Crispy Moon is a musical kaleidoscope encompassing free-jazz skronk, Japanese folk melodies, Krautrock insistence, echoes of Recurring-era Spacemen 3, South African percussion styles and space rock. One is overlain onto another, or there are sections where one approach dominates before diving into another.
The album title ‘Where’s the One?’ is the question that often cropped up during the album’s creation. That’s to say, ‘the One’ is the opening beat of each bar that the western rock musicians often had trouble locating in the rich, complex brew of distorted thumb pianos, duelling guitars and intricately overlaid percussion generated by the Congolese musicians. And in some instances, the mystery was never solved.
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs realised a record can be part of the route to something else, something which becomes their creation.
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists.
As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to win a £50 gift card for the new app Recycle Vinyl (online stock of 10,000 records + 25,000 in their warehouse + 500 more added every week).
Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.
I am fortunate to be one of the musicians involved in Spell Songs, a musical companion piece to both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator and author Jackie Morris.
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Simo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums.
One of the most interesting tracks on Essiebons Special 1973–1984 Ghana Music Power House is Joe Meah’s mysterious "Dee Mmaa Pe". It’s not mentioned in the compilation’s accompanying booklet, and Joe Meah doesn’t figure in any of the standard discographies littering the world-wide web.