TRACKS AND NOTES
Channel Tres | Song: “Brilliant Nigga” | Album: ‘Brilliant Nigga’ (GODMODE, 2019) … Hailing from the West Coast’s home base for groundbreaking — and heartbreaking — bars, sixteen at a time, Channel Tres relatively exploded in 2019. He’s already touring with Robyn, and he’s been name-checked by unlikely luminaries such as Elton John.
DJ Yoda (featuring Joel Culpepper) | Song: “London Fields” | Album: ‘Homecooking’ (xxx, 2018) … Turntablist Duncan Beiny dropped DJ Yoda Presents Breakfast of Champions, a genre-warping album, back in 2015, and he wouldn’t return with new tracks until 2018. Nothing is diminished. The beats are still strong with this one. Yoda adds Joel Culpepper to the mix on “London Fields,” and the singer is, in fact, one of London’s best kept gifted-larynx secrets.
Funky Fella | Song: “Jedi Fiesta Club” | Album: ‘Smoky Romance’ (S!x Music, 2019) … Somewhere in the bedrooms and basements of Kutno, Poland, the artist known as Funk Fella crafted the Latin American horn and hip-hop fusion that would become “Jedi Fiesta Club.” An utterly improbable outcome, perhaps, but one that is inarguably marked by his drummer’s ear for deceptively simple rhythmic decisions and a beat that never rests on cut-and-paste patterns.
Jérôme Minière | Song: “La Vérité est une Espèce Menacée (Clairière Mix)” | Album: ‘Une Clairière’ (Objet Disque, 2019) … Listeners to le musique française might know Quebec’s Minière by his pseudonymous releases under the moniker Herri Kopter, but on this track from his twelfth solo album under any name, he plants his stake in the landscape of miniature electronic symphonies. In this one, the first Dalkesh sample of the mix appears near the end of the song: it’s Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez speaking, in 2019, about the border camps in the United States.
Checler | Song: “Caisse Claire” | Album: ‘Checler’ (BMG, 2019) … Political rap from France seldom sounded so urgent. Checler is bursting with a strong point of view on the Parisian politicians and bureaucrats for whom the news has been especially complicated over the past year. It’s a timely cut, this one, and part of the francophone musical wave on which IDES has been focusing, in 2019.
The Blaze | Song: “Runaway” | Album: ‘Dancehall’ (Columbia Records, 2018) … Not all French music comes with lyrics in French. Guillaume and Jonathan Alric started with soundtracks in the 2010s, and you can hear their cinematic compositional roots still. Film surfaces in another way, too, with my addition of two segments from Jack Nicholson’s monologue on freedom from Easy Rider layered over low-pass filtered sections of The Blaze’s original arrangements.
De-Phazz | Song: “Soulflakes” | Album: ‘Prankster Bride’ (Phazz-a-delic, 2016) … The return of Pit Baumgartner to the IDES series, this time with an earlier track from the German jazz/downtempo/hip-hop project.
Sandy Bull | Song: “Strat 1” | Album: ‘Steel Tears / Endventions & Tributes’ (Omnivore Recordings, 2018) … Sitting at a junction between blues, folk, and psychedelic guitar in the 1960s, New York’s Sandy Bull carved a niche name for himself on the six-string that culminates, in a sense, in last year’s remastered and reissued Steel Tears. The album, first released in 1996, now features several extra cuts and “Strat 1” is one of those recordings. Layered into this track is a bar of Steve Wahrer’s drumming from The Trashmen’s 1963 recording of “Surfin’ Bird” — which is itself a kind of remix, featuring components of two songs by The Rivingtons, “The Bird’s the Word” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” — and also a bit of Wahrer’s vocals.
Mastered by Matt Girard, Revolution Sound Studio, 2019