Feeding time

Poptronica near-perfection (shame about the toy synth, but otherwise exquisite bassy melodic interplay, with a great scratchy noise half-way through...): Barbara Morgenstern & Robert Lippok - Wake Me Up For Meals (from Tesri on Monika).

Lippok also has a remix of Christopher Willits' Yellow Spring (from Surf Boundaries on Ghostly): think this is it...

Finally, also on Ghostly, Kiln's Fyrepond (from Dusker).

Downright neighbourly

Good Vibrato-style: Goldmund - My Neighbourhood (from Corduroy Road on Type).

Enjoying the man's Eingya (as Helios) lately too...

Class of 2008, part 2

It was a struggle to be particularly contemporary in 2008: my fault, of course, not the year's - much of what I listened to was released in the previous 50 or so years (often finally catching up, years late...). But responding to ah's very welcome Christmas post, here's a sister list of 15 more of the year's stand-out albums from an LMYE vantage point:


Aidan Baker/Tim Hecker - Fantasma Parastasie (Alien8)
Gavin Bryars/Philip Jeck/Alter Ego - The Sinking of the Titanic (Touch)
Carl Craig/Moritz von Oswald - Recomposed (Deutsche Grammaphon)
Four Tet - Ringer (Domino)
Fuck Buttons - Street Horrsing (ATP)
Headhunter - Nomad (Tempa)
Ezekiel Honig - Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band (Anticipate)
Philip Jeck - Sand (Touch)
Pedal - Pedal (Staubgold)
Solo Andata/seaworthy/Taylor Deupree - Live in Melbourne (12K)
Sunken Foal - Fallen Arches (Planet Mu)
Various - Dub Step All Stars Vol. 6 (Tempa)
Various - Ghostly Swim (Ghostly)
Various - Lagos Shake: A Tony Allen Chop-Up (Honest Jon's)
Christopher Willits/Ryuichi Sakamoto - Ocean Fire (12K)



& a deeply unfashionable extra that charmed these ears anyway:

Portico Quartet - Knee-Deep in the North Sea (Babel/Vortex)

I suspect Lawrence English, Jacaszek, Klangwart, Mapstation/Paul Wirkus, Juana Molina & Shed would all be pushing for a place in our Group of 30 too if I'd heard more than a track or two from them...

May also have to have a go at this year's Grouper, given how highly ears that I rate rate it.

Few kosher giveaways to hand to accompany all this. But here's one, beefed up with a blast from the past & a couple of extracts from one of my best backwards-looking discoveries of the year:

Scanner - I Cannot Forget

Tortoise - Seneca (from Standards, Thrill Jockey)

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Multiples extract & another (Kranky)

Class of 2008

Here is a list of some of the best albums from 2008 and I hope it will encourage further investigation. Some of these have been mentioned on other blogs but they all produce the kind of music we like here at LMYE.

2562-Aerial

Arve Henriksen-Cartography

Eine Kleine Nacht Musik-Eine Kleine Nacht Musik

Ellen Allien-Sool

Fennesz-Black Sea

Gang Gang Dance-Saint Dymphna

Gas-Nah und Fern

Goldmund-The Malady of Elegance

Hauschka-Ferndorf

Helios-Caesura

iTAL tEK-Cyclical

Johann Johannsson-Fordlandia

Kelpe-Ex-Aquarium

Max Richter-24 Postcards

Quiet Village-Silent Movie

Wah do dem

Would have liked to purge that fairly unforgiveable trumpet & generally warp & toughen this very Balearic remix up - but here anyway is a rough & ready hack of Loving Hand versus Lykke Li. Get the given-away 'original' here & the remix EP from which it comes here (listen via widget below).

Can hardly claim this version as a full-blown edit. But it does add a welcome wodge of wah wah to LH (part of DFA)'s nicely spacious, richly throbbing re-imagining of the Nordic popstress's saccharine rush.

Polar clarity

Stung by LMYE's thundering denunciation - well, possibly - ~scape have sorted their Pole giveaway. It's now soared past its original 12 seconds (which you'd probably be right in assuming was more a reflection of my fuck-wittery than any fault of theirs...) to the full six minutes-plus: frohliche Weihnachten!

Alles Klar (originally from the monstrous Round Black Ghosts compilation) isn't Pole's finest moment - try the widget of 1 below for some of that. But on the basis that inferior Pole is superior to most everything else around, its mesh of restrained percussive skip, wild spurts of noise & a fat farting bass - a fairly experimental take on dubstep - needs a listen...

Delighted to see that Herr Betke is touching down in the UK this spring - & even more excited by the prospect of him, Herr Jelinek & other ~scape-sters at BEMF in Brussels a week later (an event so cutting-edge its venue doesn't yet acknowledge it...).

Amersham action

Not us, but obviously worth supporting...

Competition here. 

Widget for Kode9's awesome Konfusion: 

Despite the shoes

You might be forgiven for having a few reservations towards Richard Barbieri - what with Japan being somewhat dubious, in both their glam rock & preen pop phases, & his Porcupine Tree stuff being dull. Moreover, I once saw him perform in possibly the dodgiest pair of shoes ever cobbled.

But there's definitely more to the man. For one thing, he's often played with The Bays - the non-recording, non-rehearsing, improvising electronica quartet billed here previously (before it got too embarrassing to be this pompous...) as 'the most important band in the world'. 

Most recently, he was part of most of last month's high-stakes live collaboration with The Heritage Orchestra (covered by LMYE here). 

For another, he's made some good stuff solo & in collaboration with fellow Japan alumni Mick Karn & Steve Jansen. Check out stately, scratchy Drops of Mercury from his first solo album, Things Buried (buy here) - which features the mighty Bays drummer Andy Gangadeen & legendary bassist Percy Jones. 

TB's squelchy, frantic Light on Glass is also a giveaway, by the way. 

Never before, never again

Having frothed up more hyperbole here about The Bays than any other artist, arguably (this & this, for example), LMYE was fairly invested in their recent classical collaborations. Happily, despite the vast scope for it to degenerate into toss with strings, adding most of an orchestra to the live-improvisation, 'music at the moment of its creation' project only cranked its bravado & wonder even higher.

The combined band isn't as nimble as the quartet, of course. But with a pair of string & wind composers writing a stream of fresh music that gets sent instantly to the classical players' screens (Wagamama, please try to keep up...) in a real-time response to The Bays' bleeps & beats & a brilliantly nonchalant conductor holding it all together, the juggernaut somehow pulls it off.

Proof? Try a storming extract from this event, which featured both the Heritage Orchestra & Norway's BIT20 Ensemble, as well as grand-standing pianist Neil Cowley: Integra 2008 (LMYE hack) [longer, lower-res version here; full performance here].

Video of the first Bays classical mash-up:

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Atlantic submergence

Back to Jarrett: incredibly refreshing after Monday night's disappointment to be reminded, finally hearing 1972's Ruta & Daitya for the first time, that Keith was once a highly adventurous artist almost endlessly open to new sounds & textures. 

After two highly constrained decades, it's almost shocking to hear him neither solo nor in the standards trio (even though the mighty Jack DeJohnette is along for the ride) - & playing stunningly dense, rich, school of Miles electric jazz. 

In the same way, it's disconcerting to go back to the challenging, beautiful & original music the trio were once generating on albums like 1977's Tales of Another (in Gary Peacock's name), or the exquisite, live-improvised Changeless. 

That's not to say that there's no boldness in his tradition mining in the meantime - Monday's many peaks at the RFH showed that yet again. But, as Daniel Paton points out, he seems to have lost interest in innovating (& certainly in writing).  

It wasn't always this way. That's hardly a surprise, of course, with someone whose post-Miles, pre-standards output includes landmarks like Facing You, the Sunbear & Bremen/Lausanne concerts (&, yes, Koeln too...), & the two astounding quartets. 

For a reminder of that time (& not forgetting how thrilling the standards can be too, especially the earlier stuff): You Know, You Know (from Ruta) & Vignette (from Tales).  

Posten Norge

Having so far failed to get anything together on Monday night's solo Jarrett 'stravaganza (excellent reviews here [with LMYE tagging along] & here [without], though...) & having missed out on Punkt UK, infuriatingly, a diversion into Norwegian post-jazz. 

Kornstad's Tempelhof is an oddly guilty pleasure - a trancey, horn-adorned rifforama given away to fuel his Single Engine of last year. 

Kornstad is also in the sometimes excellent Wibutee. Here's a nicely brisk & blobby remix of their Playmachine by the, er, sometimes excellent Scanner - his version of Tempelhof would be worth hearing...

Saving the best for last - & getting some Punkt in through the back door - Jan Bang & DJ Strangefruit (last featured here in the company of Nils Petter Molvaer) trip out with the loveable Bugge Wesseltoft for 10th anniversary live antics: Belleville Session. 

& Bugge explores his soulful side, anchored by Sidsel Endresen & NPM: River. 

Lots more live Bugge & co-conspirators here, by the way. 

Now, about that Arve Henriksen album on ECM...