Raül Fernandez Miró is a Spanish musician and producer behind the curtains of the new flamenco movement, his most notable contributions being Granada, his duo album with Sílvia Pérez Cruz, and Rosalía Vila’s Los Ángeles. The latter’s most recent album, El Mal Querer, broke through this past year and although Raul had no hand in its production, like with most projects that sprout from this movement, he was just a degree away.
La otra mitad comes 15 years after his first solo release as Refree. With each release in his discography under this guise, you can hear certain production cues unspool, Miró choosing to leave parts undressed and exposed, and continually finding subtle ways to let his guard down. La Otra Mitad, or “The Other Half”, collects…
…Raül’s two Jai Alai volumes from 2017, released as two 10-inch records. Named after the fast-paced Spanish ball game with a name translating to “merry festival”, the volumes tap on Miró’s range of styles, and at times offers a distillation of his varied voices.
The first volume is guitar-centric, mostly solo pieces named after the guitar it was played on and the date recorded. These sparse recordings are short Flamenco expressions, maybe more accurately falsetas, preserved to tape within close proximity to their inception, like plucked, young white tea leaves. The majority of the pieces on the second volume were created as the soundtrack for Isaki Lacuesta’s Entre dos aguas. Fusing languid field recordings with a vocal focus (ones distinctly recorded without the purpose of being documented for the music) with guitar work reminiscent of Vini Reilly, Miró handles each track with lightly psychedelic production touches. He cites Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” as “possessing” the pieces on volume two; Bryars’ piece, which loops a tattered recording of a homeless man singing an old English hymn in a shifty meter and slowly brings in a complementing solemn string accompaniment, is cryptic and exponentially hypnotizing. Although much shorter than Bryars’ work, the pieces here have a similar brooding but tantalizing weight.
Tak:til, Glitterbeat’s sub-label, split the volumes up rather than placing them one after the other. The resequencing of the wide-ranging, vaguely ethnographic material works in the best interest of both. The vocality and space created by the nimble guitar melodies and the melismatic, dislocated recordings contrast with sobering effect.
Black Merlin, AKA George Thompson, has released numerous EPs of chugging techno for labels including Berceuse Heroique and Jealous God. His terrific DJ sets, meanwhile, can journey from darkly atmospheric to downright mind-scrambling. But with his ambitious second LP, Kosua, the Yorkshireman goes much deeper, dragging us along on a nerve-wracking, feature-length journey through the jungle. A research trip to Bali had been the catalyst for Thompson’s first album, 2016’s Hipnotik Tradisi, on which he avoided cut-and-paste sampling in favour of a grungier, psychedelic take on gamelan bells. But later that year, Thompson had a life-changing experience on a solo expedition to Papua New Guinea, where he encountered the indigenous Kosua tribe…
…and made recordings of their daily customs, their ancient dances and the island’s cacophonous wildlife.
…During one of several trips he made to Papua New Guinea, he went full Ray Mears, spending 14 days alone in the jungle and another three exploring the crater of an extinct volcano. At 85 minutes, Kosua is itself something to disappear into. There’s a cinematic shaping to the tracks: we enter through a thicket of animal chatter, birds and the white noise of the rainforest, dense with life. Dark electronic drones frequently add a human presence—and a subtle suggestion of our true fear of being alone in nature, just another vulnerable mammal in the forest.
Over the 15 tracks, field recordings are sometimes woven into a gloomy palette of strings, pads and drones, sometimes left in their bare state. “Seane Falls Womens Kulumba” captures a song-and-dance ritual in the raw; voices fall out of time as the dancers catch their breath. On “New Guinea,” the voice of eccentric explorer Dr Lawrence Blair offers a vivid description of the island as “the last wild garden at the bottom of the world.” Further along, a step-change: distant pulsations and frozen Mills-ian techno on “Clouds” seem to emerge from the slopes of the volcano. Eventually, on “Standing At The Summit of Bosavi,” we’re swaddled in abyssal drones and synth scree as we gaze into the crater’s void.
Kosua carves out its own territory between traditional ethnographic recordings, like the one that Deep Forest plundered for “Sweet Forest,” and more subjective soundscapes, like Mike Cooper’s dreamy South Pacific-inspired collages and Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting soundtrack for the 1924 film The Epic of Everest. At times, the tracks’ locations are clearly signposted, but the most engaging moments come when we disappear into Thompson’s mind, and share in his solitude, fear and awe.
