The Ritual Chair position in a sorority facilitates rites of passage like the selection of a mentor and enforces customs like passwords, handshakes, initiation, and so on. Noise artist Hailey Magdeleno chose the term as her moniker after an unpleasant few years in a sorority. “It was one of the most god-awful experiences of my life,” she says. “I disliked how some girls treated me, even from the get-go—they were nice to me during recruitment, excited to have me join, but after I did join, they ghosted me. That hurt my feelings, betrayed my trust.”
It’s no secret that the 1960’s were a pivotal decade for jazz in America; what is less widely known is that, 4,000 miles away, a similar seismic shift was happening in Amsterdam. A new wave of musicians, who favored improvisation and free playing, were changing the sound of the city—and causing friction with the more traditionally-minded, established jazz musicians and big bands.
Considering how far he’s come without worrying about press cycles or hype trains, it’s fitting that Galcher Lustwerk’s breakthrough wasn’t a proper record—it was a word-of-mouth winner in the mix series Blowing Up the Workshop—a podcast that racked up nearly 150,000 plays over the past six years. The deftly mixed 100% Galcher set was described as “some tracks and stems from 2012,” a humble brag of a business card that set a high bar for Lustwerk’s future releases, and established his role as an enigma in the underground club scene. A lot’s happened since then, including promising (Studio OST) and playful (Road Hog) side projects and a string of solo efforts that brought his easygoing sound into full relief.
Saxophonist Peter Brötzmann is well-know for his fierce marathon performances with a wide range of collaborators. His best-known album, 1968’s Machine Gun, is regarded as a landmark in European free jazz. On his latest solo album, I Surrender Dear, recorded in a Vienna studio in 2017, he journeys deep into the past—jazz’s, and his own. Sticking to the tenor sax for the album’s full 57 minutes, he explores standards which have been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times since the 1930s and ’40s, like the title track (which appears in two versions), “Lover Come Back To Me,” “Con Alma,” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” He also turns out versions of slightly later pieces, like the 1957 Sonny Rollins composition “Sumphin,” Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg’s “Brozziman,” and two of his own compositions, “Dark Blues” and “Churchsong.”
Bandcamp Navigator is a column dedicated to a fan favorite Bandcamp practice: tag-hopping.
Curitiba, in southern Brazil, seems like a good place. It’s a huge city, and I’m sure it has all the good and bad aspects that are generally associated with that sort of thing. I’m not discounting any future possibilities, but I’m sure I’ll probably never go there, as much as I’d like to. It’s just the realities of international travel in this modern world, you know? Still, it’s as good a place as any to begin this installment of global travel by tag-hopping. Let’s get to know a group from Curitiba’s punk scene.
The New York rapper Flee Lord—protégé of the late Prodigy from Mobb Deep and close associate of the Griselda gang—had a simple plan for increasing his buzz in 2019: outwork everyone else. He’s dropped no fewer than five albums since March, including Gets Greater Later, Ups and Downs with Phonk P, Later Is Now, the 38 Spesh collab Loyalty + Trust, and RocAmeriKKKa with Eto. As if all that’s not enough, he’s determined to deliver one more full-length before the year is out.
Moondog was a beatmaker. The blind, street-dwelling composer, born Louis Hardin, wrote pieces simple enough to play by himself on the sidewalk yet complex enough to be performed by full orchestras. And at the heart of every Moondog song was an inventive beat, in a self-made style he called “snaketime” due to its slithery danceability. You can hear how essential rhythm was to him in On The Streets of New York, a collection of mostly percussive pieces played with his own invented instruments–including the “Oo” and the “Utsu”–on the pavement and rooftops of New York City.
The majority of these recordings were made by Tony Schwartz, an audio documentarian who recognized Moondog’s genius early on and forged—according to biographer Robert Scotto—“[Moondog’s] most important professional relationship with anyone other than his wife.” The excellent EP that Schwartz recorded in 1953, also called On The Streets Of New York, is included in full on this Mississippi reissue, but just as exciting is the newly-found material on side two, taken from Schwartz’s Library of Congress archives. Throughout these nine short tracks, Moondog creates looping beats, often humming and howling over top of them. The ecstatic discovery in these homemade chants and rhythms is both intimately personal and spiritually universal.
On The Streets Of New York isn’t all Moondog alone. It also includes an unreleased take of his woodwind-filled composition “Why Spend the Dark Night With You?,” as well as a stirring version of “Nocturne Suite,” originally used in a dance piece by Donald McKayle and performed here with members of the Royal Philharmonic. But it’s the work of Moondog by himself, digging into his brain for new beats, that sparks the most flames on this fantastic archival collection.
The astronomical success of titles like Celeste, Dead Cells, and Untitled Goose Game, the prominence of DIY-enabling platforms like Steam and Kickstarter, the rise of streaming—if ever there existed such a thing as a golden era of indie gaming, we’re living smack-dab in the middle of it. Perhaps a little ironically, one of the key factors powering the furor lies not in games themselves, but their soundtracks; there’s Lena Raine’s rise to fame post-Celeste, and Toby Fox’s omnipresent Undertale score, which has appeared in nationally-televised wrestling events and highly-popular Nintendo Switch games. With every new indie darling comes the opportunity for a significant musical find, enjoyable to players and non-players alike.
Saxophonist Peter Brötzmann is well-know for his fierce marathon performances with a wide range of collaborators. His best-known album, 1968’s Machine Gun, is regarded as a landmark in European free jazz. On his latest solo album, I Surrender Dear, recorded in a Vienna studio in 2017, he journeys deep into the past—jazz’s, and his own. Sticking to the tenor sax for the album’s full 57 minutes, he explores standards which have been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times since the 1930s and ’40s, like the title track (which appears in two versions), “Lover Come Back To Me,” “Con Alma,” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” He also turns out versions of slightly later pieces, like the 1957 Sonny Rollins composition “Sumphin,” Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg’s “Brozziman,” and two of his own compositions, “Dark Blues” and “Churchsong.”
Bandcamp Daily 