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Wildflower | Heurta | Joe Davis | CV & Jab | Pan American | Moritz Von Oswald Trio | Time Wharp
Welcome to my weekly recommendation digest. I am posting an album a day on threads and Instagram but this digest has more ways to listen, ways to buy physical or digital releases, a few more images, and some background words from me on why I selected this album.
This experimental project will evolve, I may try some themes, and some vibes but definitely no requests.
This week I ended up doing something different - a theme!
Each of the releases are connected to In Sheep’s Clothing.
I first connected with Jonny and the ISC crew in 2020 when Ryan was playing in their LA Bar - A listening bar, but with more LA feels, a few records for sale, no strict rules on talking and connected to a great little restaurant. I was hooked. But the Pandemic was not kind to small independent projects - especially on the West Coast of America. They shut the bar, they switched to an online record store and survived like us all.
Fast forward to 2024 and things look so different. A new store in NYC, a collaboration with an incredible restaurant near Hudson Yards. The DTLA store is rehoused, A subscription service that is aware of your discogs.
It feels like a new chapter, and I hope for a strong new future.
Maybe if there is interest I can get Johnny to do an interview for a later newsletter.
So all of these records this week were either purchased in their LA or NYC Stores or were sent to me by the lovely people who run the record club.
Love - Wildflower - Wildflower Music - 2020
Sundays are for Jazz, This UK trio is classic sax and bass vibes. Fiddly at times, intense at others. Spiritual Jazz from the UK at its most confident.
Wildflower (Leon Brichard, Tom Skinner, Idris Rahman) continue to explore areas of groove-based improvised jazz on their 2nd album. Taking a slightly freer approach to the writing process, simple but effective melodies and bass motifs are explored to create fully realized pieces with dynamic extremes that bring a full range of emotions. Recorded over a two-day session at Fishmarket Studios in London, the band sounds relaxed and at ease, giving space to explore intricate improvised interplay and dialogue fully whilst at the same time building to fiery powerful climaxes and emotional peaks. Skinner is on fire here whilst Rahman and Brichard trade riffs and push the harmonic and rhythmic boundaries. Rahman’s use of clarinet and bamboo flute plus additional layers of woodwinds, Skinner’s unique approach to stripped-down use of his very personalized kit, and Brichard’s use of both acoustic and electric basses make for a sonic landscape that is both unique and highly approachable. Touching on heavy spiritual vibes whilst taking in dark alternative grooves and delicate folk-like tunes, the overall sound remains instantly accessible.
Heurta - TV Slang - R&R/Leizure - 2023
Heurta from Berlin. Somewhere between house, funky jazz and ambient Heurta’s album TV Slang explores rhythmic moods and soundscapes: combining traces of deep house, downtempo, and a suggestion of breakbeat flavors.
Partially recorded back in 2019 and subsequently completed in 2022, TV Slang is the first release on R&R, a sub-label of Leizure focused on exploring more nuanced and eclectic sounds outside the rigid framework of dance music.
Joe Davies - Shields In Full Sunlight - Smallville Records | 2023
A dubby, Balearic, deep, minimal house album, perfect to watch the sunset in these cloudy January nights. DJ Assam delivers his first project under his own name Joe Davies ‘Shields In Full Sunlight’ which comprises eight original cuts, full of beautiful shades, unexpected twists, and twirling melodies.
From the liner notes “Davies offers up textural ethereal numbers like opener ‘Hi Life’ (featuring his brother Daniel aka Ossia, ‘Smile and Wave’ and closing track ‘Nefyn’. Also on offer is the more signature deep and dubby Smallville house sound with tracks like ‘Two Hours Earth Room’, ‘Cygnus’ (featuring Space Drum Meditation) and ‘AMY’ (featuring Johan Kaseta), while the likes of ‘’Echo Form’ sees Davies deviate into Bruk with broken rhythms and jazzy melodies or ‘Movement Into The Breach’, which embraces a more mystical, Balearic-tinged aesthetic."
CV & jab - Κλίμα (Klima) - Editions Basilic - 2023
A chilled piano release that takes away all the pain and suffering even for 45 minutes,
Κλίμα (Klima) is the third album by CV & JAB, Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. It is conceived as a rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential release; percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface The atmospheres that characterized previous CV & JAB albums develop an intimate intensity in the solo piano excursions - “Klima” and “Lands of Permanent Mist” - and there is more bass flute on “Dwelling” and “Pottery Fragments” and even some voice in “Jetstream”.
From the liner notes “Suggesting timeless wanderings in ambient études and classical minimalism, the album deploys as a mirage, inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections. The palpable depth of the recordings bestows each track with a distinctive density and presence: sounds and chords materialize and dematerialize as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey. Ten sips of a familiar rapture which ooze a renewed sense of expansion in sound, informed by more than five years of CV & JAB’s continuous sonic wanderings and wonderings together.” Fancy,
The labyrinthine and meteorological odyssey becomes tangible in the artwork, realized by the duo’s long-time collaborator Zin Taylor. Κλίμα (Klima)’s simulacra evoke a map in which curves transform into a score with “small systems of differences emerging side by side”.
Pan-American - In Daylight Dub - Foam on a wave - 2023
A dub techno release from an ambient producer setting a darker deeper tone
Pan-American is the ambient solo project of Ladbradford's frontman Mark Nelson. The fourth release from London-based Foam on a Wave is a collection of rich, pulsating ambient/dub techno.
This collection comprises Mark's dreamiest, most sumptuous, and blissed-out tracks taken from 3 obscure releases on labels traversing Zedelgem, London, and Portland - (K-RAA-K)³, Vertical Form, and BSI Records. Across these imprints, their output spans IDM, electronica, lo-fi, experimental dub, and beyond and has been a musical home to the likes of Pub, Muslimguaze, and King Jammy and more.
With a string of recent releases on Longform Editions and his long-term home Kranky, Mark continues to write and perform worldwide at festivals and prestigious venues such as London's Cafe Oto and Public Records in Brooklyn, NYC. The increasingly personal and reflective nature of his music has seen him come full circle to a more organic sound, as exemplified by his latest LP, The Patience Fader.
Moritz Von Oswald Trio - Sounding lInes - Honest Johns - 2015
Moritz Von Oswald was always shelved in the techno section in my collection - he is the co-founder of the record label Basic Channel working with Juan Atkins, Carl Craig, and many more. But recently he has been subverting the wob wob. He's created a jazz-like trio with drummer Tony Allen and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer
"One of Von Oswald’s favorite tricks is to take the heavy workload that in techno tracks usually falls on the kick drum and redistribute it across the few other instruments in his typically high-minimalist compositions. An inspired sonic engineer, he often enlists keyboard licks or delay effects to carry more rhythmic weight than usual, and as a result, his compositions are urgent and danceable but rarely revolve around a 4/4 kick." Pitchfork
Their playing has a loose, improvisatory feel but a strong sense of purpose. Even when they stretch a groove out toward the 10-minute mark they maintain the cohesiveness of a good jazz combo.
The album opener "1" starts out centered around a happily burbling synth bass line, but Allen’s hi-hat takes the lead for a sizable chunk of the track’s 10 minutes, and his bop-inspired playing is so expressive and so casually virtuosic–and Loderbauer and Von Oswald’s backup is so judiciously minimal–that he easily pulls it off.
Elsewhere the group brings some of its other influences to the front, to varying effect. On "4" they fully indulge their dub sides, and the resulting track works better when you let yourself get caught up in its gently wafting mood than if you focus in on what it’s actually doing. "7", on the other hand, dives headfirst into '70s jazz funk with a cheeky clavinet riff and greasy hi-hats, and manages to strip away the decades of kitsch that those signifiers have accumulated, rediscovering an unexpected vibrancy lurking underneath.
Time Wharp - Spiro World - 2022 - Leaving Records
Back before the pandemic MatthewDavid started an in-person session in La every month, on the first Saturday of every month, at the community art park La Tierra de la Culebra, held a showcase for Leaving Records. Matthew McQueen, label owner, engineer, producer, DJ, and musician started the event in 2018. The only objective - to "Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Tree".
"Leaving Records is not a new label, or new to Los Angeles. The endeavor was founded in 2008 as a blog before soon evolving into a label run by McQueen, and his former partner Jesselisa Moretti, a creative director and mixed-media artist who helped identify their visual identity. He befriended experimental producers like Flying Lotus and Daedelus, and frequented Low End Theory, a defunct but seminal weekly party that served as a springboard for like-minded artists.
Pivoting from an event to more of a label and online gathering. Spiro World was released as a mix of jazz, ambient, and downtempo musicianship. The third iteration of the series, now called Listen to Music Safely in Your Home Next to a Fern, features multi-instrumentalist Kaye Loggins performing her swirling compositions under the name Time Wharp. Her set is masterful - It's not a record meant for background listening, though it drifts and floats like the most serene ambient music. The songs billow and dissipate as threads of guitar riffs and arpeggios twist and disentangle almost simultaneously.
A lot of Spiro World's playfulness comes from how it merges acoustic and electronic instruments. The combination of round sine wave tones and the sharper attacks of woodwinds is recognizable but otherworldly, familiar enough to draw the listener in and alien enough to keep them there.
Throughout the album, Loggins avoids any kind of rigid structure. The slinking piano of "Tezeta," though nestled in a buzzing cloud of synth and clarinet, hints at Ethiopian jazz, and the title track moves from dewey New Age into mildly pulsing folktronica. It's a simultaneous celebration and discussion of genre boundaries, an acknowledgment that they exist but sound best when allowed to bleed into one another.
Week 4 in the books, enjoying this - any thoughts/comments? (no requests). Portland, OR.