Will Guthrie—Nist Nah

Of all the genres which fall under the dubious umbrella of “world music”, gamelan is perhaps the most popular. Gamelan itself is a style too big for one word, ranging from an ecstatic, traditional Javanese playing to a more furious contemporary Balinese. With Nist Nah, Will Guthrie tries his (presumably enormous) hand at Javanese gamelan, largely leaving the ordered chaos of his kit-based releases behind.

It’s an obvious match—Guthrie and gamelan carry convergent aims. There’s a hypnotic element to both; repetition which, koan-like, induces a break; a simultaneous order and disorder; but, above all, an overwhelming physicality. In listening, you can imagine every metallophone being hammered. While Nist Nah wears this effort on its sleeve, Guthrie does not do so to self-aggrandise or peacock. He instead shares a journey of discovery with the listener, the presence of which does not disrupt or diminish the work on the album.

And while none of this is hugely unfamiliar ground for the drummer—the ambient, droning, bell-packed atmosphere of Javanese gamelan is all through his 2012 track “Stones”—here, it is made much more prominent. The scattered thunder of Guthrie’s regular playing takes a back seat and is relegated, for the most part, to interludes like the frictional “Lit 1+2”. And with greater prominence comes greater extremity. “Elders” is such a muted track it could be one of the controlled soundscapes of Jacob Kirkegaard’s Four Rooms.

Guthrie closes Nist Nah with a gamelan learning exercise “Kebogiro Glendeng”, which feels effortlessly pulled off. It’s the polar opposite of Guthrie’s previous work, though. There is no sense whatsoever of the usual clattering improv—instead, a single phrase is repeated for its trance-inducing duration. Rather than build and crescendo, the piece abstracts itself, diminishing into a great reverberant wash that then gently fades. That it comes off so naturally is testament to Guthrie’s skill as a musician.

Nist Nah is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Salo Panto—Bait

Salo Panto are from Portland, Oregon—but their sound is such a patchwork of influences that it becomes stateless. But rather than diminish, this bestows them volatility and mystique. Bait stuffs its twenty-five minutes with surprises, never content to settle despite leaning into its repetitious grooves with full force. These divergent sounds rally into an irresistible whole. It's both bright and muggy at the same time; swamp mist ablaze with morning sunlight.

The best illustration of this is ‘Bait’, the EP’s title track. We begin with an unassuming, jangly guitar line which—over the course of seven expertly-executed minutes—transforms into a gargantuan riff. Nothing has changed, yet everything has. It’s reminiscent of post-revival Swans, who use repetition to bludgeon listeners into a trance. And, like Swans, Salo Panto expertly combine styles. ‘Bait’ is a cocktail of Savages-esque post-punk and freewheeling prog which somehow feels natural.

More influences can be felt elsewhere. The chorus of ‘Impatient Machine’ (“You’re so impatient machine”) feels built around Fall-like nonsense poetry which, unlike the work of M.E.S., does resolve into clear meaning. If there is one criticism to be made of Salo Panto, it’s this attachment to meaning. Lyrics can tend to the overt, the rational, even the didactic.

But to say that Salo Panto are nowhere near as radical as the Fall is moot—no band can be. They do exhibit a control and a collaborative spirit, though, which the enormity of M.E.S.’s ego always chased a hundred miles from any Fall release.

And it’s this control which is Salo Panto's ace in the hole. Without it, rock groups can loosen, rattle free of their own concept, and descend into jam-band dick-measuring. But on Bait, solos and meaty drum fills service the listener and the rest of the band—not just the one playing.

Bait is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Rrose—Hymn to Moisture

Rrose’s style is both familiar and inimitable. His similarity to associates SØS Gunver Ryberg and Paula Temple anchors a dark sound shot through with very individual mastery. The prolific producer has made waves with a long series of EPs, mixes and live sets (I was introduced to Electronique.it Podcast 153 by a friend), but Hymn to Moisture is his first solo full-length effort.

Rrose’s ability to maintain interest over the course of an hour was never in question—but this album is, nevertheless, a gladly-received gift. Stand-out track ‘Bandage’ is Rrose’s modus operandi compressed into a lean six minutes. The track switches between eerie ambience and severe, sawtoothed chaos. It’s a balanced piece which manages both to relieve and provoke anxiety. Somehow, two opposing modes muscle each other on and off stage without the music feeling indecisive or half-cooked.

These grand washes undulate through the album as a whole, as wired and woozy intertwine. Hymn to Moisture is self-disruptive in a gratifying way. It’s hard to believe something as industrial as ‘Columns’ sits in the same album as the lush ‘Horizon’. Stranger still is that Rrose pulls it off with what feels like minimal effort.

Just as with Ryberg’s Entangled last year, there is a stunning evocation of mood, technical mastery, and transcendence beyond the label of techno. But that’s always the mark of good music: being unable to put the thing into words without feeling reductive. In a way, that’s the point, isn’t it? Music is a medium through which we explore areas of the extra-linguistic, extra-symbolic, and uncategorisable—but not everyone does it with as much style as this.

Hymn to Moisture is available for purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Nada Surf—Never Not Together

Hunchback’s 2019 album Heavens Above describes Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper as “…an outsider because of how together he has it.” Cooper, the album argues, opposes our notion of the outsider. The archetype is a tortured Sisyphean, perpetually reliving their own failures. Cooper is, for the most part, exactly when and where he needs to be; a duck whose feet invisibly massage the current.

It’s been made no secret of—we live in a fraught and divided time. Our general response has tended to “oh dearism”; an acceptance that something is vaguely wrong, and an accompanying inability to qualify causes or formulate solutions. Ubiquity fathers absence, though. The more pervasive this depressive artistic mode is, the easier (and more necessary) it’s become to ignore.

Nada Surf’s Never Not Together crystallises a worrying fact. Cooper has company—the outsiders are now the happy ones.

On first listen, Never Not Together feels confrontationally uncool; espousing platitudinal lines like, “live and learn and forget”, and smashing out feelgood riffs straight from the Dinosaur Jr. songbook. But this speaks more to a cultural phenomenon than it typifyies Nada Surf’s songwriting. The 70s were, or so I’ve been told, an almost unspeakably difficult decade to live though. Yet those years brought us disco, funk, and afrobeat; genres which approached hardship and social injustice with a defiant spirit; a call for unity, for love, for healing. It’s what Idles more recently called Joy as an Act of Resistance.

Happiness is increasingly conflated with cheese. The world’s moneymen profit off kid misery. But Nada Surf present an opportunity to give the powers that be the finger, listen to something shamelessly chintzy, and fucking enjoy yourself for once. We’re all in this together—that shouldn’t be such a lonely admission to make.

The first track from the new Nada Surf album 'Never Not Together' available February 7, 2020. Pre order now: https://nadasurf.lnk.to/nevernottogether Animated and edited by Jonny Sanders follow the youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/nadasurf http://www.nadasurf.com https://www.facebook.com/NadaSurf/ https://twitter.com/nadasurf https://www.instagram.com/nadasurf_official/

Never Not Together is released on 7th of February. Pre-order available here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Abronia—The Whole of Each Eye

Roger Ebert once described the setting of Westerns as a landscape “where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends”. It’s no surprise, then, that the machismo of rock music so often finds itself there. Carlos Santana is the most well-known desert rocker, but its practitioners are too numerous to list. Something about the open spaces, the resonant canyons of the American frontier, invite a sound loud enough to fill them.

These things are always a balancing act—what may sound legendary to its performers can play as ludicrous to a crowd. But with The Whole of Each Eye, Abronia prove themselves to be up to the task. They achieve, but do not insist upon their own vastness. The band also incorporate a huge number ideas from unlikely sources, avoiding the anonymity of all those other grains of sand out there.

More so than Santana, Abronia resemble Malinese Tuareg band Tinariwen. Songs are driven by similarly hypnotic guitar-work and plodding beats that feel like they’re accompanying a caravan of travellers. Occasionally the pace increases for a Krautrock-inflected sojourn—such as on opener ‘Wound Site’—and the result is an apocalyptic treat; the climate-change-era Can. The sparsity of these moments, these oases of stormy weather in an arid world, underlines and emboldens them.

This confluence of styles paints Abronia’s desert as the desert of our future: a culturally amorphous landscape defined by long-forgotten traditions, the artefacts of which can be exhumed from the sand and assembled in new and exciting ways.

The Whole of Each Eye is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe