The Five music thing again for whatever it might be worth. Five? Again? Already? Five more? Maybe Six? Do we need a new editorial yet? Is there a point? Is there any point? Was there ever? What do points make? Again and again and again (and again). Five more, same as last time (and the time before) five (or six) more musical things and yeah, we did say all this last week and the weeks before and blah blah blah while the whole world window and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding and all that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter and like we did ask last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? Cut to the chase, we could just cut ‘n paste the editorial from the last time, there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut to the damn chase, who needs an editorial? Who needs any of this? Who needs it, who needs it, Cynical who? Same what every day? Here’s your five for today

Five musical things then, just how good were Hidden People last time around….

1: Pili Coït – “Guilhem Meier, river noisemaker and octopus drummer at PoiL, PinioL, uKanDanZ and LFant + Jessica Martin Maresco, strings rolled to the four corners of the tongue at Le Grand Sbam, Saddam Webcam, and most recently EZ3kiel.” More from the ever excellent Dur Et Deux label, the new album might be a little more stripped down than 2017’s excellent Pink Noise, but I kind of like this year’s lo-fi approach, hear more on their Bandcamp, you don’t need our words, you have ears, hearts and hopefully working eyeballs. “Immersion in a corrosive and comforting napalm. These two adventurers of the Velvetian underground invite us in their intimacy, by proposing a purified and rich music, which has of “Low-fi” only the contours…”

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2 Black Country, New Road and a second taste of things ot come, Taken from the album ‘Ants From Up There’, released 04 February 2022 on Ninja Tune, it is rather sounding like the second album will as good as the first – ORGAN THING: Have Black Country, New Road just hit us with what could be the best album of 2021?. More details of Bread Song here

3: Kristine Leschper – “Ribbon” by Kristine Leschper from the album ‘The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door’, available March 4, 2022, more details once again

“I found myself wanting to explore love songs, and this is really the framework of “The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door”,” says Leschper. “‘Ribbon’ is a love song that holds a certain tension — it is the taut line of attempting to read the intentions of another, built with imagery of opposing materialities: a knife meets a ribbon, asking for a kind of vulnerability. A suggestion of something new emerging at this intersection.”

“The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door” is a paean to the sensory world. It’s the first Leschper has released under her given name, having retired the moniker Mothers after eight years of performing and releasing music under it. Though both projects are guided by Leschper’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting, they couldn’t sound more different. While Mothers drew inspiration from the stark, skeletal sounds of post-punk and contemporary folk, Leschper’s new work is practically baroque, integrating an array of synthesizers, strings, woodwinds, and over a dozen percussive instruments.

Of the video Leschper says “This was my first experience writing and directing a video, as well as designing and fabricating the set. I wanted to play with the perceived reality or unreality of a space, using an absolute economy of materials. When does an environment begin to lose its “realness” and slip into the imaginary? There’s something interesting in the posturing of lip sync in music videos — I wanted to throw the microphone out of frame, as if to say: this is not a real performance, it is a performance of a performance, it’s pantomime! This is not a table, it is a painting of a table! Objects come and go, shifting between hard and soft, flat and dimensional, in a setting that provides little more than an abstraction of interior space.”

ABOUT “THE OPENING, OR CLOSING OF A DOOR”:

Out of chaos, the universe emerged, and from chaos a person can emerge, too. Kristine Leschper isn’t being hyperbolic when she describes a sensation of “being born” when a culmination of events, both personal and global, catalyzed in her “an understanding of how to relinquish control in a big way, and from that, a new sense of connectedness, transition, and impermanence.” She explains her desire to cultivate work in the spirit of the New World Poets, where in the words of June Jordan there exists “a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and of unity.”

“Earlier work didn’t involve recording as part of the writing process, recordings were simply made as a document of something that had been written and rehearsed. I have since discovered a deep affection for home recording and sound exploration, finding that I thrive in those rabbit holes of texture, timbre, rhythm, which can add so much complexity to the emotionality of a composition.”

The at-home recording process gave Leschper freedom to set her personal ethos to music divorced from the pressure of an audience. As she worked on “The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door”, the constellation of ideas that had guided her personal transformation began to cohere into something communicable through music. “My pleasure lives in the poetics of democracy — in the liberatory words of June Jordan, in the humanitarian performances of Bread and Puppet Theatre. Puppetry, like poetry, is a distillation of complex ideas into absolute essentials. With these songs, I wanted to explore themes of longing, encouragement, connectedness, these things that are both straightforward and complex, ubiquitous and vital. It is the foundation of our personal lives that extends broadly into our political lives. I wondered, what might a love song to my friends look like? What might a love song to myself look like?”

“Lately my work centers on exploring joy in its wildness and complexity, the complicated ways that this joy intersects with an imperfect world,” Leschper says. “Circularity has become a major part of my belief system, the lens through which I watch the world — observing cycles helps me make sense of my universe, both internally and externally. Popular culture loves to tell us stories about the importance of ‘growth’, personal growth, economic growth, what have you. It’s very linear. In work, as in life, I am making a conscious effort to center myself around something antithetical to that, because linear growth just doesn’t exist in nature. If you zoom out far enough, everything is cyclical, everything is in a stage of transition! It becomes impossible to ignore the vast network of systems we inhabit, that we are in relationship with each other at all times.”

kristineleschper.com

4; Lazy Eyes – Here comes the hype but never mind all that, the video is there, cut to the chase – “Today, soaring Australian psych-rock outfit The Lazy Eyes have returned, with the news of their debut album Songbook, a tour support with The Strokes next year, and the release of their latest cut ‘Fuzz Jam‘.” 

5: Mario Batkovic – Critically acclaimed Swiss solo accordion player Mario Batkovic has just released a new single ‘Repertio’, the second single to be taken from his forthcoming album ‘Introspectio’, released 3rd December via Invada Records.

“Mixing classical and contemporary sound, Batkovic seeks to explore the sonic possibilities of the accordion, without effects or loops, rather through a mutualist symbiotic relationship between man and instrument. Challenging, hypnotic and grandiose; Batkovic’s symphonic vision is unique. Featuring Clive Deamer (Radiohead/Portishead/Robert Plant/Roni Size) and former BEAK> member Matthew Williams aka MXLX, ‘Repertio’ has an uneasy, tense energy that underlies the composition. Batkovic’s skittish accordion collides with Deamer’s shuffling drum patterns and MXLX’s robust synths, resulting in an immersive frenzy of sound. “At the beginning almost classically presumptuous, the piece finds its players. It changes, transforms, becomes wilder and all this without losing its core content. The piece was created in Bristol Invada Studio and the meeting with Clive Deamer and Matt Williams was a successful start for wild anarchistic, dissonant and yet harmonious work. I personally found the work more than amusing. It was an insane musical encounter on another planet,” says Batkovic.

‘Repertio was recorded in pre-Covid times with Mario at the Invada Studio in Bristol, that feels a long time ago now as I’m sure it does everyone else trying to emerge from the pandemic. Geoff and Mario both invited me to collaborate with him after his performance at Islington Assembly Hall earlier that year. I really like Mario’s album, it’s an imposing gothic latin edifice that would assuage the most discerning contemporary vampire. It’s also an honour to share Introspectio alongside Mario’s more extraordinary fellow collaborators Colin Stetson and James Holden,” adds Deamer.

Batkovic is an aesthete, typified in the quality of his writing and arrangements. Challenging, experimental and always hypnotising, his music crosses conventional borders. As a composer, producer and performer, he combines various musical disciplines, taking the accordion to new levels.

New album ‘Introspectio’ is a self-questioning, self-examination of society and the meaning of sound. Featuring collaborations with electronic sorcerer James Holden and former BEAK> member Matthew Williams aka MXLX, in addition to drummer Clive Deamer (Radiohead/Portishead/Robert Plant/Roni Size), saxophonist Colin Stetson and concert choir Cantus Domus, Batkovic questions the place of sound, clichés and prejudices, taking the listener on a journey through infinite universes of sound.

Batkovic has toured around the world and has performed at festivals and venues including Bushfire (South Africa), Supersonic (UK), Le Guess Who (Netherlands), Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Foundation Cartier (Paris) and Berghain (Berlin). He has contributed compositions to film and game including Die Schwalbe (2016), Neighbours (2021) and Red Dead Redemption II (2018)”.

hwww.batkovic.com

More of this is a few day I expect..