28th March 2020
Chris Forsyth wih Garcia People – Peoples Motels Band
released March 20, 2020
Published by Domino Publishing Company of America
As is often the case with Forsyth shows, the gloves come off quickly and the players attack the material – much of it so well-manicured and cleanly produced in the studio – like a bunch of racoons let loose in a Philadelphia pretzel factory.
Recorded and mixed with clarity by Forsyth’s longtime studio collaborator, engineer/producer Jeff Zeigler, the record puts the listener right in the sweaty club, highlighted by an incredible side-long take of the chooglin’ title track from 2017’s Dreaming in The Non-Dream LP (note multiple climaxes eliciting wild shouts and ecstatic screams from the assembled).
This is not the new Chris Forsyth album, exactly, but then again, it kinda is because whenever he sits down to play, he makes it new.
Land of Kush – Sand Enigma
released November 8, 2019
….the music on Sand Enigma also shifts between instrumentals and vocal-led pieces, with various singers contributing their own lyrics and taking the lead on different songs – including long-standing Kush members Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Katie Moore and Elizabeth Lima (also a virtuosic extended technique clarinetist), and the newly drafted Tokyo-to-Montréal émigré Maya Kuroki. And while the bounty of heavy-hitting instrumental players are too numerous to call out here, Sand Enigma notably features two new international collaborators, and leading lights of Cairo’s burgeoning avant-electronic scene: Nadah El Shazly (vocals) and Maurice Louca (keys/synths). Among other accolades, both were recently featured as avatars of the Egyptian ‘new wave’ in a cover story in The Wire (along with Dwarfs Of East Agouza, the epiphanic trio of which Shalabi is a member) and both are perfect fits for Shalabi’s compositional sensibility and the idiosyncratic performative spaces he seeks to open up in his big band works. Shazly takes the vocal lead on three songs, including the simmeringly strange slow-burn of the superb album opener “Aha”, and the more traditionally-rooted (though suitably tweaked) maqam-based groove of “Trema” – both highlights on an album that truly bursts forth with them, like relentless fireworks set off from several corners of the world, converging over a Montréal twilight sky, inscribing a celebratory celestial score that innately resists every facile, orthodox or prevailing idea of ‘fusion’ music.