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Abdullah Ibrahim: Solotude
by Gareth Thompson
Abdullah Ibrahim once told a seminar at his M7 Academy in Cape Town, “The devil lives on the stage. This is where the ego comes out." On the strength of Solotude, recorded live on his eighty-sixth birthday, Ibrahim has crushed such personal demons and now lets angels guide his performing. One takes his point though, given ...
Joy On Fire: Unknown Cities
by Gareth Thompson
In creating his Dream City paintings, the Baltimore-based artist Minás Konsolas aspired to a mountain village ideal, an entity of intimacy and community. Using a detail from these works as the cover for their Unknown Cities album, the power trio Joy On Fire again shows how its art intersects with outsider culture. There is something of ...
Young Pilgrims: We're Young Pilgrims
by Gareth Thompson
Based in Birmingham, England, the record company Stoney Lane is named after a street where soccer team West Bromwich Albion once played. Thus, each of the label's releases is numbered with a glory year from the club's past, whether a promotion or a cup win. However, so often have West Brom yo-yoed between England's top leagues ...
Graham Costello's Strata: Second Lives
by Gareth Thompson
A top German physiologist once compared the brain's nerve fibres to a piano's keys, on which our thoughts play or strike. Scottish drummer and composer Graham Costello might relate to this, given how well he writes for the piano, as he explores themes of mental challenges on this second album with his excellent band Strata.
Maridalen: Maridalen
by Gareth Thompson
The use of sacred spaces has long been a feature of jazz recordings. Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd made their classic Jazz Samba (Verve, 1962) album at All Souls Church, Washington DC, whilst a converted Greek Orthodox site played home to Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Among similar stories, the Norwegian act Moskus recorded ...
Misc: Partager l'ambulance
by Gareth Thompson
Montreal piano-led trio Misc use their album title and artwork here to reflect on a post-Covid world. The title translates as “Sharing The Ambulance" and the cover is like an apocalyptic cartoon, showing a disused hospital truck furnished with hi-fi and easy chair floating in the sky. It could be a still from any Studio Ghibli ...
Rogér Fakhr: Fine Anyway
by Gareth Thompson
Based in Berlin, the label Habibi Funk took its name from an online comment about one of its mixes. “Habibi" is actually the Arabic word for “darling," which seems fitting for a company intent on sharing the love. Their stated aim is to reissue mostly North African musical treasures from the 1970s and '80s, ranging from ...
Fire And Ice: Two Nordic Contrasts
by Gareth Thompson
The twin forces of ice and fire have long existed in Nordic mythology. In the twenty-first century, northern European music has offered stark contrasts too, with a scene as vibrant and compelling as any on earth. Labels such as Hubro, Odin, Rune Grammofon and Jazzland have brought us many artists with a common grounding in jazz ...
Joy On Fire: Hymn
by Gareth Thompson
The industrial anarchists Throbbing Gristle stood by their notion that noise and frequency could change states of consciousness. Listening to saxophonist Anna Meadors of Joy On Fire, with her pitch-shifting and time-stretching, might back this idea up. Certainly the audience enters many realms of awareness on the band's album Hymn . Even the cover artwork, a ...
Irreversible Entanglements: Who Sent You?
by Gareth Thompson
Irreversible Entanglements first came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event in 2015, after the killing of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Who Sent You? is their second album and was released in March 2020, two months before George Floyd's death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. A five-piece collective, ...
