family elan

family elan • bow low bright glow [alt vinyl 2010]

"Fusion is a dirty word, implying clinicism and a dry sense of conscious matchmaking. “Bow Low Bright Glow” is a more a communal excavation and re-presentation of buried European folk and sufi-hearted music than any form of experiment. Family Elan are alone in their field. Here, Chris Hladowski has put together a collection of original numbers, visions created from lost/found tapes and traditional pieces (including a absolutely gorgeous “The BlackPlanets Of Her Eyes”) that are a fitting companion to Family Elan’s “Stare of Dawn” debut.

Alongside Hladowski’s voice, there’s the vocal input of Nalle’s Hanna Tuulikki – a voice as easily capable of gentle Qawwali as it is folk song. This is a record of heavy treble intricacy, Hladowski’s saz and bouzouki playing encompassing drones, folk, dervish progressive work and a woozy shimmer over and through the entwining melodies. Family Elan are more than just a project or a band, Hladowski has endowed the music here with a such a unique voice that shaky shorthand comparisons would be pointless and a short sell. Music that hints at the devotional rarely feels as inclusive, as communal and as enjoyable as this." alt.vinyl

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fotola: mary robinson

scatter

scatter - surprising sing stupendous love (pickled egg, 2004)

scatter - the mountain announces (blank tapes, 2006)

"Where most free music is partisan and dogmatic, happy to play to the gallery and perpetuate internally inscribed dialogues, Scatter effortlessly reconcile freedom and composition. Instead of compromising their output, the group's tactics bolster the character of their aesthetic cross-readings. 'National Magick' moves from watery flutes and a limber motorikpulese to a rembetika-inspired melody head, the group locking their instruments in formation. This combination of jazz-derived flexibility and bowdlerised traditional music comes on like the Sun Ra Archestra tackling the Sun City Girls classic 'Torch of the Mystics' set. Scatter's brass players slur like a drunken Albert Ayler on 'Orbling', and make like brash, bolshy big bands storming uninvited into 'Make the Time'. Rejecting the party lines that dominate improvised music discourse, while simultaneously enlivening their songs by treating them as compliant forms, Scatter's music has a joyous emotional heft, that avoids the desiccated cliches restraining so much improvisation and composition" [Jon Dale, The Wire]

"Scatter rush at early 70's collective-style folk-jazz with great enthusiasm and loose skill. Their version of Sun Ra's 'Adventure Equation' is an inspired choice, bubbling with a true sense of the power of free music. Their own compositions, too, visit late 60's folk, Zorn's nu-klezmer, Cardew's scratch-orchestra avant-garde, 70's British radical spoken word, Joseph Byrd & The Field Hippies' anthing goes multitudinous commune psychedelia, and full-tilt freak-out cosmic rock, without ever landing on any of those planets long enough to get bored or learn how to do it 'properly'. They eat the enchanted stem, sure, but unlike Tennyson's lotus-eating sailors, they can still hear the sound of the sea, and they're itching to go someplace else almost as soon as they come ashore, tribal shuffle beats zigzagging through the waves; frailed sales flapping in the breaze" [Frances May Morgan, Plan B]

“Scatter’s exuberance probably owes much to their collective dynamic … harnesses the loose feeling of communal experimentation akin to that of the various groups involved with the 1960s and ’70s free jazz scene. Scatter’s sensibilities tend toward structured improvisation and the adoption of diverse musical forms and instruments, from the celebratory jazz of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra to the musical traditions of Eastern Europe and the British Isles, invoking the primitivist-modernist compositions of Bela Bartok along the way … ” [Alexander Provan, Dusted]

Aby Amorel Vulliamy (viola), Chris Hladowski (guitar/bouzouki), Alex Neilson (drums/percussion), George Murray (trombone), Isobel Campbell (cello), Martin Beer (double bass), Matthew Cairns (trumpet), Morag Wilson (harmonium), Hanna Tuulikki (vocals) y Oliver Neilson (vocals, artwork)

'National Magick' (mp3 de Surprising sing...) & 'Urban Conurban' (mp3 de Surprising sing...)