year’s Transitions EP: the state of becoming, of ‘being between’ that is key to the Afrofuturist project. There’s always convergence too, which in his case is between music and the performing arts. He is first and foremost a dancer, but one who has found time to absorb a full range of global…
Carry Them with Us is the second album from Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul and it sees her continue to enhance her already impressive reputation as one of the leading players of the instrument and a committed proponent of experimental Celtic music. It consists of nine tracks that merge fluidly into one another, all centred around the distinctive sound of her chosen instrument, a bellows-powered set of bagpipes with a double-note drone.
Chaimbeul was born on the Isle of Skye and is a native Gaelic speaker, and the nine pieces have Gaelic titles, often with bracketed English elaborations. She describes Carry Them with Us as an album of stories and, even though it is predominantly instrumental, it does still feel…
After recording two albums remotely, the group were able to play together in the studio once again when it was time for Altin Gün to make their fifth record. That joyful sense of release and togetherness shines brightly in the sound of 2023’s Aşk. On both Yol and Âlem, the band tempered their riveting update of Turkish psychedelia with extra-strength synths, drum machines, and a surprising amount of restraint.
Here, they are able to work toward capturing the raucous, uplifting feel of its live sets; just a few seconds into the album-opening jam “Badi Sabah Olmadan,” it’s clear that they have succeeded. Once again pumping new life into decades-old Turkish folk songs, the group fills the tunes with rippling percussion, bubbling bass, and hypnotic…
…Work Hard is a wild mashup of King Ayisoba’s frenetic kologo sound and musical deep dives from an exciting roster of Ghanaian producers and contributors. Curated and partially mixed by Zea, from post-punk legends The Ex.
The Northeast of Ghana is the ethnic center of the Frafra people and the heartland of kologo music. Central to the music is the kologo instrument, as played by King Ayisoba, a lute from Northern Ghana with a minimal design: a calabash, covered in goat skins, and only two strings.
Work Hard has a different focus than Ayisoba’s previous releases. This was partly due to the disruptions and adjustments that Covid brought in its wake, which in turn necessitated a more homegrown strategy. The bulk of the recording…
The Barcelona-born composer Raül Refree started out as a punk musician, but recently has been heard more often as a producer – of names as starry and disparate as Rosalía, Ricky Martin and Lee Ranaldo – and as a collaborator, with Ranaldo again, Josh Rouse and others. He also has a sideline in soundtrack composition, and it was his work for a restored 1930 Expressionist silent film, La Aldea Maldita (The Cursed Village), directed by Florián Rey, that formed the germ of this solo album. Titled El Espacio Entre (The Space Between), it translates the film’s atmosphere of displacement and migration into a lengthy conceptual representation of emptiness and isolation.
Music from another film that Refree worked on is also woven into the album: Isaki Lacuesta’s…
The singer reflects on past loves, current politics and her once glorious Istanbul on this eclectic fourth album spanning folk to psych-rock
Pop counter-culture comes in many guises. In the case of Istanbul singer Gaye Su Akyol it sometimes seems enough that she exists, a glittering, poetic presence amid the repressive atmosphere of today’s Turkey. Now 37, she brings with her an elegant, sonorous voice and a highly eclectic mix of Turkish folk and western rock amid which are sprinkled popular anthems of dissidence – the celebrated Write Journalist Write by the persecuted singer Selda Bağcan is a case in point.
Her own songs are more oblique and personal. Those on this fourth album are mostly love calls, often laced with fanciful…
The restricted freedom of women in Iran is an issue that has been thrusted into the spotlight recently in the last few weeks. Hijab-burning, hair-cutting protests all over the country have been sparked by the supposed police brutality of Mahsa Amini, a woman who was punished for not completely following the nation’s strict dress code. On Israel-born Iran-heritage Liraz Charli’s latest album Roya, she could be seen as singing to Iran’s defiant activists. Giving them strength by expressing her fantasy of a peaceful world in the Persian mother tongue; Roya is the Farsi word for fantasy. Furthermore, Liraz shows support for the revolt by demonstrating her own risk-taking; recording an album that teams six Israeli musicians with five Iranian performers.
In his fascinating study of the history of drone, Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion, Harry Sword observes that examples of this broad genre are to be found absolutely everywhere from Buddhist chant to free jazz and techno and the innumerable drones of nature. For Misneach, Tau and the Drones of Praise started with minimalist drones, but ended up creating expansive folk pop spirituals for the modern age. Led by Dubliner Seán Mulrooney, who has pursued many musical projects in Berlin over the last decade or so, The Drones of Praise are a loose collective guest-starring Tindersticks drummer Earl Harvin, singer Damien Dempsey and Pól Brennan of Clannad.
Mulrooney sings and chants in Irish on ‘Na Heilimintí’ and the rousing ‘Ceol Ón Chré’, which…
Enlisting radical US veterans Lee Ranaldo and Jello Biafra, alongside the rising generation of rebel poets, political exiles and roots-rock revolutionaries forged during the Arab Spring, polyglot Parisians Al-Qasar whip up a globalised psych-rock storm on this gutsy debut. The band bill their self-styled “Arabian Fuzz” sound as an authentic snapshot of multicultural Paris in 2022: this loosely translates as an agreeably grimy mongrelised mixtape of punk, grunge and garage-rock signifiers interwoven with gnawa, rai and desert blues influences, all overlaid with Arabic and Berber-language lyrics.
Al-Qasar were formed by guitarist and oud player Thomas Attar Bellier, a veteran of various psych and prog-metal bands, and sometime…
Yanna Momina’s voice contains the power to silence those in the room. It’s at its peak here on the devastatingly titled ‘My Family Won’t Let Me Marry the Man I Love (I Am Forced to Wed My Uncle)’. Momina sings completely unaccompanied, dejection rife in her voice. It reminds me of the yelping vocal style of pansori, a form of traditional Korean music drama. The success of the vocalist, it is said, depends on the singer’s innate understanding of han, loosely defined by intergenerational trauma specific to Korea. There is a similar weightiness to Momina’s voice as she lets out two ululating, echoing cries. It’s a reminder of Djibouti’s own troubled history of violence against women, where forced marriages can occasionally occur in rural areas.
Made up of players from Brussels’ experimental scene and a Burkina Faso-born griot, Avalanche Kaito uses their self-titled debut album to create a new cyborg language out of ancient traditions and futuristic approaches. Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Kaito Winse brings his eruptive compositions to drummer Benjamin Chaval and guitarist Nico Gitto, the trio reshaping ancestral proverbs from Winse’s West African griot background into new forms that are driving and relentless. Avalanche Kaito’s intensity is apparent from the rumbling bass notes and noisy electronics that begin opening track “Sunguru.” A metallic polyrhythm sets up an industrial backdrop for Winse’s hypnotic vocals, and strands of static soon enter the picture along with floating…
This recording has been described elsewhere as a “debut” from a “Moroccan Sufi collective”. Not exactly. The Master Musicians are more dynastic family firm than a collective; this particular band were formed in the 1990s when a faction led by Bachir Attar split off from The Master Musicians of Joujouka led by Ahmed Attar (Attar is a surname adopted by group members).
Depending on which group one regards as the true keepers of the flame, their recording debut can be seen to have come much earlier. Perhaps in the mid-’50s, when Brion Gysin lugged a then-state-of-the-art Uher tape recorder up to their village in the foothills of Morocco’s Rif mountains. Certainly in 1968, when Brian Jones made another field recording — released in 1971, a couple of…
Simon Jeffes, the late proprietor of the Penguin Café Orchestra, lived by the maxim that any object contained within it at least one song. Hence, for example, the group’s “Telephone and Rubber Band”, which neatly combines a dialling tone and a syncopated elastic twang. Eyal El Wahab operates on the same principle. After a five-year stint as the lead cellist for the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra, El Wahab formed the band El Khat with other Tel Aviv-based musicians to explore his Yemenite roots. El Khat’s first album, Saadia Jefferson (2019), was played on instruments made literally from junk: a percussion ensemble of jerry cans, olive oil canister, tomato cans, bicycle wheels and an abandoned barbecue; a cello made from a saucepan, a broken shelf and rope;…
Let’s cut straight to the chase – The Gleam isn’t just an album, it’s a thing of beauty. Inspired by light, which we all take for granted, never appreciating what the world would be without it. We praise a sun-rise and sunset but never fully acknowledge the glory of the light within them.
As with 2019’s Philos this a completely solo work with Park Jiha playing all instruments – piri, saenghwang, yanggeum, and glockenspiel – it’s a calming yet immersive album of relaxing and meditative quality, clinical yet organic, light and dark. Minimal, maybe even ambient at times, it transports the listener to another place, a tranquil and serene place away from modern life and back to a time of simplicity.
She explains: “Breathing has been an essential…
YĪN YĪN’s dazzling second album dives even deeper into dancefloor propulsion and space travel atmospherics than their lauded debut The Rabbit that Hunts Tigers (2019).
While there is an expanded sonic richness on the new album as samples, drum computers and otherworldly synthesizers intertwine with the band’s taut playing, more than anything The Age of Aquarius is a simple, direct appeal to dance. The record’s groove manifesto can be put down to YĪN YĪN’s experiences on the road, where the positive energies picked up from their audiences fed back into a sound that increasingly “kept people moving.”
…The Age of Aquarius is a simple, direct appeal to dance. It is also a record blessed with…
A few years on from their hypnotic Of the Sun album, Polish quartet Trupa Trupa has returned with a release as eerily captivating but displaying more propulsive anger. Once more marrying post-rock, psych, and nightmarish atmospherics, the outfit offers a feast for those who like their tunes on the darker side. Over its 38 minute runtime, the listener is repeatedly dragged through uneasy sonics and dread-inducing vignettes before being smothered by dreamy textures. It’s a contrast that skillfully avoids feeling jarring, rather adding to the sense of disquiet dripping from the album’s pores. Talk of unhinged work-life balance, the military, and shame only add to the element of Kafkaesque ruin that permeates. In short, you won’t be putting this on during your next dinner party.
Well, in all fairness, he DID title it Self-Portrait...