Eureka reduct

Having unveiled our 2012 picks characteristically late in the day, here's an anticipatory 'Best of' for the new year to jump the gun on next December's list frenzy - & even provide some kind of benchmark for our eventual contribution. The list is unencumbered by the restrictions - no more than one pick per artist/label - imposed on the recent Furtive 30...

This initial selection of some 20 coming highlights ranges from Stephan Mathieu's ravishing David Sylvian remix album, Wandermuede, which is already out as a download & has an imminent formal release,  as does his Un Coeur Simple, to more speculative ones. They also include long-awaited pieces such as Aurora Liminalis from William Basinski & Richard Chartier on LINE - the pair's first since their Untitled series was expanded in 2008 (having begun in 2004). 

This 'pined-for' category also features Chris Herbert's Constants (label unannounced), which will end an absence even longer on some measures - since Mezzotint in 2006. Nor has there been a full release from Mark Templeton to savour since 2009. 

Several works in progress will add further lustre to 2013 if/when they surface. These include a new solo album from Steinbruechel & an epic remix/re-interpretation/e-book project for Kenneth Kirschner (involving Steinbruechel, incidentally...) 

Also factored in: prospective debuts from two drone collaborations, Andere (Anduin & Radere) & A pond waiting for you to leap (Le Berger & Pascal Savy). The latter may still be some way off (though, happily, Sam Le Berger threatens "much more music" this year in any case).

NB: obviously enough, this year will bring many more great releases than those highlighted here. Many outstanding artists & labels are unrepresented here. Please let us know what else these ears should be anticipating... 

Andere - s/t (label unknown)

A pond begging you to leap - title unknown (label unknown)
Chris Abrahams - title unknown (Room 40)
Chris Herbert - Constants (label unannounced)

Cory Allen - The Great Order (Quiet Design)
David Sylvian/Stephen Mathieu - Wandermuede (samadhisound)
Duane Pitre - Bridges (Important) 
Kenneth Kirschner - remix album/e-book (Tokafi)
Lawrence English - Lonely Women's Club (Important)

Mark Templeton - Jealous Heart (Under The Spire)
Mountains - Centralia (Thrill Jockey)
Philip Jeck - title unknown (Touch; also Rosy Parlane/Sohrab 7"s)
Steinbruechel - title unknown (label unknown)
Stephan Mathieu - Un Coeur Simple (Baskaru)
Tashi Wada & Stephan Mathieu - Revenant (Schwebung)
Taylor Deupree & Ryuichi Sakamoto/Taylor Deupree & Stephen Vitiello - titles unknown (12k)
William Basinski - Nocturnes (2062)/Aurora Liminalis (with Richard Chartier, LINE) 
Yann Novak - Blue.Hour (Farmacia901)/Undefined (with Richard Chartier, Farmacia901)

Mark Templeton - Buffalo Coulee

Mountains - Living Lens

Cory Allen - The Great Order (Movement II) [re-up]

Stephan Mathieu - Félicité

william basinski & richard chartier - aurora liminalis (excerpt 2)

Yann Novak - Blue.Hour (Excerpt)


Yann Novak - Blue.Hour

Nunki (unmastered final) by chris herbert

A pond begging you to leap - Celeste's Fall [re-up]


Slips Into The Ether (Excerpt) by Andere.


Lawrence English's Lonely Women's Club

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

Machines can react

Flanging with something approaching fury, deploying a hugely tactile analogue throb, Mountains shrug off blissed-out torpor & unleash a newly vigorous, almost frenzied & more than faintly kosmische version of themselves...

Blurb: "Air Museum blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic music even more without sacrificing melody or the delicacy of their sound. It is an album of firsts. It was the first album that the acoustic instruments were not processed via a computer. Instead, the processing of the instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, cello, accordion, piano, bass etc.) was done using a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques. While acoustic instruments were used extensively, the album manifests itself sonically as their most “electronic” record yet. Air Museum is also their first record that was made in a studio. Working in the studio expanded their possibilities, giving more room for experimentation. While much of the album was recorded in real time with minor editing, the band took the opportunity to utilize the studio as an instrument of sorts, investing a great amount of time in customizing their approach to post-production. Air Museum was recorded at Telescope Recording, in Brooklyn, New York, between December 2010 and January 2011, with the exception of “Blue Lanterns On East Oxford” which was recorded in Philadelphia in the spring of 2010 and “Live At The Triple Door”, an edit of a live performance that took place in Seattle at the 2009 Decibel Festival."

Mountains - Thousand Square (from Air Museum, Thrill Jockey)

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.

Time-lag accumulator

More bees, more Koen Holtkamp: at the risk of turning this site into an apiological hall (hive?) of mirrors by supplementing every last new piece with a completist addendum & keeping up an alarming proportion of bee-related content, here's a further chunk of the lovely, honeyed Gravity/Bees that has to be heard.

You can put the keeper's mask & smoke-gun down, though. Leaving aside the preview's running order seemingly the wrong way round (probably not a concern except to anorak-y types, ahem), this gives a first taste of the bee-free A side In the Absence of Gravity Please Note the Position of the Sun - as well as revisiting the Loosely Based on Bees extract featured here last week.

According to Thrill Jockey's blurb, Gravity "is a side-long piece based around a 2008 solo performance in Brighton. The technical set up was somewhat inspired by Terry Riley's 'time-lag accumulator' pieces using a delay system where Holtkamp was constantly recording over himself in order to create a continuous and fluid overall sound. A friend sent him a recording of the performance and it encouraged Holtkamp to take a non-purist approach and combine the live recording with some of his more recent studio experimentations from the summer of 2010. The work is built mainly around processed acoustic guitar, analog synthesizers, and electronics but also incorporates recordings of harmonica, electric organ, small percussion objects, and an unlikely glass of ginger ale."

LMYE is on record with a preference for Holtkamp/Mountains to dispense with the acoustic guitars (& has been guided away from this stance, helpfully). Gravity has no lack of twang, but (or because, or whatever) is as refreshingly effervescent as that glass of ginger ale...

Bonus: below also stream a previous piece of Holtkamp apiology - the beautifully paced & textured Bee Change from his masterpiece for Type, Field Rituals.

koen holtkamp - gravity bees (album preview)

Bee Change

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

"An unlikely glass of ginger ale"

On the same day we're 'treated' to a first taste of Warped Eno, how refreshing to instantly shrug off that clunking disappointment with the shimmering, layered subtleties of Koen Holtkamp. The Mountains-eer's new Gravity/Bees (extract & video below) is the kind of record that Eno ought still to be making, a beguiling, warm experimental gem that manages to enlarge notions of what constitutes a sound source (bees?!) & of what ambient music can, er, be.

To drag this clumsy yoking of the two out a bit more: these ears detect a rich whiff of Cluster/Harmonia in the extract's middle section. & while the new record avoids Small Craft's extreme fetishisation, it too isn't averse to a little object porn: "Gravity/Bees was mastered and cut at D + M in Berlin and is presented in a mini-LP format and will be available in an initial pressing of 1,000 copies with a custom letter-pressed jacket."

Oh, & apologies for the apiology but it's striking how much this theme is foreshadowed in Holtkamp's earlier work - Hives on Mountains Mountains Mountains, Bee Change on Field Rituals...

Previous coverage (& here). Field Rituals stream. Discogs (KH; Mountains).

Blurb: "The main idea behind this recording was to combine the live and studio approach, older material with newer, as well as document Holtkamp's shift from digital processing on computers to the physical world of creating patches via modular analog electronics. Both "In The Absence Of Gravity Please Note The Position Of The Sun" and "Loosely Based On Bees" combine these elements and serve to document that transition.

"In The Absence Of Gravity…" is a side-long piece based around a 2008 solo performance in Brighton. The technical set up was somewhat inspired by Terry Riley's 'time-lag accumulator' pieces using a delay system where Holtkamp was constantly recording over himself in order to create a continuous and fluid overall sound. A friend sent him a recording of the performance and it encouraged Holtkamp to take a non-purist approach and combine the live recording with some of his more recent studio experimentations from the summer of 2010. The work is built mainly around processed acoustic guitar, analog synthesizers, and electronics but also incorporates recordings of harmonica, electric organ, small percussion objects, and an unlikely glass of ginger ale.

"Loosely Based On Bees" takes the opposite approach and is mainly a studio creation with only a few live additions from a 2008 New Years performance added on toward the end. Originally spurred by an invitation to take part in the Dissolving Localities Project in Jerusalem in May 2010, Holtkamp's decision to craft a recording from bees stemmed from a desire to create something he was attracted to from a production standpoint. Something extremely detailed and resonant. On one level representing a continuous flow of sound like a drone but also having a familiar association making it human. It just so happens that Holtkamp had a friend who kept bees on his roof and the project began. After trying several different approaches he placed a tiny set of binaural microphones inside the top of the hive and got the extremely detailed and saturated representation he had been hoping for. He took the extra step to do the piece in an open D tuning and used various analog filters to emphasize the sympathetic frequencies in the bees recordings so that they would work somewhat harmonically with the instruments. In the beginning of the piece the instruments are sculpted around the bee recordings, as the piece develops the actual bees gradually become background and the instruments take focus loosely emulating the buzzing resonant characteristics of the hive."

Next: "Holtkamp is staying busy by recording sound for a documentary in Japan and working on a companion piece that will be released on Barge Recordings in 2011. He will also be playing a few solo shows both at home and abroad, as well as doing a handful of Mountains US and European shows. "

Koen Holtkamp > Loosely Based on Bees [excerpt] (from Gravity/Bees, forthcoming on Thrill Jockey)

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