Forest Casual - Drum, Botany & The Brash (Scorpio Red)
‘Drum, Botany & the Brash’ is the product of six months of outings and studio sessions by Forest Casual. These songs assemble nocturnal field recordings, barely metric rhythms, the May Day dawn chorus, wilted bouzouki and wood-pigeon wub.
Gonçalo F. Cardoso - Exotic Immensity (Discrepant)
More than two years after the release of 'Impressões de Outra Ilha', Discrepant's head honcho returns home under his birth name with the appropriately titled 'Exotic Immensity'. Conjured from the seeds of an exhibition of dioramas at Le Bon Accueil in Rennes, this double LP feels quietly epic in scope, a sprawling travelogue through imagined scenarios and what if possibilities.
Kankawa Nagarra - Wirlmarni (Mississippi Records)
Aboriginal Australian blues, country, and gospel by the great Kankawa Nagarra, Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta. These intimate recordings introduce the world outside Australia to Kankawa Nagarra, a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, human rights advocate, and environmental activist. Recorded live near her home in Western Australia, these twelve acoustic guitar and vocal tracks offer a glimpse of Kankawa's far ranging humanity, humor, and lived experience. She shifts between musical styles and languages, backed by night bugs and the call of birds. Recorded by Kankawa's longtime friend Darren Hanlon, the sessions are relaxed and warm. It's a true gift - the experience of hearing Kankawa on her own land, in her own words.
Lia Kohl - Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
It’s not difficult to find beauty in the sounds of nature – ocean waves, birdsong, rainfall – but it's easy to overlook the charm and wonder of everyday anthropogenic sounds. Equal parts reverent and playful, Normal Sounds is built around field recordings of human-made, non-musical sounds: fridge drones, grocery store beeps, car horns. Lia Kohl alternately hallows and mimics them, offering them to the listener in a new light. Using a textural cloud of cello and synthesizers, with a few notable contributions from wind players Ka Baird and Patrick Shiroishi, Kohl brings out beauty in the world’s inane noise.
Michèle Bokanowski - Cirque (Kythibong Records)
The Circus is a place of lights and colors, but also of shadows, even darkness. Admittedly, it delights children and makes adults laugh. But you only need one rainy autumn evening near a circus tent and the smell of fodder to think of the sadness of the clowns, the endless training of the animals and the freaks who are hidden in some caravan... cinema, the essence of the circus – movement, light, danger and burlesque – will have been admirably rendered in Notes on the circus by Jonas Mekas (1966), one of the inventors of the filmed diary. With
Cirque, Michèle Bokanowski does similar work, entirely dedicated to spinning, in the musical field.
