Name: Pete Paphides
Website: https://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/titles/pete-paphides-2/broken-greek/9781529404425/
Bandcamp collection:
recommendations:
The Leaf Library: The World Is A Bell
“The afternoon shadows slip through my fingers” might be as close as The Leaf Library have got to nailing the feeling of listening to their music. It’s music that seems to foment in the spaces between our interior monologue and the exterior world it exists to decode. Much of that is down to Matt Ashton, whose form in this department extends right back to his previous band, Saloon. But the presence of vocalist Kate Gibson here can’t be underestimated. The reluctance to emote recalls Broadcast’s Trish Keenan, but behind a membrane of multitracked harmonies, she sounds all but unreachable. Either in spite of because of that, the effect is undeniably moving.
Sarathy Korwar: More Arriving
Sarathy Korwar grew up in Ahmedabad and Chennai in India, where from the age of 10, he studied tabla and drums, along the way developing a love of jazz, which he continued to nurture when he moved to London and formed the UPAJ Collective, with whom he released 2018's stunning live album My East Is Your West – a record that created something utterly unrepeatable on the basis of one 45 minute rehearsal. Better still, however, was the album with which he followed it up. Along with Dave’s Psychodrama, More Arriving was the most thrilling album of last year – a wild synergy of influences ranging from qawwali music to modern jazz to Mumbai hip-hop and Indian classical. But it was also a record about what's happening in the UK right now, most sublimely on its nine-minute centrepiece Bol, featuring breathtaking cameos from Zia Ahmed and Aditya Prakash.
Earth & Stone: Kool Roots
As Earth & Stone, Jamaican vocalists Albert Bailey and Clifton Howell released a flurry of singles in the latter half of the 1970s, but only one album. Seventeen years after its 1979 release, the Pressure Sounds imprint reintroduced the wider world to their plaintive strain of roots reggae. Hard as it is to pick out highlights, Holy Land Of Home and In Time To Come remain two sky-high masterpieces of spiritual longing whose power merely intensifies with the passing of time.
Andrew Wasylyk: The Paralian
When you listen to the music Andrew Wasylyk made as part of Idlewild (back then, he was Andrew Mitchell), it really does sound like a previous life. Wasylyk’s solo albums sound like hitherto undiscovered gems from the golden age of library music, in particular Studio G and KPM. To spend time with The Paralian is to be transported to scenes not normally synonymous with outstanding beauty. Think of the city limits of a Scottish new town at dusk; straight lines and municipal fixtures silhouetted against September ochres. You’d be halfway to loving any film that had an Andrew Wasylyk score.
The Hanging Stars: A New Kind Of Sky
There’s a particular hunger unique to some music fans and it can never truly be sated. It’s a longing to escape into a world that really only exists as a composite of certain records in your collection. For The Hanging Stars’ Richard Olson, it’s a topography defined by ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’, ‘Roadmaster’, ‘The Gilded Palace Of Sin’ and more recent gems by the likes of Mojave 3 and The Essex Green. With every passing release by Olson’s own band, these inspirations further merge into something whose constituent parts are harder to identify, and A New Kind Of Sky completes that process, so that future bands of a similar bent will no doubt add ‘A New Kind Of Sky’ to the aforementioned rollcall.
Fujiya & Miyagi: Transparent Things
Many bands cite Kraftwerk as an influence, but Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi trio are among the few who retain the laconic techno-whimsy that lay beneath the Teutonic veneer. Their antiseptic sound-world serves to emphasise the human stuff they address on their second album, originally released in 2006. “I look through transparent things and I feel ok,” whispers David Best on the title track – while the slow-build pulse of Cassettesingle releases a funk that defies resistance. And, as with other kindred spirits Air, lithe basslines make straight for the spine and ensure that these songs aren’t easily forgotten. As I write, 85 vinyl copies remain on Bandcamp. You won’t regret relieving them of one.
Big Joanie: Sistahs
It’s hard to improve on Big Joanie’s own description of what they do: “The Ronettes filtered through 80s DIY and riot grrrl with a sprinkling of dashikis.” Their debut album Sistahs was the culmination of a chain of events that began when singer Steph and drummer Chardine “first met at a black feminist consciousness-raising meeting in their adopted home of London.” Chardine noticed Steph’s Raincoats tote bag and the two got talking. They sure talk a good record, but they make an even better one. Sistahs is exciting and infectious and overflowing with ideas and you somehow feel privileged to be in the forcefield of their creative energy. It’s the sort of album that makes you optimistic about the future – which, this of all years, is greatly appreciated.
The New Mendicants: Into The Lime
The sole full-length album by Norman Blake and Joe Pernice is everything you’d wish from a collaboration between two songwriters with such a strong melodic pedigree. Spin the dial on any of these nice little yearners and you’ll be rewarded with two-part harmonies that invite you to pitch in with a third (If You Only Knew Her, Out Of The Lime), Rutle-tastic face-offs for the affections of a titular protagonist (Cruel Annette) and festive pleas for forgiveness that jangle more effusively than Santa’s sleigh (A Very Sorry Christmas).
Ed Dowie: The Uncle Sold
There are solo albums and there are solo albums: albums which bear the imprint of their primary creator yet nonetheless sound like collective efforts; and then, at the other extreme, there are solo albums which sound utterly uncompromised by the involvement of others. Ed Dowie’s debut album – one of the indisputable musical highlights of 2017 – falls emphatically into the latter category. Inspired in part by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, a book populated by a cast of characters seeking to anchor themselves in the flux of big city life, the album has the feeling of a sparse secular liturgy for lost souls. Standouts include the soft, snowblind reverie of Bastard Harbour and the febrile, foetal oscillations of Verbarhemiopia. Hungry souls seeking succour to sustain them through the small hours might just find what they’re looking for here.
Darren Hayman: The Doll’s House Room
Few artists seem to be able to alchemise life into art as quickly as Darren Hayman, but even by Darren’s standards, this is exceptional. This six-track EP is named after a room in his parents’ house, into which he briefly moved in order to look after his mother after losing his father to the Coronavirus. “My intention was to make something in lockdown that didn't sound as though it was recorded in lockdown. Something that was open, loud and free sounding” explained Darren. With the exception of drums (which were supplied remotely by Jonathan Clayton), he recorded all the parts. In terms of sheer release, The Doll’s House Room is the equal opposite of the tense circumstances that created it. Catharsis isn’t much fun without melody and it’s because of the latter that these songs require no effort from the listener. This isn’t so much primal scream therapy as Primal Scream’s Early Creation Years therapy (sorry). For a beautiful show in jingle-jangle mourning, look no further than the opening track Men Die First; while Dead Summer is simply beautiful, an affirmation of the life that remains in the face of indescribable adversity. It’s a sublime example of the very thing it’s addressing. I’ve long been a fan of Darren’s music, but this – released today – is easily one of the most extraordinary achievements in a career quietly abundant with them.
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