Words and photos by Rafe Arnott
While my love for the analogue LP runs deep and is infused with a warm, if not entirely logical nostalgia, this in no way diminishes the pleasure I take from playing a compact disc, suffused as it is with digital peerage. In point of fact, I listen to and buy CDs at a healthy 0.25 ratio to records. Meaning for every four albums I purchase on vinyl, I buy one CD. I do this for a vareity of reasons, often because they are terrifically cheap (on average $5), and because there are many LPs which I’d love to acquire, but simply cannot justify the pricing many rare grooves command these days on Discogs, or at local bricks & mortar shops lucky enough to have acquired copies of some unobtainium pressings.
With this in mind, I reached out to UK label Gondwana Records for a selection of CDs whose vinyl runs were long sold out, but still had silver discs available. A package arrived in the post within a week of exchanging emails, and therein nestled five CDs: Home – Hania Rani, the Paradise Cinema S/T album, Truly – Caolifhionn Rose, Captured Spirits by Mammal Hands and Salute to The Sun – Matthew Halsall (Which will be covered in a different article concerning Halsall’s career).
An independent label birthed in 2008 by composer, jazz musician and producer Halsall, Manchester-based Gondwana Records was started as an outlet for Halsall and saxophonist Nat Birchall. By 2012 other little known, but deserving, talent plying local clubs were on the roster. The label now sports a deep stable of artists from around the globe including John Ellis, Go Go Penguin, Allysha Joy, Jasmine Myra, Noya Rao, Phil France, Portico Quartet, Sunda Arc and Chip Wickham to name but a few. Below you'll find background details concerning the artists on these featured CDs. I highly recommend readers explore the Gondwana catalog further, but these four titles are an excellent place to start.
Photo below: The system used for listening – Audio Note CD4.1x, Audio Note M3 Phono all-valve preamplifier, vintage 1950s RCA all-valve theatre monoblocs, vintage Altec A5 loudspeakers.
From the Gondwana website, edited for brevity:
Home – Hania Rani. Composer, musician and pianist Hania Rani hails from Gdansk, Poland but splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. If the compositions on Esja (her debut album) were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, then Home, finds Rani expanding her palate: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers, Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorek in Warsaw.
For Rani, Home, is very much a continuation of the work she started on Esja. “The completion of the sentence,” as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. "One can be lost but can find home in their inner part – which can mean many things – soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find home anywhere. This is what I would like to express with my music; one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us." — Hania Rani
Photo below: Gondwana Records CD packaging and graphics are first-rate.
Paradise Cinema S/T: Multi-instrumentalist Jack Wyllie (Portico Quartet/Szun Waves) presents his new project Paradise Cinema. It was recorded in Dakar, Senegal in collaboration with mbalax percussionists Khadim Mbaye (saba drums) and Tons Sambe (tama drums). The impressionistic and dream-like quality of Paradise Cinema is a stunningly effective realisation of Wyllie’s experience, in a hypnagogic state of aural consciousness: “I had a lot of nights in Dakar, when the music around the city would go on until 6 a.m. I could hear this from my bed at night and it all blended together, in what felt like an early version of the record.” Atmospherically Paradise Cinema is vaporous and enigmatic, but also percussive; existing in a paradoxical sound-space that’s amorphous, yet still purposeful, serene, but propulsive and aesthetically sharp.
Khadim Mbaye and Tons Sambe, provide the rhythmic backbone of the record. There are traditional elements of mbalax rhythm, but it is often deconstructed or played at tempos outside of the tradition, so while it hints at a location it occupies a space outside of any specific region. Paradise Cinema is also informed by notions of hauntology – a philosophical concept originating in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida – on possible futures that were never realized and how directions taken in the past can haunt the present.
On the album’s title Wyllie comments, “there are a handful of old cinemas in Dakar – these big modernist buildings dotted around the city built around independence. They’re old and derelict now, but feel to me like monuments to that period, when the city was flooded with utopian ideas about its potential futures.”
Truly – Caolifhionn Rose: Truly, the new album from Manchester singer-songwriter Caoilfhionn Rose (pronounced Keelin) moves through a tapestry of curious musical inflections; nods towards folk, jazz, ambient, electronica and even a subtle influence of psychedelia, it never stands still to take a breath, despite its ethereal and delicate core. Co-produced by Kier Stewart of The Durutti Column following Rose’s collaborative endeavours with them on their album Chronicle LX:XL, the musician’s song writing draws from a diverse palette of influences, including Building Instrument, Rachel Sermanni, Alabaster dePlume and Broadcast. Rose also professes to a love for beautiful, stripped back, piano-based music, such as Dustin O’Halloran and label mate Hania Rani.
Truly came to exist due to a deep-rooted need to create – even though its conception was interrupted as Caoilfhionn Rose recovered in hospital from an illness, she found strength within writing music. “In Spring 2019 I took part in a gig swap with my good friend and fellow musician Kristian Harting who is from Denmark. We played several gigs in the UK but unfortunately the Denmark part of the tour was cut short as I was taken ill. I was hospitalized for several weeks and have taken the last year out to recover” says Rose. “I gradually returned to finishing my second album” she continues. “Coming back to creating after being unwell was challenging but also therapeutic. This record marks a difficult time of my life and writing it helped get me through that. I am really grateful to have music as an outlet.”
Captured Spirits by Mammal Hands: Consisting of saxophonist Jordan Smart, pianist Nick Smart and drummer/tabla player Jesse Barrett, this trio have forged a growing reputation for a hypnotic fusion of jazz and electronica. Drawing on their love of electronic, contemporary classical, world, folk and jazz music, Mammal Hands take in influences including Pharoah Sanders, Gétachèw Mekurya, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Sirishkumar Manji.
Forming in Norwich in 2012, brothers Nick and Jordan along with Jesse, developed their distinctive and polished sound with their meteoric live shows and release of three critically acclaimed albums: Animalia (2014), Floa (2016) and Shadow Work (2017). Teaming up once again with trusted producer George Atkins at 80 Hertz Studios in Manchester, Captured Spirits explores themes including existence and displacement. “The name has multiple readings but was first inspired by something Jordan was reading about past experiences of ancestors being caught and coded into our DNA and having an effect on who you are today. This ties in with themes that we have touched on before relative to identity and the collective unconscious (Shadow Work). It also toys with the idea of feeling contained/trapped and the need to break out of something and also the idea of people being spirits that are "captured" in a body,” says Nick.
Photo below: Halsall's Salute To The Sun is a haunting, and stripped-down timbral delight that mediates on the essence of modern jazz, and which I will be covering in an upcoming piece on his discography.
This was a unique opportunity to sample a cross-section of an independent label’s latest offerings, and I can’t thank Gondwana enough for introducing me to some of the talent on their roster. All the CDs are beautifully packaged, possess outstanding production quality and most importantly, contained music which was thought-provoking, and at times challenging. Each disc swayed from stark musical constructs of a stripped down aesthetic to conversely lyrical, ethereal, metaphorical and lush. Halsall & Co. are charting a unique course into jazz and electronic themes with artists focused on creating content impossible to genre-fy, but which is undoubtedly addictive for those with a bent towards experimental jazz/folk/world/classical and several other stops in between.
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