Streya: New works for solo violin and violin with electronics Olivia De Prato (violin) (New Focus Recordings)
It took Soulwax 12 years to release 2017’s From Deewee, a triumphant one take clash of live drums and electronic wizardry. It’s taken less than 12 months for their follow-up; at their current rate, we can expect another release sometime next weekend. As described in an opening voice-over, this is an “essential mix” equivalent to a mixtape, originally created for a BBC Radio 1 session.
Can you find a more extensive and comprehensive rundown of monthly vinyl releases than theartsdesk on Vinyl? We can’t. But then we would say that. Don’t believe us, though; below we surf punk, techno, film soundtracks, folk, major label boxset retrospectives, avant-garde electronica, pop, R&B and tons more. Dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Belako Render Me Numb, Trivial Violence (Belako)
Rarely has an album’s artwork better reflected its content: blackness, or the void from which light occasionally emanates. This is a collection of instrumentals enhanced by vocals, rather than what might be called songs. The opening minimalist piece “Lightshaft” begins with a single plucked guitar note and its long vibrato-laden after-echo, like the sonic equivalent of a lone flickering candle.
Made from girders, say the brewers of an infamous Scottish fizzy drink. If you could siphon the music of Edgard Varèse into a can, that’s what it would taste like. Blunt, acrid, inimitable, fizzing with closely guarded, possibly unpleasant ingredients. The danger was that exposure to his entire output in one day would prove no more palatable than chugging through a two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru.
It is a truth not widely acknowledged in the UK as yet that Robin Ticciati's elder brother Hugo is no less fine a shaper of musical thought. He could, as his solo playing last night richly proved, have had a career as a virtuoso violinist playing with all the world's great orchestras. Instead he chose a much more individual path: inspiring, even electrifying a group of musicians in Sweden, forging highly original programmes in which the so-called "old" – for which read timeless – comes up freshest in the company of the new.
Tamara Stefanovich and Colin Currie – a dream team for Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual. Both are new music specialists with a gift for grace and dexterity, even in the most complex works. The score sets up a range of sophisticated relationships between piano and percussion, from sympathetic resonances to complex interplays of stretto and hocket. Yet none of this fazes the two players, nor ever challenges their close ensemble, seemingly telepathic in its precision.
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off.
Few real-life subjects of a film would allow themselves to be seen in the way Ginger Baker is in Beware of Mr. Baker. He’s violent, bullying, self obsessed, a control freak, irresponsible, sexist, foul-mouthed and harbours decades-long grudges. Since he doesn't appear to be ill, it's difficult to ascribe his behaviour to forces beyond his control. He does, though, love animals and is a legendary drummer. So that’s all right then. Not only is Beware of Mr.
It's pretty impressive that at 74 years old, the drummer Jaki Liebezeit should still be one of the most vital musicians on the planet. Maybe not all that surprising, though. From the moment in 1968 when he switched from free jazz to the narcotic jams of Can, he pioneered a rolling rhythmic style that suggested infinite patience and a man comfortable in his body, and it feels entirely natural that his beats should keep on rolling into old age. “Liebezeit” translates literally as “Love Time”, and it feels like he really does.