My Favorite albums of 2020--part 2
JD Allen (photo: Bart Babinski)
30. OOIOO, Nijimusi (Thrill Jockey)
After committing to chronic shape shifting over the course of seven wonderfully puzzling, sui generis albums, this Japanese juggernaut led by Yoshimi consolidates its various strengths with Nijimusi. Rhythms twitch, seize-up, splatter, and swing over intensely jagged, tightly coiled guitars, chugging and pulsing beneath a variety of chanted, chattered, and chirped vocals. While the general attack might not feel as radical as on past efforts, OOIOO clearly have plenty of unexplored terrain within it. As much as I love the band’s records, seeing them perform live fills out the picture. Desperately hoping for another chance to experience it again, but this one continues to scratch a lot of itches.
29. Alison Cotton, Only Darkness Now (Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube)
London violist Alison Cotton attracted early attention for her roll in an impressive new wave of British psych-folk bands including Trimdon Grange Explosion and the Left Outsides, but over the last couple of years she’s refined an absorbing experimental solo practice that’s grown in steady leaps. She reached a new apotheosis with Only Darkness Now, which effortlessly situates extended drones, like the extravagant 20-minute “Behind the Spiderweb Gate”—previously released on a Longform Editions download in 2019—a vaguely narrative piece where subtle samples of viola long tones and wordless vocal utterances coalesce into a genuinely transcendent act of levitation, where disparate threads weave in and out of the soundscape in ever shifting combinations and densities, while a lead viola line cycles through a solemn melody punctured by a needling piano note and a struck prayer bowl. There are austere folk tunes, like the stark “In Solitude I Will Fade Away,” and harmonium-viola meditations such as “”How my Heart Bled in Bleeding Heart,” the real achievement has been the way Cotton has zeroed on that liminal area between minimalism and folk.
28. Deradoorian, Find the Sun (Anti)
My expectations for Angel Deradoorian had slipped in recent years, after I carried hope after Mind Raft, her terrific solo ep back in 2009, and peerless work in Dirty Projectors alongside Amber Coffman. But after she left the band and decamped to Los Angeles I found her music wanting, drifting perilously close to new age-inspired goop. Thankfully, her stark second solo album brought me back from the abyss, neatly resituating a lot of the quasi-tribal incantations with an unexpected krautrock context, cutting the music to the bone with sleek yet homemade grooves shaped by a guitar-bass-drums trio. The rhythms effectively elevate Deradoorian’s chanting and singing, providing propulsion, depth, and dynamics. Not every tune turns on Can-like frameworks. The opener “Red Den” is a kind of psychedelic lullaby, as woozy as its is groovy, while “Devil’s Market” projects a beguiling, undeniably retro bossa/chanson vibe. But most of the tunes generate a motorik purr over which Deradoorian unspools patient, relaxed, and inviting melodies with a delivery that’s appropriately mesmerizing. While the meandering bamboo flute tooting of “The Illuminator” feels interminable, the rest of the album has consistently taken my mind to a better place.
27. Anna Högberg Attack!, Lena (Omlott)
Swedish reedist Anna Högberg’s flinty free jazz sextet lives up to the promised of its 2016 debut with this explosive yet finely etched follow-up. The group pivots between elegant themes — some derived from Swedish folk tradition, with another borrowing ideas from contemporary classical music — and bruising, interactive improvisation. While the band possesses formidable firepower, the members can also step back, forging lyric probing solos against changes and enveloping charts. The top-notch ensemble includes tenor saxophonist Elin Forkelid, trumpeter Niklas Barnö, pianist Lisa Ullén, bassist Elsa Bergman, and drummer Anna Lund, all of whom reveal individuality while committed to a focused group sound. (from the Quietus)
26. Ohmme, Fantasize Your Ghost (Joyful Noise)
The Chicago duo of Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham polished up its sound on Ohmme’s second album, leaning more into pop-rock orthodoxy, which has only made their subversions more effective. Their harmony singing engages in fewer Dirty Projectors-style acrobatics, more fully exposing its protean beauty—the soaring unison lines of “Selling Candy” get me every time—which isn’t to diminish the imaginative way their voices are so formally woven into the fabric of each tune. They’re able to channel different manifestations of their voice-blend within all sorts of different styles, whether they seem like the second coming of the Andrews Sisters or a neon Joni Mitchell. It’s all so beguiling that you can almost miss how agile, varied, and sophisticated the music is, with arrangements and production that deftly reveal how self-contained the musicians are—apart from the drumming by Matt Carroll, Stewart and Cunningham play everything. Seven months after its release I’m still noticing new details. I’m on the fence about the improvy “Sturgeon Moon,” which feels static in the context of the album, but on the other hand, it makes the transition to the dreamy closing track “After All” all the more effective.
25. Siti Muharam, Siti of Unguja (Romance Revolution on Zanzibar) (On the Corner)
It was a wonderful surprise to stumble upon a young taraab singer from Zanzibar that both cleaves to its stately Arabic roots and string-heavy instrumentation, while making some space for electric instruments and an occasionally fattened bottom. Siti Muharam is the great-granddaughter of Siti Binti Saad (1880-1950), an early taraab pioneer who helped introduce Swahili singing and kidumbak percussion into the music, and she’s connected to the great Bi Kidude, another taraab legend who died in 2013. Thanks to the good work of scholar and producer Werner Graebner we’ve had fecund periods of contemporary taraab orchestras spanning more than three decades (documented by Globestyle and his own Zanzibara series on Buda), but this feels like a real step forward. There’s the tone-setting instrumental opener “Mashozi Ya Huba” and its dusky modern groove, with a beefy double bass lines, percolating beneath bass clarinet riffs and kanun runs, but more often than any modern flourishes are finely woven into the sonic fabric with admirable sensitivity. The focal point, though, is on the Muharam’s phenomenal singing. Speaking of taraab, last June the global music crew ShellacHead dropped, TARAAB: Songs of the Swahili Coast, an astonishing collection of 78s made between the 1920s-1950s. In my experience very little of this stuff is available anywhere, so this 21-track compilation is incredibly welcome.
24. Moor Mother, Circuit City (Don Giovanni)
Camae Ayewa released a fantastic album with the collective Irreversible Entanglements in 2020 with Who Sent You?, but while that record revealed the quintet’s cumulative abilities coming into razor-sharp focus, Circuit City finds the openings blasted wide open. Granted, this is a Moor Mother project, and the febrile improvisers of IE (trumpeter Achiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Tcheser Holmes, and reedist Keir Neuringer, all in superb, Ornette-y mode) are just part of a larger sonic architecture, but they provide a serious foundation. At the same time, Ayewa is the one that’s most impressive, not only further honing her gripping presence, fierce delivery, and impeccable timing, but demonstrating an ability to orchestrate a larger sonic palette than ever before. Adi Adhiyatma and Steve Montenegro pour an ever-changing array of effective electronic patterns and tones, complemented on one stunning part by singer Elon Battle, part of a larger design that places the full orchestra within a spacey narcotic zone, simultaneously elusive and biting. Circuit City is a theater piece: “a futuristic exploration—part musical, part choreopoem, part play—of public/private ownership, housing, and technology set in a living room in a corporate-owned apartment complex.” The roiling paranoia and twitching tension generated by the music couldn’t seem more simpatico with that description, but even without any context, it’s consistently riveted me, suggesting a version of Sun Ra’s Arkestra for a new generation.
23. Polwechsel & Klaus Lang, Unseen (ezz-thetics)
In her lovely liner note essay for Unseen composer Joanna Bailie writes eloquently about sonic dislocation, absorbing sounds and letting the imagination fill in the details. Polwechsel has long excelled in the realm of such ambiguity, but it’s taken on greater resonance as they shifted toward more composerly endeavors. For this project fellow Austrian Klaus Lang, one of the most interesting composers at work and someone who happens to also be a superb improviser, joined them. There’s a strangely diaphanous texture to the Lang piece “Easter Wings,” which opens the album, forged by various by various kinds of frictions. Drifting from muted bell-like ringing, a high-pitched layer of bowed acoustic beating, astringent, harmonically-spiked long tones (from cellist Michael Moser and bassist Werner Dafeldecker), and a solemn, descending tones sparsely visited by clinky claves as it weaves its way back to the opening environment. The works by Moser and Dafeldecker are no less gripping, all of it enhanced by the roomy acoustics of the St. Lambrecht Church. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Lang graduated from guest to member. Polwechsel have rarely sounded better. Since there doesn’t seem to be a streaming source for the new album, here’s performance footage of the group with Lang from this past November.
22. Clara Iannotta, Earthing (Wergo)
I was lucky enough to hear JACK Quartet perform the four remarkable string quartets that fill this album of Clara Iannotta music last January in Berlin, a few days before the recording was made. At the time I was super impressed, but I felt absorbing all four quartets, while seated on uncomfortable wooden chairs, was a bit too much, and my attention lagged. Hearing them at home on a CD changes the experience, allowing one to lean in and notice the microscopic detail that speckles each work and to give the brain space to process it before venturing to the next piece. Iannotta builds discrete sound worlds that are related in their use of whispery extended techniques, quietness, and meticulously deployed electronics, but the universes she conjures are infinitesimal and hyper-specific while still residing within a much larger environment. The liner note essay discusses an “underwater cosmos” and the animals inside of it in connecting some of the works, but it’s been just as rewarding to impose my own environmental visions on the music, which feels paradoxically amorphous and ultra-precise. Both within and without tradition, Iannotta seems to occupy an aesthetic space that’s solely her own.
21. JD Allen, Toys/Die Dreaming (Savant)
No one demonstrates that there’s plenty more to pull from post-bop fundamentals than tenor saxophonist JD Allen. His second album with his working trio with bassist Ian Kenselaar and drummer Nic Cacioppo swings like mad, but the rhythm section burrows so deeply into the sleek grooves, finding endless variation and coloration, that the leader seems to have infinite space to unfurl his rugged, deeply soulful improvisations within. His full-bodied tone is among the best, most agile attacks in jazz today, summoning the spirits of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane in a thoroughly contemporary fashion. When people talk about music as something timeless, this is what they should be referencing. (from the Quietus)
Today’s playlist:
Wadada Leo Smith & Sabu Toyozumi, Burning Meditation (No Business)
Jennifer Koh, Saariaho X Koh (Cedille)
Yoshinori Hayashi, Ambivalence (Smalltown Supersound)
Mikoo, Dear (Jazzland)
David Grubbs & Taku Unami, Failed Celestial Creatures (Empty Editions)
