Eli Winter

We only get ten audio clips per post now, so we’ve split the Dust in two. Check out the early alphabet entries here.

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Niecey Blues

Where did the year go?  Seems like only a week or two ago, we were scraping together a list of albums we had somehow missed out on in 2022.  Now we’re about to do it again, I suppose, and the number of misses seems to grow larger every year.  Still, we’re still shoveling away at what 2023 has brought so far—nouveau shoegaze and Vangelis synths, Michigan rap and free-improvised vibraphone.  Check out this month’s Dust, the next to last for 2023, for music you might have overlooked.  Contributors include Jennifer Kelly, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Justin Cober-Lake, Alex Johnson, Jim Marks, Christian Carey, Patrick Masterson and Tim Clarke. 

Like last month, we’ll be doing this in two parts, here’s the second one.

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A rougher, more urgent take on desert blues, this live performance by the Malian guitar hero Bounaly crackles and frays with frantic energy. Put it beside the double-tapping pyrotechnics of Mdou Moctar, and it sounds almost punk. Listen to it after the nodding, swaying grandeur of Tinariwen and feel the adrenaline surge. It’s clearly from the same general West African tradition, but hopped up and aggressively, defiantly joyful. Bounaly has been through a lot to get here—rural isolation, poverty, tribal violence and more. Now it’s Sunday afternoon, relatively calm and in the company of friends. Is it too much to ask that you get up and shake your ass?

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Continuing the trajectory of his releases over the past few years, Daniel Bachman moves further into the world of musique concrete, this time around combining played, found, and manipulated sounds on a laptop. Named for a Carter Family song, the words of which provide the titles for the tracks, When the Roses Come Again is a densely layered and highly detailed recording. Snatches of often heavily treated fretless banjo (sometimes with slide-like effects, as on “Till the roses come again”) and guitar share space with other sounds apparently attributable to a mouth bow (a simple one-stringed instrument for which the mouth serves as a resonator), fiddle, and samples of bells and harmonium, though these are less obvious.

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This double LP refracts and reimagines Iron & Wine’s best-known songs with full, nearly orchestral arrangements realized in the warmth and immediacy of live performance. It’s a superb recap of Sam Beam’s artistic arc so far, but this is much more than a retrospective. Even if you’re a long-time fan, someone who knows all the words, some of these songs will hit differently. Their austere, articulate contours take on new resonance with lavish swoops of strings.  Their familiar words and hooks and licks are jarred into new patterns by the improvisatory agility of Beam’s supporting cast.

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Freedom so often arrives with the magnetic precision of stealth, a small stone in a hailstorm or a knowing word between friends. Maromas, the new collaboration between saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and synthesist Cecilia Lopez, often functions in that communicative sphere, as is the case at 1:43 of “Sentient Pipes.” It all begins as simply as Laubrock accenting one note in a phrase and Lopez emitting a similar pitch. That tone is bandied about like a tennis ball or a beloved phrase, and it’s difficult to tell if Lopez grabbed and modified it or if it was generated in some other synchronous way. Both artists then expand it outward, building rose-petal-fragile but crystal-clear counterpoint from those tiny dialogic pointillisms.

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Airto Moreira & Flora Purim— Airto & Flora - A Celebration: 60 Years - Sounds, Dreams & Other Stories (BBE)

This massive compilation tracks the intertwined careers of two pivotal figures in fusion jazz, offering three hours of music from pioneers Airto Moreira and Flora Purim.

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Photo by Ricardo E. Adame

Ben Baker Billington returns with another installment of exploratory synthesizer tracks as Quicksails. Billington concentrates on texture and produces a knotty often discordant soundscape that probes beneath placid veneers. Wresting form from apparently random collections of sound, Billington uses rhythm as his organizational tool. A mixture of synthetic and live drums flit and flirt with Quicksails’ synth fills, vocal samples and, on three tracks, guest Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone. From aqueous splodges and robotic squiggles, Billington patiently orientates the ear to his internal logic and as you adjust, tracks bloom and spread like kaleidoscopic algae insinuating their way into your consciousness and nesting there.

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Photo by Bret Kaser

On their second album Houndsteeth weave tauntingly simple musical elements into eerily appealing songs where interpersonal relationships aren’t quite as they seem. Grace Ward, Jolee Gordon and Izzy Fonseca prioritize immediacy in their execution, Ward and Gordon’s voices at the forefront, teasing in and out of synch with each other. Guitar, bass, drums and cheap keyboard sounds confidently stake out a playful musical space in which doubt is always lurking at the edges.

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