Bleep-bloops of January
a.k.a. my belated first post
2023 is super chaotic for me so far, I took on freelance jobs while having a full time one too and a lot of social gathering stuff and gigs are happening as well. The flow of music also never stops, I’ve meant to write this post like a week ago. Here are my January highlights, mostly still reflecting back to last year.
Italian wizards (lizards?) Babau’s gig on last year’s UH fest was truly one of my favourite experiences of 2022. I remember walking into the room and their stage decor was this big neon-colored hand-painted flag with vivid sea creatures & text saying “Fifth World music”, I immediately knew this concert will be my thing. I’ve been of course familiar with their great label Artetetra and their record Stock Fantasy Zone, but hearing these beautiful / playful / super silly deep sea fantasia sounds live was another level. Thinking back, the audience looked exactly like a shoal of fish, trying to dance to these somewhat broken rhythms & alien flutes. This new release is also a live recording from another gig and it’s just perfect.
To contextualize their music better I recommend to read this great interview with them on SHAPE, they talk about ideas and terms like world music 2.0, transglobal exoticism and digital folklore. They also mention their early influences here, including Jon Hassell, Sun Araw, Jan Anderzén / Kemialliset Ystävät and Spencer Clark, which are exactly the circle of musicians I’d put them in. One half of the duo, Luigi Monteanni also moderated this amazing talk recently on CTM Festival about similar topics, it’s worth to check out.
Bianca Scout really grew on me in the past year. Her collaborative album with Elena Isolini was my absolute favourite of 2022, with it’s mysterious, innocent, fairy tale-like world building. The album cover looks like if you’d catch the two of them dissapearing in the portal of this new place they invented together, vague and possibly more desirable than reality. Stepping into this portal with them, it’s like your senses would have been dulled, instruments are floating together, words are hardly shaped. They let you listen, but not giving away their secret code language.
This new solo record, The Heart of the Anchoress - what an amazing title - is similarly ethereal in tone, but a lot darker (maybe the cover is doing it for me this time too?). It is centered around the sounds of the church organ, sampled, repeated and twisted into a cosy mess. I imagine this could become a huge RYM favourite like every “women playing the organ” album lol, especially this one a while back.
In between Christmas & NYE, I was one of those stupid nerds who spent days with digging through most of the Boomkat year-end lists, until I came near enough to a mental breakdown point. I think it was worth it, because I came to know 5-6 releases which are absolute nuts 10/10 albums and I had no idea about. This brilliant compilation of psychedelic guitar folk music by Branko Mataja hits me on a really soft spot. I think many friends and people who are the same age as me had a period of their teenage years listening to Hungarian “etno” bands mixing these slavic folk traditions in a sort of cringey way, also Black Cat, White Cat by Emir Kusturica was a big TV movie here in my childhood. On the other hand, Mataja’s usage of his Yugoslavian / Serbian heritage here is not only appropriate, but also unlike anything I’ve heard before. Bold and beautiful, it creates this deep sense of homesickness, which he probably felt (he emigrated to the US), but never really talked about. I strongly recommend to read this fascinating article on Guardian about his life, how his self-released record was found and how it couldn’t be reissued for 13 years simply because his relatives didn’t really care about it much.
This fire release was also a “Boomkat year-end lists” find. I have to admit that I don’t know much about cumbia music, although I had a phase when I thought Meridian Brothers is the best band in existence, I think they’re much more experimental than the rest in this genre. Turbo Sonidero seems to be a cult Californian producer and digger of obscure latin sounds, he dedicates this tape to Californian lowrider and Mexican/Colombian sonidero sound system culture (as I read here). What is unique to my ear is that he mixes a lot of hip hop / trap and old soul records with cumbia rhythms and kind of dissonant / alien sound effects, this latter reminds me of the aformentioned Meridian Brothers. I’m happy that I can include these heavy headbangers in my future DJ sets.
I thought I’d include something that’s not ‘new’. In this new year I’ll try my best to not hoard 2023 releases as much and dig more older music on discogs and other platforms. The Digidub (artist & label) bandcamp is something I’ve meant to excavate through for a while, been doing it in tiny portions. This release was originally a soundtrack of a butoh performance piece, which took place at a scrap yard. It’s a bummer to miss out such a good sounding thing, but I was only 12 years old when this performance happened lol. The record samples a lot of these found scrap metal noises, which, yes, totally makes it sound like a dubbed out version of Chu Ishikawa OSTs, but the Lain bootleg soundtrack also came to my mind…very much my cup of industrial tea.
Ok here are some one-sentence honorable mentions!
The perfect morning listening, soooothing folk music, ethereal voice, soft pillow stuff! need to check out more of Wheatie’s albums!
Oh damn. The Gothenburg scene rn would deserve a whole post! However, this is some good lo-fi shit, very minimal, intimate and “naive”, some cool swedish spoken word /poetry (who doesn’t love spoken word on a language they don’t understand?). Reminds me of Enno Velthuys a lot.
This meeting of solo cello & broken IDM electronic works surprisingly well, sounds very analogue to me, great brain-massager. I played a track in a bar recently and nobody left, so I guess it’s ok for a semi-dancefloor environment hehe.
Ah, never enough of these 90s downtempo records. Great cover, great title, amazing song development. The longer the better! Suprisingly it’s not on youtube BUT is on soundcloud.
Seriously, OJOO GYAL is one of the best up and coming DJs out there and in this b2b with Nena the chemistry is sooo perfect, I love every track here! 100% apocalyptic dancehall burners. My working grindset mix atm.
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Don’t close just yet. I’m planning to have guest appearances as well from time to time and who else I could have invited first than my duo partner in LCR, cat whisperer & best baker: Edit (a.k.a. edithhhhh)! Although she always gives me the best recommendations in music and all other topics, I asked her to present us a recipe this time. Very long ago, when I started to get involved with the casette scene, I made some covers for the now defunct german label SicSic Tapes (RIP). They had this cool series where the musicians they worked with shared a great recipe and basically cooked & recorded the whole thing on a tape…what a lovely concept! Let’s pay honor to this with Edit’s amazing “Lazy focaccia”!
Lazy focaccia
Ingredients:
500 g flour (just make sure at least 75% is simple all-purpose or white flour)
325 g lukewarm water
15 g salt
1 teaspoon instant dry yeast
40 g olive oil (20 g when mixing the dough, 20 g before baking)
extras (flaky sea salt, rosemary, garlic…)
Directions:
Mix dry ingredients (flour, salt, yeast) in a large bowl.
Gradually add water to the bowl, and stir with a wooden spoon until no dry flour remains.
Rub the surface of the dough lightly with half of your olive oil (around 20 g), or if it's too sticky just pour some of the oil underneath the dough and rub some on the top too.
Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel, or plastic wrap and leave it on the kitchen counter for about 10-12 hours. I usually mix my dough in the evening, go the bed, and bake in the morning. After 12 hours your dough will become double the size and will be bubbly.
Pour your remaining olive oil (around 20 g) into a large pan or tray, or whatever form you would like to use for baking.
Carefully remove your dough from the bowl, and pour it into the oily skillet/pan/tray. It will be sticky and soft. In the meantime preheat your oven to 200℃.
Now comes the fun part: free your mind and add your extras. Some inspiration, tested by me from the past: thyme - sesame seeds - black pepper; rosemary - walnuts; chestnuts; grapes; dates - honey. In any case, I recommend using some extra flaky salt on top - it definitely adds a nice crunchiness and savory bite. I like sprinkling some extra olive oil once I finish spreading my additional ingredients.
Bake at 200℃ until it’s nice and golden on top, around 30-40 minutes. Let your focaccia cool a bit before cutting. Preferably remove it carefully with a spatula, and put it on a rack of some kind, so the bottom part will not stay moist. Eat it when it’s still warm.
Slice and bite and bye!
P.S.: I used some beetroot powder that I had sitting in my kitchen cupboard, hence the bubblegum pink color of my dough. I used walnuts and rosemary on the top and it turned out to be very delightful
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Thank you for scrolling thru, next post comes at the end of the month!