Album Review: La Llama by Savath & Savalas

Expanding the Savath y Savalas project to include another member and yet more musical ties to obscure South American folk music, La Llama may have been recorded on the busy Bowery but the setting sounds more like rural Brazil. Guillermo Scott Herren's project with Catalan singer and songwriter Eva Puyuelo Muns grew after 2004's Apropa't and 2007's Golden Pollen to include the Ecuadoran-by-way-of-Florida sound manipulator Roberto Carlos Lange, who makes for a perfect fit with Herren's skills and philosophy. As before, enterprising beatheads who assume that anything from Herren (or the label of release, here Stones Throw) must be chock full of breakbeats will be very surprised; Savath y Savalas productions are odd curios of slow-motion clockwork, only slowly rotating their gears and occasionally halting entirely -- a naturalist's version of experimental-techno stalwarts like Autechre.

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You don’t have to be a major rock ‘n’ roll band to follow a familiar rock ‘n’ roll career trajectory. Take Savath & Savalas, the ethereal Catalan folk project of Prefuse 73’s Guillermo Scott Herren. Savath & Savalas’ first album, 2004’s Apropa’t, was released on the Warp label and received lots of critical accolades for its enchanting Spanish and Latin folk combinations and singer Eva Puyuelo Muns’ breathy harmonies.

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What does it mean to say that you are a Scott Herren fan? In over a decade of painterly sonic experiment, bouncing from name to name, style to style, he has fashioned such a colorful body of work that even the artist himself warns against drawing connections and comparisons. Because he doesn't want to diminish his collaborators' roles, he approaches each project-- there are no "side projects" to him-- on its own terms and asks listeners to follow suit. This year alone, Herren's mark can be found on three new records: one under his high-tech Prefuse 73 moniker, another that pairs him up with Zach Hill, and, here, a return to his kindler, gentler early work as Savath y Savalas.

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Iggy Pop Iggy Pop as a chanteur, crooning and contemplating life with autumnal bitterness and resignation? That’s his unexpected guise on “Préliminaires” (Astralwerks); he even sings “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“Autumn Leaves”) in mediocre French. The album was sparked by Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island,” a time-hopping narrative about a savagely comic entertainer, his beloved dog and their clones from the distant, emotionless future. The songs touch on its plot — particularly the dog, in “A Machine for Loving” and the New Orleans jazz romp “King of the Dogs” — and also ruminate, like the book, about sex and mortality, more quietly than usual for Mr.

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