Sigurd Hole - Lys / Mørke

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 158, June 2020.

Sigurd Hole
Lys / Mørke
Elvesang (2 CDs, 80 mins)

Avant-garde bassist Sigurd Hole recorded Lys/Mørke on the island of Sørværet in the Norwegian Arctic. If it was recorded anywhere else, it would sound completely different, such is its connection to the ground from which it grew. Using only his double bass, Hole has made improvised acoustic sound-art that is intimately inspired by the sounds, colours and landscape of Sørværet. By recording out in the open, the ambient sounds of birds, rain and wind in grass become integral to the music and meanings of the album.

Dividing the double album into light (Lys) and darkness (Mørke), Hole explores the ever-important themes of ecology and the philosophical unity of humanity and nature through the language of sound. He uses the whistling sounds of the bass’s harmonics to form mimesis and mimicry, stirring reminiscences of throat-singing and Sámi joik alongside more traditional jazz and Scandinavian folk.

The atmosphere here is sparse and calm, if occasionally unsettling in its vastness. Even moments of musical turmoil are appropriate and magical elements of the sonic ecosystem. The result is so personal and introspective as to feel perhaps a little intrusive, but it serves perfectly to allow our ears to visit the cold scenery of Sørværet and to hear Hole’s soul.

Gwendoline Absalon - Vangasay

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 158, June 2020.

Gwendoline Absalon
Vangasay
Ting Bang (48 mins)

A vangasay is a type of mandarin orange from Madagascar and Vietnam popular in the islands across the Indian Ocean in between. It’s sweet and refreshing – the perfect name for Gwendoline Absalon’s second album.

Absalon is one of the young talents creating the contemporary culture of La Réunion. On Vangasay, she takes the music of her island on a tour around the world, accreting the most soulful styles into her global musical creole. On this journey, she takes the sounds of bossa and samba from Brazil, morna from Cape Verde, piano montuno from Cuba, bèlè from Martinique and Bollywood from India and brings them together with those of La Réunion into a breezy, feel-good pop. Top marks to pianist Hervé Calcal, whose arrangements tie all these influences together seamlessly.

The best thing about Absalon’s music, though, is her voice: clear and fragrant, a little jazzy and full of smile. The album is at its most delightful when her voice is given undivided attention, such as in ‘Binda’ or ‘La Diva de la Morna’, her tribute to Cesaria Evora that starts with a whole two minutes of beautiful solo a capella. Vangasay is a sweet treat, a light and airy listen to clear the cobwebs.

Rabii Harnoune & VB Kühl - Gnawa Electric Laune

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 158, June 2020.

Rabii Harnoune & VB Kühl
Gnawa Electric Laune
Tru Thoughts (67 mins)

This is an album that has me very much in two minds. It’s a fusion between Gnawa music from Morocco remixed for the European club dancefloor. Rabii Harnoune is the Gnawi responsible for the thumping guimbri and soulful wailing, and VB Kühl is the German producer who recontextualises it among all things electronic.

It’s not the most original idea out there – Gnawa x club fusions have been around for a long time and there are better examples of it than this. In accommodating the African groove, the club music seems tamped while the raw and heady energy of the Gnawa ceremony dissipates upon association with the frivolous beats’n’bleeps and cool R&B. And yet, and yet! There’s no denying that this album is really fun. It’s light-hearted and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The DIY nature of the production gives it a natural feel and the fusion flows on unforced.

Gnawa Electric Laune may not blow your mind with originality or sheer power, but as long as you approach with the right frame of mind – up for a good time without too much overthinking – it’s still an album that will be able to move your body to its own beat.

Hailu Mergia - Yene Mircha

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 158, June 2020.

Hailu Mergia
Yene Mircha
Awesome Tapes from Africa (42 mins)

After Awesome Tapes from Africa reissued three of his old tapes to wide acclaim, Ethiopian keys player Hailu Mergia – by then a taxi driver in Washington, DC – made his comeback in 2018 with his first new album for 15 years, Lala Belu. That album was a showcase of classy, intelligent jazz infused with the customary Ethiopian flavour. Yene Mircha does not reach the same heights as its predecessor. It has such a different vibe that it’s actually quite bizarre. While still firmly in the Ethio-jazz mould, this time around it seems to have lost all of the edge that made the last one so exciting.

The first track, ‘Semen Ena Debub’, is smooth, poppy and anodyne, and the rest of the album carries on in much the same vein. A lot of it feels akin to muzak or even, at times, a cheap karaoke backing track. A slight reprieve comes in the form of ‘Bayine Lay Yihedal’, a piece originally written by Asnakech Worku changed up into a swaggering Ethio-dub, but it’s not enough to save the whole set.

To follow an album so good with one like this is astonishing and disappointing. Hopefully it’s just an anomaly and Hailu will be back to his wizarding ways sooner rather than later.

My World: David Rothenberg

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 157, May 2020.



Nightingales, cicadas, whales, lyrebirds: the list of David Rothenberg’s collaboratiors makes it obvious that he thinks and feels music in a different way to most. Across his books, albums and films, Rothenberg has examined the sounds of the natural world and their inherent musicality. Although he tackles these projects with an academic eye (he is the Distinguished Professor of Music and Philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology), he does not do so as a stoic, distanced researcher, but as an active and passionate participant. With his clarinet, he creates fascinating inter-species jams that span the realms of jazz, ambient music and electronica, all the while tapping into worlds that are ultimately beyond our understanding.

To understand the sonic beauty of nature, Rothenberg has his own deep relationship to music of human origin. One of his key inspirations as a musician and musical thinker is the output of the iconic jazz and art music label ECM. “What interests me in ECM artists is that everyone is such an individual. Everyone has a unique quality that’s not super-fast or constant, in-your-face showing-off.” For Rothenberg, the profundity of the label’s output is distilled in his first playlist track, Sinikka Langeland’s 2011 piece ‘What is Tomorrow?’. “This to me is like the ultimate ECM track, it has everything and it’s unique,” he says. “Some people say that ECM sounds are kind of blurry, generic, too much reverb – this does not have any of that. It really stands out because it mixes jazz improvisers with folk music. When I lived in Norway after college, I heard her sing and play the kantele, and what was remarkable about that performance was that she cried in the middle of it. She was performing this Finnish folk music that brings you to tears as you play and sing. She has a very special tone of voice, it’s unusual, compelling. In her band, she has these great soloists who don’t solo, it’s this beautiful understated style. You couldn’t find anyone else to play just like that.” As is the ECM speciality, it’s an intense but calm sound full of emotion, and one that is easy to draw comparisons to the transcendental.

Taking that vibe to the next level, another next playlist pick, ‘Prayer and Despair’, was composed by spiritual leader and esotericist GI Gurdjieff. “I learnt about [him] in high school and college, mostly. We were into all this spiritual stuff, we saw Peter Brook’s film Meetings with Remarkable Men, and read Gurdjieff’s autobiography that it was based on. What’s remarkable about him is, who knows what he did? Was he part-explorer, part-charlatan, part-mystic teacher?” As a composer, Gurdjieff’s work was no more ordinary than his teachings. “He wandered around and grabbed bits of the world’s music and put them together. He’d have these ideas and then Thomas de Hartmann wrote them down as Gurdjieff improvised them at the piano. With de Hartmann playing, it’s this beautiful historic sound. This music cuts through towards something really deep. You do not want to play it in the car, you’ll start to space out! There’s something special going on in this music. You can’t quite say what it is, and that’s why I keep coming back to it.”



Just as he undertakes his research with humour and joy, Rothenberg’s playlist isn’t solely populated by the cerebral or ethereal. “I’m not such a serious person, you know!” Which takes us to the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry for Israel, Teapacks’ ‘Push the Button’. An unusual pick for an American, perhaps? “This was from the first few years after I met my wife, who’s from Estonia. She’s really excited about the Eurovision Song Contest, which of course I’d never heard of. We were in Estonia when it was on, and this one song really stood out. It didn’t win, but it was by far the best. It doesn’t sound like Eurovision – that’s why it’s good! These guys are rapping in different languages, Arabic, Hebrew, French, and it’s all about nuclear war coming. If you find the video, this guy’s playing a double-necked oud, which I think is pretty funny. It’s just making fun of everything, it’s a very fun song.” Holding space for both the serious and the silly seems like an important quality for Rothenberg, but they don’t necessarily have to be polar opposites. “I guess there is something that holds this in common even with Gurdjieff, in this way of finding what’s most universal about the world’s music and putting it together. Not turning it all into this global pop mush where everyone really wants to sound the same, but something authentic, something that can grab you.”

And when music grabs you, it grabs you – and it can come from some of the most unexpected places, as it did with Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux’s ‘1977’. “I first heard this song on Breaking Bad, probably the only long-running TV show where it’s actually worth watching all the episodes. It’s brilliantly done. It was this scene where they use sped-up time-lapse photography and this weird song comes on. It’s not music I know too much about, but I like the whole mixture of things, cutting and pasting different fragments of all these different styles.” Rothenberg even uses Tijoux’s Spanish-language rap as a teaching aid. “I often teach music classes for undergraduates who don’t specialise in music, and a lot of them want to write papers on how hip-hop has conquered the world and how it brings everyone together, but many of them have no idea that anyone raps in any language but English. It doesn’t even occur to them that it could happen. I’m kind of astonished as to why that is; this dominance of English is not a good thing.”

One thing that English is near-perfect for, though, is telling stories about England. Simon Emmerson’s Imagined Village project updated the meaning of English folk music to represent the country as it exists today, and Billy Bragg’s reworking of the traditional ‘Hard Times of Old England’ sums up that goal for Rothenberg. “That’s just a really great song. It takes a classic old song but turned into what’s going on in modern-day England. What I like about it that is the spirit of it and how it’s put together, and how it gets to an optimistic possibility in the future, like there’s going to be a different England someday. I’m sure that’s a message you definitely need to hear now!”

Although this optimism reflects Rothenberg’s own work and music, for an artist primarily known for his connection with nature, I expected his playlist to feature more tracks of an animalian bent. But, of course, they all are – the unavoidable fact is that we are but animals ourselves. By helping us to remember and embrace this, Rothenberg says that music can help us make a difference: “Every musician should listen to the sounds of nature and all things around us. There’s so much awe and beauty, and the more we value this stuff the more we’ll work to save this natural world that is under siege. I have no illusions that music is going to save the world, but it can do its own little part. Sound is an incredible part of the world around us, and we’re just one of many creatures. That’s why I make music with nightingales.”


Photo: Still from the film Nightingales in Berlin (2019, dir. Ville Tanttu).

Introducing Afro Cluster

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 157, May 2020.



An Afro Cluster gig is like the best jam session you’ve ever been to. All the musicians are top-notch, no-one is trying to out-do each other or show off (well, not too much) and all of the aimless noodling is filtered out well before it gets to your ears. It makes sense when you consider that that’s exactly how the band started out: meeting each other periodically during Cardiff jam nights and then meeting up regularly, accreting members along the way. Now they’re a horn-heavy eight-piece, and each musician brings something else to the table – hip-hop, Afrobeat, funk and jazz are the main culprits, but there’s a whole exciting world to be found in there.

Their connection to jam sessions extends past their origin story. The way they keep that energy in their live shows and studio recordings is by embodying that same spirit through the full journey of creation. Bassist Andrew Brown explained how their tracks come about: “We have these long jam sessions, we don’t put any restrictions on anything. We record it, and then we start to put that under the microscope and say ‘alright, this section is actually really good, let’s develop that.’” The passion and free-form creativity is preserved, while rounding-off the jagged edges and solidifying it into a cohesive whole.

It’s hip-hop that really provides an entry-point to the music, in many different ways even past the obvious musical markers. Turntablist DJ Veto reckons that it is a hip-hop state-of-mind that drives the band, and even provides the catalyst for their musical eclecticism. “To a large extent, the hip-hop element is the way that we take influences, the way that hip-hop would sample any type of music and create something different out of it,” he explains. “That’s essentially where we’re at with the band.”

Evoking vibes of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Jurassic 5, it’s an approach that harks back to the classics of alternative hip-hop, not least for their dedication to keeping their sound solidly in the political realm. Frontman and MC Skunkadelic brings in crucial topics from the real life of the UK today – racial inequality, mental health, money problems, living in a digital world with all of the bizarre, often poisonous, boundaries and borders that it facilitates – but the music is never po-faced. Afro Cluster’s parties are made with a perspective that could only have come from Cardiff, but which makes sense on a much wider scale. In many ways, they reflect a sort of South Walian Ozomatli, a band whose LA-centric sound resonates with ears and limbs around the world through an international consciousness. Where Ozomatli reinforce their sound with Mexican and Cuban rhythms, however, Afro Cluster’s finds its spice in Afrobeat, highlife and even Ethio-jazz.

They’ve been slowly gaining their reputation as an incredible live band over the past few years, and with a debut album, The Reach, on the verge of release, they’re poised to make a powerful statement for the head, the heart and the feet. Live or through speakers, they’re coming at you one way or another – make sure you’re ready.

Siti Muharam - Siti of Unguja: Romance Revolution on Zanzibar

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 157, May 2020.

Siti Muharam
Siti of Unguja: Romance Revolution on Zanzibar
OnTheCorner (36 mins)

Siti Muharam is the great-granddaughter of Siti binti Saad, the woman who turned taarab from the inaccessible music of the Sultan’s palace into the people’s sound of Zanzibar. It’s a great legacy to shoulder, and with this debut album, Muharam more than rises to the occasion.

Her voice occupies the same territory as a Bollywood diva, or Billie Holiday, or her great-grandmother; with that same easy but powerful grace. The rest of the ensemble is just as intoxicating, and together they take taarab to another level. They look back to its origins and maintain a real vintage feel while lighting a path for potential new directions for the style. The addition of bass clarinet and double bass lend a noir-jazz slinkiness, and alongside the subtlest of electronics, the feeling is of traditional music finding a comfortable home in the year 2020, rather than any self-conscious ‘fusion.’

Siti Muharam and her group are in command of a music that’s both stately and spicy, and in continuing a great taarab lineage, they’ve made something very special. Once I’d listened to Siti of Unguja, I was already excited to get to listen to it again. I just wish there was a little more of it!