Who needs who? No time for editorials, repeat, replete, reheat, let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing as last time once again, another five (or so) slices of music that have passed our way recently, five slices of music cherry picked for your delight and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of bird seed and…
Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying swordfish out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Cake oil? Snake oil? Bake the oil, everything must go somewhere and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing, we never should have done and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery.
Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, skip this bit, there’s music further down the page, five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and what’s Wordsworth? Just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us on these Five pages we reguarly post?
Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, the second five of a new year, this time we start somewhere in the Bay Area or maybe Argentina….
1: Only Now, Jaijiu – Nevermind all the hunger and everything that remains unsung, yer Unsung man isn’t that bothered about anything we might have to say or indeed play, indeed it seems he’d rather we didn’t cover his things so he says, things such as this first track from an EP that’s on the way from Indo-Californian producer Only Now and Argentinian producer Jaijiu. Nevermind all that bollox, too many egos cluttinging up the music industry, always been the way, PR people who think they’re more imortant then the actual music and take any coverage or any time and effort spent for granted, it is still about the music though isn’t it? Probably not?
What we have here, as well as some really good looking cover artwork, is some kind of rather tasty hybrid blending of high-octane Indian percussion, baile funk, kuduro, grime, dancehall, industrial music and probably a whole lot more. And it does look and indeed feel like there’s a whole load of back story to this, a whole loadsof meetings of minds and styles, a whole lot of pushing at different coloured doors, this first track does evolve in a rather deliciously intriguing way, beautifully percussive, warmly detailed. Seems Jaijiu (Elias Musiak) struck up an online friendship with Kush as a result of coming across each others work, “both stemming deep in their cultural traditions, inverted, and blown out into raw abstractions of their identities”. The bit we have here does point at things of a cubist nature, angular in the best of ways and indeed something that does threaten to be soemthing rather unrelenting based on this one fine track we’ve heard. You’ll have to go find out more yerselves, the unsung hungry man he say no to us and we’ve never wreckord label bulshit that much… Here’s the Bandcamp where more details can be found if you want them…
2: Dog Chocolate and more from the new album. This is Infinite Nuggets, a song taken from Dog Chocolate’s forthcoming album So Inspired, So Done In, out Feb 27th on Upset The Rhythm. Video made by Smooth Futon, credit where creit is due…
Previously…
3: Scared Little Toaster and a London band who’ve featured a number of times on recent Other Rock Shows which means they must be awkwardly good. Bandcamp is where you find and hear more…
4: Gangar – says here that Oslo-based “Gangar first heard Bom Bom on Synnøve Brøndbo Plassen’s solo album Hjemve, and immediately felt it was a tune they wanted to arrange. Bombom is said to have gotten its name from a blind folk musician who walked around humming the melody with the words “bom bom didelidei” — a sung echo from Norway’s folk tradition that now takes on a new form….
The track is a just released this week single from the forthcoming Ganger album due out in April…
“There was no doubt that if we were going to arrange this tune, we had to include Synnøve,” the band says.
On “Bom Bom”, Synnøve Brøndbo Plassen and Martin Steinum Brun contribute vocals, joined by Karl Seglem on bukkehorn (goat horn). Martin and Synnøve trall (vocally “tune” the melody) in interplay with fiddle and saxophone in traditional fashion, while Gangar’s distinctive, marked and subdivided rhythmic accompaniment creates a driving and unpredictable foundation.
“We quickly realized we wanted Karl on the track. Introducing unique, traditional Norwegian instruments to an international audience is important to us, and the bukkehorn became a natural part of this record. Karl is both a good friend and a huge inspiration, so we greatly appreciated that he said yes,” the band says.
The arrangement was developed by Mattias Truell Thedens and Jonas Thrana Jensen, with Richard Max responsible for the intro and the mid-section. The intro consists of accents from the rhythm section with swung triplets as the subdivision, and it’s crooked enough to throw off most listeners out there.
“The riff in ‘Bom Bom’ is easily among the top 20 hardest riffs listeners can look forward to on our next album — and that says something!”
Producer Håkon Iversen has stitched the arrangement together and contributed significantly to the instrumentation and dynamics, especially in the open, atmospheric section before the track’s climax. Simon Jackman was behind the controls and has elevated the overall result with musical input and creative use of effects.
“This is one of the more intricate and thoughtfully crafted arrangements on the album, and we’re really excited to get this track out into the world. A perfect start to 2026 for us!”
Here’s some links and while we wait for the new album to be released by Hello Records in April, here’s a previous Gangar album from 2023…
5: Magda Drozd – The first we’ve heard from Polish experimental artist Magda Drozd since that rather sublime Sopraterra album that came out about a year ago now – ORGAN: Albums – Bonnie Trash and an album about death, Karla Kvlt deliver a monolithic brooding atmospheric slab of an album, Polish composer Magda Drozd and Italian artist Nicola Genovese, together known as Sopraterra, while Scare ask if In The End, Was It Worth It?
This is a rather beautifully whispered first taste from an album that’s out this month, a first taste of Magda Drozd’s third solo album Divided By Dusk, an album “inspired by Drozd’s time in Japan” as well as her “reconnection with Polish folklore; a ritualistic, hallucinatory odyssey of ancestral ghosts, Polish folk song, crepuscular atmospheres and more” and once again all very intriguing and one again, well, once again, the hindrance of unsung hunger and a rather disrepectful taking of everything being taken for granted and well… I guess you need to go find out for yourselves, here’s the Bandcamp, maybe there will be more than just the one track by the time you hit that Bandcamp link. I am wondering why we bother doing all this?
And while we’re here wondering why we still bother, here’s the best thing The Smiths ever did…
Previously…
THE ORGAN 