New on Shfl, July 2024

Shy Thompson on Eccentric Satie and '70s Japanese folk, Andy Beta on '00s NYC, Hank Shteamer on Steve Albini, plus fifteen fresh recommendations

Shy Thompson on Eccentric Satie

Today, Satie continues to be evaluated in different contexts and across every imaginable genre. Jazz greats like Mal Waldron have done Satie suites in a post-bop style, and even leftfield folk musicians have embraced the Velvet Gentleman. There are countless recordings of trained musicians tackling Satie with the utmost seriousness, but there are just as many weird and wild experiments.

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Andy Beta on “The Other 2000s NYC Music”

To read Lizzy Goodman’s handy Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 is to vicariously live through an era of post-9/11 New York City where the biggest, buzziest, most stylishly tousled rock’n’roll groups emerged victorious. And yes, bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol definitely defined the times. But when they get lumped in with head-scratching “tourists” such as Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams (yeck!), one wonders if there might have been other bands, artists, and scenes of the 2000s that also claimed New York City (and its burgeoning borough Brooklyn) for themselves.

Hank Shteamer on Steve Albini

The albums he recorded are as important as the ones he played on. And the many obscure titles he engineered tell us as much about how he engaged with the world — and maybe more — as the canonized classics. The same goes for the albums he championed that he played no actual role in. All of it was key to the ecosystem that he helped foster year by year, riff by riff, session by session, soundbite by soundbite.

Shy Thompson on ’70s Japanese Folk

Something that drew Hosono, and doubtless many others, to folk from the US is the way it incorporated American roots music into its sound. “We realized that,” Hosono said, “and we thought about what our own roots were.”

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Bill Frisell - Orchestras

On this expansive live set, guitarist Bill Frisell’s long-standing trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston is accompanied (and sometimes swallowed) by two different orchestras: the Brussels Philharmonic, with nearly 60 musicians, and the smaller Umbria Jazz Orchestra, just 11 players of a jazzier bent.

Brandon Ross - Off the End

The seamless 65-minute performance unfolds like a dream, shifting from calm passages that feel like they’re being transformed into a dub remix in real time to climaxes that blur the line between fiery electric jazz and raw electronic noise.

أحمد [Ahmed] - Giant Beauty

Ahmed Abdul-Malik was a bassist and composer who performed with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Randy Weston, among others. He also made a series of albums as a leader which blended jazz with Arabic and Middle Eastern music (in addition to bass, he also played the oud)…Each set consists of a single long track, and they’re all different, not just in the small ways that separate one extended blowout from another as long as you’re listening carefully, but in big ways.

Rick Anderson

Jonas Hellborg, Shawn Lane - Time Is the Enemy

Bassist Jonas Hellborg has played with a wide variety of illustrious frontmen and fellow first-call session musicians over the course of his long career, but I’m not sure there was ever a guitarist that brought out the joyful virtuosity in him more effectively than the brilliant and doomed Shawn Lane, who died (aged 40) just a few years after this album was compiled from a series of live shows in Hellborg’s native Sweden.

Jonas Hellborg - The Silent Life

With this music it’s a bit difficult to tell where composition ends and improvisation begins, though clearly both are involved; Hellborg’s playing is virtuosic but not ostentatious, and it’s frequently gorgeous, particularly on the discursive and sinuous “When Ambition Ends” and the funk/chordal workout “Wounded Knee” (on which, okay, he’s maybe a bit ostentatious in his virtuosity).

Jonas Hellborg - Octave of the Holy Innocents

This album, though generally filed under Jonas Hellborg’s name, fits the classic definition of a power trio release: bassist Hellborg is teamed up with Michael Shrieve (famous for his work with Santana) and guitarist Buckethead (famous both for his otherworldly guitar skills and his extremely odd self-presentation).

Joe Muggs

Slipper - Zoon Sandwich

Slipper are a deeply peculiar proposition. Revolving around Sam Dodson who had made his name with the headiest early 90s intercontinental sample plundering super spiritual hippie-rave of Loop Guru, it evolved into a very different sort of sampledelia - still predicated on the pleasure principle, but much more decadent, eerie and urbane.

Mark Fell, Will Guthrie - Infoldings / Diffractions

Fell’s glitching, swooping, swiping manipulations of Guthrie’s playing is sometimes as ultra-minimal as his early work, but tends to pile on the complexity over the course of these four long jams.

Angélique Kidjo - Remain in Light

If ever there was an example of an artist taking songs by the scruff of the neck and going “these are mine now,” it’s this glorious reinterpretation of an entire Talking Heads album by the Beninese-French diva Angélique Kidjo.

Nate Patrin

Arthur Verocai - s/t

The deeper rep of Arthur Verocai rides off some remarkably efficient engineering genius (its 20-piece soundscape was recorded on only four tracks), not to mention an eclecticism that transliterated its MPB roots through a soul-jazz vibe that earned comparisons to visionary contemporaries like David Axelrod and Eumir Deodato.

DJ Manny - Signals in My Head

More than a decade after his earliest internet-distributed singles, DJ Manny’s impact has been directly felt at the footwork scene’s Chicago epicenter as a Teklife affiliate, and expanded out into the art-dance satellite world represented by Planet Mu. But the further his artform develops, the harder it is to pinpoint its orthodoxies, if it even has any, as he treats the routes of footwork’s syncopated, sub-bass-soaked velocity as cloverleaf on-ramps to other genres.

Beak> - >>>>

Geoff Barrow’s most successful musical project since Portishead has been carrying the neo-Krautrock torch for a good while now. It’s gotten to the point where it’d be both reductive and a decent ballpark to compare them to a theoretical Pink Floyd that decamped to Cologne post-Meddle, not to mention that the inevitable Can comparisons are set up to tee-ball levels at this point.

Jeff Treppel

Les Rallizes Dénudés - The OZ Tapes

If you wanted to experience Les Rallizes Dénudés’s heavy psych majesty, you needed to catch them in person. Difficult when Mizutani died in 2019! It’s honestly a miracle this official release exists.

Viagra Boys - Cave World

Outwardly post-ironic eighties pastiche bullshit, these canny observers of the human condition in the Social Media Age transcend their jokey name. Think Tom Waits channeled by Devo via Trent Reznor’s downward spiral.

D.R.I. - Crossover

Dirty Rotten Imbeciles’ third long-player not only cemented the hybrid between thrash metal and hardcore punk but also gave it its name. Crossover proved a few things: first, that hardcore could survive a brush with actual production quality; second, that the two genres weren’t that far apart; and third, that nothing got a pit going quite like gnarly thrash riffs sped up to punk speed.