The anglophone pop world doesn’t really have a band like Aksak Maboul, and it is our loss. Formed in Belgium in 1977, their work spans multiple registers: a globally minded mix of post-punk, free jazz, electronica and minimalist chamber music. In English terms, you’d have to imagine some improbable fusion of Rip Rig + Panic, Michael Nyman, Cabaret Voltaire and Kate Bush.
This latest album – only their fifth studio album in half a century – is a 15-part audio drama, written by vocalist Véronique Vincent, which tells a fantastical story of a forest voyage. Vincent’s protagonist – singing, speaking, babbling and “speech-singing” – converses with herons and robins, trees and rocks. She ponders her own mortality and then starts to question the very nature of language itself. Guest vocalists, including Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier, play other cast members.
Even if you don’t follow Vincent’s magical realist tale (it’s mainly in French, with a few English-language tracks), Marc Hollander’s accompanying music tells a compelling story. Dissonant piano vamps, such as L’Ombre Double, mutate into pulsating pieces of Latin trance. Veille au Rêve, a clunky jazz tune in 5/8, turns into dreamy Philip Glass-like minimalism; Fable takes a Satie-esque piano line, wreathed in reverb, and keeps modulating it up a major third, as if taking us into a gleefully disorientating dreamscape. Talking With the Birds is a glistening piece of Steve Reich-style phased music that flirts with acid house.
Even the lines between speech and song are blurred. On Miracle au Jardin, Hollander takes the cadences and tonalities of Vincent’s speech and turns them into melodies, in the way that Charles Spearin, Christophe Chassol or Henry Hey have done. This isn’t genre-hopping for the sake of it – this is a song suite that constantly confounds and probes, taking us on a journey, throwing up surprises with each repeated listen.
Also out this month
The latest album by Kenyan-American composer Nyokabi Kariũki, Feeling Body (CMNTX), was inspired by her experience of long Covid. It mixes field recordings and garbled speech with heavenly a cappella harmonies, digitally manipulated to form a groggy, dreamlike soundscape.
Alice are an endearingly punky “micro-choir” of three French women who sing in odd harmonies over childlike, minimalist keyboard accompaniment. Their eponymous album (Bongo Joe Records) is slightly wearing in toto but it sounds wonderful in small doses.
Balans by the Norwegian saxophonist Harald Lassen (Jazzland) recalls the mood of the 1974 Jan Garbarek/Keith Jarrett LP Belonging, but the drums are much more marginal here. This sounds more like a piece of delightfully woozy chamber music, where Lassen’s saxophone drifts over a tangle of chords played on guitar, clarinet, double bass and tuned percussion.
