Articles by Mick Raubenheimer
Mike Keneally: The Thing That Knowledge Can't Eat
by Mick Raubenheimer
A new Mike Keneally album is always a thing of humming excitement and intrigue. And pending contradictions eloquently resolved. Forever searching along and within nooks and crannies of the soniverse for fresh sounds and patterns, Keneally surveys the majestic reaches and possibilities of music and grins. A shockingly talented musician, Keneally has the calm energy of someone who can pull off the most complex musical riff (on keyboards and/or guitar, sometimes simultaneously) in an effortless manner, in this way appearing ...
read moreJonathan Crossley And The Chase Of Sound
by Mick Raubenheimer
South African-born, UK-based guitarist Jonathan Crossley's 2022 release Inhale is an amalgam of influences, from post-rock to jazz to math rock to electronica, all woven into a genre unto itself. Time signatures shift effortlessly and, indeed, any one time signature is played around with, Crossley's guitar and Jonno Sweetman's drums hopping from just behind to just ahead of the pulse in a kind of playful interrogation (and celebration of the limits) of rhythm and metre. Opening track “Bounce" ...
read moreHerbie Hancock: Thrust
by Mick Raubenheimer
Haters can hate, but that molten decade sprung between the mid-Sixties and mid-Seventies was a smorgasbord of innovation and adventure in music. While the heady spirit of freedom—and hyper-stimuli of psychedelics—didn't exactly wreak genius upon the average human mind (whose imaginative reach crested at tie-dye shirts, living in tepees, and emancipating body hair), original artists went and dove over the edges of all kinds of edges. Music, for one, would never be the same; nor, perhaps, ever as rampantly inspired. ...
read moreMiles Davis: Bitches Brew
by Mick Raubenheimer
Bitches Brew, (Columbia, 1970) 52 years old this year, can be seen as the elder statesman of jazz fusion, but old it is not, trapped, or rather insulated as it is in its youthfully electric vortex. This ink is daunting. In preparing to tease this retrospective into view, I am listening to Bitches Brew for the first time in a long, highly eventful decade. And the opening strains, instructively, and deceptively placid (the proverbial ellipse preceding rupture), displace me: I ...
read moreGuy Buttery: A Trio Of Heart
by Mick Raubenheimer
Renowned for his--by all accounts--wondrous musicianship, expressed predominantly on guitar, Buttery is admired not only for virtuosic technique, but a subtle and highly emotive melodic sensibility, which often evokes an air of spirituality. Following his multi-award winning seventh album, aptly entitled Guy Buttery--as, at the time, it felt like his most personal to date (see the aforementioned spiritual quality of track 'The upper reaches')--Buttery was struck down by an undiagnosable malady which had him practically bedridden for several months. Towards ...
read moreStranger Things: Kate Bush And The Forest Of A Thousand Tongues
by Mick Raubenheimer
The arrival of '80s-flavoured teen Sci-fi-meets-Lovecraft Netflix series Stranger Things 4th season has shed unexpected fresh light on one of the more reclusive and fascinating female singer-songwriters of the last four decades, Kate Bush, via crucial use of her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill (Deal with God)." The use of the song in pivotal moments of the latest season of the hit series has brought the track back into the British Top 10, near 40 years after its original ...
read moreFela Kuti: King Grenade
by Mick Raubenheimer
His Dark Majestic. Fela Kuti was born royalty, despite coming from a middle class family. One of those gifted spirits whose very presence teems with potency, Olufela Olusegun Oludan Ransome-Kuti (Fela to his friends and fans) was majestic, arresting the attention or desire of all who encountered him. He was also a rousing rebel, founding his own state in defiance of the militant Nigerian government. Embodied. Born into a middle class, but auspicious family ...
read moreTom Waits: Ringmaster Of The Elegant Riot
by Mick Raubenheimer
[For Tammi Tam.] Somewhere change is jingling, there is an accordion moaning softly in some corner somewhere, a barstool is creaking--somewhere foul glasses are being grimly emptied... The dark eerie carnival is rising once more--hurry your children into safe dreams, lock the wine cabinet; tuck your long-lost sweethearts into forgettance. Tom Waits is here, those sub-human genius features are sizing you up, asking you how your night's been; he's pouring himself a drink (he doesn't ask). ...
read moreZappa and the burning strings
by Mick Raubenheimer
Zappa. A glimpse. The composition was entering its fifth mood, a diabolical, gleeful, lurching rhythm, led by deep-plowed violin. The song was “Revised Music for Violin and Low Budget Orchestra," it was written for Jean-Luc Ponty by Frank Zappa. A new instrument dawned into my framework as that composition wheezed and moaned and ranted and spun—that classic, demure, genteel pansy of an instrument had been plucked from its staid Old European stand and forged into a complex, eloquent ...
read moreGivan Lotz and the phenomenal psyche
by Mick Raubenheimer
Givan Lotz is mysterioso. During the course of eight years as a recording and performing artist he has evaded any kind of viable categorization, each new release effortlessly slips free of perceived prior apprehensions. His most recent release, YaW, is the sonic sibling of 2016's MAW, both released through Miami's Other Electricities label. When I first encountered Lotz' music, I was transfixed. Touring with the South African collective Jaunted Haunts press, he performed mesmerizing, cyclical pieces ...
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