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.

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.

Finer to coarser

Something for the weekend, sir? An exclusive treat following yesterday's Pollen Trio post - for a limited time only, download the Australian post-jazz explorers' 13-minute epic p e a k s. Higher-res & CD-R still available via Bandcamp (ditto the group's earlier releases - both as PT & the Austin Benjamin Trio - & fine solo work on hellosQuare)...

Pollen Trio - p e a k s (self-released)

Forthcoming: a new PT album later this year, following Austin Buckett's extraordinary Stuttershine (extract below)...

Austin Buckett - Stuttershine (excerpt)

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

Fine to coarse

Pollen Trio marks a rewarding point of collision or, er, cross-pollination between two Australian lineages that LMYE (this half, anyway...) is deeply invested in - the extraordinary post-jazz trio tradition of The Necks, Triosk & 3ofmillions meeting the broader experimental church of Shoeb Ahmad's hellosQuare (our neglected label of 2010) & Ahmad/Evan Dorrian (PT)'s Spartak.

PT metamorphosed out of the Austin Benjamin Trio a while back - a transition covered in this Fluid Radio interview. Quiet for nearly two years, the trio returns in a knottier, more overtly experimental guise on the newly self-released p e a k s (full stream below) - a 13-minute epic that rattles & tinkles its loping way to a sudden intense summoning of classical PT lyricism, niftily offset by filthy synth squirts & Dorian's percussive monsoon. "We like the idea of it possesing these conflicting momentums as if alva noto, morton feldman and madvillain were being recorded improvising in soundproof rooms filtered into a PA outside," pianist Austin Buckett says.

The shift is underlined by Miroslav Bukovsky coming in for the travelling Chris Pound - an angklung an unexpected part of his armoury.

The new piece precedes an album later this year. If that can harness Peaks' distinctiveness & invention, expect to see it in LMYE's Festive 50 (the 50 releases that meant most to us during the year) for 2011 - last year's version, including several blinding hellosQuare releases, here.

pollen trio - p e a k s

Hear earlier PT/ABT highlights (including a ravishing collaboration with Seaworthy's Cam Webb), plus some great solo Buckett/Dorrian:

NB: p e a k s cover art by Elena Papanikolakis.

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

Vostok buffet

Triosk won't be back any time soon, to LMYE's continuing chagrin. But Adrian Klumpes (or Lim-Klumpes now, seemingly) is still making compelling, unobvious music in a rich variety of guises - solo, duetting with the great Shoeb Ahmad of hellosQuare, in the 3ofmillions trio (thrilling new album launched tomorrow night with Chris Abrahams...) & in enticing collaborations with the likes of Machinefabriek & Thomas Bednarczyk.

While we wait for the new solo record threatened last year, start your day with a Klumpes buffet - from the fragile, scratchy romance of Hillside & Sketch Pt. 2 [both downloadable via their SoundCloud streams below] to Abstruction's muscular, er, abstractions via the mysterious, faintly foreboding In Stillness...

Hillside

Be Still (Leaf) / Together Under The Clouds Rolling In (from bip_hop generation vol.9) / Triosk (all Spotify)

Tomasz Bednarczyk (feat. Adrian Klumpes) > The Sketch Pt. 2 [via FewQuietPeople]

Adrian Klumpes w/ Machinefabriek > In Stillness His Shadow Moved [via sound&fury; re-up]

3ofmillions > Abstruction / Nebuchadnezzar [extract] / Versus Nature [extract] (from Abstruction, Rufus) / Live in Petersham / Live in Sydney

NB: live shot by Leigh Tran & portrait by Wilk. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Old cassettes

Set sail into a Seaworthy quartet - four contrasting tastes of Cam Webb's always-beguiling & increasingly location-rich (see his Environmental Sounds blog with Two Lakes partner Matt Rösner) 'project', for want of a better word. Some of the contrast comes from Webb's relentless collaboration, clearly - besides Rösner, the pieces & streams here also feature post-jazzers Pollen Trio (the new Triosk?) & the great Italian space meister Fabio Orsi.

But at least as much seems to come from a restless, quicksilver aesthetic that flits from bucolic six-string delicacy & "birds, frogs, wind and water" to skittering impro, languid drones & metallic buzz...

Seaworthy > Summer Holiday

"Cleaning up over the summer holiday and trying to organise a bunch of old cassettes and minidiscs I came across some old recordings. This track is a rough sketch using a short sample of the 4-track guitar recordings cut up and processed through bits and pieces on audiomulch. If you like it, please pass it on."

Seaworthy > Meroo Lake Pt 1

(from Seaworthy & Matt Rösner - Two Lakes (Spotify; some streams via 12k too)

Matt Rösner & Seaworthy - Live at Serial Space, Sydney (via Symbiosis)

Seaworthy > Live at the Northcote Uniting Church

Seaworthy & Pollen Trio > Untitled 1 (from Untitled, hellosQuare)

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

Databases flee leer

Labels' role as visible exercisers of taste, as rallying points, as cultural lenses, was at least as crucial this year as last. Following our label of the year (Low Point), LMYE highlights five other curatorial efforts that helped define 2010.

Besides our picks - below, alphabetically - you could also make credible cases for Raster-Noton, Root Strata, samadhisound & Under The Spire, which all had notably strong years. So too did the fine alternative choices (just one overlap with our lot) over at The Liminal.

Broken20 - LMYE's new label of the year: making the alluring promise of "releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz" - & delivering. Even if only a couple of official releases emerged (though you could treat the excellent Rose & Sandy Play Cat's Cradle on Moving Furniture & Erstlaub's typically huge Sleepwalking Into The Underworld for the soon-gone-&-already-much-lamented Highpoint Lowlife as honorary B20 works), not only were they outstanding but their supporting cast of precursors & 'casts was spectacular - particularly the genius down-pitching of Erik XVI's The Fading Splendour of a Technological Future & label chief ruaridhTVO's 4-hour, cast of thousands Broken Roots epic...

TVO > Keep Away From Fire And Flames [excerpt; re-up]

Erstlaub > The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep [excerpt; re-up]

hellosQuare - LMYE's neglected label of the year: distance may play a part in it, but hellosQuare's low profile was never more baffling than this year when the great Australian label was dishing up must-hear releases from Scissor Lock, Spartak & label head/Spartak member Shoeb Ahmad (plus a part-exclusive release for Mapstation) - deep & often deeply different sounds from down under...

Spartak > 5 44 (Pillowdiver remix)

Raven > In Marrickville, In The Dirt / Adrian Lim-Klumpes > Hillside (both from Bown.Hollo.Lim-Klumpes.Ahmad.Dorrian, hellosQuare; NB: lo-res - higher-res versions on free download)

Thrill Jockey/kranky - LMYE's larger labels of the year: while kranky had the edge on its fellow leviathan last year, there was little to separate them in 2010 as each underscored improbable vigour this far into their craggy careers with a raft of valuable releases (to both rack up an improbably gorgeous bee-related album. Yes, really...) Thrill Jockey had the somewhat bigger names - Oval/Fennesz Daniell Buck/Koen Holtkamp - but kranky's sponsorship of Brian McBride, Jonas Reinhardt & Loscil, plus its re-release of the Pan.American classic For Waiting, For Chasing, demands equal acknowledgement.

pan•american > still swimming

brian mcbride > supposed essay on the piano b major piano adagietto

Oval > Encore

Sam Prekop > The Silhouettes

Touch - LMYE's pioneering label of the year: shepherding magnificent new releases by Philip Jeck & BJ Nilsen that were among the year's best anywhere is qualification enough for recognition. But Touch went further, bringing Sohrab's unmissable A Hidden Place, Daniel Menche's extraordinary Hover, early Hildur Gudnadottir goodness in the form of the Mount A re-release & further enhancing its Touch Radio series with 12 new instalments - including this Phill Niblock.

Sohrab > Live in Tehran [extract] (from Live in Tehran, TouchRadio)

Philip Jeck & BJ Nilsen > Suffolk Symphony Rehearsal [Radio 4 edit] (from Suffolk Symphony Rehearsal)

Touch 2010 playlist (Spotify).

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