Not to be confused with the classic 1984 Italo disco track ‘Spacer Woman’ but no doubt in homage, ‘Spacewoman’ is the new EP by Berlin-domiciled DJ, musician and producer Leona Jacewska, best known by her stage name CHARLIE.
She has become known for her notable series of SZUM electro events and being one of the spearheads of the Italo-Proto scene in Berlin which has also seen acts such as DINA SUMMER, NEU-ROMANCER, CURSES and PARADOX OBSCUR emerge.
With a Roland Juno 60, Moog Source, ARP Solina, Roland VP770, Crumar Bit 99, Moog Minitaur, Moog Little Phatty, Oberheim OB6, Sequentix Cirklon, Roland TR808 and Pearl Syncussion SY-1M in her arsenal, Charlie’s most recent release was 2022’s impressive ‘Cold Inside’ which included a remix by the notable Danish DJ legend Flemming Dalum. She opened her account with ‘Polarity Walk’, a track on the various artists ‘Mechatronica Aid EPII’ in support of Berlin-based artists during the 2020 lockdown.
Photo by Jovan Mrowiński
With a hearty rhythmic snap, the ‘Spacewoman’ title song utilises powerful kicks and throbs with sparkling synth hooks galore and suitably detached vocals that are both spoken and sung with treatments for a brilliant thumping club track.
With Chicago meeting Italy, ‘Let Go’ is hypnotic bliss, a sexy and sweaty number that swings and shifts tonally and rhythmically; this perfect strobe-lit slice of dark disco possesses a thrust and mood in the vein of fellow Berlin residents DINA SUMMER that bursts with groove and energy.
With colder trancier elements, the instrumental ‘Dark Waver’ is metronomic but bubbles infectiously as hints of ‘Oxygène IV’ threaten to breakthrough but it is jagged in all the right ways with a percussive barrage to close! ‘In The Night’ though is not a PET SHOP BOYS cover but its energetic combination of big beats, solid basslines, invader blips and spacey swirls concoct another fine instrumental, revealing a kinship with other young producers in Berlin such as Laura Bailey aka NEU-ROMANCER.
Sonically, ‘Spacewoman’ is immensely satisfying and works in the head as well as on the dancefloor. This retro-futuristic EP showcases CHARLIE as a talented electronic producer of worth, with an ability to bring workable changes within her exhilarating melodies and patterns while retaining the necessary repetitious elements essential to good club friendly music.
Masayoshi Fujita is a Japanese vibraphonist and marimba player with eight albums to his name including collaborations, his most recent solo offering being ‘Bird Ambience’ in 2021.
Birds and their behaviour are a creative haven for artists of a more ambient persuasion and in a year which has also seen the release of ‘The Secret Life Of Birds’ from Patricia Wolf, Fujita continues his avian fascination on his new work ‘Migratory’. Using the combination of electronic sound texturing and acoustic percussion instrumentation which first appeared on ‘Bird Ambience’, the follow-up’s intent is to capture a traveller’s wonder of being home.
Doing as German duo CLUSTER before him, Fujita returned to Japan with his family after 13 years of living in Berlin, to live and compose music in the midst of nature. Relocating to the mountain hills along the coast of Kami-cho on Honshu, the largest islands that make up Japan, once settled in, he established the Kebi Bird Studio in a former kindergarten to record ‘Migratory’; its concept surreally imagines birds travelling between continents and hearing this music from the land underneath.
With inspiration from swallows and cumulonimbus cloud formations, the opening piece ‘Tower of Cloud’ is glorious with a mesmerising synthesizer theme offset by marimba rolls. ‘Pale Purple’ and ‘Blue Rock Thrush’ continue the instrumental mood, although with the former is more organic and the latter introduces the jazzier sax overtones of Fujita’s father. Also sax inflected, ‘In a Sunny Meadow’ is reminiscent of the serene quality of ‘Torn Sunset’, Theo Travis’ collaborative album with John Foxx.
Vocal turns come in on ‘Our Mother’s Lights’ which brings in a spoken narrative from poet Moor Mother over soothing sax and a gently percussive motif while the angelic voice of Hatis Noit compliments the gentle hymn-like ‘Higurashi’. ‘Ocean Flow’ soothingly does as its title suggests while sparse resonances ably illustrate ‘Distant Planet’ as ‘Desonata’ floats beautifully and ‘Valley’ comes swathed in a widescreen drift.
The closing drone soundscape of ‘Yodaka’ adds another colour to the palette in the Japanese woodwinds of the shō played by Swede Mattias Hållsten; based on the ‘Yodaka No Hoshi’ children’s short story of ‘The Nighthawk Star’, the track exudes a peaceful but hopeful melancholy as it illustrates the plight of The Nighthawk who is bullied by other birds but responds with determination, non-violence and self-sacrifice to shine forever beside Cassiopeia.
Filled with appreciation of the natural world, as Fujita himself says: “Nature is there as the image to be evoked by the listener from the music”. With shades of Harold Budd’s Brian Eno produced debut ‘The Pavilion Of Dreams’ and others in their ilk, ‘Migratory’ is a wonderful collection of discreet music to be savoured in a state of satisfied tranquillity.
A product of Stuttgart and Los Angeles, ‘Neostalgia’ is the new collaborative album by CAMOUFLAGE’s Heiko Maile and composer Julian DeMarre.
The pair first worked together on the 1991 CAMOUFLAGE album ‘Meanwhile’ produced by Colin Thurston. It saw a musical diversion into more conventional instrumentation such as violin, saxophone, guitar and drums when the band from Bietigheim-Bissingen were reduced to a duo.
Outside of his dayjob with Marcus Meyn and their reunion with Oliver Kreyssig in 1999 which now sees CAMOUFLAGE celebrate their 40th Anniversary with the ‘Rewind To The Future & Goodbye Tour’, Maile and DeMarre partnered up to soundtrack the American action crime film ‘Killerman’ in 2019.
In 2020, the world was locked down by the Covid pandemic and with months of isolation at home, Maile and DeMarre got creative in each of their separate bases to create musical love letter to early electronic music from Wendy Carlos to Conrad Schnitzler and PINK FLOYD to YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA, Brian Eno to Vangelis with naturally TANGERINE DREAM and KRAFTWERK along the way. Despite ongoing soundtrack commissions for both delaying completion, the end result is the appropriately titled ‘Neostalgia’.
The opening piece ‘Patience’ is superb, originally written for ‘Killerman’ and titled ‘Leaving NY’, it has been reworked from the sweeping ambience of the soundtrack version to something more pulsating and percussive while there is a greater melodic presence.
Other tracks seeded from ‘Killerman’ like ‘Reflection (Dark Horses)’ and ‘Helios’ appear but another strong highlight is ‘Hollow Earth’ which utilises DeMarre’s Korg Lambda string machine alongside Maile’s hypnotic sequence. As the tempo rises, there comes a chilling drama enhanced live percussive rolls and textural guitar interventions which recall TANGERINE DREAM.
Meanwhile ‘Melancholia’ is a wonderful showcase for a number of vintage synth warhorses in the Yamaha CS60 and Korg PE-1000 although instead of a Mellotron, a real flute from Torsten Kamps provides the desired airy effect.
Featuring fretless bass and pretty synth, ‘Serengeti Ostinato’ rumbles rhythmically in tribute to the late Oscar winning German conservationist Bernhard Grzimek and his TV classic documentaries on African wildlife while ‘Universal Universe’ heads to the cosmos to illustrate the viewpoint of Stephen Hawking with a swinging neo-Schaffel backbone. But planet’s earth’s nature is the focus on ‘Between Trees’, a reflective ambient exploration to reflect the sense of openness between tree branches and how trees have defied changing climates before the arrival of humankind and civilisation.
Cosmic, spacey and occasionally ambient but mostly melodic, ‘Neostalgia’ blends of a variety of electronic styles with lengthy intros and outros forming key components. Tense yet hopeful, this is an album that will be appreciated by those who love the esoteric instrumental music of four or five decades ago.
Since their formation in 2017, MOLCHAT DOLMA gained a worldwide cult following with their first two albums ‘S Krysh Nashikh Domov’ and ‘Etazhii’.
From the off, the Belarusian trio had international ambitions and their popularity in Europe and the US led to the prestigious New York based independent label Sacred Bones signing MOLCHAT DOMA and releasing their third long player ‘Monument’ in 2020. Delivering a stark brand of post-punk that sounded like it had been demoed on a portastudio with dirty tape heads, with this highly derivative sound, MOLCHAT DOMA have been target of many jibing if affectionate memes by the @sounds.like.joy.division Instagram parody account.
But with ongoing political tensions in their homeland and having spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Egor Shkutko (vocals), Roman Komogortsev (guitar, synthesizer, drum machine), and Pavel Kozlov (bass, synthesizer) relocated from Minsk to Los Angeles. The end result is their fourth album ‘Belaya Polosa’ which channels the anxiety and fear of that journey into exile to face a future of uncertainty.
With the inevitable comparisons to JOY DIVISION and THE CURE, MOLCHAT DOMA have always had a brutal gothic aesthetic that polarises in black and white. But on ‘Belaya Polosa’, in a new creative environment where the sun is shining on most days, the trio while remaining monochromatic have added some musical colour. While they have not turned into WHAM! or DURAN DURAN, the dancier but still sombre sequenced pulses of classic NEW ORDER and DEPECHE MODE have crept in for a more refined studio product that doesn’t come over like a third generation cassette duplication of THE WAKE or THE NAMES…
Full of front, ‘Ty Zhe Ne Znaesh Kto Ya’ is mighty as electronic body music dominates the mutant template with strident vocals on top to provide a punchy opening salvo. It highlights how MOLCHAT DOMA have grown from the band that released ‘Monument’ as synths stab and throb in a powerful cacophony of precise industrialised sound.
The magnificent ‘Kolesom’ offers glorious apocalyptic electronic disco with an obvious NEW ORDER influence although Bernard Sumner never sounded this foreboding! With an ominous baritone from Shkutko and minimal guitar, it is a commentary on the banality of modern life that acts as a dance in the dark.
‘Son’ is more of the expected MOLCHAT DOMA post-punk fare with its Doktor Avalanche backbone programmed by Komogortsev and accompanied by a gothic bass mantra from Kozlov. However, a surprise is sprung with a bubbly sequencer section appearing in the final third to provide a shimmering contrast to the largely morose mood.
The ‘Belaya Polosa’ title song heads into The Batcave, heavy drum loops and rumbling bass in post-Wilder ‘Ultra’ Mode while something of a sister song with a dominant rhythmic loop, ‘Chernye Tsvety’ is deeper and dreamier, dressed with Lynchian guitar and a hypnotic fretless bassline although in terms of execution, it recalls Swedish band LUSTANS LAKEJAR and their 1999 song ‘Cynisk’.
Fittingly by way of an extended interlude, ‘Beznadezhnyy Waltz’ captures a haunting Cold War atmosphere in a superbly eerie piano and synth instrumental with departing footsteps on wet cobbled paths to boot. But ‘III’ sees MOLCHAT DOMA doing sparkly New York electro dance influenced NEW ORDER with the keyboard solo action something a joy to behold before ‘Ne Vdvoem’ goes downtempo into the realm of THE CURE meeting TEARS FOR FEARS.
The excellent ‘Ya Tak Ustal’ utilises metallic samples that will be familiar to anyone who loved ‘Some Great Reward’ but MOLCHAT DOMA literally morph into Berlin-era DEPECHE MODE with only Shkutko’s vocals in Russian proving this is not Dave Gahan… if only DEPECHE MODE could still be this good today. Closing with the throbbing midtempo unease of ‘Zimnyaya’, this goes the full DEPECHE MODE hog with the chromatic six string interventions and digital drum computer beats authenticating the effect.
Having relatively polished up their sound and adapted to new environments both physically and musically, ‘Belaya Polosa’ is bursting with a chilling tension and drama that reflects the world at large from the point of view of those who have had to escape and find sanctuary. Sadness and defiance are simultaneously embraced as MOLCHAT DOMA leave behind their past. This timely musical document is undoubtedly their best album to date.
US independent label Dais Records are on a roll with a roster now including acts such as KITE, TR/ST, ADULT. and DRAB MAJESTY; the latest signing is Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Geneva Jacuzzi.
With a detached Eurocentric poise reminiscent of Gina X, her oeuvre includes not just music, but performance art, live theatre, installations, set design, costume, makeup and set decoration. Her full length debut came in 2010 with ‘Lamaze’ which was assembled from various lo-fi recordings and demos made over the years. Featuring the eerie synthpop of ‘Casket’ and the dysfunctional disco lento of ‘Cannibal Babies’, her second more polished long player ‘Technophelia’ followed in 2016.
‘Triple Fire’ is her third full-length album which she has primarily written and produced with the additional input of a cast including Roderick Edens and Andrew Briggs. It is something she has described “as a hit parade of wildcard synthpop and sly post-apocalyptic camp” as well as “the record that’s going to save mankind”. While all these cheeky proclamations are in the name of art, what Geneva Jacuzzi does definitely possess is catchy hooks in her own surrealist world.
With chunky New York disco influences, the opening salvo ‘Laps Of Luxury’ presents propulsive art pop in the sultry vein of Jyl. More detached but revealing some squawky guitar, ‘Art Is Dangerous’ is Geneva Jacuzzi’s joyous celebration of the art community and its potential for cultural subversion.
Produced by Andrew Clinco of coldwave exponents and label mates DRAB MAJESTY, ‘Speed Of Light’ is jagged and more nonchalant vocally while displaying an enigmatic demeanour, ‘Nu2U’ introduces a deep groove. Brilliantly catchy, ‘Dry’ is alluring danceable synthpop but although it goes weirdly discordant halfway through, it works as it highlights the song’s lyrical gist about dating disconnection following being ghosted.
In ‘Scene Ballerina’, there are cascading modular lines and even jazz piano inflections over the strong rhythmic centre while ‘Take It Or Leave It’ provides glorious new wave pop. ‘Keep It Secret’ adds mystery and a chill to an offbeat bounce with a feline touch recalling Eartha Kitt.
With a vintage drum machine backbone and understated vocals sections duelling with a bizarre gothic backdrop, ‘Rock and A Hard Place’ is oddball and fun in the manner of Lene Lovich, before ‘Bow Tie Eater’ gets some electro funk in to provide another flavour.
The playful ‘Heart Full Of Poison’ parties like its 1983 and could be a synthier Cyndi Lauper but then there’s a sax break to authenticate that desired effect. ‘Yo-Yo Boy’ provides a moody conclusion to ‘Triple Fire’ with cascading synths and Geneva Jacuzzi’s vocal both appropriately soothing.
With Geneva Jacuzzi herself saying the album is “Funny, sexy, sad, scary, witty, hopeful, menacing. Eventually it deconstructs, turns into a party, and then ends sweet and soft”, ‘Triple Fire’ is enjoyably quirky in its delightfully odd mix of accessible electronic pop and energetic art chaos.
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