As we stumble towards the end of the year, as the day light hours slim to almost nothing, we bring you a selection of albums that we’ve not had time to cover in detail. Reviews by Andrew Bowman (AB) Matt Poacher (MP), Rich Hughes (RH) and Scott McMillan (SM).

Archers By The Sea – Aloah! (Solid Melts)

A single, twenty minute track, that touches a multitude of genres, is the latest release by the enigmatic French artist Archers By The Sea. A mood of swirling psychedelia prevails and, I’m not sure if the name itself puts the images in my head, but I imagine ‘Aloah!’ to be a journey through a seaside town. The twinkle of opening synth’s that are gently cajoled by a guitar riff are the sound of small waves breaking on pebbles. Walking on, the sound of amusement arcades ringing their wares comes into focus, not completely trill and threatening, but a coaxing hand to come in and try your luck. The sun illuminates all and baths you in a pleasant heat, each footstep another chord finely coaxed into existence, the hushed vocals shimmering like a heat haze on the horizon. It’s then you turn a corner and are greeted by the sound of a church organ, hanging on a passing breeze. A clipped beat that takes over as your walk finds you entering an urban environment again. The spoken vocals coming at you like hearing snatched conversations on the street. The music plays with memories and causes you to fall back in time, of finding places where the music makes sense. ‘Aloah!’ is an amazingly vivid sequence of music – invigorating, inspiring and a way of wallowing in that perfect place between imagination and memory. (RH)

Na Hawa Doumbia – La Grande Cantatrice Malienne (Awesome Tapes From Africa)

For their first LP release, the diggers from mp3 blog Awesome Tapes From Africa have somehow excavated a formative 1982 recording from the now much more famous Malian singer Na Hawa Doumbia (online biographies generally give a much later date for her first release). And what treasure they have unearthed here. Opening track “Ko Ro Dia” is one of the most irresistible things I’ve heard all year, with soft acoustic guitars getting into a quietly hypnotic post-Highlife groove, and remaining there, with little further embellishment, for ten very enjoyable minutes. Doumbia’s voice interacts with the rhythm quite beautifully, and with a rawness which, given her age, can not only be forgiven, but in fact adds to the sense that this is an expression of uncontainable youthful energy, and undeniable talent. Truly wonderful. (SM)

Kieran Hebden, Steve Reid and Mats Gustafsson – Live At The Southbank (Smalltown Superjazzz)

To go to the effort of releasing something with such substandard recording quality, you’d hope the event in question was something quite pivotal, and the usually excellent Scandinavian label Smalltown Superjazzz should have realised that this was no Albert Ayler Live in Stockholm.  By the time of his re-engagement with improvised music in the middle of the last decade, the late Steve Reid was, to be honest, some way past his polyrhythmic best, content to hang out on a cymbal or kick drum for an age, rather than attempt anything too taxing. However, this now more limited range made him suited to be the straight guy in a pairing with Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, which took some of the tools of jazz, and built a form of dance music with them. So you get the same rhythmic builds and drops that you’d get from a basic house track, but with added bursts of skronky noise, and greatly extended track lengths. Mats Gustafsson, who joined them for this gig at London’s South Bank, took twenty minutes to play a note – he claims to have been enjoying it too much, but I’d wager he was struggling with the limited potential the music unfolding in front of him was offering. If you haven’t got a copy of Reid’s magnificent Nova LP already, skip this and buy that instead for evidence of just how good he was at his peak. (SM)

High Places – Original Colours (Thrill Jockey)

Another album of experimental electro-disco from the New York duo of High Places. Based around the ethereal vocals of Mary Pearson, High Places, rather than just making a noise of electronics, base their sound around disco beats and juddering synth’s creating a weird music that, on one hand, makes you want to oscillate wildly, and on the other, crawl up and hide from their mean and dark riffs. Album opener ‘Year Off’ sets the tone perfectly – the beats drive the rhythm deep into your body whilst Pearson’s vocals move over the top, twisting and moving like an arc of lightning. A thick and dense groove, that’s quickly becoming their trademark sound, takes over on ‘The Pull’, the bass working overtime as it continually drags and pulls the more delicate sounds into its swamp-like sound. There’s a dub-styled flow to ‘Morning Ritual’ that folds back on itself until it disappears. It’s the final track of ‘Altos Lugares’ that perfectly surmises High Places though – a tropical beat charges beneath a thick groove as Pearson’s vocals flirt between crackling calls and submerged chants. The song full of little dashes of sound that waltz across the stage before exiting, never to be heard again. High Places reflect the sound of the world at the interface between these urban and rural environments. It’s this mesh of organic and electronic noises that creates such an evocative and interesting music. (RH)

C Joynes – Congo (Bo’Weavil)

There’s always a danger with attributing a mood or set of psychological circumstances to an author or musician, but the allure is always there. And with Congo, it’s hard not to feel a real sense of openness and positivity about Chris Joynes – it’s easily his most expansive record, and in places it fizzes with energy and seems to force itself up against the limits of its possibilities. Listening back to Anglo-Naive And Contemporary Parlour Guitar Vol. I and 2009’s Revenants, Prodigies and the Restless Dead there’s a feeling of listening to studies or miniatures in comparison – there’s the same fizzing vitality and hints of invention, but those albums simply don’t have the same ambition. Layered onto Joynes’s signature guitar technique are viola, kalimba, harmonium a homemade mbira, and despite the rudimentary recording techniques, it all sounds very lush. Which isn’t to say that that a sense of scale has been lost – the tracks here still have the meticulous sense of being worked up and there is still that odd sense of dislocation about certain tracks (particularly on something like ‘Ghosts of the Field’ or ‘Joseph in the Sea of Corn’) where you’re reminded that Joynes has a an implicit understanding of the structural timelessness of the tradition: the references to the past aren’t knowing nods or updates but ghostings. Congo is his best album yet and the future looks very exciting. (MP)

The Living Room – Still Distant Still (ILK)

There is an obvious dichotomy here: the name of this new Scandinavian jazz trio hints at late period Coltrane, while the title of the album suggests that they are in a very different space. While improvisation lies at the heart of what saxophonist Torben Snekkestad, percussionist Thomas Strønen, and pianist Soren Kjaergaard do, for the most part, their’s is a quiet, studied and contemplative interaction, in which individual sounds are allowed to resonate, and to invite response, but they occasionally break free of these restraints to create something more complex. Strønen is only occasionally on his high energy Humcrush/Food form here, but instead creates delicately shifting arrays of clicks and dings and beeps, long notes and more textural smears from Kjaergaard and Snekkestad seeping into the gaps. However, he two-part “Twining” unravels into something pleasingly frayed, however, the pianist picking at the edges with some sharp Cecil Taylor-esque runs, and the saxophonist cutting in with his extended technique. It reconstitutes finally, the record ending with some soft multiphonics and butterfly-light percussion. A slightly schizophrenic, if never less than interesting, debut. (SM)

Locrian – The Clearing (Fan Death)

Another slab of diseased, blackened noise from Locrian in what is becoming quite a catalogue of releases. Moving on from last year’s loose Ballard homage The Crystal World and the split with Horseback from earlier this year, The Clearing is a strange beast, that hints at great sonic depths but in places feels oddly thinned out and anemic. That said, they are masters at creating and sustaining a seething, ominous atmosphere, and even on ‘Coprolite’ (which I have to confess, is a little underwhelming for a track named after fossilized shit), there is something unwell lurking beneath the surafce sheen of guitars. Plus on a track like ‘Augury In An Evaporating Tower’, with its mix of fierce black metal passages, buried shrieking fire and warped electronics there is enough invention and momentum to fill an entire album, and the title track builds from a morass of soft, swirling, unnameable noise into something brooding and huge – so much so that you wish it had continued its journey out. (MP)

Minamo – Documental (Room40)

With a name like that, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Minamo are, well, rather minimal. They are, however, also rather good. The Japanese quartet of Keiichi Sugimoto, Yuichiro Iwashita, Namiko Sasamoto and Tetsuro Yasunaga, make a gorgeous haze of sound, something vaguely jazz-like, loosely folkish, subtly electronic: the closest comparison I can think of would be the Swedish group Tape. For their first release proper on Lawrence English’s Room40, Minamo have  created  suite of instrumentals which unfolds with the pace and beauty of an autumn sunset. Indeed, listening to “Draw The Line” is like falling asleep under red skies amongst crickets in a cornfield, a steady piano pulse nestling amongst digital chirrup, flecks of guitar floating through on a cool breeze. (SM)

Maurizio Ravalico / Isambard Khroustaliov – The Resurfacing Of An Atavistic Trait (Not Applicable)

There may be a new Icarus album (or hundreds of different Icarus albums, if you look at it that way) due out in the new year, but the duo’s Sam Britton, aka Isambard Khroustaliov, has been keeping himself rather busy in the mean time. After a pairing with guitarist Phillipe Pannier, and the live debut of a couple of pieces written for the London Sinfonietta, comes another, more familiar, twosome. This is the resurfacing of his duo with the improvising percussionist Maurizio Ravalico, some five years after their last release. As before, their creative dialogue involves Khroustaliov manipulating and playing back the sounds that Ravalico is making, giving him something new to respond to. Given that when I’ve seen him live, Ravalico’s palette was already extended to include all manner of unexpected instrumentation (kitchen appliances, amongst others), by the time Khroustaliov has finished with him, the results are pretty far out, extraterrestial even. “The Heavy Breathing Of A Huge Dormant Monster” takes off amidst alien chatter, before it lands on an inhospitable planet, brushed and scraped percussion being corralled into dark, grainy clouds, while “The Leisurely Exploration Of A Karstic Area” has an electronic whine which sounds like the stridulation of robotic crickets. The frivolity of the titles, as ever, belies a seriousness of approach, and across these unusual sonic terrains I find enough moments here of intelligent interaction, close encounters if you will, to make this a most unearthly pleasure. (SM)

Rob St. John – Weald (Song By Toad)

There’s a fractured, lost and ancient air to Rob St. John’s debut full-length release on the Song By Toad label. The songs are simply arranged – delicate guitar work weaves around shuffling dreams beats as John’s anguished vocals creak over the top. His voice sounds like its been around for years and lived a life that’s not, entirely, been kind. You can hear the pain and sorrow in every breath he takes. Stand out track is ‘Sargasso Sea’ which flows and moves like the currents that drive the real thing. The guitar riff, stripped back, raw and deep, reminds me of something Talk Talk would have used, an instrument in perfect harmony with the crooked vocals and jazz-tinged drums, John’s delivery so matter of fact that the words slam in your face: “I was an Island… a stripped and empty room”. This song sums up the feeling of isolation and desolation that runs through the album – a feeling of struggling through life by ones self, struggling to connect with people and places. This might not be the easiest listen of 2011, but it is one of the standout pieces – this kind of intensity isn’t easily written and recorded and should be championed as something truly great. (RH)

Pete Swanson – Man With Potential (Type)

Where most revisions of techno and dance music tend to deconstruct and put the listener at a slight distance from the action, ‘Misery Beat’, the opener of Man With Potential, places you right inside the sweaty warehouse. Then Pete Swanson sets the place on fire. He’s probably crying. The inviting acidic bleeps that start things off begin to collide with each other forming blisters over the four-to-the-floor beat, hardcore rave chords present themselves in a distressed, charred form. As an ex-member of duo Yellow Swans, Swanson is well acquainted with noise and knows how to manipulate it. Here he brings out the visceral potential of analogue fuzz, guitar and synth squall, mapping it onto insistent pulses in an apparently intuitive fashion, albeit one that’s missing from many of the noise underground’s dalliances with the beat. And when the groove takes a backseat, emotions remain feverish and frayed throughout. Yet for all its intensity, Man With Potential bludgeons with astonishing grace and beauty. (AB)

Three Cane Whale – s/t (Idyllic Records)

There’s nothing like the sound of a great group of musicians coming together under a new and fresh banner. In the case of Three Cane Whale, we’ve even got some cross-genre fertilisation thrown into the mix for good measure. Mandolin and music box fancier Alex Vann (part of the excellent experimental folk group Spiro) joins forces with trumpeter Pete Judge (player with BBC Jazz Award-winners Get The Blessing) and guitarist Paul Bradley (behind the highly regarded Bristol band Organelles). That list certainly hints and some strong possibilities. The album was recorded live in an eleven hour stint at an 18th Century church in Bristol last summer, and sounds wonderfully alive and organic, even down to the occasionally bought of birdsong caught in the mix. The music itself is a jazz-tinged folk blend, mainly driven by Judge’s spirited trumpet playing that flirts with the other instruments, the guitar and music box ultimately second best, but doing their utmost to get its attention – not quite shouting “me, me, me”, but in a more refined and controlled manner. Each of the twenty pieces played here flow into one another, common notes and refrains frequently appearing and acting as a singular thread through the entire album. Because of this it’s impossible to pick out individual tracks, the organic drift of the music all enveloping. Ultimately, the experimental directions of all three composers might be slightly dialled down, there is a certain comfortable air that hangs over the record, but it does show three individuals not just at the height of their writing powers, but also their playing powers as well. (RH)

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