JUly 29, 2020
OFfering - Live at Le Guess Who
Moor Mother, Nicole Mitchell

In 2018, Moor Mother (a.k.a. Camae Ayewa) and Nicole Mitchell performed together at Le Guess Who Festival in Utrecht. Luckily for those of us who weren’t there (and probably for those who were, too) a recording of the performance was released in early June.

Both Moor Mother -- a poet and experimental musician based in Philadelphia -- and Mitchell -- a flautist, composer and educator who was a prominent member of the Chicago avant-garde scene and now the director of Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh -- are prolific artists with their own impressive discographies. The opportunity to hear these two modern icons of Afrofuturism collaborate is a genuine thrill. 

Perhaps there’s no way to fully capture the magic of a transcendent live experience, but Offering - Live at Le Guess Who may hover close. (Music writer Alex Smith puts it well in the Bandcamp album notes: these sounds are “live on wax, a breathing, living thing, pulsating on it’s own….to nestle into the crevices of your dusty IKEA storage unit.”)

Offering is best heard with a good pair of headphones so you can catch every world-creating piece, every bit of recorded bird song, every wobbling soundwave and lilting flute, which slowly buries the listener in a lush, meditative facsimile of nature. 

Listening at first on my subpar stereo system, much of the low-end disappeared. But this is a record that sneaks up on you, no matter how you listen to it, as it builds from sounds that feel so environmental that you hardly notice them, to moments of brain-splitting industrial noise. 

But the sense of the natural world persists through electronic instrumentation, and the duo summons what sound and feel like earthquakes and thunderstorms. These are sliced through with jagged horns, then underscored by Mitchell’s sparking flute and Ayewa’s poetry which provide pockets of calm within the cacophony. “Don’t weep for me,” Ayewa murmurs on the expansive, shape-shifting opening track, her voice smothered in gurgling synth. “We’re coming up from the ugly.” 

It’s a visceral listening experience, but even in their harshest sonic moments Ayewa and Mitchell approach the collaboration like a well-constructed art installation. There’s simply so much to hear on this recording, and repeat listenings are rewarded with fresh beauty. Offering takes up as much space as you give it, which -- especially in the age of quarantine -- is exactly what we need a live recording to do. 
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Offering - Live at Le Guess Who was released on June 1. Purchase it here.

JUly 29, 2020
Rhinestone
rhinestone

Whatever your preconceptions about a country band founded in New York City (Pace salsa cowboy voice: “New York CITY?!”), Rhinestone is nothing if not well-conceived. 

The band’s name tips a hat to Glen Campbell’s famous subway-riding cowboy, by way of the 1984 movie in which Dolly Parton takes a bet that she can turn an NYC cabbie (Sly Stallone) into a country star. And with this self-titled EP, Rhinestone (the band) provides a worthy contribution to that romantic, starry-eyed country/city dichotomy.

Rhinestone boasts an accomplished lineup: vocalist René Kladzyk (Ziemba), vocalist/guitarist Oscar Allen (Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk), Jay Heiselmann (Grooms, Roya) on 12-string, and John Bohannon (Torres, Ancient Ocean) on pedal steel. 

Kladzyk in particular is no stranger to high concept -- with Ziemba, she’s explored the connection between scent and sound and memory: her 2016 record Hope is Never was packaged with incense that smelled like the flowers of her childhood home, and 2017’s A Door into Ocean was released as both a record and a perfume. 

With that in mind, Rhinestone’s conceptual tidiness is unsurprising. But there’s also a low-stakes vibe to the project, which feels like a gathering of friends who happen to share a love for outlaw country and Grand Ole Opry aesthetics. Buck Owens, Bobbie Gentry, Waylon Jennings and Shania Twain all get namechecked in the band’s press material, but no singular genre mile-marker is too heavily referenced, and -- for anyone with their own relationship to country music -- the non-linear relationship between sound and memory and nostalgia is given space to work its magic. 

For me, Rhinestone, which was recorded live to tape in a house near Red Hook, New York, triggers foggy memories of rickety Austin bars, of nightfall at county fairs, of breakfast at my grandparents’ favorite Western PA truckstop. 

A wistful gloom pervades Rhinestone, making such daydreaming easy. The lulling slowdance of “Meet Me at the Crossroads” is enveloped in ghostly hum of reverberating strings, and the upbeat heartache of “Maze of Love” flickers between light and shadow, bringing to mind Roy Orbison and the Handsome Family, with harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place on mid-career Leonard Cohen record. 

True to its namesakes, Rhinestone matches low-budget glitz with unwinking sincerity and just a glimmer of a modern edge. In other words, this little record is a dang ol’ gem.
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Rhinestone was released on June 30. Purchase it here.

JUly 29, 2020
hair birth
evicshen

What thrills Victoria Shen about noise, as a genre, is that there are no rules. “We have this idea and this notion of the way music should work and what a musician is,” Shen, who performs as Evicshen, told Noah Berlastky in a recent interview. “And then there’s noise!”

As with any similarly experimental artform, the freedom of noise is its glory and its downfall -- who among us hasn’t suffered through some aggressively alienating or conceptually half-baked set of aural disrespect? But while it might be a stretch to call Hair Birth “accessible,” Shen’s ear for composition, blended with the full-bodied commitment to raw, screeching, scratching, hissing, totally wild sound might serve as an entry point to those new to noise. 

It was artist Jessica Rylan who introduced Shen to the genre. Shen went on to work for Rylan at Flower Electronics, soldering and testing hundreds of boards and synths, and learning how to build her own.  

In addition to making -- and even inventing -- her own instruments and equipment, Shen’s approach to blending sound and art is visionary. She’s cast playable cassette tapes out of pewter and built dB meter earrings and chokers with LED lights that respond to sound. In quarantine she’s made a series of masks, including a fluorescent 3D-printed model; one which, like her jewelry, responds to sound with either an LED smile or frown, and an exquisitely creepy xenomorph facehugger mask.

Having constructed speakers out of drum heads and cassette tapes and even fabric (which she embroidered with conductive thread) Shen decided to do the same with a couple of limited runs of the Hair Birth record -- one with an amplifier, one without --  making it so that listeners can literally play the album through the art. “The art is the speaker and the speaker is the art,” Shen explains on her Bandcamp page. “The width of a continuous copper coil is modulated as it radiates across the surface of the jacket to render an image of my face mid-performance … The coil, when connected to an audio amplifier and placed in front of a magnet turns the material of the speaker into an active speaker membrane.”

It raises some interesting questions about how recorded music can and should be listened to, and how the physical and emotional experience varies depending on how you hear something. “The whole thing dances and vibrates in your hands as you listen to the album,” Shen writes, further blurring the lines between where the sound ends and the physical, tangible art begins. 

These speaker editions are nearly sold out but Hair Birth is worth your attention regardless of how you listen. Shen’s work is, at times, incredibly visceral, vibrating through the body in brief moments of extreme chaos. But she’s often quite restrained, and in those calmer moments the brain works to set things in some sort of order: is that a phone left off the hook? A jet engine sputtering out? Pixelated water dripping from a digital faucet? Just as there’s no rules for artists, audiences are free to process noise however they want. This is why Shen describes her own music as optimistic. As she put it to Berlatsky, it forces listers to take an active stance. “I’m trying to shock people out of complacency, so that they’re present.”
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Hair Birth was released on July 17. Purchase it here.