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.
Sorry this blog has been all about the music-writing (and not much else) lately, my attention has been consumed by the Aught Music blog. It's not that there's nothing else on my mind, it's just that writing for (and curating) that blog siphons off almost all my blogging energy. I've gotten a bit ahead in these last few days, though, and will try to record some other thoughts in this space soon.
In the meantime, here's, uh, more music-writing actually, but in a different form:
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."
A few weeks ago, I sent out this e-mail to a particular circle of friends:
Hi there, everyone.
If you're receiving this e-mail, it means that you're a friend with whom I've exchanged music at least once or twice in the last ten years. It also means that I know you to be a person who holds opinions about music, possibly passionate ones, and that I trust your opinions (even though they may not align exactly with mine). In other words, you are the people with whom I'd consider starting a project that involves music.
So here's the idea. Many of you know that for most of the last ten years I have made "end of year" mixes and lists trying to capture small and idiosyncratic snapshots of what the year in music looked like. I've been thinking, this year, of doing something "big" for the end of the decade, but couldn't decide exactly what I wanted to do, especially given the usual limits of time and energy. Then today it hit me: what I really wanted to do is something that wasn't just a solo project, but rather something that was collaborative, something that would involve the people who (in one way or another) who helped to define what this decade's musical landscape looked like for me.
So here's the plan.
I have acquired a blogspot domain with which we can play—http://aughtmusic.blogspot.com. From June 1, 2009 until Jan 1, 2010, I plan on posting at least few tracks a week (as MP3s) to this blog, along with short appreciative write-ups. I don't intend on writing them all myself, though, or even choosing all the tracks—that wouldn't be very collaborative, would it?
So here's how you can help out:
1) Pick a song you like.
2) Write a short appreciation of it. By "short" I mean that around a paragraph is fine, but longer is OK too. [Note: I'm intending to proceed chronologically, starting with a few weeks devoted to songs / tracks released in 2000, and moving forward from there, finally wrapping up with 2009 around the end of the year. So for now, I'm only collecting write-ups for tracks released in 2000. I'll let you know when we're getting ready to move on to 2001.]
3) Send me the appreciation in an e-mail, and attach an MP3 version of the track. [If the track is too long to fit comfortably as an attachment, or if your e-mail client balks for some other reason, touch base with me—we can work something out.]
4) Repeat as desired.
That's it! I can host the file and handle the back-end leg-work of turning your write-up into a blog post.
Collectively, you form a very eclectic group, but this seemed like a good way that we could all share our opinions with one another, enjoy some camraderie, and end up with a nice collection that celebrates a decade of good music. What say you?
The project is currently underway—you can check it out here. I've been pleased enough with this project's first phase that I'm expanding my call for participation. So if you're interested, drop me a line here or through the usual channels. (The intake of entries for the year 2000 is now closed, but I'm accepting write-ups of stuff from 2001 until June 21st.)
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.
Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.
Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year’s Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you’ve ever seen and you’ve got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.
There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)
Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.
As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).
Back when I lived in Chicago, I saw Scott Tuma perform a bunch of times as part of the exemplary Good Stuff House trio, so I knew he was one of the more interesting experimental guitarists out there. But that didn't adequately prepare me to expect him to release this beautiful and curiously moving album of Americana folk guitar. It retains its "experimental" status by including a few left-of-center gestures, but it's more heartfelt than it is cerebral. Thanks to Chris M. for sending this along.
The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.
A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.
Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.
A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.
The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.
Back when I lived in Chicago, I saw Scott Tuma perform a bunch of times as part of the exemplary Good Stuff House trio, so I knew he was one of the more interesting experimental guitarists out there. But that didn't adequately prepare me to expect him to release this beautiful and curiously moving album of Americana folk guitar. It retains its "experimental" status by including a few left-of-center gestures, but it's more heartfelt than it is cerebral. Thanks to Chris M. for sending this along.
As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).
Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.
There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)
Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year's Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you’ve ever seen and you’ve got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.
Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.
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.
In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Brixton noise scene decide, and rightfully so, that the energy and intensity of noise music could yield something amazing if it were harnessed by structure and rhythm. So they give it a try. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! 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.
Yes, we're in the final throes of 2008, which means that once again I come to you with my top ten albums of the year (with MP3s!), stretched out over ten posts to "build suspense."
Without further ado, then, I bring you...
10. Juana Molina, Un Dia
Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.
the overdriven landscape: summons of shining ruins
A nice album from 2007 that crept under my radar until I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago is the self-titled debut release from Japanese one-man band Summons of Shining Ruins [MySpace]. The pieces are mostly made with guitar drone and tape echo, which puts me in mind of acts like Rafael Toral and Area C (and anyone who likes those acts should definitely check this out), but this album also has a melancholic sweep and grandeur that sets it apart. You could almost imagine it as having been cut from the same cloth that makes up M83's overdriven electronic anthems, although you'd have to imagine viewing that "cloth" under an electron microscrope, blown up from a detail into a texture into an infinite landscape.
The Summons of Shining Ruins debut is available through Moufu-Rokuon, as is this year's "sequel release," entitled "Summons of Shining Ruins 2." Also available is a collaboration (dated 2009?) between the Summons of Shining Ruins dude (Shinobu Nemoto) and another gentleman, Brian Grainger, who some of you may know as a result of his very fine release Autumn Soil Feedback (2008).
You know that LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge," when aging hipster James Murphy remarks on kids who are full of "nostalgia for the unremembered 80s?" If you imagined a band entirely composed of those sorts of kids, you might have "Natalie Portman's Shaved Head," an unfortunately-named and yet shockingly entertaining band out of Seattle.
Their 2008 album, Glistening Pleasure, is the sort of album made by hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced. Ultimately what they've delivered is the best party-album parody since Beck's Midnite Vultures (and maybe better, since Glistening Pleasure doesn't seem to have the queasy racist undercurrents that mar Vultures' good-time vibe.)
I'm generally a believer in the idea that artists should grow and change through time, continuing to experiment and try new paths. So the fact that the songs that Mark Kozelek is currently recording in Sun Kil Moon are essentially indistinguishably compatible with the songs that Mark Kozelek was recording ten years ago with the Red House Painters should at least theoretically come as a disappointment.
On the other hand, in times of great change and personal upheaval there's a certain reassurance to be found in constancy, and the fact that I'm going through such a time right now should suggest that I could find these new songs to be a comfort.
But then again this is Mark Kozelek we're talking about, whose songs, although often calm on the surface, are not known for their psychologically uplifting qualities.
track of the week: "ambiguity song," by camper van beethoven
I've never really loved the use of "Indie" as a genre designator: I do use it, in my obsessively-maintained iTunes taxonomy, but its connection to the commercial dimension of the music world has always made it function a bit uncomfortably for me. The R.E.M. that produced Document (for independent label I.R.S.) sounds pretty much the same as the R.E.M. that produced Green (for major label Warner Brothers), so are some of those tracks "indie" and not others? What about the fact that I.R.S. itself was bought by EMI in 1994? And today's climate, teeming with subsidiary labels and imprints, makes it even harder to keep score, and if you were attempting to be rigorous in your use of the designator you'd drive apart bands who were making essentially the same style of music.
The option iTunes suggests, "Alternative & Punk," is another genre designator I've never loved, for reasons that don't require further explanation here. If I had my way, I'd go back to a label that seems to have fallen into disuse: "college rock," which I mainly remember from my own pre-college days, looking over the "Charts" page in issues of Rolling Stone, back in the late 80s.
That brings us to today's track, by quintessential college rock band Camper Van Beethoven: "Ambiguity Song." I'm feeling myself to be in a pretty ambiguous space lately, and so this song nicely captures my head-space some days. Unlike the concepts of "college rock" or "indie rock," the concept of ambiguity is one that does not quickly grow dated.
track of the week: " f/b (e) electric," by derek bailey
Anyone who comes to this blog for the music should already know Derek Bailey (1930-2005), famous for his idiosyncratic approach to free-improvisation guitar. Bailey spent his entire life relentlessly developing and re-inventing this approach, but ask someone to define Bailey's "signature style," and they're likely to describe something fragmented, discontinuous, flinty, and angular, like say, for instance, this track ("M9") from his representative 1975 album Improvisation.
But the Bailey catalog is forty-odd years of documentation of an especially rich creative process: consequently, it's also full of oddities, left turns, and intriguing digressions. One of the most compelling of these, for my money, is the 2000 album String Theory, a suite of experiments exploring the potential of guitar feedback. This track, "F/B (E) Electric," explores the dynamics of long sustained tones as finely as any drone I've heard, and would fit sublimely on a playlist of stark minimalist electronica.
Cross-posted to my intermittently-updated MP3 blog, Raccoon Audio.
The new issue of Signal to Noise (#47, Fall 2007) has in it a long-ish write-up on the Chicago "drone scene," taking as its fulcrum the festival I helped to organize this past summer, Fugue State.
Below are scans of a few pages, for those of you who ever wanted to see my picture in a magazine (click for full size).
Also please note that the Chicago debut of Flux Bouquet, a duo made up of Chicago melodic dronesters Chris Miller and Steve Fors, will be this Thursday night, at Schubas. Over and out.
Yesterday I posted my "musical eclecticism" score—87/100, I'll remind you all—but, if the truth be told, technologies of the last ten years have made it easier than ever before to have a vast collection of music, and to enjoy the accompanying eclectic taste. (A partial list, roughly in the order of my experience with them: CD burners, file-sharing networks, the iPod and other MP3 players, MP3 blogs, MySpace, the iTunes music store, Last.fm.)
I do believe that the ability to randomly access a huge stockpile of cultural material, literally at the press of a button, has begun to yield a generation of listeners for whom strictly drawn genre lines hold no authority or appeal. Which maybe goes part of the way towards explaining the preponderance of unusual genre-crossing guest stars that have been cropping up in my listening this year.
A team-up like MIA and Timbaland (on "Come Around," from Kala) elicits a little bit of head-scratching, but they're basically operating at different points of a single genre continuum: it's exactly the same bit of insider patronage that inspired the Missy Elliot / Lady Sovereign pairup from last year. You need to make that genre continuum even broader to make sense of "Flashlight Fight," a Go! Team track featuring Chuck D (which functions downright beautifully and instantly reduces the distance between the two to nothing). But there's no genre large enough to legitimate the pedigree of "Poisenville Kids No Wins," which pairs apocalyptic Def Jux rapper/producer El-P and depressive indie-rocker Cat Power. But the muttishness of it works sublimely: although she's reduced to sample-status in the first half, she emerges as a Shirley-Bassey-level force around the piece's midpoint.
So I've been playing around with Last.fm enough now that it's begun to serve up recommendations for me... But take a look at this list:
The near-total lack of signifying language here delights me, even as it reveals something about my lifelong pursuit of oddity.
It is also perhaps worth noting that I recently took something called the "Eclectic" quiz, which uses a script located here to take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile, and then collect the top five "similar artists" of each of these 20. Combining any duplicates, the resulting number of unique artists is your quote-unquote "eclectic score." Since this post is obviously shaping up to be a brag, I don't hesitate to post my results here:
87/100
The script is kind enough to print out the full list of "similar artists" that pops up: the 87 related artists for my profile are:
!!!, Aaron Dilloway, Aen, Aki Tsuyuko, Animal Collective, Antony Milton, Avarus, Belle and Sebastian, Ben Reynolds, Birchville Cat Motel, Boards of Canada, Braspyreet, Broken Social Scene, Burning Star Core (2), Caribou, Cat Power (2), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, DJ Danger Mouse, Daft Punk, DangerDoom, Dialing In, Diplo, Directing Hand, Double Leopards (2), Feist, Fonica, Four Tet, Fourcolor, Fursaxa, Go Home Productions, Hala Strana, Hot Chip, In The Country, Iron & Wine (2), Islaja, Joanna Newsom (2), Junior Boys, Keijo, LCD Soundsystem (2), Lady Sovereign, Lau Nau, Lenlow, M. Ward, M.I.A., M.I.A./Diplo, MF DOOM, Madlib, Manitoba, Massive Attack, MoHa!, Mouthus, Naph, Neutral Milk Hotel, Noah Opponent, Okkervil River, Paavoharju, Peter Wright, Phonophani, Pilchard, Quasimoto, Ratatat, Rilo Kiley, Röyksopp, SPUNK, Sack & Blumm, Sawako (2), Seht, Sogar, Spank Rock (2), Spoon, Sufjan Stevens (3), Svalastog, Taurpis Tula, Taylor Deupree, The Arcade Fire, The Dead C (2), The Decemberists (3), The Knife, The Rapture, The Shins, Thievery Corporation, Viktor Vaughn, Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Zero 7, dj BC, of Montreal
Clicking on the above image will take you to a PDF of the poster, sized at 8.5" x 11", if for some reason you want to see it larger or make a print of it.
It should be a lovely time. If any Chicago-area readers of this blog are able to make it out, I'd love to see you and say hi.
Back in May I made some brief remarks about "Fugue State," a two-day festival curated by Rebis (the record label I co-operate). I thought I'd take the time to post the full details here for readers of this blog who are into the experimental music and might be interested in visiting Chicago in two weeks...
On Friday, June 29th, and Saturday, June 30th, Rebis will present Fugue State, a two-night festival of expansive experimental music taking place at the Empty Bottle club in Chicago, IL. Fugue State is a celebration of the drone in all its many manifestations, as interpreted by some of Chicago's most innovative musicians. An eclectic array of approaches to soundforging will be represented over these two nights, ranging from harsh noise to gentle melodicism and from crafted composition to spontaneous improvisation, often within a single set. Five acts will perform each night.
A visual art component of the artists' choosing will accompany each act. Some acts will present visuals of their own creation, while others are collaborating with a visual artist to provide accompaniment to their live set. A variety of media will be represented, including film, live video manipulation, and other forms of visual expression.
schedule
Friday, June 29 (6/29): DRMWPN Haptic Goldblood Matt Clark The Number None
Saturday, June 30 (6/30): David Daniell The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush Good Stuff House The Zoo Wheel Estesombelo
artist bios
Friday, June 29:
DRMWPN Over the past 2 years, DRMWPN (aka Dreamweapon) has gradually evolved to become the premier band operating at the nexus of the many divergent strains of experimental music in Chicago. Originally intended to be an outlet to showcase the more Dionysian improvisational impulses of the core members of Town & Country (Ben Vida, Jim Dorling, Liz Payne, Ben Abrams), DRMWPN has grown into an amorphous collective that at any given show may include Michael Zerang, Emmett Kelly, Rob AA Lowe, or any other number of Chicago's free rock/jazz/experimental luminaries among its ranks. Drawing on a shared knowledge and love of minimalism, ethnic devotional music, jazz, rock, and improvised ecstatic sound, DRMWPN's sublime live sets are augmented by the flickering hallucinatory generations of their Bryon Gysin-designed dream machine.
Haptic + Lisa Slodki Haptic is a Chicago-based trio consisting of Steven Hess (Pan American, Dropp Ensemble, On, Fessenden), Joseph Mills (Jonathan Chen, Dropp Ensemble), and Adam Sonderberg (Civil War, Dropp Ensemble) that creates dense, drone-based works that can range from a rigorous minimalism to violent, carefully directed chaos. Initially conceived as a vehicle for live collaboration, Haptic has incorporated a different, rotating fourth member for each performance. Formed in the spring of 2005, Haptic has since collaborated with a diverse group of luminaries, including Tony Buck (The Necks), Olivia Block, David Daniell (San Agustin), and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded). http://www.myspace.com/hapticmusic
For Fugue State, Haptic’s floating fourth member will be Lisa Slodki (a.k.a. Noise Crush). Noise Crush combines generative and found media to perform live video manipulation. Through the use of digital and analog mixing, her work engages with human gesture and dissonant emotional states. Seamless looping and overlapping junctures between images are the focus of her live performances. http://www.noisecrush.com
Good Stuff House Good Stuff House is the collaborative project of Matt Christensen and Mike Weis (Zelienople), and Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble). Starting with rock elements (drums, guitar, keyboards) and augmenting them with other non-standard instrumentation (harmonica, electronics, reeds, salvaged carillon bells and string and percussion instruments of their own design), Good Stuff House turns these raw ingredients into a psychedelic stew flavored with just a hint of raw Americana. Atmospheric folk drift that lulls one moment, then menaces the next. http://www.zelienoplemusic.com
Matt Clark Matt Clark is a mainstay of the Chicago rock/psych/improv circuit, having paid his dues over the past several years in many of the Windy City's most feted bands, including Joan of Arc and Pinebender. Matt's tunefully psychedelic guitar leads have most recently been parsed out among his current collaborative projects Ambulette, White/Light, and White Lichens. For Fugue State, Clark is going it solo the first night, and lending his talents to David Daniell’s headlining ensemble on the second.
The Number None Number None is the duo of Chris Miller and Jeremy Bushnell, who force an ever-shifting variety of instrumentation (analog electronics, violin, harmonium, children's toys, found records, metals, thumb piano) through bewildering arrays of scavenged effects pedals and homegrown digital patches until they reaches that zone "where even open-ended words like 'free' or 'drone' are limiting." (Scott McKeating, Stylus Magazine) The Number None is the moniker they adapt when they incorporate a third player as a random element; for the Fugue State performance they will be joined by Andre Foisy, one half of the up-and-coming drone/noise act Locrian. http://www.myspace.com/numbernone http://www.imaginaryyear.com/rebis/number_none.html
Saturday, June 30:
David Daniell Recent Chicago transplant David Daniell (Antiopic, Table of the Elements), formerly of improvisational out rock trio San Agustin, has in recent years become a favorite guitarist of the minimalist rock/drone set, collaborating with stalwarts such as Rhys Chatham, Jonathan Kane, Thurston Moore, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and Tim Barnes, as well as releasing several sublime solo albums. For this performance, Daniell has assembled a contingent of stellar local musicians mining similar veins of deep sound, including Jim Becker (Califone), Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc), Matt Clark (White/Light, Ambulette), Ben Vida (DRMWPN, Bird Show, Town and Country), Josh Abrams (DRMWPN, Town and Country), Steven Hess (Haptic, Fessenden, Pan American), and Kevin Davis to help him actualize an extended, big band version of the piece "Sunfish" off his most recent Xeric/Table of the Elements release, Coastal. http://www.daviddaniell.com http://www.myspace.com/davidwdaniell
The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush The Fortieth Day is the duo of Mark Solotroff and Isidro Reyes, both key players in the power-electronics outfit Bloodyminded, a local unit known for its confrontational live shows. Here, Solotroff and Reyes show off their kinder, gentler side, using guitar, bass, and synth to improvise "sustained, withering blasts of high-pitched noise that are as distinct from one another as spotlights sweeping across the night sky; jackhammer clatter, jet-engine whines, and forlorn keyboard melodies dart in and out of those huge sounds with the grace and impunity of plovers picking a crocodile's teeth." (Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader) http://bloodlust.blogspot.com
Video artist Noise Crush will perform a second night, adding real-time computer-manipulated visuals to The Fortieth Day’s live set.
Goldblood Formed in 2003 out of a dual concern with illumination from ecstatic improvised sound, Goldblood is the core of experimental filmmaker and musician Amy Cargill and psychedelic Svengali Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow of Plastic Crimewave Sound, Galactic Zoo Dossier). Call it what you will--imaginary soundtrack, sun-blindness music, noise-ambient, or the new new age--Goldblood’s treated keys, guitars, samples, drone-machines and wordless voice ebb and flow and merge into walls of sound that can turn suddenly inside out at a moment’s notice. Goldblood have performed with Peter Walker, Eugene Chadbourne, Jah Wobble, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Magik Markers, Sightings, The Coughs, Lichens, DRMWPN,, among others. http://www.myspace.com/goldbloods
The Zoo Wheel The Zoo Wheel is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Liz Payne (Town & Country, DRMWPN, Pillow, Everyone(d) ). As The Zoo Wheel, Liz builds hybrid pieces of acoustic timbres using voice, field recordings and various musical instruments (stringed and otherwise), coaxing them into complex and shimmering patterns with a life all their own. http://www.luckykitchen.com/tar/lk032.html
Estesombelo Estesombelo is a contemplative collective based on ambient soundscapes along with minimal drone. By creating unique compositions for each subsequent performance, Estesombelo seeks to challenge not only themselves as composers, but their audience's listening capabilities. Live performances range from intensely abrasive to delicately lulling sounds, while at the same time keeping the overall aesthetic fittingly referred to as 'this beautiful sound.'
Over the weekend, I went out to Chicago's newest good record store, Permanent Records, and picked up a bunch of stuff, including Honey Rose, the newest record by Rameses III.
I'd been introduced to Rameses III from the fine track they contributed to the three-disc Gold Leaf Branches comp from Foxy Digitalis (2005), but that didn't really prepare me for the sheer loveliness of the this very fine short disc.
Give the second track, "Theme 2," a listen: it's mighty in its hush and drift. Rameses III are sometimes grouped in with the "free folk" crowd, but to my ear this music is less folk and more shoegazer: it's like My Bloody Valentine, if My Bloody Valentine wanted nothing more than to lull you into a warm, lovely sleep.
Getting up in the morning can sometimes be a challenge. And this challenge is complicated by the difficulty of finding the right sound to wake up to. I don't like the harshness of alarms, and the radio's not really an option either: I can't stand waking up to commercials, and the commercial-free alternative provided by NPR is... well, that's really a whole separate rant, that I'll spare you for now.
Determined to wake to music, I picked up a CD-playing alarm clock a few years ago, which kicked off a whole investigation of which CDs are better to wake up to than others. Recently, I've really been enjoying waking up to albums by the duo Lullatone.
As the name implies, this track, "Wake Up Wake Up," (from 2004's Little Songs About Raindrops) is just about a perfect song to hear first thing in the morning. It is absolutely gentle in every way, but it won't put you back to sleep either: it has an electronic glitchiness about it that delicately stimulates your ear until you're ready to rise.
Lullatone's newest release, Pajama Pop Pour Vous (2006), goes it one better by beginning with "Good Morning Melody," which has all the same strengths as "Wake Up Wake Up" only with the addition of breathy vocals, sung in Japanese-inflected English, about getting up and starting your day. It is so cute it makes me just about want to die of pleasure: your mileage may vary.
I've decided to spin off the MP3 posts into their own blog, over at Blog*Spot: Raccoon Audio. The reason for this is mainly because I want to start getting indexed in the Hype Machine's database, and I thought they were more likely to index an all-MP3 blog than this one, which I think could comfortably be descrbied as "eclectic" in its focus.
MP3 posts will still be cross-posted here, so you don't need to do anything or even think about the new site unless you're only reading this blog for the music-oriented posts, in which case you might want to switch to reading that one, which has a nice syndication feed and all that jazz.
That's also the place to look if you want the whole top ten all in a single post, specifically here.
I took some liberties with the dates, don't look too close.
Before I say anything, I should acknowledge that a fictional version of this album (accurate down to the participation of Dylan "Earth" Carlson) appeared in the 2005 April Fool's Day edition of the Aquarius Records newsletter, in which the album consists of a single E chord, with each band contributing a single note.
Pretty funny. And there's truth to the fact that this record could have been made with about that much investment of effort: since both Boris and Sunn O))) have rabid fan-bases, both acts could have come together and operated more-or-less on autopilot, piled up by-the-numbers guitar drone, and they probably would still have made bank (it's not for nothing that the title of the fictional parody album is Reserve Not Yet Met). So the fact that the end product isn't content to rest on its laurels is all the more amazing.
There are the requisite "heavy" pieces here: the opener ("Etna") and the closer ("Blood Swamp") are pretty much what you'd expect the collaboration to produce, which is not to say that they're not accomplished pieces of monolithic roar. But the album's real achievement is in the way that the intervening tracks diverge from comfort zones and expectations, and produce four tracks of genre-defying occultist weirdness: "NLT" is a gong-and-bass soundscape, "The Sinking Belle" is a Metal-inflected ballad (with vocals by singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes), "Akuma No Kuma" is an electronic anthem full of messed-up vocoder'd vocals and bombastic horns (maybe the soundtrack to a Conan movie set in Kirby-esque deep space), and "Fried Eagle Mind" is a trance-inducing bit of opiated ambience and static. The bonus disc, featuring Dylan Carlson wrangling daemonic Telecaster all over it, is just plain icing on the cake. This is the only album I bought this year on the day it was released (also the only one I bought at Metal Haven) and the only album I was eagerly anticipating that did not disappoint me (hello, Joanna Newsom and Lady Sovereign).
Extra bonus!: Chicago residents might want to hit the MCA sometime this month, where my pal Terence Hannum has an installation up. Entitled "Evocation," it consists primarily of video projection of a Sunn O))) performance. (Terence has curated a month's worth of drone performances at the MCA in conjunction with this installation; the first one was last night, featuring Rebis' own White/Light. Who are also playing tomorrow at the Empty Bottle, opening for the Rhys Chatham Guitar Trio. Wow. Heavy goodness all over the place this month.)
4. Mrtyu!, Blood Tantra and With Throats As Fine As Needles, s/t I know that putting "ties" on year-end lists is kind of a cop-out, but these two discs complement one another so well that by year's end it was difficult not to think of them as a unit. They showcase two opposing sides of dronemaster Antony Milton's technique: on Blood Tantra, he submerges the listener into the cauldron of Metal's deep distortion and roar, whereas on Throats Fine As Needles he and his cadre of NZ experimentalists (Campbell Kneale, James Kirk, and Richard Francis) work with quietude and stillness, their palette built largely out of cheap electronics humming softly in subterranean darkness. Look beyond the differences in surface turbulence, though, and both discs reveal themselves as similar investigations, exploring stasis, modulation, tension and release. On 20 Buck Spin and Digitalis, respectively. Listen: "The Worldy Skein," by Mrtyu!
3. Mountains, Sewn For the past five years, Brooklyn's Apestaartje label has released a cool twenty discs of pastoral drone, organic noise, and sound art. I own about half of them and there's not a dud in the bunch. Mountains is an Apestaartje "supergroup" of sorts, representing a collaboration between two one-man acts, Anderegg and Aero, who have each recorded albums of abstract electronica which are individually superlative. Together, though, they seem to reinforce one another's strengths, and this album--a combination of pretty acoustic passages and warm electronic texture--is as fine as anything the label's ever put out. Listen: "Sheets," by Mountains
2. Ghosting, Why Not Be Utterly Changed Into Fire? The single track that comprises this album spends a half hour exploring the title question, using distorted guitars and squealing machines to conjure a circle of angelic flame around the listener, threatening to consume but also promising to transfigure. This could certainly be described as a noise album—it spends a lot of its time channeling a storm of white-hot needles through the open spaces of your skull, and the experience is undeniably harrowing—but remember that the goal here is transcendence and the methods suddenly invert, seeming magical instead of menacing. No MP3 of this one, as the disc's only track is single-minded in a way that fundamentally resists excerpting. On Jyrk.
7. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, Between One game you can play, if you're a music geek, is trying to determine the point where "free improvisation" became officially detached from anything resembling jazz. A related game is trying to determine the point where one bifurcated tendril of free improvisation again crossed the territorial lines of genre to become avant-garde electronica, renouncing even the tools of jazz in favor of rewired mixers, detuned radios, dismantled guitars, and repurposed iPods. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura are among the most interesting practicioners of this branch, producing stark fields of abstract electronic texture that defy easy categorization but which compel forcefully on their own terms. The two CDs comprising Between resemble not music so much as they resemble the sounds you might hear if you could tap into onboard recordings made by an interplanetary probe as it descended through a toxic, static-riddled atmosphere. On Erstwhile. Listen: "13630 kHz," by Keith Rowe + Toshimaru Nakamura
6. Vampire Can't, Key Cutter This disc represents three sorts of noisy music fused into an improbably well-oiled hybrid: free-jazz drumming from the ever-astonishing Chris Corsano, abrasive scuzz-rock guitar from Bill Nace, and circuit-bent squee from Jessica Rylan and her homemade machines. The on-paper incompatibility of these modes would seem to dictate that these tracks explode on the launching pad, and it's true that fully half of the songs on the disc last for under two minutes, but the fearsome blazing singularity that they attain in their short and furious lifespans is like something that came straight from the mind of God. On Load. Listen: "War Lips," by Vampire Can't
5. Girl Talk, Night Ripper Momus once described mash-ups (here) as "Everything that ever sold a record, all on one plate," and I think he meant it pejoratively, whereas I see it as something of a grail to strive for. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but this album from Gregg Gillis might represent the most successful attempt yet. Night Ripper jettisons the conceptual rigor that undergirds other notable mash-up albums (say, the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera, or DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century), replacing it instead with an understanding that increased density equals increased enjoyment. Highest pleasures-per-second count of any album this year. On Illegal Art. Listen: "Hold Up," by Girl Talk
Right around the time of Christmas and New Year's, I was travelling, and sick, and working on other writing projects, and trying to beat Armadillo Run, so I never got around to posting my "best of 2006" CD list. Working with the better-late-than-never premise, I thought I'd do it this week, ornamenting it with some MP3s as a bonus. Expect it in three installments, starting with the bottom of the list and working our way up:
10. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere Flawed and occasionally indulgent, but St. Elsewhere earns major points for managing to be both a record that I heard or played at just about every party I was at this year and an album-length meditation on mental illness and the fragmentation of [black] identity. Improbable, but the unsettling lyrical content consistently fit perfectly into the alluring vibe generated by Cee-Lo's charismatic croon and Danger Mouse's warm grooves. The most obvious manifestation of this trick can be seen in the way they took a song explicitly about madness and disintegration ("Crazy") and got it to pass as the feel-good pop hit of the year, but the pattern is repeated everywhere on the album, from the inviting cover of the Violent Femmes' menacing "Gone Daddy Gone" to "Necromancing," an ode to necrophilia. Impressive, fascinating. :: "Who Cares?," by Gnarls Barkley
9. The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love Aside from "45:33," there wasn't a new LCD Soundsystem release last year, but this indie-dance release by the Rapture served as a decent stopgap, as long as you were willing to substitute Luke Jenner's sleazy charisma for James Murphy's subcultural wit. Pieces essentially updates the ideas of the disco-inflected post-punk era for an audience weaned on 80s power-pop: something like Loose Joints reinterpreted by Ric Ocasek. No claims to high significance, but definitely the most fun album I heard all year. :: "Whoo! Alright—Yeah...Uh Huh," by the Rapture
8. Keiran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Vol. 1 Many, many talented people have attempted to integrate free jazz and electronic music, with outcomes that have ranged from the blandly respectable to the utterly dreadful. This disc, made up of three improvisations between sample-manipulator Keiran Hebden and longtime jazz drummer Steve Reid, avoids these fates, managing to at least partially scale the peaks that characterize the best of ecstatic '60s jazz. Hebden's body of solo work (as Four Tet) is impressive, but he seems especially freed up here by being able to hand off the rhythm duties to Reid; this allows him to stretch out and focus on the role that would normally fulfilled by an especially "free" saxophonist, namely, providing squall and color and noise. The album isn't perfect—there are moments when the pieces lose their way—but this disc provides the most substantial piece of evidence to date that these two branches of music can be successfully wed. :: "Soul Oscillations," by Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid
For each of the past five years, Sufjan Stevens has released an EP of Christmas-themed songs, both traditional carols and originals (now collected in the Songs For Christmas box set). I heard a few of these last year around this time, and was struck by the way that they play up Stevens' central strength (his skill at composing unusual arrangments) while completely sidestepping his central weakness (his tendency towards pretention).
Take, for instance, today's track, "Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance." Its palpable aura of casual goodwill and all-around lightheartedness are so winning that I find myself preferring it to nearly all of the more (self-consciously?) "important" tracks on [Greetings From] Michigan and [Come On Feel the] Illinois[e].
[Related: I often have a hard time stomaching material by The Decemberists, whose tendency to indulge in twee anachronism is by now so shtick-y that you could essentially make a drinking game out of it (1 shot each time Colin Meloy mentions a European place-name; 1 more each time he mentions an occupation that existed in the 19th century). It is for this reason that my favorite Decemberists song is "Apology Song," about something as modest as a stolen bike.]
Thanks to Ray and Rich T. (respectively) for gifting me these tracks.
Good news from the east: Manchester airport has free wi-fi. The bad news is that I arrived while everyone was busy with their respective Thanksgiving dinners, and will probably have to wait here for a few hours. My Thanksgiving dinner may be a jelly donut from the Dunk, which investigations have revealed to be the only establishment open in the entire airport.
I'm out here on this coast for a Spring Conference staff meeting, and it will be good to see everyone... I'll be sticking around for a couple of days, and may even get to see the Antony Milton / Peter Wright / Geoff Mullen / Area C show in Boston on Monday (details here). The Milton / Wright US tour is skipping Chicago, hewing (as it is) close to the two coasts, and I feel lucky that it coordinates so tidily with my own jaunt this way.
2004 Blastitude interview with Antony Milton located here: interesting in many places, but especially for the description of how Milton came to name his CD-R label "PseudoArcana":
"[T]he name itself was intended as a critique of what has often seemed to be an elitist and high-brow perception of 'experimental' music. It is so often represented as an arcane and privileged discourse, and I guess I found that kind of problematic. The name is therefore a reflective way of saying that 'this is the type of music that people say is trying to be arcane but which is really just 'stuff that people do''."
The forthcoming Joanna Newsom album (out Nov 11) has some of the most bizarrely dreadful cover art I've seen in a while. The cover art for her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, is also bad, but bad in a charming, naif-y way, all slapped over with unicorns and chickens (etc) in a way that's both girly and crude. A visual analog to Newsom's winsome croak? Sure, why not. The new art, on the other hand, is a piece of aggrandizing portraiture that looks like it was commissioned by royalty: which is also to say that it looks like it was designed to evoke money and influence. Ick.
But then there's the credits: recorded by Steve Albini; mixed by Jim O'Rourke, with orchestra arrangements by Van Dyke Parks? Holy shit. OK, packing your album with indie-heroes evokes royalty/money/influence in its own way, but I'll eat a frickin' blackbird pie if the end result turns out to sound anything less than incredible. So, sure: bad art notwithstanding, this one goes in the "eagerly anticipated" pile, although it doesn't dislodge Lady Sovereign's full-length Public Warning (out 10/31) from the top spot.
Anyone else who thinks too much about album covers should watch this video.
Spent some time today doing something I've been meaning to do for a while: adding links to my favorite record labels (and CD-R labels and MP3-only labels, etc) to my sprawling array of de.licio.us links. I'm not sure how many people come to this site for the posts on weird music, but those of you who do might enjoy taking a look at the list. It's not yet complete, but there's 33 labels on there now, a good start. Feel free to use the comments field for suggestions as to who has been left out for the moment... (say, for instance Erstwhile, whose excellent recent release Four Gentlemen of the Guitar, featuring Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura and Keith Rowe, has somehow been criminally neglected by most of the world).
I was surprised to see Maja Ratkje's show at the Empty Bottle so sparsely attended last night. Her radical vocal work is pretty demanding, but there are so many subcultural routes through which one could come to an admiration of her. Sound poetry fans and improv-loving beard-scratchers alike should love the way she uses language and vocalized sound as a strange dynamic instrument, while there's enough weird electronic manipulation to appease the Powerbook set as well. Even the noise-niks should be in awe: her set last night at the Empty Bottle was easily as noisy (at times) as the Merzbow set from back in September, while also being far more inventive and variegated.
Here's an MP3 from Voice, her 2002 collaboration with Norway's Jazzkammer: "Trio." Try to imagine these sounds (some of which border on the Lovecraftian) emerging from a tiny woman who looks a bit like like a china doll and you'll maybe have a better understanding of why I think the full force of her work is best experienced live.
Campbell Kneale has been bringing stellar reams of noise-damage back from the mountain pretty reliably lately, and in his Birchville Cat Motel incarnation he provided another one of the year's great releases (Chi Vampires). But this two-disc release is really the one that hits my sweet spot, taking menacing drones, cryptic bits of found sound, decontextualized ritual music and random clatter and making them into totemic pileups, radiating a burnt, blackening magic. On Celebrate Psi Phenomena.
2. M.I.A., Arular
M.I.A. is the artist this year who came closest to being all things to all people. Some were won over by her hard-edged activist-militaristic pose, others won over by her doe-eyed softness. Her persona is so striking (and polarizing) that the album itself was treated by many as almost an afterthought. More's the shame, because the album is as fine a piece of dance-pop wonder as any available, blazing with the energy and fire of a small star. On XL.
3. LCD Soundsystem, LCD Soundsystem
The second great dance-pop album of the year. A great counterbalance, too, for James Murphy is perhaps the anti-M.I.A., completely eschewing the Big Global Issues that Arular takes on, instead offering silly trifles on record-collector cultural cachet and Daft Punk. But, really, who cares? This album brought the beats and the grooves to make me dance, and when I'm dancing, I don't really need any lyrics that go beyond the ones found on "Yeah": "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah." On DFA.
4. White Rock, Tar Pit
This collaboration between psychedelic agents Double Leopards and Mouthus may be better than anything either group has done individually. A slow trawl through a subterranean wonder-world, covered in luminescent fungal slime. I wrote a longer review of this back in May, which you can read here. On Troubleman.
5. Fursaxa, Lepidoptera
For years now, Fursaxa's Tara Burke has been producing albums of hypnotic, hazy chant and slightly icy song that are available either in obscure formats (the vinyl-only Mandrake) or in small, poorly-distributed CD-R runs (Amulet, The Cult at Moon Mountain). It's nice, therefore, to see the All Tomorrow's Parties label release a CD that might bring Fursaxa's work to a larger audience, especially nice given that Lepidoptera is her strongest work to date, providing the dream-addled listener with twelve tracks of opiated goodness. On All Tomorrow's Parties.
6. Various Artists, Invisible Pyramid : Elegy Box
A lot of nice experimental comps came out this year, from PseudoArcana's very fine 2-disc The Tone of the Universe = (The Tone of the Earth) to Foxy Digitalis' 3-disc overview of the psychedelic folk sub-underground, Gold Leaf Branches. But the real prize goes to Invisible Pyramid, a mammoth six-disc set described by Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson as "the SUV of drone-psych compilations." This set showcases some of the most interesting musicians from all across the globe, from Italy's My Cat is an Alien to New Zealand's Birchville Cat Motel, and although not every track is great (this disc determines once and for all that just because something was recorded in Finland doesn't automatically make it gold) the hit-rate is incredibly high, making this the most indispensible "scene report" since 2001's Improvised Music From Japan. On Last Visible Dog.
7. Jazzfinger, The Well of Used Dreams
Even after spending a week in a van with the guys from Jazzfinger this summer, seeing them on stage a half-dozen times, and performing with them once, I still don't really know how they're making the sounds on this record. The slamming door and typewriter clacks are obvious enough, and there's some piano, and something that sounds like a violin, but then there are also these grainy sounds that are maybe tape-noise, and some scary electronic textures that sound like a disemboweled children's toy... This album continues to strike me as hermetic, oblique, and intriguing, a musty curio-cabinet of a release. On Classic English Womb.
8. Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die
The only indie-pop album to crack my top ten this year, In Case We Die sounds like the cool kids in high school with the ska records got together with the weirdest of the marching band geeks to form a house band for Rushmore's Max Fischer Players. Reeking of youthful charm, charisma, and heartfelt longing, Architecture in Helsinki write small-scale pop gems that strive to be big-scale, and end up sounding like the Polyphonic Spree, only without the bloated, syrupy quality. On Bar/None.
9. Brian McBride, When the Detail Lost Its Freedom
If In Case We Die was my go-to record for summertime fun music, this record, by Stars of the Lid alum Brian McBride, has been the one that's been playing again and again as the Chicago winter locks everything into bleak, icy gloom. This is a solemn collection of quasi-symphonic chamber minimalism, full of somber melodies containing just enough receding warmth to make your your heart break. Everyone I've played this album for has come away from it moved. On Kranky (which had a good year, releasing other fine records by Ben Vida's Bird Show and Rob Lowe's Lichens project...)
10. Of, The Buried Stream
With this album, Loren Chasse, of the Jewelled Antler collective, continues his investigations into sonic pantheism, stronger here than ever before. Back in January I said this collection of organic hum, instrumental sketches, and field recordings sounds "like the work of a man trying to bear witness to a vision of personal holiness": you can read the full review here. Self-released on Jewelled Antler.
For those of you who can't be in Chicago for the Two Million Tongues festival (hyperlinked lineup below), I figured I'd post some relevant MP3s.
Since tonight Tony Conrad will be playing [!], here's "Trance #2," a sweet little drone miniature featuring Conrad in collaboration with Velvet Underground alums John Cale and Angus MacLise. This is from 1965 (!) and yet you could slot it next to something more contemporary (a psychedelic noise jam from Finland, or a slab of lo-fi sound from New Zealand, say) and it would still sound completely at home.
I'll try to post another MP3 from one of Friday's performers tomorrow, but my schedule is pretty tight, so... we'll see?
Although most Western music for the past, oh, I don't know, roughly four hundred years or so has been written with a focus on harmony as its predominant structural element, you could make an argument that turntablism, by its very nature, marks a return to the musical principle of counterpoint: viewed in a certain light, the way turntablism takes rhythmic or melodic fragments and juxtaposes them with other fragments or with duplicate versions of itself could be said to be almost round-like or fugue-like.
The contrapuntal effect of musical irony could be said to apply to much turntable material:
"Counterpoint is one of the most essential means, in musical composition, for the generation of musical ironies; a melodic fragment, heard alone, may make a particular impression, but when it is heard simultaneously with other melodic ideas, or combined in unexpected ways with itself, as in canon or fugue, surprising new facets of meaning are revealed." (from Wikipedia)
A nice example comes to us in the form of this week's Friday MP3, "Jukebox Capriccio," a piece made by turntablist Christian Marclay in 1985, which jumbles together big band horns, skating-rink organ, tinny New Wave beats, sundry bits of exotica, and scrawls of white noise into something that "means" something far more complicated than any of the records might manage individually. (This piece, along with many other pieces of radical counterpoint, are available on the wonderful 1997 Marclay anthology Records 1981-1989, on Atavistic.)
"The Boredoms are like a moon on a lake. Only there is no moon and no lake. Only Boredoms." —Yamatsuka Eye
The Boredoms are coming and playing in Chicago tomorrow night, which, for me at least, is great news: ever since 2001's masterpiece Vision Creation New Sun the Boredoms have topped my list of acts that I've wanted to see live. The Boredoms are especially interesting to me because over the last ten years or so they've managed to enact a transformation from brilliant, juvenile spazz-punks to psychedelic mystics, releasing stunning albums at every step in the process. For my money, this ranks as an artistic development that rivals any in the history of popular music. (The best comparison I can think of would be The Beatles' shift from brilliant, juvenile moptops to, well, psychedelic mystics.)
This Friday's MP3, "Super Are," is taken from 1998's Super AE, which I love because it's something of a transition album, fulfilling roughly the same sort of function in their catalog as Revolver does for the Beatles: it's that perfect blend of a developing psychedelic sound (which isn't yet in full bloom) and a pop-mania past (which isn't yet fully behind them). This track is pretty representative: it begins with gentle electronic drones, meditative chants, and a fucking drum-circle jam before lurching into the realm of the death-metal freak-out.
