Daily Drops · Vol.085每日唱片 · Vol.085
A Zimbabwean star and a Bristol post-punk crew, shelved for thirty-five years and only now allowed to speak. 剛把話說清楚，他們轉頭就讓你聽他們怎麼把話想出來。
SML — Spontaneous Music Live
Weeks after releasing their second studio album, HOW YOU BEEN, this Los Angeles quintet put out its inverse: two side-length improvisations, unedited, recorded across a three-night December residency at Zebulon and committed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales. The lineup is a who's-who of the city's improvising class—Anna Butterss on bass, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Jeremiah Chiu on synthesizer, Booker Stardrum on drums, Gregory Uhlmann on guitar. Live improvisation usually ends one of two ways, either collapsing into display or curdling into politeness; SML hold the narrow middle, five players breathing as one organism, nobody grabbing, nobody withdrawing. If the studio record is the band saying something clearly, this is the rarer pleasure of hearing them think it up. My pick of the week.
Tift Merritt — Sugar
Nine years. After 2017's Stitch of the World, Merritt mostly stepped out of the light—raising a daughter, serving as a practitioner-in-residence at Duke, advocating for musicians' rights—and the songs that accrued across that span became Sugar. Lawrence Rothman produced; it was tracked live in Nashville with a cast of ringers (Audley Freed, Robert Ellis, Dr. Dog's Eric Slick). Her voice has always belonged to what The New Yorker once filed under a "proud tradition of distaff country soul," somewhere between Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry; Emmylou Harris called her a diamond in a coal mine. A comeback album is the easiest thing in the world to overplay, all compensatory effort. Sugar does the opposite—loose, warm, proving nothing, the sound of someone no longer in a hurry to be heard.
Aliya Ultan — Looks Far Woman
A solo cello record produced, recorded and mixed by Randall Dunn—the man behind Sunn O))) and Jóhann Jóhannsson—which is reason enough to sit up. The title comes from a figure in Ultan's private mythology, a seer who moves between worlds carrying patience and the medicine of transformation, drawn in part from Jamie Sams' The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers. The six movements are named for wind, road, mountain, sky, seed and heart, but narrative isn't the aim; Ultan writes states rather than stories, treating breath and sustained attention as compositional material and settling on the hypnagogic threshold just shy of sleep. Her cello rarely sings. It rubs, it rings in overtones, it advances on you like a slow change in body temperature. For an hour with the lights off.
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri — Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun
Two seasoned hands at ambient and drone meet for a second time, and the method is the message: rather than book a conventional studio, they spent three days at Berlin's Morphine Raum—a stageless room that is both venue and studio—remaking the music each evening and recording it live to multitrack. The sources are rotary speakers, modular synthesizers and bowed guitar, all routed through a 1970s console; Martina Bertoni's cello and Andrea Burelli's violin and voice surface on a few tracks like light through a seam in cloud. The six titles—the eastern wild, over the domes, a blue descent—read like landscape but behave more like the shape time takes once it's stretched. Pressed on bio-based vinyl. It hurries you nowhere; it simply enlarges the room.
Walrus Ghost — If You Could Be Here Now
Walrus Ghost is the alias of the Brooklyn musician Christian Banks, and this is his second solo full-length, arriving after a stretch of quiet. He records real instruments and then kneads, stretches and sands them with electronics, building a homespun species of post-rock soaked in ambient, folk, lo-fi and a faint mist of late-'90s electronica. The fifteen tracks scan less like an album than a faded home movie—each one short, each one trying to hold onto an afternoon already walking out the door. The title says most of it: this is a record about absence, about filling the empty chair with sound. Out on the reliably tasteful Hush Hush label, run by the KEXP DJ Alex Ruder, on twelve-inch vinyl.
Alden Hellmuth — Tether
The New York alto saxophonist won a German Jazz Prize for her 2024 debut, Good Intentions; this is the follow-up, eight tracks that jam jazz, punk and free improvisation into the same small space and refuse to lower the volume—two basses underneath, Justin Brown driving from the kit. The album's title names its governing idea: however far the music scatters or detonates, a tether always pulls the players back to one another, and back to the listener. That anchoring is exactly what makes it wear better than most "avant-garde jazz"; the chaos has a mooring. Out on LEITER, the label Nils Frahm co-founded, on limited vinyl. The titles bite, too—"Microfictions," "Definitely Not Friends," "Supply Chain"—a musician writing contemporary nerves straight into the horn.
Biggie Tembo & Startled Insects — House of Stone
A reel left in a drawer for more than three decades. Biggie Tembo was the former frontman of the Bhundu Boys, the great Zimbabwean jit band; in the late 1980s, having left the group, he relocated from Harare to Bristol and cut this material in Startled Insects' studio, after which the whole project was quietly shelved. Zimbabwe's bright, scalding guitar lines collide with the exploratory edge of Bristol post-punk, four musicians playing freely and ignoring the question of what genre this is supposed to be. Tembo died in 1995, never seeing it released. Bristol Archive now presses it to two hundred copies of vinyl—the kind of belated meeting that usually gets turned into a nostalgia specimen, except this one was alive all along, only now permitted to make a sound.
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