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.

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 ball

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. 

Black Swan - The Quiet Divide


emuul - drawing of the line (album preview)


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)


janek schaefer - phoenix & phaedra holding patterns (album preview)


Please Stop Loving Me (Excerpt) - Nicholas Szczepanik

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)

ben fleury-steiner - Memory


willamette - echo park (album preview)

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 & Romke Kleefstra :: 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... 


Those who didn't run - Colin Stetson


Water 72.86 (extract) - i8u


Villabauer player (ECM)

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

Keep a Weather Eye Open

A Gareth Hardwick post pushing current Low Point releases listing Ben Fleury-Steiner forthcoming: prompted harking back to and digging out of lamentably overlooked gem from last year (March 2010 release). Ben's Keep a Weather Eye Open on the estimable Infraction got an ‘Also outstanding’ in LMYE’s Festive 50, but there's been barely a peep from anyone elsewhere on this accomplished bit of ambient-drone gear. Good pretext for bigging it up a bit.



Ben F-S lists among his ‘influences’ "Gavin Bryars, Robert Rich, Celer, and Mystery Sea," and his ‘sounds like’ as “A swell of broken and breaking emotion: beautiful shipwreck.” Sounds about right.



What the label says...

“From the inset, "Tender is the opaque morning" the scene has been set on 'Keep a Weather Eye Open' into a Bryars-esque dip into the sunken Titanic. Gently clattering china on a slow drop to the bed of the ocean, faint light filtering through. The band plays on, the notes become submerged & eventually a hymnal drone emerges repeating over and over in slow cycles. This is not the end however, as unlike the ill-fated Vessel of Sleep, this work re-emerges to the surface and into hazy light. Roughly 2 years in the making for release on Infraction - KAWEO is presented in a digipak with a 12 page color booklet in an edition of 900 copies. In addition the first 250 copies will receive a numbered, bonus 3" CDR, "Vessel of Sleep" (INFX 041) which contains 3 additional unreleased tracks, housed in a 6 panel cardstock folder. KAWEO was mastered by Robert Rich. "...from aft came the tunes of the band..... The ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing "Autumn" then." - Harold Bride, 1912.”



(What Norman Records says)

Audio samples retrievable “Feedback of Day : Sunlit in Stop Frame - Part 1” and “Vessel of Sleep – Part 3”

Keep A Weather Eye Open is dedicated to Danielle Baquet-Long.



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