A CLOSER LISTEN weekly #52
Dilla Day, Cruel Diagonals, Kali Malone, Remixes
Dear Listeners! Joseph again. Day late, as I found myself with a lot to say but also a lot of recent content from the blog I don’t want to overshadow. We have the latest episode of my podcast Sound Propositions, featuring Megan Mitchell aka Cruel Diagonals, whose Fractured Whole was one of our favorite records of 2023. Our review of Kali Malone’s forthcoming All Life Long got a lot of attention earlier this week. We’ve also got reviews of new music from aus & Danny Norbury, bvdub & Inquiri, and Hieroglyphic Being. And as always a new review daily over at the blog.
We recently surpassed 2,000 subscribers to this newsletter, so thank you, I have some extra features on the way. Thanks for listening with us. Rather than ramble on as usual, I’ll try some short segments below before getting into the ACL roundup.
Dilla Day
RIP James Dewitt Yancey (February 7, 1974 – February 10, 2006)
Yesterday would have been the 50th birthday of the rapper / producer / musician / genius James Dewitt Yancey aka Jay Dee aka J Dilla. He died of TTP and lupus at the age of 32, almost exactly 18 years ago. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said, and any attempt at any summation of even his relatively brief career would inevitably be reductive.
Early production placements with the Pharcyde, De La Soul, and Busta Rhymes helped launch his career, joining Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad in the Ummah, A Tribe Called Quest’s production collective.
Dilla’s work with the so-called “Soulquarians” resulted in extensive collaborations with Common, as well as with Erykah Badu, Bilal, the Roots, Mos Def, and, as Dan Charnas details in his excellent book, Dilla Time, a decisive musical influence on the sound of D’Angelo’s classic second LP, Voodoo.
It’s that concept of “Dilla time,” a shift in how musicians think about and feel time, a way of working with and against the machine-rhythms of the grid, that makes Charnas’ book so much more than a biography. Dilla was from Detroit, and Charnas connects Dilla’s groundbreaking musicianship and relationship to technology to the history and geography of the city itself in very clever ways. With his group Slum Village, Dilla played an important role in putting Detroit hip-hop on the map at a time when most media was only paying attention to the coasts.
His beat tapes helped normalize the idea of instrumental hip-hop albums, and his collaboration with Madlib as Jaylib, and especially his final work, Donuts, have proved foundational influences on the development of LA’s “beat scene” and the wider interest in experimental production that has spread around the world. As I’ve often said, hip-hop production is an important part of the history of electronic music. That said, Dilla’s influence extends far beyond any one genre, and as Charnas argues his work has changed how we think about time.
I mentioned Dilla Time way back in ACL weekly #3, before I’d received my copy of the book and had a chance to read it. So I’ll take this opportunity again to recommend the book. On the occasion of Dilla’s 50th birthday, Charnas shared the following (via Instagram):
The grid and the donut.
The donut represents one side of James. Donuts is, of course, the name of J Dilla’s final work. But that shape, the RING, means something deeper. It symbolizes the religiosity of Dilla, the posthumous iconography, the love movement, the irrational, unexplainable emotional connection people have with him & his music. It also symbolizes the RECORD, his sacrament, and the connection that hip-hop and its beatmaking clery mediate with machines between the past, present, and future. And maybe..It also symbolizes, too, the kind of DIlla fandom (or maybe standom) that emerged, with Donuts as the entry point. Which for some of us older Jay Dee fans can be slightly… annoying?
The grid is the other side of James, represents the way a programmer creates events spaced in time, but some other important things. It represents Jay Dee the musician, his instrument, the pad grid of the MPC, those yeas from his time in AMp’s basement until his breakthrough album, Slum Village’s Fantastic Vol. 2. That is not the mystical side of Dilla, it’s the rational side, the science of Jay Dee. It’s the intention, the physics of movement. The mechanics. How things actually work.
Both the grid and the donut, for me represent the two sides of James and our relationship to him: irrational and rational, quantized and unquantized.
Of course, James Dewitt Yancey was not a concept or anybody’s symbol. He wasn’t a slogan on a t-shirt, a figurine, a piece of fan art. He was a man. No biography, not even my own, can do him full justice.
The highest tribute we can pay is to say thank you, and to love and uplist the people who loved and uplifted him.
Happy Birthday, James.
The Aqueduct Walk Remix
We’ve been fans of Longform Editions since they launched (cf. my interview with Andrew Khedoori from 2019). Their most recent batch, released in December 2023, included Valerio Cosi’s The Aqueduct Walk, a 34-minute composition influenced by long walks outside in Southern Italy. I think it will be of interest to many of you Listeners, especially those who are fans of early Italian prog and German kosmische / krautrock. Among his influences on this work, Cosi cites early Battiato, Cluster, Jane Siberry, Tangerine Dream, Tim Hecker, Joanna Brouk and Jim O’Rourke’s The Visitor.
I thought to include mention of his record here because yesterday Cosi released a companion track, Walk To The Fire (The Aqueduct Walk Remix), which he describes as its "evil twin." I really love this idea, particularly as it contrasts with the mission of Longform Editions. Where the original is leisurely paced over 34-minutes, like an evening passeggiata, Walk To The Fire is instead a propulsive distillation, reinvented and reimagined as a Motorik-beat driven single clocking in at under four minutes.
Something About Shirley
Fatboi Sharif and Roper Williams announced a new LP, Something About Shirley, billed as the proper follow up to 2021’s Gandhi Loves Children, which remains my favorite Sharif project. We don’t have much do go on, but the trailer provides just enough to whet our appetites.
Something About Shirley drops on Valentine’s Day, so to mark the occasion Sharif has also released a Valentine’s Day Mix as DJ PORNO CYBORG, some of his favorite love songs from Outkast, ELUCID, and more. Listen here.
Remixes
Lastly, I wanted to share two remixes I did that were released recently.
“Soliloquy (Remix),” on Rêves sonores, Crépuscule Remixed, Youngbloods (2023)
“We Suffer Because We Lose Things,” on Daniel Carter & Stefan Christoff’s In Astronomy (remixes), rohs! records (2024)
Now, on to the best of ACL from the past two weeks!
DIS/EMBODIED - with Cruel Diagonals
Having first captured our attention with Monolithic Nuance (2018) for Longform Editions, Megan Mitchell’s Cruel Diagonals has continued to impress with each new work. With Fractured Whole, she set herself the task of producing an album using nothing but her voice as raw material. While she deserves recognition as a gifted vocalist, she deserves at least as much praise for her production work, alchemically transmuting her voice into a wide range of instruments and textures. In this episode, she discusses the production challenges posed by Fractured Whole, her background in musical theatre, her work with the feminist archive Many Many Women, and much more.
“These are not disembodied forms, I’m not just a sample pack to make your track sound better. There’s a body here, there’s something behind this.” Mitchell is explaining the decision to prominently feature her image on the cover of Fractured Whole, while problematizing the idea of #femalevocals. She points to the Rialavox Ladies plug-in suite, a “female vocal” sample library that went viral for all the wrong reasons. Rather than functioning as an anonymous “female” flourish, such disembodied vocals quickly fall into the uncanny valley. Owing to their embodiment, vocals are often gendered in a way that other instruments are not. While male artists can mask themselves (sometimes literally) and hide behind anonymous monikers and white label releases, there are different pressures on female-identified artists. Cruel Diagonals centers Mitchell’s persona, inseparable from her voice.
Sound Propositions should be available wherever you get your podcasts (including Spotify), so please keep an eye out and subscribe (and rate and review, it helps others who might be interested find us). You can support Sound Propositions on Patreon if you are so inclined, or send a one-time donation via PayPal. The first two seasons are also available on Bandcamp. I’m very grateful for any support, which will help ensure future episodes.
RECENT REVIEWS
Reviews are at the heart of ACL. Breaking format a bit, here are (slightly longer excerpts from) a few of my favorite reviews we posted on the blog in the last few weeks.
aus & Danny Norbury ~ Better Late Than Never
The album begins as quietly as winter snow. Soft piano notes fall from the sky, immersed in cloud-like ambience. Then the cello notes start to play, yielding a reflective and slightly mournful tone. By the end of “A Diary Entry from Years Ago,” the timbre has shifted from ambience to modern composition, graced with an electronic dusting that later remixers will bring to the fore. The talents of aus & Danny Norbury are so well blended that they operate as one, in the same way as the songs seep into each other, operating as a suite.
While the album seems to trace the arc of a life, it also traces the way in which one regards a life. Like a good eulogy, the album lets the negative aspects go in order to concentrate on the positive. The tone may touch upon tragedy, but one track (“Tanpopo,” or “Dandelion”) shares the name of a comedy. Perhaps Better Late Than Never refers to the ability, later in life, to look back and accept what has come before, to glide peacefully into the now, perhaps the forever.
bvdub & Inquiri ~ Destroyesterday
Destroyesterday is a deep, emotionally dense and musically complex sequence of compositions in which Brock van Wey conveys into sounds the lyrics written by Lacey Harris (aka Inquiri),who also servess as vocalist. As the liner notes reveal, this album is the joint effort of the artists to survive “destruction” as a universal metaphor but also as a relational dynamic on a more personal level. Harris’ own work as an LA based DJ and producer explores all the colours of the electronic sound spectrum with a focus on ambient-bass, dub and electronic shoegaze, so the pairing with bvdub couldn’t be more appropriate.
This album is perhaps a quite important undertaking for bvdub as we witness an orchestral layering in most of the compositions and a more lyric-oriented perspective. Most titles in the release include long sequences of string arrangements filtered through bvdub’s expansive sound like in “Alone in Crimson” or “Please Let Go and Let Me Hold You,” or the closing track “Destroyesterday.” Harris’s vocals are given the foreground and guide the listening experience. This is a fruit of a very intense collaboration in which the two artists worked on a deep level to understand and convey each other’s sounds, words and emotions.
Hieroglyphic Being ~ Quadric Surfaces
The images come from two short films made by Venezuelan visual artist Gabriela González Rondón, which lead our eyes effectively through the transformation of surface into figure, of figure into line, of line into light. The sounds are by Hieroglyphic Being, a long-time veteran of the US dance and electronic music scene, who deploys synthesized bits and pieces into abstractions that ultimately aim to integrate the gaze and the listening ear.
Entitled Parallel Spheres and Figures in Mynd, the videos emphasize an esoteric quality to the relationship between shapes, underlining that topological potential in which an object is understood as pure geometry, subjected to an endless number of deformations to the point of changing into another object altogether, but always in terms of continuity, not rupture or difference. The direct manipulation of images, film, and the use of stop-motion techniques let viewers clearly see González Rondón’s handiwork while figures flow into backgrounds, backgrounds into each other, and then back into figures once again. The eerily indistinct patterns of it all sometimes evoke symbols, sacred geometries, hidden connections articulated by a creator’s digits. They all suggest a meaningful context collapse where the distinction between analog and digital is that of the fragment and the whole, of vertiginously finding the universe in a waterdrop, continuity in discontinuity, an artificial signal within a natural one.
Hot on the heels of 2023’s resolutely epic Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which featured tracks clocking in at over an hour in length, All Life Long features a number of tracks of surprisingly brief duration, a few of them the shortest of Malone’s recorded career. With this brevity comes a newfound warmth, clarity, and brightness. Though the organ predominates on ALL, making up half of the twelve tracks, it’s the pieces for brass and chorus – some of which are alternate versions of other tracks on the album, stirring up patterns of breathtaking contrast in their wake – that make the album thrum with vitality.
One could reasonably parse the entire album strictly on its structural and technical merits, but to do so would be to lose the feeling of it. There’s the gently treading canon of “Passage Through The Spheres,” performed by the Macadam Ensemble, widening its scope in its forward passage as it takes on new voices and new depths while never becoming leaden. The contemplative “All Life Long” in its version for organ, in which Malone utilizes the organ’s endless capacity for wind-driven drone to elongate her notes, holding to them as they beat and fluctuate in place before reluctantly releasing them in a stirring long fade. Then there’s the yearning, dulcet, hard-to-recognize counterpart for voice. There’s the indomitable if world-weary stance of “No Sun to Burn (for brass),” performed by the Anima Brass Quintet, and the reedy, dazed counterpart for organ. Lastly, there’s the sweet medieval fragment of “Formation Flight” and the bleeding-out, funereal finality of “The Unification of Inner & Outer Life.”
UPCOMING RELEASES
(complete list with Bandcamp links here)
Suffering from the mid-winter blues? The winter release slate has begun to ramp up, with hundreds of albums already in the works. Some reflect the dueling textures of the season: soft as falling snow, harsh as winter winds. Others sing of the warmer months to come. We’ve even begun to receive announcements for spring releases! Whatever the weather, there is always something to look forward to, with new music constantly on the horizon. New previews are added to this page daily; we hope that you’ll find your next favorite album right here!
Ben Crosland ~ Stargazer (Bigo & Twigetti, 8 February)
Champagne Dub ~ Rainbow (On the Corner, 8 February)
Wil Bolton ~ Null Point (The Slow Music Movement Label, 8 February)
A-Sun Amissa ~ Ruins Era (Gizeh, 9 February)
Bonfarado ~ Elan Vital (Shimmering Moods, 9 February)
Derrick Stembridge | Mike Petruna ~ Cryptic Logic (Labile, 9 February)
Fer Franco ~ Ritos de Peso (9 February)
GiGi Damico ~ Together (See Blue Audio, 9 February)
Kali Malone ~ All Life Long (Ideologic Organ, 9 February)
Kenn Hartwig ~ Gameboys & Pedals (Anunaki Tabla, 9 February)
Lyndhurst ~ Caves (9 February)
Orphax ~ Structure (9 February)
SabaSaba ~ Unknown City (Hands in the Dark, 9 February)
Tessa Brinckman ~ Take Wing, Roll Back (New Focus, 9 February)
Lisa Ullén ~ Heirloom (fonstret, 12 February)
Philippe Petit ~ A Divine Comedy (Cronica, 13 February)
V/A ~ 19 Albums from Inner Demons Records! (inner Demons, 14 February)
Hexorcismos ~ MUTUALISMX (Other People, 15 February)
OdNu + Ümlaut ~ Abandoned Spaces (Audiobulb, 15 February)
Raoul Eden ~ Amina (Scissor Tail, 15 February)
aadja ~ pyrocbs (Trip Recordings, 16 February)
Adriaan de Roover ~ Other Rooms (Dauw, 16 February)
AP DUCAL ~ U (Weisskalt, 16 February)
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das ~ blackmagix.asd (16 February)
C. Diab ~ Imerro (Tonal Union, 16 February)
Cody Yantis ~ Opticks (Flaming Pines, 16 February)
Gordon Grdina’s The Marrow ~ With Fatimeh Honari (Attaboy, 16 February)
Grdina/Lillinger ~ Duo Work (Attaboy, 16 February)
Hieroglyphic Being ~ Quadric Surfaces (Viernulvier, 16 February)
Iñaki García ~ Rainbow (Bigo & Twigetti, 16 February)
ism ~ Maua (577 Records, 16 February)
Julia Govor ~ Laika and Ulka Were Here (Semantica, 16 February)
mega cat ~ S/T (Share It Music, 16 February)
Miharu Ogura ~ Ogura Plays Ogura (thanatosis, 16 February)
Moppa Elliott ~ Acceleration Due to Gravity: Jonesville (Hot Cup, 16 February)
Moppa Elliott ~ Advancing on a Wild Pitch: Disasters Vol. 2 (Hot Cup, 16 February)
Nat Scheible ~ or valleys and (Outside Time, 16 February)
Philip Sulidae ~ Circulator (LINE, 16 February)
V/A ~ I hate music, especially when it is played (NIX, 16 February)
Henrik Meierkord ~ Proscenium (Whitelabrecs, 17 February)
Luis Meihlich ~ Re-Cartographies (Whitelabrecs, 17 February)
Shane Bloom ~ Release (17 February)
Shugorei & Black Square String Quartet ~ The Sounds of Chow Gar (4000 Records, 20 February)
Geotic ~ The Anchorite (Basement’s Basement, 21 February)
AFM ~ Mille Mondi (CEE, 22 February)
Petar Klanac ~ Sept cordes (22 February)
Ali Khan | Yoyu | Lynx ~ it’s all gonna be okay somehow (Intraset, 23 February)
Andrew Land ~ And All of This (Bigo & Twigetti, 23 February)
Aviva Endean | Henrik Olsson ~ Split Series Vol. 2 (FRIM, 23 February)
Ben Peers ~ Solo Drum Machine (Elli, 23 February)
Bruno Duplant ~ du silence des anges (Moving Furniture, 23 February)
David Grubbs & Liam Keenan ~ Your Music Encountered in a Dream (Room40, 23 February)
Drifting in Silence ~ Winters Past (Labile, 23 February)
Eric Hilton ~ Sound Vagabond (23 February)
Gregory Uhlmann ~ Small Day (Colorfield, 23 February)
Jaime del Adarve ~ Las Horas (piano and coffee records, 23 February)
Jordan Tarento ~ Lattices (Earshift Music, 23 February)
Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra ~ Hereafter (Sofa, 23 February)
Marco Paltrinieri ~ Rapari Minimi (Canti Magnetici, 23 February)
Maya Shenfeld ~ Under the Sun (Thrill Jockey, 23 February)
MINING ~ Chimet (Leaf, 23 February)
Site Nonsite ~ The Japan Series (23 February)
Site Nonsite ~ Remixed (23 February)
V/A ~ Batch 1 (okla, 23 February)
Gonçalo Almeida and Pierre Bastien ~ Dialogues and Shadows (Futura Resistenza, 27 February)
Limpe Fuchs ~ Pianoon (Futura Resistenza, 27 February)
The Humble Bee & Offthesky ~ Here In, Absence (IIKKI, 29 February)
Amaro Freitas ~ Y’Y (Psychic Hotline, 1 March)
Cameron Lindy ~ Ghost Frequency II: Resonance (Earshift Music, 1 March)
cerrot ~ Butterfly Effect (trip recordings, 1 March)
The Corrupting Sea ~ Cold Star: an homage to Tangelos (Somewherecold, 1 March)
Cyclopean Forge ~ Blood Under the Glass (1 March)
Domenic Cappello ~ Basement Philosophy (Alien Communications, 1 March)
Eva Novoa ~ Novoa / Gress / Gray Trio, Vol. 1 (577 Records, 1 March)
Horse Lords: As It Happened: Horse Lords Live (RVNG, 1 March)
Jack Silverman Quartet ~ Prince of Shadows (Centripetal Force, 1 March)
Je Est Une Autre ~ Flatworm Mysticism (Cestrum Nocturnum, 1 March)
Jeremy Rose & the Earshift Orchestra ~ Discordia (Earshift Music, 1 March)
Joel Roston ~ We’re Able (1 March)
Jörgen Gustafsson ~ a darkened harbor (Ombrelle Concrète, 1 March)
Leonidas & Hobbes ~ Pockets of Light (Hobbes Music, 1 March)
Li Jianhong ~ Soul Solitary (Ramble, 1 March)
Matteo Cambò ~ Paradoxum (L’Archipel Nocturne, 1 March)
Muddersten ~ Triple Music (Sofa Music, 1 March)
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard & Quatuor Bozzini ~ Colliding Bubbles (Important Records, 1 March)
nubo ~ Planetary Vision (Western Vinyl, 1 March)
Sarah Belle Reid ~ MASS (Extended + Remastered) (1 March)
sinonó ~ la espalda y su punto radiante (Subtext, 1 March)
Squarepusher ~ Dostrotime (Warp, 1 March)
Staś Czekalski ~ Przygody (Mondoj, 1 March)
Valerie Ace ~ Stress & Stress (Intrepid Skin, 1 March)
Various Artists ~ Future Sounds of Kraut Vol. 2 (Compost, 1 March)
David Shea ~ The Ship (Room40, 2 March)
Yes Indeed ~ King of Blue (meakusma, 6 March)
Li Yilei ~ NONAGE (Metron, 6 March)
Aiden Baker ~ Pithovirii (Glacial Movement, 8 March)
Chatte Royale ~ Mick Torres Plays Too F**Iing Loud (Kapitaen Platte, 8 March)
Dabrye ~ Super-Cassette (Ghostly International, 8 March)
Doc Sleep ~ Cloud Sight Fade (Dark Entries, 8 March)
Hanno Leichtmann / Valerio Tricoli ~ Cinnte le Dia (NI VU NI CONNU, 8 March)
HJirok ~ S/T (Altin Village & Mine, 8 March)
Naum Gabo ~ F. Lux (8 March)
Nexcyia ~ Endless Path of Memory (Pensaments Sonics, 8 March)
TVSI ~ Mediterraneo (Nervous Horizon, 8 March)
UFO95 ~ Backward Improvement (Tresor, 8 March)
Federico Ughi et al ~ Infinite Cosmos Calling You, You, You (577 Records, 9 March)
AnD ~ When Stars Collide (Instruments of Discipline, 11 March)
Stumpf ~ Sand (Edelfaul, 12 March)
Celer ~ Engaged Touches (Expanded and Remastered) (15 March)
Elayn ~ Enhiar (Manjam, 15 March)
Kane Pour ~ The Last Wave (sound as language, 15 March)
Michael Vincent Waller ~ Moments Remixes (Play Loud, 15 March)
NAH ~ Totally Recalled (15 March)
Rafi Garabedian ~ The Crazy Dog (15 March)
a. brehme ~ peaou001 (peaou, 16 March)
Andrew Heath & Mi Cosa de Resistance ~ Café Tristesse (Audiobulb, 16 March)
Liberski/Yoshida ~ Troubled Water (Totalism, 21 March)
Ben Chatwin ~ Verdigris (Disinter, 22 March)
Christopher Hoffman ~ Vision is the Identity (Out of Your Head, 22 March)
julien bayle ~ Attractors (Elli, 22 March)
julien bayle ~ void propagate (Elli, 22 March)
LFZ ~ Raveled Veiled Known (22 March)
Menchaca/Noga ~ Activity of Sound (22 March)
MIZU ~ Forest Scenes (NNA Tapes, 22 March)
Ogive ~ Opalecentia (Room40, 22 March)
Ohr Hiemis, Augustin Braud ~ Opal Spine (Wic Records, 22 March)
Ryan Teague ~ Pattern Recognition (Bigo & Twigetti, 22 March)
SAICOBAB ~ NRTYA (Thrill Jockey, 22 March)
Aron Porteleki ~ Smearing (blindblindblind, 23 March)
Arushai Jain ~ Delight (Leaving, 29 March)
Ayumi Ishito ~ Roboquarians, Vol. 1 (577 Records, 29 March)
De Beren Gieren ~ What Eludes Us (Sdban, 29 March)
Farah Kaddour ~ Badā (Asadan Alay, 29 March)
Franck Vigroux ~ Grand Bal (Cyclic Law, 29 March)
Gabriel Vicéns ~ Mural (29 March)
Jinjé ~ Escape from Luna (Mesh, 29 March)
Willy Rodriguez ~ Seeing Sounds (29 March)
Jacob Parke ~ Space Cadet 64 – World Record Nintendogs + Cats Speedrun July 17 (1 April)
A Lily ~ Saru I-Qamar (Phantom Limb, 5 April)
Matthew Shipp Trio ~ New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disc’, 5 April)
sleepmakeswaves ~ It’s Here, But I Have No Name for It (5 April)
Ulrich Krieger ~ Aphotic III: Bathyal (Room40, 5 April)
[Ahmed] ~ Wood Blues (Astral Spirits, 12 April)
9T Antiope ~ Horror Vacui (American Dreams, 12 April)
Teiku ~ S/T (577 Records, 12 April)
Silvia Bolognesi / Dudú Kouate / Griffin Rodriguez ~ Timing Birds (Astral Spirits, 16 April)
Noémi Büchi ~ Does It Still Matter (~OUS, 24 April)
Meat Beat Manifesto & Merzbow ~ Extinct (Cold Spring, 26 April)
Montgomery & Turner ~ Sound Is (Our) Sustenance (Astral Editions, 26 April)