Matana Roberts - "Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis"
(Constellation Records / Cargo, since October 18)
Everything we've ever been taught was white history. This is what Tina Lawson, the dam of Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, said on the most important and best album of 2016, Solange's "A Seat At The Table". Now Matana Roberts is not a scion of a Popstardynastie, but jazz saxophonist. In addition, voice and vocal artist, ethnographer, energy converter, and - she emphasizes several times on her new album - a "child of the wind". But the lesson that Lawson passed on to her daughter and half the world in the play "Tina Taught Me" has long since been internalized by Roberts. At the latest since 2011, the start of her "Coin Coin" series, she works with her multidisciplinary complete work to oppose the white sovereignty over the past and syllabi.
Roberts operates storytelling of a different kind. "Coin Coin" is a mammoth project, based on twelve chapters, which have their starting point in the life story of the former slave and later entrepreneur Marie Thérèse Coincoin. A story, then. Coincoin lived in Louisiana at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and was an ancestor of Roberts, whose parents moved to Chicago from the south and also used Coincoin as a nickname for their daughter. The work cycle is thus a personal search for one's own roots, which, however, is valid far beyond that in the sense of an alternative historiography.
"Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis" is also field research, political intervention and sound event. Her collage technique - called "panoramic sound quilting" by Roberts - created rather abstract drone scenes in the solo "Chapter Three: River Run Thee". "Memphis" has now been recorded in quintet formation with a few extra guests and is again more tangible and accessible - at least as accessible as a plate full of expressive chaos jazz with lyrics about mothers beaten to death.
Roberts is once again concerned with the timeliness of the past and with history, understood in the sense of stratification: time as a dominion dominated by the hierarchy of conquerors, oppressed, exploited, slaughtered. The legacy of the slave trade blurs it with the extermination of the indigenous people of America, but above all with memories of their own biography. The musical equivalent of this methodology are diverse layers of spoken word lyrics, gospel echoes, improvised outbursts, fiddles, pipes, howls - all assembled into a long, rousing stream.
The insights that Matana Roberts uncovers with this unlikely music will surely be back in some annual bestsellers. All Solange and Beyoncé fans should be familiar with the first four "Coin Coin" chapters anyway. (8.9) Arno Raffeiner
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21.10.2019, 16:56 clock
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Matana Roberts
Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
label:
Constellation / Cargo
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EUR 11.21
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Swans - "Leaving Meaning"
(Mute / Pias, from 25th October)
The great, intoxicating Swans last three albums was that in the redeeming roar of the music you did not really have to pay attention to what Michael Gira brambasized in the lyrics: "The Seer", "To Be Kind" and "The Glowing Man" were monuments of noise, a cathartic sound pressure that filled many of the soul vacancies. Now, Gira, head of this post-punk or industrial noise genre band since 1982, has changed the line again - and turned down the volume knob: "Leaving Meaning" is actually a Gira solo album, recorded in Berlin with the support of numerous guests including Swans regulars such as Kristof Hahn, Norman Westberg and Christopher Pravdica, co-founders of his former folk project Angels In Light (including Thor Harris) and the singers Anna and Maria von Hausswolff and Baby Dee. Ben Frost, ice-breaker of electronic music, was hired to put the finishing touches to the sound design.
The result of this ensemble work is musically more open and differentiated than last, but that does not mean that it condenses less metaphysically. On the contrary: "Leaving Meaning", on the one hand, is to be understood as a preliminary conclusion of Giras long, long occupation with the meaning of human existence on earth, on the other hand, the title is also a warning: Who believes in this shamanic, repetitive fever dream to be able to search for meaning probably has years of fruitless text exegesis. In that sense, it may finally be the Swans album for the humble (and humiliating) work for all eternity, that should be in Michael Giras sense.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 43
MIRROR ONLINE
Playlist on Spotify
1. Swans: It's Coming It's Real
2. Leonard Cohen: The Goal
3. Matana Roberts: As Far As Eyes Can See
4th mistake Kuti: Mayday Mayday
5. Suzanne Vega: Blood Makes Noise
6. Sorry: Right Around The Clock
7. The Chap: Pea Shore
8. The Düsseldorf Düsterboys: coffee from the kitchen
9. Beck: Hyperlife
10. Michael Gira: Unreal
There are clues as to which lines are picked up here again, if not even linked. The first of several ten-minute songs comes after two exposures: "The Hanging Man" is an apocalypse blues drifting through smoldering landscapes. Giras Promethean man, crying and screaming through this desert, a sinner, half insane: "Healer, heal my wound / I am a dog, I eat the moon / healer, heal my lust," he deliriously, to then realize that the Savior, when He comes, will rape Him. Being is nothingness: "I AM I am not / I AM I am not / I AM I am not I am NOT! I am NOT! NOT!". The sun, symbolized in the yellow glow of the cover, has always been the fixture of Giras' god phantasmagoria. She is a generous life donor, but also relentless extinguisher, "The Great Annihilator", as well as a Swans album of 1995 was called, which here, together with the parallel published solo work "Drainland", probably the most clearly referenced, also musically.
"I Am The Sun", Gira postulated back then, today the sun god has become a "sunfucker", to whom the world nonetheless pays homage in unsuspecting thunder: "Surrender, Surrender, come home to Sun Fucker ... La la la la la la la la la la little man! ", Says Gira in this central piece of" Leaving Meaning "; the monotony is reminiscent of early wire songs like "Strange" or "Lowdown", you can see the original genesis of the Swans sound a bit in the cards.
But what's left, beyond that? A new, open-ended self-discovery trip on peyote, mushrooms or Berlin Pilsner. The procession train of a lost soul trudging along to heavy drum beats, which begins with tearing and nihilism and finally finds the beauty of the melody: "It's Coming It's Real", another blues, but still lifts the "Hanging Man" with soft acoustic guitar and angel choir Lichtgestalt, followed by "Some New Things" and "What Is This" two near-pop songs.
At the beginning, in the Goth-Folk of "Amnesia", Kam Gira came to the realization: "Everything human's necessarily wrong", he concludes in "My Phantom Limb", that the imperfect and all touman is also sacred: "Each pain, each one of them is sacred The imbecile is sacred (...) Fucking is sacred music is sacred Silence is sacred Mindlessness is Sacred, sacred, everything is sacred ... ", he states - but emotionless, without passion, as if he were in heaven again too boring. Price the death-overcomer! But where once the heart and whole body vibrated, now only the head is roaring. (8.0) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
21.10.2019, 16:59 clock
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Swans
Leaving Meaning (2cd)
label:
Mute (rough trade)
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EUR 17.99
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The Dusseldorf Düsterboys - "Call Me Music"
(State Act / Bertus / Zebralution, from 25 October)
This album is the upside-down of the best German-language record of the past year. It was called "The Best Years" and came from International Music, so Pedro Crescenti and Peter Rubel, who have now briefly dropped their drummer Joel Roters, to get another drummer with Edis Ludwig, who also - just like Roters - only a drummer plays, but not really one is. They have brought Fabian Neubauer, a pianist and organist - and call themselves now The Dusseldorf Dusky Boys. By the way, as they did five years ago when they were still two and not called International Music. But you do not have to understand all that.
In general, you do not have to understand anything here. "Call me music" is all about feeling. It's about putting the rocking Westphalian sound of International Music warmer and calmer. The wormhole through which one falls from one plate to the other is called "pub". The song, which still pushes its legs onto the playing field on "The Best Years", is mirrored here with a retarding effect. In short, one feels the cheerfulness, but really only very briefly, because the cheerfulness is actually too cool for any gloomy boys comparison. Where you're shouting at International Music ("Mama, why can't I always get it the way I ordered it?"), Softly plucked guitars and time-consuming organ sounds lie in the bottom of the Dire Boys. At the same time, there is a plea: "Oh Mama, shut me out, keep me out of trouble."
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
The bands share their heads, and thus the idea of turning German into a kind of wooden coffee grinder. So the gloomy boys sing "coffee from the kitchen" or drive "like a hangman"; They pick up bits of words from the Melitta family milieu and crush them to a folky, laid-back attitude that is actually as unremarkable to this country as John Fahey.
Then they sing of dawn, as if they were the plucked-winged hens, but their youthfulness wipes every dust off the counter. Peter and Pedro are already driving the car: "The highway leads me to the main train station, I'm right in the middle of it." It's all so slow on this freeway that the picture flickers in front of you. That must be her, the existential fear. You stand in front of white walls, feel for ivy, an organ sounds like a siren. The own "crime scene" growth is scalded here over a Bunsen burner to coolness. They sang everything through a '90s tape recorder, mixed was "Call me music" in Waltrop by Olaf Opal - the Westphalian is always there. "Schalke 04, I do not want to lose anymore", they sing tenderly at the end of "parties" and thus solve any toxic footballing masculinity in the most beautiful chaste tree.
It's a record that reminds you that language is just an instrument. It tastes like Werther's real and makes you think of studying German. She is a mirror of "the best years". She is wonderful, and you do not want to tie her up with such wood-paneled insults as: But next time, boys, not a mirror, but something very, very new, yes? That would be really narrow-minded. (8.5) Julia Friese
Price query time:
21.10.2019, 16:58 clock
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Dusseldorf gloomy boys
Call me music
label:
State Act (H'Art)
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EUR 17.99
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Battles - "Juice B Crypts"
(Warp / Rough Trade, since October 18th)
Battles are like the afterbirth of Dada from the spirit of the treadmill. In their New York rehearsal room, the band closed each free inch of carpet with loop and effect pedals and hung their trademark just below the ceiling: a crash pool at almost unreachable height. So out-and-out, battles invented the origami skirt, which is sometimes kinked and folded over the thumb in the seemingly most unsuitable places. Until his departure, singer Tyondai Braxton chanted gibberish through the pitch-shifter, later there were songs about ice cream and an album called "La Di Da Di". This music draws its pleasure from high-energy constriction, its use value as an ethical compass is obviously in the Sinnsweigerung.
Battles did not just make the so-called math rock cool, but even compatible with automotive advertising ("Atlas" for the US brand Dodge, 2013). Given this success of the basic artistic-philosophical formula, it is not surprising that little has been added to the current duo formation over the years and in the wake of the shrinking of the quartet. The remaining members Ian Williams (guitar, keyboard, pedals) and John Stanier (drums and crash cymbals) now take care to tell the Dada-Schwurbel-joke 17 years after the band is founded, as if the punchline still has nobody belongs. This is currently expressed in the album title "Juice B Crypts" or in music videos for geometry fetishists. And it even does it very well.
After "La Di Da Di" (2015), which was purely instrumental and looks a bit dutiful in retrospect, Williams and Stanier have now taken to the microphone for every second piece. The piggy-smart rappers Shabazz Palaces for example, Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards and Jon Anderson. The English prog rocker, who founded the band Yes in the late sixties, sings something about sugar feet 50 years later with the Taiwanese prog folkers Prairie WWWW, which also sounds pretty Spanish in the passages that are not Chinese. Clearly closer to everyday life, there is dance-punk senior Sal Principato, who lets time-weariness clash with fear of failure: "It's taking too long to get it right", he sings on "Titanium 2 Step" and still gets it, almost as thoroughly funky sound like in the early eighties with his band Liquid Liquid.
For the biggest Gaga moment on "Juice B Crypts", however, ensures Xenia Rubinos in the play "They Played It Twice". Over the squealing of Williams' keyboards, rattling guitar salvos, and a series of Stanier's snare attacks, she places the perseverance "We're not going away" with a fervor never heard of at Battles: somewhere between soul-power and hair metal. Whether this is now compatible with shampoo advertising remains to be seen. (7.3) Arno Raffeiner
Price query time:
21.10.2019, 16:54 clock
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Battles
Juice B Crypts (Gatefold CD + Poster)
label:
Warp (rough trade)
Price:
EUR 11,09
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Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)