New Mix: Jana Horn, Debashish Bhattacharya, Lankum, more
Clockwise from upper left: Lankum, Jana Horn, Anna Mieke, Debashish Bhattacharya Courtesy of the arists hide caption
NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich and I team up for a show full of sonic adventures in hopes of stretching your musical boundaries, including three songs that are over eight minutes long.
Lars opens the show with Texas-born Jana Horn. She wrote much of her new album, The Window is the Dream, while in a creative writing program... with little access to outside music. As a result, her album is sparse yet present; her lyrics are abstract and, at times, far away, but sung with a plainspoken clarity.
I'll play music from the Irish musician Anna Meike. In addition to her stunning voice, Anna plays guitar, bouzouki, piano, and cello. We'll hear her reimagine a song from the early 1900s called "Go Away from My Window."
The musician Nabalayo appears on INSHA, a forthcoming compilation of Nairobi-based electronic and experimental artists co-curated by KMRU and M³. Lars plays her dreamy and oceanic contribution. It's a twist on the siren folktale, but instead of being lured to her death, she surrenders to her ancestors to become one.
Lankum made NPR music's Top 10 albums of 2019 and the band is back with new music that is full of grief and spine-chilling drones. It's a new take on the traditional song "Go Dig My Grave."
PoiL Ueda is a collaboration between the French prog-rock band PoiL, bassist Benoit Lecomte and Japanese singer Junko Ueda, who plays the pear-shaped stringed instrument called a satsuma-biwa. This pick from Lars is a wildly loud fusion of the ancient and the future.
We end this sonically challenging show with the calm, soul-infused sounds of Debashish Bhattacharya. He's a Hindustani slide guitar player. It's a bit of a mix of Hawaiian steel guitar with traditional Indian music, with remarkably delicate melodies. His new album is appropriately titled The Sound of the Soul.