Airing Saturdays at 11 am, Brown Mtn. Lights spans the musical horizons from folk, jazz, Americana, rock to blues and beyond. This year, we saw so many amazing releases now that the music world is in post-pandemic recording and touring mode. Since we rarely repeat a spin, it was hard to narrow down this year’s most interesting records, but here are some gems that we really dig this year:
Fire! Orchestra: Echoes [Rune Grammofon]
The newest release from the mind blowing and huge [43 person] mostly Scandinavian ensemble led by saxophonist Mats Gustafsson features 80+ minutes of explosive music. Blending rock, jazz, avant garde and classical, Fire! Orchestra pulls all the punches. Free jazz legend Joe McPhee makes a submerged guest appearance on a stand-out track, I see your eye Pt. 2. Whatever you call this music…..it is thrilling and all-encompassing.
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Kaze & Ikue Mori: Crustal Movement [Libra Records]
While the pandemic does seem to be in the rear view mirror, this album emerged sort of miraculously from it. Featuring 2022 MacArthur Genius recipient and no-wave and all around experimental music legend, Ikue Mori on electronics, drummer Peter Orins and pianist Satoko Fujii, this album is a sonic adventure. With sections offering incredible dynamics, space and anarchy, it’s a great testament to the abilities of these musicians to work in the challenging conditions of the pandemic to assemble these improvisations remotely into something rather amazing.
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Nightbeats: Rajan [Suicide Squeeze Records]
Danny Lee “Rajan” Blackwell leads this Texan-born, Seattle-based, guitar-drenched psychedelic band on their 5th album. This one features a touch of Indian sounds blended with elements of The Seeds, early Stones and maybe a sprinkle of Graham Parsons. The Brown Mountain Lights creative crew all [1 of us] approve of this happy mix.
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Josephine Foster: Domestic Sphere [Fire Records]
With a voice like a distant theremin on a windy prairie, Foster’s quivering music evokes the lonely landscape. Soothing yes, but also unsettling, like a midday dream, her newest record is very stripped down, but she fills the space with the occasional gathered sound and floating lyrics that are….well….haunting: “Darling I am a haunted house / All earthly things are snares, you see / Take the breath from my mouth / Ease the door, now let me be / For / I am a haunted house / There is no light in me ”
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Hayden Pedigo: The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored [Mexican Summer]
Fans of the primitive guitar work of John Fahey or newer purveyors of the form, like William Tyler, might check out this 29 year old’s newest record. Anything from the Mexican Summer label typically catches our ears, and this one shows the incredible promise of Pedigo’s guitar work. He’s one to watch….
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Desire Marea: On the Romance of Being [Mute]
South African queer performer, actor, and trained spiritual healer Buyani Duma performs under the stage name, Desire Marea. His 2nd album employs a 13 member ensemble and combines house, gospel, Zulu tribal sounds and much more into an indescribable social and artistic statement. The daring video to the album’s frenetic centerpiece, “Be Free” encapsulates how Desire Marea beautifully represents the past, present and future of Afro-pop, and maybe just all pop.
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The Nude Party: Rides On [New West Records]
Boone, NC-born, New York-based psych-folk/ country-rockers have caught their unassuming groove on their third full-length, self-produced record. What if the Velvets and the Stones took a trip into the desert with Sky Saxon behind the wheel of a 70’s shag carpeted van? Ride on…..
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Bonnie Prince Billy: Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You [Drag City]
Like some kind of weird orange wine aged in an underground cask, Will Oldham’s music has a peculiar presence on the palate; invigorating with obscure floral notes, and…..just a little sour. His newest, and 21st record under the BPB moniker, has unforgettable lines that come straight at you like mini sermons from a front-porch prophet. Consider “Trees of Hell“: “The trees have come to take back what wе took away from them / We yanked thеir roots, claimed their branches, pulled them limb from limb / We stole and violated all that would have been shared swift / We saw inherent harmony, assumed it was our gift” This is one of his best records.
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Hauschka: Philanthropy [City Slang]
His newest album after winning an Oscar for the soundtrack for last year’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, Hauschka is Volker Bertelmann‘s prepared piano project. Getting the most out of both the percussive and string aspects of the piano, Philanthropy is a mostly positive minimalist record with titles that highlight humanity’s best attributes. My favorite is the propulsive opener, “Diversity.” An inspiring record that goes great with reading, running, walking, sitting, talking, cooking, eating, listening, etc”
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Cable Ties: All Her Plans [Merge Records]
A great fist pumping record from Australia proving that punk’s central attributes are timeless and essential. The third album from the Melbourne trio led by Jenny McKechnie features some great anthems to our most crucial issues from mental health, addiction, to trusting others and….well….the basic need for love. Check out the great mix of angry fire and devotion in “Time for You.” This is a great band.
Asheville band “Blushin’ Roulettes” played The Getaway River Bar while we simulcast it live on the AshevilleFM Live Music Sessions (ALMS) – Link is below (hover label) or you can go to the LIVE RECORDINGS tab off the main menu to hear all the great ALMS recordings..
The Getaway River Bar – The Getaway is a laid-back bar with extra chill vibes by the river. With an expanse of outdoor seating and recreations set on the edge of the French Broad River, it welcomes everyone 21+ to loosen up and enjoy a getaway hidden in-between the city center and growing West Asheville.
Absolutely dazzling 1982 solo debut by the young Ethiopian singer, backed by the legendary Roha Band. After stints with Alemayheu Eshete, and Hailu Mergia’s Walias, Sebsibe strides on her own, striking the perfect balance of innocent wonder and youthful melancholy. All the touchstones of timeless Ethio-R&B in full swing – circular rhythms, dusky keyboards, deep-pocket horns, all elevating Sebsibe’s celestial, graceful voice. Never a dull moment, enchanted in every turn, layers keep revealing themselves with repeated listens. Released to very little fanfare by Little Axe, this is one of those sleeper stunners that, once awakened, stays in heavy rotation. Unmissable.
Mississippi Records is hands-down one of the finest archival labels in the world, so no surprise they’d feature several times on any reissue roundup. Beauties, released almost simultaneously with Little Axe’s Sebsibe joint, (Mississippi is Little Axe’s parent label,) is another crown jewel of Golden Era Ethiopian jazz. Almost impossible to discern which voice belongs to whom, Ashine and Kebret’s unison vocals often sound as if emanating from one magical individual. Minor key laments mix with heartwarming ballads, with a couple rocksteady-ish stompers for good measure, music like this could only be made in a certain time and place.
Speaking of time capsules, Mississippi uncovers yet another treasure trove from Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, an Ethiopian nun who sadly passed away in March of 2023 at age 99, just a few weeks ahead of Jerusalem’s release. During the second Italo-Ethiopian war, she and her family were captured and sent to POW camps in Italy (c 1935-37); after the conflict she studied Western classical music in Cairo, eventually returning to Ethiopia in the early 40s, settling in a hilltop monastery. After a decade of “no shoes, no music, just prayer,” she helped found orphanages around Addis Abbaba, amid more political conflict, often composing and recording music privately in her spare time. These recordings, meditations for piano and voice, date to the early 1970s, before her relocation to Jerusalem in the 80s. When it comes to non-Western “outsider art,” perhaps no one is as singular, as dedicated, and revered as Gebru.
How can you not love a record like this? Charles Bogert spent the entirety of his 1957 Guggenheim Fellowship traveling around the US and northern Mexico recording sounds emanating from ditches, ponds, bogs, and anywhere else he found an amphibious friend. One of the US’s premier herpetologists (frog expert) at the time, Bogert narrates each audio entry of over 90 species with the prestige of knowledge without ego combined with the love of a hobbyist gone pro. Giving environmental context along with biological idiosyncrasy, as well as an uncommon dexterity with Latin-genus pronunciation, there’s nothing that isn’t charming about this document. Folkways presented this first-ever reissue as part of its 75th anniversary celebration in 2023, and the world is a hoppier place for it.
In 1972, the Arkestra hauled themselves to Oakland and stayed with members of the Black Panther Party to film Ra’s sci-fi fable, “Space is the Place.” (Fun fact: they used the same soundstage during the day which, at night, was used to film future-cult-classic X-rated game-changer “Behind the Green Door.”) The music for the soundtrack never really went out of orbit, but other recordings made during the same period are released in this deluxe box for the first time in 2023. Whereas most tracks of the classic soundtrack are Ra staples, condensed yet still spaced-out, bathed in reverb, the bonus LP of unearthed tracks hold extended sound abstractions and tone poems. Ra sounds as if on a pulpit’s pedestal, preaching about outer mathematics and rhythmic equations, chastising humanity for its transgressions yet welcoming its transcendence to the Greater Universe. A must for completeness, and still one of the best primers for the curious, the 3xLP set pinpoints newly-discovered stars in Sun Ra’s still-expanding galaxies.
No album merges the intersections of late 60s Soul Jazz and the forefront of Black Avant-Garde like Sonny Sharrock’s “Black Woman,” yet it’s often overlooked in conversations about either of those movements. Perhaps the world wasn’t, and largely still isn’t, prepared for Sharrock’s shredded guitar skronk (though few hesitate to laud his later White counterparts,) or the vocal turns of his then-partner Linda (maligned/praised for a similar “style” to Yoko Ono – yet more accurately, Abbey Lincoln.) Its undeniable groove, an homage/furthering of funk rock and R&B, sets forth a deconstruction and reconfiguring of preconceived ideas of any genre. It’s a protest album that whirls like a dervish, rallies for the liberation of music itself, against the confines of commercialism, using the tools of the masses to lead them toward pure, individual expression. Sly Stone got nothing on this.
Anything “new” from Nina Simone is always cause for celebration. Her performance at Newport Jazz in 1966 was one of those mythical moments folks talk about for years. Or in this case, generations. Thanks to the archival work of venerable Verve records, recently discovered tapes allow us all into Nina’s timeless audience. From the fragile yet strong-willed title-track opener, through rearranged standards simultaneously melancholy and hopeful, Nina’s dedication to the blues and the not-so-abstract truth reverberates as vital and prescient today as it was then. Legend has it, the crowd applauded so rapturously the next act was refused access to the stage. So what does Nina do? Perform an encore of “Mississippi, Goddamn” so incendiary, so poignant it smokes the “standard” live version she performed at Carnegie Hall two years prior to embers. For anyone remotely skeptical of Ms Simone’s power to convey every emotion possible, THIS will make you a believer.