Released right around the beginning of many Shelter in Place orders, Tokimonsta’s “Renter’s Anthem” could not have come at a better time. This throwback house track emerged just as people were having their income taken away yet still facing the merciless demands of that same income from landlords. Renting has possibly never been more difficult, and it has given a huge number of people a taste of the precarious experience that low income people have had all along. With these troubles comes the possibility of this new wave of discontents banding together to fight off the senseless demands of landlords. “Renter’s Anthem” feels an optimistic marching song for solidarity among renters worldwide.
This song features driving drums and uniquely gated vocals repeating, “Are you hanging on?” For many, the knee-jerk answer to this would be “No!” Yet seeing as the song release was accompanied with a message from the artist to, “keep spreading love and positivity, we all need it right now,” this song seems to ask us to reflect on the ways that we are indeed hanging on in spite of it all. Fans of Yaeji will definitely enjoy the nostalgia for 90’s house and general cheeriness presented on this track. What’s all the more impressive about this song is that it comes out after Tokimonsta’s brain surgeries for Moyamoya disease, after which she lost language and music comprehension. As she regained these abilities, she had a triumphant return with 2017’s Lune Rouge and now comes back again on the new album Oasis Nocturno. Hopefully us renters will show the same perseverance that she has. ❤
Pick up Oasis Nocturno here.
Caterina Barbieri – “Clessidra”
Italian synth artist Caterina Barbieri returns after her amazing 2019 record Ecstatic Computation with “Clessidra,” a generous contribution to Enisslab’s WorldWideWindow compilation. WorldWideWindow is a 56 track benefit album for Red Cross’s COVID-19 response work. It is a concept album where artists were encouraged to release a song they felt was relevant to the crisis, along with a picture of a window in their quarantine space.
Barbieri’s addition to the compilation is the 14 minute “Clessidra,” which means ‘hourglass’ in Italian. Within it you can hear sequencer loops possibly inspired by the maddening repetition of being in quarantine, where it feels like the sands of time are slipping away. It spends much of it’s time with an ostinato in 9/4. The quarter notes of the ostinato are placed in such a way that it would make perfect sense to have written it as two normal bars of 4/4, but there is an extra note placed in there to make things feel as if each repetition is dragging on just a bit too long. After this has cycled on for some time, things begin to liven up a bit with more melodic lines overlaid to bring a great deal more rhythmic diversity.
In the style of minimalist composers, lines phase in and out of sync with each other, creating much more complexity than just the sum of its parts. I’d like to think this symbolizes a kind of hope, where the repetitiveness of the quarantine phases into a more liberating experience as relationships begin to rebuild themselves into something new. Regardless of how you interpret it, “Clessidra” (and much of Barbieri’s other work) provides a mesmerizing experience that certainly helps spin the hourglass when we are flooded with such a great deal of emptied time. It is exciting to see artists who are able to both speak to the current crisis and support aid movements at the same time all from within the confines of their own home.
You can buy Enisslab’s WorldWideWindow benefit album here.
Ancestors: Alice Coltrane – “Transcendence” (1977)
Unlike most artists that will be covered on this site, Alice Coltrane is someone who dedicated all of her discography to the topic of liberation, albeit mostly on the spiritual side rather than the political. Despite her single-pointed focus, her body of work has an incredible diversity to it. Her music ranges from aggressive chants to slow hymns, from avant-garde classical to her brand of spiritual jazz. The song “Transcendence” is a powerful combination of those last two genres. It begins with a modernist string section swelling in ascension as Coltrane’s harp slides up and down underneath. The harp then takes over for a solo, only to have the strings intrude with a loud glissando. The strings fluctuate between European and South Asian influences as she maintains these impressive runs on the harp. There’s some great use of extended techniques in the strings to bring a certain amount of grit to counterbalance the beauty of the harp.
The interplay between the harp and the other strings seems to create a sonic story, one of a persistent transcendent force (the harp) persisting through the violent shifts of rebirth and Samsara (the strings). Her Hindu belief system of Advaita Vedanta plays heavily into her music. She describes it as going “to your fullest and highest potential and not [being] limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.”
This liberation from dogma is important to the philosophy, so much so that it does not require a renunciation of any other faiths and instead seeks a goal of interfaith understanding. This religious freedom comes up later in the album as well, with a chant dedicated to Sri Nrsimha, who is an avatar of Vishnu who comes to Earth to destroy evil and end religious persecution. Alice Coltrane was a woman who dedicated her life’s work to spiritual liberation in a time where negativity was the most pervasive tone in musical culture. While both positivity and negativity have their place, I think people underestimate how radical it is to put forward a positive vision of the future. I hope that Alice’s music can inspire those positive visions and that we can materialize them here on Earth.
Bad Bunny – “Yo Perreo Sola”
Bad Bunny’s “Yo Perreo Sola” was needed in so many ways right now. Firstly, it serves as a PSA teaching all those in quarantine that you don’t need another person to get your grind on. Secondly, Bad Bunny has brought some badly needed gender non-conforming visibility to the Billboard Hot 100 level of mainstream as well as reggaeton culture. And thirdly, it ends with a strong statement around sexual consent.
In this wild video, Bad Bunny performs in multiple drag (or just femme) outfits while grinding alone. He then shows off his subby side, subjecting himself to the multiple chains of enthroned women while he is stripped down to a skirt. Bad Bunny already made a huge public statement of trans solidarity earlier this year when he wore a shirt on the The Tonight Show that said, “Mataron a Alexa, no un hombre en un falda,” or, “They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt.” This shirt refers to Puerto Rican trans woman Alexa Luciano, who was recently murdered after having just been harassed by police the day before in a viral video.
With his TV appearance and this music video, Bad Bunny is showing trans solidarity in a braver way than almost any worldwide pop star I can think of. As mentioned earlier, the video ends with a powerful statement on sexual consent: “SI NO QUIERE BAILAR CONTIGO, RESPETA, ELLA PERREA SOLA,” or, “If she doesn’t want to dance with you, respect her, she grinds alone.” Here’s hoping this song will make you want to grind alone as well, or at least with 6 feet distance.
Sexores – “The Depressing Sounds of the Witch”
“The Depressing Sounds of the Witch” is a track that comes from Ecuadorian goth band Sexores. The song strikes a beautiful balance between new wave, shoegaze and gothic rock. It comes off of their promising new album Salamanca, a rumination on women and witchcraft equipped with some menacing cover art.
Speaking to Remezcla on her goals for the album, singer Emilia Bahamonde Noriega says, “We wanted to talk about how women have been written off as witches because they don’t fill the roles they are supposed to fulfill, like ‘wife’ and ‘mother.’ I have lived through that as a woman my whole life and I have seen it in my profession. I wanted to turn it around, not to victimize myself but to empower us. We’re sick of getting killed, the death rates are very high and the authorities are not doing enough to stop them rising.”
To paint these issues Sexores uses airy vocals, shoegaze guitars and synths, and pummeling percussion that keeps things from getting too muddy. Many lines speak to feminine resiliency, such as, “I am the witch / they couldn’t defeat.” Noriega describes recording the record as “a liberating experience” and the same could be said of listening to it.
Check out Sexores’ new album Salamanca here.
Thammudu & Mishti – “From Earth to Heaven”
Transatlantic duo Thammudu & Mishti have released a new electronic album Matters of Ascension on the great music label Tobago Tracks. Their work ranges across the spectrum from ambient to club music. The track “From Earth to Heaven” sounds a bit The Field in both music and song title. But it’s actually a reference to Marx’s The German Philosophy. In it he critiques Hegelian idealism, writing, “In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.” Now I’m not a materialist like Marx . But this song is so blissfully seductive it makes me wish I was! The blasphemous idea that we can create a heaven on Earth is a classic political motivator and I’m happy to see Thammudu & Mishti keep it alive. The utopian promise contained within the glittering ambience dies down towards the end, leaving only the sounds of people presumably marching toward progress, ascension.
Ana Tijoux – Antifa Dance
Chilean-French rapper Ana Tijoux returns with a triumphant new song, “Antifa Dance.” As an ode to international resistance to fascism and colonialism, this song is both energizing and inspiring. The Latin influenced trap beat of the verses is complemented well by the drumline percussion of the chorus. The lyrics are great in general, but a message of solidarity stood out among them:
Todo se cae, todo se sabe
Irak, Haití, Chile combate
A liberar este mundo completo
Si tocan a uno, tocan el pueblo
Which I roughly translate to:
Everything falls, all is known
Iraq, Haiti, Chile fight
To free this whole world
If they touch one, they touch the people
You can support Ana Tijoux here!
Shabaka and the Ancestors – “You’ve Been Called”
Shabaka Hutchings returns with Shabaka and the Ancestors, one of the many bands that he has been making waves in. This song opens with atonal swirls reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s avant-garde Mwandishi era. That music is accompanied by the cries of both babies and other animals. The vocalist sets the tone with spoken lines like, “Burned the mortgage, burned the student loans… An act of destruction became creation.” Eventually this chaos dissolves into a more structured jazz song with a refrain that appears throughout the album: “We are here / Cause history called.” Clearly this project looks to the past as a source of inspiration to liberate ourselves. Let’s heed that call!
You can support the band and buy the full album We Are Sent Here by History here.
Ancestors: Krzysztof Penderecki – Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)
Krzysztof Penderecki died today. His voice will live on in pieces such as this one, which is dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima. As one of the worst moments of human history, the Hiroshima bombing has had far too little coverage in art in the West. In this bold, horrifying piece, Penderecki demands you to imagine the unimaginable. With this act of empathy, the pain within this music becomes a rallying cry to never let atrocities like this be repeated. The maddening cries of this music form a reminder and a mirror image of the peace that we’ve yet to achieve.
Freeing Music 
