Tag: Jazz

TRACK | The Taxpayers – As the Sun Beat Down

5/5 golden merles

“As the Sun Beat Down” is an immense opener and laudable origin story, “God, Forgive These Bastards” Songs From The Forgotten Life Of Henry Turner (2012). Superb storytelling with Punk and experimental jazz elements, but beyond the genre, it has fury, fervor, and utter conviction.

A fierce tribute to a friend, embellished in ways that get at the broader truth underneath the reporting. A Plato to Henry’s Socrates, like every post-mortem project, it does emphasize to the outsider the importance of ensuring your own legacy while there is time. But, damn, if your influence works by other means, social and immediate, or whatever the case may be, you would be fortunate to find as impassioned and eloquent an acolyte. It’s a stunning set and exciting monument.

If you want the vinyl it’s like $100 bucks. Or a far more fiscally responsible $4 digital dollars in the format of your choosing.

TRACK | Akusmi – Divine Moments of Truth

5/5 golden merles

An inspired enmeshing of momentum, electronica curtailed to contain only the essential. Of a stunningly metered jazz/experimental set, “Divine Moments of Truth” stands out to me as a pinnacle of those forms.

The relative minimalism of what transpires builds into a great escape, evenly, cleanly out of its abstraction. It feels as though there is something at stake and yet remains “as simple as possible but not one bit simpler,” the energy is convincingly condensed in such a way as to warp your perception of relative space time. A credible spell, intuitively assembled, or the result of finely tuned music theory, I don’t know. But the kind of wonder and admiration I feel for its accumulated reserves is like the saying that any technology produced by a significantly advanced civilizations is indistinguishable from magic.

Arriving last week into the world, there’s ~30 clear vinyl remaining from a set of 300. Not a bad return on anything in the common era, much less a finely rendered crop of electronic jazz concoctions.

TRACK | Getatchew Mekurya – Akale Wube

5/5 golden merles

Here is a slight departure from the guitar-driven lo-fi, but the hiss of the tape remains, the synth-organ still chirps it’s guttural encouragements, and the hooks are everywhere present.

Akale Wube is an all time great track, for me, not only of Ethiopia, and not only of the saxophone, both of which I am not very familiar. But of the thing called music, generally. It wails.

Generally in art I am wary of outright abstraction, and view it with suspicion, as a salve to established, unjust hierarchies, and through it’s broad interpretation offering undue comfort to the enemy.

But not in this instance. At least for four minutes and eleven seconds I take Getatchew’s (lack of) word for it.