dusted

Photo by Marie Planeille

Amadjar bears the English subtitle, “The Foreign Traveler,” and it’s fair to assume that the writing members of Tinariwen were thinking about themselves when they picked it. The Tamashek (their preferred name for themselves — others call them Tuareg) have traveled the Sahara for centuries, and even when they settle for a while they know they can’t count on staying. Tinariwen first convened in Libyan refugee camps, and when they started recording albums for the world market around the turn of the century they lived in Mali. But in this decade they’ve had to steer clear of that country. Amadjar is a homecoming of sorts, for while it was worked out on the road and tracked mostly in Nouakchott, Mauritania, it was at least made in the Northwest African desert instead of Joshua Tree, CA.

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Sometimes perhaps too much is made of artist’s biographies. One simply can’t make enough of Kristin Hayter’s, as it informs almost everything about her work as Lingua Ignota. A classically trained vocalist, Hayter’s work sits at the intersection of noise, art song and experimental metal. She has also suffered extensive physical and emotional abuse. Since releasing two jarring albums in 2017 — under the name she adopted from Hildegard von Bingen’s method of transcribing mystical experience — Lingua Ignota has been gaining steady acclaim for her genuinely intense music.

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This second album from the Messthetics dials up the proggy, guitar-hero element of their sound, letting Anthony Pirog dominate the mix and the overall aesthetic. When I reviewed the self-titled debut a couple of years ago for Dusted, I said, “The nervy aggression of post-punk joins with jazz-rock’s virtuosity here, and it’s good stuff all the way through,” but this time around it’s even more jazz fusion-y than before. If you like guitar solos, belly up to the bar. If you dropped by because of a lingering fondness for taut, no-compromises Fugazi, caveat emptor.

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Eucalyptus is an octet from Toronto, Canada, which is led by alto saxophonist Brodie West. The ensemble has been recording since 2011, and for most of its existence it has traded in off-kilter interpretations of calypso forms. But something happened on the way to Kick It Till You Flip It, something changed things. Eucalyptus’ pianist, Ryan Driver, started playing clavinet. 

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In the nine years before he made Equivalents, Scott Morgan, the man behind the name Loscil, made four records in a row that dealt at least partly with the matters of place. Monument Builders was in part a reaction to the confines of his century-old home, Sketches from New Brighton invokes a particular British Columbian landmark, and the names Sea Island and Endless Falls suggest that there is a there there. Equivalents may be named after something very specific — a series of photographs of the sky taken by Alfred Stieglitz between 1925 and 1934 — but that reference is a portal to diffusion. Stieglitz’s images showed clouds and sky without orienting figures, and they were an important step in photography’s transition from being a representative medium to one capable of abstraction.

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There is no composer more completely enraptured by sonority than Melaine Dalibert, but his simplicity can be deceptive. These piano pieces, written between 2017 and 2019, are no mere exercises in motion and stasis, though both evolve and revolve within each work, often evoking that elusive and liquid moment when day becomes night. Dalibert has achieved the remarkable feat of presenting the tonal language as both traditionally referential and “other,” rendering it both absolutely relevant and somehow piquantly obsolete.

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Fern Knight’s Margaret Ayre, a classically trained musician who can play all manner of stringed instruments and sing, returns after a hiatus with a fine album of psychedelic folk. Her sound has turned quite a bit more fanciful and sprightly in this outing, 13 years on out from the tombstone chill of “Marble Grey” (on 2006’s Music for Witches and Alchemists). Ayre has added a harpsichord to our musical box of tricks since the last time we listened; it and a crack band of electrified folk non-purists give Solstice something a lot of New Weird America albums lack: a sense of fun.

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Inadequacies, imagined or illusory, are the enemy of any artist. Fixate on what’s missing or perceived as faulty and one runs the real risk of relinquishing access to the beauty that’s manifest in unalloyed expression. Art Pepper masked his struggles with self-doubt in bouts of temerity and masochism. He was forever measuring himself against the false yardstick of his peers, particularly those who took a dim view of the numerous examples of self-sabotage that checkered his career. Promise Kept: The Complete Artists House Recordings makes for a convenient and compelling case study in that conflicted side of Pepper’s psyche while simultaneously delivering over six hours of the altoist in almost uniformly prime form.

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Isaac Hayes and David Porter

During the month of June, Craft Recordings released a Stax album each day — their first digital appearances — as part of Black History Month. The albums are a mix of oddities, minor albums by soul stars, ambitious musicals and even a lost classic or two. The series focuses on post-1969 material, meaning the second wave of prime Stax material and a business now separated from Atlantic Records. Roughly considered, the period came with a change in sound and prolific stretch of artistry. Rather than sort through 30 albums, we’ll take a look at just a few that seem particularly interesting.

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