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ALBATRE // The Fall of the Damned

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 12:49:50 +0000

Albatre are back for some more «display of urgent bass and sax noise, frantic but meticulous drumming and abrupt moodshifts», but this self-description doesn’t say it all. Something changed in this Rotterdam- based band formed by two Portuguese, Gonçalo Almeida and Hugo Costa, and a German, Philipp Ernsting, since the release of “A Descent Into Maesltrom”. They’re still crossing post-Ornette Coleman free jazz with metal and punk, but now the music is more essential and minimalist, with everything reduced to the bone. And yet, the doom factor is enhanced as never before. The riffs are slowly (sometimes very, very slowly) repeated until you get hypnotized, a bit like Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground Zero used to do, and when something different happens – colorful harmonic cloud formations and harsh noise fusing in strange ways – it’s like discovering a new planet. There’s aspects of jazz- rock and of psychedelic and progressive rock going on, but what’s really important is the final impact on your stomach: the music strikes you there directly. With “The Fall of the Damned”, the jazzcore format goes to new territories.

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FRANTZ LORIOT + CHRISTIAN WOLFARTH // The Call

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:00:25 +0000

Welcome to the timbral world of violist Frantz Loriot and percussionist Christian Wolfarth. «An epiphany of sound», writes Jason Kahn in the inside cover, comparing the music pressed on the two sides of this LP with the myriads of noises he heard in a night of tempest when walking through it: «Cans and bottles skittering down the street; a street sign rattling violently; vague droning sounds appearing and vanishing suddenly as the wind seeped through cracks and crevices between buildings.» It’s his interpretation of what happens during the eight tracks – other pairs of ears can sense it differently, and that’s the best characteristic of the duo’s musical approach. Each individual perception changes it, as if it’s a living organism and you’re part of its existence. The harmonics and the blips and blops seem of electro-acoustic, even acousmatic, conception, but the only electronic devices used were the microphones and the recording machine. Everything is improvised and the configuration of these spontaneous pieces would seem derived from the reductionist school if there was less sounds in the flux of events and if those sounds were mere dots or brushstrokes emanating from silence. They aren’t, but you’re not going to listen to any thunder neither. This is a busy timbral world, indeed, but in a pleasant way. Afterall, Loriot is also a practitioner of soundmassages and for Wolfarth there’s no better measure than detail.

HIFIKLUB // E LISBOA

admin — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 14:43:22 +0000

Anthony Belguise - drums, electronics Jean-Loup Faurat - effects, guitar Régis Laugier - bass, vocals Nico Morcillo - guitar 01- SIGILO Bernardo Devlin - vocals Guilherme Gonçalves - guitar synth 02-JEU DIT SOUS LE VENT Luís Fernandes - electronics Joana Gama - piano Lula Pena - vocals 03- NATURAL Ana Deus - vocals 04- BETTER OFF DEAD João Cabrita - saxophone Paulo Furtado - guitar Afonso Rodrigues - vocals Paulo Segadães - drums 05- PESCA DA UNHA Marta Ângela - vocals João Artur - electronics 06- THE ROUND AROUND João Cabrita - saxophone Pedro Oliveira - prepared drums Maria Radich - vocals 07- EQUIDISTANTE Rita Braga - vocals Yaw Tembe - trumpet Rafael Toral - modified amplifier feedback 08- CONTINUAR SEM FIM Carlos BB - drums Rui Carvalho - guitar Rai - vocals Carlos Zingaro - violin

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JULIEN DESPREZ/LUÍS LOPES // Boa Tarde

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:44:21 +0000

French and Portuguese guitarists Julien Desprez and LuÍs Lopes manage to surpass the usual divider when electric guitars are the main tools of experimentation: either you explore the specific guitar / effect pedal sounds or use the instrument and its gadgets as electronic non-recognizable interfaces. They do both things, playing electronic music with an organic feeling. Both of them have creative jazz, alternative rock and free improvised music as common backgrounds, but what they usually do on their separate paths go beyond those categories. Desprez is a performative artist with sound as focus, but engaging the entire body on what he does, through the development of feet techniques derived from tap dance, in order to connect and disconnect his processing pedals in new ways. Lopes practices a very clinical form of noise music, preferring a methodic use of feedback lines to the sonic blasts of the computer-driven acts. Sooner or later they would have to meet, and here is the consequence of that meeting of free spirits. “Boa Tarde”, the title of the album, is the Portuguese expression for “good afternoon”, but it’s a joke: the afternoon they tell us about isn’t very pleasant. It may be contemplative, but containing a kind of existential anguish. Highly recommended.

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KNALPOT // Dierendag

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 13:54:54 +0000

«No computer was used during the making of this music.» The warning is interily justifiabe – the concepts applied by Raphael Vanoli, Gerri Jäger and Sandor Caron have traces of several musical practices having as common factor the use of laptops. The roots are on electro-pop, mathcore and dubstep, but is something else what this band from Amsterdam – but with a French/German and an Austrian playing – has to offer. There’s traces of Gang of Four, Fennesz, Battles, Supersilent, Sigur Rós, Squarepusher and much more, but the sound world they inhabit is very much their own. A world of unpredictable collages of procedures and styles, played with a guitar, a drumset, some synthesizers, processors and effect pedals, and a mixtable used creatively: sometimes it sounds like drone music with a song format, and in many moments you have the kind of groove produced on the fringes of techno and house, but with a drive coming directly from jazzland – after all, both Vanoli and Jäger have jazz backgrounds. Polyrhythms with crazy metrics live together with harmonic constructions showing the refinement of contemporary classical music, but the lightness of it all, the good vibes, the colorful, joyous, character are distinctive of pop music. What a surprise!

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MÚSICA DE SELVAGEM // Volume Único

admin — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 10:38:10 +0000

Music of Savages. The name of this project comes from a xenophobic saying of a French musician to Arthur Decloedt, when this São Paulo double bassist was living for some time in Paris. The music in question in that sad episode was, you guessed… Brazilian music. Returned to his country, Decloedt and saxophonist Filipe Nader decided both to turn that negative remark to a positive one, formulating a “savage” (read: spontaneous and free) kind of Brazilian jazz, to differentiate it from bossa nova and fusion, the styles generally perceived in Brazil as “jazz”. They invited another saxophonist (Oscar Ferreira), a trumpeter (Amilcar Rodrigues) and a drummer (Guilherme Marques) to play mainly improvised music. Because the refered bigot was also mentioning the work done by the singer-songwriters, the next decision was to make versions of songs written by the new generation of Brazilian Popular Music and treat them the way Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra used to with the revolutionary hymns of the world. Here is the result, with the composers themselves singing on top, namelly Sessa (“Música”), Tim Bernardes (“Morto”), Luiza Lian (“Dois Blocos”) and Pedro Pastoriz (“Assovio”). If you enjoyed what David Sylvian did with the likes of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Christian Fennesz and Marc Ribot you’re gonna love this, and even more if you’re a fan of Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque, being also an enthusiast of creative jazz and exploratory music.
A Collaboration between Shhpuma and Selo Risco

NICK MILLEVOI´S DESERTION TRIO WITH JAMIE SAFT // Midtown Tilt

admin — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 17:28:48 +0000

Guitarist Nick Millevoi’s (Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band, John Zorn’s Bagatelles) Desertion project has created its second opus, Midtown Tilt. Now using the title Desertion Trio, the band features Johnny DeBlase (Many Arms, Sabbath Assembly) on bass, and Kevin Shea (Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Talibam!) at the drumkit, and follows 2016’s Desertion by also featuring guest Jamie Saft (Electric Masada, The New Standard Trio with and without Iggy Pop) on the organ. Vibraphonist and percussionist Ashley Tini joins on three tracks.
Much like Desertion, the formula for Midtown Tilt continues to follow an instrumental country-folkrock mix with elements from jazz, as we would expect from these musicians. The musicians improvise as if their lives depend on it, but also evoke an imagery that takes listeners through the history of instrumental electric guitar music. Inspired by the town of Wildwood, NJ and the anachronistic clash of re-imagined cultures seen in its motels and amusements, Midtown Tilt is an amalgamation of jazz, psychedelic blues, surf music, and country rock instrumentals, often reminding us of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse scoring a western. Through Saft’s organ, something else is added: traces of the rhythm and blues played by Booker T. & The M.G.’s and of the blues-rock of bands like The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith. The mix is explosive.

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN // Toad of Light (LP)

admin — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 16:26:19 +0000

If you like the colorful atmospheres of the North European music of today, be it folk, pop, jazz or experimental, here is something special for you. And special because you can’t label it in any way: the music combines aspects of all those tendencies, but goes somewhere else. The Holy Mountain is a Norwegian duo with two instruments we don’t usually find together, accordion (played by Andreas Angell) and drums (with acoustic and electronic parts played by Aleksander Tidemann, who also uses a vintage synthesizer). With a cinematic character and minimalist structures, the four pieces reunited in “Toad of Light” have the drone-like static particularities of electronic exploratory music, but also of the pulsating waves of psychedelic and kosmische rock. As the two musicians themselves state, this debut LP is the result of a contemplation of the «eternal universe and the isolated man», inspired by the «dystopian sci-fi visions of John Carpenter, Philip Glass and Daft Punk». If your references concerning Angell are his interpretations of works written by Scandinavian classical contemporary composers and his studies of Sofia Gubaidulina’s timbral, textural and spiritual symbolism, prepare yourself to be surprised. You’ve never heard an accordion doing this (and neither a drumkit).

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Photo by Katinka Hustad

TIMESPINE // Urban Season

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:18:38 +0000

The musical identity of this trio remains consistent with their eponymus debut album, released four years ago – exemplified by fluctuating tonal centers and the interaction made of convergences and divergences. And yet, its components are now more clear, because the music feels more transparent: it sounds an American folk music from another dimension in the multiverse, a folk music filled with twisted and bizarre – but very explicit – rock and jazz elements. No wonder: the guitar is played by one of the top rock musicians in Portugal, Tó Trips, founder and member of the country-fadorock-jazz band Dead Combo; the bassist is John Klima, an intermedia artist from Redondo Beach, USA, for some years living in Portugal, who in the past was involved with the pop-rock group later identified as The Presidents of the United States of America; the zither, the electronics and occasional field recordings are manipulated by a veteran of Portuguese experimental and improvised music, Adriana Sá. She has specialised herself in the interaction of her instruments and body with reactive software, and once again we see this in “Urban Season”: her playing of the zither, with hands or bow, ignite all the electronic processing and found sounds as if by magic. And magical, mesmerizing and mysterious the music is indeed, very different from everything else you heard before.

TRAVASSOS // Life is a Simple Mess (Book + CD)

admin — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 14:18:40 +0000

Life is a Simple Mess presents us with an imaginary journey divided into three stages: “Life is Simple”, “Life is a Mess” and “Mish-Mash” where simple and complex forms co-exist in a natural and complementary way. Along the way the texts of Nate Wooley are giving clues and revelations for a possible interpretation of this symbiotic scenario of the real-unreal.

If a suggestion may be offered-use the work in these pages as many chances to live between the extremes: within the Mish-Mash. Do not allow the seeming precariousness of all the balanced elements hold you back. It is the combination of subtle, profane, mundane, irrational, and sympathetic in these images that represents the real life “glue” through which we hold ourselves together. We can appreciate the purely simple and the purely complex, but we absolutely must live and hear and see in the wonderful combination of its combinations. That’s where we learn to be human. Luckily, an artist like Travassos provides us with all we need to begin.” Nate Wooley

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Can illustrations or graphics survive to the context for which they were created for? Yes, they can, as it is a wonderful example the book “Life is a Simple Mess”, by Travassos. What we can see in these pages was originally destined by its author for record covers released by the labels Clean Feed, Shhpuma, Sunnyside and Why Play Jazz or for the promotion of the music festival Rescaldo, of which he is the programmer, but here it all gains a second existence. Without the name of a musician or a group, without a title and without the logo of a discographic company on a specific album, each piece shows itself without the rationalizing caution of an imagetic translation of the impressions provoked by music. It’s like if the images free themselves not only from its purpose but also its cause, eventually finding in its inner force their justification and their significance, even considering the inherent undefinition in the effort not to determine our individual interpretations.

Travassos’ world sums – and usually on the same visual composition – elements from several sources. One of them is a reiterated naturalist perspective, with flowers and birds protagonizing a number of visions which transforms our reality in an alien fantasy, and that simply because the act of representation always result in a recriation (a modification) of the original. Another one offers us an understanding of the human figure owing everything to comics, and prefering a pop iconography to the centuries of Beaux-Arts’ body stylizations, though treated with a formal essentialism that plays with familiarity (a house is a house is a house) and not with strangeness, in a sort of minimalist conversion of surrealism.

Music doesn’t disappear completely from this visionaryism turned autonomous. The texts on the book never refer to it, but they were written by a musician, the trumpeter and free improviser Nate Wooley, and the invitation given to him says much about it. The publication is also complemented by music on CD, with a compilation of tracks, the most part of them unreleased, of bands having Travassos as a member in his parallel activity as sound artist, like Pão, Big Bold Back Bone and Pinkdraft. In consequence, “Life is a Simple Mess” leaves music to return to it. In the middle of that journey, the also manipulator of electronic audio devices finds his full identity as visual artist, a necessary condition to relate himself less obviously, less literally, with music. And that’s very, very interesting.

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This edition is a partnership between Chili Com Carne & Shhpuma