Animatist – Inverted
Toronto-based jazzy mathy proggy rock band Animatist just released a follow-up to their amazing 2017 album Face Club. Inverted is the quartet perfecting their sound and their vision with over forty minutes of amazing material. Definitely check this one out and watch out for all the time changes!
Nnamdï – Krazy Karl
Nnamdï Ogbonnaya is a multifaceted artist. After Drool and Brat, which explored the modern R&B and rap sound with a healthy dose of creativity, there was Black Plight, a super short EP leaning on the harsher side of math rock and noise rock, and now there is Krazy Karl. This one’s a bit longer and more varied too, but it seems that most of Nnamdï’s R&B went right outside the window in favour of a more artsy, genreless vision of music. It’s definitely progressive, probably experimental, and perhaps, but unlikely, improvised to some degree. The result is a colourful music mosaic. Definitely check it out!
Tàlveg – Arbori
Straight out of Barcelona, Spain, comes the improvisational trio Tàlveg. Although there is only saxophone, guitar, and drums, the three are able to lift incredible soundscapes from these basic ingredients. The notes seem to come into existence only to live a life of torture and agony, flowing between realms as fluidly as luminiferous æther. The result is an entrancing and bewildering forty-minute experience you ought to live for yourselves!
Stephen Weigel – 🎧👂🔜🖤💗📛🎲🎰🎮🥇🚴🌫👂👂💘 (Headphones Ear Soon with Arrow Black Heart Growing Heart Name Badge Game Die Slot Machine Video Game First Place Medal Bicyclist Fog Ear Ear Heart with Arrow) / Top Secret
Warning: this album will crash your iTunes, and possibly other music players. Stephen Weigel is best known for experimenting with microtonal music for quite some time, now, and the Emoji album—also known as Top Secret—truly is over the top. Over the very top! Way over the top… On this album of experimental electronic music, you’ll hear such rare tuning systems as 1,000,003-limit just intonation, π equal divisions of five equal divisions of e, and googolplex equal divisions of the octave (just to name a few). On top of that, there are many uncommon and very alien rhythms throughout the album, but alas there doesn’t seem to be some readily available document where I could verify this. Perhaps somebody should start a wiki for this album alone! The reason why iTunes crashes, however, is not musical, alas! It’s just that the song titles have way too many characters and, I think, emojis are coded as multiple characters before being displayed by iTunes, so when the character limit is reached it can be an incomplete emoji character, which makes the program crash in some way (that’s only a hypothesis). Pro tip: change the song titles before playing them.
John Zorn – Baphomet (Tzadik)
Ahh, Zorn. Still releasing albums monthly, I see! For June, that was Baphomet here: a forty-minute piece spanning most, if not all, the genres that John explored in his career! Most of it consists of his signature jazz-metal sound, but the composition goes and evolves in so many unexpected ways that you’re constantly on the edge and ready to be shook. The rare moments that repeat enough to lure you into a sense of stability are shattered before you can realize it! It’s one of the best releases of John Zorn, in my opinion!
Agrupación Changó – Berejú (Llorona)
Agrupación Changó is a true orchestra of Colombia’s folkloric music. On Berejú, I was instantly brought back to Pixvae (listen to them if you like what you hear, but would like more metal with it!), which is one of my favourite artists of Colombian music. Changó uses only traditional instruments, however, and their timbres and resonating frequencies, as well as those of the choirs, are so idiosyncratic as to be pretty much unique to Colombia! The album delivers a great amount of traditional songs and proves their relevance in today’s world. A wonderful, magical album!
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