Me, Claudius - Good Diz, Bad Bird (Bezirk, 2018)

First thing’s first: I love the name Me, Claudius for a musical project.  I actually went to YouTube to find the Sesame Street skit from which the enigmatic English tape sorceress pinched the moniker, and it brought back a wave of nostalgia.  Now take the name of this tape: Good Diz, Bad Bird.  As far as I can tell, this isn’t bebop, and there aren’t any horns or saxes to be found.  There’s certainly a sense of virtuosity at play, as the artist is a wiz with the ferrous loops – slicing, dicing, and mangling her samples until they fold in on themselves in a repetitive haze of maximalist minimalism.  There is genius here, and it becomes apparent when one navigates deep into the crevices of this evocative cassette.

The first side of the tape is one lengthy beast of a piece, eponymous and difficult to pin down.  Piano chords stagger, stutter, and turn on themselves until they become a pool of undifferentiated timbre and tone.  Disembodied voices and a percussive rhythm eventually overtake the piano maelstrom, along with shards of white noise that are smeared into the sonic equivalent of extracellular fluid.  This is musical DNA being replicated, mutated, carved up and manipulated by an expert pair of hands.

On the flip is the diptych called “Lifestyle”.  Both pieces feature damaged drum machine loops in some regard, and both travel in an orbit where dubbed out Foley effects and an ever-present beeping noise are commonplace.  The second half is where strange becomes bizarre: the beats become subterranean and barely existent while the noises (including what sounds like a pneumatic nail gun being discharged repeatedly) are at the forefront and ring clearly.  Imagine going clubbing in a busy construction site and you get the picture.

Physical copies of this sample-delic array of tape loops are still to be had, and they’re beautiful (hand-printed on a printing press from the 1960s by Me, Claudius herself) so pin your eyeballs to your browser and navigate to the Bezirk Bandcamp to obtain one of these delightful artifacts for yourself.

Lafidki - Derichan (Chinabot / Bezirk, 2018)

The Chinabot label/collective was founded in 2017 with the release of the Phantom Force compilation, which collected 21 tracks from artists who hail from across the East Asian music scene.  Aimed at rewriting the story surrounding Asian music, the label’s mission statement is to “show a slice of what we like, the cultures we come from and our own ideas”.  Chinabot progenitor Saphy Vong, himself a Cambodian-born artist who has lived in various locations across Asia and Europe but currently resides in London, contributed his own output to the compilation as Lafidki.  His music is situated at both a stylistic and temporal crossroads, in which classic Cambodian pop music, traditional music from his homeland’s highland and mountain peoples, and glitchy electronic rhythms coalesce into a colorful cosmic ambrosia.

Chinabot has co-released the Derichan cassette with the Bezirk imprint, also a relatively young label helmed by UK artists Daryl Worthington (Beachers) and Tristan Bath (Spool’s Out podcast).  The cassette is dedicated to the over twenty ethnic groups that call the Cambodian countryside home.  Derichan translates as “bestial”, and these groups are often derided in their own homeland, often called “ethnic minorities, hill tribes, and other, more dehumanizing terms associated with wildness, primitivity, savagery.”  Vong has woven field recordings made with the help of ethnomusicologist Julien Hairon into his noise-infused electronic sound fields, folding the histories of multiple cultures into a singular clarion call, revealing tragedies that are occurring in present day.

Deforestation, human-influenced drought, and the murder of environmental activists are just some of the themes that Vong touches upon with his transcendental rhythms.  Field recordings bookend the noise-infused rhythms of “The Ceremony of the Drowned,” a paean to a cultural rite threatened by dam construction.  The sinister electronic arpeggios of “Poan Pasda” give way to oblique tones that could be the cries of the banana tree ghost, now homeless (Cambodia currently has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world).  “The Death of Chut Wutty” finds Vong exploring the atrocities of the modern era, ruminating on the murder of the eponymous environmental activist, who was allegedly shot by the Cambodian military.

Only 50 copies of this highly enrapturing cassette are available, so point your browser to either the Chinabot or the Bezirk Bandcamps to score one for yourself.