04.20.2025
Good Morning,
This is Beach Sloth. Below are this week’s albums:
· Editor’s Note – Moving forward, anything that is abnormally loud and noisy beyond what a ‘reasonable person**’ would subject themselves to will be prefaced with a *Volume Warning*. Thank you.
The Sounds of Liberation – New Horizons
The Sounds of Liberation is pure, unfettered joy. New Horizons proves it. I am overwhelmed by the sheer level of groove and colors thrown into the mix. Anything I would want in an album is here – vibraphone (love it), an infinite number of percussive instruments (yes), a perfectly executed bass line, and one of the finest guitarists I have heard in a long while (Monnette Sudler, absolute legend). However, that’s just a sampler of what is in store on this quite literally swinging sound, the kind of music that is good for the heart. Of course, there’s all that without mentioning the star, the alto saxophonist Byard Lancaster. Mere words cannot describe how much this cheered me up on a day when I had to work 16 consecutive hours, from five in the morning to nine at night. Honestly, this is the sound of liberation I need, the sort of thing that lets me write and sink into the sheer sprawl of groove-centric free jazz.
Free jazz has a comprehensive definition, and that can go all the way from sheets of noise of Borbetomagnus to more easy-going stuff. This is on the more easy-going side of things, and the grooves on here could go on forever, and I would be okay with that. Individuals could sample the album and make careers out of it; that’s how many excellent moments there are here. If no one has sampled this yet, I will be completely shocked, but given the high dollar value behind an original copy (of nearly eight grand), I am pretty sure that plenty have, nor do I blame them. This is beautiful, life-affirming stuff, even for those not into the more esoteric side of strange music – they do their best to make it approachable for even the most novice of listeners, and the warmth of the production only adds to that potential.
Khan Jamal is on vibraphone, and he’s pure fire. No slouches on this record; everyone gives it their all, and I appreciate the effort. You can hear it. Everything here has a grandeur, from some track lengths (twenty minutes for Happy Tuesday) to that wild album art (thank you, Leroy Butler). Nor is this the only thing that differentiates it from its peers – Philadelphia, where it was recorded, continues to be a hotbed of experimentation, helped by how affordable it is by East Coast standards (i.e. people can buy things with fewer problems than say, the overwhelming cost of NYC or even neighboring New Jersey). Tyshawn Sorey can attest to this, being a MacArthur Fellow and faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. Dogtown Records, named after the neighborhood it served, has multiple great albums released in its tiny run, with fewer than half a dozen. Among those are another perennial favorite of mine, Khan Jamal Creative Art Ensemble’s Drum Dance To The Motherland, released a year later (in 1973) but continuing the good vibes of this one, with perhaps more emphasis on the vibraphonist (Jamal’s a pro on vibraphone). I may review Drum Dance To The Motherland later. Let me know if you’re interested.
Would I recommend this? Absolutely. This is a real trip. I drove through a rainstorm, overworked and stressed out of my mind, yet I was not upset because this fantastic group of folks played through my speakers, rightly turning my frown upside down. Everything here works, and not a single second is wasted. It all matters, and it radiates a sense of inner peace. If this is what liberation sounds like, please let me be liberated now.
Monde UFO – Flamingo Tower
I have been waiting literal years to say this, but I think it has finally happened – a rabbit hole has begun on par with the brilliance of early Women (the Canadian band that spawned so much that I adore.) While Monde UFO is still in the early stages of this exploration, I appreciate the level of uncertainty, haunted vibes, and general unease the songs portray. The lounge aspects are notable here, and mixing them with lyrics that mention being “high as fuck” alongside near-dying lo-fi production gives it a classic cadence. This is my first introduction to them, and I appreciate the radio play aspect that pops up in many of the pieces. Sometimes it feels like the songs are wedged between these radio play aspects, from the dirge organ to the ghostly vocal delivery. These people have never raised their voices, so I am guessing they are probably Millennials or Gen Z. It strikes me as peculiar, but the younger people are, the more polite they are. The number of general jerks I have encountered who have been aged is astronomically high, and, while I do not want to be ageist, it does seem to happen more regularly with older members of society.
Weirdly, they seem shockingly capable of making unusually poppy moments when the moment suits them. Songs like Sunset Entertainment 3 and Devil Food Cake testify to this strength. Others feel like Robert Wyatt outtakes, like the unusually prog rock sweeps of Samba 9. Made up of only two members, Brian Bartus and Kris Chau, the latter of whom has a decent Instagram and website (maybe get your head in the online game there, eh, Brian?). Interestingly, I have a few mutuals with Kris, so good job there, friends, you picked wisely because they seem cool. Outside of the online sphere, the music contained within Flamingo Tower is tight thematically. I appreciate different vinyl shades, so a Flamingo Fire shade for vinyl is beautiful and fits what they do. For all the lo-fi aesthetics, there’s a distinctive midcentury charm to what they do, perhaps it is the instruments they use (dying synthesizer, tasteful saxophone, no wave guitar licks). Whatever the origin, the results speak for themselves, and there’s something immersive, blissful even, about how they do things. Sometimes, the samples they incorporate feel like they came so far out of left field that you wonder what the origins might have been.
This puzzle-like quality to the album is one of the distinctive joys. No Wave in general (and they appear at least familiar with the genre) defy easy categorization, and Monde UFO is happy to confuse you. Shit, they revel in it. Having you sit there, dazed, unable to make heads or tails of the experience, is part of the fun for them. Even the album artwork is of an electrical tower like the kind I have biked by so many times, from Idaho to Illinois, New York to California, and everywhere in between. Perhaps I should move less, and I plan on doing much less with my life now that I have done it all. Albums like Flamingo Tower appeal to me because they result from doing so much, finally creating a distinctive universe that can be sealed away from the rest of the world, simply existing and self-sustaining. Sometimes the album even veers into the romantic, the yearning, the longing, and the exhaustion that comes with too many feelings, feeling them all at once.
Lyrics are entirely impossible to decipher, to determine what they mean, and that’s part of the fun. Songs are about whatever the fuck they want, and they do not want to meet you halfway. That’s okay. You can get to them; it's fine, but you must go out more. A fascinatingly strange, eerie journey that makes no sense and incorporates literally whatever genre is within arm’s reach.
Al Karpenter - Greatest Heads
Al Karpenter’s Greatest Heads is the kind of album you could take home to your mother if your mother were really into the Nihilist Spasm Band. The lack of organization is deliberate – this is pure, unfettered chaos, though not distinctively pure noise. Oddly, noise would be easier on the senses than this – this is far more difficult, queasy, and unsettling. Perhaps the closest approximation would be free jazz, but even that feels incomplete. Sometimes they settle into something that appears organized, but these moments do not last long. Given that the universe is in flux, this is good protest music. I am also reminded of, as a tangential note, of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s complete and utter disregard for conventional tempos. When asked, Stockhausen replied that he wanted music that was as non-military based as possible, with no marches and no military allusions, as that had destroyed his childhood and the lives of tens of millions of people.
Protest music fits the sound quite well. Unlike previous iterations of protest music, of the historical Woody Gutherie who similarly was anti-fascist (wild how fascism came back, I guess time is a circle), the more recent iteration of the Fugs, and the most recent Ultra-Red. Al Karpenter’s approach has a Dadaist quality. Given how agitated and unsettled the world is, Al Karpenter’s Greatest Heads is the best version of that soundtrack, and it feels real. Nods to Suicide’s nihilism (there’s that word again) are currently in full swing, though there’s less consistency and more of this nebulous quality within the work. Mattin is well-versed in destroying music; he’s been doing it all his life, from Billy Bao to the current era. He’s always been a raw voice screaming into the void. Unlike before, though, the void seems like something it has needed for a while.
The highlight for me, at least, is the dramatic rush of the finale, the sprawling Perfect Love. For a moment, there are some hippie-like new age flourishes that recall Terry Riley’s In C. After that initial flourish, it sounds like In C after it bled to death. A burned-out, hollowed aspect takes shape. His experience alongside the furthest reaches of noise emerges, from occupying the same spaces as Russell Haswell (in Consumer Electronics) to the woozy avant-garde meanderings of 80s industrial, and is all there. The fact that he weaves together all these periods of sound without making it feel forced is doubly refreshing. His monotone, flat affect with the vocals perfectly fits the territory's harshness. I often like finales on albums, as it forces me to revisit everything I just heard before, and this is one of those moments. Once I finished this groove-laden non-groove, these noises that feel like they could have come out of a Tridex or similarly unmusical musical instrument, I felt the need to relisten to everything, to see everything that I might have missed during my first run through. I like the unevenness of the whole thing, like the song is stumbling around, hesitant at first, afraid of falling, and eventually gaining enough confidence in its footing.
As a society, we have gotten past the need for obvious protest music borrowed from pre-existing genres. Now we live in a world where the act of rebellion does not need to be couched in something comfortable, an old familiar genre. Instead, if it is going to be a rebellion against the status quo, against the way things are, doesn’t it make more sense to invent a new genre or language? Al Karpenter seems to think so.
RM Francis & Jung An Tagen - H E L L O After-Person
Two heavyweights in the crypto-audio genre have come together on the indecipherable H E L L O After-Person. RM Francis deals with audio synthesis involving speech patterns, Tower of Babel, corrupted by a virus. Jung An Tagen runs the ETAT label, a place where the passage of time does not matter. So that you know, the most accessible things on that label are a Florian Hecker release and a Lee Fraser work. You are in for some difficult listening. However, Jung An Tagen's curation with the label is admirable, and the utter lack of compromise means the listener gets exposed to the absolute weirdest digital synthesis that a person could ever hope for. Given how they might have encountered many of these artists during their stint at Editions Mego, it makes sense that Jung An Tagen would have ETAT. So familiarity with Editions Mego at least serves as a basis for what you will encounter here.
Rhythm, melody, evolution – nope, none of these are present. You are given a disorienting series of speech cut up to microseconds before its death. Language occasionally raises its ugly head, but thankfully, it is minimal. The song titles are probably the few moments where words can be successfully interpreted. Parts of this reflect upon the vernacular that is being used F-Boy being one example, specifically a reference towards the fuck boy. This man enjoys a finely aged fuck before they fuck off, hence the fucking. Outside of this, the language also descends into outright chaos, sometimes transforming into drones or high-pitched nonsense. Sometimes, it feels like the voices are trying to equalize and are failing. The destruction of language has rarely been done with this level of digital precision. Everything within the album has this speech in a blender element, think if Jaap Blonk and Hecker got into a jam (maybe Chimärisation but with Reza Negarestani switched out for the Dutchman). Still, you get snippets of actual words, but these move too quickly most of the time. Most of the time, the album lingers in this uncanny valley aspect, where it is almost language (English, German, I could pinpoint, but those are the only two languages I’m fluent in).
Far from easy listening, this challenges the listener. Even for noise-heads, this might be a bit too much. The conceptualization of the work might leave many listeners cold. However, a nice way of approaching this is with a sense of humor. Both artists, Francis and Tagen, are within the orbit of Viennese pranksters. Think early-era Mego (before the Editions) or the constant antics of Farmers Manual (who are still rocking it, somehow). Maybe not the most accessible work, not perhaps the most boundary-pushing of artists, but still fascinating in its stark unwillingness to compromise. It works on an abstract rather than any emotional level; it is avant-garde slapstick. Like all ETAT releases, this is free for download from the elegantly minimal ETAT site.
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**Your idea of a reasonable person, music-wise, I'm sure, differs from mine. **Still, if you’re already here, you’re already unreasonable by sheer virtue of your attendance, and I thank you for that. **
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