KLOF Mag Regular
Find out what what music we've been enjoying recently with a handful of new music reviews and an uncompromising Mixtape.
KLOF Mixtape #34
Our latest Mixtape offering starts in Central Africa and ends in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Ft. Elijah McLaughlin & Caleb Willitz, Iztok Koren, Jessica Ackerley, SML, Black Decelerant, Tashi Wada, Tor Invocation Band and more.
In typical KLOF fashion, it’s an eclectic offering that ends on an uncompromising behemoth courtesy of the Tor Invocation Band. In the words of Thomas Blake, one of KLOF’s review team, who reviewed the album ‘Medicine’:
Travel Sickness is where things really kick off, as Jake Blanchard steps away from the harmonium and contributes electronics and shahi baaja (a souped-up Indian electric zither with drone capabilities). The early parts of this twenty-one-minute behemoth are raga-like and imbued with a skewed sense of spirituality, but it soon implodes in a welter of electric guitar (Dublin-based experimentalist Ahongus McEvoy), Mandola (the returning Natalia Beylis) and, most notably, Fergus Cullen’s wild and often violent saxophone. It resolves – if that’s the right word for it – in a gloriously clamorous pileup of freeform astral jazz, reminiscent of Sun Ra or Don Cherry or Pharoah Sanders. It’s a million miles from the flighty, danceable folk of the opener, but the journey has undeniably been a worthwhile one.
Enter here:
Reviews of Note
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Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange?
Even experimental music has its conventions. Within the genre’s sphere, there are poles of minimalism, microtonality, noise, ambience, deconstructed clatter and pillowy hypnagogics, all of which have their adherents and all of which have been fertile breeding grounds for any number of beautiful or groundbreaking works of art. Tashi Wada has always been slightly different. His music takes aim at a point just beyond a recognised convention or cluster of conventions. His drones are more than drones: they squirm and pulse, modulate and stridulate. His melodies are open to the influence of chamber music and pop but always seem to dodge their final destination and end up somewhere far more interesting. His loops are broken in unexpected places.
Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey – Beehive Cathedral
For their debut album, Beehive Cathedral, Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, and Cleek Schrey installed themselves and their various instruments in a cabin in Tennessee and spent time exploring, in depth, some of the Old-time fiddle and banjo tunes and Appalachian music they have gathered collectively thus far. The objective was to record an album of material that encapsulates the spirit of this Old-time music, meaning the trio, who have spent years playing alongside one another in various outfits, paid attention to the intricacies and fine nuances of the sound they were creating, including string buzzes, ‘minute shifts in bow pressure, organ clacks and banjo overtones,’ (Decosimo).
It results in a deeply satisfying, intimate listening experience.
Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra
…the latest in a series of albums that celebrates and explores the far-out music of Sun Ra - it’s a marriage that fits like an astronaut and a space suit. In fact, the Kronos’ David Harrington is very clear in his assertion that Sun Ra, whose music sailed over traditional jazz before launching into bold sonic explorations in electronica and mystical realms before spying a land on the horizon that would one day be known as Afrofuturism, rightly belongs in the same canon as other twentieth-century greats like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Nina Simone. But to execute this excursion with the required panache, the Kronos Quartet have enlisted a crew of similarly visionary space cadets from the worlds of jazz, experimental, improvisational and other fields of contemporary composition; this lift-off is going to be explosive. The whole album succeeds in playing like a transmission from the stars, a deep space echo and chime.
Festival Review: Fire in the Mountain 2024
David Weir reports back from his time in the Cambrian Mountains at Fire in the Mountain festival – Being non-corporate, not-for-profit and volunteer-run, the difference between Fire in the Mountain and many other festivals is obvious from the outset.
Black Decelerant – Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant
Black Decelerant – a duo consisting of producers Khari Lucas, aka Contour, and Omari Jazz – make a kind of music that they describe as improvisational jazz but which, in reality, ranges over a lot more ground than that tag implies. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with New York label RVNG Intl.’s previous releases (Sun Araw, Horse Lords) or with the first instalment in the Reflections series (an ambient collaboration between Steve Gunn and Bing & Ruth’s David Moore). Reflections Vol. 2 shares some superficial similarities with its predecessor, but here, the ambience is more highly charged with political, spiritual and philosophical overtones.
Tor Invocation Band – Medicine
Tor Invocation Band is the loose experimental collective led by Yorkshire-based illustrator, composer and drone aficionado Jake Blanchard. The lineup is ever-changing, but previous releases have featured the talents of Chris Hladowski, Sophie Cooper and Natalia Beylis: names that are a seal of quality but also give you some idea as to the uncompromising and avant-garde nature of what you are about to listen to.
Medicine may only consist of four tracks, but it takes you on an incredible journey nonetheless.
Chris Corsano – The Key
The overall sound of The Key tends toward a hard-edged, rocky sub-species of post-punk, but in Corsano’s hands, everything is up for grabs, and those genres become mutable and malleable. This is an album of freewheeling creative fervour, indebted to the worlds of free improv and jazz. Not a moment of it is anything less than engaging, and it is frequently astonishing.
Elijah Minnelli – Perpetual Musket
Perpetual Musket features four folk songs translated into the musical language of reggae and a b-side of four dub versions of those songs. One of Minnelli’s great gifts is highlighting the ambiguous hinterland of a melody, the space between childishly sweet and outright sinister. In the case of Soulcake (which features the vocals of Shumba Youth), this means slowing the tune down a bit, juxtaposing a clear, powerful lead vocal with strange and disembodied backing, and laying down an insistent rhythmic skank. It’s every bit as otherworldly as the famous Peter, Paul and Mary version but occupies a very different corner of weird Britain.
Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers
Gabriel Birnbaum seems to have mastered the art of writing songs with a deceptive simplicity on Patron Saint of Tireless Losers. Hiding somewhere behind the curtain are lyrics that have been poked and prodded until they have met their current form, teaming with music that defies categorization. They don’t conform; bits and pieces of lyrics and dreams spill out of them, dodging and weaving any attempt to be pigeonholed.
Other News
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Dorothy Carter’s 1976 debut album ‘Troubadour’ to be reissued
Folklorist Dorothy Carter devotions were for ALL the people of the earth, their history and traditions. Taking a brisk tempo, hammering the Kora Dance syncopation upon her dulcimer, she evokes the holy qualities of the dervish, while her pious fluting evokes western medieval music. All in all, a hypnotic essay conveyed with an openhearted humanist polytheism. Now, for the first time – 46 years after its original release, 20 years after Dorothy passed, and 11 years before the centennial of her birth – her debut album Troubadour (she had been playing music for decades by this point) is to be reissued by Drag City on August 30th.
Documentary: Murailles Music present – Borja Flames ‘cosmogonie pop’
In their latest Echos documentary, Murailles Music presents the music of Borja Flames. ‘cosmogonie pop’ examines Borja’s music and synesthesia. It’s a beautiful insight and an informative documentary that offers plenty of food for thought on music today.
Masayoshi Fujita announces new album Migratory ft. Moor Mother and Hatis Noit
Japanese composer, vibraphonist, and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita has announced his new album, Migratory on Erased Tapes (September 6th). Over the past few years, Fujita’s life has involved a very personal migration in the pursuit of a dream to live and compose music amid nature. In 2020, after 13 years of living in Berlin, he returned to his native Japan with his wife and their three children. They now live in the mountain hills along the coast of Kami-cho, Hyōgo, three hours west of Kyoto…an area described as Japan’s hidden paradise. Once settled, he transformed an old kindergarten into his own music studio, Kebi Bird Studio.
Erased Tapes shares how, on his new album, the composer and producer masterfully reimagines and mesmerises with his trademark vibraphone sounds and resumes his experimentation with the marimba and synthesisers that he first incorporated on his 2021 album, Bird Ambience.
New Single/Video: Alba Haro – Lo que sueña de noche
Spanish artist Alba Haro shares her video for ‘Lo que sueña de noche’, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s Zorongo Gitano. Its refined and dreamlike qualities also highlight her evolved and inventive relationship with the cello.
Jessica Ackerley shares album title track “All of the colours are Singing
To mark the announcement of their new LP on AKP Recordings, Canadian-born guitarist, composer and improviser Jessica Ackerley shares their unconventional and deeply rewarding title track and first single, All Of the Colours Are Singing. The accompanying self-directed and edited multisensory video was inspired by Georgia O’keefe’s 2023 exhibition at MoMA, “To See Takes Time,” and Bob Ross’s paint tutorials. O’Keefe’s working methods also offered a framework for Ackerley’s own trajectory…
Until next time…