Teutonic jelly

Three flavours of Teutonic jelly: solo workout ('with The Exposures') & showing jazz chops (of a sort) with toy-toting Japanese funsters & one of the great drummers...

Bonus:

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

Curators/custodians/compilers

We noted the exceptional Type as LMYE's label of the year recently - but need to acknowledge more outstanding sound curators/custodians/compilers that were also key in helping shape our listening year.

At the risk of sending the pomposity/self-importance dial off the gauge, they start with four more highlighted labels that had a particularly intense impact here. An additional 15 who all also made a consistent difference bring us up to a top 20 - though this is a wholly arbitrary number, of course, & many other labels are also bringing out great music across a host of genres & styles; we try to acknowledge some below as well.

Implicit in all of this is the well-rehearsed idea that despite all of technology's lowering of barriers to entry labels remain important - perhaps more than ever. When we're flooded with new music their role as visible exercisers of taste, as rallying points, as cultural lenses, seems to really matter. Certainly, it still does to LMYE...

kranky > LMYE's larger label of the year: like Thrill Jockey (see below) only more so: meaning incredible vigour & new avenues even after all these years - especially this, this, this, this, this & this (& still thinking about this...) [previously/more/more] >> Tim Hecker > Visiting An Imaginary Country [LMYE hack] (from An Imaginary Country)


Low Point > LMYE's new discovery label of the year: consistently excellent & now making smart Type-style use of SoundCloud streaming - especially this, this, this, this & this [previously] >> Gareth Hardwick - Versions of Aversions [LMYE hack] (from Aversions)



12k/Line > LMYE's 'staggering consistency' label of the year: an unflagging succession of exceptional releases, whether from its rich Australian connection (see Room40 below), label head Taylor Deupree himself or other sources - especially this, this, this, this, this, this, this & this [previously/more/more] >> TU M' - Monochrome # 03 (from Monochromes, Vol. 1) [re-up]



Anticipate > LMYE's 'if only they would release more' label of the year: regrettably few releases but always a source of, er, anticipation & excitement - especially this, this & this >> Klimek - Movies is Magic minimix (from Movies is Magic; NB: higher-res version available from Anticipate)



Ad Noiseam

Audiobulb

Bine

Fang Bomb

FatCat

Ghostly International/Spectral Sound

Highpoint Lowlife

infrasonics

Miasmah

Modern Love

Raster-Noton

sustain-release

Thrill Jockey

Uncharted Audio

~scape

Also: Amazing Sounds, Bedroom Community, BPitch Control, Constellation, Domino, Erased Tapes, Hessle Audio, Hotflush, Home Normal, Honest Jon's, Hyperdub, Kesh, Kompakt, Mobeer/Moteer, Moving Furniture, Mule Musiq, Ostgut Ton, Overlap, Perlon, Planet Mu, Punch Drunk, Rekids, Room40, Root Strata, Rune Grammafon, Samadhisound, Spekk, Staubgold, Tectonic, Temporary Residence, Touch, Warp, Werk...

NB: further links & references to follow as & when...

>> The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - Embers (from Here Be Dragons, Ad Noiseam) >> Tujiko Noriko/Lawrence English/John Chantler - I Can Hear The Heart (Live at Cafe Oto) >> Pausal / Alpine. - Song From A Cloth Pocket / fr:om (from Pausal (EP) / Fr:om Harmed Weather To Stark, Micro, Climates., both Highpoint Lowlife) [re-ups]

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

Gothic gravity

As immense as the 16th-century Gothic church in which it was recorded (St. Catherine's, Krakow, since you ask), it's no exaggeration to say that Ben Frost at Untold 2008 is one of the most stunning (& demanding) things I've heard all year -huge slabs of trembling, brooding, intensely physical sound, manipulated with great deftness into something monumental, beautiful &, at times, pretty fearful.

A number of people report it as the highlight of last year's festival. There's also a wry story around that it triggered a queue of priests complaining to Unsound's organisers...

Find a 10-minute LMYE hack below. The full thing is here. Note that the recording "was made from the audience seating area, rather than via the mixing desk, to capture a sense of the church's massive interior and acoustics."

Unsound have Biosphere & Stars of the Lid performing in the same space this year, making these ears wish they were trekking out to Krakow this time round. So too do the tribe of other tasty performers captured in Philip Sherburne's round-up mix of 2009's cast of thousands (fascinating background here, by the way) & in bshosa's crisp, urgent 08/09 package.

Frost's new By The Throat is out imminently. I've not heard it yet (apart from the The Carpathians giveaway featured below), but those who have rate it - no surprise, given the savage excellence of the earlier Theory of Machines. It & other fine Frost output (though not Steinbruechel's amazing, ultra-subtle Theory reworkings on Basis, regrettably...) can be streamed here.

Ben Frost > Unsound 08 (LMYE hack) > The Carpathians (from By The Throat, Bedroom Community)


Oh, & Unsound & ~scape finally unveiled the Connections free download album previewed here previously today. As reported & rehosted, its east/west collaborations feature both Pole & Pinch (will re-up separately)...

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

Cosmic pitch

Exclusive: days away from LMYE's second anniversary, the honour of hosting an unreleased track by Groupshow leaves me choking up a little. Granted, I'm a sentimental windbag - but the Jelinek/Pekler/Leichtmann post-krautrock powerhouse isn't, fortunately. 

From the same sessions as the new The Martyrdom of Groupshow (~scape), Eastern (Lune Jaune) shows off their restlessly intelligent & off-kilter sound. The trio's vast experimental lineage - & their comfort with tricky, even unloveable texture - is scrawled all over the satisfyingly abrasive Memory Foam. 

Plus, for anyone who missed this public 'service' first time around, hear all 12 sanctioned samples from Martyrdom lovingly stitched together into a sad anorak's single file. Made so you didn't have to (not that you'd have considered it, anyway), it gives an intense immersion in the Groupshow sound in just over 10 minutes... 

Alternatively, hear the whole thing via Spotify. 

& here's a still-blinding Berlin performance by the trio - then unnamed, or possibly known as Kosmischer Pitch (& also at least once as Center of Excellence) - a few years back.  

Photo by Marco Microbi/Club Transmediale.  

NB: interview with Hanno Leichtmann & overview of his countless projects & engagements (solo, Pole, Static, Forest Jackson, White Hole, Vulva String Quartett...) to follow. 

In the meantime, check out a fascinating, astoundingly presented interview with Jan Jelinek by Colin Buttimer (Hard Format/Eleventh Volume). 

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

Martyr paste

Hoping to get a review of post-krautrock powerhouse Groupshow's new The Martyrdom of Groupshow (due on ~scape next month) up shortly. In the meantime, hear all 12 sanctioned samples from Team Jelinek/Pekler/Leichtmann lovingly stitched together into a sad anorak's single file so you don't have to (not that you'd have considered it, anyway)...

& here's a still-blinding Berlin performance by the trio a few years back.  

Photo by Marco Microbi/Club Transmediale.  

Background (~scape has plenty more in this vein...): "GROUPSHOW is a project by three producers of electronic music based in Berlin: Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann. The three artists, steeped in the formal language of minimalism, engage in a boundary-free collective improvisation that has its ancestors in both Fluxus and Krautrock. GROUPSHOW performances do not recreate previously rehearsed or recorded music. Instead, they attempt to make an open-ended aesthetic process both audible and tangible. 

The pursuit of these aims has several practical consequences. Wherever possible, GROUPSHOW position themselves and their equipment in the middle of the performance space, avoiding the use of a stage, risers or any kind of spatial separation between performer and audience. The lighting remains static and clinical throughout the performance while real-time video, filming from directly above the musicians and projected onto a wall or screen, shows the three members playing and manipulating their tangled pile of equipment. 
Whenever possible, GROUPSHOW begin playing before any audience members enter, thus deliberately avoiding the dramaturgical imperative of an opening from which the rest of the musical narrative is expected to unfold. As the intensity of the music and degree of the audience's attention are both subject to flux, GROUPSHOW set no time limit to their performances and members of the audience are free to come and go, engage and disengage with the music as they please.

Everyone loves Andrew Pekler, Hanno Leichtmann and Jan Jelinek and now you can have them in your home or office. The tracks collected here re-live the most memorable moments from approx. 200 Gigabytes of improvised jam sessions. An impressive arsenal of low quality effects pedals played by our three professional amateurs comprises the bedrock on which The Martyrdom of Groupshow was built. Pekler, Leichtmann and Jelinek may switch instruments on a regular basis yet every one of these collages features actual dirt fragments from Groushow HQ, for instance listen closely at 2:13 in ‘Incredibly Comfortable Slippers’."

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

Navigating Navapolatsk

Lovely, dubby squelch from cross-border collaborations with Belarus, curated by ~scape: Pole vs I/DEX > Track 3, Pinch meets Pavel Ambiont > 1_18 (both from the forthcoming Connections, neither track title particularly reliable...).

Blurb: ""Connections" is a forthcoming compilation to be released in collaboration with scape early 2009, available for free download. Showcasing a diverse range of artists in electronic, club and experimental music, the compilation breaks through the EU's eastern limits to bring together producers and musicians from Western Europe and Belarus. "Connections" is funded by the ECF, as well as the Goethe Institute Minsk, Polish Institute Minsk, Swedish Institute and Pro Helvetia. Curated by scape, Unsound festival and IN-Touch."

More background. 

PsyPhotos by Pavel Ambiont

Bonus: I/DEX's fine Scalene (from Seqsextend, Nexsound).

More, possibly related Belarussion collisions tomorrow night, should you find yourself in Minsk with time on your hands (featuring both I/DEX & Pavel Ambiont, plus Frank Bretschneider & Alva Noto - together, seemingly):

All of this hybrid ~scapery reminds me that the new Round Black Ghosts is out & no doubt essential...

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

Ah, is this not happiness?

The murky, scratchy, hard-hewn beauty of Jan Jelinek's Discrete Machine & Nobukazu Takemura's Der Riss teil zwei (both from The Best of JUNK JET - also hosted at Last.FM, thankfully...). 

Reminded of The Idler feature 'Ah, Is This Not Happiness': I stagger stretched into an unwelcome new day & stumble upon a pair of richly dense, squiggly tracks by two favourite artists, neither previously train-spotted & both free to share. Ah, is this not happiness?

Bonus: a far simpler, but still appealingly subterreanean piece (let's leave the toy dog out of it for now...) from the same source - Kid Fellow's junkset

NB: first photo from Takemura's blog. 

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...).

Wonky honk

No great surprise that a wonky, honking (&, yes, chunky) Jelinek remix of some previously unencountered jazztronica should float LMYE's boat: Yeah, That's Right (Meteors Noire remix) [from this EP] NB: ad-supported giveaway from We7, as you'll hear... 

From the same stable as Our Theory, who include Blue Noter Eric Truffaz, is the Nublu Orchestra: visit L.E.S Gardens [from this album] for a more sprawling, spacey take on honked-up 'tronica. 

For once, thumbs down to ~scape, by the way. A fresh Pole 12" (half-fresh: a new track & his contribution to this awesome compilation) is great news - but a 12-second freebie? Lower-res but somewhat meatier are this extract & this one. 

Thumbs up, though, to the excellent Beta Lounge's "countless hours of expert audio arrangement and dj mixes digitized live at our studios in San Francisco, Hamburg, and from locations across the globe" - 774 sets archived with love over 12 years, including Burnt Friedman/Jaki Liebezeit/Atom Heart, Jah Wobble, Pantha du Prince, Efdemin & even Derrick May, plus Pole & Jelinek: donations welcome.

Pole position

#1 in an occasional series: Fantasy Remixes...

The re-release of Pole's staggering 1, 2 & 3 on ~scape makes me want to hear his huge talent in other contexts. A dose of all that smear & buzz & textured dubby weight would do wonders for LTJ Bukem's gorgeous but perhaps too perfect Horizons (from Logical Progressions, Level 1) - imagine its glossy brilliance reframed by the spacey crackle of Pole's Fragen (from 1), say.

Legitimate plunder (re-up)

Often dark, fairly minimal & occasionally quite recent electronica, etc - all plundered from the surprisingly tasty (if largely unnavigable) music section of download.com...

NB: some tracks waved past LMYE 'nothing under a year old' stance due to legit giveaway status.

>Ellen Allien: Bim (from Sool, BPitch Control)
>Autechre: Altibzz (from Quaristice, Warp)
>Jan Jelinek: Universal Band Silhouette (from Kosmischer Pitch, ~scape)
>Mouse on Mars: Chartnok (from Varcharz, Sonig)
>Radiohead: Nude [Holy Fuck Remix] (from Radiohead/ Remix/ Nude)
>Nobukazu Takemura: Cogwheel (from Sign, Thrill Jockey)



More to follow...

DownThemAll.

Brass necks

The Necks' swirling, incantatory brilliance is getting to me. Some great tracks from a soundtrack of theirs (to this film) led me to a brooding hour broadcast here (be quick - it's only there for seven days...).

The obvious comparison is with the still-lamented Triosk, another Australian piano trio that reached far beyond jazz... But this lot work in a narrower, longer-range way, building massive, rolling peaks over vast slabs of time.

I'd love them to match Triosk by doing something with Jan Jelinek, though - they should team up with his live krautrock band (with Hanno Leichtmann & the fine Andrew Pekler, who is overdue at LMYE but coming soon...). Hear the 'Kosmischer Pitch' trio on this extraordinary performance [according to the Teutonic notes, it "applies the wildpitch-mix of house music to the same transcendence of a focused timescape"!].



Anyway, hear/download a - brief, by Necks' standards - 25-minute live workout of theirs from a couple of years ago here. Make the ~scape/Triosk connection with this new set from the excellent Roam the Hello Clouds splinter.

Listen to The Boys I from The Boys OST.



Buy other albums from their site or Boomkat (only one, though...) or Amazon.

Video:

Right on for the darkness

Get over to Skull Disco pronto for a giveway mix. It's a dark, clanking hour in DST's company - one that really encapsulates this huge, echoey sound.

Would have liked to link this up with one of the awesome Shackleton & Peverelist remixes of Pole. But LMYE's lonely but sincere 'policy' on not posting music unless the artist has made it freely available won't allow that...

For now, here's the original Winkelstreben (from Steingarten). Before the Peverselist treatment, it was a fine piece of 21st century Krautrock.

Also, check out an earlier Pole collision with a dubby edge: the shimmering Balalaika Dub with Manuela Krause (from Mein Freund Der Baum on Monika Enterprise, home of a number of LMYE's German electronica favourites; also on this quite tasty compilation, which also includes Burial Mix lynchpin Tikiman/Paul St Hilaire & Cabaret Voltaireist Richard H. Kirk's Sandoz...).

Back to SD, live video: