Non-ECM Reviews

Kosi: One More Cup of Coffee

| Tyran Grillo

One More Cup of Coffee

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i’d kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
–from “kidnap poem,” by Nikki Giovanni

Kosi is Akosua Gyebi Sorensen, a child of New York who has grown into her own on a bold, reflective debut album. One Cup of Coffee makes no excuses, pulls no punches, and leaves the mirror streaked with experience. Raised by hardworking immigrants in Southeast Queens, Kosi took to her own musical formations early on, despite her household tastes. “My parents played records of Jimmy Cliff and Shirley Caesar,” she muses, “but I always preferred to borrow Billy Holiday albums from the library. I don’t know what drew me to her as a seven- or eight-year-old child, as I couldn’t possibly have understood what I was hearing.” Yet it’s clear from her words and her sounds that a deeper understanding was just waiting for the ideal moment to emerge.

Kosi would go on to study at Brooklyn College, by which time her love of singing had already been instilled through participation in her local church choir. Outside the congregation, life had its way. As any musician knows, the City can be an unforgiving sea of voices vying to be heard, as attested by the fact that Kosi’s uncompromising talents are these days more often heard echoing through subway tunnels—a gig she’s owned since around Thanksgiving of 2013. And certainly we can give thanks that One More Cup of Coffee has materialized for those unable to ride the rails, for it shows just how those cavernous transportation portals have honed her art into something at once inviting and aloof.

Accompanied by guitarist Aron Marchak, she weaves a spell that is as much a portrait of her environment as of the contradictions of her own urbanity. To these ears, the relationship between voice and guitar is tight as yin and yang—so attuned, in fact, that one who didn’t know any better could be forgiven in thinking that Kosi was accompanying herself. The artist tells a different story.

“I’ve only been working with Aron for about a year. He works with many different artists in a variety of different styles (jazz, gospel, r&b, rock, etc.), and so he’s usually prepared to do whatever I ask him to do, provided I can articulate clearly what I want from him. Also, contrary to popular belief about singers, I’m not exactly the most demanding human being, and I’m ready and willing to work with whatever I’m given. The combination of his adaptability and my adaptability gives the illusion of ‘tightness’ when in fact, it’s the loosest of all possible partnerships.”

To that effect, Kosi sings with heart, about heart, and allows the disjointedness of lived experience to voice itself as memory. Her diction crinkles like a windblown shopping bag, in which rattles a variety of reference points. From jazz to blues to neo-soul: it’s all there, pre-tapped and ready to be heard, but with such freshness of vision that it could be from no other singer. This is Kosi’s strength, a raw yet elegant presentation that explodes with originality, as is especially the case when one considers the album’s only two standards alongside the intensities of her own songcraft. Of those tunes, she notes “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as something of a random choice:

“In a rehearsal with Aron one day, while I was searching through my folder for something or other, he started playing it and, recognizing it, I sang along with him. I liked how it sounded, so I suggested that we perform it at the show for which we were rehearsing. The inclusion of one wordless standard became a habit for us after that. Actually, maybe more of a ritual than a habit. I like the idea of singing wordless tunes because it makes me a part of the ensemble rather than just being a feature to be accompanied.”

The Mingus classic proves a fitting introduction, easing us into the album’s nocturnal universe without betraying the emotional rollercoaster about to ensue. Kosi’s instrumentality applies a smooth appliqué to Aron’s rich picking, carrying the tune in gracious slings of honor. Of the album’s other standard, “Autumn in New York,” Kosi says the following: “The album was released in autumn in New York. I was also born in autumn in New York. Autumn is my favorite season, and New York is the only city with which I identify. If I had to choose only one standard to identify with, that would have to be it.” In the duo’s purview, this song lovingly connects indoors to outdoors, nature to nurture. A leisurely stroll through Central Park. A counting of blessings on ten fingers. A romantic vision of a city ravished yet perseverant.

Kosi

Yet what makes One More Cup of Coffee such a memorable experience is its multifaceted exploration of womanhood, which in Kosi’s diaristic originals comes across as both impervious and vulnerable. The singer cites “Need Your Love” as a prime example of the latter, for what appears on the surface to be a sensual, self-assured song, comes with a price. “It may be the most anti-feminist thing I’ve ever written,” she avers.

“It is about a woman putting on masculine bravado, or in other words, completely compromising her womanhood, so much that she’s willing to degrade, objectify, and overextend herself because she needs to feel ‘loved’ without ever even defining what that love would look or feel like. I am not glorifying this mentality; the narrator of this song is a pitiable creature who has (perhaps momentarily) lost all her strength but is still clinging to a false front. I am admitting to it, though. The narrator is me, or was me at the time when I wrote the song, proving that feminists are not immune to feelings of complete weakness.”

These sentiments bear echoes of third-wave feminist politics, which challenge essentialist (read: popular) notions of gender by owning up to, and learning from, moments of breakdown—as must we all, from time to time. Kosi is unafraid to perform her past as a means of re-creation. The end effect is a song set that de-mythologizes femininity and gets real for an hour. It’s a message touted by such visionaries as Audre Lorde, whose subscription to the erotic over romance reclaimed the former’s vilified spectrum as a levee against the tide of despair. As Lorde once wrote, “There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity.”

With this in mind, we hear songs like “Karen” in more nuanced light—not as professions but obsessions of self-image, refracted through the soul and body of another, succumbing to love’s illusions all the same. Likewise, “Marlene” walks the cracks of heartbreak between suspicion and bodily trust, the infection of affection held under the microscope, and erupts into the album’s most cathartic moment: a grunt that plays like some visceral, operatic win. A verbal takedown of mind over matter, to be sure. Such expectorations are tempered by inhalations of resolve, as in the inebriated haze of “The Last Shot,” which is all about losing faith but also gaining trust in others when the chips are down. The bluesy perseverance of “Once and Future” negotiates even harder-won affirmations.

The relationships portrayed on the album are all the more realistic for being so fleeting. Whether the compromises of the title track (“One guitar string missing—I think that one’s the G? / One knight in tarnished armor come to rescue me”) or the brokenness of “Little Miss Generous,” there is a genuine recognition that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. All of which funnels into “I Wrote you a Song,” the album’s unlisted bonus track, which finds beauty in solitude and refuses the need of another body to define self-worth, confirming that love must start with the self before it can ever trickle into another’s waters. “I wrote you a song that you’ll never hear,” she sings, “cuz I’ll only sing it when I know you’re not near.” Hearing these words, we cannot deny them knowing that we are their substitute targets.

Although Kosi lays no claims to an overarching theme, the album deals with gargantuan questions of love and loss all the same, and does so with unabashed honesty. At times confrontational, at others lyrical, her personality hits you with all it has to offer. If you can’t handle it, don’t run away. Just listen more.

Exploding the Sandbox: A Moment with TOTEM>

| Tyran Grillo

Voices of Grain In his seminal essay “The Grain of the Voice,” French philosopher Roland Barthes asserts the failure of language to interpret music for the precise reason that language and music are one in the same. Needing no self-projection to justify its existence, music is a signifier without identity that expresses its materiality by what he calls the “grain.” During a recent interview with between sound and space, guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil, who alongside bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Andrew Drury is part of the free improvisation triangle known as TOTEM>, explains the importance of the grain in a mode of sonic production that may seem far afield of its roots but which in fact burrows past them: “The history of what I’ve been involved with, which is jazz-based, brought me to these sounds. When I look at the music of, for instance, of Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, and how each had his own musical influence—for Taylor it was classical; for Coltrane, world music; and for Ayler, folk—as a springboard for improvisation, I see those same influences in my own evolution. All of this and more, including contemporary classical music from the second half of the twentieth century (Xenakis, Reich, Lachenmann, etc.), has made me realize that playing guitar is in large part about imitating my own environment. It’s not unlike a child who acquires language just by being around family members and learning to communicate. For me, it’s as simple as that. I take everything I’ve ever heard or experienced and pass it through my filter, using my guitar as an instrument for the exploration of that sound by way of communication. So concepts of music, noise, or sound—really, all of these things are part of the same thing.” We may easily connect this way of thinking to Barthes, who avers that music, “by natural bent, is that which receives an adjective,” an assertion that renders moot any question of genre. Subjecting music to the violence of nominalization precludes the lived experience of its descriptive realities. In less uncertain terms: adjectives are active, while nouns are dead matter. The creation and absorption of sound functions as an act of translation, a way to experience the afterlife of sonic production through another form, be it in words or in reverberations.

TOTEM

To be sure, the matter-makers of TOTEM> know a thing or two about adjectives. Voices of Grain, which comes five years after their 2008 debut Solar Forge, brims with them. Although thoroughly established on the lunatic fringe of New York’s jazz scene, their presence is mappable by no coordinates, save the curtain behind which an ancestral Oz beats his drum. The virtuosity of each member is formidable, but when standing in the center of their galactic fury we needn’t understand any means of execution. We are more likely to find strange comfort in the mystery behind every utterance. Despite the frenzy, there is hardly a trace of urgency to the sounds, which come to us through noose-outlined ovals of sky, each a window into another, ad infinitum. And where does all of this leave the hapless writer, who struggles with words as if severed from the music they entail? Eisenbeil has an answer for that, too: “A vast majority of sound is created in the world and how that sound is used in situations is predicated on people being engaged in one form or another. Writings by those who sit removed just expecting to be fed say more about the writer’s environment than about the music’s. Musicians will tell you that the more the audience is involved, the better the experience is. It turns into something larger than everyone and everything involved. It’s an ancient process.” As indeed the free qualities of “Genosong” take shape, and in my own attempts to participate in the conversation, I initially struggle for reference points. To wit, possibilities include the Laswell/Haino/Ali joint Decided … Already The Motionless Heart Of Tranquility, Tangling The Prayer Called “I” (1999, Tzadik) and the pioneering work of Derek Bailey. Yet the confluence of signatures that is TOTEM> discloses another genealogy entirely, one quoted above yet also expressed by spontaneous architectures. The result is a hulking vessel that becomes indistinguishable from the waters it plows. Between the breakers of Drury’s drumming, Blancarte’s thick knot-work, and the guitar’s ever-fractal song, the trio trades shine for brine in a pirated helix of comportment. One can almost feel the mitochondria warming up. There’s a sense here of tentacles grasping on to something, of suction and underbellies barnacled by nocturnal passage. What seems a maritime nightmare is in fact a jazz dream, each strand of braid taking a solo while the others lock into supporting grooves. Such moments are brief, although periodic enough to prove TOTEM>’s three-dimensional locution. From oceans eternal to motions internal, from ship to submarine, creaks and water pressures abound in the claustrophobic symphony of “Written in the Body.” What appears to be a dive inward marks its clip by friction of strings and osmosis of skins. Chronology, then, becomes not an ordering of events but an event of orderings, each strand one possible pathway through the mind’s eye, a constant breaking and reconnecting of bare life. Further tensions ravel in “Toward Jouissance,” which stretches and rubs a balloon to the brink of rupture, and in “Counter Memory,” which draws a whirlpool of collective becoming. The latter is more explicitly layered as guitar elicits a frantic cartography across insectile spectrums. “Message Without a Code” not only names the next track, but might as well be the band’s slogan: despite the seemingly cryptic methods (extended techniques, and so on) of execution, the sounds produced are stark naked. Acceptance of that nakedness, molecular it may be, are the listener’s only entrance fee to a full experience of these goings on. More than that, it’s an awareness of one’s physical universe and the planetary alignments of performance. No mere analogy, this image reaches back to Eisenbeil’s genealogy of forms, which taps into a decidedly Foucauldian sense of biopower, that elusive yet pervasive technology of physical management: “Noise is the grain of the voice, and with the grain expresses power,” the guitarist goes on to say. “The idea is that all of the leading exponents of jazz have always had this kind of noise in their sound. Whether it was Ornette Coleman or Charlie Parker, or Evan Parker, or William Parker…many of these musicians were criticized early on for this grain that comes through their sound, which people initially perceived as noise because their emotional filter didn’t allow it to penetrate their being. Yet now that noise is accepted. It must be heard.” Perhaps this is the message of “Post-Repeating,” the album’s most outward statement by far. It cuts a vast horizontal plane, a frozen ocean cracking in the sun with meditative cause, and paves our way toward the final “Silence On Its Road.” In the end, there is only the beginning, a gesture that resounds with every possibility at its fingertips. All explosions look like implosions with enough mirrors around. “Music,” says Eisenbeil, “is best when formed when people have an open heart.” It need be nothing more or less. Like the arrowhead that ends the band’s name, it points forward, no more knowing of the future than the rest of us. And so, while the album does proceed in an extremely physical manner, it orbits us at such a rate that the distinction between the body and its environment collapses in endless porosity. Eisenbeil agrees: “I love playing with Tom and Andrew. It’s a fantastic experience for being completely natural. Every single time we get together, whether in public performance or in the studio, it’s a transcendental experience that is much bigger than the three of us. The sound is an entity in and of itself, a universal life force that the three of us are part of.” To that life force will be added the curious who, with open ears and hearts, find themselves drowning in the sandbox of TOTEM>’s sound-world, swallowing every last grain until it screams.

Belonoga review in RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

Fans of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares won’t want to miss the latest album by one of its most distinguished members, Gergana Dimitrova.

Belonoga

Under the moniker Belonoga, she forges otherworlds by means of her studied voice, along with a group of dedicated musicians. The result is a potpourri of styles and traditions, with a fragrance just as intoxicating. Check out my review and listen to samples at RootsWorld here.

Through the Eyes of the Sun

MONO: for my parents

| Tyran Grillo

TRR213_CD_Booklet_RE21003_OUTSIDE

MONO
for my parents

Takaakira “Taka” Goto guitar
Tamaki Kunishi bass, piano, glockenspiel
Yoda guitar
Yasunori Takada drums, glockenspiel, timpani, tubular bell, gong
The Holy Ground Orchestra
Released September 4, 2012 on Temporary Residence Limited

On May 29, 2010, a friend and I filed among an eager crowd into Daniel Street in Milford, Connecticut to bask in the tidal wave of Japanese instrumental rock outfit MONO. It was my first time hearing the band in person, and the claustrophobic feel of the space lent the experience an intimacy that only small clubs can offer. That venue has since been turned into a pizza restaurant, but the music that once coursed through me there continues to spoke dark corners of my mind with its cutting wheel.

It took eclectic genius and underground forerunner John Zorn to recognize the vision of MONO, who at the time had only put out the debut EP Hey, You on Japanese indie label Forty-4. Zorn introduced the band’s dense wall of sound to a wider audience of unsuspecting listeners (myself among them) via his Tzadik label in 2001. Under the Pipal Tree instantly made MONO a household name in post-rock, tracing the shadows of such influential acts as Sonic Youth and Godspeed You! Black Emperor while keeping a foot also in the door of classical minimalism. Yet it was already clear that MONO was carving its own path into the contemporary soundscape with a force so luminous that it eroded a valley down to the earth’s molten core.

MONO

Such physicality of expression was honed to raw perfection in You Are There (2006, Temporary Residence Limited). Song titles such as “The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain” and “The Remains of the Day” were prime indicators of the music’s cinematic charge before a single note was heard, accurate descriptors of a deep relationship to, and respect for, what has come to pass on the way toward incendiary futures.

You Are There

At the same time, the band kept its eyes peeled skyward and achieved something accordingly transcendent on its follow-up, Hymn to the Immortal Wind (2009, Temporary Residence Limited). Packaged with a short story by Heeya So, the album was a full realization of means and message.

Hymn to the Immortal Wind

MONO’s meticulous grammar puts onslaught and introspection in consistent dialogue with one another and sets the band apart from a legion of Mogwai clones. By way of opening declension, “Legend” sets a precedent, maintained throughout, of sustain and cellular parsing. The former emerges into the foreground by way of the Holy Ground Orchestra, the strings of which rest the music on a thin metallic edge. An anthemic guitar bursts across the stratosphere, a meteor portending not doom but glorious radiance. Like the eponymous planet in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, it comes hurtling with quietude in anticipation of its beauteous crumbling. There is a swell and thrum to this evolution, the Beethovenian tinge of timpani pushing through the narrative clichés into a fully embodied territory of caution. The dropdown meditation comes like a savior who, with final breaths, gives shape to the balloon of time that will float its soul away. Tectonic gears lubricated by soil and decomposed bodies turn the world into a clock, the rhythm to which humanity marches in solidarity, finding in the kiss of apocalypse a sense of community and hope for the great beyond. The ending is simultaneously takeoff and landing, a rendering of contact between the seen and the unseen, which lifts its contradictions to the altar of “Nostalgia.” Here guitar tremolos glide around bass in ribbons of flight while strings drag their feet across frozen rivers freshly dusted with snow and human ashes. There is a tension here between chords as memories. The song ends in a line of twinkling stars, hovering over the head of a sleeping child who scales them into “Dream Odyssey.” She leaves a crumb trail of stardust by her passage, forming a staircase for any who dare follow. Realizing she has made the right decision, she jumps into the currents of the Milky Way—not a leap of drama but a surrender to gravity from behind closed eyes. With arms outstretched and chest to the heavens, she falls back into the folds of her slumber.

Official video for “Dream Odyssey”:

Such images come naturally in the warmth of MONO’s sound blanket. And with an average track length of 11 minutes, their scenography is not for the faint of heart. This holds especially true for “Unseen Harbor,” which finds the quartet at its densest and most intensely filmic: a quiet sanctum that compresses coal into the diamonds of its universal alignment. The drumming lends spacious punctuation—à la M83’s soundtrack to Oblivion—to the growth of this text as it trickles into the undertow, only to be consigned to a vessel without a home. All of which funnels contemplatively into “A Quiet Place (Together We Go).” The album’s consistency of technical and atmospheric flourish finds resurrection in this, its final hour, thus bringing the cover photograph to life, walking hand in hand from infancy to old age, and seeking in the fallible body something eternal, something made of light.

Of its many facets, for my parents actualizes but a few and shapes their reflections in the image of something divine. Life itself hangs in the balance of this music and builds from its interstice a grappling so unbreakable that it holds the forces of this planetary system together and sings our mortality without fear. Welcome to the void.