#4: Isabassi, Symposium Musicum, De Leon, & more.
A busy beginning to Spring slowed the motions of the newsletter down a little. Here's some music to go with the warming of the world.
Ah delays and lateness, ever a theme in my life. Thankfully, the reasons for the delays the the last few editions of this newsletter are all on the good side — a DJ gig at Prague’s Meetfactory, before Tim Hecker, definitely occupied my focus for a great period of time, but a couple of otherwise music-related and poignant things happened to me recently, which I expect will reappear here in some form when they (eventually) reach their conclusion.
The first of these, already feeling like a lifetime ago, was an interview with a good friend in music, Rami Abadir (who performs as ABADIR, and I mentioned in my CTM festival review), around a matter which is really important: racism and unconscious bias/prejudice in music journalism. It’s a project involving a few other writers, and probably more than just Rami as interviewees, but since things are in the works still I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Rami is Egyptian, and had some words on the matter of coverage of both himself and other artists in his community that are really valuable to hear as a writer. Valuable, but not suprising: I’ve felt for a long time that coverage given, particularly on some platforms, is somewhat amateurish, the kind of thing that is liable to display poorly-thought-through ideas and words.
The other jam in the conveyor belt of Reach was a workshop I was asked to hold at Ankali/Planeta Za here in Prague, as part of the Gravity Network project which is ran by the club’s organisers, along with Jesna 1 in Warsaw and RSO in Berlin. The workshop was made possible with help from another EU-funded network, Reset!, and it was concerned with the disparity between the coverage of ‘Eastern’ European artists and those in the West of the continent, particularly on platforms such as Resident Advisor, Crack, and FACT.
There were around 13/14 people in the room, and it was both interesting and unsurprising for me that the entire group had almost exclusively negative experiences in dealing with these platforms. It’s a really common story here in Czechia, and many friends in the wider Eastern European region echo the complaints. More on it at the end, after the music!
Isabassi - Speaking Things
Super Hexagon - 24/03/23
The setlist of the gig I played before Tim Hecker on the 14th April has influenced quite a few of the picks in this month’s release, and this is one of them: on ‘Speaking Things’, Brazilian composer and musician Isabassi demands your attention, and rewards all that you give.
From the first moments of subbass in opener ‘Escapist Foley’ until the final moments of the LP, Isabassi shows us a superb balance of sound design know-how and club-facing expertise, blended into a fully compelling composite. ‘Janus’ demonstrates the straddling of both worlds, as does ‘personal fave ‘Mesclado’, which I played at the event. Check the subs on the latter: rich, vibrantly textured, tuned for damage on big rigs — a trope seen throughout the record.
In some ways this album reminds me of the kind of top-shelf material on Mana records (more on them below): a unique approach to rhythm and flow, each track adds new flavour to the full album, side-stepping the ordinary completely. Can’t recommend this record enough!
(Hat tip to Pablo Diserens for putting me in touch with this one!)
Symposium Musicum - Symposium Musicum
Mappa - 09/05/23
Mappa, based out of Slovakia, are one of my favourite discoveries since moving out to Prague. We had lots of their records in Noise Kitchen, the synth/modular shop/space I used to work at here, before it’s sad closure (P.S: I believe our unsold stock is in Cabinet Múz in Brno, if you’re ever dropping by). A while back, when I was still writing and doing work for Inverted Audio, I did a mix exclusively with Mappa material, so if the label is new to you this might be a good guided tour.
As a label Mappa are extremely adventurous, and they also undertake a lof of really valuable work with records to ethnomusicology: a past release, 'DILO’, documents a disappearing Ukrainian dialect through khroniky or Ukrainian folk songs. ‘Symposium Musicum’, the name of both artist and album, approaches music on a parallel plane to ‘DILO’.
The album ‘Symposium Musicum’ is developed from field recordings, interviews, and observations collected in the villages of Podolínec, Lomnička, Levočské Vrchy, and Kolačkov - all areas of the eastern and north-eastern Slovakia with significant Romani enclaves. It’s described as a collaborative album with local Romani people, audible in the captured voices, but this knowledge lends itself to the musics and audio photographs from the villages really powerfully.
There’s only a few tracks available to hear on Bandcamp, but the full album fully delivers on the whisper of promises made by, for example, ‘Romane Gila’ — it’s a real shame you can’t hear the furious rhythmic percussion of ‘Attention’, which is seeded with whistles and cheers from the Romani people present as recording. Like many other works by Mappa, the prescient cultural value of the record sits very close to the raw enjoyment of the music itself.
De Leon - De Leon
Mana Records - 04/04/23
Seeing a notification for a new album via Mana Records feels like an unspoken promise of absolute quality. This self-titled release, from past label participant De Leon, doesn’t buck the trend. Try as I might, it’s really hard to come up with a better sentence for describing the feel of the record than the label’s own phrasing, so I’ll echo it: ‘This album inscribes itself into a tradition of works that enable listeners to perceive deeper valences of time and psychedelic aesthetics of scale…’
What De Leon manage to do with their recordings of percussion is quite remarkable - as is the evident competency displayed with every taste of sound. Lifting specific tones, from a gong or a chime, say, into a transportative realm of sound, De Leon are authoritative and full of mystique on their second outing for the label.
While there’s a sparing serving of information on the process of recording, the most part of the album is left up to the imagination, which I feel is for the best: there’s no track titles to colour the music in some way, and the self-titling of the album itself serves the same purpose: stripping back any distractions from the music itself, allowing a total listening experience thoroughly worth a solitary, undistracted dive into.
Track Picks are playlisted via Buy Music Club, an online Bandcamp interfacing site that lets you create playlists where Bandcamp’s website doesn’t. You can visit the playlist by links here and in the banner image, and you’ll be able to listen to these songs in the curated order.
If words can serve as medals, I give EXILES the highest possible commendation. The Hungarian label are incessantly brilliant — frustratingly so, as I feel pressure to diversify my track picks to different labels, rather than repeating myself. The latest, ‘Janus’, demonstrates the dedication both of the owner and the musicians brought into the label’s embrace: The title track, selected here, is made from playing two individual pieces, which make up the first two tracks of the EP, simultaneously. The approach in building these separate works to be two halves and a whole at the same time is just outstanding.
Corell - Collides (ft. Igor Dyachenko) [Appendix.Files]
This entire mini-LP (?) from Corell is truly special, and probably one of my all-time favourites on the INDEX:Records sublabel. It’s filled with exceptional moments of contemporary ambient that deal with a duality of expression: floating ambience and modernist extreme sound design. This collab with Igor is inline with the formerof these two states, while the title track leans more toward the latter.
ǝɯǝɐ - Social Ablution [Secuencias Temporales]
It’s not very often that a small voice such as mine receives a message such as I received from ǝɯǝɐ, one which goes along the lines of “I’ve been actively listening to your mix series and I really appreciate your work - it influenced this release”. Considering also that ǝɯǝɐ is a brilliant producer I’d been following for a while, I was really touched, and really happy to be introduced to such a brilliant EP. There’s a lot on offer here, but this one is a real floor-setter.
Don’t DJ - Lemon Garlic (Morgan Buckley’s Generative Bodhrán Remix) [Berceuse Heroique)
Don’t DJ is a firm favourite, as is Morgan Buckley, but this meeting of minds is beyond a perfect pairing. Don’t DJ’s near-endless permutations of rhythm are intercepted and reimagined on the Irish Bodhrán drum by Buckley (of Wah Wah Wino collective — one of the absolute baddest (here being praise) collectives I know of). Lock in and prepare for a wild ride.
Yao Bobby & Simon Grab - Fagnan [Exist Records Palestine]
Earlier this month I hosted Odai Masri of Exist Festival Palestine on my radio series on Netil Radio, PAIJATA, and it was all a rush on all sides as he was readying a new fundraiser release for a skatepark in Gaza. Yao Bobby & Simon Grab’s LP on LavaLava is fucking crucial, and this is a great taster and instigator for you to go find more of their truly inimitable music.
Gent1e $oul - Geomagnetic Reversal [Fast Castle]
I’ve been following Berlin’s Fast Castle for a little while — they’ve released some great music so far, but I felt like I was always kinda waiting for something to arrive that showed some extra spark, or perhaps a more developed sound. This is it: killer grooves for all kinda of dancefloors, to be danced to with a big grin.
REZZETT - Off For Spots [The Trilogy Tapes]
I love Rezzett’s singular sound — it’s so identifiable, so alike to only itself. The new album is fantastic, although I expect that once the pulse-spike of the freshness of this album subsides, my obsession will reduce to a rolling boil. Until then, this one’s staying on loop.
Kick21 - Process by Witch [Comic Sans]
Comic Sans were once super prolific, and dealt out a massive range of music I still really dig while I was Deputy Editor at Inverted Audio. It’s been a few years since they released new music, and I’m really happy they’re back with such a strong outing from friends of the French label. This one fits here, but many others are very much worth your attention also.
A month of favourites in the track picks it seems: Priori is another producer with that singular sound, and despite the fact that he treads in so many different spheres of music and releases quite a fair bit, I’m usually playing something from his new releases in every chance I get. The title track from his recent EP with Midgar might be my favourite music from him yet: quicksilver in the bloodstream, emphatic, intentional breakbeat, pure groove.
Skip Club Orchestra - Groove 13.1 [Grooves/Outlines]
Speaking of Grooves: after that phenomenal REIFSMA LP, Polish experimental footwork label Outlines re-open their Grooves sub-label with a brilliant tape of thinker music that remains aligned with the spirit of the percussion-heavy 160BPM genre.
Seim - Pheromone Communication [Jungle Fatigue Records]
I stumbled across this brilliant compilation of jungle - apparently curated by a 17-year-old Korean boy - quite by accident, but I’m surprisingly impressed. Tracks like this one, from Seim, give me the taste of those old Jungle comps, like Trans-Central Connection, while others are more contemporary and experimental. Well worth the dive - especially as the whole thing is pay-what-you-feel (don’t pay nothing folks, world’s hard enough as it is!)
Purelink - Head on a Swivel [NAFF]
This specific track is actually out for a few years now, but with NAFF doing the good thing and bringing this and ‘Maintain the Bliss’ to vinyl, alongside two more sedate masterworks by the brilliant Purelink, I took this opportunity to revisit. and remember that it’s good to not only look at the most recent music for prime gems.
The workshop on coverage of Eastern music by Western platforms was a really poingant one, and it impressed on me the importance of independant voices in the world of music journalism: not one of the people in the room had entirely positive experiences with the major names in dance music journalism.
As part of hosting the workshop I’ll be writing the whole thing up, so once I’ve got through the 2 1/2 hours of audio (I need a body double) I’ll be better able to provide some of the feedback the group gave. If you’re part of these larger platforms in any way, feel free to write me through social media if you’re curious and concerned by the idea that vast regions of the European continent feel rejected and angered by such platforms…