First Impressions 017: Jazz decay, jangly gems, solo piano, dub detritus and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

This week I just made it to the finish line, so nothing more than thoughts on six new releases, all of which I have to say are particularly excellent.
-
OK, let’s go:

silver dawn: Zosha Warpeha: Based in Brooklyn, Zosha Warpeha did time in Norway studying that country’s rich folk music heritage, taking away the Hardanger d’amore (a relative of the Nordic fiddle) as her instrument of choice to explore new spatial expression and spectral resonance from the outline of tradition. These nominally short improvisations are too stirring in their physical heft to be wholly meditative, yet their notes often bend and hang in reflective pause. The effect is a charge of peculiar and deep energy there may be a word in Norwegian for. That energy feels summoned less from will than spirit, such is the rare air this album contains.       

Kuvioita – Olli Aarni: A new album mere weeks since the previous from the Finnish experimentalist, this time joining the overcrowded and somewhat soggy field of solo piano that’s now entering its endzone of bland cosmopolitanism. Acknowledging himself that a solo piano album is a ‘loaded concept’ and therefore an ‘intimidating’ realm to enter, these improvisations are surprisingly unabashedly sentimental. In their slow, gentle and spare way, each note is played to matter and take hold, space and melody sharing an even luminescence like leaves slowly falling from high up. While far from the surreal planes Aarni typically invokes into his work, the bright serenity of Kuvioita avoids cliché with mark of surety he brings to any of his varied works, as he continues to hone his intuitive measure for balancing feeling and form.

Trash Can Lamb: K. Freund: On his new album, Ohio native K. Freund subjects his sax and piano jazz balladeering to all sorts of digital leakage and musique concrete run-off to see how they might make sense together. There may initially be the whiff of a bratty lark in the way these incursions scrape at the surface beauty of his laments, and Freund is content for his compositions to fizzle out like a balloon wheezing out air in the corner of a dank room. More closely, Freund engages these two distinct streams in a kind of slow dance, circling around each other until they come together in an uneasy embrace. After painting impressionistic patterns of decay, Trash Can Lamb picks up steam to have everything come together in simpatico that feels a lot more like the strangeness of life in full bloom.  

Brumes – Ezsaid: The work of French artist Louis Vial is deep, dark dub detritus, creeping in with cavernous sweeps of reverb and nervy pulses that often sound like the inner workings of a broken clock closely mic’d. Slow and lumbering syncopation refuses to lull the oncoming dread, often reduced to a stuttering dissolve inside Vial’s suite of sunken tremors. If Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry buried his masters in the dirt and blew dope smoke over them, Vial may have poured water over his hard drive before going to print.

 Sand Paintings – Raymond Richards: Sand Paintings marks the territory of this Portland, Oregon artist as the imaginary bordertown desert horizon expanse that Calexico built the blueprint for. No surprises to see Calexico drummer John Convertino in shuffle mode throughout, then, with Richards otherwise multitasking aside from some keys and brass. Richards’ exquisite guitars slide, echo and entwine into a mesh of gorgeous melody and pulpy intrigue. Add in freewheeling rhythmic punch and you could be taken back to an era of groovy movies where the plot never came first, but the scene always shone.

Combustible Gems – Lightheaded: This could purely be a nostalgia run for me, considering the first song had me in fantasy mode imagining Slowdive if they came from Dunedin and recorded for Flying Nun. It goes deeper than easy handles though as this New Jersey band savvily perfect a package of unperfected jangle pop – lovingly loose limbed and rubbery at its edges but crisp at its core with motoring guitar melodies ringing and weaving with thrilling timeshifts. Lightheaded take each song on as a mantle of mixed emotion, heightened with theatrically unravelling strings, dreamy synths and harmonies that yearn for innocence. Lightheaded can’t shake a past that was never theirs, making pop as a memory recess for today’s times.

Thanks for reading.
-
Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.