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Beginning

Following two excellent singles, Jake Robertson finally gets serious with the ALIEN NOSEJOB solo series with this, his debut LP. While those two stuck relatively close to the rock’n’jerk’n’pop that we’ve come to enjoy over the various bands Jake has been a part of, this LP is a whole new beast (alien?). Taking a notable step to the side, off the path, and into the brush, this album sees Robertson flirting with calypso and goofy pop. It rules. We finally have our punk Paraiso, and who better to bring it to us than the man who brought us other Fox Network Specials such as “The Five Fabulous Weeks of the Chevy Chase Show”.Alien Nosejob is Jake Robertson (of Ausmuteants, Hieropants and Frowning Clouds) and the four songs are bedroom recordings, augmented by a full-blown horns section in one instance. Sounds like early Devo on a meth trip with its stuttering guitar and jerky rhythms fitting perfectly.

Founded in 2015, Tears|Ov are sound artist/self-taught musician Lori E Allen, classically trained cellist/mixed media artist Katie Spafford and illustrator/prison psychotherapist Deborah Wale. The trio first collaborated on Lori E Allen’s ‘Tears of the Material Vulture’ cassette on The Tapeworm, a re-imagination of a brief collaboration with Madame Chaos of cut-up cablecasts, 1995-1996, on Manhattan Neighborhood Network and Television in New York City. That release served to resurrect a hibernating creative practice between the three friends.Their writing process takes the form of structured improvisation. Allen will create a bed of loops, field recordings or a full framework. She then shares this base with Wale and Spafford who embellish or delete, the three building the pieces through long improvised sessions in London, playing late into the night. During these sessions, the feeling of a songs’ words or the emotional tone of a sound can spark sudden mood changes, altering the arc of the compositions. ‘Crucially the music is improvised – it is never the same twice. There are triggers and moments that signal moving to another part of the music, but the timings and lengths largely depend on our moods and interpretation on a given day/performance. Because of this, the album was recorded with ambient mics capturing multiple instruments. It wasn’t possible to record all the instruments separately as we respond to each others improvisation. Even if the changes are very minor, they really affect the emotion of each piece’ Spafford says.

Elite Beat is a musical collective from Portland, Oregon with a history spanning back to 2006.'Selected Rhythms' captures the finest moments from all three of their ultra limited cassette series 'Casual Rhythms'.Packed full of DIY dub mixing, cosmic orchestration and raw, percussion driven polyrhythms, the recordings have been remastered and put to vinyl for the first time with sections from Casual Rhythms Vol. 1 being re-shaped into previously unavailable single tracks.Recording plays a big role in the Elite Beat creative process. The studio as an instrument. Much of the Elite Beat music is mixed in an all-hands-on-deck dub style approach - live with an analog mixer and loads of FX being thrown and dubbed in real time. The sound is genre-less rhythm music with an emphasis on live playing, free form expression and technique that borrows from soundsystem culture. Inspiration can be heard from all parts of time and place. Some Ethio Jazz, Black Ark psychedelia, Exotica, Malian blues, even Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love. Each member an accomplished musician in their own right, Elite Beat thrive on collaboration. 2018 saw the release of their astral-Saharan jams with celebrated Taureg guitarist Mdou Moctar.The players get together every Wednesday evening, sometimes to chat, sometimes to play. The 'record' button gets pressed when they find what they are searching for. For this crew it's all about 'Casual Rhythms / Harmonious Lifestyles' - if things don't fall under that mantra, then it's got to go. 'Less is more' for Elite Beat and their cosmic sounds.

bandcamp: ...The album intertwines various strands of 20th century Chicago musical history. Take El’Zabar himself. A native of the city, he came up rubbing shoulders with greats like Chaka Khan (once married to El’Zabar’s childhood musician partner Hassan Khan). El’Zabar lived across the street from legendary jazz composer Roscoe Mitchell, and counted Earth, Wind & Fire horn players Don Myrick, Louis Satterfield, and Rahmlee Michael Davis as his friends. He played with cult soul star Baby Huey and his band The Babysitters, and shared bills with jazz legends like Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. It was a period when the city boasted a sizeable audience for all forms of Black musical ingenuity.