Lend Me Your Ears

Friday, 6 January 2012

50 + 50 Compiled

ElevenElevations II by Albient on Mixcloud

At the risk of overplaying the 50s riff, here's notice of another 50 - this being the sum of tracks selected from LMYE's Festive 50 + 50 (lookee here and here) and spun into three assemblages for LMYEers' listening (pl)leisure. Here's the first, ElevenElevations I.

ElevenElevations I by albient

The second, ElevenElevations II, is at the top of this post. The third, ElevenElevations III (see what I did there?), is over on mixcloud or just click below (n.b. it's not so much the Evil Twin as the Beaty Triplet).

ElevenElevations III by Albient on Mixcloud

Have a good trip-tych!

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

Fifty-fifty balls

After Monday's first instalment, a further 50 exceptional artists/releases to complete LMYE's 2011 Festive 50 + 50. Not, of course, that our centurions' were the year's only worthwhile sounds - we're intensely conscious (particularly after relishing others' deeply-felt - & very different - lists, notably Anti-Gravity Bunny's, Gacougnal's, The Liminal's (& its contributors'), The Milk Factory's, Suborno's, Fluid Radio's & 5:4's) of how much more thrilling music 2011 had to offer & how partial even our expanded selection must inevitably be.

Still, as with our earlier batch, each of these artists/releases resonated greatly with one or both of us over the year. Some will with you too, hopefully...

Keith Berry - The Ear That Was Sold To a Fish (album preview)

Sublamp - Girl, Calling to an Empty House [via pdis_inpartmaint]

kreng - grimoire (album preview)

Further 50 (or so...)

3ofmillions :: Abstruction (Rufus) / a. d. l. r. :: Foam On The Waves Of Space-Time... (Non Projects) / Aquarelle :: A Shifting Visage (Low Point; split w/Alex Cobb)/Sung In Broken Symmetry (Students of Decay) / A Winged Victory for the Sullen :: A Winged Victory for the Sullen (kranky) / Keith Berry :: The Ear that was Sold to a Fish (Infraction) / John Chantler :: The Luminous Ground (Room40) / Chubby Wolf :: Turkey Decoy (Digitalis) / Cleared :: Cleared (Immune) / Dark Class :: Gendie/Music For A Destroyed Landscape (Heat Death) / Deep Magic :: Lucid Thought (Preservation) / / d_rradio :: Forecast (Heat Death) / Ensemble Economique :: Crossing the Pass, by Torchlight (Dekorder) / Erstlaub :: The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep/The First Few Seconds After Sleep (Broken20) / Keith Fullerton Whitman :: 101105 (Dekorder; split w/Alien Radio)/Regaining Composure, Negating Freedom (Ekhein) / Ellen Fullman :: Through Glass Planes (Important) / Steven Hess & Christopher McFall :: The Inescapable Fox (Under the Spire) / Ezekiel Honig :: Folding Live (self-released) / The Inventors of Aircraft :: The West Country (Rural Colours) / Ithaca Trio :: Quiet, Please (Coma Architects) / Jasper TX :: The Black Sun Transmissions (Fang Bomb) / Leyland Kirby :: Eager To Tear Apart The Stars/Intrigue & Stuff Vols 1-3 (History Always Favours the Winners) / Kenneth Kirschner :: Twenty Ten (12k) / Kreng - Grimoire (Miasmah) / Will Long :: Rosy Reflections (Avant Archive) / Loscil :: Coast/Range/Arc (Glacial Movements) / Machinist - Of What Once Was (Moving Furniture)

The Inventors of Aircraft - Calling Out My Goodnights

Dark Class - Music For A Destroyed Landscape

machinist - of what once was (album preview)

Marsen Jules :: Nostalgia (Oktaf) / Nickolas Mohanna :: Reflections (Preservation) / Moss :: Moss (12k) / Mountains :: Air Museum (Thrill Jockey) / Yann Novak :: Presence (Hibernate) / Oneohtrix Point Never :: Replica (Software/Mexican Summer) / Fabio Orsi :: Stand Before Me, Oh My Soul (Preservation)/The Theft of a Rose (Time Released Sound)/Wo Ist Behle? (Boring Machines) / Ous Mal :: Ous Mal Is Dead...Long Live Ous Mal (Preservation) / Duane Pitre :: ED09 for string ensemble, live at The Stone (Basses Frequences) / Pleq & Spheruleus & Various :: A Silent Swaying Breath (Audio Gourmet) / Pollen Trio :: Peaks/Roll Slow (hellosQuare; also Austin Buckett (of PT) :: Stuttershine) / Raime :: Hennail (Blackest Ever Black) / Nicola Ratti :: 220 Tones (Die Schachtel) / Steve Roach :: Sounds From The Inbetween (Timeroom Editions) / Leonardo Rosado :: Opaque Glitter (Feedback Loop) / Sam Rosenthal :: The Passage (Projekt) / Ryuichi Sakamoto :: Flumina (w/Fennesz; Touch)/summvs (w/Alva Noto; Raster-Noton) / Pascal Savy :: Liminal (Feedback Loop)/Passing Light (Hibernate) / Martin Schulte :: Treasure (Lantern) / Sohrab :: Shouting At Dictators/You Are Not Alone/You Are Not Alone II (Touch) / Spartak :: Nippon (New Editions) / Sublamp :: In Our Hiding Voice (Hibernate) / Tape Loop Orchestra :: Maybe I Told A Small Lie (self-released) / Mark Templeton :: Scotch Heart (Sweat Lodge Guru) / VCV & Shinobu Nemoto :: Jovian Clouds (Install) / Vladislav Delay :: Vantaa (Raster-Noton)/Vladislav Delay Quartet (Honest Jon's) / Moritz von Oswald Quartet :: Horizontal Structures/Restructure 2 (Honest Jon's) / Christopher Willits :: Gold (self-released)

(al/jacl/joint)

Oh, & a log-rolling extra - albient :: PyschogeoGraphic Designs Vol. 1 / 2 (unreleased)...

Cloud Four - VCV & Shinobu Nemoto

Steven Hess / Christopher McFall - IV

alva noto + ryuichi sakamoto - summvs (album preview)

Photo above by Christopher Willits. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Sunday, 1 January 2012

Fifty-fifty ball

The new year already, but these ears are still clinging to 2011...desperately & rather absurdly trying to hear everything & anything released in the old year that might bear on our Festive 50 + 50.

Anyway, time to commit: this expanded iteration of past year-end list-making once again tries to get round the one-eyed arbitrariness of shoe-horning all the vitality of a year's listening, the tangents, blind alleys & inevitable shifts, into a handful of its 'best' releases. This time out we're picking an extra 50 exceptional releases/artists alongside the 50 that stood out most for us.

With the flood of tape & digital releases, as well as the growing tendency to collaborate, facilitating greater output from many LMYE staples, we've also shifted focus somewhat - from individual releases to artists. So we'll end up after tomorrow's further half-century with a hundred great music-makers of 2011, & a rather higher number of their releases...

As last year, our joint picks are not an elite within the 50. Rather, they are simply the common ground between two co-authors whose separate choices give some flavour of our generally slightly different emphases.

Black Swan - The Quiet Divide

emuul - drawing of the line (album preview)

Festive 50
Black Swan :: In 8 Movements/The Quiet Divide (Experimedia) / Kyle Bobby Dunn :: Ways of Meaning (Desire Path) / Emuul :: The Drawing Of The Line (Digitalis) / Lawrence English :: Acute Inbetweens (w/Stephen Vitiello; Cronica)/The Peregrine (Experimedia) / Father :: Return of Father (Root Strata) / Chihei Hatakeyama :: Mirror (Room40) / Tim Hecker :: Dropped Pianos/Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky) / Stephan Mathieu :: A Static Place (12k)/Remain (Line)/To Describe George Washington Bridge (Dekorder) / Pillowdiver :: Elliott, Lou & Bill (Twisted Tree Line) / Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Plays Thelma (Desire Path) / Janek Schaefer :: Double Exposure ( Cronica)/Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns (Spekk) / Steinbrüchel :: Narrow (Room40) / Nicholas Szczepanik :: Ante Algo Azul (self-released)/Please Stop Loving Me (Streamline)/ talkingmakesnosense :: Coruscates (Rural Colours) / David Wenngren & Christopher Bissonnette :: The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude (Home Normal)
(joint)

janek schaefer - phoenix & phaedra holding patterns (album preview)

Please Stop Loving Me (Excerpt) - Nicholas Szczepanik

Frank Bretschneider :: Komet (Shitkatapult) / Conforce :: Dystopian Elements (Delsin) / Ben Fleury-Steiner :: Places that Find You (Low Point) / Function :: Ember (Sandwell District) / The Garden :: In Sea-land (Install) / Inward Content :: Inward Content (Meanwhile) / Kangding Ray :: Or (Raster Noton) / Laurel Halo :: Hour Logic (Hippos in Tanks) / Lucy :: Wordplay for Working Bees (Stroboscopic Artefacts) / Maps and Diagrams :: Get Lost (Time Released Sound)/The Town Beneath the Sea (Nomadic Kids Republic) / Sean McCann :: The Capital/The Sky Is Filled With Incredible Wishes (Aguirre)/Prelusion (Recital) / Yves de Mey :: Counting Triggers (Sandwell District) / Regis :: In a Syrian Tongue (Sandwell District) / Sandwell District :: Feed Forward (Sandwell District) / Spheruleus :: Voyage (Hibernate) / Vatican Shadow :: Washington Buries Al Qaeda Leader At Sea/Yemeni Commandos (Hospital Productions) / Willamette :: Always in Postscript (Own)/Echo Park (Infraction)
(al)

ben fleury-steiner - Memory

willamette - echo park (album preview)

Bee Mask :: Canzoni Dal Labatorio Del Silenzio Cosmico/Elegy for Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools) / Black to Comm :: Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage (En/Or) / Billy Gomberg :: Give Or Give In (Digitalis)/Only The Sun For Our (Students of Decay)/Quiet Barrier (Rest + Noise) / i8u :: Surface Tension (Murmur) / Jan & Romke Kleefstra :: Sieleslyk/Tongerswel (Gareth Davis/Jan Kleefstra/Romke Kleefstra; Rural Colours/Home Normal)/Deislieper (Kleefstra-Pruiksma-Kleefstra; Hibernate) / Le Berger :: Everything is everything else/Expeditions on the Grayscale (one tiny, two medium and a grand one) (self-released) / Jon Mueller :: Alphabet of Movements (Type) / The Necks :: Mindset (ReR) / Pimmon :: Lay Down Real Slow (Stunned)/The Oansome Orbit (Room40) / Preslav Literary School :: Alamut (Corvo)/La Reflexion du Tir (Full of Nothing) / Quiet Evenings :: Gold Coast (Rotifer/Hooker Vision)/Intrepid Trips (Hooker Vision)/Spirit Smoke (Kimberly Dawn)/Transcending Spheres (Preservation) (plus any amount of QE strands Motion Sickness of Time Travel & Nova Scotian Arms, but especially Crystal Anniversary (Aguirre) / Alexander Rishaug :: Shadow Of Events (Dekorder) / Richard Skelton :: *SKURA - A Collection (Sustain-Release) / Colin Stetson :: New History Warfare Vol.2: Judges/Those Who Didn't Run (Constellation)/ New History Warfare Vol.1 12" (Aagoo) / Svarte Greiner :: SGAR (w/Alexander Rishaug; self-released)/Twin (Type) / Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer :: Re: ECM (ECM) / CM von Hausswolff :: 800,000 Seconds In Harar (Touch) / Xela :: Exorcism (self-released)
(JL)

NB: Deaf Center's Owl Splinters (Type), the Piiptsjilling/Kleefstra contributions to Peter Broderick and Machinefabriek's Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplat) & Greg Haines w/ Mariska Baars & Sytze Pruiksma/Piiptsjilling/Heather Broderick & Nils Frahm's Seelocht (Into The Great Wide Open) &, to stretch incorporation rather further, Machinefabriek & Gareth Davis's Ghost Lanes (Dekorder) are honorary parts of the JL list through Greiner & Kleefstra too...

Those who didn't run - Colin Stetson

Water 72.86 (extract) - i8u

Villabauer player (ECM)

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Des res

LMYE's New Label of the Year hardly released a thing in 2011. Not much of a basis for recognition, you may think. But however minimal its output what did come out of Desire Path was exquisite - & if there's a better record in 2012 than its next release (which almost made it out this year anyway, so gets co-opted for these purposes - along with its debut release from late last year...) these ears will be very, very surprised (& thrilled, obviously)...

A label "focused on creating distinct pathways" that seeks to enable listeners (for whom it prescribes a strictly vinyl regimen) to "escap[e] to a place they may otherwise never find", DP emphasises location & journey in its output - not in the literal sense of field recordings, but rather in the recapitulation & inspiration of memory of place. This year this led us down the path to Benoit Pioulard's blurry 'lake within a haze', Thelma, & Kyle Bobby Dunn's lovely lacustrine counterpart, Chester - as well as his inviting Canyon Meadows.

I've probably got entirely the wrong end of the environmental stick. But the next of these resonant spaces, which clearly also chime with the 'sonic topographies' Solo Andata summon on Ritual, seems to be the monumental Aude of Janek Schaefer & the genuinely legendary Charlemagne Palestine.

A first taste of this unexpected pair's extraordinary collaboration, Raga de l'apres-midi pour Aude, surfaced earlier this year in a fine DP mix for Type's Typecast series - stream & download the 'cast & hear the hallucinatory, keening Schaefer/Palestine raga below.

Can ears pray? Too metaphysical for New Year's Eve, perhaps. But these ears certainly offer up a profound hope that DP manages to build on its masterful initial quartet in the year & years ahead...

Janek Schaefer & Charlemagne Palestine - Raga de l’apres midi pour Aude (edit)

Desire Path - Away Outside

Tracklist:

Kyle Bobby Dunn – Dropping Sandwiches in Chester Lake (Start-3:45) DEMO - Taken from then-forthcoming album (later issued as Ways of Meaning) on Desire Path Recordings

Antonymes – A Fragile Acceptance (3:45-10:10) Hidden Shoal

Skjolbrot – Rue Victor Masse to Gare d’Austerlitz (10:10-14:35) Self-Released

Janek Schaefer & Charlemagne Palestine – Raga de l’apres midi pour Aude EDIT (14:35-22:35) DEMO Taken from forthcoming album on Desire Path Recordings

Solo Andata – Carving (22:35-31:10) from Ritual on Desire Path Recordings

Black Swan – Movement 1 (31:10-37:27) Experimedia

Jannick Schou – 21.25 (37:27-40:51) Dead Pilot Records

Field Rotation – Acoustic Tale 3 (40:51-45:10) Fluid Audio

Ithaca Trio – For Ailing Health (45:10-End) Self-Released

Kyle Bobby Dunn - Canyon Meadows

Statuit - kyle bobby dunn
"Somber piece for an indoor swimming pool setting on a really grey day. Afterwards, going home and watching french films and an animation you forgot the name of."

Benoît Honoré Pioulard - Calder

Solo Andata - Myrmecia

Solo Andata - Ritual

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Noisy channel

LMYE's Under the Radar Label of the Year exerted an ever-increasing influence on these ears as 2011 ground on. So much so that by the end of the year Dekorder's often thrilling, usually genre-defying output would come to claim large chunks of the imminent 'Festive 50+50' of releases that mattered most to us this year...

Even with label chief Marc Richter's outstanding Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage surfacing elsewhere (En/Of), the highlights of Dekorder's 2011 curation were a match for anyone's - the drama, intensity & invention in Ensemble Economique, Alexander Rishaug, Stephan Mathieu, Keith Fullerton Whitman/Alien Radio, Machinefabriek & Gareth Davis, Xela, Astral Social Club & Datashock (in parts) were exceptional.

EE's Heat Waves & KFW's 101105 were two of 2011's most notable tracks. Mathieu's ravishing To Describe George Washington Bridge 10" added valuably to his immense year. Xela's The Sublime (a reissue of a Digitalis tape from last year, pedantically speaking...) gave a subtle but hugely powerful conclusion to an important trilogy of LPs. Rishaug's Shadow of Events was only a half share of his two delicious releases during the year (or perhaps three-quarters, since the other was a collaboration with Svarte Greiner), while Hauer & Davis were their unfailingly gripping selves on the long-form Ghost Lanes.

& there's still more (this, for example) to hear!

Dekorder playlists (Spotify) - 2011 & older.