Spekulation — The Monarch Review
Truth Be Told – Spekulation
Wednesday, April 3, 2013 11:12 — 0 Comments
I received an advanced copy of Spekulation’s newest record, Truth Be Told, two months ago. That version of the record did not include the final song, “Nothing Left To Doâ€. That sixth and ultimate track is as sweetly composed and important as any I’ve heard in recent memory.Â
Spek and Duke
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 19:05 — 0 Comments
As fellow editor Evan Flory-Barnes likes to point out from time to time when the difficult conversation of genre arises, many of the old jazz masters preferred not to speak of their work as “jazz”, opting instead for the simpler word “music”. It was a response to classical music snobbery. Hip-hop suffers a similar snobbery, despite enjoying wide popular appeal, just as big-band swing did in its day. Spekulation cleverly rebukes this snobbery with his newest work, “The Ellington Project”. His work is Music, definitively. Using samples from Ellington’s band and snippets of the Duke talking, Spekulation creates new songs […]
Monarch Music for Brooders and Believers
Sunday, April 3, 2011 13:07 — 0 Comments
Gout is a new cut from Ruminator, a side-project of Diminished Men‘s guitarist Steve Schmitt. Brooding and pensive, this song embodies exactly the project’s name. Spekulation is making his second appearance in Monarch Music, this time with a remix of Michele Khazak. Quite What It Is also ruminates. Khazak’s lyrics lilt and sway, involuting and coiling against a sea of sonic melancholy. One-eyed Dog is, more or less, a field recording. Louis Loomis, as the group calls itself, explores an eery musical landscape with distorted violin and anxious drums, the bass looming and dark. Errant keyboard tones arrive and depart like […]
The answer isn't poetry, but rather language
- Richard Kenney
