Shay Hazan "When It Rains It Pours"
Bassist, composer and producer Shay Hazan returns with his third solo album, ‘When It Rains It Pours’, on Batov Records. Following the critical success of ‘Reclusive Ritual’ and ‘Wusul’ وصول, Hazan takes a bold step forward, shifting from the guimbri-led sound that established his reputation to a broader palette of bass, guitar, and synth-driven compositions.
Where his earlier work foregrounded the raw, earthy textures of Gnawa tradition, ‘When It Rains It Pours’ reflects Hazan’s evolution as a producer and multi-instrumentalist. Across eleven tracks, Hazan deepens his exploration of layered grooves, spiritual melodies, and experimental textures, resulting in his most expansive and personal statement to date.
The album’s title embodies Hazan’s experience of being tested by life when multiple challenges arrived at once – musically, personally, and physically. A painful period in which he was unable to play double bass or guimbri due to joint issues became the spark for rediscovering the electric bass, reconnecting him with an instrument he had set aside on personal projects for years. The record documents this transition, capturing the tension between struggle and renewal.
NOMON "Echoes of Breakage"
Echoes of Breakage is the debut album from New York’s NOMON, the sister duo of percussionists Shayna and Nava Dunkelman. Building on the deft collision of traditional Asian sounds, electronics, and contemporary percussion music established on the duo’s 2021 EP Card II, the new album captures dramatic artistic growth and sonic expansion. The duo’s deep roots in percussion music have been increasingly complimented by the seamless incorporation of electronics and long-form compositional ideas. They’ve arrived at a bracing marriage of past, present, and future, making sense of disparate individual musical practices. Echoes of Breakage boldly elides any sort of stylistic convention, instead tapping into instinct and careful listening to bring seemingly incongruous ideas together, whether it’s how gamelan-inspired breakdowns are subsumed by moody electronic soundscapes or the way they build slow-build dramatic tension through meticulously measured interaction where every gesture is carefully weighted.
Echoes of Breakage is a celebration of family that uses a wide assortment of tools, styles, and rhythms unbound by any single tradition, era, or aesthetic. In NOMON Shayna and Nava Dunkelman push one another and coalesce, trusting their guts to meld their ideas into richly unified pieces that don’t concern themselves with genre. Instead it delivers a perfect marriage of pleasure, rigor, and experimentation, rejecting any notion that such things are mutually exclusive.
Prostitute "Attempted Martyr"
Written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil. Dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love.
Via "Via"
From Dromedary Records:
That’s a pretty big statement – he was, of course, referring to Thalia Zedek (Come, Live Skull, Uzi) and Jerry di Rienzo (Cell, Nuclear Theater). Of course I’d never heard of Via, but soon after, I had a folder of rough mixes emailed to me. And soon after that, I was sitting with Thalia and Jerry – again in Catskill – discussing releasing this music together.
Listening to it was like opening a time capsule – a group of 8-track recordings from 1987, before Come, before Cell, when these amazing musicians were just discovering themselves. The music was loud, aggressive, and actually ferocious in spots, these two brilliant guitar players coming into their own, with a rhythm section of James Apt and Adam Gaynor of the band Nuclear Theater and Phil Milstein of Uzi providing tape loops. I could instantly hear what Chris described to me months before.
Via splintered after playing just two shows – one in Boston, one in New York after the band members moved there to be closer to Thalia, whose work with Live Skull was becoming a more full-time endeavor. The only documents left by Via are these six songs, recorded in Jerry’s basement studio in Somerville, MA, along with one gig flyer and some lo-fi live cassette recordings.
Chris Brokaw, who wrote the liner notes to the album, states, “The music bears some cosmetic resemblances to Sonic Youth, but the songs are way more raw, primal, seething, coiled – inexorable. I still can’t get over it.”
We’re proud to introduce you to the music of Via.
-Al