Mar 17 2014
Something Different: Dana Lyn – “Aqualude”
Most of the music featured on the Something Different review series situates itself far out on the fringes of Jazz, with only the barest strand of thread connecting it back to the nest. It never sounds like anything else. But there is music that is equally isolated in its vision, and yet so hauntingly identifiable that the requisite dissociation from anything-bop is neutralized, and the music simply hovers nearby, untranslatable as Jazz, yet entangled within its roots, creating a hybridization that is both alien and familiar.
The traditional folk musics and blues that inform much of Jazz, both past and present, shine brightly from the unconventional music of Dana Lyn. Her bizarre visualizations of the sounds of the soil are curious oddities and stunning displays of beauty. Her newest recording, Aqualude, is an example in point.
Your album personnel: Dana Lynn (violin, viola, angel door, music box), Mike McGinnis (clarinet, bass clarinet), Jonathan Goldberger (guitars), Clara Kennedy (cello), and Vinnie Sperrazza (drums).
An album with a chamber music aesthetic and a bit of rock ‘n roll in its DNA, this folk-jazz recording modulates sounds between swaying down-home dances, a ferocious grind and crunch, quirky conversational asides, and sweetly stated melodic glides.
The album brings the heat with opening song “Carping,” as Golberger’s electric burn trades volleys with McGinnis’s clarinet, giving a sense of the battle between light and dark. This leads, a bit incongruously, to “Mother Octopus,” a tune with a stately elegance, even when it displays kinetic affectations that challenge the music’s fluidity of motion.
But this isn’t to be entirely unexpected. Lyn is part of the collaboration Bach Reformed (along with guitarist Rob Moose), a project that takes the J.S. Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo and remakes the raw materials as structures for duets. It is not your typical classical music recording, weaving together a back porch languor of folk music with the courtly grace of Baroque, and resulting in an album easy to engage while simultaneously curious in that 
way museum artifacts affect viewers with a crosshatch of contexts… a sense of existing in multiple moments and differing points of reference.
It’s a pleasant form of disconcertion, the kind where variables don’t necessarily come into focus and, instead, remain teasingly just out on the periphery of vision. It’s a sensation that leaves its mark all over Aqualude.
The avant-garde piece “Queequeg,” exudes the modern jazz approach of wedding post-bop jazz freedom with indie-rock poetic structure, leading to a song that drummer Sperrazza moves in a unified direction, even as it barely retains its shape and form. “Yeti Crab Theme Song” is the album’s masterstroke, assimilating all of its various influences and perspectives into one cohesive expression… and sounding both gorgeously melodic and rhythmically animated in doing so.
“Pyramids” opens with the moonlight beauty of violin and clarinet rising and falling in synch with an exquisite finesse, maintaining that state of grace even after guitar’s pronouncements alter the cadence into something sharper and hardened. When Kennedy enters on cello with a deep and urgent hum, the song’s disposition becomes one with a heavier atmosphere, eventually building up into a frenzied conclusion.
“The Snow is General” leads a dual life as avant-folk song and contemporary classical pastoral, planting its feet in one territory or the other, and switching between the two with an unpredictable frequency. There could be some parallels drawn between this song and the music & compositions of Threads Orchestra and Jonathan Brigg, another ensemble that defies any type of definitive categorization and inhabits territory all to its own.
And the branches of Lyn’s folk music expressions can be traced back to similar roots as her previous recording, The Hare Said a Prayer to the 
Rainbow and Followed the Fox Down the Hole, a forward-thinking presentation of traditional Irish music.
A duo collaboration with guitarist Kyle Sanna, the recording is grounded in the source of its inspiration, while affording itself plenty room for personalization by the artists, who, obviously, live in the present day and can’t help but feel the compulsion to create music in ways that reflect their own experiences in the light of Today.
Aqualude is just a more comprehensive fulfillment of this approach, encompassing a wider array of music influences and breathing them out with a panoramic display of evocative imagery.
Of imagery, there are three interludes spread throughout the album, each with an air of improvisation and an eerie underwater sonic quality. This isn’t accidental, as it is Lyn’s intention to tell a story of the sea with Aqualude, going so far as to create a wonderful Tumblr page that matches each album track with a Lyn narrative and an image from artist Olivia Brown, whose art is featured on the album.
Aqualude ends with the angelic harmonics of “Yeti Sleeps,” a song that floats peaceably downstream, gradually gaining speed but never dispensing with its soothing nature. The song trails off, ending with a return to the eerie underwater ambiance of the album’s interludes. And really, for an album comprised of songs of the sea, there’s no other way to go out.
A gorgeous and intriguing album, and one of those rare instances when a recording that sounds like nothing else has the possibility to appeal to just about everybody. Differentiation for the masses.
Released on Ropeadope Records.
Music from the Brooklyn scene.
Available at: Bandcamp | eMusic | Amazon MP3
The Something Different review series highlights albums that are unlike anything else, and which embrace the best qualities of creative vision.
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Mar 27 2014
Something Different: I Think You’re Awesome – “Løft Mig Op, Så Jeg Kan Nå”
Many of the albums I feature on the Something Different review series are best observed from a distance… they are as much spectacle as sonic engagement… expressions of creativity that should be bonded with both for enjoyment of the music and the intrigue from edgy creative endeavors. I Think You’re Awesome negates that duality entirely, creating an album that is so genial, so simple to connect with that it’s easy to overlook the massive achievement of creating something so extraordinarily idiosyncratic.
Your album personnel: Kasper Staub (juno, wurlitzer), Alex Jønsson (guitar), Morten Kærup (banjo, guitar), Jens Mikkel (bass), Andreas Skamby (drums), and guests: Scott Westh (trumpet), Maria Isabel Edlund (cello), and Jens Bang (trombone).
The title translates to “lift me up so I can reach.”
Right away the album shows its unique personality. The album opens with “Be Kind to Your Neurosis,” a song that matches Kærup’s peaceably ambling banjo with wavering synth chords and a cheerfully twittering drum contribution. Jønsson adds some melodic shading in accompaniment on guitar. The music’s individuality does nothing to stifle its genuineness, an abiding sense that this music comes from the heart and isn’t some wild stab at differentiation for the sake of, well, just being different.
“Girls With Radical Haircuts” rambles right along, Mikkel’s bass and Staub’s wurlitzer an enchanting pattern of twisting lines. It continues right onto “Jeg Vil Ik’ hjem,” but with Westh’s trumpet slowly exhaling melodic notes over the top, something he continues to do on the title-track “I Think You’re Awesome.” Featuring the melodic lines of guest trumpeter and trombonist Scott Westh and Jens Bang, it’s a series of long sonorous sighs from brass instruments bolstered by the brighter shades of guitar accompaniment, and punctuated by drummer Skamby’s easy-going cadence… creating a dreamlike atmosphere, of mesmerizing qualities within a sea of activity.
“Morgenfunk” changes things up a bit, opening with the sound of flailing brass instruments, breathy and volatile… a bit of dissonance from a highly melodic album. Jens Mikkel’s bass grows increasingly prominent as the song progresses, eventually leading to a talkative solo passage.
The album ends with “Schwartzwald,” and features cellist Maria Isabel Edlund, whose contribution is one hundred percent hypnotic beauty. Cello, backed by the Staub’s enthralling wurlitzer accompaniment, brings this captivating album to a lovely conclusion.
The album is Self-Produced.
Music from Denmark.
Available at: eMusic | Amazon MP3
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By davesumner • Jazz Recommendations, Jazz Recommendations - 2014 Releases • 0 • Tags: Something Different