What? WORD is review­ing demos now? Um, no. This is a weird one, but I decided why not.

I used to make music, mostly solo, some­times with friends. Friends and I released two com­pi­la­tions and I had a cou­ple tracks on each. A cou­ple years ago, I felt like I really found my voice and decided to go full-on with a demo and tried to get a label to pick me up. No one was inter­ested. I thought it was a really excel­lent set of music that hinted at the larger album plans I had for it. I may go back some­day and work on the rest of the tracks I had started, but who knows. These 5 are the most pol­ished and the music I feel most proud of. Thought you may all be inter­ested in hear­ing it.

Masaru — The War Against (2006 Demo)
01. “What World Is This” (mp3)
02. “The War Against” (mp3)
03. “Bren­dan” (mp3)
04. “Hoard” (mp3)
05. “Awk­ward Bow” (mp3)

I’m no expert (if such a per­son exists, it’s prob­a­bly Frank), but as near as I can tell, first there was tra­di­tional African music, which became influ­enced by Amer­i­can jazz and big band. This led to High­life, char­ac­ter­ized by large ensem­ble groups. After awhile, soul and funk began to creep into High­life, and Afro-beat was born, a genre pio­neered by Fela Kuti, a thor­oughly fas­ci­nat­ing musi­cal force. Afro-beat, in turn, became influ­enced by proto-disco and garage rock. This lin­ear line that stretches back cen­turies and has been trans­formed through the years into dif­fer­ent types of music is all cen­tered around that dis­tinc­tive syn­co­pated African rhythm, a sound that weaves into your head and trav­els through­out your body. It may be the sin­gle funki­est rhythm in the world. I know that my world­view of music was utterly changed when I first encoun­tered it. Qual­ity offi­cial releases of this music is some­what sparse, espe­cially in the U.S. How­ever, Sound­way Records has been qui­etly try­ing to change this and releas­ing amaz­ing col­lec­tions to the world over the past cou­ple years, com­plete with extremely infor­ma­tive liner notes. This review cov­ers their recent Nige­ria Spe­cial series, show­cas­ing music com­ing the most pop­u­lous African nation.

Nige­ria Spe­cial — Mod­ern High­life Afro-Sounds & Niger­ian Blues 1970–6
The first of these is a double-CD set cov­er­ing a width range of sounds that fall into two cat­e­gories, tra­di­tional high­life bands and more pop-oriented music. Some of my favorite tracks on here are the min­i­mal “blues” record­ings, rep­re­sent­ing a look at Nigeria’s folk music and how it was trans­formed by the emerg­ing “Afro” sound. Celes­tine Ukwu & His Philoso­phers National’s “Okwukwe Ne Nchek­wube” is one such exam­ple of the merg­ing of styles that came from this period. The pace is slow and relaxed, the gui­tar very intri­cate and beau­ti­ful, there is a notice­able lack of horns, and the vocals are very quiet and lilt­ing. A stark con­trast to the The Hykkers’ “I Want A Break Thru,” a track that ups the tempo and inten­sity with a dis­tinctly garage rock tint. Through it all, is that syn­co­pated style of beat. Else­where you get The Niger­ian Police Force Band turn­ing in a great exam­ple of high­life with “Asiko Mi Ni.”

Nige­ria Disco Funk Spe­cial — The Sound of the Under­ground Lagos Dance­floor 1974–79
Next up is a look at the sounds com­ing from Lagos, a city that came be know as one of the musi­cal hotspots of West Africa. Lagos was home to many dance clubs and the pop­u­lar music was influ­enced by funk and disco, aimed squarely at get­ting peo­ple on the floor. This isn’t disco as we think of it, this is a wholly unique con­coc­tion. High­life and Afro-beat mixes with extra wah-wah gui­tars and pro­nounced basslines, horns are used more in a clipped, funky way, and the drums use a less fre­netic pat­tern in favor of a steady pulse that’s powerful.

Nige­ria Rock Spe­cial — Psy­che­delic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk Spe­cial in 1970s Nige­ria
The last Nige­ria Spe­cial comp is pos­si­bly the best and cer­tainly the most badass. Hear­ing Afro-beat mixed with Amer­i­can rock styles is intox­i­cat­ing and com­prises some of the funki­est, heavy-hitting music I’ve heard. From the open­ing Ofege track and it’s key-centric struc­ture to the punchy beats and expert gui­tar of The Hygrades’ “In The Jun­gle,” this rock music is the funki­est rock ever cre­ated. And funk was some­thing Amer­i­can rock never was com­fort­able with, favor­ing a dif­fer­nent kind of groove alto­gether. Tabukah ‘X”s “Fin­ger Toe” dials it back a lit­tle with a great call and response, horn and gui­tar led track. One of the most pop­u­lar Niger­ian rock bands was The Fun­kees and their “Acid Rock” here shows why, a psy­che­delic mon­ster of gui­tar and horns sounds. My all-time favorite track on this release, though, is the mon­u­men­tal “Coto­cun Gba Gounke” by Colo­mach, which is a decid­edly studio-created song. The gor­geous per­cus­sion and call and response vocals were prob­a­bly mostly what this band orig­i­nally did, until they got into a stu­dio where they added fuzz gui­tar to this sound and came up with the hugely unique mix heard here.

I don’t know if Sound­way plans to con­tinue this series, but I hope they do, as the work they are doing in bring­ing this music out of the dusty bins and garages of Nige­ria and West Africa is fan­tas­tic. Please check these out!

The past few years have been an eye-opening expe­ri­ence for me in terms of get­ting heav­ily into funk and soul music from the 60s and 70s. I’ve blogged about it a few times, but I’m not sure I’ve given proper credit to Larry Gro­gan over at Funky 16 Cor­ners for intro­duc­ing me to a lot of impor­tant finds through his blog. Eldridge Jones, Lee Dorsey, etc., I first found them here. His “Radio” series is my lifeblood. You can see and down­load the entire archive at his site. Hours upon hours of ridicu­lous heavy shit. Any­way, this post is a good way to let you know he is doing a pledge drive to help with upkeep costs on a blog like this. You can find more info at this link. Check it (and the rest of the blog) out. Also, Larry did a few guest mixes over the past year for var­i­ous blogs. They are all pure qual­ity and I’m link­ing 3 of them here.
Heavy Heavy Heavy: F16C Mix for Right Side of Funky (mp3 mix) | Track­list + Info
Six Mil­lion Dol­lar Groove: F16C Mix for Flea­mar­ket Funk (mp3 mix) | Track­list + Info
I’ve Got The Funk: F16C Mix for This Is Tomor­row (mp3 mix) | Track­list + Info

I thought that Nico Muhly’s first album Speaks Vol­umes was a lovely, if pos­si­bly too intel­lec­tual, album. Gor­geously com­posed, there were parts of it that felt like they were going right over my head. This can hap­pen a lot in this age of “con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal” music com­ing from labels such Type, Mias­mah, and Bed­room Com­mu­nity. Indeed, Bed­room Com­mu­nity has a his­tory of releas­ing par­tic­u­larly off-kilter jux­ta­po­si­tions of sound. I’ve writ­ten at length about the Val­geir Sig­urðs­son and Ben Frost albums, two titan­i­cally impres­sive bolts of cre­ativ­ity. Muhly’s sec­ond album, Moth­er­tongue appears to be the third part of that album tril­ogy to me, a strong state­ment for this fairly new record label. And the rea­son why I feel this way is that Muhly has injected a beau­ti­ful rough warmth to this com­plex new album. Hinted at in the title, this is an album about voice and how it can be used as an instru­ment, but not in a Medulla type of way. The cut-up, repeat­ing, lay­ered voices here are used as an instru­ment along with strings, keys, elec­tron­ics, per­cus­sion, not instead of them. The syn­ergy is remark­able. The open­ing 4 part “Moth­er­tongue” fea­tures Abi­gail Fis­cher, a clas­si­cal mezzo-soprano, hav­ing her voice uti­lized like few other singers of her back­ground. The repeated phrases serve as move­ments and motifs through­out the piece, twist­ing, turn­ing, and behav­ing like a vio­lin or trom­bone would. Helgi Hrafn Jóns­son sings and plays trom­bone on the next suite of music to a haunt­ing effect. The ele­gant and antique struc­ture of this suite is sim­ply beau­ti­ful, full of frag­ile piano and for­mal harpischord. How­ever, the true mas­ter­piece of this album is with­out a doubt the final suite, “The Only Tune,” fea­tur­ing label-mate Sami­don con­tribut­ing voice, banjo & gui­tar to Nico Muhly’s bed of elec­tronic and sym­phonic noise con­struc­tions. There is a won­der­ful murk­i­ness to this set of music which con­jures, to me, a lone man on the porch of a run-down shack, sur­round­ing by the sounds of a swamp alive with wildlife, lament­ing the tale of two sis­ters and their tragic fate. It’s eerie, dev­as­tat­ing, and lingers with you long after it fades into silence. The use of feed­back Muhly employs here is an inter­est­ing device com­ing from a clas­si­cal com­poser of his pedi­gree. The dif­fer­ent ele­ments teeter and brush up against each other to cre­ate majes­tic ten­sion for the entire dura­tion of it’s epic 3 parts. A highly rec­om­mended and astound­ingly cre­ative sopho­more album. Go to this page for more infor­ma­tion about buy­ing options includ­ing dig­i­tal + phys­i­cal bun­dle deals. You can very eas­ily pre­view the entire album at this link. Check it out!

One of my favorite pro­duc­ers is that lovely Eng­lish­man Wax­fac­tor aka Sasqwax.. A cou­ple years ago, he released the amaz­ing instru­men­tal sci­ence fic­tion hip-hop opus Sci-Fu, which I gushed about on this very blog here. The eter­nally reward­ing radio show/podcast/engine of audio destruc­tion Rhythm Incur­sions (which Wax is a found­ing mem­ber) has done the world a ser­vice and put it all up for free, includ­ing art­work and the lit­tle Buddy Peace teaser mix of the album from way back when. Read all about it here.
Wax­fac­tor — Sci-Fu (full album) (ZIP — mp3s)