Manafonistas

Are there pioneers of the post-Krautrock era? If so, Kreidler should be placed first row! Once I had the band  in a live broadcast, and we talked about the salad days of Kraut (a children‘s memory for them), we talked about „die alte Bundesrepublik“. After all, Kreidler named themselves after the historic moped. „Spells and Daubs“ is incredibly fresh music (an audiophile delight by the way, from bureau b), more than a touch hand-made. There are definitely pinches of Cluster and Harmonia, but so cheerful, so relaxed and probably shaken out of the electronic sleeves unconsciously. Random parallels and echoes, a myriad of inspirations. Wondrous drumming too, sometimes reaching our for another neon-lit horizon from the 80‘s. As Boomkat writes: „Now approaching their 30th year in business, Kreidler elegantly keep moving forwards/backwards with a taut but supple tribute to their mutual influences from British pop music. In 10 tunes, reduced from more abundant early sessions, they beautifully home in on the rhythmelodic impetus that was morphed in translation from US soul into english synth-pop circa the early ‘80s; juicing its essence into sleek instrumental forms that have been polished to a tip-of-tongue shimmer by Peter Walsh, who was hand-picked by the band for his paradigm-setting mixing desk credentials, perhaps most notably on Heaven 17’s new wave/synth-pop ultra classique ‘Penthouse and Pavement’.“ 

The woman behind „Moor Mother“ is Camea Ayewa. Her deep and simple wish: keep jazz history alive without collecting dust! Memories easily turn pale when being marginalised by putting them into safe places. She opposes such losing ends with non-linear historiography – and an impressionistic theatre of voices, moods, and reverberations. What unfolds before our ears is certainly one of the most exciting jazz radio plays to imagine. 19 short compositions open up a deeply relaxed network of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, soul and ambient. Any analytical approach is strictl forbidden. Resembling pure dream texts, „Jazz Codes“ offers a journey through history, from a consistently Afro-American perspective: memories of jazz legends, excursions on racism, the indispensability of the blues, the sexual origins of the word jazz. And so much more. Tune in, dream on, remember all!

An eerie forest and cloudy landscape adorns the cover of the Finnish piano trio‘s stunning album „Both Only“, a sonic and adventurous take on „nordic noir“ – this label should not be reserved for some gloomy nordic crime novels alone! Whereby the atmospheric range of this combo goes far beyond dark and spooky „mood music“. Nine fascinating, almost film-like moods revolving around airy and dense textures, including instuments found in the studio and, easy to experience, entrancing effects in the course of events (by creative use of repetitive figures arising from the shadows). Each piece has a special pull of near-stills, slow motion and accelerations. A good quantum of „mystery“ prevents any trace of routine. Of couryse, „Both Only“ is a stand-alone, but you cannot go wrong to try to let the music put its spell on you in between the reading the Swedish master novel „Was ans Licht kommt“ (Rowohlt 100 Augen)!

Maybe half a dozen times I played „Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter“ by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra in my radio nights running three decades, and only now found out with more than half-conscious vagueness that it was the irresistible adaptation of an African template, and with the good old mbira it is now also brought to new life, on the first work by Midori Takada in decades. Midori Takada did well never to follow the ridiculous superiority thinking of the Wiener Schule of classical music, and discovered early on the multiverse of a single drum, and like Cage, she found that a single perfect note on the shakuhachi could sometimes exude more magic than some of the high-flying, form-obsessed Western orchestral music of past centuries. The spellbinding art of elementary textures, and btw, fantastic covert art. Here we are seduced (again) by this female magician who lets us fall deeper and deeper into an ancient African folk tune. „Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter“ is such a terrific perfomance, that starts with strangeness and moves forward to the dance of life that life can be.

You sometimes have to go to the  margins to get hold of such treasures like „Clarinet and Piano – Selected Works, Vol. 2“. Funny the duo calls itself like it calls itself, but British humour is part of the presentation of one of the finest pieces of this year’s chamber music (the cover, the underwhelming title, the understatement in the approach to Les Baxter, Neu and other strange alliances). When asked for a recording anecdote Stephen Black said: „Nothing particularly exciting, just your usual next door’s dog barking, or the sound of a pigeon in the chimney breast. It was fuelled by coffee and cheap bread.“ Nothing to add to this, except, maybe, imagining  how Jan Reetze and his better half are listening to this music in their Pittsburgh skyscraper, and Ian McCartney will walk endlessly the streets of Glasgow and easily forget about time (with Group Thinking in his ear-phones).

„I’m autodidact. There was no music school I went to. I can neither write nor read scores, but even so, the body of work that I created since I moved from healing to tone-art in 1967 includes thousands of  musical works, about 1000 texts/poems, an uncountable amount of photos, photo-collages and films. There’s a lot yet to come out from my archive of unreleased works.“

(Roedelius)

Finally, another edition of a Cluster concert from the days of old. To be released at the beginning of December, two months after Roedelius‘ autobiography „Das Geschenk“. Every performance had been a risky affair for Moebius and Roedelius: they all started at point zero, with no more than a few sketches in the back of their minds. But on that trip, sponsored by the Goethe Institut, they did a hell of a ride, in the mood for grooves and free jazz, kind of. Free improvisation has always been on their agenda, but jamming along with a great saxophone player from Cologne, had been a really surprising twist. Gerd Dudek was the joker in the game surfing on the rhythmic waves of their most robotic pieces. Very unusual, too, Cluster did a cover version of „Ruckzuck“, the first earworm ever by a music company called Kraftwerk. The tracklist: Wolkenmaler /  Brandzeichen / Ruckzuck / Drachenhimmel / Chant Of The Earlybirds / Feuerland. In a word of sincerity, Brian Eno commented the release of this archival rarity,  writing that the music didn‘t at all live up to the expectations of a Cluster concert, and that he has mixed feelings about  the freewheeling rides of saxophone that seemed to arrive from a different universe. But, then again, he concludes, „confusion is the gateway to the new.“ Sometimes the new takes its time to arrive in public awareness. And now it will happen in dead quiet vinyl (and CD, DL). In fact, Brian was the most famous guest of the release party for this long buried treasure. And it all happened in a dream tonight. Sad thing is I forgot about ninety percent of the dream story. I was far away from turning it into a lucid dream. And in the morning I said to myself: how many lines will someone reading this believe it is all true till he or she realizes it‘s just a story being cooked in the windmills of the mind. Fair enough to end with the words of Mr. Roedelius remembering the early times: „It started around 1967 after working for about ten years as a nurse guider of the dying, physiotherapist and masseur, but also as a roofer gardener, kitchen-help, cook, detective, mountain-guide, toilet-cleaner, flight and travel-companion, animator, waiter, ice-cream-vendor and many more of such jobs and activities.“

Cluster Classics:
 

• Zuckerzeit
• Sowiesoso
• Cluster & Eno
• After The Heat (Moebius / Roedelius / Eno)
• Grosses Wasser

If you want to sum up the guitarist John Scofield’s ramified vita, you can say with a clear conscience: he is a perfect team player, well grounded in jazz and blues traditions – even where bold experiments are in the offing, Scofield ensures the necessary down-to-earthness. He has never published a pure solo album – until now. But what else to do at home, in times of the virus? Electric guitar, looper – and sheer unlimited time. Luciano Rossetti’s cover photo: a stray dog, a wooden fence, a huge sandy beach, pale outlines of houses in the distance. This is how it often looked – entire stretches of coastline without a trace of tourism, nature – taking a deep breath and reclaiming its spaces. The photo also reflects the complete unagitatedness of Scofield’s style of play, away from all trends and fashion. What an unexpected beast of an album: so many rough edges, never clean perfection.

The whole album, „Bleed It Out“, is about the menchanisms of revenge. Shakespearean stuff, so to speak. The lyrics contain a lot of subtleties, double meanings, challenging verses. The music, according to the main topic, is more hard-rock-edged and straight forward than earlier masterpieces like „Goths“, „Dark I  Here“, or „Sunset Tree“.  John Darnielle had been inspired by action movies, mainly from the 70’s and 80‘s. And, god gracious, I followed his kind advice to dive into the two „Mezrine“ movies by Vincent Cassel. „Heart stoppingly exciting“. It is an old prejudice of „posh academics“ that action movies are  only there to thrill, and have no depth. Listen to this album, and the abyss looks straight into your face! And, aside from that, you‘ll spend some quality time with some shivers running down the spine.

Hi Michael, now I know which project you are talking about, I just didn’t know that it had come out on record yet, but I got the record in the post yesterday, and the poem in question is the third of these four. 

it derives from a big project in Hull, England, where the poem were to have a bigger role, one poem was to have been mounted on Humber Bridge and another one on a big lawn (…) The record is amongst other things based on the four poems (…) 

All the best 

Nils Chr. Moe Repstad 

The Height of the Reeds – excerpts taken from Nils Christian Moe-Repstad’s book: Wunderkammer (bridge)

(1) I could have said that I grow together with an English oak and tried to do the same with the sea, but nature has a slow determination of distance: the peripheral oceans, the peripheral nerves, like reefs and roots

(2) The swans bend their necks backward to see God, they know the magnetism of the blue space, but the prayers say God in Heaven: in the black space only black swans see Him, pulled between stars, asteroids, meteors and satellites.

(3) Search for places you know, because there is nothing beyond, only a bare tree along the road and a face other than your own, but that is how you begin to die how you begin to live, among the dead the tree is a face that blossoms.  (lawn)

(4) You and I are not all that we can be, who shall measure the height of the reeds in the wetlands, during which cycle do they burn, it is time for the insignificant theses: are we irreplaceable or waders.

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