Naomi and I have spent countless hours with a favorite CD compilation called Soul of Angola: Anthologie de la Musique Angolaise 1965/1975, released in 2001 by French label Lusafrica. We stumbled on it at Twisted Village, our friends’ Harvard Square record store in the late nineties and the aughts. It was the height of an adventurous CD reissue era, with music surfacing from crate diggers everywhere. Each week, it seemed, something mindblowing arrived at Twisted Village that had previously only been known to aficionados. And often with liner notes by those aficionados, to boot.

This particular comp seized us and never let go. It’s a double-CD of haunting laments sung over percussion-driven grooves, with quiet acoustic guitars playing rhythm and electric guitars on lead. (If you take a look at our work since the 2000s, you might see where we got some of our ideas for instrumentation.) One artist on the comp in particular, Artur Nunes, I feel we could listen to ad infinitum – his voice is piercingly emotional, his melodies profoundly melancholy. It was clear from the compilation that he was a star of Angolan music. Yet I could find no releases under his own name. In the liner notes, printed in French and badly translated English, it only said, “During these disturbed times of the end of the colonial period, many were the artists who paid a heavy price for their engagement: Artur Nunes, David Zé and Urbano de Castro, all died during the aborted attempt of military coup in May 1977 at Luanda.”

I consulted every collection of Angolan music that I could find, but none had more information about what happened to Artur Nunes or the other artists mentioned in that sentence, David Zé and Urbano de Castro. In 2010, the German label Analog Africa released an extensively researched compilation, Angola Soundtrack: the Unique Sound of Luanda 1968-1976, with liner notes detailing interviews of surviving 1970s musicians whom compiler Samy Ben Redjeb managed to track down in person, including a brother of David Zé. But when Rejeb asked what had happened to David Zé, he was told, “Don’t get involved in that matter.”

“During my whole trip to Luanda,” Samy Ben Redjeb wrote, “I wondered why… records by David Zé, Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes were nowhere to be found. I later discovered that after the events of 1977, the music of these three artists was banned from airplay and I have a feeling that people in possession of their records must have thrown them away to avoid any risk of being affiliated and seen as guilty by association.”

Two books in English fill out parts of the story, one by a scholar and one by a journalist. The scholarly book is Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (2008), by Marissa J. Moorman, Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Moorman’s book is a history of colonial and post-colonial Angola focused on community building through music. She argues that music contributed to political structures of the developing independent nation while still under colonial rule. “Through the music scene Angolans declared a cultural sovereignty that did not simply lead them to politics but was political in its own right. Cultural sovereignty shaped their expectations about independence and nationalism,” she writes. Moorman documents not only how important but how extensive the Angolan music scene was throughout the period leading up to independence from Portugal in 1975. It was a thriving industry.

Tragically, political independence in Angola was followed by a protracted civil war between factions backed by competing cold war interests – a war that didn’t formally end until 2002. “What happened to music and the music scene?” asks Moorman. “Musicians describe the period from 1974… until the early 1990s as a hiatus in the history of Angolan music.” War is no better for music than for anything else we value in life.

The bitter irony of the events in May 1977 that took the lives of Artur Nunes, David Zé and Urbano de Castro alongside many thousands – some say many tens of thousands – is that it wasn’t a part of the civil war per se. It was a power struggle within a single party, the MPLA, which would eventually prevail and become the government of Angola. These artists had been members of the MPLA, even serving in a musical military unit sent by the party for performances in other African nations to help build alliances.

This explains why the murder of these musicians was followed by the silencing of their voices on existing recordings. Because they were killed in an effort to suppress a movement within the party that took power, their deaths were never publicly discussed as a martyrdom or even a loss. Moorman reports that decades later at the national radio station, RNA, “I encountered numerous vinyl discs with deliberate scratches and Xs through particular songs or with writing on the label that said não tocar (do not play).” Urbano de Castro, according to Moorman, was “the artist who produced the most records from 1969 to 1978,” and yet, “I found only one single by Urbano de Castro in the stacks.”

The silencing of these musicians extended to the story of their death. Moorman learned next to no detail about the incident in the course of her research in Angola, and although their loss is featured on the very first page as part of the initial inspiration for her book, they figure in a mere handful of paragraphs. “There are no published accounts of their deaths,” Moorman explains. She can only report theories she picks up in conversations with the few who are willing to discuss the topic.

BBC World Service journalist Lara Pawson, stationed in Angola starting in 1998, ran into the same wall when asking questions about the political events of 27 May 1977. She made it a quest to find out more, returning to Angola after her BBC stint to chase down as much information as she could from those who remembered and would talk about it. In the Name of the People (2014) is a first-person account of that investigation, which doesn’t result in an authoritative history so much as fragments of trauma, guilt, rationalization, and, again, competing theories from those who are willing to put them forward.

Pawson doesn’t delve into the musicians’ story, drawing on Moorman for that part of her account, but does uncover a good deal more about the May 1977 conflict. The power struggle within the MPLA, as Pawson details, had much to do with opposition between black working-class supporters from the Luanda neighborhoods known as musseques (shanty towns), and white and mestiço supporters who had through education and wealth inherited more of the Portuguese colonial institutional power. All were socialists, or at least part of the same Marxist-Leninist party.

On 27 May 1977 the institutional faction of the MPLA, if we might characterize it that way, purged the generally more working-class supporters of what they took to be a coup within the party. These murders extended far beyond any such political explanation, no matter how Machiavellian; Pawson learned that the bloodletting included petty grievances and grudges, not to mention widespread and no doubt random sadistic violence. Whatever the MPLA leaders thought they were doing, it was a horrendous, pointless, murderous and eternally shameful incident. No wonder no one wanted to talk about it afterwards, or even play records by the brilliant musicians who were killed by it.

A recovery of these glorious pre-war recordings finally began in 1997, when surviving musician Teta Lando of 70s Angolan band Africa Show started to compile suppressed tracks in a series of releases under his own aegis, Teta Lando Produções. One of those collections is Soul of Angola.

Teta Lando died of natural causes in Paris, 2008. The Angolan “golden age” recordings he and others worked to recuperate remain scarce as physical copies but continue to be shared online. And new reissues occasionally pop up, including this freshly pressed 1975 album by David Zé.

Listening to: Marisa Anderson, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music

Cooking: a boiled egg

Originally published by Bandcamp Daily (June 24, 2016)

On Fire was the last all-analog album I participated in. That means it’s not just old, it’s ancient. It was made to be a record — with two sides, and a paper sleeve. There was no other way to listen to it.

I can’t help but hear it now as preserved in analog amber for that reason. There’s a hesitation, an aura of space around its sounds that’s more than producer Kramer’s beloved plate reverb — I hear it even in the silences between tracks. Maybe it’s the awe we felt toward the recording process itself. Tape was rolling, our palms were sweating, we had one chance to get this down and here it was, for better or worse. Can you hear the sound of a moment passing from present to past?

The tape lapped up that moment right away, like a cat. By the time it reached the take-up reel it was already in the past. Listening back in the control room, the sounds instantly felt old because the moment was gone. The performance was captured, the sound of our band was fixed.

We were happy — very happy, as I remember — with that sound. That’s why we titled the album the way we did. It was self-deprecating, in part, because we knew we sounded wimpy compared to the rock ideal of the time. But to ourselves we really were on fire, because what we heard back was a record we would like.

I still like it, as a record. I love the hushed way it opens with “Blue Thunder,” such an unexpected move then for an indie band. I’m amazed we got everyone to go along with it. Some of the band’s best tracks are on there, but there are also weak songs for me — the ones I might skip were it not on vinyl. (I know most of our fans will disagree, but I never thought “Strange” really came together — it can still make me cringe.) Kramer knew well how to sequence an album to maintain interest — the long instrumental section of “When Will You Come Home” is one of my favorite grooves we hit, and always gets me to turn the record over, just as Kramer said it would.

On Side B, “Decomposing Trees” starts things off fresh and odd again, with its disconnected sounds and lyric. And sax? Who would have thought it! Have to see what they do on the next track… And so it goes, through the sad, elegiac ending of “Isn’t It A Pity” — a unanimous cover choice that presaged the band’s dissolution into lost friendship.

Along the way, there are enough surprises thrown in that I’m still taken aback — the nutty schoolyard “nah-nah-nah’s” behind the backwards solo in “Another Day”… the lead guitar entering on top of the second vocal verse in “Plastic Bird”… even some of my own drum fills give me a start (did I mean to do that or did it just happen somehow?). And through it all, Naomi’s bass sounding so grand and melancholy.

Am I getting maudlin? Probably — it’s a moment in amber for me, remember. But maybe it could be for you, too? Many of my favorite albums are soundtracks to a part of my life I will forever associate with them. If Galaxie 500 made any record like that, I think it must be On Fire. It was so charged for us. Maybe, under the right conditions, it can pass that charge on to the listener.

I wonder what it’s like to encounter this album for the first time as a stream or download, instead of an LP. It has three bonus tracks tacked on the end now, a legacy of the CD era – so its sad conclusion might pass you by a good ten minutes before the music actually stops. And you don’t get that reset after the first five songs, a pivot exactly midway through. Try an open-ended pause before Track 6 — it might be just a moment until you want to hear those weird bells again; or it might stretch from getting ready to leave home, to coming back after a day’s work or evening out. Or maybe it will be much longer, if Kramer was wrong about the end of Side A. There’s other music that can slip into that space. Side B will be there whenever you come back to it, preserved in amber.

Listening to: Artur Nunes, Memórias

Cooking: Yemeni coffee

[stream album in full or use individual track cues embedded below]

Damon & Naomi

Hi the Listening Party will start at 3:30pm ET - welcome and feel free to introduce yoursel…

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Naomi and I started the year with performances over three nights at Café Oto in Dalston, London. We were joined by friends and special guests, and the kind of audience that a venue like Oto, which has cultivated its crowd for nearly two decades, provides. The club reminds me of the original Knitting Factory on Houston Street in New York, which we played in the late 80s, or of Tonic, its spiritual successor on the Lower East Side, which we played in the late 90s and 00s. These too were venues that leaned on experimental music and avant-garde jazz, but let a simple song-based band like ours play to their sophisticated audiences. Most importantly, these were venues you could go to any night they had music and hear something unusual, whether it was your thing or not. That is what I look for wherever I find myself, as a performer or audience member, but it is increasingly rare. Its magic ingredients are a longstanding location and a consistent approach to booking – precisely what escalatin…

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Looking at the music business this past year, it can seem like the only longterm plan being discussed is AI. There’s no other dominant technology on the horizon – nothing to succeed streaming – and there’s no new paradigm for artist development.

Yet AI is hardly longterm thinking. Cause where does AI go, in the long run? Away from human musicians, and away from fans of human music. That’s a problem, not a solution.

In other words, the music business at present would seem to have no longterm plan for the music portion of their interests. Which leaves us with an industry even more out for short-term financial gain, and even less interested in the health and longevity of its participants than ever.

I recommend that everyone look to artists themselves for any creative thinking not only in and through music, but about music and the necessity of its longterm viability for our communities and economy.

Here is a selection of what I was listening to from artists in 2025, gathered from links posted at the end of each entry in the Dada Drummer Almanach. Most are new, or at least newly released, but there are a few vintage finds that were simply new to me.

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GENE SIMMONS: We listened closely to the shows and realized we couldn’t release it as is, it needed some work and some fixes…

PAUL STANLEY: Eddie Kramer was great at helping to create Alive! and I say create because the album was really an enhanced version of what took place… There was some controversy about that but truth be told it’s the most accurate sounding live album of its time.

EDDIE KRAMER: The whole idea of the album was to make it sound larger than life.

Originally published by Art in America (April 29, 2020)

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I handed my US passport to the EU immigration officer, and got a question back I’d never heard in this situation. Not where are you going, or how long are you staying, or why are you here. But: “Where are you from?”

I was nonplussed. This uniformed officer was looking at my passport, with my photo and New York City birthplace in it. “I’m American,” I said.

“But your name,” he continued.

What name is American? “My name is Polish,” I said, as if he needed that information.

“And where is your Polish passport,” he replied. Again, I was completely nonplussed. “I don’t have one,” I answered.

“Why not?” he said. I am still, weeks later, trying to parse the tone of that question. Was it advice?

This was just a short visit to Lisbon for a speaking gig at a music conference, nothing requiring visas or instruments (which tend to elicit questions at immigration) or merch (which can compli…

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Teiji Ito is invariably linked to Maya Deren, since their professional and romantic relationship spanned the last decade of her career, 1952–61, and the first of his. Deren’s account of their initial encounter is as steeped in self-mythology as any of the images in her films:

“Teiji, I have the feeling that if ever you were approached by an inquiring reporter and asked for one or two of the most important or critical moments in your life — you certainly would have to mention that one where I ran into you in front of the five and dime store.”
“When you asked me to do the score for your film.”

Ito was only seventeen years old at the time. Born in Japan to a samurai-class family with long-standing ties to the theater, he had immigrated with his parents to the United States shortly before Pearl Harbor. By the time he met Deren, then thirty-five, he had learned to play a variety of instruments and performed onstage accompanying his mother, a dan…

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Harry Partch is one of a handful of composers who seem to interest rock musicians (John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Terry Riley being other examples). One reason for this might be that Partch’s music – like most rock music — was written to be played on his own instruments. Although Partch wrote scores in a manner not unrelated to classical music, he wrote in a scale of his own definition (forty-three tones to the octave), for an orchestra of unorthodox instruments built to his own specifications. Like the music of Sonic Youth, who after the recent theft of their collection of modified guitars announced that they would no longer be able to play certain songs ever again, Partch’s music is wedded to the particulars of the instruments he used to write and perform it.

This permanent bond of music to instrument is very un-classical, it challenges the idea of a score as a temp…

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Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) are a collective that dates from that brave era the 1960s, when art was made unabashedly in the service of the revolution. As Frederic Rzewski, the pianist and composer who has served most often as the group’s spokesperson, explained in a 1969 interview:

“We are making the first steps now toward an actively revolutionary music, a music which will not be an instrument of ruling-class ‘culture’… but rather a force in the hands of the people, a special language belonging to everybody. When this happens, the ‘concert’ will come to resemble other liberated forms such as the party or the day off.”

MEV’s two best-documented pieces from the period, SpaceCraft (1967–68) and Sound Pool (1969), are exercises in such ground clearing. The former work is a collective improvisation based on a plan conceived by Rzewski, in w…

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We had been ushered into a grand old theater in Boston with a massive central chandelier, two balconies, and long history of hosting out-of-town premieres for Broadway. Still, three times an announcement came over the PA – twice in Spanish, once in English – instructing us that we were about to experience a “theater of song.” No one seemed to be paying attention to the recording. A boisterous crowd was busy greeting friends or fetching drinks, and few bothered to take their seats early. Even after holding the curtain longer than any Broadway show would permit, many in the full house were still just arriving. As the lights finally dimmed, the room continued to buzz with activity. And a diva took the stage, alone.

Natalia Lafourcade only recently turned 40, but has been making albums since she was a teen and already holds the record for most Latin Grammys won by a woman (18). The next runner up is Shakira. When she emerges from the wi…

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Originally published by the Boston Phoenix (July 25, 2003)

João Gilberto is renowned for his subtle sense of rhythm. But when the legendary singer and guitarist, now in his early 70s, shuffled onto the stage at the Wang Theatre Sunday, one day and 90 minutes late, it was a different feeling for time — or lack thereof — that had created the atmosphere in the house. A missed airplane flight had led to the postponement of the event for a day, changing a Saturday-night date into an early-Sunday-evening concert; and then an unexplained hour-and-a-half delay to the start of the show had begun to turn this eagerly awaited Boston debut of a master musician into a disastrous night at the theater. Gilberto hadn’t played a note and already ther…

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Originally published in No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, ed. Rob Young (The Wire/Orion Books, 2012).

And n…

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Various Positions, by Leonard Cohen (Passport Records, 1984)

“I went to see Walter Yetnikoff... Walter said, ‘Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good,’ and he turned down Various Positions for U.S. distribution because it wasn't contemporary.” (LC quoted in Yakety Yak, by Scott Cohen, 1994.)

I’ve been taking stock of what some of the musicians I most admire were doing at my age, and come to the sobering realization that many of them were making the most neglected albums of their careers. Various Positions is that record for Leonard Cohen — it didn’t even warrant release, in the eyes of his once-and-future label Columbia Records. Yet this is the record with Cohen’s most covered song in recent years, “Hallelujah.” It’s the one that starts the same way he still begins his live shows, with “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and ends with the exquisitely sincere, “If It Be …

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Originally published by Artforum (March 2007)

Cornelius Cardew et al, Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, ed. Edwin Prévost, (Harlow, UK: Copula, 2006), 400 pages.

Some gestures are so large, they cast the rest of a career into shadow. Such is the case with English composer Cornelius Cardew, whose rather spectacular conversion to a Maoist-influenced branch of Marxism in the early 1970s led him to denounce both his avant-garde mentors and his own pr…

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Originally published by the Boston Phoenix (March 27, 1998)

I wasn’t alone in spending an inordinate amount of time listening to Bob Dylan this past year — in addition to the usual collection of obsessive Dylan fans (more accessible than ever thanks to the Internet), the mainstream music business re-embraced its prodigal son, giving Dylan three Grammys, including Album of the Year. But I found Time out of Mind (Columbia), the much-praised new album, lacking what I look for from Dylan. Instead, I’ve been listening to bootl…

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Twenty-five years ago this week, the Tokyo band Ghost came to our home and we recorded an album together in the living room.

When Sub Pop released the album on CD (Drag City pressed the LP cause Sub Pop wasn’t making vinyl then, what a time it was!), they hired Byron Coley to write the bio and track notes. These texts seem tailor-made for a publication called Dada Drummer Almanach so I’m resharing them here in honor of the anniversary.

The album, digitally speaking, is currently free/pay-as-you-wish on Bandcamp. Enjoy — and Happy New Year!

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“The common reader… differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure…” - Virginia Woolf

This isn’t a music blog, exactly - but regular readers know I include a listening recommendation at the end of every essay. Each of the last two years, I collected these recommendations into their own post in lieu of a “best of” or (god forbid) “wrapped.”

2023 list

2022 list

In 2024, I also posted a few articles that could maybe pass - if you squint - as music journalism. ICYMI, there are essays about:

Taylor Swift and Cindy Lee

Mitski and Julia Holter

Galaxie 500 outtakes

Krautrock

Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Joni Mitchell demos

Habib Koité

Dave Van Ronk

And here are all the Dada Drummer Almanach listening recommendations from 2024, with hotlinks to Bandcamp wherever possible. This isn’t a ranking, it’s chronological - I’ll include what I was cooking at the time for seasonal flavor. It begins and ends in winter:

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Habib Koité tours the world music circuit, and has for thirty years, but he is neither a traditional artist, nor does he play a groove-based music that crosses borders through global rhythms. He is a studied, careful singer-songwriter who over the course of a long career has released only six albums of mostly original songs written in multiple languages from his native Mali. “Composing is a terrible process for me, it explains all the white hair I have,” he told Songlines magazine. As a guitarist, he plays without flash - but excels at a subtle vocabulary he has developed on a Canadian-made, electro-acoustic nylon string guitar, the Godin Multiac. He is, in short, a one-off. Perhaps all great artists are. And perhaps that’s why they so often don’t fit the model of any given genre, much less one based on such a vague (and vaguely suspect) concept as “world” music.

Still, what is a working musician to do but tour the available cir…

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