People has not been very aware of who Angelo
Bruschini was possibly until he passed away today after a long battle with lung
cancer. Former member of Blue Aeroplanes and other bands, producer of albums
like Strangelove’s self-titled Lp in 1997, he should be known to you my reader
for the guitar parts on the Mezzanine album, one of Massive Attack’s
masterpieces and one of the most intriguing albums from the end of the 1990s.
I still remember the first time I heard the
guitar parts of Angel, Mezzanine’s opening track, with that precise and rich
sound. All the album has this intriguing parts that are perfectly on time, as
if they were played by machines or computers. More than a reference to Neu! or
Can and the krautrock world, Massive Attack accurate timing on this record is
due to the will to create a music that can be felt as alienating and
threatening as in the worst dystopian novel.
Cinematic as that album is, it required all
musicians to border on perfection, something rare in rock music not because of
a lack of technical skills from the people involved in it but because in this
style of music it is required to be emotional and expressive, and perfection
can be an enemy. Mind only during the passing of time how much low fidelity
counted even more or so, so that not only the musicians should have been more
sensitive, but also the recording process involved in it.
I’m relistening to Mezzanine right now, and
pieces like Risingson, full of pedal effects that seem to slow down or even to
brake the music creating a thrilling effect, the dialogue with the ethnic
instruments and electronic parts on Inertia Creeps by a minimal guitar, the
arpeggios on Man Next Door, the few notes spent during some parts of Group Four,
are all testifying of a unique approach to music that made the members of the
band declare today that is “impossible to quantify [Bruschini] contribution to
the Massive Attack canon”.
Far from being a minor loss, that of Bruschini
is instead the loss of a vision shared between musicians and the loss of a
creative process. I still remember how much was praised but also criticized the
approach to music by a band like black midi, of whom I talked earlier this year
in a group post, for an album like Hellfire. This album, far from being
relatable with Mezzanine as an overall project, has a similar approach to music
in that the players seek for perfection of details up to the point of refusing
to leave the listener, for almost an entire record, able to feel his own
thoughts, overwhelmed as he is by the music itself.
Not by chance another dystopian tale
through sound, and in this more direct than Mezzanine who is open to
intepretation, both bands created a perfect device in order to take the
listener and guide him through a mirror up to another dimension that tells many
things about the present time when the album was conceived: Mezzanine has left
people into a middle-ground, with all the implied sensations, while Hellfire
leave the current audience almost dismembered. Time has passed, and society has
changed for the worst since 1998 up to 2022.
Finally a part of history, Angelo Bruschini now
can rest in peace and it’s up to us to come back to the times in which, through
records or live performances – I remember one in Milano in 2010 at Circolo
Magnolia where the visuals remembering also the brutal murder of Stefano Cucchi
in my country by policemen were compensating a too much patinated sound – since
he and the music he created were such an important part of our lives.
Some time has passed since my last post on this
blog. I haven’t listened to so much free jazz or improvised music in these last
months or so, as long as I’m listening more to post-punk or other genres. Fact
is that the only record I bought issued in 2023 so far is Algiers’ Shook, an
interesting mix of electronics, hip hop, free jazz, soul, blues, dub, all
played with a punk attitude.
Other artists I’m currently listening to are
black midi, a band who plays punk with a progressive attitude – and some hot horns
on it – and Idles, who are possibly the most important band to come out of
Bristol in these last years. Ah, I wanna name also Fontaines DC, at least their
first releases. Obviously all these musicians, along with others as Shame or
Murder Capital – the less interesting to me, since they hide a lack of
concreteness behind Flood production – are part of an interesting revival that
remains such, even if with a lot of personality.
Anyway I can’t find not even such a thing as a
revival right now in free jazz and improvised or experimental music. Obviously
the great ancient musicians are still producing good stuff, but younger
musicians, if there are some, are insanely hidden and I can’t find them. To
tell the truth, some young or ‘new’ people is sending me music. A young guy
from Italy sent me some audio files of what he calls an attempt to actualize
Lettrism through electronics, but the final effect was sloppy and poor.
This is how younger musicians seem to me. But
since I’m planning to write, as I did with Don Cherry, a retrospective on
Anthony Braxton, I think it’s time to take some pause from wild experiments
with a little bit of rock music tinged at various degrees with free jazz, and
so here you’ll find some advices for your purchases. The first band I’ll talk
about diffusely in this post are Algiers, from Atlanta, capital of the Georgia
state.
They are a quartet composed by Franklin James
Fisher (voice, guitar, piano, percussions, cello), Ryan Mahan (bass,
percussions, piano, synthesizers, voice), Lee Tesche (guitar, loops,
percussions, voice), and Matt Tong (drums, percussions, voice). Born as a trio
at the beginning of the 2010s, Algiers are a politically conscious post punk
band who in their career released four albums all under Matador Records.
Shook is possibly the most intriguing release
you’ll find out this year. A shift in the territories of hip hop (Irreversible
Damage) and electronica (Cold World), the music of this album is full of
references to blues and gospel (Green Iris), free jazz (the sample of Nuclear
War from Sun Ra with an electric bass superimposed), funk (I Can’t Stand It),
and some incursions in the territories of punk music (A Good Man, 73%).
With a strong tie to the post-punk coming out
of Bristol at the end of the 1970s as an interesting interview
with Mark Stewart from Pop Group released before the death of the latter
testifies, both as far as sound (as in the song Something Wrong) and as ideals,
but with all the experience coming from decades passed to refine a sound,
Algiers are the perfect act – you’ll find some intriguing live concerts
captured on the internet – for those of you who’ll want to explore new
territories until pure experimentations will come back to us again.
Far from being a music of pure rage, the songs
contained in Shook will lead the listener to an inner voyage and to discover
how creating a community can be the most assertive part of the work of a
musician. The album is, indeed, also full of hosts, from Zack De La Rocha (Rage
Against The Machine) to Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), from Patrick
Shiroishi to Backxwash.
And if the so called post-punk revival started
at the beginning of the new millennium with bands like Interpol, the acclaimed
gurus of these last years are undoubtely the Idles, to whom even a movie,
titled Don’t Go Gentle and directed by Mark Archer that I’ll attend to next
week was dedicated in 2020. The same year Ultra Mono, in my opinion one of
their most focused records, was published by Partisan, a label you’ll want to
deepen as far as catalogue since PJ Harvey signed with them for her new release
this July.
“How d’you like them clichés?” sings Joe Talbot
in Mr Motivator and two things hit you: first, the band makes always the same
music through their records – sometimes with more anger, sometimes more
introspective – but second, it is always good music. Like the Ramones, never
changing their three chords formula, Idles, composed by Talbot on vocals, Adam
Devonshire on bass, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan on guitars and Jon Beavis on
drums, are able to build incredibly good songs without boring the listener.
And if the previous Joy as an Act of Resistance
(2018) featured a song against toxic masculinity like Samaritans and a
beautiful cover of Solomon Burke’s Cry To Me, the purchase of Ultra Mono (2020)
is mandatory for those who love hear Jamie Cullum (sic!) introducing a punk
song with his piano (Kill Them with Kindness), the violin of Warren Ellis from
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds duelling with Colin Webster’s saxophone (Grounds),
and to end a punk album with a tight and anthemic cover of True Love Will Find
You In The End originally written by Daniel Johnson aptly renamed Danke.
But in general if you are interested in hearing
a band chatted by the likes of Pearl Jam and the rock’n’roll gotha, Idles are
the perfect act for you. Possibly live – they’re adding dates to their rich
list. And if Idles are making everyone come to an agreement, not the same is
possible to say about our next hosts on this blog: black midi. After their
debut Schlagenheim (2019) they were compared to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask
Replica by Steven Edelstone on Paste, and hailed as the next big thing in the
rock industry; black midi in the meantime have released three records different
the one to the other.
Their last album, Hellfire (2022) is a mix of
post-punk played with a progressive approach (interestingly enough, not vice
versa), with one of the singers more into David Thomas than into Don Van Vliet,
and a good dose of horror vacui that can be handled only by expert musicians.
So Geordie Greep (guitar, voice), Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin (guitar, voice),
Cameron Picton (bass, guitar) and Morgan Simpson (drums) have created a concept
album that depicts a dystopian future populating it with bass, guitars and
drums weavings that are raising the bar of the listener expectations.
While we obviously wait for their future
releases, we can report also how part of the reviewers, at least here in Italy,
have tried to bite the brake of enthusiasm underlying the fact that this music
features solutions that in a way are oddly blasé – there are also some
references to some of the classical Decca songwriters with their albums full of
orchestral arrangements – and that Hellfire can be taken to the utmost as a
good alternative to bands like Porcupine Tree with their loose and limp, and
always equal to themselves, records.
Last band I’d like to give you advice about are
Fontaines D.C., a nice group of musicians coming from Dublin and that since
2019, year the band released their first album Dogrel, issued three albums that
are always more and more a mix of pop music and folk influences, with some
clear limitations in the singing – Grian Chatten is great as a punk singer but
pop music requires a different attitude. We won’t talk diffusely about them
since there are no jazz tinges in their music but if you have ever been into
Joy Division and The Clash you’ll for sure have to give these guys a chance.
Post-punk, as Simon Reynolds stressed
enough through his 2010 book Rip It Up and Start Again, was possibly the last
effort, before Slint, Gastr del Sol, June of ’44, Goodspeed! You Black Emperor
and others in the 2000s, to create a music coming from popular basis but open
to contaminations with different elements, from free jazz to avant garde, from
dub to ethnic tinges. It was also a music in opposition to bourgeois and
conservative values. It is not strange this music is living a revival in our
confused times.
Hope you’ll enjoy this music even if it is not
completely bathed in free jazz because it is vital and interesting. I still
remember how much protest letters came to the desk of The Wire after their
interview to Sunn O))), but interestingly enough movie director Jim Jarmusch,
for whom music is important throughout his movies and as part of his creative
process, after using musicians related to the avant garde as The Lounge Lizards
or Mulatu Astatké deepened the relationship of images and sound through the
music of Wu Tang Clan and Boris, showing how overcoming close-mindedness can be
a victory for creativity.
This is also why I’m happy to host these
musicians on my blog. If you want to enlarge your discographies without
completely betraying jazz, but widening its language, these bands are here for
you. They will also help you to live more the present time and its tensions.
Hope in the future they also will be of incitement for younger generations of
free jazz and avant garde players not to loose both wickedness and self
consciousness, commitment and fantasy. It is also a reminder to myself not to
fossilize into a single genre since music is out there and it’s good in every
shape and form.
