Published on
January 24, 2025
Category
Features
Essential weekend listening.
This week’s rundown is by VF’s Kelly Doherty and contributors Annabelle Van Dort, Emily Hill and James Hammond.
FKA Twigs
EUSEXUA
(Young)
It has been a hot minute since FKA Twigs stormed into our consciousness and ten years since her debut album LP1 via the Young imprint. . EUSEXUA, her third album, is the record we have all been waiting for all these years from Twigs. It is an otherworldly pop, techno art mash-up – a fusion of delicate melodies and club-forward carnage balanced with the contrast of her beautiful voice. Twigs is at the top of her career. – EH
Various Artists
Spiritual Jazz 17: SABA / MPS
(Jazzman)
For the whopping seventeenth instalment of their storied Spiritual Jazz series, Jazzman excavates the vaults of Germany’s Saba and MPS labels, curating a technicolour fusion-filled tracklist that celebrates the globalist philosophies of these two influential musical institutions. As the liner notes state, ‘plurality’ is a guiding principle of both SABA and MPS’s outputs; both labels united talented players from both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, such as Elvin Jones, Nathan Davis, George Gruntz, and Hideo Shiraki, whose genre-crossing compositions—from psychedelic sitar floor-fillers (“Raga Jeeva Swara”), gamelan improvisational experiments (“Gambang Suling”), and modal waltzes (“Blue Dance”)—mirror the visions of hybridity at the core of SABA and MPS. – AVD
Rob Mazurek
Nestor’s Nest
(Keroxen)
Whilst performing at the 2023 Keroxen festival in Tenerife, Rob Mazurek set aside some extra time within the island’s tranquil climes to record this freewheeling slab of adventurous sound. Taking inspiration from his surroundings, the field recordings of Nestor’s Nest are met with a permutating wave of synth and instrumental sounds, and an ethos/ track listing that stands in praise of fruit- from star fruit to papaya. Suitably expansive works from Mazurek and a testament to the ongoing sonic explorations of the Keroxen festival. – JH
Green Cosmos
Abendmusiken
(Frederiksberg Records)
Abendmusiken, the 1983 debut and only release by the German quartet Green Cosmos, is a collection of meditative, atmospheric jazz rife with soaring saxophones and looping, bedrock beats of kalimba. Reissued by Brooklyn-based Frederiksberg Records for the first time, Abendmusiken plays evocatively with space and dynamics, traversing vast Komsmiche spaces in the album’s tranquil moments, while also braving denser and dissonant junctures of avant-garde unpredictability. – AVD
Piezo
Ecstatic Nostalgia
(Dekmantel)
If you’re regularly out in the club, you have probably heard music by the Italian maverick Piezo. This producer has been quietly crafting percussive leaning techno for the last couple of years, releasing via his own label Ansia and seminal UK outfits such as Idle Hands, Swamp 81, Wisdom Teeth and now Dutch legends Dekmantel. Ecstatic Nostalgia is an exciting record for a lot of reasons. It steps into a new realm of possibility – the cuts are more driving techno with touches of electronica and trance, exploring the vast realms of this talented producer’s tastes. A welcome return for the UFO series with the promise of more exciting things to come. – EH
Joe McPhee
I’m Just Say’n
(Smalltown Supersound)
Alongside a string of recent ‘70s reissues and a career-spanning book that focuses on Joe McPhee’s trailblazing path in improvised music, I’m Just Say’n is a present-tense statement of McPhee’s enduring brilliance. A prodigious collaborator, here McPhee sets up camp once again with saxophonist and flautist Mats Gustaffson and creates a spoken word record of sorts that places the musicality of words into the duo’s dialogue. Acerbic, oft humorous, and keenly primed to the instrumental and electronic sounds, McPhee’s voice branches out further afield with this aural oddity. – JH
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