Cherished friends, gentle readers,
It has certainly been a long time since the last issue of Mortar. Life has been a whirlwind of change with an impossibly busy schedule that I am actively whittling back down to a place of balance. Since my last issue in January I have moved to a new house across Oakland complete with a music studio, excellent housemates, and a yard. In April I got a new job as a wine salesperson for Roni Selects (a natural wine importer and distributor), held a performance residency at Indexical in Santa Cruz with Tasting Menu, and just in the last two months travelled to Los Angeles, Upstate New York, New York City, bought a new car, and played shows with Desert Magic in Santa Cruz and San Francisco. In a refusal to use better words, shit has been crazy and feels way out of balance. I feel out of touch with myself, my friends, and my interests. I am making a lot of effort to carve out more time for myself, my own music, writing, and to draw better boundaries for myself and with my job. That being said, I am jazzed on this new job which is a tangible level up from any previous job, happy in this new house where I live with other musicians and have a space where I can create, and happy to be driving some new wheels.
All of this JUST IN TIME to move again (temporarily) back to Petaluma next week to work my next wine harvest, this time with Jolie-Laide. They’re a boutique winery based in Sonoma that makes crispy, citrusy skin-contact white wines and crunchy, buoyant red wines. They work with really rare and obscure grape varieties in California like Poulsard, Mondeuse, Trousseau Gris, and Gamay and focus on whole-cluster fermentation, a method of winemaking where you leave the stems with the grapes during fermentation. This produces some of my favorite styles of red wine and really wild and interesting white grape expressions. I’m elated to work and learn with them and to have another reprieve from the city.
In this 28th issue of Mortar, I’m keeping it brief just to check in, and say hey. Write-ups on recent releases and a past favorite from SBTRKT, Nabihah Iqbal, Nico Georis, and Ben Reed.
When Ben Reed isn’t touring with Frank Ocean or recording with Sampha, Joviale, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel (the list goes on) he is quietly recording his own joyful, colorful, and florid pop gems bolstering perky jazz harmonies, beaming horn arrangements, and chewy poetic lyrics.
From 2011-2016, Reed explored pop song writing, recording songs in his home and at friend’s studios with the help of a bevy of gifted instrumentalists and vocalists. The result of these years patient work is Station Masters, a sunny suburban trot of pop, jazz, and freak shit. His formal training in Jazz at Middlesex University and continued participation in the vibrant London pop and jazz scene is distilled in his thoughtful, imaginative songwriting across 13 tracks driven by bass, guitar, vocals, and drums, but furnished with fresh wind arrangements, and charming puzzle-pieced musical forms. His songwriting is approachable and off-kilter, teasing out earworm melodies and soothing themes but building enough satisfying tension through wonky intuitive lyrics, funky organ solos, and highlighting woodwind and brass voices deep within a songs groovy corduroy textures.
Station Master is a split display of raucous party jazz and charming sunny balladry with songs like “Das Zeichen Der Spinne” or “Allgones” to add further shaggy depth to this catalogue. A key element to the strength of this album and one of my favorite aspects to this music is the vocalists. Reed works with singer/songwriter Georgia Rodgers and with longstanding collaborator and artist, Laura groves who’s combined vocal prowess melds the music together like a good hug. Every time I listen to “Be Mine” I tear up a little. Be it the carefree music, push and pull of the form, flickering vocals, or need of a licensed therapist, I find the song incredibly moving and is certainly my favorite on the album.
Tucked away from the limelight in the cliffhanging lush green wilds of Big Sur, musician Nico Georis spun magic out of a glittering arsenal of vintage keyboard delights. The Californian musician grew up with a musical father, who was a touring keyboardist in the 70s and 80s. Surrounded by this menagerie of synthesizers and ivories, Nico experimented with home recording and tape machines. After years in New York City as a musician, Nico returned home and lived in a number of rural creative enclaves including Big Sur and Jenner, on the Sonoma coast. While living in Big Sur, Georis began improvising to the shape of clouds while under the effects of psilocybin. Over the course of five years a musical identity to these cloud shapes took shape and became his latest release Cloud Suites, released in June 2023 on Leaving Records.
Each track alludes to a piece themed around a particular cloud formation or phenomena. “Sundog”, “Ice Cyrstals”, “Cumuloids” all a different cloud-derived inspiration for Georis’ relaxed, meandering keyboard lullabies. His lo-fi home recording techniques lend the music a really comforting and nostalgic tape hiss and fuzzy quality that benefits the mellow mood. Put this music on as you cook, lay in a hammock, lounge in a yard chair, or doze off under the whir of a fan on a warm afternoon nap.
Nabihah Iqbal was a human rights lawyer before slowly transitioning into a full time musician. The London-born musician was brought up in a Pakistani-British family of creatives (her older brother is a poet and younger is a photographer). Growing up listening to a swath of Britpop, punk, and metal, her real musical jump off came with her DJ residency on NTS Radio, where under the moniker “Throwing Shade” she mixed dense collaged programs of global pop, experimental, folk, and electronic sounds. In 2017 she took to making her own music with a debut EP “Weighing of the Heart” on Ninja Tune. At the same time she was a frequent collaborator with the late producer SOPHIE, having provided vocal samples to several of her songs.
In 2020 at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, Iqbal was in Karachi visiting her grandparents. Before leaving, a studio burglary robbed her of a laptop containing two years of unfinished music and work on a new album. Arriving in Pakistan depleted, what would have been a two week trip turned into a two month lockdown as the pandemic swelled and she found herself stranded. In this place, Iqbal made the most of her situation, bought a cheap guitar, and went about (re)writing the songs that would become DREAMER, her 2023 shoegaze symphonic released on Ninja Tune.
10 tracks pack a hypnogogic high with reverb drenched ballads, dreamy guitar pads, and backbeat slapping drum machine. I hear a certain flavor of dreary British nostalgia or dreaminess that connects Iqbal to current counterparts like King Krule and back to OGs like Cocteau Twins, The Sundays, or Mark Hollis. Iqbal’s vocal delivery is cool and steely, ethereal and soaring. “This world couldn’t see us” hears her vocals delivered like beat poetry over a neo-romantic goth romp soaked in hairspray straight out of mid-80s London. “A Tender Victory” showcases the imminence of the guitar for this album, speaking to Iqbal’s days in Pakistan waiting out lockdown, exploring local flora and fauna, and writing songs. “Sky River” reminds us of Iqbal’s earlier productions in more dance-floor oriented sounds with a smooth trancelike four-on-the-floor beat and splashy silky synths. DREAMER is more coherent stylistically than in genre, as in one album you get shoegaze, techno, Grouper-like folk, and pop, celebrating Iqbal’s vast influences, abilities as a musician, and deftness as a producer of sharp, angular, fog-drenched fantasies in reverb.
When I was in college, my friend and housemate Qaaim and I shared nearly a full circle of a venn diagram with music tastes. One of his early suggestions alongside future staples like Sade, Iman Omari, and Jesse Boykins III, he turned me onto SBTRKT, which would become probably one of the most listened to artists in my life not to mention forays into every collaborator on SBTRKT’s long roster.
SBTRKT, the moniker of London-based producer, Aaron Jerome, entered the limelight with his 2011 ubiquity, “Wildfire”, featuring the powerful dexterous vocals of Little Dragon front-woman, Yukimi Nagano. This song along with his debut collab with Sampha, “Something Goes Right” soundtracked my early 20s. His music is a sleek medley of UK Garage, Jungle, and Jazz melted into a kind of bubbling galactic soup with comparisons to the likes of Flying Lotus, The XX, or Erykah Badu’s “New Amerykah” albums. After his 2011 debut, 3 more albums marked his output, gaining speed, further collaborators, and taking noticeable artistic risks by pulling in seemingly disparate influences like experimental electronic music, hip-hop, and modern jazz. Finally in 2023, we’ve received RAT ROAD, Jerome’s most ambitious and in-depth release yet. At a whopping 22 songs deep, the album is an index of ongoing collaborations, genre sidechains, and technical growth.
Jerome recruits a cast of recurring characters, from Sampha and Yukimi Nagano’s soulful crooning vocals, and new endeavors with poet, Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s brooding beat, airy delicate chimes from new talent, LEILAH, and even several songs with the Bay Area’s pop-oddity mogul, Toro y Moi. Each collaboration feels like a true cross-pollination between Jerome and his guest artist’s style. Similar to the aforementioned album DREAMER by Nabihah Iqbal, RAT ROAD is a Golden Corral buffet of genres but there is an obvious unifying stylistic feel giving slick UK Garage, London club aesthetic à la XL Recordings circa 2015, combined with a shiny, cool modern development of sound palette and clear growth of each contributing artists’ own voice. I think while albums like RAT ROAD aren’t necessarily focused and/or a masterpiece, they show us an artist growing and pushing forward despite the press, fame, and commercial expectations in a sterilizing music industry. The album shows what SBTRKT is interested in, what he can achieve, what risks he’s willing to take, and where the music is headed.
Thank you for reading. Be well. Stay in touch. Let me know how you are and what you’re up to.
with love and curiosity
debauchery and lunacy,
Cody
beautiful 🌟