The Dark Jazz Project – 3 / Dead King (A Play In Three Acts)

“Don’t overdose on this stuff,” The Dark Jazz Project’s Andrew Spackman told me when he sent me his new album, 3. “It’s pretty potent!”

I reckon I can handle it. I’ve been consuming Spackman’s music for years, first when he was know as SAD MAN and more recently as The Dark Jazz Project. Wonky jazz bangers were always Spackman’s medicine of choice, but with his most recent reinvention, it’s like he’s taken his music into a whole new dimension. I don’t mean into some sort of spiralling, ‘groovy, baby’ timewarp. I mean darker. Jazzier. Projectier.

3 is intense, though, even by Spackman’s standards. The risk advisory is to be noted. Twenty tracks. Two hours. An accompanying play called Dead King (A Play In Three Acts). This sort of stuff would take most artists years to come up with, but Spackman is able to deliver this kind of wonderful sprawl with a spontaneity and fluidity – at high speed – that’s resolutely fresh and refreshingly imaginative.

Never one to repeat himself, 3 flips and flops like around like manic three-legged frog, delving deep into dance music’s murkiest corners to drag out skewed rhythms, off-kilter half-melodies, headcleaning glitchy noise and a seemingly limitless collection of cool jazz samples. And that’s just the first track, the decisively-named ‘Jazz’. The effect here is like watching an especially dexterous DJ seeking out the most floor-clearing tracks in his collection and yet managing to get the stoic crowd to wiggle along with manic glee.

Picking out standout tracks from 3’s vast number of cuts is a tough, nay impossible task. They’re all belters. If highlights you must have, check out ‘The Great Ones’, a track which lurches from graceful, contemplative piano to a segment that sounds like Moby’s ‘Thousand’ remixed by a Dutch hardcore artist while juggling cans of ball bearings. Meanwhile, ‘Carloza’ twitches forth on a breakbeat reimagined by Gene Krupa, over which Spackman sprinkles tinkly synths and buzzing, vital hooks.

‘Babonza’ sounds like a shoot-out between Star Wars laser pistols and a drinking straw noisily chasing the final drops in a plastic beaker containing Ken Kesey’s Kool-Aid. ‘The Stranger Again’ is a tight, 4/4 monster that rapidly switches direction into a noisy mess, just as you’ve started showing off your best moves. It rather reminds me of when I was dancing to the Paul Oakenfold remix of U2’s ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’ at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Wildmoor nightclub and the DJ switched tracks just as I had started playing air guitar along with The Edge.

3 is effectively the informal soundtrack to Dead King, involving a medieval monarch, a timewarp (okay, so I was wrong about the timewarp: groovy, baby) and a magical, energy-providing creature. The play is beautifully presented, with fantastic photography and a totally bonkers narrative. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for the King, though the title may have already yielded that clue.

Mr. Spackman, you have outdone yourself this time.

Footnote: this review was completed while flying over Canada. As ever, I had eschewed the onboard entertainment in favour of the moving map. Two places were beneath us as I concluded the final sentence – Flin Flon and Pukatawagan – while Medicine Hat was off in distance. I fear that my mind had reached such befuddlement by Spackman’s latest collection that place names and track titles had become indistinguishable. Sheesh, he wasn’t wrong about the potency.

Shameless plug: Spackman contributed to my Mortality Tables LIFEFILES series with a track that was literally made with nothing but clothes hangers. Check it out here. All proceeds to the Deaf Children’s Society and Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

3 and Dead King were released / published by Irregular Patterns on July 7 2023.

(c) 2023 Further.

Amongst The Pigeons – Embrace The Point Of No Return

Embrace The Point Of No Return by Daniel Parson’s Amongst The Pigeons project couldn’t be more different from his 2021 album Silence Will Be Assumed As Acceptance. For a start, this is a solo flight for Parsons, whereas Silence Will Be Assumed… was very much a collaborative release. It’s also instrumental, eschewing the vocal contributions that have characterised his last few releases. And yet, in spite of these differences, Embrace The Point Of No Return feels like a strangely logical follow-up.

Celebratory and upbeat, tracks like ‘Swipe For Latex’, ‘Trespass’, ‘Proximity Alert’ and ‘Who Do You Have To Go Home For’ have a compelling urgency and intensity – solid beats, dominant synth hooks and a propulsive, irresistible forward motion. That sense of intensity was also evident on Silence Will Be Assumed… with its focus on environmental disaster, social inequality and racism, but here it’s as if Parsons has accepted that the world is totally fucked, so we might as well just give up and dance. With that in mind, these pieces all shimmer and twitch with a euphoric, hedonistic carefreeness, devoid of any existential worries or troubles.

‘Nightshade’ is this writer’s personal favourite, a delicate, low-key banger that transports me back to early 1990s dance music. That track seems to encapsulate a sense of levity and optimism. I may be conflating this with my own now-distant youthfulness at the start of that decade, but it really felt like you could lose yourself completely in dance music’s rhythms and melodies and ignore what was going on in the world and the rest of your life.

This is the joyous, positive, life-affirming DJ set that plays while we watch our final sunset. We are dancing on the terminal beach, our eyes fixed on the diminishing horizon, outside the last nightclub on Earth.

Embrace The Point Of No Return by Amongst The Pigeons is released August 4 2023 by Peace & Feathers.

(c) 2023 Further.

drøne – The Long Song

drøne is a duo of Mark Van Hoen and Touch’s Mike Harding, accompanied by ‘invited guests’. Presented as a single piece divided into discrete sonic movements, The Long Song captures the pair exploring a soundworld characterised by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in currents.

On ‘Escapement’, snatches of overheard conversation and baritone prayer calls join hissing noises that sound like gas escaping from a damaged canister, what could be a faltering shortwave data broadcast and tiny clusters of electronic melody. The interplay between these disparate elements is sudden and fleeting. Nothing stays in place for long. Everything – literally everything you hear – is ephemeral and inconsequential.

The approach taken on ‘Escapement’ runs through the entire duration of The Long Song. On ‘Altamura’, sounds arrange themselves into an inchoate, distant rhythm, but just as you start to lock into its abstract groove, it drops away and is replaced by a grainy – possibly VHS – recording of a weather broadcast from a location that isn’t specific. The effect is like listening at twin speeds: a sense of things unfolding both slowly and also rapidly. This isn’t some intense trading of ideas designed to appeal to the hyperactivity of the modern age, as the pace is rarely ever frantic; yet somehow ideas are allowed to evolve here at a surprising velocity, just one that is delivered with the extremest subtlety.

‘Inanna’ is one of the most gripping and arresting pieces on the album. Here, a collection of haunting, overlapping choral vocals (from Bana Haffar, Jana Winderen, Anna von Hausswolff and others) floats delicately and elegiacally into view. The presentation is at once uplifting, joyous and vital, yet they float above a foundation layer of gravelly, impenetrable sub-bass and clusters of wild static. As soon as your attention locks onto that, any sense of joy immediately evaporates, leaving you suddenly doubtful and uncertain. Something similar happens on ‘He Frightened The Bird Away’ which follows, only here it is a vaguely sinister, alien tapping sound and restless non-rhythm that punctures its way through clouds of becalming, descending harmonies.

There are countless moments like this across ‘The Long Song’, moments that trip you up and force you to reconsider what it is that you thought you might have heard, that decontextualise and recontextualise themselves endlessly. It shows two artists in complete control of their sound palettes, fully aware of the powerfully disorienting impact their assemblages can have on a listener.

The Long Song by drøne was released 5 May 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Secret Flight – Secret Flight

Secret Flight first floated ethereally past my music radar at a performance at Milton Keynes Gallery in January 2020. Built from wonderfully delicate synth sounds, heat-haze hooks and brittle rhythms, overlaid with hypnotic, angelic vocals, that Secret Flight performance occupied a unique zone bordering lo-fi electronica, classical melodies and a sort of shoegazer-y feeling of numbness and detachment.

This self-titled album follows an initial release in 2018, My Forever Mirage. Secret Flight contains some truly mesmerising, haunting pieces, each constructed using that fragile, sparse approach to arrangements that left such an indelible impression on me back in 2020. Along with more resolutely ephemeral pieces comprising just voice and elegiac synth chords, there are some truly breathtaking standout moments. One of these is the seven-minute ‘A Prism’, laden with detuned beats, subtle arpeggios, a relentless spiral of synth tones and a chamber choir coda about grief that offers a sense of resolution and closure.

Another outstanding track is ‘On The Day’, which has a beautiful, 1981-vintage synth-pop outlook, the combination of precise, restrained electronics and soaring, beguiling voice recalling Yazoo’s finest moments. ‘Vertigo’ has a crunchy beat with a vaguely glam rock swing, the accompanying vocal having a sort of muted euphoria that reminds me of early Smiths, while the quietly defiant progressions of closing track ‘To Lose’ is going to be the music accompanying the final scene in the movie adaptation of the book I haven’t written yet.

Secret Flight is a remarkable, if consciously understated album. It maintains a firm hold on your attention, enveloping you with its delicate presentation and revealing more of itself and its sentiment the more time you spend with it. Its vocal themes are open and honest, yet also shrouded and deliberately obfuscated, offering a window into emotional turmoil, love, loss and personal anxieties. A powerful (yet subtle) journey from start to finish.

Secret Flight by Secret Flight is released May 26 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Gvantsa Narim – Apotheosis Animæ

Gvantsa Narimanidze is a sound artist from Tbilisi, Georgia. Her latest work was inspired by the winter season and was composed between the end of 2022 and start of 2023. It was a winter fraught with anxiety given the ongoing Russia – Ukraine conflict and fears that gas supplies across Europe would be insufficient to cope with extremes of cold weather, ushering in nightmarish predictions that countless people, suffering fuel poverty, would freeze to death.

How much of that backdrop fed into Apotheosis Animæ is hard to discern. What is evident is a frosty stillness that presides over the delicate, sparse pieces that Narimanidze presents here. The piano-led opening track ‘Apotheosis’ is augmented by gentle reverb which only enhances a mournful, slightly dejected tone. It’s almost as if Narimanidze is sighing outwardly at the start of colder weather and the unstoppable slipping by of time.

That air of austerity and acceptance wends its way with intense subtlety through the pieces here. The ten-minute ‘Amnesia’ begins like an outline of itself, wherein all detail has been scrubbed away and replaced by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in momentum, a growling synth tone and high-pitched string sound drifting in like a bitter breeze. Snatches of voice, eulogising humankind’s relationship to the Earth, taps into Narimanidze’s belief system, foreshadowing a dramatic denouement wherein all the disparate elements previously buried deep in the mix coalesce into something tangible, something living.

‘Born In The Mist’ consists of suppressed, howling sounds that carry a sense of danger, heavy processing giving rise to a murky, dramatic, almost claustrophobic soundworld. It reminds me (pleasantly) of the first time I came upon one of Thomas Köner’s quiet works, whereupon I turned the volume up to an ear-splitting level to experience the brutality of amplified near-silence. ‘Train’ is easily one of the most mesmerising pieces in this collection, beginning with icicle-sharp pirouettes and gradually opening out into a crystalline field of synth pads on the axis between the haunting and the joyous. Elsewhere, the expansive ‘Codex’ has a lingering latency, an unswerving drone loop dominating the background while tendril-like synth arpeggios creep slowly into earshot. A stately, muffled glissandi piano motif adds a sense of grandeur as it weaves through the drone and synth spirals.

Narimanidze is a masterful sound designer, capable of infusing her pieces with a naturalistic spirit but also a searching, inquisitive, unresolved quality. Those signature flourishes can be found all over Apotheosis Animæ, representing a fantastically intricate, complex and yet spiritually rewarding body of work.

Apotheosis Animæ by Gvatsa Narim is released on 26 May 2023 by Cruel Nature.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Rupert Lally – Backwater / Hacker

Backwater is the second novel from Switzerland-based electronic musician Rupert Lally. Like his debut, Solid State Memories, Backwater is a suspenseful thriller. However, instead of pitching its wares in a dystopian and terrifying near-future like his first book, Backwater occupies the past, present and future. The story temporally criss-crosses all three to follow its lead characters as they try to prevent environmental disaster using the rare natural resources of the Bronze Age past, mysterious archways allowing instantaneous movement between eras.

This is principally a high-speed race against, and through, time, but also an exploration of other, deeper, themes: the bond between father and child, gender inequality, power struggles, corporate villainy, technology and climate change. It is hyper-aware of big issues facing society today but also authentically well-researched about Bronze Age history and culture. A trace of Solid State Memories arrives with a brief trip to the future, where we find Earth ravaged by global warming and profligate resource exploitation, a dirty husk of its former self filled with criminality and hunger.

Backwater is complicated, as most time-travelling tales can be. It both demands and requires complete focus, especially when Lally’s prose moves at an urgent pace through different time zones, left-turns and unexpected events. Like his previous novel, Backwater confirms Lally as an original story-teller drawn to mystery and drama-filled narratives. Dizzying and rewarding.

A sense of mystery also pervades Lally’s latest album, Hacker, released by Spun Out Of Control. Hacker operates in a interstitial time zone somewhere between 1980s movie soundtrack and 1990s Warp label electronica, using brief samples of WarGames, Hackers and other films to supply a plot line of dial-up era computer vigilantism.

Lally’s recent albums have been among the best, and perhaps most accomplished, in his career. Hacker sits comfortably in his latest streak of excellent releases, even if it is the complete antithesis of Wanderweg, the pastoral and bucolic exploration of natural landscape and pathways of his adopted Swiss home that preceded it. Here, the focus is squarely on icicle-sharp melodic tendrils threading their way down phone cables, encouraged and framed by rhythms as focused as an algorithm figuring out the password for a locked military server. Where standout tracks like ‘Hot Swap’ and ‘2600Hz’ are freighted with a vital, relentless energy, ‘Access Denied’ is thwarted but tender, and easily one of the most poignant pieces Lally has ever composed.

Backwater by Rupert Lally is available now at Amazon. Hacker by Rupert Lally was released December 23 2022 by Spun Out Of Control

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

Mister Poppy – Jelly

“Jelly is like time. Jelly fits any mould. It resists the sentimentality of form. Jelly is a state of putrefaction before dust…” – Andrew Poppy

Jelly is the follow-up to Andrew Poppy’s Hoarse Songs from 2021, and finds the composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist exploring harsh electronic tonalities that emerge from the shadows of our collective imaginations.

Consisting of five long pieces, Jelly is accompanied by a libretto that shows Poppy the lyricist to be one part Beat stream of consciousness poet, one part experimental philosopher and one part languid observer. Mostly delivered as spoken word verse, Poppy’s words come across as a sort of voyeuristic sequence of clipped words, half-formed sentiments and hyper-visual word patterns. Dramatic, dirty and laced with a Lynchian notion of the fixated gaze, Poppy’s words alight upon grim notions with microscopic detail. Opening track ‘Tattoo / Copy Something That You Love’ might be about the processes involved with getting a tattoo, but it’s delivered with a nightmarish visceral streak that’s as unflinching as the Velvets’ ‘Heroin’ – a different needle, but the same sting.

According to Poppy, these pieces were at least partly inspired by Robert Rauschenberg. That would certainly explain the abrupt edges, collaged approach and his insouciant approach to subtle appropriation. Each piece here hovers round the twelve-minute mark without ever feeling like they have no sense of direction. Each builds slowly and often imperceptibly from base elements – a sonorous bass pulse, a fleeting, fluttering tone – toward some dramatic conclusion, without losing sight of an essential minimalistic ethos that allows empty spaces to be just as prominently featured as Poppy’s finely-crafted loops and dense blocks of electronic sound.

This is an often uncomfortable listen (which I intend as a compliment). There are many times on pieces like the haunting, hyper-sensual ‘Mister Post-Man / No More Fumbling’ where I’m reminded of Coil, especially when a flurry of strings drift into view on top of Poppy’s wiry, undulating electronic sequences. That’s not to suggest that these pieces deal with some sort of dark, brooding, shadowy occultist magick. It’s more the case that they contain a sense of tantalising, enveloping danger, acting like a portal to somewhere other than here, where every moral sensibility is inverted.

If that all seems to jar with a title that feels playful and ridiculous, therein lies Poppy’s compositional sleight of hand – an ability to take something quotidian, atomise it, play with the mess it produces and reassemble it with only the briefest sense of where it came from. A beautifully challenging and intensely-detailed album.

Jelly by Mister Poppy was released October 1 2022 by fieldRadio. Thanks to Philip.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

John Derek Bishop / Inge Weatherhead Breistein – Ro

Ro pairs electronic experimenter John Derek Bishop (Tortusa) with tenor saxophonist Inge Weatherhead Breistein. The album captures the duo performing in five churches along the western coast of their Norwegian homeland, with Bishop manipulating Breistein’s sax in real time using live sampling techniques.

The first thing that grabs you on the opening track, ‘Spurv’, is the rich tendrils of reverb that surround Breistein’s horn. This give his playing a stately and atmospheric quality, even when he launches into a run of more forceful notes instead of the more delicate passages elsewhere. Those sections are at once soothing but also inquisitive, as if he was seeking answers from the furthest corners of the room, his circular breathing technique seeming to gently lift you up out of your most contemplative thoughts.

Bishop’s processing similarly alternates between extremes. At its most subtle, his looping technique creates a chorus of Breisteins, a many-layered orchestra of saxophones, giving a sense of depth and perspective to his playing. Sometimes his contributions exist solely in the background as a microcosm of tiny sounds freighted with almost percussive textures, or as fleeting constructs of dissonant drones; elsewhere, as on the seven-minute title track, his involvement becomes increasingly prominent, especially in the second half, where he contrives to convert Breistein’s playing into a swooning, cinematic piece full of drama and tension. For the most part, at least in the first few pieces, Bishop occupies a terrain of considerable restraint and a generally respectful approach to his manipulations.

Perhaps the most surprising moments come with ‘Lag’ and ‘Stim’, where Bishop feels emboldened to add in a consistent rhythm alongside his partner’s sax. After a number of quiet, softly undulating pieces, those pieces have a crushing, disruptive edge, their rattling textures seeming to shake the pews and foundations out of their holy slumber. ‘Trekk’ begins with a passage of what could be echoing birdsong and clattering percussion, but might well be re-pitched and reassembled sections of Breistein building his horn and warming up. Whatever the source, as the piece progresses it evokes the feel of a slow riverboat cruise through some exotic jungle rather than trawling the cooler waters of Norway’s coastline, acting as a perfect example of this duo at their most inspiring.

Ro by John Derek Bishop and Inge Weatherhead Breistein was released by Punkt Editions / Jazzland on October 21 2022. Thanks to Jim.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

Various Artists – Fictions

The latest release from Crammed Discs’ reinvigorated Made To Measure series is described as a compendium of ‘wordless fiction’. Curated by Crammed Discs co-founder Marc Hollander (Aksak Maboul), the album compiles eight tailor-made pieces that navigate a path between ambient, soundscapes, adventurous electronics and modern classical stylings.

While the pieces here are new, there is a sense of reverence through the inclusion of a track by Benjamin Lew and Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown. The pair originally worked together during Made To Measure’s initial years, releasing Douzième Journée: Le Verbe, La Parure, L’Amour in 1982 and its follow-up A Propos D’Un Paysage in 1985, creating mesmerising and innovative clashes between tapes of African music and electronics. After hooking up again at a Made To Measure event in 2019, they found themselves rekindling a creative partnership, and their track – ‘A.D. Sur La Carte’ – is a haunting stew of inquisitive synths and mournful trumpet that together feel amorphous and ephemeral.

Another Made To Measure alumnus is Pascal Gabriel, here appearing in his Stubbleman alias. Gabriel released his critically-acclaimed Mountains And Plains audio travelogue for the label in 2019 and has collaborated with Crammed Discs and Aksak Maboul in the past. His piece finds him working with Norweigian trumpet player Nils Petter Molvær. ‘Ne Pas Se Pencher Au Dehors’ has definite soundtrack credentials, the melodic synth refrain and more direct trumpet playing that comes in after two minutes sounding (to me) like the perfect accompaniment to Michael J. Fox’s final scene in Bright Lights, Big City as he watches the sun rise over Manhattan’s East River and contemplates starting his life afresh.

Elsewhere, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith delivers a cascade of burbling synths on ‘Waterways’, managing to enrich analogue sounds with an aquatic sense of motion, over which floats a pretty xylophone motif. LA’s Mary Lattimore is an artist that has truly redefined approaches to playing the venerable harp, and her ‘Bird’ offers up a sweet, heart-wrenching duet with electronics that is simultaneously hopeful yet thwarted, as if gazing wistfully on the fleeting nature of existence.

Not that these are all delicate, gentle sonic experiments. French composer and sound artist Félicia Atkinson’s ‘The Sun, Perhaps Three Of Them’ bristles with wild energy, a central white noise drone and what could be a voice is nothing short of chilling, while Christina Vantzou’s tone poem ‘Museum Critic’ use of out-of-place found sound to catch you off guard and knock you out of the meditative state provided by other tracks here.

Taken as a whole, Fictions represents an absorbing, inspiring collection onto which you can write your own personal narrative.

Fictions was released October 14 2022 by Crammed Discs / Made To Measure

Thanks to Jim at Ampersand and PG.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

Rupert Lally – Forgotten Futures

I recently found myself watching a National Geographic documentary about the 1986 Challenger disaster. I was nine years old when that tragedy unfolded over Florida. I remember vividly watching it on Newsround when I got home from school and again on the evening news with my father. I hadn’t realised until I watched the film, but that was probably the first time I became aware of death. It also seemed to end my fascination with all things space and science fiction, which had been an obsession thanks to growing up with the Star Wars movies.

Rupert Lally’s Forgotten Futures reminded me of that day and that life pivot. The premise of Lally’s album, originally recorded for Lost Futures magazine, was to look back on his own childhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As he acknowledges, memory is a troublesome companion – whereas, at the time, we might have been filled with hope, optimism and the dreams of a thousand possible futures, with the benefit of hindsight we often see things differently. So it was for Lally while recording Forgotten Futures. On the title track we find him running through a list of futuristic visions that all seemed possible back then, but which now seem fanciful and a long way out of reach – except for TVs in kitchens and slightly limited approximations of smart homes – brings to mind how utterly disappointing those exciting versions of the future actually were. (Growing up, my vision of the future was basically informed by the Smash mashed potato adverts. The future has definitely not lived up to those expectations.)

This is undoubtedly one of Lally’s most introspective albums. Not dark, per se, but certainly more questioning and reflective than some of his other material. Pieces like ‘Everything We Leave Behind’ and ‘Kaleidoscope’ have an unresolved, restless and often thwarted dimension to them. Central to those tracks, and in fact every track on the album, is an undulating, queasy edge to the sounds as if each one has had its pitch changed in real-time. A a plot device, that technique is a useful way of evoking how memories become less certain over time, how they change, and how we question their accuracy through the lens of contemporaneity. For me, that sound nostalgically reminds me of buying a battered 7-inch of ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’ by Human League. The electronic horn melody on that song sounds a little out-of-tune at the best of times, but when your copy of the single is warped so badly that the vinyl looks like a circular walk through hills and valleys, any sense of euphoria in that riff is brutally suppressed. It remains one of my most disappointing charity shop purchases.

‘The Lost Places’ finds Lally recounting a dream where he revisits the town of his childhood – the architecture, the restaurant he’d visit with his father, the supermarket he frequented with his mother and the basement carpark beneath that still fills him with fear. His delivery is detached and uncertain, reflecting that recurring idea of a disappointed nostalgia and how our memories deal with joy and trauma over time. It is a deeply personal – yet completely relatable – moment, and one that seems to unlock the critical sentiment of this ruminative album.

Forgotten Futures by Rupert Lally was released May 6 2022.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.