On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ I’m still in the process of wrapping my head around the highly imaginative Estuario by Juliana Kaiser, who mixes tonal synthesizers, environmental field recordings, rickety percussive ticks, and slightly muffled voice recordings, among other elements. Intoxicating and transporting. It’s almost like a drama-less radio drama. Kaiser is from Patagonia, Argentina, and lives in Buenos Aires.
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▰ I’m a sucker for that realm where the orchestral, the glacial, and the granular become virtually indistinguishable, and such is the case with Drift by LA EL, who is based in Houston, Texas:
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▰ After the Wildfire is a fantastic album of Fourth World music from Jan Bang (“live sampling, electronics”) and Arve Henriksen (“trumpet, voice”), though despite the title credits, it’s actually a quartet, rounded out by Eivind Aarset (“guitar, electronics”) and Ingar Zach (“percussion”), and in fact more than that, as it also involves them playing “set within the orchestral textures shaped by” the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Džijan Emin. The quartet are all from Norway. The other musicians are based in the Republic of North Macedonia, where the sponsoring body for this work, the Skopje Jazz Festival, is based.
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I tracked down some footage on YouTube (see below). I recommend starting the album with “Halfway Between Noon & Sunset.”