The Lot for May
Ripe Fruits Mid-Journey in Fern Valley
Last Friday, after a fair amount of travel this past month, I was back in town and back at the Lot Radio. But, perhaps due in part to The Lot also being on the fairgrounds at Horst Festival in Vilvoorde, Belgium this past weekend, The Lot Radio wasn’t quite back. And so despite being back, there was no outgoing signal emanating from that shipping container in Greenpoint.
And so instead, this month is a virtual one with a Buy Music Club playlist. (Which annoyingly, Substack doesn’t allow as a proper embed.) Blurbs below:
Olof Dreijer - Loud Bloom
You could say that I’ve been anticipating Olof’s solo debut since back in the late ‘00s, when The Knife slowed down their output and sister Karin branched out with her Fever Ray project. The Oni Ayhun 12”s that he snuck out into underground Berlin clubs were thrilling classics of their own, but I was drawn to Olof’s non-Eurocentric explorations. He remixed South African shangaan electro, produced Tunisian folk artist Houeida Hedfi, jammed on Caribbean steel pan, and crafted an epic piece that sampled tree frogs in the Amazon rainforest.
So I’ve been ecstatic that it all came together for Dreijer’s proper solo debut, easily one of the most thrilling dance albums of the year, and a shoo-in for my own mental year-end list. I even wrote about the album here. As much as I love the sun-bright bangers, the more abstract back half also astounds. (Two years ago, I also came here to plead for more ambient explorations from Olof.)
Croz Boyce - Croz Boyce
Sung Tongs II? There was a time when all Animal Collective projects would have emerged with that as the band name, no matter if it was two or four of the members/ longtime pals. That’s at least the rule back when Avey Tare and Panda Bear rendered Sung Tongs as a duo thwacking acoustic guitars way back when. There’s a healthy amount of acoustic guitars shining through on Croz Boyce, which perhaps makes me think of it as the spiritual successor to that iconic indie-rock document.
It also feels like a nice left turn from AnCo folks, even reminiscent at times of their Campfire Songs project. (Wait, maybe that’s the original Sung Tongs then??) But by that same token, I was recently walking around in Geologist’s neighborhood of Takoma Park, most famously home to the late finger-picking guitar god John Fahey. So now I can’t help but connect some of these delicate guitar figures back to the godfather, though I imagine it’s Avey Tare on guitars here with Geologist on all the squiggly sound bits surrounding it.
More than that, I think about how Sung Tongs was an intimate expression of male friendship, made at a tender time in their lives, when Panda Bear was leaving the States behind to follow love to Portugal and it seemed that the band might not survive the distance of the Atlantic Ocean. But we know how that history worked out for them. So now I hear in Croz Boyce another expression of friendship, this time between Tare and Geologist. Now it’s a deep friend dialogue measured in decades, a conversation taking place across distances, though with only a few national forests separating Avey Tare and Geologist these days.
helllhound - Here in the Valley
Mind that extra ‘l’ in the name of helllhound, a duo consisting of Cadmar Fitzhugh and Nailah Hunter. Musical partners as well as life partners, Hunter’s music was already on my radar the past few years, due to her way with the harp. This project also finds her twining guitar and piano around her vocals. While her previous two albums might have been perceived as being correctives to the stresses of urban living, Fitzhugh and Hunter disengaged from LA living to fully embed in the rocky terrains of the Sierra National Forest, the album page describing how it “evokes the textures of the natural world and the unseen dimensions of ancestral memory. It moves like mist through tall pines and echoes like a fireside tale overheard from across a moonlit meadow.”
At times, I’m reminded of the Raincoats at their most magical, especially on a piano-laced song like “by sea.” Here in the Valley also doubles as an album of expectant motherhood, recording from those early weeks of pregnancy on through the arrival of their newborn. Perhaps that’s what gives the music within a sense of hushed wonder. Or maybe it’s that sleep-deprived delirium attendant with such a sensation.
Marc Leclair - Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes
As a veteran of the early ‘00s, I thought I had eared every click & cut clickable. But if I think back on it, my tastes veered more towards the modem start-up noise of Mego than the mouse drag-n-drop of more subtle practitioners. Honestly, did I even hear Akufen’s My Way back when it was inescapable in 2002? I definitely didn’t even hear the pin drop of Marc Leclair’s Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes.
A pal at In Sheeps Clothing sent files my way. Fittingly, they helped bring it back out after twenty years drifting lost in history. This recent chat with Stephan was also useful in better positioning listening to it:
It still took some time for the full effect of the album to settle down on me. Maybe it has to do with the cover image, but each piece hovers around the eight-minute mark, and the aural delights of the tracks don’t really open up until you wade out into the middle of them. As the title suggests, the pieces grow slowly and accumulate more finely attenuated features as they lengthen. The hiccups, glitches, staticky pops, and clicks abound, but as you get deeper in, you can pick out bird calls, organ, running water, thunderstorms, strummed acoustic guitar, and more.
Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. - Infinite Black Inside
In all honesty, I really wasn’t familiar with the productions of Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. before checking out Infinite Black Inside, courtesy of the heads at FO. Each track hit like the unbeknownst other side of a icosahedron. On shuffle with other albums, they tumbled out rough and askew, each one banged and flummoxed in a wholly new style.
Just looking at his Bandcamp page feels especially daunting: nearly two dozen releases have binary code for titles, while another stretch run of self-released albums with fuzzy Polaroid covers makes me wonder if Alfa might be the Black Jandek. Alfa’s life story is well worth exploring, from his prison bid for drugs to recent health issues from a pulmonary embolism, and the music reflects a creative life that reflects his flinty determination.
Hans Reichel - Dalbergia Retusa
Few things have utterly bewildered me like first encountering the sound of Hans Reichel’s daxophone. It was on this green 7 inch single released on the bespoke experimental Table of the Elements label and it sounded like a cartoon from Mars, all alien gloop and slapstick beauty. It would be years before I finally gleaned that the sound I heard was from his daxophone, but one of many self-made instruments rendered by the West German guitarist-instrument builder over his idiosyncratic career. Irregular bits of bowed wood can sound like thaaat?
It’s such an otherworldly sound, that at times I tended to overlook his formidable explorations on guitar through the ‘70s and ‘80s, even those that he built himself. So leave it to avowed Reichel superfan Oren Ambarchi to compile this comprehensive overview of Reichel’s deep cuts, cherrypicking otherworldly gems from distant planets. Some 23 staggering pieces in all are compiled, with Reichel’s singular take on solo guitar (and its many permutations he would subject the guitar to) revealing just how many new worlds are still out there to imagine on that stringed instrument. I also like this sticker quote about this music as “expanding the capacity of our senses…a sonic miracle on repeat.”
Khôra & Mas Aya - Primordial Mind
There’s still a surge to be felt when something comes across the earbuds that feels totally out of nowhere, which is how I felt upon encountering the pieces from Toronto-based duo Mas Aya and Khôra. And each time, I would have that uncanny feeling that arises soon after waking, a wild dream quickly slipping away in daylight. A selection from Primordial Mind would overwhelm my senses but soon after the name of the group or who even sent it to me would turn intangible. I finally found the promo email from Marionette announcing the duo’s latest effort and some of the pieces have their brain-swimming properties intact, even after multiple spins.
Laurence Pike - Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet
Just as I start to type out that “I’m not familiar with the work of Sydney-based percussionist Laurence Pike, that I just trust pushing play on a new Balmat release,” I realize that’s not entirely true. Perhaps that’s just the fate of most steady, solid drummers on others’ projects, that you don’t always look closer and connect the dots across eras. But as I scroll Pike’s credits, I immediately spot a half-dozen albums I’m familiar with, from a live Bill Callahan record to the gamelan chimera of Paradise Cinema to early ‘00s future jazz group Triosk to some time playing in Liars. And wow, there was a Liars album back in 2021??! Who knew?
Triosk –especially their one-off collab with Jan Jelinek back in 2003– seems like the clear antecedent for Pike’s latest, Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet. But Pike taps, blips, and dribbles his way beyond such confines into a woozy new headspace. Pieces are a delectable blend of the spacy and the tribal: synths set at cosmic, the hand percussion energizing the air, fretless bass slipping around and keeping everything smooth, with some Jon Hassell seasoning for good measure.
