Tony Stamp peruses the pastoral folk of Naima Bock, a pivot into rowdy pop from Hurray for the Riff Raff, and new aural landscapes courtesy of Wellington producer Jet Jaguar.
Giant Palm by Naima Bock
Photo: Suppled
Naima Bock used to be known as Naima Jelly, when she was a member of the buzzed-about South London band Goat Girl, which she co-founded in her teens. That outfit traffics in twitchy post-punk, and Bock found herself exhausted by the analytical nature of it all, wanting to make something detached from politics and self-analysis.
There’s a dreaminess floating through her solo debut Giant Palm, about as far from punk as possible. If anything the emphasis is on slowing down. Artists respond to our planet’s various troubles in various ways, and Bock’s response seems to be a blissful surrender.
Around the time Naima Bock left Goat Girl, another London musician called Joel Burton left his band too. He fell out of love with guitars, and studied classical piano, becoming invested in experimental improv and orchestral music.
He and Bock became aware of each other and wound up collaborating on this album. Burton said “I was doing a lot of stuff that was very diffuse, and Naima had all these songs that were fixed and could act as a really good anchor”.
Burton’s sense of when to intrude on Bock’s diminutive tracks is expertly judged, and London’s lockdown became something of a blessing, in that many of their friends were free to join them in the studio. Over 30 musicians wound up contributing. Burton told The Quietus he asked himself "why not be as ambitious as possible?"
Every contribution feels intentional though, and this still comes across as a solo album, just one that occasionally shifts into something more communal.
Bock was born in Scotland, and spent her early childhood in Brazil. Her stepfather was a folk aficionado, and she developed a fascination with standards of the genre, researching prior interpretations as far back as possible.
Her affinity for British folk is apparent, but occasionally elements of Brazilian genres like bossa nova make their way into her songs, as on ‘Working’.
After she left Goat Girl, she studied archeology and began working as a gardener, both of which seem very appropriate - her music evokes a sense of history and a love of nature.
She wrote many of the songs on Giant Palm while taking long walks, which she talks about in the PR for the album, saying “there’s a stripping away that takes place” when headed for a “fixed but far-off’ destination.
That tranquillity and calmness of thought is apparent throughout. Her distinctive voice acts as a sturdy barometer, while Joel Burton’s various contributions surge around her like gusts of wind on a hilltop.
Life on Earth by Hurray For the Riff Raff
Photo: Suppled
Many artists change their style, but they don’t usually shift as much as Hurray for the Riff Raff, who started their career-making folksy Americana, and continued in that vein for some time, only to pivot into electronic pop and rock modes. And this isn’t just a case of switching producers and putting a new coat of paint onto familiar songs, this is a change from the ground up - new types of song that often feel like a completely new artist. There’s a sense of liberation running throughout their latest album.
Hurray for the Riff Raff is the project of Alynda Segarra, who was born in The Bronx, and settled in New Orleans after an adolescence spent hopping freight trains and travelling around America - a romantic bit of myth-making that comes up in every profile of them, but Segarra admits they can hardly remember.
Their last album The Navigator explored their Puerto Rican heritage lyrically as well as musically. It coloured their sound with new elements, but Life on Earth feels like a fresh start.
Segarra has changed as a person too - they told Pitchfork they’re "trying to create a new pathway in [their] brain". Reading interviews they encourage people to think of this as their first album, and there’s an overarching sense of becoming a new person, but not necessarily leaving the past behind.
On Wolves, they sing “You’ve got to run babe/ you know how to run” over an insistent drum loop. It’s an echo of their itinerant past, and through the album, this sense of fleeing is tied to the immigrant experience in America.
Life on Earth’s overarching philosophy is specific, coming from Segarra’s reading of the 2017 activist text Emergent Strategy, which theorises on “radical self-help and planet-help”, seeing all life on earth as intertwined.
They asked the Guardian hypothetically “How do we stay present, how do we intensely feel joy and not just the crushing weight of it all? The album presents answers in the form of empathy. One example is ‘Jupiter’s Dance’, which they say offers support to migrant children.
In 2019 Segarra visited ICE facilities in Louisiana (that’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Along with the organisation Freedom for Immigrants, they helped free two men from the compound. In the song ‘Precious Cargo’ they tell the story of an imprisoned migrant family, before one of the men they helped joins in, telling his own story.
Life on Earth is a particularly weighty thing to call an album, but its substance does a good job justifying it. These aren’t heavy songs though, they’re easily digestible and uplifting - Segarra has a voice with a weariness that speaks to a difficult past, but their songs aim to be buoyant. Joy in the face of oppression is the whole idea.
At one point on the song ‘Nightqueen’, the poet Ocean Vuong can be heard in a sample that gives the album its title, saying “As a species, as life on Earth, we’ve been dying for millennia,” Vuong says. “But I don’t think energy dies. It just transforms.”
Room Tones by Jet Jaguar
Michael Upton AKA Jet Jaguar Photo: Bandcamp
Many years ago when I was studying music production, a tutor told me he thought the future of music would be based around sound more than melody or harmony - he felt that every possible combination of notes had been done, so the only advancements left were in the realm of timbre and tone.
Looking at music this way, like it’s a vast, partially undiscovered continent, is something I still consider, and I think time has proven him partly right - songwriting is still reinventing itself, but it’s true that there are no limits anymore when it comes to sound design.
Wellington musician Michael Upton AKA Jet Jaguar has pitched his tent in this particular area. There are traces of melody to be found, but his music is mostly about creating new aural spaces.
His self-titled debut in 1999 was built around the merging of hip hop, dub and electronic production, and is emblematic of a burgeoning ‘NZ sound’ that came with the necessary gear becoming more affordable.
In recent years his work has drifted into more abstract realms, focused on real-world sounds, sometimes manipulated into something new, sometimes presented as they are. This new album Room Tones signals an edging back towards structure.
His prior release was Recording, and in the notes to that one, Upton wrote that he sees his music like a diary. Recording was the apex of his interest in ambient music - tracks revolved around an appliance hum, or thunder, with place names in some titles, like ‘Vanuatu, With a Fridge’, and ‘Storm in Lisbon’.
When I interviewed him in 2018 he told me about a frog pond recorded in Vietnam, and how he used his recordings as a starting point for composition. If they were from overseas trips years prior all the better, because those sounds provided an unfamiliar starting point. The tradition continues here on tracks like ‘Ōokayama Cats At Night’.
This is the second Jet Jaguar release to come out on Shimmering Moods, a record label in Amsterdam. According to their website, they offer music that “offers the listener a soundtrack for daydreaming, walks around the city or in nature, a creative activity, meditation, or invites them to a fully concentrated listen”.
That certainly fits the music on Room Tones. ‘Tonal Drift’ sounds exactly like its name, built around a drone that gradually changes over its duration, seemingly simple but carefully calibrated in its lush depth.
Michael Upton writes in the notes for this album: “In sound work for films and so on, recording a ‘room tone’ is where you record the space where the action is going to happen, but while nothing is happening. I'm forever interested in music where not much is happening, so 'Room Tones' made me laugh - a collection of recordings that are barely there but still serve a point? The name clicked.”
As Michael says, not much is happening in this music - seemingly, that is. Listen closer and there’s a rich tapestry of detail on each track. The idea that this music slowly reveals itself is appealing to me, and on Room Tones, as always, Jet Jaguar creates aural spaces that are very pleasant to get lost in.
