Just last month we nominated Peter Broderick as the person responsible for the largest body of wonderful music in Two Thousand and Eleven, and now he again presents a collection of sounds that you very much need to hear. We won’t say much of anything about this new album; it speaks for itself not only in terms of quality, but also in a more direct sense as it is also a website. (And you thought that was only for terrible ideas from the 1990′s!)
http://www.itstartshear.com can also be obtained in non-website form.
t.
I’m very glad that I found this amazing drone-ambient piece by Reykjavik-based artist Russel Harmon on NFOP just now. The Ben Frost reference definitely makes sense – yet the beauty and harmony (ha, almost a pun – so close) Russel, who also plays guitar in the Icelandic instrumental outfit PORQUESÍ, manages to add to the intense sounds made me play this one over and over again.
An EP will be out his March, so until then close your eyes (press play before that, sorry I forgot) and enjoy the “Tragedy Fractures”.
We like Retro Stefson - not just because Ted and I had a physical (like real, you know?) reunion at one of their shows in Oslo. Here is them playing a new song for a Take Away Show, bringing the Iceland Airwaves Festival back to its roots: an airport hangar.
Reviving a dormant tradition here at O(h)rtlos, we have an hour long mixtape featuring some of the best songs we’ve heard in 2012, along with some lingering favorites from the year past.
We took (shamefully brief) note of Moon Bounce fairly early, so I don’t have a problem getting to this new video after XLR8R, and I do particularly want to make a mention of it, as it’s one of my favorites in recent memory.
“Telephone” can be seen as a spiritual sequel to the video for the epochal “Once In A Lifetime.” Both are, at their core, videos in which uncomfortable-looking white men in suits do silly dances. In the earlier piece, a sweaty David Byrne build his routine through imitation, mimicking the movements of the pastor, the salesman, the nervous wreck, and, with the aid of global communications technology (we see video of the very people he mimics) villagers of Africa and South Asia. His goofy dance is constructed of exaggerated versions of quotidian actions lifted from a range of different lifestyles around the world.
Three decades later, in a world much further enmeshed by communication technologies, Corey Regensburg, again clad in suit and bowtie, is confronted by a lone (aesthetically out-of-date) telephone and finds either the (excessive?) information conveyed over it or alternatively its (crisis-inducing) lack of functionality to be so overwhelming that he is reduced to staring forward with a mixture of terror and incomprehension, uselessly interrogating it as a physical object, attempting to use it as another piece of technology (a sequencer/sampler) and descending into manic hallucination. Mimesis breaks down, madness begins. Although Byrne (in character) acts in the earlier piece as though he may have been on the verge of madness himself.
Mostly, they’re both a lot of fun.
The song itself starts with some early-Four Tet strings, lays on some off-kilter R&B rhythms and a wickedly pitch-shifted refrain, goes out with a jungle break and generally makes one quite excited to hear the full-length album being cooked up for a Spring release.
We’ll tell you about it!
t.
These two new songs from your favorite delicate French musicians take up where the duo last left off, taking as a model the final song of their three-track demo: the burbling synth opens to announce that they continue to be interested in exploring 80′s sonics (in a manner less overstuffed and grandiose than certain of their disproportionately lauded countrymen) while dropping vocal refrains that are sure to be buried deep within your brain after a few listens. For a two track single titled in the reverse order in which the songs appear, it is, of course, perfectly sequenced: when delicate guitar notes begin to emerge at the 0:41 mark of “The City,” it feels as though the entire momentous sweep of the preceding “Sunrise” was there to prepare you for their impact; the title track then unfolds in a self-assured fashion, taking its time along the way to play with a sound that lands uncannily between vocoder and saxophone. There’s no third entry to match the propulsive, hypnotic character of the demo’s “After the Sun,” which first caught my ear so forcefully, but after spending enough quality time with these songs, it’s clear that the fellows in Princesse don’t need to make such a insistent appeal to the ear. They have made two songs that reveal their superb construction and luxurious ornamentation at their own leisurely pace.
It sounds like Princesse are doing some stretches before they smack us all across the face with a burning hot album. We can certainly hope so, can’t we?
t.
Can this please be the breakthrough moment for Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services?
Conditions at the moment seem propitious: With the third volume of the Black Mill Tapes reaching an LP length, and coming soon after an excellent collaboration with The Advisory Circle (also offering a track here) on the more established Ghost Box label, The Head Technician is perfecting the ability to apply his BBC Radiophonic Workshop-inspired aesthetic to rhythmic forms currently in vogue. His take on Space Disco (“Electronic Rhythm Number Five” and “Electronic Rhythm Number One”) differentiates it texturally from the predominant school settled across the North Sea while equaling its cheerful trance. More gripping is the transformation of a Coldwave-invoking sort of Italo-Disco, heard in the middle section of “Hexden Channel” and epitomized by “Inside the Wave,” which finds the point between menace, sensuality and machine artifact that seems to be the exact point at which producers of Witch House so dearly wish to arrive and so rarely do. Pye Corner Audio may then be well placed on the Grand Array of Trends for the well-deserved accolades to begin pouring in (Warren Ellis is a good start.)
The most impressive accomplishments on Vol. 3 may however be in those moments when no drums are heard. Snippets like “Memory Wiped,” “Transmission Two:Pathways Closed,” “Theme Number Eight” and come very close indeed to matching the distant-but-enveloping, desolate-but-warm, soul-bendingly paradoxical beauty of unforgettable Boards of Canada interludes like “Bocuma”, “Olsen” and “I Saw Drones.” No small feat to enter such an orbit; in their fleeting poignancy, those short tracks stand as some of the most affecting in the history of electronic music (enough so that I will evoke Boards of Canada in every fourth review here at O(h)rtlos.)
The Head Technician ascends toward rarefied air. O Pitchfork Media, unleash your pliant hoards!
Black Mill Tapes Vol. 3 is unquestionably worth your time to listen to, and you may well agree it to be worth an exchange value of 5.99 of your Earth British Pounds.
t.
Although still relatively new, Breton is already far too advanced a group for me to have anything of use to say about them. Each new song they release is of such quality as to make up for 5 mediocre post-millenial British post-punk albums, 1 lackluster Ninja Tune release and 18 bro-step tracks, combined. Fortunately there is no need for wordsmithing on my part to impel you to seek the new Blanket Rule EP, as 320 kbps MP3′s of same can be acquired directly from their website free of charge. “Ordinance Survey” and “Sandpaper” can both comfortably be described as MASSIVE.
Blanket Rule serves as a prelude to a full-length album to be release this February.
Enter a state of excitement.
t.
In the past year or so, net labels like Radology and Hyperboloid have provided a window onto a surprisingly engaging contingent of new music producers from a Russian music scene that, from the outside, can be exceedingly opaque.
In 2012, Dopefish Family is making a solid play to be added to the roster of Russians to follow, with two equally promising offerings of warped synth goodness. Milky Toad and Chikiss conjure a sort of hauntological dream-pop reminiscent of Paavoharju’s arboreal weirdness across the Finnish border, while Silver Boy’s Voyuer balances Chillwave-generation low-motion-Disco with butter-thick slabs of Synth-Funk Exotica of the sort one can imagine a sleazy vacation rental company commissioning for a promotional VHS tape. The two albums are different in genre but share an unmistakble affinity for layers and layers of past-atuned synths, and it should be very interesting to see how a Dopefish roster can expand its explorations around that central facet.
Or maybe they’ll switch to bluegrass. The future remains unwritten! We’ll let you know.
t.
Like the Village Voice Pazz & Jop list, here at O(h)rtlos our favorite albums of the year doesn’t come out until the following January…and is also considered one of the most complete and authoritative of such exercises.
Before I get into my own meaninglessly long list of musical releases from 2011 that I enjoyed in that same year, organized into untenable categories, I have some incoherent musings on a few aspects of the musical landscape as I experienced it.
Many publications treated James Blake and his eponymous full-length debut as definitional. That album is a decent affair that comes as a slight disappointment after his much more interesting EP’s, and certainly isn’t terribly innovative. Its adoring critical reception is therefore a bit mystifying. My intuitive sense says that this confusing phenomenon is actually related to another: King of Limbs and the muted impact of the first Radiohead album since 1997 that didn’t seem like a big deal. KOL is not a misstep by any means; it contains a number of strong additions to the band’s oeuvre. Part of why it seems insubstantial is surely its stunted track list. Ten to fourteen tracks is what one gets from a Radiohead album; here, eight. It’s hard to say if King of Limbs would feel more canonical with the addition of the songs from the high-quality “Supercollider / The Butcher” single and “The Daily Mail / Staircase”. Yet ultimately I don’t think that a longer King of Limbs would seem much more of an important Radiohead entry; it’s not just the short length that dims the impact of a new Radiohead album, and to begin to see why, one should take a look at the other Radiohead-related material surrounding KOL. There’s the the 8-part (and counting?) remix series in which all sorts of currently important producers ply their craft with the basic materials available. Jamie xx, to my ears a much better exemplar of a now-sound than Blake, takes the exercise to a sort of ritualistic extreme with this 3-part meditation on “Bloom.” Then there’s Thom Yorke’s work with Burial and Four Tet on “Ego / Mirror,” both songs much more vital than anything on the (remember, still excellent) new Radiohead album proper. Much of the praise surrounding James Blake has involved marking him as the poster-boy of a supposed post-dubstep aesthetic. That sound, however, may not represent an evolution of dubstep and its strange commercial explosion of the last few years as much as it signals the final victory of Kid A, which eleven years ago set the template for so much of the forward-looking pop music to come after it. “Post-Dubstep,” to the extent such a thing actually exists, does indeed inherit a 2-step groove, but Kid A is everywhere else in its DNA. The same reason lies behind the false identification of a standard-bearer for post-dubstep (Blake) and the curiously diminished impact of King of Limbs. Pop music has now fully absorbed “Everything in Its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “Motion Picture Soundtrack” and “Idioteque;” a new Radiohead album is not the same because at this moment, more than perhaps any other, Radiohead is all around. Some commentators may, in the resulting confusion, identify James Blake as the face of post-dubstep. Yet, as boring as this may be, it’s our old friend Thom.
A running concern of mine throughout the year has been the slate of excellent releases that could be labeled ‘conjectural’ or ‘imaginary world music,’ epitomized by Zun Zun Egui‘s Katang, YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN, and Gang Gang Dance‘s Eye Contact. 2011 also saw an unprecedented number of commercial releases from Tuareg artists, including Bombino, Group Doueh, Terakaft, Toumastin, and the now well-established Tinariwen. Strange coincidence that this outpouring should come in a year that saw the death of Muammar Gaddafi, that peculiar and terrible post-modernist who played such a large role in the Tuareg’s fate. The Tuareg’s desert rock may also be seen as a conjectural world music; if the most dire prediction of the prophets of global warming come to pass, the coming century will see the Sahara leap across the Mediterranean and bring its frightful desiccation as far north as Berlin, and so the syncretistic music of the Tuareg would come to be an appropriate indigenous music for Europe. All of these albums, from the Global North and the Global South, speak in their way of possible futures.
If one were to ignore trends and flights of fancy, however, and focus merely on who it was that brought to our ears the greatest amount of wonderful music, that distinction would clearly go to Peter Broderick, the expatriate Oregonian who had his hand in a dazzling range of works, including his collaboration with Nils Frahm as Oliveray, work with Rauelson, Machinefabriek and the devastatingly lovely Lentemusiek with Laura Arkana, as well as his own Music for Confluence and Music for Grace and Mercy.
Also of special note was the even more prolific Ranvir Bassi, who I may dare say emerged as one of the most idiosyncratic and demanding electronic artists of the year, and threatens to continue in the same manner in the twelve months ahead.
Now here are my favorite twenty albums released in 2011, as near as I can reckon, followed by a long and utterly meaningless list of many worthy others, alternatively in and not in any particular order. My apologies to everyone and everything.
Top 20
20. Trails & Ways – Temporal + Territorrial
Pitchfork Media has told us that the single greatest song of 2011 was M83′s “Midnight City.” Even if we don’t accept this to be true, it says much of the sharp talent possessed by Trails & Ways that they turned around in almost no time at all with a cover of that same song which far surpassed the original. Less shocking a feat if one had also heard their debut EP, where they were similarly triumphant in handling Miike Snow’s “Animal.” More impressive is how well their originals stand up to their organic re-imaginings of others’ works; both of these brief offerings lead with some of the more wonderfully poetic songs that I, who gives not much emphasis to the lyrical, have heard in some years, while “Chills” ranks as the best song written so far about global warming.
19. Lo-Fi-Fnk – The Last Summer
Like attending a rave hosted by an ice hotel made of sugar water.
18. LAKE – Giving and Receiving
All hail the Evergreen state. K Recs forever.
17. Jonti – Twirligig
A trifle it may seem, but it’s the closest to an original recreation of The Avalanches’ Since I Left You yet attempted.
16. Flash Bang Grenada – 10 Haters
Busdriver’s “Least Favorite Rapper,” the Jhelli Beam track on which Nocando alit, consumed me for much of 2009. Looks like those two were also fans, as they decided to make an album of it. As much as I effused over Das Racist last year, it must be admitted that these gut-busting, neck-breaking cats have been up in that stratosphere for a minute now.
15. Hoquets – Belgotronics
The simplicity of the (self-built) instrumentation kept me from placing this album any higher up the list, but really I’m kidding myself. Likely I’ll remember this long after any of the others, such a wonderful quirky little gift to the world it is. An album dedicated to Belgium we shall never need again.
14. Gang Gang Dance – Eye Contact
The sound of the house band at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in Johnny Mnemonic.
13. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Hysterical
My least favorite aspect of this album is that it has regularly been labeled ‘a return to form.’ With four years since a CYHSY LP (although that period has also seen an Alec Ounsworth album and one from Flashy Python) it might be considered a return, but as one of the (seemingly) few people who considered Some Loud Thunder to be a brilliant album (with perhaps the best production sound not from Brian Eno since Paris 1919) I’m offended by the idea that Clap Your Hands… succeeded here because they ‘returned to their roots’ or some such nonsense. So don’t call it a comeback, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is one of the best indie rock groups of the last decade, and if you’d like quick proof that they haven’t made a single misstep not invented in the minds of a sophmore-slump hungry online music press, skip directly to “The Witness’s Dull Surprise.”
12. Battles – Gloss Drop
11. Plaid – scintilli
10. 13 & God – Own Your Ghost
9. Laura Arkana met Peter Broderick – Lentemusiek
Many commentators seem to have decided upon The Magic Place from Juliana Barwick as the most purely beautiful album of the year. They, of course, are wrong. It’s this one.
8. Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
An album that makes the definitive case for both the saxophone and electric amplification.
7. French Quarter – Desert Wasn’t Welcome
6. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
5. Zun Zun Egui – Katang
4. Eleanor Friedberger – Last Summer
I’ve never been a fan of the Fiery Furnaces, a group that never seemed to hold on to a single music idea long enough to extract anything satisfying from it. The exceedingly coherent Last Summer stands in stark contrast; the ten tracks feel like they are two moments. The first half a single, breathless take on all emotional power contained within all details and differences in the mundane, the second half a single, dizzied reflection on time.
3. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
2. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l
1. Skeletons – PEOPLE
People always come around.
If, for some reason, you’d like to read a much longer list with many more releases I enjoyed this year, you can do so by clicking here.
t.
