New on Shfl, December 2024
Hank Shteamer on the ’90s Chicago Underground, Jeff Treppel on Darksynth, Shy Clara Thompson on Calypso, Ned Raggett on Christmas Music, Rick Anderson on Bebop, plus 15 new recommendations
Miscellany
Thanks everyone for sticking with us throughout 2024, you can look forward to more of the same in 2025 :) I hope Shfl has introduced you to some great music. I generally run a Best Of in January (or maybe even February depending on how long it takes me to put it together) so you can look forward to that next year, but in the meantime there’s always our continually-updated list of every 2024 release that made it onto the site here, as usual you can just click on the filter button and flip through, I’m sure there’ll be something that you haven’t heard yet in there. It’s been a good year for music!
Hank Shteamer on the ’90s Chicago Underground
San Francisco in the ’60s, New York in the ’70s, Detroit and D.C. in the ’80s — if any other recent American music scene deserves to be mentioned in that storied company, it’s Chicago in the 1990s. It’s hard to think of another time and place where such a fertile musical subculture flourished, in which so many different personalities and aesthetics swirled together in such a natural and uncalculated way. What produced this climate was a rare convergence of talent: jazz trailblazers, rock radicals and genre-transcending conceptualists, all colliding and commingling, sharpening existing sounds and birthing entirely new ones.
Collections
Jeff Treppel on Darksynth
Nostalgic for a future that never existed, darksynth artists took the blood- and neon-soaked megacities we never got and built them out of synthesizers. A nightmarish reflection of the sunny synthwave genre that arose in the late 2000’s, they drew from a similar pool of influences (Daft Punk, Justice, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream), but leaned into horror and dystopian cyberpunk themes and harsher sounds. The key difference? While artists like Kavinsky and College came from the electronic scene, many darksynth artists were forged in the world of metal.
Shy Clara Thompson on Calypso
Calypso only started making its way out of the Caribbean in the ’30s and ’40s, but it’s part of a long tradition dating back to the early 19th century. When French planters arrived in the West Indies along with slaves they imported from West Africa, they were unknowingly bringing West African culture along with them. Kaiso music, which was developed by West African slaves to surreptitiously share stories amongst one another and poke fun at their masters, was usually sung by a storyteller or oral historian called a griot. Kaiso persisted through the gradual abolition of slavery in 1834, morphing into “calypso” through changes in language and Anglicization over time.
Ned Raggett on Christmas Music
First off, it’s important to be clear about one thing here – there is absolutely no true definitive guide to the truly key albums of what Wikipedia’s entry calls “a variety of genres of music regularly performed or heard around the Christmas season.” When you’re talking a couple of thousand years of musical, literary and other traditions at play, themselves with widely scattered origin points and sonic and compositional elements, it’s impossible.
Rick Anderson on Bebop
By the early 1940s, however, a coterie of New York musicians were growing tired of big band swing’s conventions and were experimenting with a new approach to jazz that involved headlong tempos, complex melodies, and extended chromatic chords. The nucleus of this group was saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, a once-in-a-generation talent whose addictions led to a tragically young death; others in the circle included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis (the latter of whom would go on to be a central figure in the emergence of “cool” jazz a decade later), the highly idiosyncratic pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, guitarist Charlie Christian, and bassist Charles Mingus.
Reviews
Jon Dale
Eddie Marcon - Yahho No Potori
What stands out most about Yahho No Potori is the confidence of the writing, and some of Eddie Marcon’s best songs are here: the lush quietude of “Toratolion” is a ‘career’ best, a song as gently moving as it is self-effacing and unassumingly played. And while there are plenty of delicate, unassuming singer-songwriters out there, few do the thing with the grace and warmth of Corman and Marcon.
Cabaret Voltaire - Red Mecca
While their industrial peers like Throbbing Gristle and SPK went for shock factor, a jolt to the nervous system to shake the listener out of complacency, Cabaret Voltaire’s music simmered with angst and paranoia; later, beyond the mid-1980s when they moved closer to the dancefloor and pop, that tendency would be leavened by a relative clarity in the production, but on Red Mecca, it’s the murk that makes the music so powerful, and I’ve heard few albums that sound quite so much like they’re oozing from the speakers.
The Soft Machine - The Soft Machine
But on their debut, self-titled album, The Soft Machine’s first, and perhaps best, line-up of Kevin Ayers (bass, vocals) and Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), joined by organist Mike Ratledge, were finding their feet, navigating terrain somewhere between psychedelia, progressive rock, and jazz, all of which were informed by a kind of playful whimsy that’d disappear after their first few albums, when the fusion took over.
Shy Clara Thompson
RRR-100
RRRecords frequently put out compilations to highlight their roster and musicians that they were connected to, and RRR-100 is one of their most ambitious undertakings: a record of 100 tracks by 100 different musicians, housed in locked grooves designed to loop endlessly.
George Kuo - Kiho’alu: Stories in Song, Vol 1
Dancing Cat’s first release following Winston’s death is by the venerable George Kuo, who still plays slack key music and passes on his knowledge despite nearing 70 years old. Having learned directly from Raymond Kane, Alice Nāmakelua, and Gabby Pahinui, he is a living relic that carries the spirit of the genre’s pioneers.
Germ Lattice - Gipping Through the Ages
The building blocks are basic — bass, synth, and huge booming percussion — but what makes Germ Lattice unique is how their music seems to unravel before it fully comes together, like a mass of fabric being braided on one end while it’s yanked apart from the other.
Joshua Levine
Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes
Exhausted and demoralized after several years of the recording/touring cycle with no commercial success, by early 1972 Mott the Hoople disbanded in defeat. As the legend goes, the Birmingham group’s tiny devoted fan base included David Bowie, at that moment a burgeoning star. Bowie convinced them to stay together by giving them the song “All the Young Dudes” and producing what became their long-awaited commercial breakthrough.
Mott the Hoople - Mott
Mott presaged glam but their irony-laced hard rock crunch fit right in. None of their albums were flawless but this quasi-eponymous LP – their first as hitmakers – comes close.
Mott the Hoople - The Hoople
Rock and roll has never produced another artist quite like Mott the Hoople. They exhaustively chronicled the genre with reverence and regret like no one since Chuck Berry. As students of show business, The Hoople brings the curtain down on their peak period in grandiose, baroque fashion, and the album is produced like an old Phil Spector recording.
Andy Beta
Le Grand Ouest 1978-1988
Hyper-specific regionalism no longer applied only to grapes and four years on, the Les Éditions Vermillon label moves to the Normandy/Brittany/Pays-de-la-Loire northwestern corner for Le Grand Ouest 1978-1988. The first set showed how France’s love of Chic translated into those sides, but Le Grand Ouest is a little more subtle and introverted, its flavor notes arising the longer it spins.
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy
What started out a night for woodshedding jazz standards soon mutated into something stranger as the group’s mycelium tendrils reached further and further out. You can hear these seeds sprouting on 2022’s Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy, but its follow-up, The Way Out of Easy, shows the ETA IVtet in full bloom.
Miles Davis - Birth of the Blue
It’s a brief but fascinating glimpse into a group just starting to congeal. Cannonball Adderley’s alto was already the perfect blend of blues shout and tender purr. Tenor saxophonist John Coltrane was about to make his presence known in a big way, but was still relaxed, offering up a gentle stream — soon to be a gushing torrent — of ideas on the three standards here. Bill Evans’s left hand already knows how to carve out space, and Miles takes a leisurely yet bittersweet muted solo on “Stella By Starlight.”
Megan Iacobini de Fazio
Nídia & Valentina Magaletti - Estradas
In 2023, on an absolutely sweltering summer night in Ortigia, Sicily (as the rest of the island went up in flames), Italian Drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Valentina Magaletti and Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia took to the stage to perform the results of the artistic residency they had just taken part in. Their show was an explosion of acoustic, wiry drumming, heavy duty electronics, and blaring synths which left the audience asking: “When will we be hearing more of this?”
Dar Disku
Indian jazz and disco legend Asha Puthli seems to be popping up everywhere recently — from reissues to remix compilations and brand new productions — which can only be a good thing.
Esy Tadesse - Ahadu
Esy Tadesse’s Ahadu is a gentle call to step back and embrace the stillness and peace of solitude. The Ethiopian-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist and composer blends traditional Ethiopian scales with desert blues, psych-rock, and Western jazz, creating a soundscape that feels both otherworldly yet grounded in a sense of place.