10. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me Restrained minimalist compositions which periodically descend into shredding noise. Read more | Listen: "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant"
9. Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport I prefer the less polished raw energy of their 2008 debut, Street Horsssing, but this follow-up is still an undeniably fine selection of anthemic psychedelic stomp.
8. Mountains, Choral This outfit, made up of former Apestaartje personnel, has released three fine albums of pastoral drone this decade. This newest one stayed in heavy rotation for me this year.
7. Sunn O))), Dimensions and Monoliths The boundaries of the Sunn O))) project have grown broader with each release, absorbing more and more material like some kind of black metal Katamari. This album finds them experimenting with keening choirs ("Big Church") and transcendent horn playing ("Alice"). It's not always successful, but when it works it expands their scope breathtakingly.
6. The Antlers, Hospice A staggering song cycle about death, loss, and grief. Best way to hear it is by yourself, in a slowly darkening room.
5. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes This album filled the slot that was filled last year by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head's Glistening Pleasure, and in 2005 by Architecture In Helsinki's In Case We Die: indie-pop music, made by young people, charming, charismatic, polished, and addictively sweet. A slightly shameful pleasure, but also a true and abiding one.
4. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix This is the great indie-pop album of the year: upbeat, energetic, yet also somehow grandly sad. Read more | Listen: "Lisztomania"
3. Gregg Kowalsky, Tape Chants The idea of creating music by playing recorded matter on 6-10 cassette tape players simultaneously may sound a bit like someone trying to update Philip Jeck's turntable installations and performances. But Kowalsky's project is really its own thing, with conceptual underpinnings that differ completely from Jeck's, and just one immersion into Kowalsky's invitingly smoggy low-fi drone makes it completely clear that this is a soundworld that must be appreciated on its own terms.
2. Dan Deacon, Bromst The eleven pieces that compose Bromst mostly sound like the soundtrack an old-school videogame that you might have experienced in a dream: all velocity and candy color. But just when you're ready to dismiss them as whiz-kid geekery they open up into something lovely, possibly even holy. Listen: "Red F"
1. Jónsi and Alex, Riceboy Sleeps Beautiful ambient tracks from this side-project of Sigur Ros vocalist Jón Birgisson. Each track arranges acoustic instruments, voices, crackle, loops and hum into a kind of billowing fog that permeates directly to my brain's pleasure pathways.
Way back when the Aught Music blog was covering 2000, I wrote about the Queens of the Stone Age's track "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," noting that it describes "a lifestyle so hedonistic that it would kill the majority of its listeners very quickly were they to adopt it." I also wrote that the track "evokes a special type of vicarious pleasure in the listener's head," and that this process was "is one of the reasons popular music even exists in the first place." Hip-hop, of course, excels at the creation of very dense constellations of incantations and images that trigger the vicarious-pleasure parts of listener's brains: this, in fact, forms a key part of its appeal. A great example might be Tittsworth's "Drunk As Fuck," which celebrates just about every taboo one can think of: from the reeling intoxication identified in the track's title to, uh, genital torture. Anti-social? Sure. Take it seriously and it's actually disturbing. But take it as an opportunity to temporarily put on the costume of someone irresponsible and dangerous—to become "the king of all sleazy things" without any risk to one's self—and it yields a very concentrated form of ridiculous delight.
I spent a lot of time this year listening to this song and trying to make some sense out of its lyrics. The opening couplet reveals some sense of the futility of this task:
So sentimental
Not sentimental, no
If the underlying rhythm and melody weren't so joyous and energetic, one could mistake this tiny packet of self-canceling non-referentiality for a very compact Samuel Beckett play. The refrain doesn't exactly clarify matters:
Lisztomania
Think less but see it grow
Like a riot, like a riot, oh
Not easily offended
Not hard to let it go
From the mess [?] to the masses
Um, OK? There's at least a noun here, relatively close to the pronoun... so... is this a song about the composer? Or about this film? Or... is "Lisztomania" a stand-in for popular manias of all sorts? That helps the "riot" lines to make sense, and maybe the thing about the "masses," but it doesn't really help with the stuff about being not hard to offend, or reveal anything akin to a point of view…
And so it went. The opacity of the song (the entire album, actually) bugged me, and then all it once it didn't anymore. When I was able to accept the lyrical content as rather inspired word salad, it freed me up to enjoy the album's bittersweet, nostalgic elation, which is actually communicated to the listener with absolute clarity.
aught music: 2009: "luscious voluptuous pregnant" by jason crumer
Jason Crumer's Walk With Me is my favorite noise album of the year: it's an almost perfect hybrid of scouring intensity and measured restraint. (The first five or so minutes of this track—an irregularly looping set of piano motifs—sounds like it could have been an early Terry Riley piece or something from an academic conservatory.) Fineness notwithstanding, it still feels wrong to publicly admire a track with a title like "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant," sort of like discussing one's own fetish(es) in mixed company. But, uh, I actually think it's a great title—sexy in a sort of upside-down way—and a good sign that noise music (even measured, restrained noise music) hasn't lost its sense of the taboo.
I wasn't actually a huge fan of Erykah Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah—but this track, "The Healer," was, to my mind, the single most invigorating piece of music the year had to offer. Badu's decision to marry the concepts of healing and pop music isn't in and of itself very interesting: any number of lesser talents could take those two ideas and emerge with a garden-variety homily about the enduring power of music. The greatness of this track comes from Badu's decision to use this framework as a structure into which to jam all sorts of left-field weirdness, ending up with a salvo that's a deeply compelling mish-mash of metaphysics, resistance politics, science fiction, and what may or may not be pure nonsense:
"We ain't dead," said the children
Don't believe it
We just made ourselves invisible
Underwater stove top blue flame
Scientists
Come out with your scales up
The lyrical content is a great fit with Madlib's stoned-sounding production, last appreciated on this blog here.
If Jacaszek's "Lament," which I wrote about not long ago, is like what house music would sound like if it emerged from a Transylvanian castle, then Rod Modell's blurred, smeary track "red light" is what house music would sound like if someone were playing it to you in an attempt to bring you out of a very deep drug-induced coma.
Treny, the 2008 album by Jacaszek, can perhaps best be described by saying that it's what house music would sound like if house music emerged from a pre-industrial Eastern European castle instead of from the dance floors of post-industrial Detroit. (Or you can say it's like that band Enigma, only good.) Gloomy, crepuscular, capital-R Romantic, and pretentious: this is the kind of music that puts me in touch with my sexiest inner Goth. Envision blood and candlelight.
aught music: 2008: "bedroom costume" by natalie portman's shaved head
For as much as pop music ostensibly concerns itself with physicality and sexuality, it's surprisingly rare to find songs that really evoke the particulars of erotic exchange with any degree of specificity. So when I find one, I end up appreciating it with special zeal. Remember 2001, when I posted "Love With The Three of Us," to my knowledge the world's only great song about menage-a-trois? Anyway, now we're in 2008, and here's "Bedroom Costume," which is likely the world's only great song about the mutually beneficial relationship between a voyeur and an exhibitionist. Note especially the moment when the exhibitionist finally delivers her version of events, around 1:30—it's a moment that's equal parts heartbreaking sweetness and unbearable erotic ferment.
Earlier this fall, I sent the following to Twitter:
OK, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the song isn't really about marrying models--the title alone gives that away. But it should still be possible to write a song about pretending to be a huge success that would be a sort of free-wheeling celebration of lavish fantasy, and that isn't really what this song does either. In fact, on one level the song actually functions as a critique of the imagination, presenting it ultimately as a withdraw from the pleasures, sensations and interpersonal connections provided by existence:
I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I'll miss my sister and my father, miss my dog and my home
I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone
And yet the song's crowning touch is its assertion that, even despite these many sacrifices, total withdraw into insular fantasy ultimately remains preferable to bearing the disappointments of reality:
Yeah its overwhelming
But what else can we do
Get jobs in offices
and wake up for the morning commute?
The song takes a familiar rock-star fantasy, and by looking at it from a slightly different angle, reveals the suicidal ideation at its heart. This is genius at its bleakest, a glossy, upbeat anthem that seems intended for blasting on infinite repeat as you prepare your overdose.
Back when the Aught Music blog was covering 2005, I wrote that M.I.A. might be the Artist of the Decade, in part because she was the living embodiment of a number of important trends that defined music in the Aughts more broadly. To see that logic continue to play out, one need merely examine the rise of "Paper Planes."
It was released on M.I.A.'s second album, Kala, in 2007, but wasn't the lead single. (That was the likably weird "Boyz.") This track lay dormant until used as the backing track for the Pineapple Express trailer in early 2008, whereupon it blew up in a big way, permeating the culture until even the people who are arguably the biggest musical superstars in the world had to pay tribute. It's easy to see why: the second "Paper Planes" starts playing (about a minute in) is the exact moment this trailer starts to become cool:
Once upon a time it may have been possible to keep your categories separate: movie trailers over here, viral YouTube clips over here, music videos over here, commercials over there. But the Pineapple Express trailer neatly collapses all of these categories: I'd say that it single-handedly sold more copies of "Paper Planes" than any commercial could have, except that it actually is a commercial, for both the movie and the song. Except that it isn't. Except that it is.
One might see this as dispiriting: straight-up evidence that capitalism continues to mutate and evolve, spawning ever more pervasive forms. (The fact that the explicit topic of "Paper Planes" is the circulation of capital can be read as a crowning irony.) Or one might see it as a symbol of the unpredictability and ultimate richness of cultural cross-transmission. Probably it's a little of both, but the fact that a simple dance track can invoke these kinds of questions pretty much exemplifies the enjoyment that I derived from M.I.A. this decade.
If M.I.A.'s Arular was the first album I ever bought on the strength of tracks downloaded from MP3 blogs, then Amiina's Kurr was the first album I ever bought on the strength of hearing tracks through a streaming music service, specifically Last.fm, one of those websites that builds up a profile of what you've listened to in the past and then puts algorithms to work all in the name of figuring out what else you might want to hear. You liked Band X? You might like Band Y. That sort of thing.
The fact that these services exist still strikes me as quite amazing. Some virtual bot somewhere is hard at work identifying patterns in some vast torrent of data, just waiting for me to query it as to what it thinks I'll like? Even if the outputted results were crap, this would still qualify as a sign that we're living in a piece of science fiction. The fact that the outputted results are good— that a band like Amiina was among the first results the service ever gave me —is even more stirring: it fills me not just with wonder but also hope. We're in the future, and it isn't totally broken!
Amiina is a group comprised of four women, best known for their occasional service as Sigur Ros' backing band. Their music has all the elements that I admire in Sigur Ros— mystery, grandeur, icy beauty —with very little of the (masculine?) showboating that I sometimes detect in Sigur Ros' work: consequently, they're pretty much a perfect band to serve my way.
There will be some people who lament a culture in which people get our music recommendations not from other people but from robots. That may, in fact, be why you're here, reading this. So this is me, a fellow human, telling you that I think you should buy this record.
aught music: 2007 : "superheroes" by the toxic avenger
In the last years of the decade, I went back to listening to a lot of electronic dance music. Dormant since the late 1990s, this love was re-awakened by my discovery of terrific European techno acts like Daft Punk and Justice. Try as I might, I just can't resist this kind of music: my response to it, in fact, borders on the Pavlovian. Give me some fat synth lines and some dance-floor-destroying beats and my brain automatically responds by flooding my mesolimbic reward pathway with massive amounts of dopamine. Shameful, really.
Perhaps my reaction can be best illustrated with an audio-visual aid. Here's a video of myself dancing (in disguise no less!) to "Superheroes 2007," a track by The Toxic Avenger, an act who's less well-known than some of the other French techno practicioners, but every bit as fantastic. (Special thanks to K. for introducing me to him.)
aught music: 2007 : "friday night at the drive-in bingo" by jens lekman
Euro heart-throb Jens Lekman has an outsized personality, and that personality seems sometimes to be an equal mix of arrogance and self-deprecation. This is a combination that understandably makes him hard for some people to take, but to dismiss him too fast would be an error: he has unquestionable gifts as a song-writer, and his best tracks are characterized by sharp wit and a precision of observation which remains all too rare in the indie-pop scene. Night Falls Over Kortedala, the 2007 follow-up to his well-regarded 2005 album Oh You're So Silent, Jens, misses as often as it hits, but it ends on the great "Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo," a track which trenchantly sketches the way urban hipster youngsters like himself think about small-town life. Lekman points out the way that he/we cheerfully fetishize half-imagined "quaint" qualities of "the country," while simultaneously imagining ways that we can transform it into something more hipster-friendly, a process that would annihilate whatever sense of difference drew us there in the first place. Clever, insightful, and spry: it's songs like this that draw me to Lekman and keep me coming back.
I hesitate to say that 2006 was the year that mash-ups "grew up," because a youthful insouciance—even a brattiness—is really central to a good mash-up. It's not a form that can really be said to "mature." But 2006 was the year, it seems to me, that a few people began to realize that if they wanted to stand out they were going to need to do more than just line up a vocal track with a backing track that kinda fit with it in some kinda funny way. They were going to need to do much more. They were going to need to take it to a whole new level. Of the people who tried to complexify the form, the most impressive, for my money, was DJ Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, whose average track combines not two but dozens of culture's most memorable hooks, utterances and incantations. I wouldn't ever have thought that I'd buy an entire album of mash-ups, but Gillis' Night Ripper (2006) provides a pleasure-yield so concentrated that it easily qualifies as one of my favorites of the decade.
I still have a difficult time writing or even thinking coherently about Hurricane Katrina and its impact. I remember spending hours online in 2005, reading the news reports, my sensation of horror growing wider and deeper as the disaster unfolded. I strained to get a mental handle on the full scope of it, but never quite managed, certainly not enough to develop anything meaningful to say.
Fortunately, other people persevered where I quailed, and we now have our share of relevant statements on Katrina. If I were going to pick one song that "says something" lasting about the disaster, I'd choose Lil Wayne's "Georgia...Bush," a track that serves as quality evidence of Chuck D's famous assertion that hip-hop is the "CNN of Black America." In just under four minutes, Wayne discusses governmental incompetence at both the national and local levels, logistical difficulties for returning residents, conspiracy theories about the levees, and 1965’s Hurricane Benson. Wayne's political invective is satisfyingly inflammatory, but ultimately his verses provide no catharsis: he lingers on images of misery and death, leaving a lasting sensation only of irreperable harm, a thing that his anger—and ours—can't erase.
It's easier than ever to be a completist. The Internet makes it easy to track down a band's complete discography, and digital distribution hubs like the iTunes Music Store make it easy to cherry-pick far-flung tracks from B-sides, undesirable soundtracks, or weird compilations. But the completist bug never really bit me. There are lots of artists that I like, but no artist that I like with such intensity that I've felt compelled to track down everything they ever released.
I did, however, feel glimmers of that completist feeling in my relationship to a record label in the mid-Aughts, specifically Apestaartje, a Brooklyn-based electroacoustic label with an unweildy name (I'm still not sure how it's pronounced). Apestaartje's release history began in 1998, and by 2006 they were essentially my favorite label: I owned most (but not all) of their back catalog, and I would unquestioningly purchase any new record that they released.
M. Rösner's Morning Tones appears to be the label's final release (it came out in 2006 and nothing new has appeared since). Inasmuch as there can be a fitting way to close up shop, this album is it: it encapsulates everything that the label does well. Specifically: it arranges sounds that are clearly made by computers (sustained drones and busy chattering) next to sounds made by what I consider the most lovely of the acoustic instruments (acoustic guitar, piano, violin, and what may be an accordion). Specifically: it is minimalist, delicate, vaguely pastoral, a little bit sad. Even the title works as something of a small manifesto for the label, in the way that it uses the humble everyday beauty suggested by the adjective morning to humanize the slightly cerebral and abstract noun tones. I’m sad to see the label disappear, and sad to feel my nascent completist impulse come to an end, but every morning I wake to a playlist that contains most of the Apestaartje records, and I can confirm that they make a very satisfying set of morning tones indeed.
PS: As I wrote this post, I used time-lapse screen capturing software to record my writing process. It may entertain some of you to see the thing claw its way into sense:
aught music: 2006: "pieces of the people we love" by the rapture
For a short time in the mid-Aughts, I read a blog called "Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance Again." I don't read that blog any longer (it's been defunct since 2006) but the phrase that the author used for his title struck me as nicely zeitgeist-y at the time, and has stuck with me as a useful little sense-making tool, one way to reveal a pattern in the ebbing and flowing of trends over the course of the decade. Viewed through its lens, the long-ago 90s began to seem like a period when "alternative" or "indie" music lost touch with the kinesthetic impulse, surrendering the domain of repetitive beats to rival genres (electronica, hip-hop). If we accept that, then the Aughts begin to seem like a period wherein indie musicians reclaimed these pleasures, all at once remembering hey, moving your body? It feels good!
As a sense-making narrative, this one, like all others, simplifies some things and leaves others out, but it's not without its share of explanatory power, helping to put early-decade developments like the "electroclash" movement and Peaches' embrace of the banging 808 into a context that also includes dance-punk acts like !!! and the Rapture.
The Rapture's most lasting contribution to this story may have come early, with the cowbell-happy "House of Jealous Lovers" (2003), but their 2006 album Pieces of the People We Love represents a very fine extension of the energies therein, and it blows off the torpor that afflicts your average hipster at least as well as any other full-length rock album from this decade.
aught music: 2005: "your little hoodrat friend" by the hold steady
A few years back, I did some writing on the Hold Steady, noting that while their 2005 album Separation Sunday rarely strives, on a sonic level, to provide anything more than old-fashioned bar rock, it lyrically functions at a very high standard, ultimately emerging as a song cycle that rivals The Mountain Goats' great All Hail West Texas.
The characters on Separation Sunday are born-again Christians or people struggling with drug addiction, or both, and all activity on the record is permeated by an air of dead-endedness, although one punctuated by moments of clutching, desperate hope. See, for instance, this moment in "Your Little Hoodrat Friend":
Your little hoodrat friend's been calling me again
and I can't stand all the things that she sticks into her skin
like sharpened ballpoint pens and steel guitar strings
she says it hurts but its worth it
tiny little text etched into her neck
says "Jesus Christ lived and died for all our sins"
she's got blue-black ink and it's scratched into her lower back
By the mid-Aughts, a lot of people were creating new interfaces that allowed nerdy musicians to easily manipulate the sound chips in obsolete technology like the GameBoy or the Commodore 64, flooding the Internet with tunes built around old-school video game noises. Both forward-thinking and backward-glancing, 8-bit music got a fair share of attention, with no less a figure than Malcolm McLaren (smelling money no doubt) publicly pronouncing that 8-bit music was "the new punk rock." I enjoyed a lot of this music for its ability to produce bursts of nostalgic feeling in me, but "Comsten" is the only "gamewave" track I've ever heard that has the ability to truly approach the sublime. This track is frantic even at its outset, but it occasionally "powers up" into something so dense and frenzied that it threatens the mind's ability to process it. Eventually it disintegrates into a whirling torrent of annihilatory pleasure, with only a vamping, increasingly deranged melodic line to remind us that we're still somewhere within the big tent that is pop music.
aught music: 2005: "blood on our hands (justice remix)" by death from above 1979
"Blood on our Hands" is an unfathomably sleazy track from Death From Above 1979's unfathomably sleazy album You're A Woman, I'm A Machine (2004). By "unfathomable," I mean something that's almost bordering on "incomprehensible": trying to parse the lyrics leaves you with fragmentary phrases ("But the things that I've done to you") that don't connect to anything else in the song, but which definitely sound disreputable.
With this 2005 remix, the two French dudes in Justice have done something amazing: they have taken the original, scummed it up with the electronic squelch and big beats of European house music, and somehow made it even sleazier. Put this on when you want to feel adolescent and evil.
aught music: 2005: "berlin" by alva noto and ryuichi sakamoto
Insen is the second collaboration between the minimalist noise-sculptor Alva Noto and the airy pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto: a follow-up to Vrioon, from 2001. Taken together, these two albums stand far and away as the finest ambient electronic work to be released this decade: they are perhaps the only albums of the Aughts that serve as worthy successors to Brian Eno's canonical Music For Airports (1978). Like Eno's record, Insen is humanist and emotionally affecting without relying on music's traditional mechanisms for seizing attention: it is "as ignorable as it is interesting." But the album also distinguishes itself from the many Ambient clones that sprung up in Eno's wake, particularly through Noto's deployment of crisp, precise electronic micro-events. Noto superimposes mathematical grid-structures over the amorphous beauty of Sakamoto's piano lines, constraining them within structures of rationalist order, and preventing the album from drifting into the territory of toothless New Age music. Two collaborators operating at the top of their respective games, and yielding an absolutely perfect balance of elements.
Listen: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto >> "Berlin"
aught music: 2005: "losing my edge" by lcd soundsystem
I've already mentioned the fact that I thought a lot, in 2005, about being an aging music fan. And part of this may have been because 2005 marked the release of the best song ever written about being an aging music fan: LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge."
I'm losing my edge
To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin
I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets
and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties
The early portion of the song is a gauntlet of trenchant observation and self-lacerating humor: no music fan of my generation will pass through without it landing at least one palpable hit. But the song's best passage comes around the 5:45 mark, when James Murphy begins racing through a roll-call of "relevant" bands. It's as simple as a grocery list, but no other gesture this decade has more truly evoked what it feels like to be a music fan in the contemporary world: the terrifying sublimity that comes from having your very identity bound up in efforts to attain mastery over a spectrum of cultural material that is, for all practical purposes, infinite.
This Heat Pere Ubu Outsiders Nation of Ulysses Mars The Trojans The Black Dice Todd Terry the Germs Section 25 Althea and Donna Sexual Harrassment a-ha Pere Ubu Dorothy Ashby PIL the Fania All-Stars the Bar-Kays the Human League the Normal Lou Reed Scott Walker Monks Niagra Joy Division Lower 48 the Association Sun Ra Scientists Royal Trux 10cc Eric B. and Rakim Index Basic Channel Soulsonic Force Juan Atkins David Axelrod Electric Prunes Gil! Scott! Heron! the Slits Faust Mantronix Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines the Swans the Soft Cell the Sonics the Sonics the Sonics the Sonics....
aught music: 2005: "the guilt of uncomplicated thoughts" by brian mcbride
Brian McBride may be better known for his contributions as one half of the drone duo Stars of the Lid, a concern which produced some very excellent work this decade (perhaps most notably The Tired Sounds Of..., from 2002). Still, nothing in their discography adequately prepared me for an album with the impact, consistency, and emotional force of McBride's solo debut, When The Detail Lost Its Freedom. These songs are mostly instrumentals, but they convey a sense of grand sadness, profound yearning, and inconsolable loss more indelibly and expressively than the output of any number of the decade's mopey singer-songwriters. The lack of lyrical content invites speculation—was McBride coming out of a relationship? Was he leaving a place that he loved? Maybe both? Ultimately, however, not knowing gives the music a more universal appeal: it permits us to use these songs as soundtrack to our own woundedness, regardless of cause. This is potent stuff, however, so apply with the utmost caution.
aught music: 2005: "what's in store?" by architecture in helsinki
Around age 14 or 15—when I was first developing an identity as a music listener and collector—I thought of music as a window into adulthood, and I enjoyed listening to albums that I believed might provide some insight into the adult world (Paul Simon's Graceland is the one that first comes to mind). By the time I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I was living in Chicago, performing in a band, and beginning to make friends with people in other bands: I had begun to think of music as being something made by my peers. But now I'm 36, almost 37, and increasingly I think of music—especially pop music—as something that's made by "kids." Architecture in Helsinki's 2005 album, In Case We Die, is a personal milestone for me in this department: it was the first album I ever loved even though I knew, knew in my bones, that it was made by people substantially younger than me. It's slightly alarming to have lived long enough to have experienced this shift, but it doesn't make me like In Case We Die any less. In fact, the album embodies everything there is to like about young people: it's ambitious, creative, energetic, earnest, charismatic and sweet. Occasionally they reach for something that they can't quite achieve but the enthusiasm evident in the reaching is in and of itself enough to make my heart swell with adoration.
Is M.I.A. the artist of the decade? She wasn't my favorite artist of the last ten years, but there's a couple of things about her that neatly embody any number of trends that were important to the Aughts.
A lot of ink and pixels have already been expended on discussing her personality / biography/ brand, and it's likely that most readers of this blog already have an opinion. I will say this: love it or hate it, M.I.A.'s diaspora-inflected polyglot mashup identity—part refugee, part resistance fighter, part art-school hipster —puts her in a pretty good position to create songs about militaries, terrorists, prostitutes, hostages, and markets: all highly relevant subject matter for the Aughts. The fact that songs with these heady, even grim topics almost uniformly work as sure-fire dance-floor igniters is a small miracle unto itself. (Exhibit A: "10 Dollar.")
None of this might have mattered very much if M.I.A. didn't also have a keen grip on the mutating systems of musical distribution, another reason why she stands for me as a key cultural figure from the decade. She was not the first person to understand the mash-up, the remix, the calculated leak, the MP3, the file-sharing network, and the blog as the new decade's prime mechanisms of musical transmission, but she exploited that understanding with unusual canniness. Recall that prior to Arular's release, she and Diplo built buzz by integrating her vocal tracks into a mix (Piracy Funds Terrorism) and circulated that mix via the Internet. This move ended up being a wildly successful end-run around the traditional apparatus of music production and distribution, a stunning implementation of strategies and technologies that were, at the time, novel. What this meant, in my experience as a listener, is this: Arular is the first album I bought on the strengths of tracks I had downloaded from blogs.
As I think back to that story, I remember that when I went into Tower Records to purchase it, I was thwarted: the album hadn't come out yet. Thanks to the Internet, I had a few tracks from the record literally in my pocket, but the actual physical album hadn't yet made its way into existence. I didn't understand that as a sea change at the time, but in retrospect, with Tower Records now vanished from the earth, it kind of looks that way, and M.I.A. will probably forever stand as the artist who best embodies that transition for me.
aught music: 2004: "decay 2 [nihil's maw]" by sunn o)))
I wanted to end my 2004 write-ups with something big, and what could be "bigger" than the sound produced by drone-metal overlords Sunn O)))?
Their signature technique—play loud chords at dirge speed and through an unholy heap of amps—is nothing if not ably monolithic, but they're more interesting when they experiment with alternative routes to hugeness, as they do on their near-perfect 2004 album White 2. That album's closing track, "Decay2 [Nihil's Maw]," features some guitar, to be sure, but it's far more interested in the other sounds in its palette: the terrifying keenings, the yawning groans. In fact, the first sound identifiable as a guitar only arrives once the E-Bow kicks in around minute five, and by then we're well on our way, vertiginously descending into the vastest of hells.
2004 saw the release of a great four-album box set from Rune Grammofon producer Helge Sten, who records under the name "Deathprod." As the moniker suggests, this is music intended to be disquieting: it's mostly monochromatic Norwegian drone, made by grim electronic devices, raggedy violin, and some process of in-studio desecration that Sten refers to as the "audio virus" procedure. Even an adventurous listener might regard the prospect of four discs of this material with some degree of trepidation—but there are real rewards to be had here. Specifically, I'd point to the first four tracks on the Imaginary Songs From Tristan de Cunha disc, a suite of songs posing as field recordings from the remotest place on earth. Weathered and weird, the resulting tunes are finely imagined: they're recognizable as sounds produced by humans but they're alien enough that they can't be associated any existing genre of "music" ("world" or otherwise). Ultimately, they join the short list of great fake-ethnomusicology gags from this decade (a list that only contains one other item: the hilariously phony music that ran over the closing credits of Borat).
aught music: 2004: "america's most blunted" by madvillain
"They" say that every album has a particular drug that serves as the perfect accompaniment, accenting certain elements of the music in the same way that wine embellishes certain elements of a good meal. It's not hard to imagine examples: the twinkling polygons evoked in the mind when one listens to Aphex Twin probably look more vivid on Ecstasy, and I might understand the appeal of classic Rolling Stones more thoroughly if I were loaded on cheap beer. The quintessential example, of course, is marijuana, which has been involved in the production of so much music that one might reasonably feel the need to smoke up occasionally just to figure out what the hell is going on. Madvillainy, a 2004 album produced by the duo of hip hop producer Madlib and rapper MF Doom, is a prime example of an album that might benefit from the completion of this prerequisite: its cluttered yet warm production, lyrical obtuseness, unpredictable samples (including pontifications on time from Sun Ra), even its juvenile digressions and unfinished quality, all speak clearest to the mindset of somebody who is nicely toasted. So by the time we reach track six, "America's Most Blunted," the Madvillain dudes are pretty much double underscoring something that is dead obvious to begin with. But I'll be damned if every single second of it isn't pure delight.
I was introduced to this track by the poet (and Aught Music contributor) Eric Burger at one of our "listening parties," and I've been forever grateful. Eric and I both have an interest in the "moves" that pieces of artwork can make, especially those slippery artworks that change from one shape to another. Jazz and improvised musics are great for this purpose, and if asked to produce an example I might point to this piece from Norwegian quartet Food. For its first few minutes it sounds like a soundtrack to the Mesozoic Era: all primordial slime and calls from weird insects. But a few minutes in it's found its way into a strange metallic groove: it's as though a band of automata have emerged from the swamp to thrill the dawning world with funky robotic jazz. And then in its final moments it transforms again, into some kind of squawking contraption: the automata folding up and lifting off into space, perhaps. Watching this piece "move" from the uber-primal to the weirdly futuristic, makes it feel a little bit like you've just spent seven minutes looking out the window of a very nicely designed time machine.
aught music: 2004: "we all know" by devendra banhart
So 2004 brought us a bunch of records from personalities who seemed like a cast of characters emerging from some mouldering storybook universe: Joanna Newsom's wizened elf-princess, CocoRosie's creepy quasi-Victorian ghost sisters, and Devendra Banhart's lusty, bearded... gnome? Respective roles aside, one thing that's immediately apparent as soon as any of them open their mouths is that all of them, in their own ways, are staking out some piece of territory halfway between babbling child and croaking elder-thing, and none of them are doing this by way of settling in the middle-ground of conventional adulthood.
This approach was certain to annoy anyone with a low tolerance for quirk, but I've always had a strong attraction to High Weirdness, and consequently I think Newsom's Milk-Eyed Mender, CocoRosie's La Maison De Mon Reve, and Banhart's pair of 2004 albums (Rejoicing in the Hands and Nino Rojo) are four of the greatest albums of the decade. Each of them have their own strengths: Newsom's album is the one with the most lyrical complexity and metric inventiveness, and CocoRosie's is the one most willing to engage with the actual musical present (via the use of drum machines and electronic toys). But the two from Banhart remain my favorites of the group, in part because of the sheer hook-y goodness of the song-writing, and in part because the world-view Banhart puts forth is the one that most closely resembles what I like to think of as my own. On these two discs, the world is repeatedly presented as fundamentally polymorphous, mutable, erotic, holy, and joyous—check out, for instance, the track "We All Know," one track which comes pretty close to hitting each of those points.
We belong to the floating hand that's made from some animals
aught music: 2004: "diplo rhythm" by diplo (and co.)
Diplo's a white dude, but his DJ sets, mixtapes, and other musical projects frequently incorporate contributions from baile funk or Jamaician vocalists, or other samples drawn from the "Global South." How you respond to Diplo is going to be connected to how you respond to this sort of cultural activity. On a bad day, I might consider him a crass appropriator, or a kind of information-age colonial imperialist, utilizing the works of "authentic" brown people as a way of enriching his own "brand." But on a good day—when I'm more prone to admire the fluidity of cultural forms and the positive effects of cross-cultural transmission—I'm more likely to consider Diplo's work as an extended act of fandom, amplifying and popularizing a style of music that might normally have fallen outside of the listening scope of First World pop cosmopolitans like you or I. Still other days [!] I might argue that this type of music is actually the legitimate musical heritage of someone who grew up consuming the hybrid dance music(s) germinating in the hothouse environment of Florida's club scene. It's a complicated debate, and I don't really know where exactly I stand on it. But on the bright side, I've never been opposed to things that raise questions, and so the political and aesthetic concerns that circulate around a track like "Diplo Rhythm" (from his 2004 long-player Florida) may actually elevate it above a lot of other tracks that sound equally great on the dance floor.
Listen: Diplo (with Sandra Melody, Vybz Kartel, and Pantera os Danadinhos) >> "Diplo Rhythm"
As a fan of experimental guitar music, there were three artists whose work I followed closely throughout the Aughts: Christian Fennesz, Keith Rowe, and Oren Ambarchi. These players used a variety of unorthodox methods to expand the guitar's atmospheric and textural vocabulary, establishing the instrument's continued relevance to "post-guitar" genres like electronica, ambient music, minimalism, and drone.
All three of them were well worth watching—and the 2006 album Four Gentlemen of the Guitar where they jam together with non-guitarist Toshimaru Nakamura is essential—but I wanted to give Ambarchi a post of his own (this blog has already looked at Rowe and Fennesz, after all). And Ambarchi, comparatively, is no slouch: he released a string of great albums in the Aughts, beginning with Suspension (2001) and running up to In The Pendulum's Embrace (2007). The one that really stands out for me, though, is Grapes From The Estate (2004), a collection of four fantastic tracks which showcase Ambarchi at his best. "Corkscrew," the lead track, is like a black leather sofa made by an avant-garde designer: it can be appreciated either intellectually (for the originality and solidity of its structure) or sensually (for its lushness, richness, physical presence). This music is directed, stunningly confident, and highly recommended.
aught music: 2004: "the wrong way" by tv on the radio
The Aughts turned out to be a pretty good decade for soul music, thanks in part to standard-bearers and retro-minded torch-carriers (Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse, Jamie Lidell). But if you wanted to hear something that represented an approach to soul music that could be said to be "21st-century" in orientation, you could do a lot worse than to check out TV On The Radio, especially their first full-length studio album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. This album effectively takes an array of Black vocal stylings (given voice here by lead singer Tunde Adebimpe) and integrates it with the cluttered, loop-driven framework of post-Radiohead guitar rock. The fit isn't always clean, but having a few edges showing suits the band's millenial aesthetic, with its hints of neurosis and violence. Everything fits, even the parts that don't fit: what could be more twenty-first-century than that?
Sung Tongs is the album I think of as Animal Collective's "breakthrough record"—the first of their studio albums that lived up to the energy and promise of their live shows. As such, there are a lot of tracks worth writing about ("Leaf House" and "Who Could Win A Rabbit" are both exemplary) but when it came time to sit down and write, I immediately knew I wanted to pick this tiny incidental bit, less than a minute in length. Its emphasis on vocal harmonies and odd sonic textures make it instantly plain why some consider Animal Collective to be the "Beach Boys of the Aughts," but my fondness comes less from the way the song affirms some party line and more from its lyrical content. That's pretty funny, since the song only has one line, but when I hear it I never fail to imagine some high school kid not that different from myself at age 17—let's say sensitive, troubled, introspective and overwhelmed. I imagine him hearing the seven words this track has to offer, ideally through a haze of epiphany-making THC, and having his life suddenly change direction. I imagine that one day he will remember hearing this song as the exact moment at which everything began to get better.
If I can step outside of the field of music for a moment, I'd like to point out that 2004 was the year that marked the release of Katamari Damacy, a video game for the Playstation 2 that constitutes a cultural touchstone of the decade in its own quirky Japanese way.
Katamari Damacy—and its sequel, We Love Katamari (2005)— were beloved among people who didn't ordinarily love video games, and there were undoubtedly a lot of reasons for that. Some were won over by the game's innovative mechanics, others by its cutesy character design.
I kind of doubt that the game's kicking J-Pop soundtrack was the deciding factor that won over any holdouts, but on the other hand it probably didn't hurt. And even if you never played the game, you should still check out the music, if you have any interest in what global pop looks like in the Aughts. (This track backs the levels "Make A Star 2" and "Ursa Major.")
The National has always struck me as a band that's very much concerned with the project of narrating and interrogating what it means to be an adult male in the 21st century. For a taste of how they approach this project, you could check out their 2004 EP Cherry Tree. The seven songs here are models of male expression: from flirtatious and articulate to emotionally inept, from recklessly accusatory to sincerely conciliatory. No catalog of masculine musical modes, of course, is complete without a brag, and Cherry Tree contains a really good one in the form of its second track, "All The Wine." Listen to Matt Berninger's precision with language, his fresh approach to image and metaphor, and his controlled delivery. Dare to identify with the character he gives voice to here and you too can feel this confident, this competent, this, er, manly. You too can feel like you're put together beautifully. Like God is on your side.
aught music : 2003 : "regicide" and "reconstruction" by matmos
So around the time this blog first turned its attention to 2003, my sometimes-collaborator Laura Janine Mintz and I exchanged a few e-mails about doing a joint write-up on Matmos' The Civil War. We set up a collaborative Google document into which to post various fragments of commentary, with the idea that we'd somehow shape it into a finished product somewhere down the line.
We never quite managed to finish this. A bit of a shame, really: it would have reflected nicely upon the record, which, made by partners / lovers M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, is as fine a piece of harmonious musical collaboration as this decade has to offer.
Or is it? The album intially seems like an extended comment on life in contemporary polarized America—due in part to its sonic emphasis on militaristic sounds such as marches (listen, for example, to the album's opener, "Regicide") and due in part to the timing of its release (three years into the Bush presidency). But then you have Daniel himself claiming, in The Wire, that the album was at least partially inspired by "the domestic civil war between us as boyfriends and bandmates." So perhaps the creative dysfunction that de-engineered our fledgling roundtable was the more appropriate homage? Entropy saluting entropy? This is, after all, a band who has acknowledged a criticism that "all our songs are essentially the same: they start out with an orderly grid or set of patterns and then they fall apart and unravel."
But The Civil War builds things back up as much as it tears them down. Look, for instance, at "Reconstruction," which begins with "a noisy, chaotic section" and then resolves into "a very tranquil, melodic end." I include it here not only to make a point about creative processes but also to do justice to a statement by Laura, salvaged from our broken-down notes, where she says "This album is one of the best examples of an albumy album that I can think of. Sure, you can listen to one track, but you can't understand any of them without listening to all of them, and all hang together superbly without really sounding very much alike, apart from the endless beat of the march."
aught music : 2003 : "i've lived on a dirt road all my life" by manitoba
Here's how I imagine the Manitoba album Up In Flames came about: Kieran Hebden, a vinyl-collecting nerd, secludes himself in his bedroom with a trove of purloined break-beats which he proceeds to integrate into new sonic constructions, full of ornament and embellishment. To this task, he brings an omnivorous sensibility, raiding, in approximately equal measure, the fire energy of 60s jazz, the blasted-out, disorienting energy of late-80s-early-90s shoegazer rock, and the twentieth-century avant-garde love of sound for its own sake. He emerges with ten tracks that resemble Cornell boxes: idiosyncratic, meticulously built, self-contained, slightly airless yet weirdly vast. It's a deeply cerebral project, yet, like the best hermetic projects, it has, as its end, the aim of discovering something that is beautiful, blissed-out, and ecstatic.
aught music : 2003 : "while we have the sun" by mirah & ginger takahashi
Here's my contribution to the roundtable on Mirah and Ginger Takahashi's album Songs From The Black Mountain Music Project, currently being discussed at Aught Music:
This wonderful little album is valuable for many reasons, but not least because it functions as a documentation of a particular creative process. As explained in the liner notes:
"Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi went to Black Mountain, North Carolina in the cusp between summer and fall of 2002 to create music ... For one month, Mirah and Ginger lived a life that combined summer's carefree nonchalance with autumn's diligence. They stayed in a friend's grandmother's house, rode bikes through the six-block town, cooked with vegetables from the garden across the street, and played music every day. And they invited friends to come down for a few days at a time and help make an album to document it all."
One month is about a perfect chunk of time to complete a humble, human-scale creative project, and many of the songs on this album are essentially commenting on what it feels like to live a humble, human-scale, creative life. This crystallizes memorably on "While We Have The Sun," a tender meditation upon life and death:
If you want to shake whatever separates you from
The holiness you want to make your life on earth become
Live your life with a compassion you can be proud of
Then let your last breath fade away with dignity and love
One of my favorite musicians of all time is Markus Popp, aka Oval, who memorably explored the aesthetics of glitch, digital error, and algorithmic noise through a string of excellent albums in the late 1990s (most notably Systemich (1994), Dok (1998), and Szenariodisk (1999)). For most of the Aughts, however, he's been laying low: there's been no release under the Oval name since 2001, and the only other release Popp's been involved with since then is a 2003 collaboration with vocalist Eriko Toyoda, released under the name "So."
There are rumors that he's got something new in the works, but if he'd hung it up for good So would be a fitting swan song: it's perhaps the most delicate and affecting of any of the projects he's been involved with. Toyoda's vocals are wispy and fragile, and using them as source material has the effect of tempering Popp's tendency towards fragmentation. The aesthetic of sonic disassembly is still very much at work, but here it feels gentle, tender, maybe even romantic—less at exploding and more at undressing. The result is a vaguely erotic atmosphere of sound, a kind of polymorphous haze, through which we can glimpse mingled elements of men and women, ghosts and machines. A very fine, very beautiful, very human album.
aught music : 2003 : "bad news" and "don't be scared" by a.r.e. weapons
Here's my contribution to the roundtable on A.R.E. Weapons' self-titled debut album, currently being discussed at Aught Music.
In the story I heard, A.R.E. Weapons were signed to Rough Trade on the menacing energy of two early songs: "Black Mercedes" and "Street Gang." These songs are built around smoggy, murky electronics, and they feature vocals that mumble transgressive stuff about drugs and violence. Transgression sells, and it's easy to imagine the record company happily imagining that they were sitting on the next Suicide.
"Black Mercedes" and "Street Gang" are buried way at the end of the resultant full-length, however, and every other song on the album is in a completely different vein: specifically, a cheesy fist-pumping inspirational vein. It's pretty easy to imagine most of these songs as the soundtrack for a training montage in a 1980s sports film: the track "Bad News," in fact, is an explicit homage to the Bad News Bears.
The album never really loses its transgressive edge, though, so it almost ends up seeming like it's engaged in the project of prying the emotional pleasures of "positive" anthemic music away from jocks and giving it to the burnouts, druggies, and losers. Consequently, you end up with bonkers stuff like "Don't Be Scared," which contains verses like the following:
People think you're a sleaze
Cause you're down on your knees
Suckin dick, every night
Aw, that's alright
People think you're retarded
Maybe even cold-hearted
Cause you only care about yourself
You don't care bout no one else
People think you're a spazz
Just because you're a spazz
So what?
Spazz on, spazz
People think you're wrong, kid
Take it from me
You're doin all right
You're doin all right
Er... OK... but... are you just pulling my leg here? Is this some kind of album-length experiment in irony? Anyone who's ever felt like a loser can surely enjoy the endorphin rush "Don't Be Scared" provides, but is it really all right to only care about yourself?
I've been listening to this album steadily since 2003, and still can't quite puzzle out exactly what the band is up to. I intend this as nothing other than the highest praise.
aught music : 2003 : "mika rasvaa maan sisalla (part VII)" by uton
When trying to describe the one-man Finnish act Uton, I sometimes refer to it as "forest drone." But what the heck does that even mean?
Imagine it like this: you're deep within a Finnish forest, surrounded by whatever kind of old-world botany they've got there. Mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns. At dusk, you come upon a dark grove which contains has a weird cairn of slime-coated stones grouped around the base of a metal apparatus, which looks like a set of organ pipes with some kind a crank attached to it. It might be some forgotten European municipal project from the 1960s; it might be three hundred years old. Tough to tell. The crank is badly corroded, but you're still able to turn it. After you've given it one complete revolution, expecting nothing, the pipes tremble, cough out some brackish water, and then start to emit this music. Darkness continues to fall, and all at once the bioluminescent slime coating every surface around you begins to glow.
Here's my contribution to the roundtable on the Books' fine album The Lemon of Pink, currently being discussed over at Aught Music:
Thinking about mixtapes again. Back in the days when my mixtapes were actually tapes, I took obsessive pleasure in making sure that the mix "fit" precisely in the alloted space. No cutting songs off in the middle. No long stretches of emptiness that the recipient would need to fast-forward through before reaching the end of the side. It had to be perfect: if there was more than say, a minute of blank space left over, then there was room to fit in another song. Over time I developed pretty good mental repetoire of short songs, but I had also collected a library of other interesting fragments that could serve the same purpose: snippets of movie dialogue, sound effects, snatches of poetry, little pieces of radio dada, whatever.
I made a couple of mixes on audio tape in 2002 (I still have my roadtrip mix from that year) but by 2003 I think I'd switched to making mixes on CD-Rs for good. Which is kind of a shame, because "PS" from The Lemon of Pink would have made a great mix-ender.
It lasts for fifty-six seconds and it's not a song. It may once have been a fairly tender conversation, but the guys in the Books edited it down and then edited it down again until only uncomfortable interstitial bits remain—false starts, baffled laughter. In its final form, it's a model of yearning. It's a pure balance of the initmate and the awkward. And if that doesn't describe every single mixtape I ever made...
This song, unerringly focused on the most dreary aspects of the quotidian, uniquely captures the precise flavor of [my] depression. It's nominally upbeat, and it occasionally rallies into a nearly triumphant mode, but these are illusions: the emotions revealed here are nothing more than the tremulous bravery one musters while crumbling internally or, better, the sick sense of satisfaction that one is permitted to indulge in only at one's most wretched.
The casserole was good
and the drives were so nice
welcome to the worst part of your life
At the time it was released, Fog was one guy, Andrew Broder, who hailed from Minneapolis, MN—and, sure enough, this track sounds exactly like what one might produce in the midst of endless grey wintertime.
aught music : 2002 : "lightsabre cocksucking blues" by mclusky
"Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues" has one of the best titles ever, plus a fury and energy that enables it to surpass just about every other garage-rock scrapper from this decade. But the real reason I'm writing about it for this project is because it gives me an opportunity to link to Joel Veitch's Flash animation of the track being performed by kittens.
aught music : 2002 : "ghost plants (part VII)" by thuja
Back in 2002, I picked Thuja's Ghost Plants as my album of the year, and I wrote that it sounded like music composed by a tribe of mutants from the post-apocalyptic future, fiddling with the ruins of our industrial society. The truth of that is embodied nicely in this representative segment (the tracks are all untitled), which jettisons mostly everything about Western song structure and replaces it with little more than ominous electronic oscillations, clattering, grinding, sticks, stones. If you wait for something to "happen" in it you're liable to be disappointed, and yet if you listen to the crenellations and complications of its anti-formal forms with real attention, you will find that they are enormously rich in aesthetic interest, even beauty. Same as anything, I guess, but if that lesson is one that this album can teach then it's well worth the price.
aught music : 2002 : "insomnia" (excerpt) by maja ratkje
The subculture of "noise music" exploded during the last ten years, producing waves of output so challenging and vast that it's difficult to make even a partial listing of what might be the "best" noise tracks of the decade. That said, I definitely have my favorites, and if I were asked to direct someone to the peculiar pleasures that noise music can provide, I might choose this passage from Maja Ratkje's "Insomnia" (from her fantastically weird album Voice). Its primary sonic element is Ratkje's unnervingly delirious witch-howl, and you can brace yourself for that, but no amount of bracing will really prepare you for the moment that happens about twenty seconds in, when Ratkje's witch-woman abruptly multiplies into an entire armada, which proceeds to flay every living thing on the planet in an orgy of interstellar fury and glee. Terrifying stuff, but also undeniably exhilarating, and (if I'm to be completely honest) more than a little bit sexy.
aught music : 2002 : "human shield" by anti-pop consortium
One of the most enjoyable hip-hop acts to watch during the early part of the decade was the Anti-Pop Consortium. They only released two proper albums before splitting up but they managed to cram an incredible amount of disparate stuff into those albums: vintage analog synthesizers, robotic drum-machine programming, unusual lyrical inflections (dancehall and Nuyorican poetry-slam culture are both influences), gangsta fantasias, science-fiction imagery, affable clowning, sloganeering, skits, spaced-out marijuana-tinged studio fuckery… This cornucopia of pleasures doesn't attempt to fix what isn't broken—it's loaded with plenty of "classic" elements of hip-hop—but it also includes no shortage of oddball material, ultimately justifying its release on the Warp label (better known for releasing weird electronica like Autechre and Squarepusher). A representative track might be "Human Shield," from Arrythymia, structured around familiar hip-hop brags that then proceed to distort, skew, and push on towards more cyborg heights.
2002 is one of those years that marked something of a pendulum swing in my listening habits: immediately prior, there had been a couple of years where I'd been delving deep into instrumental music—post-rock stuff out of Chicago, experimental electronic ambient music out of Europe, etcetera. What had gotten kicked to the back burner were actual songs: you know, the things with actual people singing? With, like, verses and stuff?
So, in 2002, I tried to rectify this, buying a lot of material from indie songwriters. I'll confess that romance was a factor: I was beginning to get entangled with a songwriter, and I wanted badly to impress her with my mixtape skills. The relationship didn't survive, but I picked up some good music in the process, including the Rough Trade Antifolk compilation, which introduced me to a bunch of rough-edged talents whose music has been among some of the best I've discovered this decade (Kimya Dawson, Jeffrey Lewis).
A representative track from this compilation might be Brer Brian's "Harlem 99," an ode to being young, broke, and drunk in a big city.
We play Atari, we never play Doom
Last night we just caught a big mouse in my room
The fun never ends here, have you seen the broom?
I think I sold it.
The song is kind of jokey, but it has a sadness at its core that's hard to shake off once you're tuned in to it. I shared this song with the songwriter I was about to get involved with, and at the very end of our relationship she played me a cover version she'd made of it. I was quite literally floored. I like post-rock and experimental electronica as much as the next guy (if not way more), but only an actual song can knock a man down to the carpet and leave him there, aching.
I know that the music found on Minamo's album .kgs is made by human beings: they're from Japan, and I think there are four of them. But I like to imagine that the music is instead produced by some very elegant science fiction bauble that hovers near me and produces music that is custom-generated to be in maximum accordance with a very fine-grained model of my aesthetic tastes. You see, I like the sound of guitars, and I like the sound of bells and chimes, and I like repeating minimalist patterns, and I like smooth electronic drones, and I like abrasive noise, and I'm still not sure that human beings—even four very talented human beings from pre-earthquake Japan—can bring these elements together into the seamless, dense, beautiful flow that is basically every Minamo track ever. So, employing the principle of Occam's Razor, I conclude that I must be the lucky beneficiary of future-Earth devices that generate algorithmically-perfect music and then stream it backwards through time. And I'm OK with that.
aught music : 2002 : "the best ever death metal band in denton" by the mountain goats
This was my contribution to the All Hail West Texas roundtable, which happened last week at the Aught Music decade-in-review blog:
I've sort of given up on the idea that songs should tell stories. When a song can glean so much potency and emotional force from the use of non-narrative devices such as direct address ("Love, love me do") or declarative expression ("I got soul / and I'm super bad"), one begins to develop a skepticism towards the whole endeavor of burdening songs with narrative elements.
Of course, a tradition doesn't last for five hundred years unless there's good work being done within it, and so it stands to reason that the Aughts might contain their share of good narrative songs. Someone hunting for these need look no further than the Mountain Goats' 2002 album All Hail West Texas, which explicitly states its narrative intentions directly on its album cover: "fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys."
I've never been exactly able to work out which of the fourteen songs were supposed to be about which of the seven people, but why quibble? Especially when the album contains mini-narratives like "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton," which lasts two minutes and thirty-six seconds and is one of the best stories told this decade, in any medium, period.
aught music : 2001 : "harder better faster stronger" by daft punk
Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my tenth post for that project (my sixth for 2001).
Geeks love technology. It's easy to see why: when you're using technology well, using it to amplify your skills and talents, it can make you feel competent, effective, powerful—maybe even a bit high. This weird endorphin rush is nicely evoked by this track ("Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"), coming to us courtesy of the two French geeks who comprise Daft Punk. Of course, the ubiquitous spread of technology has its drawbacks, and they're embodied here too: "more than ever / our work is never over," sing the robots, revealing the diabolical catch embedded in the bargain with perfect clarity. This summation of the human relationship to tech is concise and tidy, and can be appreciated on an intellectual level, but if you appreciate it on only an intellectual level you're missing the point: this is a dance song, and dance songs are less about what they make you think and more about what they make you do. (Specifically, what they make your feet and your hips and your ass do.) In this region as well, the song excels: it redoubles in sheer awesomeness roughly every thirty seconds. Perhaps my favorite dance song of the decade.
aught music : 2001 : "forcefield" by lightning bolt
Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my ninth post for that project (my fifth for 2001).
By 2001, American punk looked, at least to this observer, like a pair of rather stagnant pools. On the one hand you had the pop-punk of the mainstream, recombining the increasingly empty signifiers of "Punk" in search of market value. On the other hand you had the underground, but only the most dedicated delvers could find the gems sunk within in its dispiriting glut. Then along came Rhode Island duo Lightning Bolt. Their album Ride the Skies, aside from being excellent, is also snotty, annoying, libidinal, minimalist, spastic, and palpably gleeful. In short, it contains, in a very pure form, nearly every pleasure that punk music ever provided.
Depsite this, I balk at calling Lightning Bolt "punk," exactly: they're really too weird and ecstatic for the label to fit. Maybe you could call them "art punk." This is a little more apt, given their affiliation with the Providence / RISD scene of the early Aughts. This scene—infamously centered around the "Fort Thunder" art space—got known for its brilliant, damaged, psychedelic visual aesthetic, to which Lightning Bolt's music is the precise sonic analogue.
aught music : 2001 : "tonight was a disaster" and "number ten" by casiotone for the painfully alone
Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my eighth post for that project (my fourth for 2001).
Some folks will tell you that the saddest instrument in the world is perhaps the Spanish guitar, but I know better: the saddest instrument in the world is the thrift-store synthesizer. As Exhibit A, I present you with "Tonight Was A Disaster," by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, the solo project of Californian depressive Owen Ashworth. The instrumental bridge that commences right at the track's midpoint is probably the most plaintive forty seconds 2001 has to offer; pathetic in a classical sense.
As a bonus, I'll throw in "Number Ten," a song which concludes with a uniquely heartfelt usage of searing circuit-bent noise. It sounds pretty much like a dental drill banging around inside a washing machine, and yet it's also unmistakably the sound that rages in your skull when you're in the middle of having your heart broken.
aught music : 2001 : "i want wind to blow" by the microphones
Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my seventh post for that project (my third for 2001).
Readers of this blog may have notes that it's at least in part devoted to celebrating those clusters of memories which indelibly link specific albums to specific times and places. A partial listing of my own albums that feature in such memories might include Patti Smith's Horses (the soundtrack to my first apartment in Tucson) and Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die (the soundtrack to my final apartment in Tucson). By 2001, however, I'd left that city for the crumble and overcast glory of Chicago, and one of the first albums I listened to death there was The Glow, Pt. 2 by the Microphones. Its ramshackle song structures, ultra-low-fi production, and mumbled lyrics ("The sound of cars / the smell of bars / the awful feeling of electric heat") still evoke the feeling of being in that cramped apartment, surrounded by compact discs and books, looking out the window at the wires and brick of North California Avenue, feeling wistful for relationships that had ended, and generally being a man in my late twenties in every possible way.
Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my sixth post for that project (my second for 2001).
The music world, collaborative and promiscuous by its very nature, tends to generate its share of "strange bedfellows"-type alliances. A good example could be seen by those who kept an eye on psychedelic music throughout the Aughts: early in the decade that scene was characterized by a lot of heady cultural exchange between the free folk subculture and the drone subculture. This fecund blooming of partnerships between two microgenres of music that didn't look that similar on the surface was puzzling: both groups were obviously interested in prying at the doors of perception, but was there really a meaningful sonic kinship, or were these just folks who got along because they liked the same drugs? For my money, this is still an open question, but it's helpful, now as then, to have the band Pelt to gesture at as an illustration of the potency of the allegiance. Everything seemed to flow into them—Fahey-esque Americana guitar, Indian raga structure, ethno-drone instruments from around the globe, acid-trip logic, the blasted-out hum of post-Sonic Youth rock amplification—and from this nexus materialized this campfire apparation: the 2001 double album Ayahuasca. This album maintains real value for me as an awesome synthesis of disparate influences.
Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my fourth post for that project:
No discussion of the music of the Aughts is complete without reference to Norway's Rune Grammofon, perhaps the single most consistently intriguing label of the decade.
One reason this label's releases appealed to me so strongly was because of their eclecticism. They adhered to no particular genre stricture, and consequently they were free to romp across an intimidatingly broad expanse: their discography includes albums of electronica, modern composition, cerebral jazz, stark drone... They seemed perhaps happiest releasing albums that violated genre boundaries in and of themselves, or otherwise proved hard to classify. As evidence, one need look no further than their very first album, Supersilent's 1-3 (1998): a three-hour, three-disc set consisting mainly of free improvisational pieces that unexpectedly melt down into passages of electronic abrasion.
But today I want to talk about something prettier. Specifically, Rune Grammofon's 15th release, Nils Økland's Straum (2000), an album consisting primarily of fiddle music. It's very lovely, but no less of a damned thing in terms of classification. This track, "Var," for fiddle, piano, trumpet, and voice, is airy and drifty enough that it could fit on a New Age sampler without incident, and yet it's impossible to listen closely to the piece without noting its roots in jazz and improvisation. And Økland's playing the Hardangar fiddle, a traditional instrument of Norway, so maybe we should be talking about it in terms of "folk music?" Or should he be treated as a composer for the fiddle, creating something that fits that oxymoronic category, "modern classical?"
Sigh. One really shouldn't agonize over something this beautiful.
aught music : 2000 : "feel good hit of the summer," by queens of the stone age
Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my third post for that project:
Queens of the Stone Age is a band featuring the guy who used to be in Kyuss, which is kind of a dubious pedigree as far as I'm concerned, and I wouldn't say that they were a great band. But I'm glad they existed, if only for "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," a song in which the lyrical content consists entirely of a list of recreational drugs, repeated unto excess. Should you appreciate it as a song built around a formal constraint? Or as a uniquely explicit representation of the Dionysian linkage between substance abuse and rock musicianship? Uh, sure, but for my money the song's real value simply inheres in the way it evokes a lifestyle so hedonistic that it would kill the most of us very quickly, were we to adopt it. This ignites a special kind of vicarious pleasure in the listener's head, and I'd argue that that type of pleasure is one of the fundamental reasons popular music even exists in the first place. Enjoy!
Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my second post for that project:
Most anyone who has spent much time making mixes has made at least one mix that was intended for a person who they were romantically interested in. To really make a "courtship mix" with the requisite fervor, one must believe that certain songs possess an almost magical capacity to seduce the listener. People who believe this, of course, are themselves not immune to the seductive capacity of song, and may in fact be even more susceptible to it than the average person. And so, every once in a while, a mix-maker comes upon a song that causes them to fall into swoon, and they can only hope that this song will never be aimed at them with seductive intent, for they know in their bones that they would be helpless to resist whoever wielded it. To many people, Mirah's 2000 track "Sweepstakes Prize" may simply be a run-of-the-mill indie-pop confection, but when I first heard it I knew it was a song that was personally irresistible, and I reacted to my discovery of it with a sort of hideous chill, the same way one might react to discovering a bullet with one's name engraved upon it.
Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my first post for that project:
Rich Thomas and I occasionally debate which music-related events from the 1990s cast the longest shadow over the music of the Aughts. At the top of my list is usually the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's great Anthology of American Folk Music. Pretty much everyone who bought a copy of the reissued Anthology immediately went out and bought a banjo or a fiddle, and would end up doing at least a short stint in a freak-folk band by the end of the decade. Needless to say, this also led to a lot of engaging head-clutching about issues of authenticity and fake authenticity: i.e., is is OK to go around emulating the music of (say) hardscrabble West Virginian working-class people if you're (say) a white kid from some middle-class suburb somewhere? But issues of authenticity are awfully tricky, and this fact is nicely pointed out by cultural wag Momus on his 2000 album Folktronica. This track, "Mountain Music," points out (and embraces?) the oddity of appropriating old-time music for a modern context while simultaneously critiquing our entire notion of authenticity, pointing out the ways in which it's a distorting (and comforting) illusion. Representative verse: "It never was so simple / it never was so pure / the folks who made it never were / so ignorant and poor / They traveled round the world / and never stayed where they belonged / and if they had we'd never have / these lovely mountain songs."
If I were ever to find myself in a position in which I needed to commission artists to write the score for a video game, one of the first people I might turn to would be Parts & Labor keyboardist Dan Friel. The noise-pop miniatures found on his solo release Ghost Town don't make direct use of 8-bit "chiptune" samples (there are enough other people doing that already, often to great effect) but a track like "Buzzards" nevertheless perfectly captures the essence of old-school video games, evoking an aura of propulsion, navigation, collection, and triumph.
...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like.
In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Bristol noise scene sagely decide to try to use structure and rhythm to harness some of the energy and intensity of noise music, in the interest of getting it to yield something amazing. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Wild success. Interestingly, substitute "punk music" for "noise music" and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms' Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade's most awesome trilogy. Thanks to Nancy P. and Steve F., who both correctly intuited that I would like this album.
And that concludes this year's top ten. Want them all in a single post for easier linking purposes? Try here. The MP3s should remain up for at least another few weeks.
