St Moritz

 

'delicate fluidity & shape-shifting'

Photo by Marion Benoit.

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

158 Bleecker?

Dubby menace, spiralling squirts & tones, reflective Bitches Brew minors, & future sheen degraded into blurry, puffy washes - all flogged along by oil drum percussion once again, but framed now by a venue acoustic & studded with appreciative yelps: the sound of the Moritz von Oswald Trio Live in New York.

Was it their US debut (February 6 at Le Poisson Rouge)? I assume not, since that had ReComposed orchestral action. But I shouldn't be getting into this, as I've really no idea & Honest Jon's aren't saying...

Anyway, a resequenced (extracts #4, 1, 3 & 2, fellow trainspotters!) LMYE hack of samples from the forthcoming album - a companion to our earlier bodge of Vertical Ascent.



Absent any decent footage of MvOT in NY, two slants on their recent performance in Detroit:





Interview. & another (video, way longer).

Moritz von Oswald Trio > Live in New York [extracts] / [lo-res] (from Live in New York, Honest Jon's)



NB: photos by pablosanz.

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

Venerable vigour

Warp's exuberant 20th birthday celebrations bring home the realisation that the same landmark is looming for another venerable independent. But while Thrill Jockey may date all the way back to Bettina Richards' bedroom launch in 1992, it's hardly showing its age - indeed, to these ears the Chicago label's hit a particularly rich, vigorous vein of form lately.

Perhaps that has something to do with Tortoise's emergence from hibernation. Certainly, the post-rock leviathan's first proper album in five years (see here) has added to the label's recent momentum.

Besides the many pleasures of Beacons of Ancestorship itself (interview & performance here), Tortoise have also revived the former glory of their remix encounters with the likes of Oval & Autechre. Most notably, Mark Ernestus (Basic Channel) has fermented a slowly decaying version of the zithery Gigantes - sold out on 12", but available on US iTunes & released in Europe next month...

At the other end of the band's spectrum, Doug McCombs' collaboration with David Daniell has also budded into a release (Sycamore). No accident, perhaps, that the wonderfully sustained 15-minute post-jazz/rock epic Vejer de la Frontera features Tortoise's John Herndon too.

With their unashamed lap-steel & accumulated hours of improvising, you could see the Daniell & McCombs duo as deconstructor-editors of a guitar-led American tradition.

David Daniell & Douglas McCombs > F# Song (from Sycamore)

As ever, there are also compelling things happening on the label away from Tortoise's orbit. Take Lokai & Jason Urik.

There may be a few cheap points to be scored by claiming Lokai as a European version of Daniell & McCombs. But a closer model for the pair is probably something like Eno's Music for Films - rewardingly moody sketches, often brisk or even curt by the standards of Thrill Jockey peers & with a portentous, clangy quality recognisable from sister/cousin incarnations Nemeth & Radian (previously featured here).

Lokai > salvador (from transition)

Meanwhile, Urik's forthcoming Husbands & remix (with Joe Williams) of Thank You's Pathetic Magic pick up the brilliant mantle of Mountains (featured here previously) - dense, elongated, immensely textured droney vamps. Ironically, the twinkling, slurred remix is the shortest of these lovely pieces: pretty perfect in its own right, but due a further reworking/stretching, perhaps?

Jason Urik > The Eternal Return (from Husbands - vinyl-only!)

Other Thrill Jockey-related posts on LMYE: here (Lithops), & here, here & here (Nobukazu Takemura).

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

Slithery sheen

The Moritz von Oswald Trio > Patterns 1-4 [extracts] (from Vertical Ascent, forthcoming on Honest Jon's)

The first taste of the impeccably-lineaged (Basic Channel/Maurizio meets Vladislav Delay!) MVOT confirms those earlier YouTube sightings: Moritz, Vlad & the other guy are dealing in an amazing slithery, sheened 21st century space jazz - propulsive, percussive & rather distant. 

Not sure when Vertical Ascent is out. But it can be confidently put down already as one of LMYE's highlights of 2009...

Photo by Marco Microbi

For trainspotters only: the slower Pattern 2 extract comes after 1, 3 & 4 in this little compilation.

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

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)

Remove red from white light

An effortlessly pulsing, cleverly smeared working of the rich seam of dubby post-techno, Pattern 4 by cyan341 on Uncharted Audio is respectfully in the Basic Channel lineage - to the extent of having its own decimal-placed version (4.1: buy here). 

If its imminent vinyl release in the perfect format (10", obviously...) weren't persuasion enough, cyan gets further kudos for citing this great 1990 compilation as a key inspiration (previously blogged by LMYE here). 

Moreover, it has a fine remix by the relentlessly interesting LJ Kruzer - both skipping and melancholy. 

To arouse your appetite further, an LMYE-hacked hors d'oeuvre from this summer's STFU gathering: Heidelberg Heat - feast on those lovely, mad synth stabs & vamps... 

cyan's deliciously spacey set in its hour-plus entirety is here, while for completists everything from the event is here under Creative Commons.

Pic by filarion. 

Bonus: Kruzer giveaways - Koi Carp, Mowzer & Pitville Park. 

Tiki-taka

Tikiman/Paul St. Hilaire is the commanding, supplicating voice of much of the great Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix output that LMYE's been celebrating lately (see here, here & here).

Besides his own Basic Channel-linked label (False Tuned), he collaborates pretty constantly & widely - including with Apparat & Modeselektor last year: check out the ferocious live workout of Let Your Love Grow on Things To Be Frickled, or the marginally more restrained version on Happy Birthday...

He was also on Soul Jazz's first Box of Dub dubstep compilation last year.



Here's some other non-Rhythm & Sound outings (Main Street isn't too far from its BC cousin, granted, but anyway...) - several G-Stone sessions among them:

Dub in a Nutshell ft. Paul St. Hilaire > You Never Know [SoulPhiction Mix] (from Motorsoul Vol.1)

Main Street feat. Paul St. Hilaire > Acting Crazy [Club Vocal] (from Round One to Round Five)

Mind over Midi featuring Tikiman > Revelation (from World Dub Pastry)

Rodney Hunter feat. Paul St. Hilaire > Vampire (from Dub Club - Picked From The Floor EP)

StereoTyp meets Tikiman > Jahman [Original Version] (from My Sound)

Live:

Dubbed-out symphony

Awesome dubbed-out symphony of surging, clicky, fluttering atmosphere & texture: Basic Channel's Q Loop from BCD (now often sold as Compiled).

Wiki/Discogs.

Basic Channel - Radiance III

NB: 'video' is a still image only - but worth a play anyway to hear/be reminded of this awesome track...