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...
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)
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.
The new year already, but these ears are still clinging to 2011...desperately & rather absurdly trying to hear everything & anything released in the old year that might bear on our Festive 50 + 50.
Anyway, time to commit: this expanded iteration of past year-end list-making once again tries to get round the one-eyed arbitrariness of shoe-horning all the vitality of a year's listening, the tangents, blind alleys & inevitable shifts, into a handful of its 'best' releases. This time out we're picking an extra 50 exceptional releases/artists alongside the 50 that stood out most for us.
With the flood of tape & digital releases, as well as the growing tendency to collaborate, facilitating greater output from many LMYE staples, we've also shifted focus somewhat - from individual releases to artists. So we'll end up after tomorrow's further half-century with a hundred great music-makers of 2011, & a rather higher number of their releases...
As last year, our joint picks are not an elite within the 50. Rather, they are simply the common ground between two co-authors whose separate choices give some flavour of our generally slightly different emphases.
Festive 50 Black Swan :: In 8 Movements/The Quiet Divide (Experimedia) / Kyle Bobby Dunn :: Ways of Meaning (Desire Path) / Emuul :: The Drawing Of The Line (Digitalis) / Lawrence English :: Acute Inbetweens (w/Stephen Vitiello; Cronica)/The Peregrine (Experimedia) / Father :: Return of Father (Root Strata) / Chihei Hatakeyama :: Mirror (Room40) / Tim Hecker :: Dropped Pianos/Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky) / Stephan Mathieu :: A Static Place (12k)/Remain (Line)/To Describe George Washington Bridge (Dekorder) / Pillowdiver :: Elliott, Lou & Bill (Twisted Tree Line) / Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Plays Thelma (Desire Path) / Janek Schaefer :: Double Exposure (
Cronica)/Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns (Spekk) / Steinbrüchel :: Narrow (Room40) / Nicholas Szczepanik :: Ante Algo Azul (self-released)/Please Stop Loving Me (Streamline)/ talkingmakesnosense :: Coruscates (Rural Colours) / David Wenngren & Christopher Bissonnette :: The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude (Home Normal) (joint)
Frank Bretschneider :: Komet (Shitkatapult) / Conforce :: Dystopian Elements (Delsin) / Ben Fleury-Steiner :: Places that Find You (Low Point) / Function :: Ember (Sandwell District) / The Garden :: In Sea-land (Install) / Inward Content :: Inward Content (Meanwhile) / Kangding Ray :: Or (Raster Noton) / Laurel Halo :: Hour Logic (Hippos in Tanks) / Lucy :: Wordplay for Working Bees (Stroboscopic Artefacts) / Maps and Diagrams :: Get Lost (Time Released Sound)/The Town Beneath the Sea (Nomadic Kids Republic) / Sean McCann :: The Capital/The Sky Is Filled With Incredible Wishes (Aguirre)/Prelusion (Recital) / Yves de Mey :: Counting Triggers (Sandwell District) / Regis :: In a Syrian Tongue (Sandwell District) / Sandwell District :: Feed Forward (Sandwell District) / Spheruleus :: Voyage (Hibernate) / Vatican Shadow :: Washington Buries Al Qaeda Leader At Sea/Yemeni Commandos (Hospital Productions) / Willamette :: Always in Postscript (Own)/Echo Park (Infraction) (al)
Bee Mask :: Canzoni Dal Labatorio Del Silenzio Cosmico/Elegy for Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools) / Black to Comm :: Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage (En/Or) / Billy Gomberg :: Give Or Give In (Digitalis)/Only The Sun For Our (Students of Decay)/Quiet Barrier (Rest + Noise) / i8u :: Surface Tension (Murmur) / Jan & RomkeKleefstra :: Sieleslyk/Tongerswel(Gareth Davis/Jan Kleefstra/Romke Kleefstra;Rural Colours/Home Normal)/Deislieper (Kleefstra-Pruiksma-Kleefstra; Hibernate) / Le Berger :: Everything is everything else/Expeditions on the Grayscale (one tiny, two medium and a grand one) (self-released) / Jon Mueller :: Alphabet of Movements (Type) / The Necks :: Mindset (ReR) / Pimmon :: Lay Down Real Slow (Stunned)/The Oansome Orbit (Room40) / Preslav Literary School :: Alamut (Corvo)/La Reflexion du Tir (Full of Nothing) / Quiet Evenings :: Gold Coast (Rotifer/Hooker Vision)/Intrepid Trips (Hooker Vision)/Spirit Smoke (Kimberly Dawn)/Transcending Spheres (Preservation) (plus any amount of QE strands Motion Sickness of Time Travel & Nova Scotian Arms, but especially Crystal Anniversary (Aguirre) / Alexander Rishaug :: Shadow Of Events (Dekorder) / Richard Skelton :: *SKURA - A Collection (Sustain-Release) / Colin Stetson :: New History Warfare Vol.2: Judges/Those Who Didn't Run (Constellation)/
New History Warfare Vol.1 12" (Aagoo)/ Svarte Greiner :: SGAR (w/Alexander Rishaug; self-released)/Twin (Type) / Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer :: Re: ECM (ECM) / CM von Hausswolff :: 800,000 Seconds In Harar (Touch) / Xela :: Exorcism (self-released) (JL)
NB: Deaf Center's Owl Splinters (Type), the Piiptsjilling/Kleefstra contributions to Peter Broderick and Machinefabriek's Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplat) & Greg Haines w/ Mariska Baars & Sytze Pruiksma/Piiptsjilling/Heather Broderick & Nils Frahm's Seelocht (Into The Great Wide Open) &, to stretch incorporation rather further, Machinefabriek & Gareth Davis's Ghost Lanes (Dekorder) are honorary parts of the JL list through Greiner & Kleefstra too...
LMYE's Under the Radar Label of the Year exerted an ever-increasing influence on these ears as 2011 ground on. So much so that by the end of the year Dekorder's often thrilling, usually genre-defying output would come to claim large chunks of the imminent 'Festive 50+50' of releases that mattered most to us this year...
EE's Heat Waves & KFW's 101105 were two of 2011's most notable tracks. Mathieu's ravishing To Describe George Washington Bridge 10" added valuably to his immense year. Xela's The Sublime (a reissue of a Digitalis tape from last year, pedantically speaking...)gave a subtle but hugely powerfulconclusion to an important trilogy of LPs. Rishaug's Shadow of Events was only a half share of his two delicious releases during the year (or perhaps three-quarters, since the other was a collaboration with Svarte Greiner), while Hauer & Davis were their unfailingly gripping selves on the long-form Ghost Lanes.
