What have you been listening to this week?

Nick Drake – Bryter Layter
Country: UK
Release Year: 1971
Genres: Singer-Songwriter, Chamber Folk, Contemporary Folk
Featured Instruments: alto saxophone, bass, celeste, drums, flute, guitar, harpsichord, male vocals, organ, piano, viola
My response to the music: An exploration of the profound loneliness one can feel whilst being surrounded by a sea of people. Alone in the crowd with only an equally-lonely alto sax to keep you company. I wonder if his musings on what he could have been is him head-hopping into all the strangers around him. "Fly" is the clear frontrunner here, expanding on his search for identity, be it in faces or names. And only in understanding identity can we make real connections with others. Like many great albums, there's an existential crisis at the core.

Tomasz Stańko Quintet – Music for K
Country: Poland
Release Year: 1970
Genres: Free Jazz
Featured Instruments: alto saxophone, bass, drums, tenor saxophone, trumpet
My response to the music: Those two dudes on the saxophones sure know how to make their instruments cry in some kind of panic. The jazz isn’t as free as I was expecting...definitely has some bebop feel to it in parts. Stańko, the composer, turns his trumpet into a weapon but doesn’t bludgeon you to death with it. Just gives you a bit of a push, letting you know what he can do with it. The title track clocks in at 16 minutes, and it’s wonderful. All over the place.

Stephan Micus – Thunder
Country: Germany
Release Year: 2023
Genres: Avant-Folk, Tibetan Music
Featured Instruments: bass zither, burmese temple bells, calabash, chimes, frame drum, harp, himalayan horse bells, ki un ki, lute, male vocals, nyckelharpa, sapeh, sarangi, shakuhachi, trumpet
My response to the music: I had no idea there were so many gods of thunder. I guess it makes sense, though. Thunder is a powerful thing, makes chihuahuas tremble in terror.

Maleem Mahmoud Ghania with Pharoah Sanders – The Trance of Seven Colors
Country: Morocco, USA
Release Year: 1994
Genres: Gnawa, Spiritual Jazz
Featured Instruments: female vocals, guimbri, handclaps, karkabas, male vocals, tambourine, tenor saxophone
My response to the music: A couple of Americans hop a plane for Morocco to play some gnawa music, except one of those Americans is Pharoah Sanders, and the place they decide to play is someone's house, where Ghania is surrounded by many of his family members as they all make a field recording album, half of which is traditional, ritualistic gnawa songs, along with a Ghania original, a Sanders original, and a strong collaboration between the two to kick off the whole session. Not only is this recording just over 70 minutes, it's meandering and ritualistic in nature—giving your mind room to wander, too—so this might test some people's patience.

Frank Zappa – Hot Rats
Country: USA
Release Year: 1969
Genres: Jazz-Rock, Jazz Fusion
Featured Instruments: bass, clarinet, drums, flute, guitar, male vocals, organ, piano, saxophone, violin
My response to the music: There are moments when the stars align and the muses themselves come down to touch the lips and fingertips of artists they favor. This is one such album—or rather, the way “Willie the Pimp” and “The Gumbo Variations” go together. Willie is the only actual voice on this whole album, but “Gumbo” is him speaking in a different way—speaking with his feet as he walks his neighborhood, speaking with the back of his hand when he has to put his hos in line. I wish I hadn’t given my pimp costume to my friend. I had this amazing pimp costume I wore at Halloween. It was made of (fake) crushed velvet, lined with zebra-striped felt—and platform shoes to match. The ridiculous, wide-brimmed hat was lined in glittery gold ribbon. I’d wear it right now while listening to this album, the way Buscemi puts on lipstick and listens to “Telephone Line”.

富樫雅彦 (Masahiko Togashi) – Guild for Human Music
Country: Japan
Release Year: 1976
Genres: Free Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz
Featured Instruments: bass, cello, drums, flute, keyboard, piano, saxophone
My response to the music: A percussion-led jazz album, the drums giving it a very Japanese feeling, being one of those extremely interesting dives into all that fearless space and wild, unpredictable rhythms that only jazz can provide. Do yourself a favor and expand your mind with this one.

Silly Wizard – Caledonia’s Hardy Sons
Country: UK
Release Year: 1978
Genres: Scottish Folk Music
Featured Instruments: accordion, banjo, bass, bodhrán, bouzouki, fiddle, guitar, harmonium, male vocals, mandola, mandolin, synthesizer, viola, whistle
My response to the music: This is jolly peasant music, not jolly, peasant music. It starts off with a folksy bang, like we're going to go have a dance down the pub or on the village green. Their Child ballad renditions are pretty much a staple for all British Isles folk, what with their obsession with the common and equally strong themes of love and death. It's interesting how prominently the flute figures into traditional folk music regardless of region, though how the instrument is employed varies. The flutes are more melodic and less tribal in feel here. I enjoy how this album, at its end, dips into a rather introspective accordion and fiddle track, a perfect end when you're worn out from dancing, crying, or both.

Lhasa – The Living Road
Country: USA
Release Year: 2003
Genres: Contemporary Folk, Singer-Songwriter
Featured Instruments: bass, clarinet, double bass, drums, electric piano, female vocals, glockenspiel, guitar, marimba, organ, piano, synthesizer, theremin, trumpet, ukulele, vibraphone, violin
My response to the music: An American-Canadian raised in Mexico and the USA and also lived a significant time in France, Lhasa is an artist without borders, and it is immediately evident in her music, especially since she sings in Spanish, English, and French and seems at home with all three tongues. I love the slow dark waltz of the cabaret music that underpins a lot of these tracks. Lovely violins and beautiful Mexican-style trumpeting on this album.

Ayreon – The Source
Country: Netherlands
Release Year: 2017
Genres: Progressive Metal, Rock Opera
Featured Instruments: acoustic guitar, arp solina string ensemble, bass, cello, drums, electric guitar, electric piano, female vocals, grand piano, guitar, hammond, male vocals, mandolin, synthesizer, violin
My response to the music: This album is epic in its scope and oh-so fun in its approach. Here we have the story of a race overrun by AI and have to flee Alpha with only a remnant of their species. They end up on another planet, a water world they name Y, and have to adapt to live in that radically different environment. And they do, with the help of a chemical called 'the Source'. But at the end of the story, you know that the poison of that original rise of the machines lives on, because the Alphans are taken over by machines once again and enslaved, and this time there's no escape...as we hear on earlier Ayreon albums.

Ali Farka Touré – The Source
Country: Mali
Release Year: 1993
Genres: Songhai Music, Blues
Featured Instruments: acoustic guitar, calabash, congas, electric guitar, male vocals, maracas, njarka, spoken word, tabla
My response to the music: I'm no expert in the blues, and this is my first Songhai album, so the usual bullshitting I do when reacting to albums will probably be more evident now. What this seems to me is a meditation on blues seen through the lens of traditional Mali music. A lot of African music I've come across is repetitive (in the best sense), as it builds on a lick or a brief musical theme, expanding with joy all the permutations possible. Of course I lack the cultural and linguistic context to understand this music completely, but it feels like a meandering journey always keeping its gaze on the horizon. That is, a lot of space and openness communicated though the music. Halfway through the album, "Hawa Dolo" sideswipes you with heartbreaking beauty.

Modest Mouse – The Moon & Antarctica
Country: USA
Release Year: 2000
Genres: Indie Rock
Featured Instruments: banjo, bass, drums, guitar, keyboard, lap steel guitar, male vocals, violin
My response to the music: A great collection of fun singalong songs, but I’d update it from “look out the window of my color TV” to “look out the window of my smartphone”. Either way, we’re looking out artificial windows onto an artificial world.

Natalia Lafourcade – De todas las flores
Country: Mexico
Release Year: 2022
Genres: Singer-Songwriter, Chamber Folk, Vocal Jazz
Featured Instruments: bass, female vocals, guitar, male vocals, piano, saxophone, spoken word, violin
My response to the music: According to Lafourcade's own press, this album "is a musical diary inspired by different life experiences. It is a piece that honors vulnerability, life and death, femininity, nature, the mystical, love, and heartbreak." Sounds like all the best themes of folk explored in one album. Musically, this whole album is a groove, with swanky piano, understated brass, confident guitar work (both acoustic and electric), and, of course, Natalia's own smoky vocals. Listen to this one loud and feel the bass in every corner of your skull.

Tom Brosseau – Perfect Abandon
Country: USA
Release Year: 2015
Genres: Contemporary Folk
Featured Instruments: acoustic guitar, double bass, drums, electric guitar, harmonica, male vocals
My response to the music: This guy is great, so charming and friendly. He communicates through simple folk songs and tells some interesting stories of his life. I can understand why Brosseau's albums aren't more well known, though. He isn't going to have a widespread appeal because his strength as an artist is in his subtlety, his breathy vibrato, and his simple style. He also sings one of the most profound things I ever heard, and it wasn't until after I had listened to this album many times that I finally heard him sing: "Love can do no wrong; therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law." On a rainy everyday bus ride to work, I sat stunned.

Colette Magny – Feu et rythme sample
Country: France
Release Year: 1970
Genres: Chanson, Avant-Folk, Free Jazz
Featured Instruments: double bass, female vocals, guitar, spoken word
My response to the music: Batshit insane vocals over the weirdest guitar and double bass plucking. Wails, whistles, chirps, trills among the drizzling music of the groaning strings. You've not heard the poem "Jabberwocky" until you've heard Magny massacre the beloved verses of the famous wordplay.

Minoru Muraoka – Osorezan sample
Country: Japan
Release Year: 1970
Genres: Jazz Fusion, Japanese Folk Music
Featured Instruments: bass, biwa, drums, electric guitar, female vocals, koto, organ, scat, shakuhachi, taiko, trombone, vibraphone
My response to the music: Not afraid for the rock part of the jazz fusion to be played on Japanese instruments, even the shakuhachi and the koto, with a strong Japanese flavor to the phrasing. And of course there are the wild-as-the-mountains female vocals cutting through the mists. It's not until near the end of the epic opening track that brass jazz instruments come into the equation, and then the Japanese hand drums start going crazy. Very little electric guitar on this one.

Björk – Homogenic
Country: Iceland
Release Year: 1997
Genres: Art Pop, Electronic
Featured Instruments: accordion, bass, cello, clavichord, drum programming, electronic drums, female vocals, glass harmonica, harp, horn, keyboard, military snare, pipe organ, timpani, viola, violin
My response to the music: See, the thing is: you can’t actually take a radio to the mountaintop. Yeah, I ain’t a fucking Buddhist, either, love.

Flotation Toy Warning – The Machine That Made Us
Country: UK
Release Year: 2017
Genres: Chamber Pop, Indie Pop, Art Rock
Featured Instruments: bass, drums, female vocals, guitar, keyboard, male vocals, programming, sampler
My response to the music: I don't have much time, none of us really do, So I'm fucked if I'll be spending it with you This whole album is a slow swirl of the ghosts of a dull pain, a pain that issues forth from loss and fear. Fear of a mountain he is climbing alone. He'd like to have a companion, but he'll go it alone if he has to. This is a beautifully lonely meditation.

Samla Mammas Manna – Klossa knapitatet
Country: Sweden
Release Year: 1974
Genres: Rock in Opposition, Avant-Prog
Featured Instruments: accordion, bass, drums, guitar, male vocals, piano, spoken word
My response to the music: Måltid being one of my favorite albums, I wasn't expecting this as the follow up. This is hardly RIO, in my opinion, because, frankly, it's too playful, too carnivalesque. This isn't a criticism of the album—I like it!—but it's more humorous in the Canterbury Scene vein than anything else, especially moments like the yodeling on the fourth track or the clown bicycle horn on the fifth track. The turn towards jazz fusion the band takes here connects this album to a lot of similar-sounding music in my collection.

Toshiyuki Miyama & The New Herd – Nio & Pigeon
Country: Japan
Release Year: 1972
Genres: Experimental Big Band
Featured Instruments: alto clarinet, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, bass trombone, celesta, clarinet, drums, flute, gong, guitar, maracas, melodica, piano, soprano saxophone, tambourine, tenor saxophone, toys, trombone, trumpet
My response to the music: Fun, rollicking, inventive big band numbers steeped in Japanese cultural allusions, so the extensive use of children's toys as music makers on this album should not come as a surprise to the listener. Jump up and enjoy this one!

Alba – Hildegard von Bingen
Country: Denmark, Germany, UK
Release Year: 1998
Genres: Medieval Classical Music
Featured Instruments: female vocals, harp, pipe, psaltery, tabor, tar, triangle
My response to the music: A beautiful rendering of von Bingen's compositions, with magical harp, sacred psaltery, and rustic pipe all weaving a tapestry of lovely music out of which the female alto vocals spring, expressing the abbess' illuminating poetry.

I.B. Sundström – I den skinande gyttjan
Country: Sweden
Release Year: 2017
Genres: Art Pop, Ambient Pop
Featured Instruments: bass, bassoon, clarinet, didgeridoo, drums, english horn, female vocals, flute, male vocals, saxophone, violin
My response to the music: If you grasp it, it'll slip through your fingers like sand. If you speak of it, it'll pop like a bubble on a fountain. If you dance to it, you'll find years have passed until the next dawn.

Szabados Quartet – Az esküvő / The Wedding
Country: Hungary
Release Year: 1975
Genres: Avant-Garde Jazz, Free Jazz
Featured Instruments: double bass, drums, piano, violin, zither
My response to the music: Another one of those marvelous examples of folk music informing jazz to create something new and unexpected by imaginative musicians who are just as influenced by American jazz greats as by their own non-American culture. In this case, one cannot escape the name Béla Bartók.

Orkiestra Muzyki Nowej etc. – Acousmatic Music (Marcin Stańczyk)
Country: Germany, Netherlands, Poland
Release Year: 2021
Genres: Modern Classical, Acousmatic Music
Featured Instruments: double bell trumpet, electronics, female vocals, male vocals, orchestra
My response to the music: Acousmatic compositions written by Marcin Stańczyk between 2016 and 2018 and released on CD in 2021. The whole concept is insanely fascinating to me. Just the fact that the inspiration for this kind of musique concrète could come from Pythagoras' teaching style is the last thing I would've ever expected in a listening experience! Unfortunately this kind of performance is meant to be experienced live, with the audience blindfolded, and the performers moving silently about the room so the listeners have no idea where sounds will come from, separating the sounds from the sound-makers, just as Pythagoras would sometimes stand behind a curtain to lecture so that his students would focus on what he was saying and not on him. Hence the word “acousmatic”, coming from the Greek word akousmatikoi, referring to the students who were limited to pure listening. I did my best. I lay down on my bed, put on my headphones, turned off the lights, hit play, and closed my eyes. Not gonna lie: there are some rather alarming (mildly terrifying?) moments herein.

Anthony Braxton – New York, Fall 1974
Country: USA
Release Year: 1975
Genres: Avant-Garde Jazz, Modern Creative
Featured Instruments: alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass, clarinet, contrabass clarinet, drums, flugelhorn, flute, moog synthesizer, sopranino saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet, violin
My response to the music: Listening to this reminds of when I first heard Roland Kirk. Like Kirk, it seems Braxton can play whatever you put in his mouth, here playing alto sax, clarinet, flute, etc etc. This album is a perfect example of the spectrum of jazz accessibility, because with some tracks you're just kind of bopping along, and at other times you sit up and say "what?", like when the moog synthesizer makes you wonder if a robot is taking over the performance. But it's all good, no matter what original composition Braxton is exploring. Like so much of the jazz I like, this recording is not afraid to explore the silence between the notes.

박지하 (Park Jiha) – The Gleam
Country: South Korea
Release Year: 2022
Genres: Post-Minimalism
Featured Instruments: glockenspiel, mouth organ, piri, yanggeum
My response to the music: What light would sound like if you could hear it, from its diffused rays to its chromatic intensity. Light that drops like liquid as well as light that squeezes through dusty boards held together with rusted nails. The melodic and the discordant blended together like the spectrum, both visible and invisible.

Tom Waits – Real Gone
Country: USA
Release Year: 2004
Genres: Experimental Rock
Featured Instruments: banjo, bass, bells, chamberlin, claps, drums, guitar, male vocals, shakers, turntables
My response to the music: This is all guitars, and percussion. Sounds like he's flirting with some of those popular indie rock sounds that swirled around the beginning of the century, yet this is typical Waits experimentation, so he makes whatever he's doing his own, transforming it through his dark meditations on sin. Brennan influences so strong here that she's basically become a co-songwriter at this point. Here, at the end of his career, the 70s Waits is finally, at last, dead. Some sinister, black ghost has risen in his place, grinning shamelessly. Though this is Waits' only studio album I don't gush over, I understand a little better what he was talking about in one of his interviews: about how he feels angrier as he ages, and how percussion sounds better because of it. If you follow the mule from Mule Variations, it'll lead you into the barn of Real Gone. And if you follow the mule, don't complain when you get dirty.

Beck – Mellow Gold
Country: USA
Release Year: 1994
Genres: Alternative Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Slacker Rock
Featured Instruments: acoustic guitar, bass, drums, electric guitar, harmonica, male vocals, organ, sitar, slide guitar, synthesizer, violin
My response to the music: The song that put Beck on the map, "Loser", is actually the weakest song on this album. For most people, this is Beck's debut. Maybe the lead single, so overplayed as to become trite in many music nerds' minds, is the reason Mellow Gold hasn't gotten the love it deserves. Many years ago, I took Beck's sage advice and have ever since been giving the finger to the rock n roll singer who dances upon my paycheck. Beck simply doesn't get better than "Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs", spoken intro and all. Come on, motherfucker! Put your clothes on!