Outsideleft Week in Music we are all molecules now

Undoubtedly one of the superstars of this summers’ Supersonic Festival in Birmingham in the UK, will be Backxwash the alter ego of Ashanti Mutinta, the Zambian-Canadian rapper & producer currently of the parish of Montreal, Quebec. The second track released from her forthcoming 'Only Dust Remains' LP, 9th Heaven is an example of her tougher than nails angry-poetry-as-catharsis, set to frenetic dynamited drums, it's thrilling, enthralling and immersive. Can't wait to see her at Supersonic (full line up here).

The gently repetitive Richardson feels like mod music done right. There's a requisite dissipation or enervation whatever you'd call it, maybe neither of those things when speaking of energy; a wistfulness for what may never come again. Cassandra Jenkins - a modern legend. Chainmail. Bad looking well worn headphones. Wow. I love the video! All together unobjectionably lovely.

Wild relentlessly intense funk from The Peas, really amazingly brilliant, if I told you this was out on Colemine or Record Kicks you'd be out there right after it. Has a total Jimmy James vibe before there was Jimmy James. The Peas you will know, but will you know the remarkable backstory of how a 2006 single has washed up on our shores right now? In limited numbers? A box of a few remaining singles available from the original run, disappeared at a live show. For the best part of 20 years thought stolen. Now here they are. Available for €5 which they say is the price of a pint, so they haven't been to a pub in the UK in a while. Check Bandcamp here if you're in the mood for Gettin' Some.

Norwegian singer and musician Jenny Hval is a remarkable artist. She has released 8 albums of experimental music, plus she also writes incredible, weird speculative fiction. 'To be a rose' is the first single from her forthcoming album Iris Silver Mist, and shows her at the peak of her power. Hval's incredible voice twists and turns over unsettling electronic pulses, ultimately resolving into a melody that could almost be thought of as 'pop'. It's a fantastic track, and bodes well for the new album.

Jazz-Dance fiends Ezra Collective are back with a new single; 'Body Language', which features the silky vocals of long-time collaborator and tour partner Sasha Keable. It’s Ezra’s first release since their acclaimed recent album, 'Dance, No One’s Watching' and this new single is a typically danceable slice of their infectious jazz crossover groove. Body Language sets a Latin mood from the get-go, with supple bass underpinning drummer Femi Koleoso’s busy rimshots. Sasha weaves her exotic voice around the tight brass and Joe’s stepping keyboards, then there’s a breakout trumpet solo to get you bounding off your seat.  Femi remarks: “Body Language is a tribute to the Latin American communities of London that deeply inspire us. A collaboration with a friend who has been part of the EZ family for years. The language of the body is dancing and this song is a celebration of this.” Ezra, and Sasha – whose roots are British-Colombian - have taken their funky body language over to Latin America, following the Collective’s successful 25-date 2024 European tour, which concluded with a memorable finale at London’s OVO Arena.

Sparks twins (sic) are back with a second single from their forthcoming LP MAD!. Entitled 'JanSport Backpack' it's a return to more familiar sardonic territory from the stodge rock of their previous effort. A jaunty little number, it bounces along nicely enough, albeit at risk of being a little obscure to anyone this side of the Atlantic. JanSport are (according to Wikipedia), the world's biggest backpack manufacturer responsible for around half the small backpacks sold in the USA. A fact which does little to identify exactly who the brothers are aiming their irony at. Thankfully the lyrics (already up online) offer a clue, suggesting that "All the girls seen from behind... They wear a JanSport backpack" That claim may ring true Stateside but not in Europe where JanSport's products are far less prolific. Indeed it's likely to be countered with the observation that over most of the continent it's near impossible to board public transport without encountering a young lady strapped into a day pack bearing the  Fjallraven Kanken arctic fox logo, or someone of any gender porting bags made by Karrimor, Lowe Alpine, The North Face, Berghaus or Decathlon. It might also raise the question of what degree of original research Sparks have based their assumption on. Ron is 80 next August and Russell 77 next October, ages at which creeping around behind far younger females, taking notes on their accessory preferences could appear a touch unseemly. Unless of course the single is "ow you say" deliberate product placement...  on the subject of which if any of the six other backpack manufacturers listed above would care to get in touch...  Sparks new album 12 track album, MAD' is out May 23rd, also from Transgressive Records, on CD, Cassette, Black Vinyl LP, blue vinyl LP with lenticular* gatefold sleeve, and a red vinyl LP with deluxe triple gatefold sleeve. And, as reported previously, the band will be promoting it with dates in Japan and Europe in June-July.  
* it means "lentil like"… We have no idea either, but if we find out we'll let you know.

Ora the Molecule is rightly massive of course and yet here, Nobody Matters. What a sweet gooey ironical conundrum. "They only love you when you're dead" is the refrain. I think it's taken from a sign on the wall of the 6Music production office. Thrill to the running and jumping and carefully stepping down steep hills in wholly unsuitable for that purpose loafers, and definitely suitable and suitably fetching faux motor cyle hat. Swoon and maybe even sway a little to the archetypal disco beat and the marvelous lyricism or lyrical cynicism you might say and the Ab Fab shooting script notes so patently present and great. cool.

LA's Tombstones In Their Eyes have all the right influences - Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus And Mary Chain - so why isn't this catnip for me? It's just a bit of a ponderous dirge at the end of the day. Never quite reaching the heights of antisocial distortion nor the sweetness of melody of their predecessors, the song just kind of floats there, alluringly at first but it's not long before tedium sets in. Missed opportunity. 

Well, I can barely hear the new Pachyman record over the very beautiful citywide travelogue video. Great to see so many familiar streets and sights again. Lots of the East. BTW, the Lakers are back in case you hadn't noticed. With 'the' trade. While Pachyman himself doesn't look like too much of an athlete, he's a great cool musician and producer and running through the streets I loved so well, he gives it a go. 

It's been seven years since the release of 'The Moon Viewing Garden' EP and Mercury's Antenna have come back in some style.  What sort of style?  Well, think of Faith and the Muse, Cocteau Twins, Lycia, This Mortal Coil, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and that sort of thing. It's as well for them that that sound remains perennially popular and they have a third album on the way in the spring.  I expect they will be popping up at the Whitby Goth Festival and similar events around Europe at around that time too.  Nothing is new any more in the music world of course,  and it's true that this treads a well trodden path, but having said that, it doesn't miss a step.

Sweet, free range travelogue. There's the gorgeous languid skipping spaces thing available here. Stones skipping across the surface surface of a pond. The warmth of friendship. That, that there's not so much to worry about. It's like there's life somewhere in a lovely bubble I'd forgotten existed. 

It's a challenge what with that Crazy Horses long gone to seed on the guitar opening moment. But Super Dumb has already found its own singular groove. mssv combine the chops of jazz, the highly skilled frustrated pain, with the kicking against the pricks punk rock mayhem. Genuinely difficult music. Without allowances. Do you have the stomach for it?

Reissue of Black Slate's 1976 debut single is beautiful, but all too brief. It featured recently on the soundtrack LP that accompanied Life Between Islands the massively expansive Tate Britain show thrillingly and comprehensively ruminating on the huge artistic and cultural impact of the diasporic generations belonging to the Caribbean Islands and the UK. Dub version on the flip. Catch this while you can.

Montreal's Neokosmos promises to unleash "The Fury of Synthesisers" here, and yes, there he is, stroking his keyboards and getting very excited about it too.  'Heavy Ambient 'is how I'd describe this, if that's not an oxymoron.

Kilo Kish is everywhere. Currently curating a residency with "Womxn In Windows' thing at MOCA in Los Angeles celebrating the launch of American Gurl: home–land, a presentation of six short films work that negotiate land, diaspora and displacement. Never has work seemed more timely or necessary. An interdisciplinary artist, Kilo Kish works with music, film, installation, performance and the written word. Her 2022 LP American Gurl was critically acclaimed by the likes of NYT and Nylon. R3program from the new EP is an synthy hypnotic essay on disassociation and existentialism. It's serious and it's still pop.

Previously, I said in my review of their David Lynch inspired cover of Twin Peak's 'The Voice of Love' that'Each Dream, A Melting Door' was an EP of "atmospheric piano based tracks evoking states of mind and shades of nature".  It was, and it  most certainly is.  Haunting and minimal, it uses space as an instrument, alongside improvised piano, guitar and samples.  The resulting mix is simply sublime. You may not realise it, but you have probably heard Bhatia already, either as a member of the experimental pop outfit Son Lux, or penning the score to ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, a film I highly recommend you see.  Bhatia is also due to co-score the new Marvel Studios film ‘Thunderbolts', so you will hear even more of him soon.

Sounding Like Ash is no bad thing, and if I avert my ears Slow Motion Film sound straight out of the late nineties, and there’s more than just proficiency needed to blending so seamlessly into the genre of your influences. Untitled#1 fills me with the kind of novelstalgia I need to get through what feels like the longest winter since records began. A much younger me would have recorded this from the radio, played it in the common room and demanded people tell me what about it wasn’t great. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t pushing into any new territory music wise, but it’s as comforting and refreshing as a cup of tea on a hard day.

Self-described as "Flowerkraut", the debt to perfect band Stereolab here is staggering (As is Stereolab's to Sergio Mendez and a million hi-fi demo records) but the addition of boogaloo simulacra horns is a smart move toward repayment. They are a massive collective of a band, handing out flowers and pamphlets at the airport of your earhole. Take one, child. Let them give you a new insufferable name. Dig wig-out space jamz for the seratonin-depleted to safely feel joy in the comfort of the world. 

Remember Switched On Bach? Or Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Pictures At An Exhibition? Truly it is difficult, when presented with a new instrument to fully understand that it requires new composition, arrangement and performance skills. A head change. It took the post-war German yoof to fully get behind this concept. Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and, in the UK, Delia Derbyshire and in Russia, as featured on this compilation, ALEXANDER NEMTIN, who creates a soundscape that, whilst still a little fugue-y, does conjure up more of a brave new world than the old one through a sine wave filter. SÁNDOR KALLÓS adds a frantic viola to his own Mars-by-1957 soundscape, followed by a tape loop of a hyper-ventilating cosmonaut that transforms into a charming giggle. It’s worth the wait. I had a vivid dream in the late 1990s of discovering a barn somewhere in eastern Europe full of Russian synthesizers. Up to then I’d never even seen one. I woke up excited and then disappointed when I realised it was just a dream. Years later I got hold of one for a while and it did look fabulous but it sounded just like the Moog it was built to emulate. These pieces are the aural equivalent of that dream, a visit to a place that, it turned out, did exist after all.

Trevi finds an allure in the darkness of Masma Dream World, read his thoughts right here

That Brittany Howard SG. That Brittany rockin' out. Oh boy. There were serious legal problems with a member of the original Alabama Shakes line up I think, I don't want to minimize that. So enjoy if you can, with care.

Mermaid Chunky are on their way to being regarded as the best band in the world I guess. When Céilí came out we mentioned them as festival contenders and this morning alongside Backxwash, Rich(ard) Dawson and a plethora of others, Mermaid Chunky have been announced as stars of the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, perhaps the premier uncompromising truly alternative fest. in the world. And they're still great. More festival info, here.

In the 80s/90s hinge, I was engaged in creating and trading and playing on the radio music from "cassette culture" - weird tapes created by loners all over the world in the confines of their apartments, spending all their spare change on postage and time at the Kinko's making mail art collages. Since I had a radio show, I got lots of tapes sent to me, filling stolen plastic bread racks in my bedroom, some memorable, some forgotten. We all had band names and label names even if/though frequently it was just us. (My band name was Pain Clinic, and my label was Voodooboy Productions.) Most of this music is lost to the ether, but the YouTube algorithm delivered Tim Stebbing's unassuming Princess of Mars back to me. Lovely synths and drum machines. I confess I did not remember the name or the music, but I vividly recall the charming cover and its place on the green rack of tapes, next to underground luminaries like Malok and Squidbelly Phelgmfoot and the Plug Uglies. I feel I spent an hour in that apartment one Saturday afternoon, licking my wounded heart, watching the shadows of cars passing on the ceiling as I fed Princess of Mars into my handmedown stereo. I had an 8-track player with one of those cassette adapters that I often employed for these sessions. I don't even think I got this directly from Mr. Stebbing but in a package from another tape trader. We would send other people's tapes to other people in the spirit of transmission and because there was so much of it. So here!