We’re approaching Music Regular’s first birthday. It’s been a turbulent year full of challenges and changes, harrowing predicaments, growing pains and… just kidding! It’s been super fun and very little has changed in the world of The Reg. Or has it???
TADAHH! I started an Instagram account for the newsletter. If that’s a thing you like, go and follow it, share it around, tell your friends. I’ll be announcing an exciting project there imminently (ie. tomorrow), so best to go and get gettin’ tuned in.
Now back to the thing in itself: end-of-year is the only time I intend to include albums here that were actually released in the given calendar year. The issue looking back on albums from 2021 will arrive next month. This month’s issue is dedicated to exciting reissues, compilations and archival things that came out this year. It’s a big’un.
click on the covers to listen or go your own way ~~
Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band - Tezeta
This has been in heavy rotation for me this year. It’s a reissue of an impossible-to-find album from the heyday of Ethiopian jazz. Describing it to someone recently, I instinctively used the term ‘cloud jazz’ and I feel like that offers a good sense of the vibe. It’s out through Awesome Tapes From Africa, and for the heads out there, the label offers some really amazing notes on the when&where of how this music came to be.
Amelia Cuni - Pampara Festival 13.3.1992
Amelia Cuni is primarily known for her work in a few niche circles of contemporary classical + experimental. This, however, is a stunning display of her vocal practice within dhrupad music, a classical Hindustani form. Cuni, who is Milanese by birth, lived in India for over a decade, studying with masters of the form and, as Black Truffle explains in their press release, “these recordings document her performance at the 1992 Parampara Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, a landmark event celebrating the global spread of Indian classical music, bringing together Indian teachers with their international students.”
Leo Acosta - Acosta
Mexican dummer, composer and arranger Leo Acosta spent a career working for labels that insisted on a certain degree of creative control over his work, forcing him to record and include versions of popular and/or chart topping numbers on his albums. In 1970, he recorded this, his final LP for Capitol Records, and first with full creative control. Officially titled Acosta, but known amongst heads as El Leon for obvious reasons, the whole thing is chockablock with shit-hot grooves.
Kraig Kilby - Satori
I feel like a lot of artists are trying to make music that sounds like this right now: warbly, knotted, soft-fusion jazz; killer breaks and lyrical runs amidst magical magnetic interference. Kilby began recording Satori in 1977 and, after a few sessions, shelved it. Following a career’s worth of gigs and distractions, he unearthed the recordings in 2007, added two short improvs to the tracklist and handed it out to friends and collaborators. This year, it got a much-deserved wider release through Detroit’s Just Us Records who frame it rightfully within the “prehistories of Hip-Hop and House music”.
Kiko Kids Jazz - Tanganyika Na Uhuru
An absolutely resplendent collection of Tanzanian dance music collected from Kiko Kids Jazz tapes released between 1962 - 1965 from the beloved and reliable institution that is Mississippi.
Female Species - Tale Of My Lost Love
A compilation of lost gems from Female Species, a longstanding, revolving-door group centred around Californian sisters Vicki and Ronni Gossett. Spanning two decades, from the mid-60s when the Gossetts were teens, through to the 80s, the music touches most major trends in American music therein: bopping garage rock, gooey country tunes, folksy twee pop and other adjacent tributaries. The songs are great, the productions are perfectly minor, the vocals are badass, the vibe is largely variety-tv-game-show fun.
UMAN - Chaleur Humaine
Another sibling situation here, French sis/bro combo Danielle and Didier Jean created this otherworldly pop album in the suburbs of Paris in 1992. It’s breathy, sophisticated, intimate and… odd. I don’t think it ever had wide enough circulation to impart much contemporary influence, but it certainly could have: you can hear atmospherics akin to vaporwave throughout, and vocal tics and tricks that feel like early maps to the PAN universe. There’s also an undercurrent of carnivalesque melody that makes me say, “Ahh, only the French…”
Mario Rui Silva - Stories From Another Time 1982 - 1988
A selection of tracks culled from the 80s output of Angolan musician, researcher and intellectual Mario Rui Silva. Moving between gorgeous guitar balladry to groove-centred slow burns, there’s equal attention paid to melody and rhythm throughout. Really lush movements here.
Nuron + Fugue - 1993 - 1996
I think I’ve mentioned before that I feel like a real n00b when it comes to house and techno, so I’ll keep it humble here. The internet tells me this is an anthology of super duper UK cult classics. I’ve found descriptions such as: ‘sublime hi-tech soul’, ‘whirring downbeat’ and ‘lip-smacking swang’. It’s good, I like it.
Various - Indaba Is
Released through Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings and curated by South African luminaries Thandi Nthuli and Siyabonga Mthembu, Indaba Is functions as a contemporary survey of South Africa’s incredibly vibrant jazz and improv scenes. The music included touches on a broad range of styles/moods while remaining concise. It’s really well sequenced, which I love, and feels anthemic, spiritual, groovy and solemn in turn. Big and deeply felt.
Willie Dunn - Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies
Following the landmark Native North American compilation in 2016 comes this anthology of Mi’kmaw-Irish songwriter Willie Dunn. Light In The Attic did a larger reissue campaign this year, including three of his studio albums, though this collection feels like the most essential stuff. Dunn spent the better part of his life in and around Montreal and has been referred to by his indigenous peers as ‘our Leonard Cohen’. Essential listening.
Deadline Paranoia - 3/3
The thrilling conclusion to Ongehoord’s series collecting the work of this mysterioso, experimental dub group. Seeing as they only performed from 1986 thru 1988 on the airwaves of WHS, a pirate radio station in a squat in Amsterdam (and apparently once on a nearby street corner), you’ll be forgiven for being uninitiated. Very, very deep alien(ated)(ating) dub and related rattling.
Viejas Raíces - De Las Colonias Del Río De La Plata
Smooth, funkified anti-colonial jamz from Argentinian musician Jorge López Ruiz. Recorded in 1976, the album combines elements of jazz fusion with traditional Uruguyan candombe music. It’s a recent discovery, so I’ll leave it there.
Singing Dust - Singing Dust
A preeeetty ambitious 1986 album from Australian pianist Robert Welsh reissued in collaboration with the fantastically oddball Efficient Space. I find that listening to one song at a time can be the best way to take in Welsh’s particular blend of new age, devotional, jazz and computational funk. In a certain light, Singing Dust feels like it floats somewhere near the realm of the one and only Beverly Glenn-Copeland.
Morteza Mahjubi - Selected Improvisations from Golha, Pt. I
These pieces for solo piano were originally broadcast between 1956 and 1965 on Gohla, a radio program centered around Iranian music and poetry on the national broadcast station in Iran. Composer/pianist Morteza Mahjubi had a unique tuning system (which I admittedly don’t fully understand) that allowed him to replicate the sonorities of traditional Persian art music. The combination of scales, modes, recording quality, and instrumental timbre make for a pretty ghostly and potent listen.
Xochimoki - Temple Of The New Sun
A collection of mystical tracks culled from two short-run tapes, originally released in the 80s, by Xochimoki, a duo featuring American ethnomusicologist Jim Berenholdz and Aztec wisdom keeper Mazatl Galindo. Any words I reach for mostly fail the intense, primal nature of the music on display here. The heavy flutes, pounding rhythms and stoic vocals are totally transporting.
I’m super interested in feedback / dialogue / suggestions. If you have ideas about the newsletter, want to share music with me, have specific questions / requests, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And please: share this newsletter with a pal if you feel so inspired!
Yrs.,
Andrew P.
andrewdanielpatterson [at] gmail [dot] com