Crxssings is the title of a massive new album of collaborations, 34 tracks in all featuring a variety of interactions between pairs of musicians. Many are remixes, while many others appear to be more directly interactive. (Update: These are all remixes. I received a copy of the press release. It’s a very promising collection, nonetheless.) Just check out the lineup:
Shelly Knotts x Jan St. Werner, Ipek Gorgun x Mira Cali, Aaron Dilloway x Lucrecia Dalt, Laura Luna Castillo x Leyland Kirby, France Jobin x Anne Guthrie, Mads Emil Nielsen x Jan Jelinek, Alessandro Bosetti x Yannis Kyriakides, Seth Graham x Yves De Mey, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma x Le Révélateur, Mark Fell x Jim O’Rourke, Christina Vantzou x Jasmine Guffond, Kreng x Celer, Bjarni Gunnarsson x BJ Nilsen, Jerusalem In My Heart x Black To Comm, Klara Lewis x Lawrence English, Gabriel Saloman x Machinefabriek, BEAST (aka Koen Holtkamp) x Chuck Johnson.
What makes the listings especially promising is how the ordering of the participants appears in sets of pairs, suggesting that, for example, where musician A is listed as having been remixed by musician B, a different track flips the relationship, with musician A remixing musician B. What brings all the musicians together is a cause:
All the funds generated by the sales of this album will be donated directly to City Plaza Hotel, a squatted refuge located in the heart of Athens, Greece, organized for and by migrants from Africa and Asia. These funds will support their struggle to provide material needs for those fleeing economic, environmental, political and military disasters in their home countries. At City Plaza Hotel residents work together in ways that center their own agency, dignity and solidarity with each other. One early, pre-release highlight is “Not to Decide is to Decide (Remixture),” a reworking by Jasmine Guffond of unidentified tracks by Christina Vantzou. It’s a gloriously slow-moving mass of heavily textured strings.
Album available at crxssings.bandcamp.com. The release date is July 1. As of today a half dozen tracks are already available.
In the wait for the full release, one thing the collection brings to mind is an early album, dating from 1996, on the Lo Recordings label titled Lo Recordings Vol: 2 Collaborations, featuring such heady combos as Mike Flowers Pops and Funki Porcini, David Toop and Bedouin Ascent, Scanner and David Cunningham, and Lol Coxhill and Paul Schütze. It’s on streaming services, but the listings for Collaborations seem in some cases to not credit both artists. Metadata remains something of a nightmare.