On this month’s editions of Ley Lines, we bounce from the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nations to the crisscrossing musical landscapes of West Asia, looking at how indigenous flute traditions, Palestinian poetry, abandoned Greek villages, and Welsh triple harp melodies are evolving and being reimagined by artists exploring the relationship between memory and place.
Timothy Archambault
Onimikìg
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Onimikìg Ideologic Organ
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Vinyl LP, 2 x Vinyl LP
Indigenous flute player and architect Timothy Archambault (Kichesipirini Algonquin and Métis) channels brontomancy (divination by thunder) on Onimikìg, mimicking the sound of thunder on a cedar flute. Each piece utilizes a different extended technique on the flute to articulate the various sounds of thunder, returning to a central multiphonic warble that represents the horizon. “If I were looking at the earth, or a silhouette of a mountain range, for instance, the warble will be the stone or the rock, and the light would be the melodies,” Archambault once noted to Raven Chacon in an interview with Blank Forms. Notated in traditional birch bark inscriptions, these songs activate Algonquin forms of knowing and engaging with land.
Du Yun
Where We Lost Our Shadows
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DU YUN: Where We Lost Our Shadows Du Yun
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Produced in collaboration with Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Jarrar, Du Yun’s orchestral piece Where We Lost Our Shadows debuted in 2019 at London’s SoundState festival. With this recording by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, the masterful musical meditation on displacement and exile is now available to the wider world. Combining raga-based compositions, field recordings, and poetry by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, the piece captures the discordant experience of being uprooted by violence and war. The emotional peak comes during “Scene 5 – The Camp and Poem Pillow,” where Sofia Jernberg sings a heartbreaking rendition of Zaqtan’s poem “Pillow” amidst ominous, discordant strings: “I’m back/ With a bullet in my heart/ And that’s my pillow/ I want to rest.” Shayna Dunkelman follows with a blistering percussion solo in “Scene 6 – Eruption,” which comes to a resolution in the final “Scene 7 – Desert Raga and The Pomegranate Rain” as vocalist Ali Sethi intones over ragas that evoke nourishing natural forces.
The Standing Stones featuring Alasdair Roberts
Twa Brothers
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Twa Brothers The Standing Stones
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Vinyl
KLF and The Orb trickster Jimmy Cauty links up with Jem Finer on hurdy-gurdy and Scottish folk singer Alasdair Roberts for an anthemic, apocalyptic collision of the old and new. Clocking in about a minute longer than Roberts’s 2005 rendition of the traditional Scottish tune, “Twa Brothers” chugs along at a trudging pace, interlacing the tragic lyrics with police sirens, psychedelic guitar solos, and punctuating hi-hat rolls.
Cerys Hafana
Crwydro (EP)
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Crwydro (EP) Cerys Hafana
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In a 2022 essay, triple harpist Cerys Hafana describes Welsh folk music as a “story of change.” Hafana is one of a few Welsh musicians who still plays the triple harp, an instrument that’s come to symbolize Welsh tradition. But on Crwydro she does away with the instrument completely, rearranging some of her compositions on her 2022 record Edyf for piano and adding two new compositions. The effect is stark: Where the triple harp versions float with airy mystique, her piano interpretations exude an intimate gravity.
Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman
Another Tide, Another Fish
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Another Tide, Another Fish Andrew Tuttle
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Michael Chapman’s unfinished final album Another Fish, released after his passing in 2021, sees a transformation by Brisbane folk alchemist Andrew Tuttle. Tuttle’s ambient deconstructions on CD 1 zoom in on a psychedelic tendency that rears its head on Chapman’s sprightly, unaccompanied recordings that ground the record on CD 2. Where Chapman’s originals are jangly yet poignant sketches, Tuttle often focuses on a tone or texture and expands it into the horizon, like on “One Lateral Line.” At other times, Tuttle engages in a conversation with Chapman by adding his own pointillistic banjo plucking over the former’s bright guitar textures.
more eaze
lacuna and parlor
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lacuna and parlor more eaze
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Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
New York-based more eaze distills the sounds of Americana into her left-field chamber music through haunting steel guitar, synthesized atmospheres, barely-audible field recordings, and patient, unadorned violin melodies. She taps into the vibrant New York scene to add colors to her portrait of ambient America: Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s humming modulates with meandering sine waves on “leap year compersion,” Nick Zanca’s organ and Alice Gerlach’s cello provide a foundation for Jade Guterman’s sloping acoustic guitar lines on “waltz (in memoriam old ways of living)” and the sprawling 19-minute “blanking intervals.”
Kolida Babo
Spirits of Mauronoros
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Spirits of Mauronoros Kolida Babo
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Vinyl LP
Socratis Votskos and Harris P. are the Greek musicians behind Kolida Babo, performing spiraling, jazzy woodwind runs over shimmering Moog textures and folk rhythms inspired by Armenian and Northern Greek traditions. Named after Mauronoros, a village that like many others in northern Greece has been emptied out in the wake of economic crises; on Spirits of Mauronoros, the sounds of the duduk and kaval assert themselves alongside clarinet and sax, lingering reminders of the village in the urban sprawl.
Başak Günak
Rewilding
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Rewilding Başak Günak
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Vinyl LP
On the latest record from sound artist and composer Başak Günak (aka Ah! Kosmos), fragile layers of ambient textures unfold as overlapping murmurs and croons create an otherworldly soundscape. Rewilding refers to the strategy of restoring damaged ecosystems by letting natural processes play out; here, Günak’s deconstructions of a Turkish folk song coalesce and restore themselves amidst delicate crackles and various swelling drones provided by organ, bass clarinet, halldorophone, and Buchla.
Kit Sebastian
New Internationale
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New Internationale Kit Sebastian
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, Hat
Kit Sebastian makes their Brainfeeder debut with a bit of Anatolian rock that takes cues from Azerbaijani pop, Brazilian samba, French chanson, and even Indonesian gamelan. It’s funky, and just plain fun; yet instead of celebrating a borderless utopia, they reflect on the shattering of the illusion of the city on lead single “Metropolis,” singing of the harsh realities of immigrant life. There’s a dizzying array of folk textures here. Turkish clarinet, santour, oud, zither, and other instruments are united by their tight approach to rhythm and melody. On “Bul Bul Bul,” they fold the gangsa pemade’s pelog tuning into a driving funk anthem, tying everything together at the end with a bass-guitar-gangsa riff in unison along the contours of the Javanese tuning.
Dar Disku
Dar Disku
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Dar Disku Dar Disku
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Vinyl LP, Cassette
In a similar vein, Bahrain’s Dar Disku threads together the traditional and popular musics of West Asia through a shared language of disco and electronic dance music. Raised on a diet of Umm Kulthum and ABBA, the duo of Mazen Almaskati and Vish Mhatre graduate from crate digging and label managing to a debut album that synthesizes their influences into a thumping sound of their own. AutoTuned Algerian raï driven by breakbeats and house synth stabs on “Galbi” feat. Aymen Attia; funky Turkish disco on “Sabir” feat. Billur Battal; cosmic Bollywood disco from legendary singer Asha Puthli on “Baar Baar”; for Dar Disku, this self-titled record is a testament to a lifetime of friendship and sound for Almaskati and Mhatre.
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