For the Record: November 1, 2024.
Ace Bandage, Christopher Trapani, and more new arrivals and upcoming releases.
For the Record rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community: contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined, on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.
This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts, Â and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)
These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! To submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, email information to nightafternight@icloud.com.
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not express the views of any employer.
Topspin.
This is not a Bandcamp Friday. The next one is December 6. But your favorite artists, bands, and independent labels are still putting out new projects worth your attention—and they can use a bit of extra help ahead of the holidays, too.
Me, I’ve just acquired the complete-ish recordings of Brooklyn post-punk jam band Ace Bandage – 12 recordings for the princely sum of $20.80 – prompted by the newly released all-improvs collection, A.I. Can’t Jam. I learned about this young quartet via Ambient Audiophile, the newsletter operated by one of my most trusted sources for psychedelia, prog, and ambient musics, Jeff Conklin, who also curates the consistently enriching radio program The Trailhead.
I say complete-ish because Ace Bandage is a group disposed toward an almost implausibly broad range of cover songs, which they avoid in their Bandcamp releases; instead, they provide links to the Internet Archive, where pretty much all of their shows to date are posted in full. It’s a generous bounty, but also a cautionary tale since the Archive is slowly crawling back from a catastrophic cyberattack. Evidently all of those shows are available to stream again via the site’s WinAmp embeds—but this calamity underscored why storing recordings locally – both free giveaways and purchases – is simply the best solution.
Noise Uprising, the new release from New Orleans-based composer Christopher Trapani on the venerable yet ceaselessly enterprising New World label, is an astonishing creation. Trapani’s bio spells out his interests in a variety of techniques, and sources: consonance, microtonality, just intonation, Delta blues, shoegaze guitar, Turkish makam. You could chalk it up to eclecticism, but Trapani has something more syncretic in mind.
From Bandcamp (emphasis added):
The inspiration for Christopher Trapani’s (b. 1980) new song cycle is Michael Denning’s book Noise Uprising, which chronicles the explosion of vernacular recording that took place in the late 1920s in port cities around the globe. The historical 78 rpm records of this era are the not-so-silent witnesses of the birth of son, jazz, samba, rembetiko, fado, tango, etc. They reveal a kind of B-side of music history, a people’s history of music-making driven by the bustling marketplaces of colonial port cities. Noise Uprising (2024) is a polystylistic atlas that unravels a subterranean, cross-cultural network far away from, and with a wider reach than, traditional concert halls.
My enthusiasm admittedly is based on a single flabbergasted listen and another in progress as I type this. But my response is profound and visceral… there are beautiful, moving songs here, as well as delirious disorientations that remind me of the guerilla ethnomusicology practiced by Sublime Frequencies contributors like Mark Gergis on I Remember Syria. I look forward to spending more quality time with this album—and I also need to locate my copy of Denning’s book.
Erratum: Nov. 2, 2024.
When I sent this newsletter out yesterday, it included an enthusiastic endorsement of a new archival release by saxophonist and composer Tim Berne titled What’s the Worst That Can Happen? Seems that title was a self-fulfilling prophecy: an error in identifying a source tape resulted in the unintentional duplication of a previously released performance—to be specific, a selection from the 1996 release Unwound. Berne has posted regrets for the error; allow me to add mine for amplifying it. (The performance is as fiery as I claimed, regardless.)
New this week.
Bang/Duch/Honoré/Toop/Wastell - Wunderkammer (Confront)
Florence Cats - We are now approaching Mo i Rana (Hitorri)
Dave Douglas - Gifts Trio Live (Greenleaf Music; subscriber exclusive)
Limpe Fuchs/Mark Fell - Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch (Black Truffle)
Florian Hecker - Resynthese FAVN (Blank Forms Editions)
Catherine Christer Hennix - Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord (Blank Forms)
Pierre Henry - Labyrinthe ! (Recollection GRM)
Taizo Hida - The Rain Traces Its Outline (Ftarri Classical)
Taizo Hida - Yunagi (Ftarri Classical)
Ken Ikeda/Roger Turner - an Asura in Spring (Ftarri)
The Jazzmen (featuring Joe McPhee) - Nineteen Sixty-Six (Corbett vs. Dempsey; recorded 1966)
David T. Little - Dark Hymnal (Cantaloupe Music)
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė - ALETHEIA: Choral Works - Latvian Chamber Choir/Sigvards Kļava (Ondine)
Roberta Michel - Hush - compositions by Jane Rigler, Victoria Cheah, Jen Baker, Mert Mert Morali, and Angélica Negrón (New Focus)
Berke Can Özcan & Jonah Parzen-Johnson - It Was Always Time (We Jazz)
Bernard Parmegiani & François Bayle - Divine Comédie (Recollection GRM)
Dan Román - DVXNS - Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Neuma)
Sachiko M - Sine Wave Solo at Ftarri 2022 (Hitorri)
Elliott Sharp - Mandorle: New Music for Mandolin (Zoar)
Tomin - A Willed and Conscious Balance (International Anthem)
Christopher Trapani - Noise Uprising - Sophia Burgos, Sofia Jernberg, Zwerm (New World)
Drew Whiting - All In - compositions. by Drew Whiting, Pamela Z, John Mayrose, and Yaz Lancaster (Neuma)
Works (Michel Gentile, Daniel Kelly, Rob Garcia) - Scouring for the Elements (Connection Works)
Upcoming releases.
November 8
Mattie Barbier - paper blown between the spaces in my ribs (Dinzu Artefacts)
Moons (Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, Katie Porter, Christine Tavolacci) - Moons (Editions Verde)
Aki Onda - 99 Cent Dreams (Dinzu Artefacts)
November 11
Rob Mazurek Quartet - Color Systems (RogueArt)
November 15
Dan Lippel - Adjacence - compositions by Dan Lippel, Mario Davidovsky, Ken Ueno, Peter Gilbert, Nico Muhly, Tonia Ko, Peter Adriaansz, Tyshawn Sorey, Carl Schimmel, Sidney Marquez Boquiren, Tania León, Bernadette Speach, and Charles Wuorinen (New Focus)
November 21
Mariska Baars/Niki Jansen/Rutger Zuydervelt - Hardanger (laaps)
November 29
Abdou - Gouband - Warelis - Hammer, Roll and Leaf (Relative Pitch)
Dan Blacksberg - The Psychic/Body Sound System (Relative Pitch)
Ornella Noulet - Promise of Faithfulness (Relative Pitch)
Ryoko Ono - The Days (Relative Pitch)
December 6
Blessed are the Hearts that Bend - A gentle death/a sudden birth (Spectral Industries)
Ju-Ping Song - Monad - compositions by Lois V. Vierk, Molly Joyce, Kate Moore, and Rahilia Hasanova (Starkland)
December 13
Sophie Agnel, Michael Zerang - Draw Bridge (Relative Pitch)
December 15
Giuliano d’Angiolini - )))((( (Elsewhere)
January 10
Philip Glass - Aguas da Amazonia - Constance Volk, Third Coast Percussion (Rockwell)
January 17
James McVinnie - Dreamcatcher - compositions by Nico Muhly, Meredith Monk, Laurie Spiegel, John Adams, inti figgis-vizueta, Gabriella Smith, Giles Swayne, Bryce Dessner, and Marcos Balter (Pentatone)
February 21
Jules Reidy - Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.