Shake Stew: Lila

Editor's Choice

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Nikolaus Dolp (d, log d)
Johannes Schleiermacher (ts, f)
Oliver Potratz (el b)
Precious Nnebedum (v)
Herbert Pirker (d, perc)
Lukas Kranzelbinder (b, guembri)
Astrid Wiesinger (as, kalimba)
Mario Rom (t)

Label:

Traumton

November/2023

Media Format:

CD, LP, DL

Catalogue Number:

4721

RecordDate:

Rec. November 2022

Shake Stew conjure Viennese souks, born from leader Lukas Kranzelbinder’s Moroccan adventures and hunger for music that moves and blows minds. Their albums are literally dislocating, shimmering through alien terrain, hunting trances and dances. One ecstatic audience-member told Kranzelbinder that their music could raise the dead, and meant it. It’s a parallel Austrian phenomenon to UK jazz’s reincarnation as culturally rich dance music, its recombination of body and soul. The difference is Kranzelbinder’s cinematic imagination, his gold-and-black costumed band’s visual and ritual sense of transport.

Where fourth album Heat was a potent post-pandemic return, Lila seems less into impact. Three studio tracks are followed by three taped in a small Viennese club, neither one thing nor the other, and Marco Kleebauer’s production mines diverse sonic stances, as new angles are pleasurably explored for their own sake.

‘Not Water But Rest’ starts with an alien croak, spectral sounds hanging in the atmosphere as Shake Stew’s double-drums clatter dryly. The regular dub influence is heaviest on ‘Detroit’, Kranzelbinder’s second tribute to Jim Jarmusch’s film of dissolute vampires in a desiccated city. Sunken echoes and tumbling kalimba chimes dankly coalesce in a soundscape of skeletal heaviness and urban urgency, space-funk for the undead, eerie winds flickering through a Midwest wasteland. Sometimes Shake Stew’s whole septet are the rhythm section, and the beat here is claustrophobically tight, even as space stays open and timbre and tone overwhelmingly accrue.

‘Lila’ is lovely gospel-soul, brass balmily floating in a sweatless heat-haze under blue morning skies. The rhythm is reggae-inflected, the spirit raised. The live half starts with contrastingly rasping saxes making quick, jabbing runs over thrummed bass and pounding drums. ‘Shasta Fey’ (a Thomas Pynchon heroine) is a showcase for Oliver Potratz’s ‘Bass VI’, a surf music standby here plumbed for doleful, fuzz-burred twangs. This is an album of enormous, integral sonic detail and exploratory zeal, adding six more chambers to Shake Stew’s sultry house of music.

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