That Music List: LIST 240

Hello again,

To the surprise of I suspect few if any of you, I can confirm that I've usually got a few weeks' worth of That Music Lists already compiled and written up in advance, so as to account for holidays, vicissitudes of life, etc.

However, that doesn't preclude the possibility of me swapping in a track or two at short notice if something presses a claim for immediate inclusion rather than waiting several weeks hence, and two of this week's choices weren't going to be choices until earlier this week.

I hadn't even come across Angine de Poitrine before then, which is a shame, as I've long said there just aren't enough French-Canadian duos who specialise in microtonal experimental rock whilst dressing like a combination of Strawberry Switchblade, Chrome Hoof and Mr Noseybonk. I've long said that, haven't I. Yes. Long said.

I've genuinely long admired their currently (terminally?) inactive fellow Québécois act Malajube's determination to perform in French, only French and nothing but the French, but Angine de Poitrine take their refusal to compromise many stages further - sexless polka dot costumes teamed with identity-masking headgear; ambiguous pseudonyms (Khn and Klek de Poitrin); and a complex, loop pedal-enriched music with nods to Primus and mathrock, yet also on sufficient nodding terms with jazz to afford them column inches in the likes of Jazz Times.

It's quite extraordinary stuff, performed and delivered by a duo so tight as to understand each other telepathically, it seems, unless the occasional exchanged grunts do actually mean something. I'd love to see them come over to Britain for dates, or at the very least a Freak Zone session.

Also added at short notice is the lead single from The Banishing, the most recent (2024) album from Kavus Torabi. It's funny; I'd gone seventeen years without watching Kavus in person before last weekend's appearance at Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield (my first gig of the year), and now our paths are set to cross twice inside five weeks with Cardiacs to look forward to in Manchester next month.

Always happy to play Sheffield in general and evidently Sidney & Matilda in particular, and a warm, generous presence on stage, Kavus coped with the vicissitudes of malfunctioning monitors and a capitulating harmonium in good humour. That harmonium had certainly earned its keep, not least during a majorly extended interpretation of The Sentinel, an instrumental invocation originally uploaded to Bandcamp in 2020.

The admittedly wholly subjective measure of What People Look Like would have suggested a crowd neither drawn primarily from the Gong, nor from the Cardiacs, nor from the Utopia Strong end of Kavus fandom. Me? I might have been sporting the only Cardiacs top on show, but I loves me some looped, sequenced psychedelic drones as much as the next person, so all was well.

And we all also loved and felt the impassioned run through The Skulls We Buried Have Regrown Their Eyes, a Knifeworld era track which, as Kavus noted himself, is as horribly relevant now as it was on release back in 2014.

In fact, the whole recent solo tour has been a strange and emotionally charged experience for this British Iranian, playing out as it has against a backdrop of the ongoing major crisis in Iran, an uprising followed by a massacre of citizens by the state on what's believed to be an unprecedented scale. Kavus's Facebook updates on the situation, in so far as credible updates are available to him, are recommended listening.

Live conflict and ongoing struggle inform another List choice this week, if in a more overtly, determinedly political form. Formerly an educator, news reporter and activist as well as a musical reality show star, Elaha Soroor's is a voice which won't be easily silenced even as a now exiled Hazara Afghan.

Our Freedoms Must Be Won, the latest in a series of collaborations with the London world/electronic act Kefaya, sets Soroor's protest lyrics in Farsi to a pounding, almost waltz-time wash of busy percussion and stark synths, the latter immediately redolent of early 1990s Wau! Mr Modo acts such as Electrotete.

I don't care much for the term world fusion, covering as it can a multitude of sins - cynical, will-this-do adding of Western beats over a kora, say - but this meeting of two musics has genuinely excited me more than anything in this loose-ish genre since Mbongwana Star's 2015 masterpiece From Kinshasa, to all intents and purposes a Congolese interpretation of PIL's Metal Box.

Not far off twenty-one thousand YouTube views for Our Freedoms Must Be Won in two and half months hopefully suggests a degree of sympathy for the ongoing fights for intellectual and ideological freedom in Afghanistan (for women especially), as much as it suggests an enthusiasm for the music. The smattering of dehumanising, racist comments left on the sponsored Facebook post for it, on the other hand, sadly suggests that some hearts and minds aren't for winning over.

Heavenly, of course, were another act to attract their own share of aggressively derogatory comments back in the day, invariably utterly disproportionate in their venom relative to the apparent crime of marrying pointed, principled, sometimes dark lyrics to the sweetest of indie punk pop confection.

Words wound, and the then Sarah Records roster were obliged to wear more music magazine-inflicted wounds than most. Alongside Steven Wells' recommendation to Secret Shine to arrange a date with a warm bath and a razorblade, the infamous "Die, Heavenly, die" review in Melody Maker of Heavenly's Decline and Fall of Heavenly LP endures to this day as the most shocking of the lot.

It is the opening track of that third Sarah Records album which forms the Then part of a Heavenly Then and Now which I wouldn't have reckoned on ever needing to add to That Music List until the band's unexpected reactivation in 2023, one whose gathering momentum has now reached the point of new album and extensive tour.

As it is, this decade has already been a golden period for lovers of all things Amelia Fletcher, Rob Pursey and related. The Catenary Wires collaboration with poet Brian Bilston; membership of Swansea Sound; guest appearances on stage with erstwhile Sea Urchin James Roberts and on 6Music's Roundtable singles review with Huw Stephens; curatorship of the Words & Music alldayer in Rolvenden Layne; and running the immaculate Skep Wax Records imprint, home of The Cords, Tulpa and European Sun and the spiritual home of the C25 movement in so far as it exists.

And on top of all that activity, now this. And it's a big this, the tour alone set to take in 26 venues across Britain, Greece, France, Canada and the US. "Die, Heavenly, die"? Heavenly could hardly be more alive.

Suffice it to say I'll be there with bells on when the tour hits Sheffield on March 21st, for what is currently planned to be my first gig of 2026 not to feature Kavus Torabi. Now how's that for bringing this opening full circle!

Oh, there are plenty of other treats this week as well, don't worry about that. Here are just a few:

A Loved Album revisits Autogeddon, the third part of Julian Cope's early-mid 1990s trilogy and my favourite long-player of his by a good margin. Punk, pop, folk, krautrock and lots more besides all chucked in, but a highly cohesive piece of work nonetheless; and if not a seller in its millions, still sufficiently high-profile to net the Archdrude a memorable appearance on Top of the Pops, performing I Gotta Walk (included here) in little more than a sackcloth.

Sheffield/Maltby's very lovely Pink Opaque, or as you might also know them that Danielle off of Only Connect and that Pete off of Colin Murray's Great Football Songbook and that both of them off of lots of previous ace indiepop acts.

Hubert Kah. Fronted by Hubert Kemmler, originally one of the more striking and provocative breakout stars of the Neue Deutsche Welle (appearances in makeup, straitjackets, nightdresses and all), but seen here in the early throes of his maturation into one of the most omnipresent figures in German 1980s pop variously as performer, writer or producer. Kemmler's career would eventually be hamstrung by sustained battles with depression, but this will not be the last time our paths cross with him on TML by any means. Nor will it this track's producer Michael Cretu, better known to British audiences as the brains behind Enigma, but responsible for so much more than that.

The Melons. Vanessa Vass (nee Turner) won't remember this, but we exchanged a number of letters circa 1995-6, such was my enthusiasm for her and the late Sheggi Clarkson's engaging run of Mark Radcliffe-endorsed sevens.

Rose City Band. A sublime, gentle, beautiful chug from Ripley Johnson, he of Moon Duo and Wooden Shjips. The spelling of the last-named always raises a smile - do you think the band's favourite fish might be tjuna chjunks in brjine?