ID Music 2021 Year in Review
Part II: Ecstatic Dance vs Ambient Jazz
The Inter-Dimensional Music 2021 Year in Review aired in three installments on WQRT Indianapolis, Marfa Public Radio, and LOOKOUT FM in Los Angeles. Find the setlist to Part II below. We’ll post a new Mixcloud stream with each update to our 2021 Year in Review.
HOWEVER! The complete cycle is now available in its entirety to newsletter readers – like you! thank you! – as a single three-hour 320kbps MP3 download.
The archiving of Inter-Dimensional Music's 2021 Year in Review stretches into March 2022, as we continue to test the imaginary boundaries of linear time. This is part two of a freeform essay about the music I enjoyed during the last year, organized loosely by genre and filed according to the interconnected concepts of yin and yang as they apply to both vibe and tempo. There’s also language from the Tao Te Ching about the similarities of hope and fear. It’s kind of confusing! But we’re having fun. The accompanying mix touches on a lot of these ideas, but not everything in the writing is in the headphones, and vice versa.
You can find the first installment here:
2021 in Ecstatic Dance
• Yang Tempos
• Mostly Yang Vibes but Shackleton is Yin for sure
Our entry point to the dance music of 2021 begins in 1985, at the auspicious intersection of ritualistic jazz and hippie-trippy physical mindfulness practice. I first heard the music of Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors on the Observations of Deviance radio show, a weekly mix of pan-global experimentation that leans heavily on jazz, and whose host is a vocal antifascist with whom I overlap occasionally in my online rants about neo-nazis and other white supremacists in metal. At the time Observations was on the airwaves of Tucson, AZ and has since migrated to WFMU, but for me it’s an after-hours kitchen clean-up soundtrack via Mixcloud.
I recognized the name from conversations with a friend in Taos who has participated in the artist’s trademarked 5Rhythms ecstatic dance program. Roth and her collaborators create an intensely percussive sound with just enough darkness swirling underneath the brilliantly colored exterior to keep things from becoming saccharine. And while she mostly avoids New Age cliches, I didn’t expect to encounter her tunes in the Observations mix, keeping easy company with Anthony Braxton and Les Rallizes Dénudés. Such auspicious coincidences are not to be ignored.
Roth’s catalogue begins in 1982, and is at least 17-albums deep. Her work ranges from soundtracks for bougie workshops at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute, to collaborations with a community of players working in the rarefied orbits of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. As Anton Spice writes in the liner notes to this 2021 collection, “For a spiritual polyglot like Gabrielle Roth, movement was a means through which to channel a wide spectrum of teaching, from experimental and transpersonal psychology to psychedelic counter-culture and Zen Buddhism.” Hell yeah dude. I’m stoked for this.
Roth eventually dismissed the groups early ‘80s attempts at recording rock-based music as “too much ego, too didactic.” The work on this compilation is a survey of what happened following further study, including deep dives into Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, and Nyabinghi drumming practices such as those practiced by Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus. As Spice puts it, “they made music that was meant to be felt rather than listened to; music to induce altered states of consciousness.” This is also one of the guiding principles behind the Inter-Dimensional Music project, from metal to raga to Live Dead and back again: sounds to accompany personalized rituals, music that comes from the space before thinking, audio to inspire interpretive dance workshops, circle pits and other forms of therapeutic movement.
Roth’s music can be understood as a yang counterpart to the decidedly darker percussive workouts of Sam Shackleton, the self-anointed “maverick psychedelic ritual trance maestro.” His immediately identifiable matrix of vertigo-inducing basslines and disorienting polyrhythms will be familiar to regular listeners of the show. It’s especially thrilling to hear the soundsystem-forward production of his ‘00s dubstep and techno work applied to outer-limits collaborations with avant-garde jazz figures like Wacław Zimpel or to the devotional poetry on the Tunes of Negation project.
His 2021 solo album Departing Like Rivers feels like listening to an ecosystem adapting and evolving in symbiosis with the rhythmic soil that is forever shifting at its root. “It is intended as a psychedelic album as much as anything,” it says in the liner notes. “You can listen to it in a more meditative way without getting distracted by the details.” We have similar aims with the ID Music experiments with meditation, though we’re more aligned with the Zen aphorisms laced throughout each hour, rather than the downpressing yet satisfying Herzogian perspectives sampled here.
A tendency toward Orientalism is one of the only hesitations that I have with music in Shackleton’s orbit, the cohort of artists working in the aesthetic shadow of Bryn Jones, aka Muslimgauze. Jones’ massive discography is overwhelming in its sprawl alone, ranging from harsh industrial techno to pastoral ambient. But his militant Fourth World vision remains a constant throughout. He maintains an outsider’s fascination with Islamic spirituality and a seemingly well-intentioned – and always emphatic – critique of Israel and the West’s role in conflict and oppression across the Muslim world. This is a long-standing topic of discussion regarding Jones’ work, and will surely continue: Jones died in 1999, but his archive is still being excavated. His discography stands at 141 albums as of this writing in March 2022.
Most often this kind of Orientalism manifests in dance music filed under the “tribal” label: Complicated drums combined with polite Kruder & Dorfmeister-style upscale downtempo to achieve an “ethnic” vibe. The worst example of this kind of objectification can be found in the work of artists like Dominick Fernow, aka Vatican Shadow, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Prurient. While the complexities of Jones work is frequently critiqued for his outspoken pro-Palestinian activism, Fernow’s politically ambiguous work as Vatican Shadow fetishizes militaristic aesthetics and Middle East conflict in a deeply cynical way. As Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, he dabbles in similarly non-committal references to colonial oppression across the Global South. These dalliances become increasingly sinister considering his years of openly collaborating with and releasing black metal and noise projects from explicit white supremacists and politically-engaged fascists. If you know me on Twitter1, you know I like to yell about this with friends from online:
And then there’s Tunisian producer and DJ Azu Tiwaline. Her Draw Me A Silence album embedded itself in my neurochemistry during the 2020 annual Winter Solstice Medicine Journey, and has been in heavy rotation since then. Authenticity is a complicated thing to determine without relying on the aforementioned Orientalist valuation and commodification, but there’s something very different about an artist who is seeking “a new sound in her origins which take root in the Sahara and El Djerid region in the south of Tunisia,” as she describes it. “A sound from the desert, drawing on berberian and saharan transe music that connects human beings with Nature.”
Tiwaline released consistently wonderful music over 2021, including remixes for and by Flore, Laksa, and Don’t DJ. Her Draw Me a Silence LP emerged in three installments, and was completed in 2021 with the ambient track “Eyes of the Wind.” Tiwaline’s Instagram account offers opportunities to keep up with her many audio projects, along with photographic documentation of the irrigation systems of her Saharan palm tree oasis.
The rhizomatic nature of dance music is increasingly helpful to me as I’ve gotten older and moved to geographically and/or culturally remote areas – a tiny settlement in the Chihuahuan Desert and then a small, quiet city in the Midwestern Rust Belt –losing touch with its natural club setting. It can be difficult to determine the roots and inspirations of artists who don’t DJ – not to be confused with the artist Don’t DJ – as opposed to selectors like Tiwaline. If one is curious for more “shamanic and trance-inducing atmospheres to summon feathered gods and animal spirits,” or perhaps more of the “percussive and throbbing rhythms, traditional sounds and leftfield tribal electronics” heard in her work, one need only parse the playlists for her Rinse FM show, guest mixes, or the playlist2 that she’s compiled under the preceding description with Paris-based producer Dang-Khoa Chau, aka Đ.K.
Exploring these pathways allowed me to catch up on so much of the electronic dance music I’ve missed in the last decade: Timedance, Al Wooton, Don’t DJ, Dengue Dengue Dengue, Faze Action, Livity Sound, and the Good Morning Tapes label, among many others3. But Đ.K. is the person who has become a fixture on the ID Music Soundsystem thanks to Tiwaline.
I am tempted to describe Đ.K.’s sound as an uplifted yang counterpart to Shackleton, or as the online retailer Boomkat puts it, “rhythms redolent of Muslimgauze gone Balearic." But that is partially the problem with the lack of detail in Fourth World music’s aesthetic lineages: If anything, Shackleton and Muslimgauze are yin variations on Tiwaline’s project, or the South Asian sacred cultural heritage that Đ.K. has been exploring in detail since 2019’s The Goddess is Dancing and his 2021 album Gate of Enlightenment.
2021 in Ambient Jazz
• Full spectrum Yin/Yang tempos and vibes
When I started as an intern at URB Magazine in the late ‘90s I was fresh off the boat from Indiana, a white boy from the Midwest with a deep sense of curiosity about the blend of hip-hop and electronic/dance/club music that the publication covered. I was also very aware that I was an outsider in this zone, and I became more comfortable in my roles as editor, critic, and journalist by saying “I don’t know” often. It’s an approach to culture that has helped me to resist cynicism as well as the haughty nostalgia that Gen Xers fall into as they age: I never want to be the guy who won’t shut up about how the kids today will never understand how good4 Fugazi was, or why your favorite band isn’t as good as Melvins.
This is even more true when it comes to jazz. I’m happy here in my role as an outsider, and grateful to find guides to this ecosystem: From critics such as my longtime colleague, confidante, and comrade Piotr Orlov, to broadcasts like Observations of Deviance, and radical connector artists like Luke Stewart and Carlos Niño.
Album credits and interviews with these two prolific musicians serve a similar role as Tiwaline’s DJ sets: They provide multiple entry points to a complex culture where I happily remain a wide-eyed and perpetually curious novice.
The marquee installments in Niño’s prolific discography as both bandleader, collaborator, and guest player are often extraordinary. The collection of soothing inland seaside vibes of his 2020 Chicago Waves album with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson is a personal favorite. He also seems to thrive in supporting roles, like contributing gongs and percussion to Jamire Williams’ sublime “God’s Morning Invitation.”
But it was the Carlos Niño & Friends edition of Aquarium Drunkard’s Lagniappe Sessions that held my attention in 2021. It’s one of those special pieces of music that slips by unnoticed into my library, and has me hopping up from my chair to see what’s playing whenever it surfaces in the rotation. And like so much of Niño’s music, it offers helpful suggestions of where to look next. The AD series is focused on covers, and here Niño and his buds create 17-minutes of shimmering New Age ambient jazz fusion through their treatments of luminary compositions by Iasos, Laraaji, and Pharoah Sanders with Joe Bonner. These legends are now Niño’s contemporaries, and his covers offer subtle expansions on the originals while also serving as deeply respectful tribute.
One could compile a list of the best of Luke Stewart’s 21st Century output that would be as wide-ranging as this survey of metal, ambient, dance, jazz, and drone. I don’t know if a month went by in 2021 where he wasn’t somewhere in the Inter-Dimensional Music mix, and I’ve yet to fully immerse myself in Irreversible Entanglements, his “liberation-oriented free jazz collective” with Moor Mother and Keir Neuringer. My experience with his catalogue began with Blacks’ Myths, a project that combined the energy and weight of hardcore and metal with jazz structures, without succumbing to the noirish cringe that sometimes occurs when metal guys decide they’ve invented “dark jazz.” Stewart was drawing new forms from jazz histories of which I’ve only scratched the surface, and rendering them with textures where I could also hear Sunn, Neurosis, and Black Flag.
I turned to the 21m composition “Before” from his 2020 collaboration as Six Six with Anthony Pirog most often. Along with the many quiet moments on Niño’s albums or the more atmospheric passages foregrounded in Bill Laswell’s interpretations of Miles Davis, it’s a perfect realization of the elusive “ambient jazz” experience. Liner notes identify it as an “exploratory meditation,” and a sound bath of “subtle tones, loops, and layers.” This mellow is counterbalanced by 20m of exquisite, grating cacophony via “After” on the flip.
Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet’s self-titled album has also been in heavy rotation over the last six months, Robert Beatty’s vividly lysergic cover art establishing its rightful place as a modern classic of psychedelic improvisation before the metaphorical needle translates its digitally encoded bass, sitar, drums, and saxophone into the lossless vibrations emerging from our speakers. It’s an important part of considering Stewart’s output as a whole, a sound recognizable as jazz, with instrumentation that immediately points to a history of experimentation with non-Western concepts by such luminaries as Don Cherry and Colin Wolcott. And not just because Earnshaw’s sitar playing is so transcendent.
And so it’s helpful when considering Stewart’s comparatively dense Works For Upright Bass and Amplifier series. The first volume appeared in 2018, and resurfaced on my timeline as Stewart announced the 2022 release of Vol. 2. Listening and reading about the artist’s approach to group improvisation offers context for processing these disorienting compositions where amplifier feedback is interwoven with the bass’ percussive thuds and bowed shrieking. If Blacks’ Myths brought to mind Fugazi’s jazz and dub-informed rhythm tracks, Works For Upright Bass and Amplifier is closer to the hypnotic squall of drone metal explorers like Eagle Twin or Khanate.
“The concept of being a (C)omposer is a result of centuries of musical hierarchy, regarded and celebrated as the ultimate form of a musical artist,” Stewart writes about his work with the Exposure Quintet for their 2020 self-titled album, echoing Gabrielle Roth’s dissatisfaction with her early, more ego-centric work . “The example set out by the journeys of many in Improvised Music […] allows for exploration of ‘composition’ in true collective non-hierarchical form… The ‘Composer’ here, is merely the organizer of the spirit energy of the ensemble.” With these solo works it feels as if that approach has been adapted to self-improvisation. And perhaps it also applies to the relationship between the listener and the artist, as Stewart suggests in his writing about Bass and Amplifer: “My Hope is for the Listener to discover a connection within themselves, To inspire deeper personal development, and radical change when needed.”
At the other end of the spectrum from Niño and Company’s shining, uplifted yang vibrations we find the dank downpressing work of Chicago’s Mako Sica. Like fellow Chicagoan fusion outfit Tortoise, the group’s music morphs between a kind of progressive rock, broadly psychedelic improvisation, and avant-garde experimentation. I found them by following the trail of master percussionist Hamid Drake to the 2018 Ronda and 2020 Balancing Tear collaborations, so their sound is imprinted as jazz to my ears.
Their 2021 work includes a third collaboration with Drake, along with Tatsu Aoki on upright bass and shamisen; and Thymme Jones contributing piano, trumpet, handclaps, and “balloon.”
Ourania seemed to fly under the radar, although to be fair I’m hardly the most vigilant watcher of avant-garde jazz skies. This extraordinary album is the product of a single spontaneous two-hour recording session, where the group moves from Morricone-style desert ambiance to heavyweight meditations on the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin. In keeping with their Chicago lineage, there are easy and fitting comparisons to Natural Information Society’s ecstatic polyrhythmic trance. There’s also an almost occult sense of melancholy given voice by Brent Fuscaldo. It’s a weary drift of human sounds that never quite coalesce into specific signifiers, emanations from the space before thinking. It’s both mournful and life-affirming. As Byron Coley writes in his appreciation of the work, it’s “as fresh a slap of freedom as you’ll hear all year.” Although their other 2021 album – Garland of Heads on Astral Spirits – offers further exploration into these territories.
Thanks as always to old and new friends for reading and listening, and being patient for these somewhat delayed updates. You are why I continue to produce this strange program that just marked its fourth year on WQRT Indianapolis and is now approaching its 12th year on Marfa Public Radio.
😑
☸️✨🔊✨🖤
🙏🏻
DC
Next up:
The ID Music 2021 Year in Review continues with my favorite metal that is not metal and my favorite music that is actually metal. Plus our hotly anticipated top picks for slop-style DIY kitchen candling.
20220107 PROGRAM NOTES
For this week's practice, we continue exploring a non-hierarchical, circular diagram of our favorite sounds of 2021. We flow from the damp, heavyweight chill of last week's Yin vibes through a transitional zone where the downpression transforms into the uplift of Yang. It's both a gloaming and a dawning, an indeterminate space lit by particles of gray light that are just beginning to carry warmth.
We'll hear language throughout the broadcast on the phantom nature of both fear and hope from the Tao Te Ching.
stream: Part II via Mixcloud
download: ID Music 2021 in Review 180m Megamix (320kbps)
ID Music 20220107 setlist
artist - work
Azu Tiwaline - Until The End (Don't DJ Remix)
Đ.K. - Middle Path
DEAFKIDS - Luz Cinza
Malignant Altar - Belial Rebirth
Dodsrit - Shallow Graves
SUNN O))) - Pyroclasts C#
Tapes - Silence Please pt 1
Kevin Richard Martin - Glisten
SHIVARASA - Field of Love
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio on the West Coast of Texas, LOOKOUT FM across Los Angeles, and 99.1FM WQRT in Central Indiana
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@CosmicChambo is locked in the interest of maintaining the bubble but DM me if you’re into anti-fascist ranting, Zen aphorisms, and/or T1D memes.
A playlist that disappointingly a) is on Spotify and b) includes work from Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, the Fourth World ambient/techno project from Dominick Fernow, the aforementioned artist who releases and distributes music from actual fascists. Cold comfort to know that metal is not alone for ignoring white supremacy as long as it’s aesthetically pleasing.
The last six months of selections from the ID Music Bandcamp Library reflect these interests.
Fugazi was really good!