Cherished and gentle reader,
This is Mortar issue #27 and it contains music write ups on Asa Chang & Junray, Isabelle Antena, DOMi & JD Beck, Kali Malone, and Faye Wong , a ~gallery~ of works by artists delighting and innovating in the boundless possibilities of Microsoft Paint, and a film review of Tár. Lots to chew on! Thank you so much for reading and listening.
In the dusty recesses of the enormous catalogue of Japanese experimental music you can find this freakish treat from Asa-Chang & Junray, Hana (“flower), a six song EP painting in courtly abstraction, like a ukiyo-e made in gloopy 3D graphics. The band is comprised of percussionist Asa-Chang with tabla player U-Zhaan, and Hidehiko Urayama, a non-performing member who skews audio through computer programming. While only a trio, their songs feel symphonic, joyfully experimental, and ridiculous, harnessing a blizzard of tabla, voice, electronics, field recordings, guitar, and audio processing.
A recurring ingredient across their early albums is speech as rhythm, doubled on tabla, emulating bols, the syllables used in North Indian Classical music to learn taalas. In this case, the text isn’t mnemonic rhythms but poems or phrases in Japanese, mostly spoken by Chang, vocalist Kyoko Koizumi, and a computerized voice. Rhythm plays a central role across the album, carrying the alien melodies, and generating patterns that turn into vamps and sequences to be morphed, expanded, and improvised over. As much as the music is a form of poetry nodding to ritual music and tradition, it is also a hilarious and whacky dance with unfazed play and cathartic absurdia.
There’s a lounge at a 1997 French airport painted in kitschy pastel, adorned with plastic palm fronds, luminescent polished linoleum, filled with cigarette smoke and bubbly sun-hungry vacationers waiting for a flight to Marseille where the music of Isabelle Antena plays on for an eternity. The French singer began her career as founder of the electro-bossa clique, Antena, when they lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium, literally next door neighbors to San Francisco expat synthster punks Tuxedomoon. When Antena split in 1985, Isabelle carried on under her own moniker creating a signature bubblegum pop twinged electro sound that bloomed on her first solo release En Cavale.
Through the 80s and 90s Isabelle went on to release five more albums, sprouting a soundworld somewhere between Stereolab and Sade, marked by smooth jazz, bossa nova, and french pop influences. There’s an earnest play in her music that I love akin to Julee Cruse’s oneiric psalmody and The Roches grinning sincerity while touting a cameraflash cool and pre-Madonna swagger. While many of Isabelle’s contemporaries dove more into nu and acid jazz territories, favoring turntablism, 12” house remixes, and production by the likes of Suba or Towa Tei, Isabelle turned more acoustic into the early 2000s with her most recent releases sounding closer to Paris Trio or an uncovered Elis Regina album. I’m partial to her earlier DX7-heavy productions with their campy tropical fruit punch, but Isabelle still managed to make “easy listening” tropes, e-jazz sway, and JNCO-clad trip-hop essence into mellow lounge offerings well into the 2010s.
Sometime in spring 2017 I was at a house show in Pasadena, CA put together by a friend and bandmate. Upon walking up to the house I was immediately “iced” by a stranger and realized music was already happening and pulsing out from the living room. Inside what looked like two high schoolers were shredding on electric keyboard and drumkit. Another visual artist was using an overhead projector to cast shifting visuals made of dyed oils and water onto the wall behind the musicians. The music was incomprehensibly jazz at breakneck speed and folks were writhing and thrashing like a punk show mosh pit.
Turns out those musicians were DOMi & JD Beck, a jazz2.0 duo known for their scrappy, post-irony drenched origins on YouTube where they posted clips like these^^ highlighting their virtuosic technical ability and handling of extreme tempos and puzzling rhythms. Their bio reads:
Posted transcriptions of Madvillainy and Thundercat gained the attention of Anderson .Paak, who began collaborating with the musicians and signed them to .Paak’s own label APESHIT for their debut studio album release, NOT TiGHT. The album is 15 tracks of their own compositions featuring a swath of musical collaborators and mentors including .Paak, Thundercat, Herbie Hancock, Mac Demarco, Snoop Dogg, and more. Its an unashamed celebration of their musical influences and smirky dismissal of stodgy, straight-laced professionalism that plagues the commercial music realm.
DOMi and Beck’s songwriting is impressively fresh while acknowledging and utilizing the past. Chord progressions and voicings are evocative of early 80s jazz fusion records while fast forwarding to pick up a torch lit by galactic-minded jazz musicians and producers in L.A like Thundercat, FlyLo, or Madlib in the late 00s . You have to really give the duo credit for presenting their vast musical crossroads effortlessly and how the wildcard features, like DeMarco or Busta Rhymes, root right into their florid musical language creating uniquely nihilist, refreshingly honest, and wildly exciting music. NOT TiGHT gave DOMi and Beck the platform they needed to show off their dextrous production, carefree approach, palette for detail, and inspiring artistic growth.
In May 2017 I was at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles to watch a performance of Wallace Shawn’s (the “inconceivable!” guy from Princess Bride) 1996 epic theater work The Designated Mourner. While starring a three part cast of Shawn, Larry Pine, and Deborah Eisenberg, the play was largely Shawn monologuing vivid stories and moral dilemmas in the midst of democracy’s collapse.
In the opening scene of Todd Fields’ 2022 film Tár, conductor-composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) speaks openly and candidly with suave candor and luminary confidence. She converses with the interviewer like they were family and still finds a way to hook the audience in, building drama in her storytelling, embodying her mastery and strength, and displaying a deep knowledge and passion for music.
Shawn and Tár have us hooked. They build more tension and paint more imagery in single scenes of dialogue than most scripts hope to achieve in an entire work. Both artists are tortured, passionate recounters of their crafts. Shawn with embarrassment, fear, and creative dilemma'; Tár by peacocking, in professionalism, and with power. Shawn speaks of the past in a future uncertain while Tár veils in a colorful impersonal- fearful and dodging of her past to uphold a certain future.
This opening interview is impressively gripping- it teaches us something about music, inflates a larger than life image of Tár and her profession, and plants a tiny seed of tension by way of doubt as we perceive her shadowy vulnerabilities. This seed takes hold and begins to grow, slowly punching through Tár’s facade and revealing a volatile achilles heel.
The film is filled with Lydia’s habitual compulsions, ones that at first feel like symptoms of her genius, but start to appear as tiny glimpses into an unhealed past. Tár has fought tooth and nail to reach her position and fame but her willingness to help other marginalized voices in a predominantly male and hetero field begins to wain in service of her interests and ego. In maintaining an impassable chasm of tenacity between her and others, she faces her past and inner demons alone, a struggle that occasionally plunges this film into the horror genre and blurs our perception of reality. Are we watching Lydia’s life collapse as a result of her behavior and hauntings or are we observing a nightmare that hasn’t happened yet? As the cracks in the facade deepen we watch a career and image crumble without a solid foundation or an actual practice of, as mentioned in her opening interview, “teshuvah”, an atonement and a willingness to return to and deal with a unsavory past you’re running from.
Ominous rolling storm clouds approach bringing with it a malaise, an awe, and a reverence for the life created out of the vast bellows of drones in Kali Malone’s crushing electroacoustic work Living Torch. Through the patience of canonical drones appear the incredible acoustic phenomena and infinitesimal timbral spectrum available in just intonation. Malone uses these features as her medium, employing drone as a vehicle to unfold and marvel at a shocking expanse of details typically lost to our ears.
Though Malone is known for her pipe organ works, Living Torch harnesses the brooding synergy of bass clarinet, trombone, modular synthesizer, computer processing, and boîte à bourdons- a french invention inspired by an Indian drone instrument called a shruti box. Acoustic frequencies melt into the electronic workings of modular synthesis, pure data programming, and Malone’s engagement with Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. “Living Torch I” burns slow in its embers, the ARP engulfing a patchwork of screeching drones and harmonies brought forth by the bass clarinet, trombone, and boîte à bourdons. “Living Torch II” seethes and builds to an inferno of electronic noise and brutal distortion. Heavy as it may be, the music is deeply moving in its ability to conjure color out of gray, or rather, to awe at the infinitesimal spectrum of gray.
Mid-90s Hong Kong was teeming with a vibrant nervous psyche following a golden era for the bustling, cosmopolitan, neon-drenched city-state. British rule was to be handed back to mainland China the following year and a general malaise wafted through Hong Kong society as their colonial occupiers conceded governance jeopardizing the greater democracy Hongkongers experienced over mainlanders. Media, education, and politics effused nationalism siding with British occupiers, Hong Kong sovereignty, or Chinese rule and this anxiety set in over the city like a looming storm cloud. It is in this haze of cultural stress that musician/actor Faye Wong shaped her album Fuzao (浮躁).
Wong was 27 in 1996 and Fuzao (浮躁) was the last album of a record deal she had signed with the Hong Kong based Cinepoly label. With the terms of the contract coming to an end, she took more creative liberties, making a heavily dreampop-influenced rock album with collaboration from Scottish band Cocteau Twins, and with fully Mandarin lyrics, or in place of lyrics- her voice as an instrument. Wong had grown up in Beijing and left for Hong Kong in college to pursue a singing career. Her first several albums were written in a mixture of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English- the latter two being languages she learned only after moving to Hong Kong, spending a freewheeling and influential year in New York City, and to appease requests from Cinepoly to make music that would connect with local audiences. (In the 80s/90s Hong Kong music industry, Mandarin-lyrics were stereotyped as trashy and associated with mainland nationalism)
Fuzao (浮躁) roughly translates to “anxiety” or “restlessness.” The title track (first video) captures the spirit of Wong’s album, showcasing the three major ingredients that set this album apart from her previous; lush dream-pop influence and co-writing with the Cocteau Twins, lyrics (all in Mandarin) speaking to the general feeling of unease buzzing through Hong Kong, and Wongs’ voice as an instrument- using syllables in place of words to sing the chorus. The album listens in delicate, fuzzy, pastel hues. The luxuriant jazz-inspired chord structures, nostalgic dream pop guitar sound, and antiphonal drum machines/sounds were an escapist elixir for Hongkongers in 1996 and still echoes as a standout gem of 90s Canto-Pop today.
**title taken from David Berman’s poem “Governors on Sominex”
take two and take care,
Cody