Strewn: [Un]collected Thoughts
The successor to Cerberus? A one-timer teaser? Who knows…
(Originally there was a bigger, more rambling intro in this space. It seems unnecessary now. This is a call to action, and not just tweeting something or posting to a timeline. Let’s be the change…)
(You can stop here if you’d like — if your mind and heart aren’t in the spot to read musings about art, I understand, but I am still compelled to put this out into this slice of the universe because art is a motivator, a healer, a reflection.)
Ann Eysermans — For Trainspotters Only [Cortizona]
In the grand tradition of Mark Tucker, Andrew WK, and Chris Watson, Belgian-based Eysermans combines machine with muscle. For Trainspotters Only combines her anxious, yet beautiful harp with the powerful forces and sounds of locomotion. It feels like putting on the earbuds and self-hypnosis colliding in the passenger car of an Amtrak bound for purgatory. The hellish rumble from the train coupled with the angelic harp — a choice is to be had, but I’d rather sit with my hands gently folded in my lap to avoid having to make a choice.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer — Recordings from the Åland Islands [International Anthem]
Maybe Eysermans’ train ride leads to the edge of space and time where the Åland Islands lay. That exquisite moment where nature and nurture combine into heavenly solace. Recordings from the Åland Islands is a splendid postcard of these islands that inhabit the Baltic Sea, with Chiu and Honer honoring both the natural space in crystal clear field recordings but also their own shimmering strings and keys. Wherever this is, I want to be there in this moment soaking up both the islands themselves and where this magical combination became a reality. The album continues to find itself on my turntable in moments where I need positivity to vibrate from an outside source deep into my rotted, poisoned carcass. It is an antidote to what ails me, but even I know its powers — like the majesty it captures — its fleeting, and perhaps even endangered.
Chet Baker Trio — Live in Paris: The Radio France Recordings [Elemental]
There is a dim flirtation with post-war Paris, the place where jazz artists — particularly black artists — could ply their craft and thrive. For Baker, a white musician coming back to the area in the 1980s, it was his source of redemption. Baker’s history was fraught with drug abuse. He eventually found himself spending his last decade in Europe, but it was here where he also found his reputation as both a trumpeter and crooner restored. This hefty collection captures a couple of performances in 1983 and 1984 in the city of lights and is a stunning reminder that even worn down by continued battles with addiction, Baker was a brilliant musician capable of capturing that flirtatious magic with his aged, abused vocal cords still ready to deliver a velvety phrase. Though his embouchure suffered, his playing still carried hints of his greatest moments when he first visited nearby French haunts in his youth, when he was a rival to trumpeting greats.
Sonic Youth — In/Out/In [Three Lobed]
Need a reminder of how much you miss Sonic Youth? While it seems silly to find that feeling in an odds and sods collection, In/Out/In serves as a firm reminder that even late era Sonic Youth were head and shoulders above so many of the bands they matured with or influenced. In a year where Three Lobed has delivered so many awesome records (I’m still digesting the equally awesome Lattimore/Sukeena LP), it’s nice to have ol’ reliable Sonic Youth in the mix in ’22, even with these previously unreleased takes from 2000–2010. It’s five slices of the best circular-shaped food you desire.
Anna L.H. Rose & Brad E. Rose — Blanket [The Jewel Garden]
Much like when reading the book, A Fox Found a Box, I have found myself curled up with my kids enjoying father and daughter Brad and Anna Rose delivering an album that feels visceral and immediate. Like reading a story about a forest of creatures discovering a radio and being transfixed by melody and opened to a world of new emotional and musical states, my daughters and I feel similarly about this testimony. The crunching of nuts, the crackling of a fire, the limitlessness of the synthetic stars above. It’s like The Wild Robot (another novel for kids) come to life; sounds read out in onamonapia now have tangibility and meaning. When Anna seemingly exclaims, “Woah, what’s going on?” — its innocence about a singular moment is something I wish my children could carry into all of existence.
Naomi Alligator — “Seasick”
Trying to remember what new love and newer heartbreak felt like when I was younger is but a very dull memory. Those pangs I feel now are different, sharper, more rooted in the disappointments of a real world gone sour. But “Seasick” is the sort of flashback that is important to me as a father with two young daughters. They have yet to reach the age of maturation where I must be prepared for these sorts of feelings, but it’s coming, and it’ll be here before I can accept it. And yes, a song is unlikely to make me comprehend what they’re feeling, that situational aspiration to at least capture a brief moment of it within myself in some strange idea that I can give them a hug and transmitted the message to them in those moments is what I hold onto. And maybe a silly video to a very real emotional recall will help, even in a blink, to remind them its fleeting and eventually they will capture those feelings in a jar called the human body for a potential love of their life.
Kula Shaker — “The Once and Future King”
Much of the controversy and oddness that surrounded Kula Shaker in their native England never reached stateside, but to be fair the band’s star was dimly lit outside their country. But for many in the states, especially youth too young or too removed from the Paisley Underground, Kula Shaker provided a brief missive of modern psychedelia that wasn’t linked to monoliths like Pink Floyd, or not as presentable in a band such as Mazzy Star whose biggest hit was a gently dark folk ballad.
And yet that grandiosity that graced 90s tabloid presses in England seems to have infected the video for Kula Shaker’s latest return, “The Once and Future King.” And with it, maybe there’s also a hint of Division Bell-era Pink Floyd too. Yet, it hits all the right notes for all these reasons. Maybe it’s just a shred of stupid nostalgia hitting me in the feels. Perhaps it is the intent of the new album’s title where my hopefulness dwells.
Twitter: @genxsaisquoi @cerberuszine
