Cruelle – J’ai remplacé l’amour par l’argent

I’m not gonna lie, I looked at this because of its cover, prominent on the right hand side of the latest releases of Avon Terror Corps whilst listening to the last post (which, because I’m doing this an advance and scheduling it, I can’t hyperlink said post because it ain’t posted yet).

I stayed for the music, however. Really good beats. The first track especially blew me away as I wondered how anyone could conceive of making a beat like that although I realised that if you swapped out all the kicks to an array of toms you’d have something very tribal indeed. And as one of the commentators noted, the drop in the middle of But is absolute genius.

But I think the whole album is. The way the last track finishes the album – the only song in English – is another one where I was skeptical of the song until it got to the end and I realised it was in fact brilliant. It takes a special artist to be able to do that. Whether she was sitting on the loo at the time she thought of it is not made clear.

Dead Space Chamber Music – The Black Hours

This will come as a suprise to literally no-one, but there is an amazing amount of music transmitting through the Bristolian Hub. I’ve recently highlighted some Bokeh Versions releases, and encourage you to dive in to their catalogue if those are your thing. Now it’s time for the Avon Terror Corps. What a fantastic name.

Imagine, if you will, Alison Cotton, Abronia and Haress sharing a room and passing the musical parcel to each other for a spell as well as having moments of all joining in a glorious and harmonious cacophany. That might just about pass as a sign-post pointing the way to what you might expect to hear on The Black Hours.

The record is a reference to a medieval manuscript called ‘The Liturgy of the Hours, or the Office of the Dead.’ I find it interesting that the paragraph where this info is related also draws attention to the parralels between prayer and music creation / crafting. Although I haven’t made the explicit connection myself, I’ve philosophically been down this way for a number of years.

Abu Ama – Arabxo Ishara

More Bokeh Versions goodness for you here. I love the story told on this page, of how the artist sent the label almost 500 tunes and said ‘pick some.’ If only choosing album running orders was so easy!

Reference points for me here are like a mashup of Muslimgauze, Saint Abdullah and Hamza El Din being brought together in righteous dub-groove harmony.

Run Logan Run – For a Brief Moment We Could Smell the Flowers

I will never, ever, in my life consider myself a jazz fan. That said, this blog has featured contributions from Valerio Cosi (regularly), Fire! Orchestra, Pharoah Sanders and The Comet is Coming, all of whom hail from the jazz corner of the room we call the musical world (and that’s just off the top of my head – if I wasn’t too lazy to search, I imagine I’d find quite a few more).

And now we can add Run Logan Run, a duo from the ever fertile metropolis of Bristol. I listened to three of their releases so far and this is my favourite but I like them all.

Of the names mentioned above, I suppose the nearest reference point is The Comet is Coming; certainly, they have that contemporary take on their material which makes it not just jazz, there’s loads more to it than that. It’s a good maelstrom to completely lose yourself in.

This is a lockdown album, which is making me feel a bit lazy, as loads of artists have put out lockdown albums now, and my two or three are still being faffed over (albeit I did quietly re-record 6 albums and replace the previous versions on Bandcamp). The first is nearly done though.