Plenty compiled

Late? Indisputably. But we can't let 2020 go without acknowledging a raft of outstanding compilations that, like our recent Festive Twenty, succoured these ears over a challenging year. 

The list numbers a baker's dozen. It mostly comprises conventional collections of a single label's output, though one collects disparate pieces from a single artist. It also includes a mix confined to a single label, which seemed both eligible & worth celebrating too.

Along with two further instalments (initiatives that went beyond a single release & an alternative 20), the list helps broaden the Festive Twenty. As emphasised, the Twenty makes no claims of 'best' but is rather what resonated most with us when we recapitulated the year (subject to the restriction of one pick per label/artist, for each contributor's list of 10). 

Besides the deliberate restrictions to maximise inclusiveness, we no doubt overlooked many compelling candidates.

This is the same. In contrast to the Twenty's democracy, however, this list is largely the responsibility of jl - though with al's helpful input.

Several of the releases benefit health, social & environmental charities. Others simply showcase the work of labels or individual artists - including the ultimate meta release in this territory, a vast compilation of compilation tracks...

The longest pick contains over 100 tracks; the shortest, nine. Most are pay what you want. None is more than $10 (for the digital version, anyway).

One was released on New Year's Day 2021, while another (along with a single artist mix that would also have been included but for the 'one pick per' hairshirt) was originally available as a crowdfunding reward for a 2019 campaign. This list is unflinchingly claiming both for the year just gone, all the same.

Mea culpa corner: LMYE, er, compiled a list of outstanding 2019 compilations too, but failed to publish it at the start of 2020 when life (or death, strictly speaking) got in the way. Still not sure how to resolve that failure, but this list - which features several labels who also graced the unpublished list - is a first down-payment on doing so.  

Building A Better Reality: A Benefit Compilation (JMY) 

Distant Lights Receding (TVO)

Gap In Time (Dronarivm) 

Healing Sounds II: A compilation for those in need (Past Inside the Present)

Home Normal (Home Normal)

homework - year 5 (taalem) 

LINEmix6 (LINE)

Moving Music: sounds from the rocking chair (Moving Furniture)

Mutatis Mutandis (Spire)

Mysteries Compilation | Chapter One (Mysteries of the Deep)

Particle Count (Room40)

Points Of No Return (Beacon Sound)

Solitary Hymns (Vaagner)

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

with God Herself

Still clunky, still well intentioned: the formula for our annual Festive 33-1/3 is, once again, no more than one pick per artist/label by each of us. 

We then augment the resulting list (two sets of 15 releases selected independently, meshed & supplemented when doubles necessitate a bit of horse-trading...). The addition comes from four further projects that fall outside the normal 'release' boundaries - bigger &/or more ambitious (in multiple media, for example), or unexpected collaborations.

The rationale remains to spread recognition as far as possible. Over & above LMYE's desire to embrace - rather than limit  - the multiplicity of sounds & artists we love, this is an attempt to acknowledge & respond to year-end lists' inevitable partiality. How different ours & others' might look on another day or in another mood, given the vast amount of great music every year brings...

As previously, the striking quality of some labels' output forces unpalatable choices. Outstanding releases like Lawrence English's Cruel Optimism, Kassel Jaeger & Jim O'Rourke's Wakes On Cerulean, Robert Crouch's Sublunar or Marc Kate's As If We Were Never Here didn't make the cut here only because something else on their particularly strong imprints (Room40, Editions Mego, Touch & Dragon's Eye, respectively) meant even more to one of us. But in any broader sense they are clearly core parts of the year's best...

As always, for a more inclusive picture of our listening pleasures please check out the monthly Lend Me Your Radio series on SoundCloud, al's Mixcloud & jl's Bandcamp (collection & wish list).

Olli Aarni :: Nielu (Florabelle)
Olivier Alary :: Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators (Line)
Anjou :: Epithymía (Kranky)
Aquarelle :: Leave Corners (Debacle)
ASC :: Trans-Neptunian Objects (Auxiliary)
 



Andrea Belfi / Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer / Masaya Ozaki & Kaito Nakahori - Alveare / Lowlands / Mythologies (Iikki)
Benoît Pioulard :: Lignin Poise (Beacon Sound)
Celer :: Plays Liberace (Celer)
Dominic Coppola :: Golden Blonde Air (Boudoir)
Dramavinile :: 7 (Unknown Tone)
 




drøne :: A Perfect Blind (Pomperipossa)
Endurance :: Echoic Architecture (Polar Seas) / Molecular Shrine (ACR)
Forest Management :: The Elevated Quiet (Constellation Tatsu)
David Fyans :: Subscriber Series (Erstlaub)
 




IJO :: Melancholika Vol. 2 (ACR)
The Inward Circles :: And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies (Corbel Stone Press)
Hannu Karjalainen :: A Handful Of Dust Is A Desert (Karaoke Kalk)
Steven Kemner :: Gradation Movements (Fluid Audio)
Moon Zero :: Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space (Denovali)
 




Jake Muir :: Acclimation (Dragon’s Eye)
The Necks :: Unfold (Ideologic Organ)
Ogive :: Folds (Room40)
Orphax :: Somniātōrēs (Orphax)
Pausal :: Avifaunal (Dronarivm)
 



poemme :: Soft Ice (Polar Seas)
the prairie lines :: eyes down slowdown (Whitelabrecs)
Steve Roach :: Nostalgia for the Future (Timeroom)
Claire M. Singer :: Fairge (Touch) 
Sontag Shogun & Moskitoo :: The Things We Let Fall Apart / The Thunderswan (Home Normal)



 
Thet Liturgiske Owäsendet :: Hafvet (Low Point)
The Transcendence Orchestra :: Modern Methods for Ancient Rituals (Editions Mego)
Various Artists/Jon Wozencroft :: Movements (Touch)
Velleitie :: Scheming the Afterimage with God Herself (Sounds Against Humanity)




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

Rocambolesco

It's hardly a surprise from the home of Cosi, Ielasi, Orsi & Ratti, of course. But so much ravishing music emerged there in 2016 that if we were indifferent enough to the category's absurdity Italy would surely be LMYE's Country of the Year...

As our Festive 33-1/3 - out tomorrow, allegedly - will show, some of the 2016 releases that mattered most to these ears are by Italian artists. A number of those that fell victim to our hair-shirted methodology (only one release per label/artist) are too. 

This, ahem, renaissance embraces a host of styles - from post-rock to ultra-minimalism. Given that, is there anything distinctively Italian threading them together beyond nationality? 

Perhaps. Many of the artists below manifest notable care & restraint over their sounds - a commitment to selection & balance that seems rooted in the country's broader culture. Che figata!

Bonus:



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

Wonders/wanders

Ian Hawgood's Love Retained is laced with poignancy. These 10 sketches - "simple pieces...tracked to cassette, & contain[ing] no editing or mastering, so you know, filled with 'mistakes'" - are deeply affecting. Their restraint & directness amplifies the sense of frailty around their "beautiful & freeing" incompletion.

Hawgood originally intended to pass the mostly piano tracks on to potential collaborators. But he came to use them unadorned: "looping on low levels at night, or when the mind wonders/wanders."

The release - numbered homen100, formally out on Christmas Day & with a photo by Melanie Hawgood - is also intensely valedictory. Due to depression, Hawgood "will likely not complete a new album ever again." As a result, it marks "my first & last solo release on the label [Home Normal] I founded with my friend Ben many moons ago, & also marks me fully stepping down from the label after returning for a bit in 2016."

Profits will go to Mind. 







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

Thirty-three & two-thirds

Once more into the hair shirt, dear friends: staying with our sincere though inevitably clunky attempt to spread recognition as widely as possible without devaluing it too much, LMYE’s co-authors each independently pick 15 releases that particularly mattered to them during the year – but under two constraints: no more than one selection per artist & one per label. 

Duplication across our 2015 line-ups was limited. Only William Basinski & Richard Chartier's Divertissement (Important), Celer's How could you believe me when I said I loved you when you know I've been a liar all my life (on his own Two Acorns) & Triac's Days for Chartier's Line featured on both initial drafts. 

This year we again expand the resulting master list to a 'Festive 33-1/3'. This blatant wriggling inside the hair shirt is meant to also celebrate a quartet that each amount to rather more than a single release: the welter of intense 'ritual' sounds in D.Fyans' own name since his last appearance as Erstlaub; Dauw & Eilean's often thrilling pairing & repairing of artists across their Dialog Tapes (also here); Headphone Commute's admirable, anonymous 'Undisclosed' series; & the bucolic conclusion of Duane Pitre's "unplanned trilogy" in Bayou Electric. 

Mandatory health warning: as always, plenty of other artists & labels than those featured here made great music this year. We regret not being able to include more of it...






Oren Ambarchi & Jim O’Rourke – Behold (eMego) [jl]
William Basinski & Richard Chartier - Divertissement (Important) [al/jl]
Christopher Bissonnette – Pitch Paper & Foil (kranky) [jl]
Celer - How could you believe me when I said I loved you when you know I've been a liar all my life (Two Acorns) [al/jl]
Alex Cobb – Chantepleure (Students of Decay) [jl]
Donnacha Costello - Stay Perfectly Still (self-released) [al]
Robert Donne, Stephen Vitiello & The OO-Ray – Nuvole (Geographic North) [jl]



Eating Flowers - God Was A White-Tailed Deer (Reckno) [al]
D.Fyans – Various (self-released) [jl]
Tobias Hellkvist – Pause (Dragon’s Eye) [jl]
High aura’d & Mike Shiflet – Awake (Type) [jl]
The Inward Circles – Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984 (Corbel Stone Press) [jl]
Philip Jeck – Cardinal (Touch) [jl]
Johan Johansson with Hildur Gudnadottir & Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – The End of Summer [Sonic Pieces] [jl]



Ken Karter - Monad XXI (Stroboscopic Artefacts) [al]
Le Berger – Music for Guitar & Patience (Home Normal) [jl]
Moon Zero - Moon Zero (Denovali) [al]
Offthesky & Pleq - A Thousand Fields (Infraction) [al]
Yui Onodera - Sinkai (Arctic Tone) [al]
Pact Infernal - The Descent [Chapter 1] (Lucy Remixes) (Samurai Horo) [al]



 


Periskop - Immerse (Kabalion) [al]
Benoit Pioulard - Stanza I & II (Baro) [al]
Duane Pitre – Bayou Electric (Important) [jl]
Akira Rabelais – the little glass (self-released) [jl]
Ryuichi Sakamoto/Illuha/Taylor Deupree – Perpetual (12k) [jl]
Gabriel Saloman – Movement Building Vol. 2 (Shelter Press) [jl]
Simon Scott – Insomni (Ash International) [jl]



Shuttle358 - Can You Prove I Was Born (12k) [al]
Sons of Melancholia - Silencer (diametric.) [al]
Sustainer – Radiolas (Room40) [jl]
Triac - Days (Line) [al/jl]
Various Artists – Dialog Tapes (Dauw/Eilean) [jl]
Various Artists – Undisclosed (Headphone Commute) [jl]
Chris Weeks - The Cloud (self-released) [al]







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

Lend Me Another Radio

Another month, another belated, inevitably partial sample of the period's riches...

Highlights include a strikingly poised, shimmering Christopher Bissonnette piece (from a forthcoming kranky release); a ravishingly bucolic, meditative version of LMYE's old flame Le Berger, for Home Normal; the glowing, gathering warmth of Maxwell August Croy & James Devane's returning En (on the ever more essential Students of Decay); a quite lovely Lee Ranaldo workout for Important; a valuable "atypical & personal" Chris Herbert set of "phasing & stippled atmospherics" for Sydney's Ears Have Ears; & a refracting first taste of the as-yet unreleased Tsjinlûd (a Frisian collective that includes Jan & Romke Kleefstra & Anne Chris Bakker, who appears under her own name too...). 

Also notable, TVO & Andrew Sharpley's provocative, caricaturing 'Feast Of Fools' - leering at the "dancing bears" of the "dead-eyed" Labour leadership losers, with exemplary agility (released at the moment of the Corbyn coronation). 

Further contributions from the Broken20/Moving Furniture axis are a powerful Digisizer dirge from Orphax & yet more rumbling longform beauty from D. Fyans (aka Erstlaub). 

September's 'radio' also features compelling new work by Chambers (Michael Red & Gabriel Saloman), Will Bolton, Scott Cortez, Emptyset, From The Mouth Of The Sun (Aaron Martin & Dag Rosenqvist, who also appears in his own, post-Jasper TX right...), L A N D, The OO-Ray, Andrew Pekler, PERILS (Kyle Bobby Dunn & Benoit Pioulard), Ruhe, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Taylor Deupree, Small Things on Sundays, Undisclosed & Voyou. 

The full 3-hour SoundCloud playlist, plus a few supplementary streams & videos, is at the bottom here. 

Disclaimer: no doubt September brought reams of deeply worthwhile releases besides this lot. Apologies that these ears haven't got to them yet. 

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

Normal Service Resumed

Close to an LMYE best label award for contributions to 2013 (Annual Hairshirt), it was A Very Good Year for Home Normal, which recently celebrated its 5th birthday. After a shaky early-’09 inception (Sketches) an increasingly stronger run of releases has seen the Tokyo-London enterprise slowly grow to the status of a beacon of stylistic tone-setting, sustaining a burgeoning ambient drone and organic electronic community. Despite relatively high print runs releases are often sold out at source—further cause for celebration for Ian Hawgood, for whom, in the face of a flagging mainstream music industry and his ‘not promoting the hell out of it,’ (interview, Tokafi), it's been business as usual. LMYE has been meaning to resume Normal service since the turn of the year, so here goes… 

One of the stand-outs in ’13-14’s stream was Fabio Orsi + Pimmon’s Procrastination—but blow me down if this didn’t come out last February, so ffwd-ing to now in the interests of currency, we find a certain Mr Margraff ditching duck-down-delving nom de disque and coming out as plain old René, maybe a way to say that Phasen comes from a more authentic self—more guard-down hair-let-down. Over eight smeared—presumably steel string-wrung—textural meditations Margraff shapes shudders of unsettled mien from slender means—getting closer to source sounds’ core, small grabs blurred and transformed—a shift from previous ethereal and shoegaze orientations to bleaker, more fragile but more focused compositions.

The aptly titled Continental Drift (previously earslent) is the outcome of a cross-continental communion between LMYE fave, Sam Landry (North America), aka Le Berger, and musician mates—René Margraff (Europe) again, with Fuzz Lee (Asia), aka elintseeker, making up Faures. The eponymous earth alluded to is the least salient element evoked here. Rather they are air—palpable musical gestures of soaring, water—sequences suggestive of submersion, especially in the longer-form “Asthenosphenic Movement” trilogy, and crackling fire, all converging in highpoint, “Magnetic Striping.” The trio fuses controlled grainy rushes with more composed unfurls in a shimmering son et lumiere. Overall, a notably neo-romantic deep-water, wide sky, beyond-horizon, into-the-spheres affair, this unlikely ambient-drone supergroup engage in an unwontedly pretty poesis of sound design. The trio spin this accompanying quote into their semiosis of sound: ‘It let them float and drift, break apart and converge. Where they broke away, cracks, rifts, trenches remain; where they collided, ranges of folded mountains appear.’ (geologist Hans Cloos re: Wegener’s theory). 

Back to 2013, on a completely different tip is c60 / tmkutekt by wndfrm, which is real Oregon kid (geddit?) Tim Westcott (who some may have caught as Cloudburst for Resting Bell release, Katedra) with two long-form ’scapes sourced from location recordings of the Biosphere Museum of the Environment in Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montreal’s geodesic dome, which showcases the water ecosystems of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence River region. Westcott’s dome of enclosed sound is initially all restraint, silence abounding, then a deal of metallic hiss as a backdrop for an odd back-quack; the further it peels, the more it reveals, ending in a kind of intense long thin wire drone. The second piece sets out like an industrial dryer before chatter enters followed by remote reverbed clank, the whole then drowned out by a passing plane. If, as the sleeve has it, Canada Council for the Arts funded this, I’m putting in a proposal. In the meantime, a virtue with c60 / tmkutekt is definitely patience.

A propos of patience, Ithaca Trio offers Music For Piano & Patience. With previous on Hibernate and Under The Spire, Oliver Thurley plots a path from a lowlight Leeds with a set of nicely reel-to-reeled piano loops. Obvious reference point is Lord of the Decadent Tinkled Ivory Loop, William Basinski, but these two half-hour pieces are sui generis; the first lets loops spool out somewhat scatter-gun, with a warm grain of tape saturation, skips and crackles, weathered-seeming—as if from some unearthed old vinyl find from a loft stash; the second—more structured—sounds like someone stopping off for a pensive plonk at an old Johanna in a deserted church.

Far from—let alone up—any notional alleys approaching the al wing of Earslend Towers is Place For One Day—trailed as a sort of alternative minimal-electro-folk record—by a project called Birdt (violin/vocals - Janne Mansens|accordion, synths, vocoder, glockenspiel - Sascha Schmitt|bass clarinet - Gareth L. Davis|guitar, vocals & lyrics – with a bunch of mates playing, singing & helping along). Likewise leaving your LMYE scribe’s chimes unrung, though undoubtedly well-crafted, is At Home - Piano Book (Volume One) by Sardinia-based Stefano Guzzetti—a set of ivory-tinkling lyricism to please Dustin O’Halloran types.

 

Chronovalve aka Mike Engebretson has been under the radar for some time now plying his ambient trade; associated with the (now sadly defunct) Smallfish enterprise half a decade or so ago, he (re-)surfaced last year with Trace of Light which has oodles of lush textured ambiance and a few neo-choral wisps with lashings of synthi-ness. For the sleep-deprived, this is the right somnific stuff—cloud-watch micro-symphonies, billowing, undulant drift, reminding of the days/daze of fave ‘snooze-to’ records (Somnium, DJ Olive, anyone…?). Currents swirl, waves coalesce in fleeting intermesh, then peal off in a rendering of sonic light bathing sounding object in halation effect.

Finally, commemorating its 5th birthday is a 5-disc comp, Elements, featuring 60+ artists from Home Normal past, present and future, raising money for 5 different charities. 

Last word to HN: ‘In this modern digital age with its constant stream of information, we've sought to work as quietly as possible, firmly rooting our ethos that things can be released in a subtle, quiet way. 'Organic' has always been the key word, and we are so thankful that people seem to still appreciate the natural path we've chosen, ignoring all the noise that surrounds our chosen way.' 

Chronovalve - Trace of Light from Chronovalve on Vimeo.



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

Hair skirt

Weeks into the new year but still, er, partying like it's 2013 (fretting ludicrously over inclusions even now, more like...), we finally get round to highlighting 50 more releases that particularly mattered to us last year.

Listed below, they provide a companion to & expansion of last month's Festive 30 - & together form this year's Improbably Late 80 (successor to last year's here & there). 

Though you'd probably appreciate never hearing more of it again, please note that these releases were selected after shedding the 'no more than one pick per artist or label' hairshirt in which each co-author was clad when determining our initial group. Like them, these 50 have their own playlist - tracks below are from the 18 releases unavailable for that list.

Disclaimer: inevitably, 2013 brought many more great pieces of music than the 80 we've managed to highlight. But these were the ones that really resonated with us during the year...



36 :: Shadow Play (3Six)
Aquarelle :: August Undone (Students of Decay)
Anne Chris Bakker :: Tussenlicht (Somehow)
B/B/S :: Brick Mask (Miasmah)
Ben Fleury-Steiner :: Clearings (Rural Colours) 
Bengalfuel :: Keewadin (self-released)
Celer :: Climbing Formation (Entropy)/Radish (Commune)
Chris Abrahams :: Memory Night (Room40) 
Chris Watson :: In St Cuthbert’s Time (Touch)





Cindytalk :: A Life is Everywhere (eMego)
CMKK :: Gau (Monotype)
Dadub :: Untitled EP (Stroboscopic Artefacts) 
Dalglish :: Niaw ot Vile (PAN) 
Daniel Menche :: Marriage of Metals (eMego)
David Sylvian & Stephen Mathieu :: Wandermuede (samadhisound) 
Duane Pitre :: Bridges (Important)  
Erstlaub :: Twenty Paces Outward in a Spiral (Broken20)
Fabio Orsi & Pimmon :: Procrastination (Home Normal) 
Faures :: Continental Drift (Home Normal)





Gabriel Saloman :: Soldier’s Requiem (Miasmah)
Ithaca Trio :: Music for Piano & Patience (Home Normal)
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier :: Dark Morse (Shelter Press)
John Davis :: Ask the Dust (Students of Decay)
Kangding Ray :: Tempered Inmid EP (Raster Noton)
Keith Berry :: Towards the Blue Peninsula (Infraction)
Koboku Senju :: Joining the queue to become one of those ordinary ghosts (MIE Music)
Kwaidan :: Make All the Hell of Dark Metal Bright (Bathetic)
Machinefabriek :: Attention, the Doors are Closing! (self-released)/Vergezichten (Alien Transistor)





Mark Templeton :: Jealous Heart (Under The Spire)
Miko Vainio & Joachim Nordwall :: Monstrance (Touch) 
Mountains - Centralia (Thrill Jockey) 
Nils Quak :: Infinite Folds (self-released)/Und Unsere Häuser Sind Särge (SicSic)
Phill Niblock :: Touch Five (Touch)
Pillowdiver :: Bloody Oath (Dronarivm)
Quiet Evenings :: Impressions (Aguirre)
Rachad Becker :: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1 (PAN)
Rafael Anton Irisarri :: The Unintentional Sea (Room40)





Richard Chartier :: Interior Field (LINE)
Ryuichi Sakamoto & Taylor Deupree :: Disappearance (12k)
Simon Fisher-Turner & Philippe Petit :: A Ti Dou Li Dum A Ti Dou Li Dum Ti De (hellosQuare) 
Stephan Mathieu :: Un Coeur Simple (Baskaru)
Stephen Vitiello & Molly Berg :: Between You & the Shapes You Take (12k)
Svarter Greiner :: Black Tie (Miasmah)
Tobias Hellkvist :: Turquoise (Small Fragments)
William Basinski :: Nocturnes (2062) 
Yann Novak :: Blue.Hour (Farmacia901)
Yann Novak & Richard Chartier :: Undefined (Farmacia901)







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