New Release Day!

Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez & Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley

Today’s the day! Two new releases from Burning Ambulance Music are officially available everywhere. Let me tell you about them below.

Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez, Mama Killa: This is a loud, heavy power trio rock record with elements of country, blues, and avant-garde improvisation. Mendoza (electric guitar) and fluke-mogul (violin, electronics) have been working together for a while as the duo AM/FM, and they team up here with drummer Pérez, from the death metal bands Hypoxia and Castrator.

The Wire says, “depending where you drop the needle, Mama Killa is a slightly, fairly, or very metal record… Mendoza, fluke-mogul and Pérez belong to an unselfconscious generation of experimental musicians who are comfortable to engage metal sans air quotes and in an honestly exploratory spirit.”

Avant Music News says, “from the outset, Mama Killa distinguishes itself with gritty, heavily distorted playing from Mendoza and fluke-mogul, while Pérez exhibits creative restraint (if you can say that about drum lines with double bass pounding).”

Stereogum says, “these three artists have created a monstrous racket. ‘We Will Be Millions’ begins as an all-consuming sonic dust storm, a hard-hitting and expansive exercise in free jazz as black metal. But as the song’s six minutes stretch out, the trio finds space for other, eerier kinds of discord.”

Eyal Hareuveni at Salt Peanuts says, “This trio features fearless improvisers who like their music thunderous, raw, and brutal, as a late feminine equivalent to the seminal sonic assaults of John Zorn’s PainKiller, Massacre (with Fred Frith, with whom fluke-mogul plays), or Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha. Pérez, with her massive, high-intensity drumming, is the secret weapon of this trio and keeps pushing Mendoza and fluke-mogul to experiment in the uncompromising universes of black and death metal.”

At Last Rites (an actual metal site!), Danhammer Obstkrieg writes, “The reason I’m popping Mama Killa in front of your eyeballs and eardrums today… is that no, it’s not jazz. It’s also not metal, nor yet again is it noise or drone or punk or post-rock. The only thing you can truly say this album is is a coming together of three voices who make a thrilling new chorus… If you’re still feeling twitchy that, hey man, this is a heavy metal website and I don’t understand these sounds, what if you came into it focusing on how Mendoza’s guitar sometimes sounds like My Bloody Valentine-styled sculpted noise by way of Gorguts’s Obscura? Or what if you looked at how ‘We Will Be Millions’ opens with a snare drum four-count from Pérez that immediately erupts into a squall of noise? What if you slotted this adventurous, omnivorous album next to Aluk Todolo’s Occult Rock and Chaos Echoes’s Transient in your next ‘freak-rock death-noise’ listening session? But how much should we have to lean into what Mama Killa is not in order to sink our teeth into the bloody, palpating energy of what it is? Then again, if I tried to tell you I wasn’t listening to Pérez’s mid-song solo on ‘Nowhere But Here’ at least a little bit like if it was the intro to Judas Priest’s ‘Painkiller,’ I’d be insulting you with lies. At their best, though, when these songs lean into noisy, woolly rock improvisation, they approach the same sort of blissful, genre-agnostic annihilation of Japan’s Boris.”

Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!

Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley, Flashing Spirits: This is a previously unreleased live recording from September 1988, performed at the Outside In Festival in Crawley, England. Taylor and Oxley had performed together for the first time ever less than two months earlier, on July 17; that performance was released as Leaf Palm Hand and included in the legendary In Berlin ’88 box set.

In my book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, I wrote, “Oxley has no interest in being ‘the drummer.’ He’s a percussionist, Taylor is a percussionist — recall Valerie Wilmer’s oft-quoted line about his treating the piano like ‘88 tuned drums’ — and they are peers on a level playing field. He rattles across the kit as quickly and dexterously as Taylor overruns the keyboard, and his leaps between the lower and upper registers of his multifarious instrument mirror the pianist’s, in spirit at least. He never seems to be following Taylor at any point. And yet, their duo is absolutely that. They are not just playing simultaneously, they are playing together.”

James Taylor at AllAboutJazz says of this release, “Understanding that 38-minute piano-drum duo improvisations are not for the faint of heart, patient listeners will find endless crevices and corners to explore in Flashing Spirits, with repeated plays revealing deeper moments of conversation between Taylor and Oxley.”

The Wire calls it “a coruscating, scintillating, incandescent exhibition of free jazz at the highest level. The precision and clarity of Taylor’s playing satisfies the artistic imperative of inevitability, and have never been heard to more beautiful effect. He had a unique and unmistakable vision, an ultimate signature style, and here Oxley beautifully complements and potentiates it.”

S. Victor Aaron at Something Else writes, “Oxley, a master of timbral manipulation, sketches out his art on a tonal canvas and Taylor instantly tracks down the harmonic components implied and acts as an extension of the drum kit. The two ratchet up the intensity at an incremental pace, and Taylor’s swift runs begin to take over… Neither of them ever quit over thirty-eight minutes trying to get their respective instruments to relinquish more. And like some invisible switch, they together take the din down to a tranquility full of considered, contemplative figures followed by another build-up.”

Dominic Valvona at Monolith Cocktail says, “Taylor leads, if you can call it that. But only because it seems he lights the torch paper first with incipient pushes and dabs and slashes. But really there’s no telling in who leads what, as the action picks up and runs, leaps, dives, falls, tumbles and flushes through a pummelled, sieving, hoof-like gallop and wild non-rhythmic spirited traffic of drums and elbowed as well as cross handed piano. Despite all this avant-gardism and energy, neither of the participants ever lose the thread, get lost in the excitement and uncoupled freedoms of spontaneity… Two performers at the height of maturity, abandoning convention and free-wiled, Flashing Spirits is an incredible document of disciplined chaos and play.”

Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!

One more thing: Both these albums come in beautiful sleeves designed by Burning Ambulance co-founder I.A. Freeman, who is available to design album covers for you at very reasonable rates. Interested? Get in touch!

Thank you as always for your support. If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here, but come back on Tuesday, when we’ll be discussing Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve, which turned 30 earlier this year. Paying subscribers, stick around for articles on Karol G; a really dopey-sounding work of literary fiction; advice columns; some tech dumbasses hoping to build a new Brasilia; and the conflict between technical proficiency on one’s instrument and genuine expressiveness.