OUT OF THE BOX #16
Sly & The Family Drone + Dead Neanderthals / Mai Mai Mai (2018)
Out of the Box is an irregular series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.
OUT OF THE BOX #16
Sly & The Family Drone + Dead Neanderthals / Mai Mai Mai – Flesh Logics / Anatole (2018)
This split seven inch is the tenth and final installment in the second volume of God Unknown Records’ Singles Club series. Previous installments in volume 2 include Thor & Friends and Woven Skull, Father Murphy and Grumbling Fur, and Charles Hayward and Tomaga. There have been 4 volumes so far in this subscription-only Singles Club, and with the most recent series ending in 2021, it may be over for good. Despite being a subscription series limited to about 200 copies, most of the installments can still be found for reasonable cost on Discogs.
I love a good subscription series, like Temporary Residence Ltd’s Travels in Constants. There’s something beautiful about trusting a label and being surprised by each installment, by being more willing to listen with an open mind. Splits are often great for this as well, being blown away by a surprise b-side or an unknown artist. Now that said, I don’t live in Europe and int’l shipping being what it is, I was never actually a subrsriber to God Unknown Records’ Singles Club, but instead picked up a copy directly from Toni Cutrone (Mai Mai Mai) himself while interviewing him in his apartment in Pigneto in Rome in early 2019, as featured in this episode of Sound Propositions.
For this edition, God Unknown brings together three contemporary European psychedelic artists for a wild trip. Mai Mai Mai delivers more of his deep bass tribal take on Mediterranean music on the b-side. The a-side, on the other hand, brings together two groups from northern Europe. North London “neo-jazz wreckin' crew” Sly & The Family Drone are joined by "New Wave of Dutch Heavy Jazz" duo Dead Neanderthals, in effect doubling the drums and sax over which Sly vocalist Matt Cargill adds his electronically-abstracted vocals. I last mentioned Sly in my December 2024 mini-review marathon, praising their LP Moon is Doom Backwards for its patient restraint and James Allsopp’s scene-stealing reeds, for fans of sludgy rock, skronking jazz, and free form but grooving psychedelia.
DN first came on my radar when they collaborated with Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) as DNMF for a self-titled record (2014) and later Smelter (2018), both on Moving Furniture Records. I appreciated how Otto Kokke & René Aquarius’ saxophone and drums added some meat to Machinefabriek’s electronic abstractions, leading me to explore their own catalog, which while a duo project is full of collaborators. Zuydervelt also designed the packaging for DN’s Prime (2014), which I own in a beloved cassette format, and which also features improvisor Colin Webster on baritone sax. DN’s latest, Other Worlds, has just been released and features more of saxophonist Otto Kokke incorporating synths. DN had also previously released Split with Sly in 2016, and joined forces for a proper collab uniting the two ensembles, 2017’s Molar Wrench LP.
“Flesh Logics,” the a-side on this seven inch, thus sounds like it could have been from those same sessions. While the tunes on Molar Wrench often sound intense and saturated walls of drone and skronk, “Flesh Logics,” while no less heavy, leaves more space to breath, allowing the doubling of the drums and sax to be felt. At just over 6 minutes in length, the ensembles have room to vamp out, deconstructing their tower of sound on the second half, as the wailing sax gradually drops out, then the supporting drone sax, leaving us with nothing but a circular drum pattern. Solid stuff, not quite on the level of the material on Molar Wrench but a nice track that stands on its own.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given my inclinations, I find the b-side to be more engaging. Born in Calabria in the deep South of Italy, and raised around the Mediterranean before becoming a key figure in the Roma Est scene of the 2000s, Toni Cutrone’s Mai Mai Mai project channels Mediterranean waves of occultism and fragmentary history into a ritualistic sound bath, complete with costumed performances. “Anatole” points us towards the Eastern Mediterranean, a track which begins to build itself up only to fall apart several times, its broken mechanical-cum-tribal beats dropping away and coming back, a tension that is heightened by Cutrone’s deep bass and hissing hi end. The rhythms become increasingly more insistent, building to a crescendo at the six minute mark rather than simply fading away. A beautiful addition to Mai Mai Mai’s strong catalog. Recommended.