Annual hairshirt

Apple-cheeked scamps roasting on an open fire, chestnuts ripping open their stockings in the dawn's half-light & - to complete this touching yuletide scene - LMYE donning the annual hairshirt of our Festive 30...
 
As last year, we've constrained our compilation of this list of 30 releases that particularly touched us in 2013. To spread recognition as widely as possible (& to try in some small way to acknowledge the arbitrariness of singling out a fraction of the year's great music...), each co-author was restricted to no more than one pick per artist or per label.

At the risk of cold-shouldering exceptional albums that fall foul of one or both of these 'rules' (Chris Watson's In St Cuthbert's Time (Touch) & Richard Chartier & Yann Novak's Undefined for farmacia901 come immediately to mind...), this builds some breadth into our choices - while making room for our fairly complementary tastes to have alighted on different pieces in the same artist or label's catalogue.

This year both of us were mostly listening on the run & in the cracks between other commitments. Perhaps as a result, our overlap was minimal (unlike last year) - with only Tim Hecker's blinding Virgins appearing in both of our first CVs.

We'll acknowledge other notable releases in a follow-up post soon. We'll also be running a label of the year-type piece.





Benjamin Dauer :: The Pace of Which (Twice Removed) [al]

Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Roanoke (self-released) [al]

Boards Of Canada :: Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp) [al]

Bruce Gilbert & DAW :: Diluvial (Touch) [jl]

Christophe Bailleau & Julien Demoulin :: Outshining Memories (Time Released Sound) [al]

Cory Allen :: The Great Order (Quiet Design) [jl]

Dalhous :: An Ambassador for Laing (Blackest Ever Black) [al]

Eluder :: Through Horizon (Infraction) [al]

Francesco Giannico :: Luminance (Somehow) [al]

Hakobune :: Nebulous Sequences (VoxxoV) [al]

 

 

Jon Hopkins :: Immunity (Domino) [al]

Kenneth Kirschner & Tomas Phillips :: Five Transpositions (Sad) [jl]

Kiln :: meadow:watt (Ghostly International) [al]

Le Berger :: Variations on not too much really (self-released) [jl]

Main :: Ablation (eMego) [jl]

Maps and Diagrams :: Timbre (Dronarium) [al]

Mohammad :: Som Sakrifis (PAN) [jl]

Orphax :: Un Coeur, Deux Coeurs, Un Coeur, Sans Coeur (Broken20) [jl]

Pausal :: Sky Margin (Own) [al]

PITRELEH :: PITRELEH (Important) [jl]

Ruhe :: Easing (Cotton Goods) [al]

Savvas Ysatis & Taylor Deupree :: Origin (12k) [jl]

Secret Pyramid :: Movements of Night (Students of Decay) [al]

Simon James Phillips :: Chair (Room40) [jl]

Slow Walkers :: Slow Walkers (Peak Oil) [jl]

Stephan Mathieu :: The Falling Rocket (Schwebung) [jl]

The Necks :: Open (Northern Spy) [jl]

Tim Hecker :: Virgins (kranky) [jl]

Tomonari Nozaki :: Une Histoire de Bleu (Invisible Birds) [al]

William Basinski & Richard Chartier :: Aurora Liminalis (LINE) [jl]

 

 

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

Sound, gravity, water

Pro skater, experimental musician, & what next? A CV as varied as Duane Pitre's gives grounds to anticipate equally radical future shifts...so I confidently expect the man's first nanotechnology breakthrough or Bolivian cookbook in due course.  

In the meantime, though, his music stands out as some of 2013's most dazzling & notable (as it has been for some years, of course...). Both his keening, East-West colliding Bridges & the extraordinarily restrained, profoundly other-worldly PITRELEH (a collaboration with, you guessed it, ELEH that I struggle not to call spiritual & that summons a rare & deep musical language) will be seen here & surely elsewhere as obvious highlights of this year's listening. 

Below also hear a bracing, thrilling new piece (performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in June or thereabouts). Glib as it probably is to claim it seems informed by both of the recent releases, despite being significantly more abrasive than either, I'll say it anyway...

The suggestion somewhere that this is Pitre's likely next direction has to be worth a whoop or two, no? 

In other news: a worthwhile Village Voice interview (& an in full version) from a couple of months back, with a welcome reminder of that Cory Allen collaboration previously mentioned in dispatches...

pitreleh (eleh & duane pitre) - self titled (album preview)

IMPREC Podcast#5: Autumn Releases 2013 [features PITRELEH -Vibration: Sine Pools (excerpt) at 24:34 & Duane Pitre - Feel Free Live at Cafe OTO (excerpt) at 41:37]

Imprec Podcast#4: Summer Releases 2013 [features 3 Questions with Duane Pitre at 18:12, Duane Pitre - Bridges: Earth/Ember/Serpent (excerpt) at 25:45 & PITRELEH - Side A (excerpt) at 1:01:31, plus background excerpts from Duane Pitre - Feel Free Live at Cafe OTO]

duane pitre - bridges (album preview)

Bridges (album excerpt) by Duane Pitre

Bridges: Cup/Aether/Crane (excerpt)

Monolithic Youth (excerpt) by Duane Pitre

Music For Microtonal Guitar And Mallets by Duane Pitre

NB: Duane Pitre photo by Dorka Hegedus. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Our tidal flats

It's not just the national cricket team working up a head of steam down under as the year closes. Lately Australia's Room40, LMYE's label of 2011 (joint with Experimedia, trainspotters!), has unleashed a gleaming raft of essential 'editions' that add lustre not only to an already benchmark catalogue but to 2013's output more generally...

This new batch underlines the label's characteristic anti-generic open-earedness. From Eugene Carchesio's manic glitching to Heinz Riegler's therapeutic lullabies, via major statements from Simon James Philips (the gloriously, grandly pealing Chair) & Rafael Anton Irisarri (the crepuscular, clankingly pensive Unintentional Sea), this disparate outpouring somehow reaffirms the uniqueness of Room40's voice. 

Moreover, the label still has the great Chris Herbert's Constants to come (some earlier blather). A delectable, delicate freebie EP, Wintex-Cimex 83, only stokes the appetite for the return of an all too rare releaser - now due in February...

& that's not even to mention head honcho Lawrence English's magnificent collaboration with Liz Harris (Grouper), Slow Walkers - though that's a somewhat less recent vintage (even more so in the video below)... 

Simon James Phillips - Poul

moth to taper by simon james phillips  


Simon James Phillips - Set Ikon Set Remit

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Lesser than the sum of its parts


Rafael Anton Irisarri - Daybreak Comes Soon

rafael anton irisarri - the unintentional sea (excerpts)

Chris Herbert - Soft Quasars

 
Eugene Carchesio - Day 3

Eugene Carchesio - Day 12

Heinz Riegler - SLEEP HEALTH (Side A Excerpt)


Wake - Slow Walkers




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

Seismicity zones

Continental Drift could hardly imply earth much more (so too the album’s 'Geologist Monthly' track titles). But earth – in all of its worthy, grounded, lumpen-ness – is the least of the elements here. Rather, to these ears this is an airborne, grandly* soaring sound, mostly, with moments of timeless marine submersion & calm (particularly in the luscious, longer-form Asthenosphenic Movement trilogy) as well as of fiery crackle & roar. 



Each is at play in the thrilling high point, Magnetic Striping. A controlled, faintly abrasive rush provides a richly contrasting sound bed for a slower unfurling of trio trickery – a shimmering, glinting son et lumiere a trois. 

Faures - Magnetic Striping

Peeled out from behind their baffling Faures moniker (perhaps it means more in German?), Sam, René & Fuzz sound more like a scrubbed, marketing-friendly boy band than an ambient-drone supergroup (the trio’s tri-continentality another form of ‘drifting’ collision, of course). & in a way that’s fitting since a snappily melodic ear uncharacteristic of the genre underlies much of CD – particularly the two song-length Uplift pieces (Isostatic & Orogenic, as if you needed telling…). 



Another way of putting it: CD is a largely unexpected slab of pretty (though hardly cute or winsome) - a notably romantic excursion out across deep waters, vast skies, even beyond the horizon & up into the spheres – a soundtrack to ascension, or immersion. 

Sam is a brewer. So, finally, some tasting notes: rich, lingering body with only a touch of offsetting bitterness, not cloying, little spice, some intense top notes, elongated finish. 
    
*Grand, certainly, & occasionally grand-standing but rarely grandiose…

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

Language of the unheard

From a super-spare palette, pared-back martial rage from Gabriel Saloman - a key part of Miasmah's outstanding run over the past year (besides his fiercely poised, affecting Adhere, a highlight of LMYE's Festive 30 last year, & the forthcoming Soldier's Field, the label has also knocked out essential listening from B/B/S, Svarte Greiner & Kaboom Karavan lately...). 

Gabriel Saloman - Boots On The Ground









Gabriel Saloman - Mine Field (clip)

gabriel saloman - adhere (album preview)

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

Idle tractors

It's disconcerting to discover from Poland's Monotype that Lydia Lunch is still with us (though it's surely impossible that she's not made at least one record called Medusa's Bed already?). But it's more confounding still to have missed Gau, the beguiling debut from CMKK - a 'supergroup' from the LMYE pantheon, comprising serially promiscuous Dutch collaborators Jan & Romke Kleefstra, & Machinefabriek, plus Celer. 

"Without any plans we just went for it and ended up with hours of material that was later edited to the 48 minutes that is 'Gau'" - Machinefabriek. 

Blurb: "In March of 2012, nearing the end of a tour together through the Netherlands and Belgium, Celer, Machinefabriek, and Jan and Romke Kleefstra gathered in a country studio, spending an afternoon improvising to record Gau. Recorded by the old hardcore rocker Jan Switters at the Landscape studios in Gauw, situated in the countryside in the midst of Friesland, the place was surrounded by green fields with idle tractors, few trees, buzzards and only massive farmhouses dotting the horizon. From the almost four hours of original studio recordings, later mixed down in Rotterdam by Machinefabriek, this 48 minutes, titled 'Gau', represents the highlights of an afternoon with coffee and orangecake in the isolated Frisian countryside. 'Gau' is a Frisian word that means in a hurry or fast, but is also the Frisian notation of the village name where the studio is located."

CMKK - Gau (excerpt) [MP3 here]

The quartet hinges on Machinefabriek, of course. Besides his rewarding but unobvious recent pairing - each's epic fecundity notwithstanding - with Celer, Rutger already participated in the great Piiptsjilling with the Kleefstras (& Mariska Baars). 

Jan & Romke in turn continue to mine rich seams of salty Friesian impro with a host of other partners & contexts...

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

Apparent extinction

A pair of scintillating 'reinterpretations' by artists behind two of this year's more demanding & rewarding releases. Though one is rather more aligned with the original's glitchy momentum than the other, there's a billowing, layered intensity to both Rashad Becker & Cindytalk's takes on Pure's delicious the.end.of.vinyl - a 1999 Mego classic recently made available as a freebie download by Cronica (or cough up an appreciative Euro for it on Bandcamp ...). 

Each of these run-outs (ahem) comes from a Cronica-curated companion compilation of responses to Pure's locked-groove explorations - No End of Vinyl, naturally...

Blurb: "Fourteen years after the original release of “the.end.of.vinyl”, Pure’s first digital-only release, ten artists gather in its evocation, reinterpreting Pure’s compositions and infusing them with their own reflections on digital musics and the future of its media. 

“the.end.of.vinyl” was one of the early releases on Mego, the Vienna-based label that in the end of the millennium showed us what the music of the future could be. In 1999 its title resonated with post-analog angst, recalling the transformation (maybe even the demise) of the music market and of the cultures that it had helped to breed. It announced and perhaps confirmed an end that is still latent. 

“No End of Vinyl” started to be conceived as a set of discs that would fix onto vinyl the (mostly) digital compositions. Somewhere along the process, a dissonance between the nature of the pieces and that of the format started to become clear and a decision was made to revert to the “old” format of the Compact Disc. In a moment when analog formats seem to be going through a stage of resurgence or a final surge of vitality, we arrived to an album about the endings of a medium, released in what once was thought to be its successor and that has been coming to its own apparent extinction much sooner than vinyl has."

Various Artists - No End of Vinyl (excerpts)

Pure - the.end.of.vinyl (excerpts)

Rashad Becker - Dances III

rashad becker - traditional music of notional species vol. 1 (album preview)

Cindytalk - My Drift Is A Ghost

Cindytalk - As If We Had Once Been

cindytalk - a life is everywhere (preview)

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

Farfisa & charcoal

Ahead of a long & very keenly awaited album, Constants, due some time this year on Room40, two slightly tangential but totally rewarding routes into 2012/3's Chris Herbert - still, or perhaps ever more, a marvel of detailed sound construction & manipulation, with a rare ability to make abstraction moving...

The first is an unmastered & possibly extended version of the release's exquisite, subtly cymbal-splashing coda, Nunki, which Herbert doubted back when first posted would "survive in such a lengthy form" - though the track listing below at least shows that the piece's potential purging ("if at all") has passed. 

The second, Disjecta, is a "collage of material that didn't make the cut for various reasons" - though the 13 listed tracks do include the presumably connected/featured disjxet. Of Herbert's description of this rejected material - "some of it is bananas, some of it is great but just didn't fit" - these ears detect little fruit but rather a richly nutritious harvest... 

The suggestion that in Constants "there's a lot more going on under the hood emotionally and technically" will make the many who appreciate his earlier work hunger all the more for this "aesthetically consistent development - I'm not veering too far off the track for this one, I'm sticking to my influences and fairly narrow pool of obsessions."

"Constants sounds prosaic and neutral but it has (for me) pleasing connotations on several levels. Someone once said "I think people should essentially make the same album again and again, just get better at it", with a couple of caveats I would agree with that. 

It's also (and this sounds so absurd it almost physically pains me to draw attention to it) quite a personal record in many respects, there's been a lot of life changes since the last album and to some extent this has coloured my world view in trying to dedicate time and resources to things that matter most.  It's preposterous to invoke all of this of course but in some way on some level it is about the steady presence of people and ideas that I care about."

running time (approx) 69:13
zona
william / vactrol
spirit copy
sea holly
former shoreline
as blue as your eyes lover
cinders
news from the sun
disjxet
ninths
microlensing
favours
nunki

Nunki (unmastered final) by chris herbert



While we're lunching sur l'Herbe (sorry), have some chewy SoundCloud experiments, rewarding live workouts & a stream of the mesmerising classic Mezzotint too...

live architecture test: submerged, fractured by chris herbert

two point source by chris herbert

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