Cerberus Vol.3(14)
Featuring Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi/Carlos Niño/Loren Connors/Hari Maia/Phantom Handshake/Wes Tirey
Preamble
Last week was a good one: put to bed the upcoming quarterly issue of Casual Game Insider, got that second Pfizer jab (holding vigil for those in India and elsewhere; vaccines alone won’t “solve” anything), and enjoyed those drops of mana in the form of Bandcamp Friday releases. I wish other areas had that sort of mystical, magical power.
Bandcamp Friday reminds me of yesteryear when albums dropped on Tuesdays. I know, albums now (usually) drop on Fridays but there was something cool about an early to midweek flood of new music. I would bike to wherever my legs would carry me (growing up in a smallish Midwesterner town, it meant Target or Sam Goody in the mall. Later in teen life, it meant trips to the suburbs for harder to find fare. Now, it’s all a few clicks away at the end of long, exhausting weeks that can provide slight to moderate mood enhancement. And we’re all in need of these attitude adjustments from time to time. The magic of my youth is but a fading memory, but I’m glad modernity affords newer, equally casual moments of enjoying sound.
With this in mind, I may play with the format of this newsletter in the coming weeks and months. Much like childhood, removing oneself from as much structure as possible is good for the soul.
Reviews
Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi — Yamawarau
I don’t subscribe to any media format’s superiority over another. I may love Neil Young — and his position may be correct — but music is about moments. It’s about experiencing sound and having it wash over you wherever and whenever it arrives. That may mean a rigged Discman in the tape player as you carefully avoid uneven pavement, it may mean on Bluetooth earbuds while jogging with your phone strapped to a body part, or it may mean in the kitchen with YouTube blasting from your tablet. There’s a righteous and correct argument that the means of these delivery systems is at odds with our habits and the rights of musicians, but the point is we are gifted the talents of others and that gift can and should be received willingly in any vessel that makes the most sense for that appointed time.
The reason for this soapbox moment comes courtesy of Yamawarau, the third installment from the quartet of Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, Matthew Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi. The seasonal jazz albums they have made now rises to meet the growing heat of mid-spring (in the northern hemisphere) as Mother Nature gears up for full-blossom. And Yamawarau is best served and listened to as conveniently as possible. Spring is a time of renewal, and though we all are still watching the Earth unravel, there is hope and restoration that we gather from myriad sources to keep moving forward. The brightness and vibrancy of Yamawarau is but one vital piece of this psychic energy. Harnessed alone on one piece of media, it would falter.
Selfishly, I wish there were vinyl pressings of these seasonal suites (box set after the fourth album arrives, cachedmedia? I know it’ll take years thanks to record pressing bottlenecks). But the delivery system doesn’t matter, it’s the glorious music. When the harmonious vocals of “Floorless Room” reach for the innocence of those early Beach Boy harmonies; before Brian’s anxieties, Dennis’ alcoholism, Carl’s cancer, and Mike Love’s batshit craziness, coupled with the gentle caresses of a still melody, it’s the sort of music I want to take with me but also hoard in the privacy of a so-called record collection. It’s a seed to spread, but perhaps I could also have my very own pot with my very own plant…
This is the beauty of Yamawarau as it glides from one’s speakers with assured ease. Like the lamb replacing the lion, it is a wooly, gentle reminder of the delicacy of nature while also embracing its organic powers. Notes bloom like flowers and budding trees. Melodies swell like the winds bringing in a seasonal shower. And all I want to do is here Yamawarau come to me wherever it can, whenever I need it.
Carlos Niño & Friends — More Energy Fields, Current
International Anthem/LP; CD; CS; DL
In my cries for diverse media, here we have it in jazz virtuoso Carlos Niño. And much like the title implies, More Energy Fields, Current is a supernatural stroll through vivid valleys and monstrous mountains. Mixing many jazz-adjacent sounds into one package, Niño and his band of cohorts unleash a tome of positive vibes that is accessible to anyone, anywhere. All it takes is an ear to the wind and a bit of patience.
Or if you can’t wait for USPS or your local record store is experiencing closures and/or delays, digital files will do.
But more apropos may be finding a TARDIS and going back to the mid-70s because More Energy Fields, Current continues the trend of its label revisiting and repurposing the vibrancy of that jazz era, just now being unearthed by both the people who lived it and those who want to bask in it. Yet the album is far from dated. Just because it harkens back in time doesn’t mean it’s a tribute or a relic. There is far too much depth and knowledge of the present and future in its DNA. It, too, is a travel of both space and time. It exists inside the moment, unnoticed, like an ethnographer intermingling with the essence of the past to hopefully branch into a more robust and positive branch. Or maybe the fumes of “Ripple, Reflection, Loop” are just making me envision all this. The soothing vocals of Sharada and the pastoral workings of Laraaji can do that to you.
More Energy Fields, Current has this power to transport you to various locations across numerous planes of thought and experience. “The World Stage, 4321 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90008” is very specific with its placement, with Niño’s electric engine of percussion leading the way (happy to see Sam Gendel guest on the track, as Fresh Bread is a favorite of mine that I have yet to find the words to capture).
All I know is that Carlos Niño and his friends are in tune with a universal understanding that I can only experience with this album. And like the practice of transcendental meditation, being available in all formats is like receiving its messages wherever I can quietly sit down, meditate, and open myself to it.
Loren Connors — Domain of the Wind
To know me is to know my favorite guitarists.
What Connors does with silence is just as convincing and musical as what he does with guitar strings. Much like Brutalism in architecture, Connors creates monolithic structures entombed with concrete. His works break up the pristine blue sky with vicious intent, trying to discombobulate and reappropriate the space as a form of righteous indignation toward unseen forces that create the illusion that all is okay, when frankly, it’s not.
Domain of the Wind is such a testament, this time Connors’ guitar playing the role of a gale-force that is intent on knocking down the same Brutalist structures he has created in the past. The thing about architects is they like to tear down as much as they like to build. The horizon is their canvas, and buildings are the objects on their boards. But Connors finds himself only human, his lungs heavy with humidity and out of breath. His jet streams echo and reverberate across his concrete creations, forcing all the wind into a tunnel that changes not the skyline but the face of his buildings, slowly over time like an eroding wind. Connors is a composer never satisfied, always working to change the landscape as evens dictate and it’s a delight to listen to it each and every time.
Hari Maia — Distant Fields
A distant, lingering bellow interrupts the eerie atmosphere of “For When I’m Dreaming,” setting the pace for this darkly moody album from Maia. The Brazilian musician largely composes soundtracks, but Distant Fields is a standalone release. Yet Maia’s work is able to craft its own dystopian film through his dissonant, spatial compositions.
Maia presents two sides of the coin: the pursuit of silence and solitude, and the many interruptions which invade those quiet moments. No matter where one tucks themselves and how hard they work to shutter the outside world, it creeps in under the cracks, through the hinges, and between the jambs. Distant Fields captures this truth with full grit. His synth cascades over his world with power, taking over whenever it desires. All one can do is yield to it, and hope that through mercy is grants some reprieve. But it never does.
Phantom Handshakes — No More Summer Songs
New York-based Federica Tassano and Matt Sklar, AKA Phantom Handshakes, have created quiet the paradoxical pop ideology: swearing off the sounds of summer by creating an album of bedroom pop that is heavily influenced by the sweet sweat and hazy nostalgia of youthful summers. Tassano’s dreamy vocals atop the wistfully positive “I Worried” capture the conundrum of No More Summer Songs in full: the spirit of freedom and rebellion under the thumb of the oppression of growing up in a world tailored to adulthood. Do we chase that robotic bunny like racing horses stuck on an oval track or do we bust free to run with the pack of ferals on the outside?
Tassano and Sklar’s music seems as conflicted as we do about these propositions. Drenched in perspiration and hormones, No More Summer Songs oscillates between rapidly-paced lo-fi pop anthems and downtrodden bedroom confessionals captured in loose-leaf poetry and Liverpudlian guitar melodies. “This Shade” sounds like a teenager singing to her copy of Teen Beat from a bygone era; not pining for the subjects in the glossy pages but for what they represent. “It’s a Prison” encapsulates these conflicted feelings of wanting to hold onto childish mementos and emotions, while also understanding we all step in and turn the keys on cells of our own making.
No More Summer Songs continually makes the allusion that we eventually abandon what it is that excites and motivates us in youth. We once were not motivated by careers, bills, mortgages. And yet, we’re still all enveloped in the same childish worries even into adulthood (vanity, selfishness, ambition versus yearning). It’s also a stark — perhaps even painful — reminder that pop music always knows our innermost secrets and fears and can concisely speak to them in 4-minute melodies.
Wes Tirey — The Midwest Book of the Dead
Tirey speaks to a musical nature often lost in modernity. Despite moving to the city life of North Carolina, Tirey continues to create strikingly rustic musings on the fields and open landscapes of his youth in BFE Ohio.
The Midwest Book of the Dead is the most plainitive statement in his growing discography canonizing a way of living that is disappearing at the hands of its own originators. The haunting opener “Red Corn, Yellow Corn” is a throwback to 40s folk with few modern touches (provided by Ryan Gustafson’s guitar work). His deep growl pairs nicely with the lilting, angelic voice of Liliana Hudgens. The harmonies are uplifting, but stark, presenting a landscape that is still rooted in hope though its yearly yields are fewer and less fertile year-to-year.
Tirey is at his best when he lets his voice tremolo and reverberate in the silences and simplicity of his melodies. “If Love Blues” speaks to the abandoned factories and tattered towns of the Rust Belt, now decades in rot, signaling the decline of the middle class and the embrace of the many epidemics ravaging many parts of the United States.
That Tirey does this at the crossroads of classical folk and country, paired with the modern alternatives that revived these branches of folk at the end of the 90s and the turn of the new century is not by accident. It presents the very real choices of these midwestern towns where these disparate ideas butt up against each other on a daily basis; people wandering around with smartphones in desolated, dilapidated towns where farming — already a job with slim margins — no longer allows ends to meet. And the factory jobs that allowed these people to make loose ends sometimes meet are long gone at the behest of corporate greed brought on by board members and technological advancements that have surpassed the Industrial Revolution. And yet, these places cannot let go of those footprints in the mud, choosing to preserve them than erase them.
Tirey’s voice is those boots, heavy with clay and decay. There is still hope to reap, but it’s becoming harder work for less reward. And just maybe Tirey, and the troubadours of his ilk, can help others remember that this what America has become in so many places. Where do we go next when we have abandoned one heartbeat of America for another?
