"I once heard Floating Points DJ in bright sunshine and was disappointed: he played a forgettable mix of funk and disco that bore little resemblance to his production work. His best music is masterfully paced, transitioning effortlessly between the calm and the cacophonous, and it's better suited to a patient listener than a raucous crowd. This sets him up perfectly for a Late Night Tales mix: the solitary, nocturnal headphones-wearer has always been the series' target audience, and beneath the night sky's warm blanket, FloPo—real name Sam Shepherd—feels at ease, crafting a soothing, drifting set that feels intimately connected with its listener.
...Many of Shepherd's choices are the product of hours spent listening to music, a penchant for the obscure which is to be applauded, but the true art of DJing, as Shepherd exhibits here, lies in making connections between records—not based on genre or bpm, but because together they create the desired mood, tell a particular story, paint a certain picture; whatever the metaphor, it's a skill not just in playing music, but in listening to it.
"The Blue Note Record label needs little introduction. Musically, graphically and sonically iconic, the label created and defined the golden age of modern jazz on record. Founded in 1939 by German émigré Alfred Lion, the label's roster of artists is a litany of giants -- Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock, and many more. With peerless musicians in the grooves, the legendary Rudy Van Gelder behind the boards, and graphic design genius Reid Miles creating emblematic artwork for every release, Blue Note -- "the Cadillac of the jazz lines" -- was outstanding in every way.
"Incredibly unique concept album from the one and only, Tom Zé. As featured in Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Brazilian Albums of all-time list (2007). One of Ze's finest albums in our opinion, originally released by Continental Brazil in 1976 – a tough one to find at a good price in its original form now.
"...Poor Martin Frawley. He broke up with his long-time girlfriend, Jules MacFarlane, after eight years, which also put him out of a job, since the two of them founded and co-led the angsty, jangly Melbourne band Twerps. He's also evidently broken the 3-0 barrier, a classic, nearly stereotypical age for soul-searching, progress-measuring and feelings of inadequacy in any business, let alone one as exposed and emotionally on display as songwriting. But good news, Frawley has made lemonade, squeezing out the sour juices of life into a lovely, acid-tipped, unassuming but quite refreshing solo record, Undone at 31.
"The first thing that strikes you about this album is the colorful sound Simon Ghraichy brings out from the instrument. This is also due to the unique timbre of the piano and the relatively close recording. The album starts with a lovely transcription by the pianist, followed by uniquely programmed set of pieces and composers, the center of which is Schumann's "Humoreske" and "Etudes In Variation Form on a Theme By Beethoven" (based on the second movement of the Seventh Symphony).
...Pensive, less fractious autobiography continues in slower but just as outstanding songs. "It's a new day, another night that I've survived," 61-year-old Forster sings in The Morning. Life Has Turned a Page, meanwhile, is an affable sketch of someone else's life, its twists and turns underpinned by unassuming melodic shuffles.
"While Gunn's work often touches on themes of discovery and wander, his new LP repositions him in a manner allowing him the chance to confront and reflect what he's been searching for. Within its nine tracks, Gunn addresses matters of death, acceptance, and expectations, all of which round his music with serenity and credence, thus positioning him on the forefront not only as a quintessential narrator for our time, but a faithful guide who gently directs us revitalized and untroubled.
"Following last year's terrific Baby Only You & I EP, Montreal singer-songwriter Chloé Soldevila is back with Anemone's debut album. It's a nice mix of styles that manages to pull from different eras and genres — '60s sunshine pop and yé-yé, krautrock, '90s Madchester — into a sound that is distinctively theirs and, as Chloé puts it, captures "the feeling of driving endlessly on a sunny day with a lover, the feeling of dancing and forgetting about everything while feeling high on life." Beat My Distance is an exceedingly charming debut album, filled to the brim with memorable melodies and great arrangements.
"The Mexican, Central and South American immigrants who settled around east Los Angeles have long had an affinity for soul love ballads (aka slow jams). In recent times the scene they and their descendants initiated has intensified and spread to soul fans and collectors around the world, especially those already sympathetic to the music and intrigued by titles that were finding favour among the hip lowrider set.
"..."Ripe For Anarchy" is a through-and-through ode to indie pop, in the historic definition of the genre. "My Old Town" and "N.R.E.A.M." could be album cuts on a Grant McLennan solo album, "Don't Let Our Time Expire" and "Naive Scenes" could be The Smiths, the Sparklehorse cover "The Hatchet Song" bears an uncanny resemblance to Australian pop pioneers Even As We Speak, and "I Feel Dread" has the unmistakable earmarks of The Field Mice.
"Soul Jazz Records' new release 'Soul of A Nation: Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher' is a powerful new collection of radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap made in the era of Black Power (1969-75).
This new album features a number of important and ground-breaking African-American artists – The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry, Funkadelic, Gil Scott-Heron and more – alongside a host of lesser-known artists all of whom in the early 1970s were exploring new Afrocentric poly-rhythmical styles of music – radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap – while at the same time exploring the Black Power and civil-rights inspired notions of self-definition, self-respect and self-empowerment in their own lives.
During this era African-American jazz musicians ripped up traditional definitions – rejecting the term 'entertainer' to redefine themselves instead as 'artists'. They worked outside of the mainstream music industry perceiving this artistic relationship to be fundamentally exploitative and politically flawed. Artists instead formed their own pan-arts community-centric collectives, set up their own record labels, ran concerts in alternative performance spaces – art galleries, parks, lofts, community centres – all as a way of taking control of their own creative destinies...Their music developed into a radical and intense Afrocentric mix of jazz, funk, soul and street poetry, all in search of a new musical language that could better represent artistic African-American cultural expression.
All of the featured artists here were involved in this search in different ways; A shared sense of Afrocentric collectivism joined the dots between the deep avant-garde experimentalism of The Art Ensemble of Chicago (here featuring soul singer Fontella Bass singing the powerful 'Theme de Yoyo') to the hyper funk psychedelia of George Clinton's Funkadelic.
The poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and Sarah Webster Fabio performed with a backdrop of street funk and heavyweight percussion laid down the template for the birth of rap. The Har-You Percussion Group, a group of young Harlem teenagers, showed how government-sponsored social initiatives helped create great art and music. Gary Bartz and The Oneness of Juju offer spirituality and cosmology. Collectives like The Pharaohs and Detroit's Tribe add deep jazz and street funk in equal measures. And so on.
"Welcome to the twentieth installment of the Oxford American's Southern Music series. North Carolinians are not shy about celebrating their achievements—see: FIRST IN FLIGHT; the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and the Halifax Resolves; America's earliest public college; Pepsi; Michael Jordan—and in the realm of music, the land of the longleaf pine has had a deep and enduring influence. I will tell you right off that a lot of the stories and songs in this issue are about pride.
The songs on the accompanying sampler (you can listen to the CD that came with your magazine, or via digital download using the code on the card inside the disc sleeve) were made across almost one hundred years—from April 1924, when Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis cut "Big-Eyed Rabbit" on 78 rpm, to September 2018, when Shannon Whitworth recorded a beautiful new version of Ella May Wiggins's 1929 protest ballad in Asheville especially for our mix. In between, you have moments of transcendent musical history: Coltrane joining fellow North Carolinian Thelonious Monk's band for some months in 1957; Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson sharing a stage in Winston-Salem in 2002; Cas Wallin hollering an old ballad of Madison County into a field recordist's microphone in 1963; Sylvan Esso reconfiguring its music live on all-Moog synthesizers in 2013; Big Boy Henry talking his improvisational blues in 1982; brothers Vernon, Doug, and Link Wray gathering around a tape recorder in their kitchen in 1952. Some of these songs have not been publicly released until now.
"...From the stately strings on Goodnight Europe to the plea for adventure as she croons 'Everything's been done / But not by you and me' on the crisply melodic Alpine Town, this is pop music with a bittersweet centre but a sugar coating so beautifully assembled that it slips effortlessly into the deep recesses of your brain. There's so much joy captured in the jaunty piano of I've Done the Best and the lovestruck Oh My Love (What Have We Done), that it's hard to believe that when she's not making music De Graaf is working on war crimes trials for the UN.
There are touches of the Magnetic Fields in the arrangements, the effortless melodies of Teenage Fanclub or a less abstract iteration of Beach House, but when De Graaf waltzes through the slide guitar assisted Antoine or the potent power pop of Where Did You Go she's so perfectly in command of her medium that it's astonishing.
"Plenty has changed for Doug Paisley since his 2014 album Strong Feelings. He's a family man now, which prompted him to take a break from touring and recording—though not, it seems, from writing. Which brings us to one thing that hasn't changed: the Toronto singer's gift for spellbinding subtlety on songs that take quiet hold of your heart and refuse to let go.
"Some people just make beautiful music. You can, as a listener or a writer, seek the best descriptions of what the music does, how it makes you feel, where it takes you to, but when all is said and done, some music is just beautiful. It's an overused term, the kind that adorns press releases, posters, and social media so as to be rendered less powerful than it once was, but, and at the risk of repeating myself I have to say it again, when music is beautiful, it just is. Such is the case with Solo Piano III, the dazzling new record from Chilly Gonzales.
"At its core, The Lamb is an album about a lack of control. It operates between two poles, shifting between paranoia about the apocalypse and the insular struggle of rewiring your brain during struggles with addiction. Both of them stem from feeling like you have no say — over your actions, your destiny, or what might happen to you at any given moment.
"Smokescreens began as a love letter to the Flying Nun scene of the 1980's and it's outlying bands. Chris Rosi and Corey Cunningham had become friends when the pair toured together in their bands Plateaus and Terry Malts in 2011. By 2015 both had moved to Los Angeles where they began the band in earnest with Rosi on guitar and Cunningham on bass. After getting their sea legs playing the bars and bowling alleys of Southern California, the duo recruited engineer/drummer Jon Greene to help them commit their shambolic paeans to kiwi pop onto tape. Recorded in a disused dairy factory and mixed in mono, their self-titled debut came out on Cunningham's label Parked In Hell in February of 2017 and was reissued by Spain's Meritorio Records later that summer.
After the passing of Jon Greene, the pair re-grouped with drummer Brice Bradley and bassist Jenny Moffett, a move that enabled Cunningham to switch to lead guitar and keyboards. The group worked tirelessly, nurturing their sound and writing batches of songs with steadfast dedication. They soon decamped to Primitive Ears, a small studio in North Hollywood, where they tracked the 10 songs that make up "Used To Yesterday." After a handful of quicksilver sessions, the group brought the tapes to producer Kyle Mullarky (The Allah-lahs) who created a final mix that really captures the band's rhythmic drive and melodic verve.
"Used To Yesterday" continues Smokescreen's zeal for New Zealand pop but also incorporates influences from the more melodic side of Messthetics-era DIY pop and expands into classic indie pop territory, a natural fit for the group's new label Slumberland Records. First single "The Lost Song" perfectly encapsulates where the band is coming from on this new record; literally a lost demo from the group's earliest days, it is here given a NZ-meets-Athens GA arrangement, galloping along at an urgent clip and packed with guitars that strum and jangle in magical unison.
"J. Spaceman makes music that can fill Royal Albert Hall. For nearly three decades, his band Spiritualized has turned space-rock into a spectacle worthy of crystal chandeliers and velvet seats, complete with choral, horn and string arrangements. The last 10 years, in particular, have yielded the positively lush records Songs in A&E and Sweet Heart Sweet Light, which throw back to the orchestral bluster of late-'60s Scott Walker and The Beatles at their most extravagant. But when making a new record, J. Spaceman (a.k.a. Jason Pierce), like every other musician struggling in an economy unkind to artistry, could not afford excess time in a lavish studio. So he bought a laptop and got to work.
Not that you would know it just by listening, but And Nothing Hurt makes a living room sound like a cathedral.
"I wanted to make like a 1960s Columbia Studios recording, but without ever going to the studio to put that thing together," he told KEXP. "And it seemed kind of dumb. I don't know what went down. I became so obsessed."
J. Spaceman learned the ins and outs of home recording in his East London abode, using a cast of musicians just as ambitious as on his standard fare, painstakingly layering sound on sound to get bigger and bigger. (To complicate the process, he had to book 10 different studios to record instruments he couldn't quite capture at home.) "I'm Your Man" is a sterling example of his ambition: Its warm, Stax-style horns are swirled in psychedelic R&B, culminating in a sky-high guitar solo. "Let's Dance" is deceptively stripped back, a charming space waltz that builds with piano here, guitar there, and then slowly adds a Beach Boys-style boom boom tsh to what eventually becomes a synth-and-horns carnival of sound.
There are a few rockers, as well, perhaps in a nod to 2001's Let It Come Down. Both "On the Sunshine" and "The Morning After" set the R&B rave-up to raging speeds, culminating in a cacophony of feedback, free-jazz saxophone and drums. But J. Spaceman is quick to temper the noise with something like church, especially in the spectral slow burn of "The Prize."
"This is an unusual, beautiful and dark album curated by — and at times performed by — the Danish musician Agnes Obel. It's part of a series of artist-curated albums called Late Night Tales. Nils Frahm, The Flaming Lips, Jon Hopkins and others have put their own records together for the series in the past. For her Late Night Tale, Agnes Obel has chosen music from a wide variety of artists — from the soul of Nina Simone to the wit and wisdom of The Kinks' Ray Davies, the lush strings of Henry Mancini, the quirkiness of Can and the ethereal Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir. Somehow she has managed to stitch it altogether.
My first listen to this album was transporting. Agnes Obel says that she "collected all the songs together with my partner, Alex Brüel Flagstad and we just spent time listening to records, trying to see what would fit together. Some of the music I've included here is on mixtapes we made when we were just friends as teenagers. Each one of the tracks produces stories in my head."