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Latino Body Music Vol. IV

Habitat by Leon Louder / Scattered EnsembleMontreal-based composer Leon Louder spent the 2020-21 lockdown period in remote collaboration with four fellow musicians, exploring tones from homemade and traditional instruments and percussion, using a mixture of live sampling and improvisation to create aleatoric tonal landscapes. Inspired by a stay on a remote island in the St-Lawrence River estuary, where the weather can shift dramatically from serene to turbulent at any moment and the dialogue of birds, insects, and seals is omnipresent, Habitat is a sequence of restless sound worlds, an impressionistic depiction of a constantly changing ecosystem that had its parallel in the emotional turmoil of pandemic time.Like the phenomena they approximate, the pieces exist in a continual state of composition and recomposition. Populated with melodic fragments that call and respond, break apart and ricochet, they ask the listener to live in the music as much as to listen to it, accepting discord as equal to harmony, chaos as part of the order.The individual tracks are strikingly varied, not only in their vocabularies of sound but in the moods they create and the hints of environment they evoke. They range from "Full of Light", in which mesmerizing bell and woodwind tones interweave in melodic counterpoint, building to a gently driving train-like rhythm that conjures some sort of Celestial Express -- to "Underpass", whose low dark sounds and simple repeated rhythms carry us down through subterranean strata bored out by primeval life forms, into what feels like a maze of subway tunnels on another planet.The recordings bring into play double bass, vibraphone, homemade zithers, piano, modular synthesizer, and found percussion, and feature collaborators from the Montreal experimental music community: radio artist Martin Rodriguez, multi disciplinary artist Gabrielle Godbout, drummer and electroacoustic composer Samuel Bobony, and multi instrumentalist Rodney Sothmann.

Rogue Signal by Hess & Harrison

This mini LP is an explicit message from Lustpoderosa’s sonic continuum. These 7 tracks show the deep connection of Marlene Starks’ work as a writer and an artist to her role as mother and DJ in times when there is an urgent need to dismantle the patriarchy in our society and rave culture. Marlene Stark is telling us much more than a great musical story with the symbolic title “Hyäne". Marlene wants to direct our attention to a reviled creature while she reflects on its literary and symbolic meanings. Although hyenas live in a matriarchal society, its transmutation can be perceived as the ongoing struggle of the non-male body in an androcentric world view. Marlene Starks reinterprets the figure of the hyena in a very poetic, self-ironical and honest way, as shown in the tracks ‘Hungry As a Hunter’, ‘Hyäne’ and ‘Language Of Old Woman’. It’s a neo-ceremonial call to rethink established structures without missing out the turbulent landscape of today’s politics. From early trip-hop to post-rave elements, Stark combines her sonic adventures with an impressively nonchalant and colloquial vocabulary. Her voice, as well as the voice of guest singer Stefanie Mader, achieves a remarkable vocal structure that goes beyond the mainstream. This is the contemporary body music for the next generation.

Bax is back. First released in 2011, Mosca’s UKG homage, ‘Bax’, did big things when it landed. Almost 10 years on, it’s time for a repress.Though Mosca missed the golden era of garage in the nineties, he caught on to darkside pioneers such as Horsepower Productions, Benny Ill and El-B later on. A blend of homegrown British styles lies at the core of his electronic music influences, early dubstep, jungle, minimal grime and bassline, which he’d experienced first-hand at Sheffield’s legendary Niche club. (Little known fact: The name Bax is a partial nod to Steve Baxendale, the man behind Niche).All these elements coalesced in the studio and the two-tracker materialised in a couple of days. Both sides of the record do their thing on the floor; ‘Bax’ with its now infamous ‘My DJ is live in the place’ sample, that earworm melody and a ruffneck b-line. On the flip ‘Done Me Wrong’ sees Mosca incorporate several key garage tropes; the bassline swinging alongside soulful vocals (which get sliced and diced), not forgetting that cheeky rewind.

Reunion's major musical genre, Maloya, becomes "gazé" (crazy) through the sounds composed by Grèn Sémé for this new EP.A gassed maloya that combines direct inspiration from the purest line of this traditional réunionese music with the highly contemporary evolution that is the Grèn Sémé group's signature.Composed during the studio sessions for their latest album, "Zamroza", the first three tracks on this new EP reveal the sunny side of the Creole band.