Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad - In The Merry Month of May (Vinyl)

Released on Blue Chopsticks (Drag City), this remarkable album documents the final studio recordings of American experimental legend Tony Conrad, captured before his death in 2016 in collaboration with Irish composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe. The pair performed together for years as Ma La Pert, and these improvisations find them in full flight: Walshe's extraordinary voice weaving in and out of Conrad's electrified and prepared violin, moving from strident close harmony to distorted near-abstraction.

The title track nods to the unrest of May 1968, its harsh dissonances matched by a music video from long-time Conrad collaborator Tony Oursler. Elsewhere the record ranges wide, from the slide guitar blues of 'He Only Had One Paw' to the gleefully off-kilter singalong of 'Day of the Fair' and the mellow, gramophone-haunted closer 'People Need to Know'. Playful, political, and deeply human, it is a fitting last conversation between two singular artists.

"This open-ended polysemy makes this music delightfully fizzy" - The Journal of Music