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Whistling Away in the Background

March 5, 2021 · Leave a Comment

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Steve Cobby – I’ve Loved You All My Life → Maybe there’s a lockdown stimulus to Steve Cobby‘s prolificness — he’s released two previous albums since the pandemic’s start, as well as a single and a murmur or two from his old outfit, Fila Brazillia. But Steve has always brimmed with musical output, a career-long series of textured and melodic songs with intricacies that belie their frequency. 

If there is a stuck-at-home influence on his latest album, the warmly titled I’ve Loved You All My Life, it’s in the sense of longing for sightseeing. The cover depicts a green, lush, but enclosed location — the starry sky is our escape hatch. And the music seems to travel, not explicitly quoting worldly influences but hinting at them as if remembering what it was like to be a tourist. “Kintsugi” comes closest, resembling a sort of Polynesian jazz fusion with tuned percussion, soaring flute-like lines, and thick four-fingered chords. Someone’s whistling away in the background, like an overzealous member of Martin Denny’s band. There are many other sonic vacations on the agenda — “Plutus Maximus” feels like a night-time stroll through a pleasantly unfamiliar town, and “Keeping Ourselves Together” could soundtrack a tranquil cabana session, fruity drink in hand. And the album closes with “Mise En Abyme,” a wistful duet of harmonica and piano that might signal the recognition of memory, that the things we miss the most live on inside our heads. 

I’ve Loved You All My Life is a joy to listen to and, yes, reassuring. This album might be my favorite of Steve’s work out of all of his recent (all worthy) options. And, if you’re into vinyl, act fast — the Bandcamp campaign to get the album on vinyl ends in a week (Steve’s already met his goal, but this is still the only way you’ll get to nab the wax). 

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Tomaga – Intimate Intensity → It’s never too late to discover a great band. Sad circumstances may make it seem otherwise, as in the case of Tomaga. Somehow this London duo was off my radar despite first appearing in 2013. I happened across their 2019 album Extended Play 1 a few months ago, and from the first track, “Bluest,” I was immediately roped in. Tomaga’s sound is textured and intricate, with jazzy post-punk drums, flashes of discordance, and in-studio arrangements hinting at a modernized This Heat. That’s when I learned the bittersweet moment of my discovery — looking up Tomaga online, I saw that 1/2 of the band, Tom Relleen, had just died of stomach cancer.

Tomaga’s other half, drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, announced last month that the band completed a new album before Relleen’s passing. Intimate Intensity is due on March 26 and, judging from the four advance tracks streaming on Bandcamp, this is an early contender for ‘album of 2021.’ The title track is especially potent, carrying forward all the elements that drew me into “Bluest.” The drums, accompanied by pingy percussion, play at a meter just out of grasp; a muted bass carries a wisp of melody; warm, melancholic strings embrace this sonic space. This is the final sound of Tomaga (as it’s the last song on the album), and it’s weighty and intensely moving.

Floating Points collaborated with Marta Salogni on a gorgeous, plaintive ‘reinterpretation’ of “Intimate Intensity,” released last week. It’s a benefit for The Free Youth Orchestra, a charity set up in Tom Relleen’s name. Amazing stuff. 

Side note: I recently wrote about my love for an EP by Holy Tongue, and I now see that Valentina Magaletti is also a member of that project. 

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Abel Ray – “Last Exit To Transkei” → I don’t listen to much house music anymore (which I suppose is funny from someone once kinda known as a house DJ). At one time, the genre sounded like the future but now, to me, a lot of it sounds stuck in the past. So it’s exciting when I run across something house-adjacent that’s nudging the genre forward an inch or two. 

Abel Ray is an electronic music-maker hailing from Morocco, and “Last Exit To Transkei” is a track from his forthcoming Labyrinth EP. The cut draws upon the same pool as My Life in a Bush of Ghosts and similar fourth world experiments — a stew of cultural music and references stirred and poured over a rhythmic backbone. At times dubby and spacious, “Last Exit To Transkei” reveals its layers over ten engrossing minutes. Flutes, chants, hand percussion, and restrained synthesizers may sound like nothing new, but seamlessly meshed, they signal where things will go. This is music that blurs genre and location, the four-on-the-floor beat as a map guiding the listener through the territory. 

Filed Under: From The Notebook, Listening Tagged With: Abel Ray, Bandcamp, Fila Brazillia, Holy Tongue, Martin Denny, Morocco, Steve Cobby, This Heat, Tomaga

Gingerbread Mixtape

December 21, 2020 · 1 Comment

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ASCAP, BMI Partner To Launch SONGVIEW Comprehensive Song Database → If you’re a music publisher, perennially at the top of your Xmas list is a central database for looking up song rights information. In other words, a search engine that’s PRO agnostic: input a song and find out the writers, the publishers, and the shares no matter the rights owner. But BMI’s search only shows songs with BMI representation, ASCAP shows only ASCAP, and so on. So, until you strike gold, you’re going from PRO-to-PRO to find writer and publisher details on a song. 

Here’s a start: today, BMI and ASCAP announced Songview, a search platform that shows results from both repertoires. It’s slicker than the companies’ previous search engines (it’s especially an upgrade for BMI) and seems to return more accurate results. This will make things easier, but I’d love SESAC and the others to come on board. And my face would assume a permanent joyful expression if one day Songview included details from international publishers and PROs. How cool would it be to look up a song and see if other publishers control it in different territories? Often it seems that half of a music licensee’s job is figuring out this complexity, investigating like a song-rights sleuth. Regardless, I’m encouraged by Songview. Fingers crossed that these are early days, and the participation of other PROs on the platform is on the horizon.

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Every holiday season, David and Jennifer send us (and other lucky friends) an assortment of hand-crafted gingerbread cookies. This year I got a mixtape. Goes great with coffee. (Be sure to check out David’s blog 1000 Cuts.)

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Holy Tongue – Holy Tongue → No one knows where dub goes. UK duo Holy Tongue are doing their damndest to track it down. Witness: Post-punk spliced with dub the way it was done, anachronistic but futuristic like if at the end of Primer the time machine room was revealed to be This Heat’s Cold Storage studio. Holy Tongue are Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion and Al Wootton on guitars, synths, and the occasional siren. The performances are improvised, phase two of the magic apparently happening on the mixing desk where the Tubby/Sherwood spirit inspires all manner of echoing, hi-hat filtering, spring reverbing, and other ravishing embellishments. The result is as good and gritty as many early ‘80s On-U experiments. It’s refreshing in 2020 to hear something so raw yet technical, unsequenced but rhythmically tight. There’s no word whether Holy Tongue is a one-off or a continuing affair. I’m rooting for the latter (and live shows!). This tradition of exploratory studio hybrid-dub needs to live on and on and on, like a tape delay’s rising, infinite ghost tail.

Filed Under: From The Notebook, Listening, Publishing + Copyright Tagged With: ASCAP, BMI, David Sanborn, Dub + Reggae, Holy Tongue, Post-Punk, Rights Management, Songview

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8sided.blog is a digital zine about sound, culture, and what Andrew Weatherall once referred to as 'the punk rock dream'.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a slightly jaded but surprisingly optimistic fellow who's haunted the music industry for longer than he cares to admit. A former Q-Burns Abstract Message.

"More than machinery, we need humanity."
 
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