heep see 2-14
Not really a Valentine's Day theme, more a deadbeat VDay theme, with just a few album blurbs
Greetings from the West Coast. Chasing down leads and tying up loose ends (no doubt fraying some strands even further) for book research, so just a few notes on some non-car soundtrack listening these past two weeks.
Studio - West Coast
I once lived and made a living writing about music in the mid-’00s, yet while I still have their promo CDs on a spindle somewhere, I never ever wrote about a long lingering favorite from that era: Studio’s West Coast. About the closest I got to summarizing my feelings about the album was in a review of a Dan Lissvik (one half of Studio) solo album:
With each passing summer, Studio’s lone studio album, West Coast, becomes more of a Dark Tower, an unobtainable beacon forever on the horizon, seemingly never to be reached or returned to. When the Swedish dance duo released that sprawling double album in the summer of 2007, it capped six years’ worth of singles and brought them a great deal of buzz…West Coast still casts a shadow over Lissvik’s body of work as a solo artist.
I try not to be that sort of critic, always weighing an artist against their own past output, but the highest praise I could impart was in comparing the best Lissvik tracks to…Studio: “Those three middle tracks seem like an aural mirage, West Coast still totemic and distant on the horizon after all this time.” At the time, I didn’t even realize it wasn’t available on streaming platforms (maybe subconsciously why I kept the CD promos close by rather than landfill them). And every summer, I would put it on for a drive and get lost all over again in its beach-at-dusk vibes. I always thought there would be a follow-up and maybe I could profile them then. Alas.
Even in 2025, West Coast still feels ineffable, never to be repeated, a type of early 21st century magic never to be re-bottled. Thanks to the heads at Ghostly for putting it back into the present.
Boof - Night Blooming Cereus
It always comes without warning, a new Maurice Fulton drop. I’m happy to report that the sixth Boof album both sounds like every classic Maurice Fulton production (my main argument is that every Maurice Fulton production is a classic) yet feels as fresh as the cover flower itself. And much like 2015’s The Hydrangeas Whisper, Fulton is the lover man who drop’s a new album on Valentine’s Day, a the perfect mix of opulent chocolate box and perfumed flower bouquet.
Kamalesh Maitra – Raag Kirwani On Tabla Tarang
I’m back home from college, but with the house to myself. I also have some blotter with me and I’m determined to find the perfect music to soundtrack this inner excursion. But this is the Dallas wastelands that I’m in and the only music store for miles around is Best Buy, so I diligently walk the airless CD aisles of the place, intent on finding this heretofore unimagined music. I spent hours agonizing over the dearth of choices there, but I still own the silver disk that I decided on that day: Pandit Kamalesh Maitra’s 1996 CD Tabla Tarang - Melody On Drums.
Let’s just say I chewed/ choosed wisely. I knew absolutely nothing about Maitra, but Tabla Tarang was everything I could have hoped for in this imaginary mystery music: rhythmic but droning, immediate and infinite. Maitra was a master of the tabla tarang, an instance of smaller, higher-pitched tablas serving as melodic instrument, wherein 10-16 tablas are tuned, meaning that rhythm, melody, and harmony all blend into one expression. The closing 45 minutes of “Raag Mia Ki Todi” was body-erasing bliss, but even the shorter raags were full trips in their own right.
In late December, Black Truffle released Raag Kirwani On Tabla Tarang, a previously unheard 42 minute recording dating back to 1985 by Maitra. The word Tarang means “waves” and that’s what this recording feels like, wave after wave washing over me. What I never realized at the time is that while it was classical Indian music, Maitra’s music was also so much more than that. Before Maitra, tabla tarang performances existed only in the 5-minute range, mere interludes amid the larger raag, so Maitra exploded the form of the instrument, radically rendering full-length raags on it. Even without blotter, each rippling drum hit from the master still undulates the spacetime fabric.
Norberto De Nöah – Böhöbé Spirits Müsic
I know precisely zilch about Norberto De Nöah, except that when a selection from his recently reissued 1988 debut (courtesy of the heads behind Canela En Surco in Spain) comes on, I’m gobsmacked by its idiosyncratic mix of ritualistic hand percussion and early ‘80s gear and wish the song would last far longer than 2-minute-ish runtimes.
According to the notes, De Nöah came up amid the age of African music making significant inroads to Western ears, thanks to the likes of King Sunny Adé, Salif Keita, and Youssou N’Dour ascending to global superstardom. He moved from Fernando Po (now known as Bioko) to the mainland in the early ‘80s, formed a band with fellow African ex-pats and local Spaniards, and cut a single in 1985 that’s considered the first African record to be cut in Spain.
When that band fell apart, De Nöah decided to do it all himself. He started his own record label, booked studio time, and then went in and played everything himself: not just native hand percussion, but also the new-fangled Yamaha RX-5 drum machine and a Roland D-50 synthesizer. Böhöbé Spirits Müsic was the end result, an updating of De Nöah’s native Bubi music and its ceremonial songs cut with the kinds of American pop/ funk rhythms he could hear on the radio. After another album, De Nöah sorta vanished from the scene, never to be heard from again. In the notes, a Madrid-based writer deemed it “the perfect combination of all characteristics that defined the Equatoguinean Afropop music made in Madrid during the 1980s.” It’s the only one I’ve heard thus far and a fascinating one at that.
Yumiko Morioka - Resonance
The past few weeks, I’ve been smitten with a forthcoming release from two legends of Japanese kankyō ongaku, composer Takashi Kokubo and pianist Yumiko Morioka. Though their individual output couldn’t be more different; Kokubo has over 50 releases (and inclusion on vital sets like the Kankyō Ongaku box and JD Twitch’s own Japanese ambient mix) while Morioka has but one. But that’s not for a few more weeks.
Sometimes the album you are looking for is buried waaaay deep in your own inbox. Searching for the release date for this upcoming album, I stumbled upon an email from late in January 2020. Publicist Jessica Goodchild sent me files for an upcoming reissue of Morioka’s lone solo album, Resonance, explaining that Morioka had “just moved back to Tokyo having relocated to the US in the 90s, after her California home was burnt to the ground in 30 minutes one night in the 2017 wildfires.”
(If I remember January 2020 clearly, the email must have hit when I was out in LA for a friend’s 40th, as the actual email and files completely passed me by. Within six weeks’ time, I would have found such a radiant set of Bösendorfer piano pieces the perfect balm for the early pandemic. Alas.)
Enamored as I am by Morioka’s forthcoming album, I lamented that I missed out on her reissue completely, that vinyl now long out of print. Just as I wondered if I would be paying scalper prices for the thing, I re-discovered the promo email, and as an “atmospheric river” pours down outside the window in California at the moment, Morioka’s piano meditations arrive just in time.