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It's been, yikes, over a year since I did some short album reviews. I stopped writing but I didn't stop listening. In fact, the quest I embarked on some years back to expand my musical horizons and to be less passive in my consumption of music has been an unmitigated success. I listen to and enjoy a much wider range of musical styles and eras today than I ever have in the past. And I'm not done yet!
No over-arching theme to today's three, just a hodgepodge.
This album feels, to me, waaaay ahead of its time. I've never heard anything else like it that isn't a decade younger or more, but maybe that's just ignorance on my part. This album is the ~45 minute (cassette enthusiasts rejoice!) result of the enthusiastic application of early digital audio technology to recordings of Hassell's own Indian raga-inspired trumpet playing plus recordings of a diverse range of traditional ethnic instruments. Hassell called this a "unified primitive/futurist sound". It's repetitive and trance inducing and unmistakably digital/electronic, while also being smooth and mellow and organic sounding, like the incredible and unexpected lovechild of ambient/minimal techno and record store bargain bin "world music" compilation discs that violently outshines both of its parents. If you can recommend me more stuff like this, please do!
Aka / Dabari / Java on YouTube
It took a long time, and a circuitous route via jazz rock and jazz fusion, if that's a distinction you care to make, but it finally happened and I've become a fan of "proper" jazz, whatever that means. Donald Byrd is a *firm* favourite and I could easily have made a post just recommending three of his albums, but let's not get carried away. I might hesitate to dub "Fancy Free" my favourite of the Byrd albums I enjoy, but it is, to my neophyte jazz mind without the proper taxonomic skills to explain how or why, the one which feels the stylistically purest and simplest. The album name and the album art (sea birds soaring against a lovely cloudscape) fit the music perfectly. It's cheerful and playful, relaxed and unhurried, sure to induce a good mood.
Goodness me, I'm not even sure what to call this. Electronic progressive rock? The French answer to Krautrock? Ose was a short-lived (well, originally short-lived anyway, back in the 70s; astonishingly, they resurfaced with a new release on Bandcamp in 2021 after a multi-decade hiatus!) project lead by prolific experimental musician Richard Pinhas who recorded many more albums with his earlier band Heldon, and if you enjoy "Adonia" you will likely enjoy Heldon's output and Pinhas' solo work, too. I'm sharing "Adonia" here rather than anything else simply because this album was *my* gateway into this little world, so it might as well be yours, too. This is science-fiction inflected Krautrock, or actually, maybe it's more rock-infused Berlin school electronica? Lots of synths, cold and crystalline, befitting the mood set by the reminiscent-of-Dune album art, with plenty of step sequencer goodness, but with lots of great electric guitar work, too. Actually, yes, this really is progressive rock meets Berlin school, not French Krautrock. There's no propulsive motorik drumming here. There *are* drums, but the sequencers steal the show in terms of rhythmic elements. Guitar soars meanderingly over the top of steadily plodding synths while banks of blinkenlights (in God-fearing traffic light colours, not a blue abomination amongst 'em) do their blinky business in the darkened control room of a drifting, derelict spacecraft. Yep, nailed it. Front row candidate for the national anthem of the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu.