Beats + Pieces Vol. 70

Crystal Chen, Ken Ishii, Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun.

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

CRYSTAL CHEN, KISS IT BETTER

This year, I’ve been doing some copywriting work for the Tamaki Mākaurau-based Chinese-New Zealand singer, musician, and visual artist Crystal Chen, who makes music with a vivid cinematic quality and takes photographs with a haunting, lyrical energy. I say all of that to say this: regardless of the medium, there is a cohesive synergy to her work. Last week, Chen released her latest single, ‘Kiss It Better’. The text I wrote for her is below.

An emerging musical powerhouse, Crystal’s songcraft draws from the storied influence of mid-20th-century American jazz, swing, and gospel singers like Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin while bringing their sensibilities into harmony with the ornate sounds of 1970s soul music (in the mode of Minnie Riperton and Al Green) and the modern Latin jazz lilt of Esperanza Spalding. Vividly imagined, her songs reach out to the listener like a warm hug or a late-night video call between besties.

At the start of 2024, Crystal reintroduced herself with her R&B/boogie single ‘Love Letter’ (created with fellow Tamaki Mākaurau musician and producer Kenny Sterling of Mānuka Recordings). In a testament to the synergy between her sound and visual sensibilities, the ‘Love Letter’ music video (co-directed with Kenny) won ‘Best Music Video’ at the HALO International Film Festival. It was also nominated for an LA Independent Women Film Award and ‘Best NZ Music Video’ at the 2024 Vision Fest Film Festival.

‘Kiss It Better’ is a masterclass in dreamy organic soul music. Rendered richly, it captures the feeling of sorting through your memories from a sweaty late summer’s night spent bar hopping and tearing up dancefloors with your best girls. As the double bass keeps pace, the song’s instrumentation unfolds into a free-flowing confluence of RnB, jazz, bossa nova and soul. With elegant percussion shuffling in the background and sultry vocal harmonies surrounding her, Crystal sings with the intensity of a slow-burning flame, relating stories of bad bitches getting the party started, sexily lit cigarettes and smoky sexual chemistry while imploring a nameless paramour – or perhaps even a friend – to kiss it better.

Playing-wise, ‘Kiss It Better’ showcases the vivid, emotionally interpretive skills of Joe Kaptein (electric Rhodes and synthesiser, guitar, glockenspiel), Adam Tobeck (drums), Hank Trenton (double bass), Francesca Parussini (tenor saxophone), trumpet (Jack Thirtle), Harrison Chau (Harp), and Kenny Sterling (percussion and conga).

Written by Crystal, her keyboardist Joe Kaptein (who also arranged it) and Annika Rani, ‘Kiss It Better’ was mixed by Christoph El Truneto and produced by Kenny Sterling. In late January 2025, she will unveil an accompanying Y2K-style music video to complete the picture she’s painting here.

Recorded between Roundhead Studios, Sterling Studios, and Hansa Studios, ‘Kiss It Better’ offers us an intimate window into the studio sessions that went into her forthcoming debut album, due for release next year. Created with support from her creative community (via a recent Boosted funding campaign), the album features an extravagant cast of collaborators from Tamaki Mākaurau’s red-hot modern jazz, soul, and funk music scenes.

Outside of the studio and video shoots, this year has also been significant for Crystal on the live front. In May, she played her first headline show at Big Fan in Morningside. Since then, she has shared stages with the Melbourne alt-indie trio Telenova and the Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based acid jazz, disco-funk and post-punk eight-piece Revulva.

THE RANSOM NOTE: KEN ISHII, REFERENCE TO DIFFERENCE

To celebrate its 30th anniversary earlier in the year, Japanese label Musicmine / Sublime Records reissued Ken Ishii’s cult classic ‘Reference To Difference’ and Susumu Yokota’s ‘Acid Mt. Fuji’ as deluxe remastered vinyl packages with new liner notes. As some of you already know (sorry!), I was lucky enough to write the ‘Reference To Difference’ liner notes, which were recently republished online by The Ransom Note.

Originally released in 1994, Ishii’s masterpiece showcased a fusion of ambient atmospheres, space-age techno, IDM, and minimalism. This reissue not only revives a pivotal moment in the 1990s Japanese techno scene but also reaffirms Ishii’s status as a pioneer who helped bring Japan’s sound to the global stage. If you want to read the liner notes, click here.

PINK WARM BELLY OF A DYING SUN:

Lukasz Polowczyk, the Polish sound artist, poet and educator also known as AINT ABOUT ME, has heard that when a thermobaric bomb explodes, the vacuum draws the breath out from your lungs, your flesh turns cold black on the inside, and the rains down, raw diamonds the size of coarse hail. He recounts this story in a sculpted mid-Atlantic accent over a sea of snarling electronic drones on ‘Glacier Gospel’, the third track on Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun, the collaborative self-titled EP he recently created with the multi-instrumentalist and producer Marc Jacobs, aka PRAIRIE. As he recites near the song’s coda, “We don’t have much time if you look at the full trajectory of the vector, and we waste it on pretty much everything that matters the least.” Earlier today, I published a standalone interview with Polowczyk. You can read it here.

WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:

If you like ambient music, you’re going to like Dreams & Whispers by Warsaw’s Bartosz Kruczyński. I hate to be trundling this tired old line out, but more people should be talking about this album.

DFresh: Alex Kassian & Hiroaki Oba collab. Track 3 is a sublime ambient version. A soothing start to ya Sunday.

Me: So good aye.

DFresh: Delicious. I had listened to that early 4 to the Floor Track 1 version numerous times. It has a tasteful European feel with integrity. Kassian is doing so well.

Call this one Casiotone For The Northern Territories. Backed up by minimalist DIY Casio beats programmed by Yuta Matsumura, the young Aboriginal Australian singer, poet, and visual artist Keanu Nelson turns in a game-changing debut album. When I finally listened to Wilurarrakutu, it shook me to the core. To paraphrase Mississippi Records, “Eight haunting, searing, lonely tracks, somehow familiar yet new, sung in both Papunya Luritja and English. Someone said it’s like Francis Bebey meets Suicide meets a slew of home-made Soundcloud artists, broadcasting from one of the most remote places on earth.”

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:

Behind the Mask: You like movies? Name a few of your favorite screenwriters. If you’re grasping for names, you’ll appreciate that the talent for putting memorable words in the mouths of fictional characters is an under-acknowledged art form. These often unknown but prolific prose artists rarely emerge from the shadows of their famous creations. Welcome to the world of Daniel Dumile, whose youthful nickname of “Doom,” a phonetic abbreviation of his last name, has come to describe one of the most mysterious, misunderstood, and masterful rap artists of the last twenty years. For Wax Poetics, Andrew Mason. Read here.

58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. Only One Remains: Art Kane’s “Harlem 1958” gathered giants of the music. Sonny Rollins, 94, looks back at the historic picture. For The New York Times, Hank Shteamer. Read here.

What Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Took from the Tornado: The legendary folk artists discuss rescuing their tapes from a catastrophic storm, singing as if they have one mouth, and making music that’s like a pebble tossed in a river. For The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich. Read here.

‘They felt they couldn’t market us to white people’: 90s hip-hop iconoclasts Digable Planets return. For The Guardian, Stevie Chick. Read here.

FIN.