Rum Music for April Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan

Embracing this column’s slow transition into gurdy-only content, let’s begin with Tomo. This is a follow up, with some minor crossover, from his previous 2024 Knotwilg cassette. There are new versions of a couple of the same pieces from that tape – a killer version of the Flynt-ish ‘Wheel Of Life’ and flywheel repetitions of ‘Vielle Electronique’. I played them back-to-back: this LP sounds far better. As with the tape, there is a clutch of styles, monstrous versions of traditional forms, rabid bourrées and jolly little dances bumped next to heavy macabre drones and screaming solos. 

And while we’re on the subject, lest we forget the power the quaint old vielle à roue contains within its wheels, here’s another France record. I’m sorry to say it’s really good and you should get it. I don’t know what to tell you except to apologise and say I know I said the last France record was great, but this one is even better. I saw the live show where this was recorded but the mastering has honed and elevated it into something more muscular and striking than I recall, which was excellent and chaotic. Yann Gourdon is really tearing it up, listen out for the bit where the crank handle fell off the gurdy. I guess if you needed to be frugal about it you could get by with only Do Den Haag Church, but it feels a bit like only owning Trilogie De La Mort by Eliane or Live ’72 by LRD – why would you stop there? Sure, you could get by, but why do you need to merely get by? What is life for except abundance, completism, excess, desire? (Don’t answer that.)

Now for something not very different at all. Turner Williams Jr. is a painter and musician from Alabama living in Marseille I’ve covered effusively before. He plays the shahi baaja, a type of Indian zither that’s an electrified version of a bulbul tarang with 15 strings. Here it sounds like a guitar, but with extra resonances that bring a presence that puts this a cut above – see for example, the warm bass phrases on opener ‘Jonquile’, which feel like taking a series of deep breaths, while its plucked strings remain in looped stasis. Loved the cassette on Tom Val’s Les Disques Omnison, and love this too.  

Speaking of Les Disques Omnison, this is the album I’ve listened to most this month. Jeanne Gorisse is apparently a classically trained double bass player but seems to have achieved escape velocity from those constraints, and not in the usual way. There is something pleasingly clunky and borderline inept about some of these tracks in a way that pushes past contemporary avant-garde or New Music and into DIY textures. I mean this all as a compliment, because if there’s any direction it’s almost impossible to move it’s back into the DIY from the conservatoire. That’s not true of all the tracks here but it’s what I like about it’s character, loose with bendy, dissonant strings. ‘Freya’ sounds drunk, ‘Ni Mais Si’ is hesitant and proximate to free improv, ‘Atropos’ comes on like heavy weather and wild wilds. 

I feel affectionate towards this mussed up DIY shoegaze-y stuff from Canadian musician Kayla Jane Macneill. Macneill was a member of The Puppet Wipes, who released two albums on Siltbreeze, among other bits and pieces, and this is her first solo album: 22 tracks on CD from the Paris label that gave us Tori Kudo’s Studio Village Hototoguiss. The guitar sound is a Proustian rush on the tip of my tongue – is it a hint of Joanne Robertson I detect? – but the closest I’m getting to nailing the flavour of this is a cross between low key Roy Montgomery and Efficient Space’s Ghost Riders comp which sounds odd when I write it down and is really no Venn diagram at all. The whole sound is just a little out of reach – big swampy sounds, vocals sunk in a murk, the occasional clear moment of big guitars that want to go outside, only the whole thing is happening behind a dirty window. 

Don’t take your ears off Suryadi’s Bandcamp, new music appears there regularly – I feel like I cover him often, but not nearly enough to keep up with his prodigious output. This one, Titir, is centred around his self-made kentongan, a Javanese ‘slit drum’ (actually an idiophone) which was traditionally used as a mode of communication by night watchmen, a length of wood with a central slit dug out, and often carved into anthropomorphic forms. People who grew up in the 1980s are said to be the last generation who would recognise the sound, used as warnings and reassurances. Here it gathers with other gongs, bells and drums in acoustic percussive pieces, that have the beautiful feature of being recordings you can move around inside, there being much to hear in the acute details of the sound close up, and more to absorb in the bigger picture. Go to his Bandcamp, drop in anywhere.

A late entry I will spend more time with after filing copy, Lea Bertucci’s latest composition The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is one of her best. I love the direction she’s been going in, it feels very Paul Horn Inside The Great Pyramid (I love that record), but the precision and levitation of this piece is just transcendent. It was written for Norbert Rodenkirchen, and in particular, his collection of rare flutes. He’s a master flautist and early music scholar from Sequentia (who you might know as key performers of Hildegard Von Bingen’s choral works) and Dialogos. Here, Bertucci diffuses samples of him performing on a Medieval traverso, swan bone flute, sheep bone flute, Renaissance tenor and Renaissance bass flute, through an eight-speaker array. The effect is transportive, it’s on the brink of new age but a new age I want to be a part of. I feel surrounded by a gauzy miasma of airy flutter and drone that is truly beautiful: an escape into light.