Hundred Waters

According to my Facebook Memories, 10 years ago today I saw the band Hundred Waters at The Earl. Mitski, then relatively unknown, opened. 

Hundred Water are a psychedelic indie rock band fronted by Nicole Miglis on vocals, keyboards, and occasional flute. Their first album, released in 2012, was self titled, and their subsequent two LPs were The Moon Rang Like a Bell (2014) and Communicating (2017).

Yesterday, Miglis released a solo LP titled Re: Communicating which consists of solo piano versions of songs from the Communicating album. All solo piano - no vocals, no drums, no electronics - just piano.  It's an interesting decision, considering the source material was released eight years ago and the sound is a stark departure from the rest of Hundred Waters' discography.

It's not uninteresting, though. Without knowing the context, a listener might take the tracks for a collection of semi-classical piano studies. In the old days of record stores and bins sorted by categories, this one would probably have gone into the Classical or at least Instrumental aisles. But I've bought lots of music out of those bins back in the day (okay, mostly the rock and jazz bins, but I wasn't without purchases from Classical and Instrumental).

I'm all for artists expanding their techniques and taking bold artistic chances. Here's a sample if you're curious (and also a link to buy her music should you be so inclined).

      

For comparison purposes, here's the original, Blanket Me, a Julia Holter-esque track from the Communicating LP:

Personally, I prefer the term "worm hole" to "rabbit hole" - the former sounds more cosmic and better describes how you could get transported to a different dimension of time and space. But whichever you prefer, the Stephen Hawking concept or the Lewis Carroll construction, the hole I fell into today led me here.

A Jackson

I'm pretty sure I've already posted this here, but in recognition of walking a Jackson so far this month, here's A Jackson in Your House.

Swans

If the grifters who currently own the copyright to Marvin Gaye's music also owned the rights to the music of David Bowie, they would sue Michael Gira over the  final 6:00 minutes of Swans' new single I Am a Tower for its resemblance to Bowie's Heroes. 

But they don't, and Bowie himself would have recognized that the evolution and development of creative music as an art form necessarily includes references and homage to previous works. And as far as theft of intellectual property goes, no one can reasonably claim they purchased I Am a Tower thinking it was Heroes, nor does Tower's appeal lie solely in the resemblance in its closing passages to Heroes. If anything, Tower may incentivize a new generation of listeners to go back and listen to Heroes.

Not to mention that the spoken word vocals at around 3:45 sound reminiscent of The Doors' Horse Latitudes. 

But this discussion already loses sight of this epic, 19-minute powerhouse drone meditation by Swans, the first single from their upcoming Birthing LP, to be released May 30.         

Maruja

The many releases on New Music Friday yesterday included EPs by Porridge Radio (The Machine Starts to Sing) and Nels Cline (Slipping Into Something), as well as the albums Ghost/Spirit by Jules Reidy, Kind Regards by Oren Ambarchi, Volume 2 of John Zorn's Bagatelles, and The Equinox by Zorn's Painkiller. A good set of music, there.

Yesterday also saw the release of Tir na nÓg, the third EP by Manchester's Maruja, a fully improvised piece recorded live on September 12, 2024 at the U.K.'s Salford University. Maruja’s music is a ferocious combination of post-punk and free jazz. Although Tir na nÓg is primarily instrumental, their music typically also includes vocals with lyrics rooted in hip hop.

Check them out.

Angels and Demons at Play

For comparison purposes with Marshall Allen's recent release, here's Sun Ra's original version of Angels and Demons at Play from the 1965 LP of the same name.

Nyokabi Kariuki

Today's deep dive down musical rabbit holes led me to Kenyan composer and sound artist Nyokabi Kariuki. The lyrics to her song, Galu, are simply "I go down at six AM to swim in the Indian Ocean."

I don't know much about her at this point, but hearing her music is like experiencing a shared dream, floating in and out of a subconscious colored by an East African upbringing as filtered through the Fourth World imaginings of Jon Hassell.