Bandcamp Recommendations // Joel Berk

please open your wallets/ears today

Checking in with our follower Joel Berk on his music recommendations….all Bandcamp, no Spotify (here’s why).

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Art Ensemble of Chicago – We Are On The Edge (Erased Tapes / Pi Recordings)

Iconic, innovative and internationally renowned force in avant-garde music The Art Ensemble of Chicago released their 50th anniversary celebratory album We Are On The Edge in April, and Erased Tapes are honoured to announce the vinyl edition of this exceptional body of work.

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Nicole Mitchell & Moor Mother – Offering (Live At Le Guess Who) (Self Released)

There is a traditional, ancient magic embedded in the dusty spaces surrounding Moor Mother’s afro-retrofuturist tech-jazz, amongst the noise emblazoned with phoenix fire screeds. She is an Orisha willing to embrace a foreboding cyberpunk narrative informed by Born In Flames and Space is the Place, if it will free you, the traveller, the future mystic, from a carbon-rusted sheath, so that you, a sword on fire, may burn. “How do we get it back?” Empowering these ideas are dream drones, ghosts on soundwaves burst through her instruments like a poltergeist– Nicole Mitchell conjures at her cauldron, uninhibited by the specter of spectacle, by the post-academia, five-stars-and-an-Eventbrite-link-industrial complex.

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Angel Bat Dawid – Transition East (International Anthem)

“Transition East” features two new pieces of music created by Angel Bat Dawid in response to Emma Warren’s 2019 book “Make Some Space” – i.e. the book that chronicles the history of London DIY music institution Total Refreshment Centre.

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Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble – Stay Beautiful (International Anthem)

An ode to Chicago: In a hospital room, doctors and nurses come in and out, evaluating, recommending, prepping, and testing. But once visiting hours are over the patient is left alone with their thoughts, ruminating on the intimidating lack of agency and loneliness of losing control of their own circumstances. Drifting towards despair, they discover flowers in the room. There is a note attached that expresses what I would say to Chicago in its most precarious condition.

“We see you. We love you. Stay beautiful.”

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Irreversible Entanglements – Who Sent You? / S/T (International Anthem)

Stay on it! This is the future! This is the spectral dreaming, the reshaped soundwaves of post-Katrina, post-Osage Avenue, post-Obamacare that we borrow from to do this work, so stay on it.

Irreversible Entanglements are a liberation-oriented free jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. – Don Giovanni Records