Weekly Music Roundup: Jlin, Arthur Moon, and Masayoshi Fujita

Week of July 30: This week, a bluesy take on the Rolling Stones, scores by Jlin and Dustin O’Halloran, new music from Brooklyn-based Arthur Moon, and ambient music by Masayoshi Fujita. 

Jlin Releases Dizzying Excerpt From Dance Score

The Indiana-based producer known as Jlin works in the style known as footwork, or Chicago footwork. A form of house music that often uses strong bass lines, a somewhat slower rhythm, and lots of samples, it began in Chicago, but Jlin has been making inroads with it in Europe as well. Now, she has collaborated with the celebrated choreographer Wayne McGregor on a literal bit of foot-work: his dance piece Autobiography. It has provoked some of her starkest, trippiest music yet – at least, that’s what the first single to be released from the dance score suggests. It’s called “The Abyss of Doubt,” and over a slow but highly syncopated beat, Jlin scatters sampled instrumental bits and lots of vocal clips. The one that’s most easily recognizable is the line “they’re all gonna laugh at you” from the horror film Carrie, but the other samples, some of them sounding like they’ve been altered in speed or partially reversed, are just as unsettling. 

The entire score for Autobiography comes out on September 28, and Jlin is performing this Friday at the Panorama festival at Randall’s Island. 

Chicago Blues Musicians Cover The Stones

The Rolling Stones’ earliest songs were covers of Chicago blues tunes from Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed. So when a bunch of Chicago blues men and one blues woman decided to cover The Stones, it not only made sense, it also attracted the attention of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards themselves. The resulting album is called Chicago Plays The Stones – a title that fans of the old pop/rock band Chicago may find a little confusing – and it comes out on September 14. When it does, you’ll hear Jagger joining blues legend Buddy Guy on a version of “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” that is dramatically different from the original; Richards aiding Jimmy Burns on a sly, sauntering version of “Beast of Burden,” and 82-year old harmonica wiz Billy Boy Arnold doing “Play with Fire.” But you don’t have to wait until then to hear multiple Grammy nominee Billy Branch doing a slow-burn version of “Sympathy For The Devil” that’s full of fun touches – the gritty slide guitar, the barreling blues piano, and the harmonica subbing in for the “doo-de-doo”s of the Stones’ original. 

Dustin O’Halloran And Ane Brun Collaborate On Song From The Film Puzzle

American pianist/composer Dustin O’Halloran has had an unusual career: for years he was part of the so-called post-classical scene in Berlin; but he was also half of the ambient/post-rock duo A Winged Victory For The Sullen. Lately, he’s become a sought-after composer of film scores, including the Oscar-nominated score to Lion, done with German pianist/composer Hauschka. Now, he’s released the music to the new film Puzzle, and this time, he’s done most of the score by himself.  The lone exception is the song “Horizons,” for which he called on the Norwegian folk/rock singer Ane Brun, whose ethereal vocals float over the Minimalist piano music that recurs throughout the rest of the film. O’Halloran rounds out the sound with layers of strings and manages to make a cycling series of three chords into something surprisingly expressive. 

Arthur Moon’s Queer, Fractured Funk

Arthur Moon is the work of the Brooklyn-born, still Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter Lora-Faye Åshuvud. New Sounds listeners may know Lora Faye’s genre-blind program “Odd Theory,” which runs on our 24/7 New Sounds radio stream. Like the music she picks, the music she makes is a rangy, often dizzyingly eclectic mix of artful intention and twisted pop music sounds. She’s just released a new video and song called “Wait A Minute,” which over the course of three and a half minutes manages to give us a boom-chick-boom beat, a kind of fractured funk built around the slicing and dicing of said beat, and some lovely, multi-tracked vocals that skirt R&B and sneak into art-song territory. Meanwhile, the video contrasts scenes of Gay Pride and Dyke marches with found footage of mid 20th century American life. The video suggests that resistance is anything but futile; the song says you should be able to dance at the same time. 

Masayoshi Fujita’s “Magical” Vibraphone

The term “ambient” music was originally coined by Brian Eno for his 1979 instrumental album called Music For Airports. Over the years, it’s come to be associated with atmospheric electronic music; but it’s worth remembering that Eno’s original ambient record featured piano, wordless voices, and the vibraphone. The Japanese composer Masayoshi Fujita is a vibes player as well, and that instrument, with its characteristic motor-driven vibrato sound, fits perfectly in the ambient world. On Friday, Fujita put out an album called Book Of Life, which sees him doing things like “preparing” the instrument with tin foil or beads to change the sound, or playing the keys with a cello bow. It is largely a solo vibes record, but you could be forgiven for assuming it was somehow electronic. There’s also a piece called “It’s Magical,” which owes more to the so-called Minimalist composers – especially Steve Reich, who has often used the vibes as a central part of his pulsing, pulsating music. “It’s Magical” pairs the vibraphone with flute and bowed strings to shimmering, hypnotic effect.