New on Shfl, April 2024
Harold Heath on Chicago House, Phil Freeman on Chamber Jazz, Jon Dale on Sean O’Hagan and Joshua Levine on Hyperpop, plus seventeen new recommendations
Harold Heath on Chicago House
Chicago House was a genre that coalesced on the dancefloor, created from a culture that had been deemed inferior or passe by the mainstream, like the classic Philadelphia International sound, faceless Italo-Disco or manufactured Euro-synthpop. The music embraced and celebrated the elements of disco that most irked the racists and homophobes: its queerness, its relentless repetition, the synthetic production aesthetic, its narcotic hedonism, egalitarian spirit, its celebration of powerful vocal divas. Then it intensified those aspects further, distilling the genre down into a new, purified version of itself: house music.
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Phil Freeman on Chamber Jazz
To put it simply, chamber jazz is jazz with the qualities of chamber music. The pieces are more thoroughly composed, rather than being melodic heads used as a springboard for improvisation. The instrumentation tends to be quieter and more subtle. There may be strings (but not an orchestra), and there may not be drums. Despite these factors, though, chamber jazz — at least in the 1940s and 1950s, when the style first began to develop — retained a swinging rhythm and kept at least one foot in the blues.
Jon Dale on Sean O’Hagan
While there were many curious trajectories out of the post-punk moment, the route taken by Irish autodidact and polymath Sean O’Hagan is still one of the most surprising, full of unexpected turns and unpredictable leaps of faith. He’s probably best known for leading the High Llamas for several decades, a group whose steady development, since their appearance in the early 1990s, betrays a musical openness and voraciousness that’s far beyond the ill-applied “Beach Boys traditionalists” tag that still occasionally haunts their music.
Joshua Levine on Hyperpop
The bubblegum melodies are framed by corrosive-sounding samples and electronics that jarringly fuse other contemporaneous turn-of-the-century styles like nu-metal, EDM, trap, and even ska. The songs are sung with the wounded intensity of Hot Topic emo. The contrast is part of the point – hyperpop producers deliberately let the seams show.
Reviews
Nate Patrin
Broadcast — Distant Call (Collected Demos 2000-2006)
If the first collection of early-draft recordings released as Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009 hinted at a map of where Broadcast seemed to be going before singer and co-songwriter Trish Keenan passed in 2011, Distant Call: Collected Demos 2000-2006 is a sketchbook — better yet, a storyboard — of how she and co-founding member James Cargill arrived at the creative destination that inspired those future routes in the first place.
As a still-young veteran rapper who’s spent the bulk of his career figuring himself out, MIKE seems to have hit his stride after passing the quarter-century mark. That’s not just in terms of establishing an on-record persona, though he’s developed into an introspective philosopher who’s already prioritized personal, familial, and social stability over the trappings of notoriety. And in the case of Showbiz! he makes getting his shit together sound like the kind of hustle that builds the most useful form of resilience.
Traxman — Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3
One of the sharpest tricks the best footwork producers have at their disposal is a distinct yet endlessly adaptable structure to work with. When the stutter-stepping, hyper-syncopated kick-rumble/snare-rattle momentum is prioritized over everything else, you can find an endless supply of source material to adapt to it if your crates are deep enough.
Shy Clara Thompson
LanPage — Ten Pages
Somunia’s vocals effortlessly soar over the deconstructed dance beats, changing tempo and meeting the meter wherever it takes her. Similar to recent J-pop albums by groups like PAS TASTA and TEMPLIME, it takes the temperature on various internet-braided pop trends and, well, doesn’t make them easier to understand — but makes them fun to try getting your head around.
The Time — The Time
In mid 1980, Prince was deep in the recording sessions for Dirty Mind. He had given one of his regular jamming partners, Morris Day, free reign to use the studio for whatever he wanted. One of the first songs he started putting together was the groove that would eventually become the final track of Dirty Mind, “Partyup.”
MyGO!!!!! — Michinoku (跡暖空)
BanG Dream! (or Bandori for short) is a Japanese multimedia franchise. Similar to other properties like Love Live! and Idolmaster, it elevates seiyū (Japanese voice actors) into idol-adjacent stardom by giving them music to perform and popular characters to embody. Unlike those franchises, however, Bandori’s talents are encouraged to play instruments and form groups that can perform concerts on their own — and they actually take it seriously.
Andy Beta
Wadada Leo Smith — Defiant Life
Like Don Cherry before him, Smith brings laser focus not just to the ground beneath his feet, but also to the world burning around him.
Joe Henderson — Multiple
In 1963, pianist Bill Evans began using the studio to layer his piano and record Conversations With Myself, while the next year John Coltrane famously overdubbed his voice chanting the title of A Love Supreme, and Miles Davis – with producer Teo Macero – used the studio itself as an unofficial band member to make a fusion of rock and jazz. But a decade on, Joe Henderson still faced critical grumbling for using multi-tracking to expand the dimensions of the music.
Masabumi Kikuchi — One Way Traveller
Japanese jazz masters and classic albums at times still need a translation for Westerners. But if pianist Masabumi Kikuchi’s closest parallels would be Herbie Hancock or Paul Bley, this 1982 album audaciously evokes Miles’ On the Corner.
Amelia Riggs
Adrianne Lenker — Bright Future
There’s that old tired trope about “[City] Being Another Character” in a film. The idea that the setting of the thing is so prominent, so baked into the bones into what you’re experiencing that it becomes as important as the action on screen. The same could be said for tape hiss.
Bon Iver — SABLE, fABLE
I have a lot of empathy for those who continue to have to weather a story foisted upon them long after that story was first told. Justin Vernon, in nearly every report on Bon Iver, Volcano Choir, or anything else he’s attached to, will seemingly forever be attached to the time he went to a cabin in the woods and made a really great album almost two decades ago (try not to think about that passage of time). SABLE, fABLE is the reclamation of a narrative.
Neko Case — The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
The creatures that crawl, cry, and kill through The Worse Things Get are — before any fates are revealed — alive. Alive through the incantation that is Neko Case’s voice/pen combo, both sharp and seductive.
Sean Wood
Polyansky — Schnittke: Concerto For Choir
The 1985 Concerto for Choir, by Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke, has one of the most arresting openings in 20th-century choral music. Schnittke, known earlier in his career for wild borrowings from other genres, still works multiple styles into a single phrase: ancient-sounding polyphony fragments out into dazzlingly prismatic clusters in the course of few seconds.
Hermmann, Bernstein — Cape Fear
Herrmann’s score, taken from the original film and inserted into the new one, is both campily over-the-top and thrillingly tense, an able partner in crime to Scorsese’s frenetic cutting and zooming.
Herrmann — Taxi Driver
It all mimics the sounds of New York, but it also mimics the isolated and troubled mind of protagonist Travis Bickle — hissing clouds of mental steam, lonely nocturnal wandering, and strange juxtapositions. Herrmann’s score, his last, points out the kinships between Bickle and his environment.
Ezra Furman — Mysterious Power
Ezra Furman’s rowdy and brilliant Mysterious Power, written before their breakthrough to bigger audiences in the late 2010’s, showcases all of this songwriter’s many good sides: self-immolating punk-rock performance (“I Killed Myself But I Didn’t Die”), deft fusions of the Hebrew Bible and the Clash (“Hard Time In a Terrible Land”), and bona-fide craftsmanship (“Wild Feeling”).
Fritz Reiner — Rimsky-Korsakov: Schéhérazade
Scheherazade, based on the Arabian Nights, is one of the most kaleidoscopic orchestral showpieces of the late 19th century, memorable in particular for its thrilling portrait of Sinbad’s ship at sea. Rimsky-Korsakov, who actually did write the book on orchestration, perhaps never topped the panoramic majesty of the fourth-movement shipwreck, where the sea foam seems to leap out of the score.