Now Playing on The Tonearm
Steven Bernstein, No Permission Required
The New York trumpeter, composer, and bandleader behind Sexmob and the Millennial Territory Orchestra returns with a pair of linked albums, ‘ResoNation Trio’ and ‘Ultra Resonance,’ and talks trumpet trios, dub reinvention, Levon Helm’s Rambles, and the downtown scene that formed him. Interview by Lawrence Peryer.
Scrimshire’s Light in the Woodside
Founder of Albert’s Favourites and Wah Wah 45s veteran Adam Scrimshire talks through ‘Bring Our Light to Every Corner,’ his new album built on four years of looking for personal peace, the grimness of the UK political moment, and the music community he named for his granddad’s cassettes. Interview by Chaim O’Brien-Blumenthal.
Cento Threeo — Always Halfway There
Don Cento of the Austin trio Cento Threeo discusses the band’s debut album ‘Halfway to Mellowtown’ and its jazz and Americana roots, the Ahmad Jamal influence, and a creative process built on long friendships rather than deliberate genre strategy. Interview by Steven Garnett.
Katsumasa Kusunose Photographs the Vanishing World of Japan’s Jazz Kissa
The Japanese writer and photographer has visited roughly four hundred jazz kissa over fifty years; his book ‘Jazz Kissa’ is a record of what remains, assembled from dim rooms, Altec A7 speakers, and the silences between tracks. Interview by Andrew Hamlin.
This Week’s Episode of The Tonearm Podcast
Suzanne Ciani: The Buchla’s Orchestral Homecoming
The electronic music pioneer joins the podcast to discuss ‘CIANI/ORKEST,’ her live album pairing the Buchla synthesizer with the 50-piece Metropole Orkest, and why she has always heard the instrument as orchestral.
Rotations
Lawrence Peryer’s Rotations returns with a fourteenth episode that wanders from South London to a self-tuned gamelan in Bali:
Episode 14 is now up on the Mixcloud archive. Music we played to pair up with The Tonearm this week includes trumpeter Steven Bernstein, the Welsh-English prog-folk quartet Hen Ogledd, South London spiritual-jazz producer Scrimshire, and the Austin jazz guitar trio Cento Threeo. There was also a trip to Japan via a 2001 drum-and-vibraphone dialogue, an NHK television-drama score, and Kikagaku Moyo’s Tomo Katsurada solo work, all to mark this past Friday’s Tonearm piece on Japan’s jazz kissa listening bars.
The rest of the hour ranged similarly wide and free: a fifty-year-old Can improvisation newly out of the archive, and a closing set from Bali, where composer Dewa Alit’s self-tuned gamelan meets solo piano.
As always, a new episode of Rotations premieres this Tuesday at 11:00 p.m. Pacific on SPACE 101.1 FM in Seattle and streaming at space101fm.org.
The Hit Parade
“Media depictions of the Caribbean tend to exoticize the region; [Lido] Pimienta, however, wishes people would see it as ‘not decorative, not just where you go to relax or go wild,’ but rather ‘a respectable place.’” ❋ “I asked Mat Maneri, can you make me cry? And then right away he played something that made me cry.” ❋ “Anyone in a bedroom with an iPad has more technology available than The Beatles had for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but nobody I know is making Sgt. Pepper’s in their bedroom.” ❋ “It’s unlike the Western rock band—we are a community band . . . the older musicians carry the tradition and the younger ones can bring the energy; everybody has a role.” ❋ “We used to call it trance music … if you listen to just one fucking tone, like La Monte [Young], you don’t think ‘minimal’, you get stoned!” ❋ “[Instrumental pop is] a stylistic Frankenstein’s monster built from bits of jazz, country, gospel, and surf music.” ❋ “On 10 July 1981, the producer Lloyd Coxsone was minding his own business on Atlantic Road in the heart of Brixton when he spotted a young Rasta called Maliki being hassled by the police and attempted to intervene.” ❋ “LGBTQ musicians have made an art out of saying what can’t overtly be said, just as LGBTQ listeners have learned to hear what others can’t.” ❋ “Art has been a vehicle to constantly, radically reimagine a way out, a different tomorrow.” ❋ “But if we want to move past lumping together lists of women artists on the basis of their gender, we have to start including them in other groups—among their musical peers, in real time, not as unsung heroes or forgotten legends. And that’s a process that starts with men.” ❋ “[The zine is] the long way round compared to other media, but the scenery is always better.” ❋ “Once you open your mind and your ears to things that might sound, at first, a bit off, you might come to think the idea of limiting the scale to 12 notes is what seems arbitrary and weird.” ❋ “Elements like onomatopoeia and mimetic words in pansori sometimes create unexpectedly catchy and addictive melodies when placed over pop music.” ❋ “Before a musician from another country can take the stage in the U.S., someone has to file paperwork with the federal government on their behalf. And not just any paperwork—a petition, hundreds of pages long.” ❋ “The relationship between pernambuco and music is not a typical one of environmental overconsumption, however. It is the primary consumers of this resource, the bow makers, who have tried hardest to conserve the wood.” ❋ For more curated music links, be sure to follow The Tonearm’s feeds on Bluesky and Mastodon.
New Music Recommendations: Agile Experiments - Havana (RIYL: percussion-led Fourth World jazz-funk, Cuban son and changüí through a post-production lens) ❋ Helado Negro & Reyna Tropical - Helado Tropical (RIYL: Latin-inflected ambient-pop drifting between synth haze and rhythmic pulse) ❋ Ken Ueno & Wukir Suryadi - Earth Song (RIYL: site-specific electroacoustic ritual, wordless voice and handmade plow-metal instruments, in Senyawa’s orbit) ❋ Lesley Mok - transient (RIYL: IDM and beat-making meeting Afro-Cuban rumba; Autechre by way of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas) ❋ Lumtz - Tesoros (RIYL: diaristic lowercase ambient and field recording, intimate and domestic) ❋ Paul Carlon Trio - Between Us Three (RIYL: piano-less tenor sax trio, the Sonny Rollins lineage crossed with Cuban abakuá and guaguancó) ❋ St. Silva - Forager (RIYL: tape-loop ambient and field recording in the Japanese environmental tradition, early Eno and Hiroshi Yoshimura) ❋ The Black Drumset - Friends in Dark Places (RIYL: percussion-led psych, krautrock, and shoegaze under heavy synth drone; for fans of Mogwai and The Black Angels)
The Deepest Cut
For most of the past decade, Chloe Drallos made music as Zilched, a Detroit band that toured hard and built nearly everything itself, trafficking in what she called “doom pop.” Zilched ran its course in 2023 with Earthly Delights, an alt-rock and goth-pop record whose lead single, “The Flood,” got a video from filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. A 2024 solo EP, Three Seasons, marked the turn. The Cave, out now on Life Like, is her first full album under her own name.
She recorded The Cave in Detroit with Kate Derringer of Shadow Show at the Echo Chamber, mastered by Fred Thomas, with a roster of the city’s musicians filling out nine songs of guitar hooks and spaghetti-western horns. Thomas, who released it, calls the result “part rock record, part manifesto.” Drallos is a filmmaker as much as a songwriter, and her short films drag b-movie vampire gore into a late-capitalist present. That eye runs through a record she built to play like a western.
I asked Chloe how her filmmaking and her songwriting share the wheel, and about the passage The Cave traces from a cave to the ocean waiting outside it. Oh, yeah—and I also asked her for something she loves that more people should know about.
Explain myself?! Capricorn, songs, movies, books—I love to hang out.
Behind The Cave: I’d been just writing tons of songs, thinking my next album would be so feminine, that it would be healing. But I realized what’s really getting me back to me are these ‘sad bastard music’ albums—Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Rowland S. Howard, Father John Misty—and outlaw country, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings. I wanted to make a sad bastard album for single girls without cleaning up or emasculating that sound too much, where the main character is still a cowboy, and maybe holds the tokens of my favorite books, too. Something to take with you. I like to think it was accomplished.
Songwriter first and foremost, but both brains! Definitely on the longer cuts like “And To Each Weekend” and “A Mirror or a Door,” those songs are way, way more influenced by movie scores and sequencing. A lot of my background vocals too. I love operatic textures, even if I don’t necessarily have the voice for them yet. “The Hunger” is partly about finding solace in movies, just as a fan. I love creating scenes and following the drama. Whether thinking in images ever fights the song, I think that one’s not mine to answer—my love for long songs and drama is pretty unfashionable.
The ocean is a very real symbol for me. I actually didn’t see any seas with my own eyes for nearly twenty years, but since that return I’ve found my way back and back again. As corny as it IS, it always feels like the peak relief of the journey, where you’re like, “Fuck it, I am so small and the world is so infinite.” The Joseph Campbell quote [“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”] I actually read for the first time after the record was already getting wrapped up, and thought, “Well, perfect.” I truly wasn’t letting myself think about albums or connecting the songs until about halfway through, when I did write “The Cave” and started having fun with all those concepts. I was finding my way out by living as if I was on a journey. The songs just happened.
Then Chloe told me about a couple of things she loves:
Currently I’m pretty obsessed with Tom Robbins—Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker. I was introduced a couple months ago, and he’s basically done most things I attempt to do with my writing, just 100 times vaster. He’s funny, gross, and inspiring. And I’m always rooting for Patriarchy—The Cave would not exist without The Unself! Everyone should listen to Patriarchy!
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