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year-in-review II
So. Barring the acquisition of anything truly shattering in the next week or so, here is my top ten list of albums for 2003:
1. Matmos, The Civil War
This album continues Matmos' project of marrying unorthodox sounds and electronic noise to house-music beats. This formula has always been appealing, but it's the thematic underpinnings here that drive this album to greatness. Matmos has never been shy about using themes which reflect their fractured take on the zeitgeist, but an album centered around a set of military marches feels uniquely relevant in a year marked by cynical military action abroad and the redoubling of the battle lines drawn here at home. Soundtrack for a peace march? Dance music for colonial queers? Yes. Oh, my, yes. On Matador.
2. The Books, The Lemon of Pink
The Books came onto my radar last year, with their attention-getting (yet spotty) debut Thought For Food, built around a palette of cello, acoustic guitar, and a blizzard of samples. They've stuck close to the same formula for this release, adding occasional vocals and cutting out the filler, and they've produced a masterpiece. Although these pieces defy easy description—are they songs? instrumentals? electronica? folk? non-linear documentaries?—each one somehow always manages to sound exactly right. On Tomlab.
3. Manitoba, Up In Flames
Music for omnivores. Technically "electronica," this album also merrily raids lush indie-rock leftovers out of the icebox (people who miss the era of My Bloody Valentine and the Stone Roses should take note) and even occasionally slaps some (plundered?) free jazz sax solos into the mix. Incredibly dense, candy-colored, jubilant constructions. On Leaf.
4. John Fahey, Red Cross
By the time of John Fahey's death in 2001, he had taken on something of the status of an American icon. Some of the reasons for this are cryptic and they await the eager student in their occultation. But you don't need to know anything about any of that to know that this was a man who spent his entire life playing the guitar, and when an album is released that contains the final recordings of a man who spent his entire life playing the guitar, you had better believe that that album might contain a testament of a sort that cannot be casually uttered. Compositions of an almost unearthly gravity, rife with the blackness of the grave. On Revenant.
5. ARE Weapons, s/t
In my original sidebar writeup, I called this an album full of "anthems about taking drugs, fighting, and the value of believing in yourself," and I don't know if I can describe it any better now. Occasionally reeks of the desperation of other primal electronic bands such as Suicide, but more commonly sticks to the braggadocio of early Beastie Boys. Only just when you're ready to write them off as another snotty party band, stoopid with googly-eyed O's, you can't help but detect an undercurrent of weird earnestness under it all, even sentimentality. What, exactly, is going on here? Are these songs ironic but posing as sincere? Or sincere posing as ironic? Or a little from Column A and a little from Column B? Nobody knows, but that's a little something you can ponder while you're trying to get the catchy bits out of your brain. On Rough Trade.
6. Various Artists, Wooden Guitar
I usually try to resist putting various-artist compilations on my top ten list, but this one is curated by the exceptionally insightful Dawson Prater of Locust Music, which is rapidly emerging as one of the most interesting labels of the moment. Mr. Prater has selected four important guitarists to contribute long-form acoustic improvisations for this project: Steffen Basho-Junghans, who has been charting out a startlingly new vocabularly for the guitar over the last several years; Jack Rose, who is looking more and more like the heir to the Fahey "mystic Americana" mantle; Sir Richard Bishop, who contributes an arabesque-riddled set that will satisfy fans of his Sun City Girls work; and Japan-improv king Tetzumi Akiyama, who here charts an excursion into the Void. Each individual piece is excellent, and, taken together, they serve as a snapshot of a vital new genre (free folk? deltadelica?). On Locust.
7. The Black Mountain Music Project, Songs From the Black Mountain Music Project
This album, made by indie chanteuse Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Mobilivre-Bookmobile maven Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and a cast of assorted extras during a month out in rural North Carolina, focuses on the (joyous) process of music-making rather than the finished product, and, in doing so, reconceptualizes the very concept of The Album, opens up the door to thinking about an album as a collaborative scrapbook; an arrangement of mementos of intimate time spent together. During its one month of existence, the Black Mountain Music Project successfully completed some lovely songs ("While We Have the Sun" is my pick for Song of the Year), but even the field recordings and other sonic oddments that round out the record serve their purpose: evoking the beauties of the rural environment and an overall ambience of anything-goes creativity. On K.
8. Fennesz, Live In Japan
Fennesz's great talent lies in being able make music that's twenty minutes into the future while still somehow keeping an eye on the tattering grandeur of the past. This album showcases that talent uniquely, as Fennesz spends a great deal of this set disassembling his own back catalogue (clippings from Endless Summer and Field Recordings crop up) and arc-welding the resultant fragments into exciting new shapes. One could say that this is what we all want from a live set: something familiar, presented in a form that reasserts its absolute relevance. On Headz.
9. Rafael Toral, Electric Babyland / Lullabies
Toral is a master of the drone—his Wave Field and Cyclorama Lift pieces are indispensible—but he is also a masterful self-reinventor, revising or deeping his palette of choice from one album to the next. The palette for the five Electric Babyland tracks on this disc—processed music-box—is a new one for Toral but he makes characteristic magic from it. Then he follows these with the three Lullabies pieces, which pair up the music box textures with the sparse guitar melodies and ambient hum which are foundational to some of Toral's other (exemplary) work. On Tomlab.
10. The White Stripes, Elephant
A guilty pleasure, I suppose, but I can't help but be won over by the way Jack White's persona toggles between two incompatible modes: laddish schoolboy and mouthy devil. (Only the latter is capital-R Rawk, true, but don't deny the other its tradition, which at its best looks like Ray Davies or the early Beatles and at its worst looks like the Monkees.) Throw in Meg White's mawkishly loveable "Cold, Cold Night" and an assload of honky blues hooks and I'm a believer. On V2.
Last year's list
2001's list
Pitchfork Media's top 50 of 2003
The top ten of Matt Wellins, from Dusted Magazine. |
Friday, December 26, 2003
9:01 PM
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twisty little passages
One of the gifts I got for Christmas (early) is Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, an interesting-looking book about interactive fiction. When I start to read it I'll post some notes on it here.
For those who can't wait that long, check out the notes over at Adam Cadre's Calendar. (By the way, Calendar is worth checking out even if you're not interested in Montfort's book, in that it presents a refreshingly different blog interface, a novel hybrid of a blog archive page and a LiveJournal in, well, calendar view.) |
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
8:24 PM
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year in review I
Hipster record store Other Music has recently released their Year-End Recap, featuring outstanding albums of the year (in the categories of electronica, [indie-]rock, folk, hip hop, mixes, experimental, psychedelia, post-punk, etc. etc.). My own top ten for this year has been more-or-less fixed since the beginning of the month, and will be posted here in the forseeable future. |
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
8:09 PM
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dancing and memory
Thursday night I had a fabulous time dancing at a friend's apartment.
I've always enjoyed dancing at clubs and suchlike, even in the midst of stodgy crowds. Long ago I decided that it was better to look foolish dancing than it was to look foolish standing still, and this is a decision I've never regretted. Even so, out in clubspace it's hard not to be at least a little bit self-conscious; it's hard to really get into it and do, shall we say, deep dancing.
Since, on Thursday, I was in the presence of no one other than an old friend, I found myself able to shed some of this self-consciousness and dance pretty "deeply," which led me into a set of unexpected emotional realizations; it wouldn't be going too far to call them "epiphanies" of a sort.
Even the casual observer can make out relationships between dancing and stretching: in fact it's hard to pretend that there's any sort of meaningful boundary between the two. But I hadn't realized the extent of the relationships between dancing/stretching and healing. At the risk of sounding too New Age here, I really feel like I can say that this particular experience of dancing was a healing experience, both emotionally and physically, or at least the start of one: after I was done I felt like I needed a therapy session to help work with some of the emotional material that the dancing helped to dredge up.
The fact that a lot of the material that surfaced was old, semi-forgotten business, is leading me to posit relationships between physical health and memory that I wouldn't previously have considered valid. When I try to explain the connection between the two concepts in a linear fashion I end up using "emotional health" as a mediating concept (physical health is related to emotional health which is related to memory) but the experience I had on Thursday suggests that the interrelations between all these things are so deeply gnarled that to use a linear chain of discrete concepts to represent their interrelationships is actually a fairly profound misrepresentation.
So: it seems fruitful to consider dancing as a kind of tool by which the body can access past experience—in a different way from the way that thought and reflection (what we normally consider to be "remembering") accesses past experience.
I feel fairly certain that there are writers out there who have written on this idea, and I also feel fairly certain that there are probably dancers out there who make use of this idea in their practice. But who are they? |
Monday, December 22, 2003
8:12 PM
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re: DSMHUAV, the magical black
I love reading the shards of random syntax that get heaped into spam e-mail messages in order to confound spam filters.
For instance, this morning's e-mail brings me this chunk:
"avocado checkbook barbara fcc lawrencium odyssey cargill autumnal / dolomitic mute cordite triode assiduity / ascendant copybook annette bernardino"
Related: Outside the Inbox, a "compilation of songs inspired by and titled after the subject lines of mass-email." |
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
11:00 AM
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moriyama daido
Came upon the work of Moriyama Daido while surfing around the web looking at photographs (which I can do more of now that I've got the superfast! modem). The galleries accessible from this page are breathtaking, particularly the third one. |
Sunday, December 14, 2003
11:24 PM
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parasitic games
Game designer Eric Zimmerman's personal site is currently under reconstruction, but it's worth browsing the version stored in the Internet Archive.
I like the games he designed to be played in the space of an art gallery, but I'm particularly intrigued by Suspicion, a game "for 12-24 players designed to be played in an office environment over a week of real time. ... a social game in which players all belong to secret groups. To win the game, you must find the other players in your groups using code words and code gestures. Then you work with your allies to sabotage other groups and 'steal' their Suspicion cards through clever gameplay."
More on Suspicion here:
"Traditionally, games take place in artificial environments. Football players, for example, operate within strictly delimited boundaries of time and space when they play football. Football games take place in a field. The games have a beginning and an end. There is normally no question as to whether or not the players are actually playing the game. Suspicion, on the other hand, does not create a separate environment for play. It has a parasitic relationship to the already existing physical, psychological, and social work environment. Suspicion operates in this environment in curious ways.
For example, by randomly placing the players in groups, the normal hierarchies and power relationships of the office are restructured into the more perverse and arbitrary ordering of the game."
Love it!
I learned about Suspicion when reading this writeup of the "What Is A Game?" conference in Utrecht, which contains other interesting tidbits such as the rules for how to play a massively multiplayer rock-paper-scissors game.
Eric Zimmerman's game company, GameLab.
Labels: game_commentary |
Friday, December 12, 2003
9:02 AM
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swarm documentaries
So here are the basic premises behind my "swarm documentaries" idea:
1. Affordable image-capturing technologies are more prevalent than ever before. (Disposable cameras, affordable digital cameras, camera-phones, etc.)
2. Affordable sound-capturing technologies are also more prevalent than ever before. (Handheld cassette recorders, Minidiscs, PDAs with recording capability, Audblog, etc.)
3. New communication technologies (cell phones, Internet) help to easily facilitate spontaneous or semi-spontaneous social gatherings (smart mobs, MeetUp groups, etc.)
4. Given points 1-3, it seems possible to assemble a group of individuals to collaboratively document a specific event.
5. Grid blogging serves to distribute the task of archiving the material gathered by the individual "documentarians."
Informal swarm documentaries already exist: I'm thinking of some weddings I've been to, where the official wedding photographer is replaced (or supplemented) by the guests themselves simply by placing a disposable camera at each table at the reception. A more political use might be the "open publishing" or "participatory media" models utilized by Indymedia to cover street protests.
So. The strength of this documentary model is that it produces a lot of raw information easily and cheaply. This is also its primary drawback: people are pressed for time, and they may not have a particularly strong interest in sifitng through a lot of disorganized, potentially redundant information. Part of the appeal of a documentary is that someone else has already done the sifting for you, gathered the relevant material, and ideally shaped or arranged it in a way that reveals connections or otherwise makes sense of it. Assuming that this idea is not outmoded (and it may be), it appears that even a swarm documentary might need an editor, even if it's just someone to group the different participants categorically (as Ashley Benigno has done with the results of the grid blogging project).
Ideally, the task of editing would be distributed, too—the participants themselves should be able to take on the task of editing. Perhaps some kind of Slashdot-style collaborative flitering scheme? |
Friday, December 05, 2003
11:56 AM
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grid blogging
Lots of minor annoyances this week: a thirty-hour power outage, a long phone conversation with tech support, jury duty. On the up-side, I discovered (through City of Sound) the concept of grid blogging: a term coined by Ashley Benigno used to refer to a project wherein a group of bloggers collectively tackles a specific topic on a specific day. It's not a tremendously groundbreaking idea, and the very nature of blog interlinking has probably caused things like it to emerge previously, but what I like about Benigno's act of naming it is that it enables people to think about grid blogging as a formal mode, which could ideally spawn a whole series of interesting future projects. (It could potentially help along an idea I've been trying to develop for the past couple of years: a way to apply the principles of distributed computing to documentary-making, which would potentially result in a product I would call a swarm documentary.)
In any case, Ashley's interesting notes on the first (?) grid blogging project, with the theme of "the brand," can be found here.
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Thursday, December 04, 2003
2:59 PM
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arbus on disneyland
Here are Diane Arbus' notes on Disneyland:
"Wonderful pseudo places at dawn. Disneyland, ruins of Cambodian temples which never existed, false deserts littered with bones of animals who never died; like a shrine for unbelievers. And black swans swim in the moat of a castle which looks like the advertisement for a dream. It must be done at dawn I can do it at dawn"
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Monday, December 01, 2003
12:34 PM
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