Music
Deb Grant on the culture that lit up her year
by: Deb Grant
28 Nov 2024
The cover of Julia Holter’s Something in the Room She Moves album features a painting called Wrestling by her childhood friend Christina Quarles. Image: DOMINO RECORDING CO LTD
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Winter is here and with it a long-established tradition – the chronicling of the music, books and concerts I’ve loved most since January. A post-Covid affliction I can’t seem to shake, one that seems to be shared by many people I know, is that my sense of chronology has been upended. I have endless trouble recalling how long ago events took place, where I was or what I was doing on any given date (I’ve accepted age could also be a factor; I keep forgetting I’m turning 40 next year, no doubt I’ll need regular reminders after the event too).
Reflecting on my cultural highlights is like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs through the year; as we rocket towards the end of 2024, they help me find my way back to the parts I’d like to remember.
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Soft Power by Ezra Feinberg is the album I’ve returned to most often this year. Aptly named, it’s a collection of gentle, contemplative instrumental music which swells and contracts like a film score. Feinberg is a practising psychoanalyst based in Brooklyn who plays several instruments on the LP including guitar, Wurlitzer organ and Moog Matriarch. I find synths and acoustic guitar don’t always blend well but the instrumentation on this record falls together beautifully, enhanced in particular on the closing track, Get Some Rest, by the magic touch of harpist Mary Lattimore.
Julia Holter’s Something in the Room She Moves has a similar delicate magnetism. I was initially drawn to the album by its cover art, a painting by Christina Quarles of two kinetic figures clasping each other in blotchy water-colours. The theme of bodies features heavily throughout the album, a more tangible subject matter than Holter’s previous, more ethereal and dreamlike work, and the record is rich with romance and lyrical elegance.
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In contrast, Edrix Puzzle’s Lotus Blossom is decidedly confrontational. A group of skilled jazz players, they take inspiration from Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock along with the psychedelic avant-garde and Hot Rats-era Frank Zappa. Psych-jazz has become more popular over the past few years, demanding varying degrees of patience from the listener, and I appreciate the meticulous skill it must take to make a record which is both challenging and pleasant to listen to. Lotus Blossom has not been far from my headphones since its release.
On the subject of challenges: when Joe Boyd’s near-1,000 page epic And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain landed on my doorstep I baulked at the size of it. It’s taken Boyd – a musical scholar best known for producing music by Nick Drake and Pink Floyd, and bringing American blues artists such as Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the UK – 17 years to release a follow-up to his much-loved autobiography White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.
It appears he’s spent all of that time tirelessly researching this global music opus, which sprawls across time and continents, connecting dots between traditional folk music and its contemporary successors. I needn’t have felt intimidated – despite its size and vast subject matter the book is a breeze to read. The narrative is built on stories, which Boyd has accumulated plenty of.
He even had a hand in coining the term ‘world music’ (the divisiveness of which he addresses in the pages in earnest). As I concluded when I spoke to Joe about it for Manchester Literature Festival in October, it may be the only book about popular music you’ll ever need to read.
The evolution of Ethiojazz is covered extensively in And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, and it’s thrilling to close out the year accompanied by a new record by the genre’s pioneer, Mulatu Astatke. Tension, a collaboration with Tel Aviv’s Hoodna Orchestra, is upbeat and brass heavy, augmenting traditional modal melodies with a joyful swing.
Finally, I attended Laurie Anderson’s Ark: United States V at Factory International in Manchester not knowing quite what to expect. The online blurb, though extensive, offered little clarity. On stage, Anderson introduced the show as an opera, giving a detailed synopsis of what was to come, most of which failed to materialise. No matter, what did follow was as engaging as it was disorienting, our magnetic host escorted us through animated visuals, AI-assistant vignettes, beautiful music, stories from science, her childhood and outer space.
She invited us to participate in collective screaming and Tai Chi. The subject matter was unflinchingly grim; politics, climate change, AI’s trivialisation of truth. But the brightness in her voice held a spark of optimism which has stuck with me since the curtain came down. Uncertainty awaits us in 2025, but I believe her message was this: great art grows in dark places.
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