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Even on a label as freethinking and freewheeling as Chicago-based International Anthem, Carlos Niño is something of an outlier. While his stablemates have ridden the recent wave of free jazz, righteous funk and ambient experimentalism, Niño has taken a different route, one that is harder to define. Calling him an outsider musician is the easy option, but that doesn’t quite cover all the bases. For one thing, that term implies a certain propensity for working alone that doesn’t fit with Niño’s method: he is an inveterate collaborator, and Placenta is his fourth album in as many years to be credited to ‘Carlos Niño & Friends’. And the mythic outsider artist is not known to court success, whereas Niño’s most recent project was as co-composer, producer and percussionist on bona fide superstar André 3000’s most recent album.
So, who is he? His presence on over 150 different recordings tells you that he is able to don many different musical hats, but on Placenta, he is, first and foremost, a father. It is essentially a concept album about the physical and spiritual aspects of birth and parenthood, inspired by the arrival of Niño’s second child, Moss. Musically, he acts as a kind of ringmaster, main improviser and percussionist. On opening track Love To All Doulas! he creates an open, welcoming (though also mysterious) backdrop of bells and chimes. Fellow André 3000 collaborator Nate Mercereau, who plays a significant role on a number of Placenta’s tracks, adds French horn, and the resulting piece shimmers with bright life.
If the language of free improvisation can sometimes seem impenetrable to inexperienced listeners, Niño’s approach is humanistic and welcoming enough to allay any fears of elitism – this is very much an album led by the visceral processes of human bodies, and as such its charms are available to all who are willing to listen openheartedly. This viscerality is particularly evident on tracks like Some Rest For The Midwives… which was recorded live during a performance that also involved the creation of visual art. It begins as a series of clicks, crashes and rattles before gaining in complexity and strangeness, almost seeming to mirror the way the human mind learns about music from infancy through to adulthood.
Because of its central theme, Placenta is an album of universal scope. It is also, however, a distinctly Californian record. This is most obvious on a piece called In Appreciation Of Chico Hamilton’s Vast Influence On The West Coast Sound, which pays loving homage to the great LA-born, NYC-based jazz drummer. Its intricate, subtle rhythms are augmented by flourishes of spacy synth. Spiritual themes have been explored by many California artists, and are of central importance on This “I” Was Not, featuring Ariel Kalma’s spoken poetry and Surya Botofasina’s warbling organ.
Although these spiritual concerns are treated with due seriousness, the album is not short on humour: witness the delightful musical pun of Real Vital Organs (on which Jamael Dean’s organ creates a kind of bodily avant-garde space-fusion). Synthesised guitar, bowed bass, and exploratory drums combine on Surges, Expansions, a track that sounds like something Sun Ra might have heard in his deepest dreams. The ghost of Herman Blount and his Arkestra haunts much of this album: space is indeed the place, but for Niño, that means inner as well as outer space. The short, beautiful Carla’s Beads provides the perfect synthesis of meditative introspection and celestial mind-expansion, while the album’s mighty final track, “Play Kerri Chandler’s RAIN”, runs back and forth between electronic bleeps, hooting vocalisations, organic and interpretive percussion and pointillist bass notes.
André 3000 makes an appearance on the almost pastoral Birthworkers Magic, And How We Get Hear… where he creates a bubbling, bucolic flute-scape along with fellow flautist Maia. A large ensemble cast features on the flowing epic Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy, a free-jazz space odyssey that also features the voices of Niño’s partner and child and a surprising, fluttering accordion courtesy of Michael Bolger. But despite the massed and varied ranks of collaborators, the whole album has a decidedly natural flow to it. Niño has somehow managed to capture the way in which the natural process of human reproduction, childbirth and becoming a parent can apparently make time speed up or slow down. This strange feeling – time suspended, time rushing by – permeates the entirety of Placenta. Niño’s musical contributions – his chimes, bells, cymbals, gongs and shakers – provide a consistent backdrop, but equally importantly, he acts as a facilitator or catalyst or lightning rod through which the swell of creativity can be filtered and condensed. The result is a work of warmth and humanity and unruly, anarchic joy.
Placenta is released on May 24th via International Anthem.
Pre-order/Pre-Save: https://international-anthem.lnk.to/Placenta
