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.
Showing posts with label Type. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Type. Show all posts
Monday, 4 January 2016
Sunday, 1 January 2012
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.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Return to the fold
Eno, eat your heart out. Ezekiel Honig's reworking & opening out of his recent Folding In On Itself goes far beyond a couple of remixes & a 'special edition' boxed set. Rather, he has re-engaged with the Type release at a profound level - or two levels, indeed, since his follow-up includes both a kind of live deconstruction/reconstruction & a series of paintings & collages.
Both responses - "a music release with new art made for each iteration, a painting with accompanying sound" - add new blurrings & further layers to the original's drowsy, sedimented qualities. Each rethinks its host in some way - Folding's somewhat submerged feel played up & refracted across the space of an aquatic hour, themes & tones allowed to drift like flotsam & jetsam on water, & this idea of spreading, bleached driftwood extended on into the muted, smeary paintings, & even their host material - & invites us to as well, of course.
This post features two extracts from the live performance (together, about a quarter of it, which Honig delivers as a high-res 500MB+ AIFF file) & the first three pieces in what he intends to be a "continuum" of 99 unique but linked paintings.
"I'm releasing a live performance, from the release party for Folding In On Itself, recorded in New York City on May 12, 2011. The set is very much connected to the album in scope and feel, warm electroacoustic settings with muted kick drums and spacious melodic fragments, but it is a disassembly and reassembly of those pieces, an improvised arrangement based on loops and individual sounds, which also makes liberal use of elements from other material, both finished and in-process. In comparison to the album, or any of my albums, it is more open-ended and creates different relationships among sounds, coaxing them into one new fluid piece. The hope is that it retains a narrative sense, and perhaps more so because of the extended and continuous nature of it.
In this instance I wanted to make something that is as much about the visual, physical art object as it is about the sound. Instead of a package per se, I'm making textural paintings and collages on wood, which come with a code that can be used to download a full resolution file of the music. Rather than tack on a CD to the object, I wanted to call attention to the lack of need for a physical delivery device for the audio, allow it to break free of packaging constraints of any sort, and go a step further than cover art.
Each piece is one in this series of 99, but is essentially on its own at the same time. The aim is to follow a guideline based on the first piece but each one is quite different in texture, stroke, color, and all the subtleties of the hand, as opposed to printing replication of any kind. Each is part of a continuum, so that one leads to an idea about the next, and connects to it, but does not restrain where it can go. It is a music release with new art made for each iteration, a painting with accompanying sound."
More of Honig's arresting thoughtfulness in this recent post & this mnml ssgs interview from a few years back...
Extras:
Concrete economics - ezekiel honig [live edit from Le Placard set - Montreal, 2008; re-up]
Monday, 30 May 2011
Hell and Bach
Portland's man of Porcelain (Opera), Jeff Witscher, with a follow-up from Hell (Rene) for Type, The Terminal Symphony, that’s a quite different kettle of chips from that debut and its handy little bonus disc.
There he was quite the nu-Kosmische cowboy, riding a wild frontier of high pressure atmos and bubble'n'squeak, giving a refresh to what was turning into electronica’s latest over-chewed Flavour of the Month gum. But with a sonic template based more around experimental 90s electronica The Terminal Symphony slips sneakily into a completely different decade, with an obsessively rigorous compositional style and an electronic take on classical minimalism.
Following the debut there were a series of collabs, 7”s, cassettes, and splits, though none really prepared us fully for his latest flame. He takes classical minimalism's forms as a main springboard from which he forges his own Hell-ish re-contextualisation in which the digital and analogue synths and drum machines of Porcelain Opera are reframed in a different structures. Type reckons Witscher “has used his enviable background in noise, punk and synthesizer music to come up with something totally removed from the current scene, and absolutely singular.” Certainly he’s been around the block a few times, as anyone with more than a cursory lurk in the experimental cassette undergrowth would have seen, but it was clearly the recent analogue and Kosmische fetishism of OPN and Emeralds et al. that put Hell on wheels. The Terminal Symphony is definitely a leaner, punchier animal than more generic peers leaking incontinental drift and arpeggio overflow. It opens with a familiar grunt and grind that tugs and chugs through “Chamber Forte” before the dissolve into the album’s main theme, whence familiarity fades and a neo-symphonic voice (more like that of Marble Sky (see further down this post) emerges. This voice returns on the hauntingly elegiac closer, “Adagio For String Portrait.”
Chamber Forte by _type
Comment from Hell: "I wanted to make a tighter record without flooding the content and giving up the space, instead blurring it, […] I had some older material around, but for most of I started with a clean slate for all arrangements and with a list of ideas I'd formed over a few months while living in Europe. This record was a shift, consciously and unconsciously, towards whatever is next."
Lighthouse Marvel by _type
James Knapman, a contrib colleague from igloomag, says: “Some albums may dazzle, glitter and shimmer, but few do so with the blinding intensity of The Terminal Symphony and never more so than on the scintillating “E.S. Des Grauens in Fifths.” Here, the classical and baroque influences are truly obvious, as are the sounds of the classic Moog synthesizer, as it builds from a repeating two note analogue waltz into an exquisite choir of rolling arpeggios, bass synth pads, ascendant washes and mesmerizing swarms of meticulously arranged, dancing beeps and bleeps.”
Rene Hell "{e.s. des Grauens in fifths}" from Megazord on Vimeo.
And then: “The smeared, bleached out and flat colours of seventies television are constantly merged with loud, nineties experimentation. There’s the tinny harpsichords of “Juliard Op. 66″ bristling with brightly coloured synth keys, the wowing, off-kilter warbles and flutters of “Oxford Meter End” and a sort of lo-fi texture running through “Detuned Clarinet” that is quite endearing in the context of the Vangelis pitch-bending and urban atmospherics that surround it. Rounding things out in unforgettable style, “Adagio for String Portrait” immediately brings to mind the translucent, glowing but melancholy beauty of track twenty-four on Aphex Twin’s seminal Selected Ambient Works 2.”That’d be “Matchsticks,” incidentally, as memorably deployed by Chris Morris in his Blue Jam episode, “Welsh Water Daddy.” Any excuse for some Jaaaaaaaam:
Back to Hell's beauty:
Adagio for String Portrait by _type
“From harsh noise freak outs to meditative drone works, Witscher’s ever evolving approach to music has been well documented in the cassette underground with releases as Impregnable, Deep Jew, Secret Abuse, and Marble Sky as well as founding the Callow God and Agents Of Chaos labels. The music Witscher produces as Rene Hell draws from the deep well of post-war electronic music but manages to sound like nothing else, no small feat considering the rampant cannibalism and repackaging of synthesized sounds from the 70’s and 80’s that passes for “progressive” music these days.”
Fragment from an interview with Jeff Witscher:
“JW: […] I was really inspired by North Star and Glassworks. I’m really into the idea of reinterpreting classic minimalism.
EVR: Have minimalist composers been a strong influence for you won work?
JW: Well, I’ve listened to them for quite a while but I suppose I’m just seeing something different in them now. I love Terry Riley, Roberto Cacciapaglia and Arvo Part. I’m a huge Cacciapaglia fan, I think Sei Note in Logica is flawless. You should check out Sonanze and The Anne Steel albums.”
This prompted an esoteric minimalist tangent - a Roberto Cacciapaglia chase turning out not to be of the wild goose kind:
In fact, much of Witscher’s output prior to going to Hell - as Marble Sky, Abelar Scout, Disfigure Mare, and such like - was towards the ethereal and ambient noise end of the spectrum, offering up hours of layered ambient and drone pieces. Marble Sky’s The Sad Return was a particular favourite from 2009 – it dripped with plangent slow-fi low-core symphonics, as on the wistful ambient-drone-tastic “Pulling Up Grass Under Blanket”
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Disintegrating city
Ezekiel Honig on Type? This LMYE wet dream (a revered artist - & proprietor of the great Anticipate - on our label of 2009) could hardly disappoint. Haven't heard all of Folding In On Itself yet, but tracks & samplers rooted out so far (all streamable below) carry a fuzzily muted - but still entirely distinctive - wistfulness under a sort of anti-veneer of metropolitan found sound.
The woozy, world-weary Subverting The Memory Of Your Surroundings embodies much of this - bleeding, blurring synths freighted by street clatter & tunnel echo...
Blurb: "New York-based Honig's Type debut Folding In On Itself doesn't make his music any easier to describe but does a lot to clarify the mood. This is deeply melancholy music, and while it doesn't revel in sadness, it conveys a sense that the things we grew up with and see disappear can never be recaptured. Memory and the corruption or distortion thereof is at the core the record, and like the cover which is made up of hazy family snaps of a changing Manhattan, Honig has tried to capture a sense of entropy in his quickly disintegrating city. Using a palette of locally-recorded environmental samples, decayed acoustic instruments and the unusual, clattering percussion that has become his signature, Folding In On Itself is probably Honig's most measured and defining record. Elements of his previous work are still present, heard most obviously on the breakthrough Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band (ANTICIP 006CD), but every tiny part has been trimmed and honed with a selfless attention to detail. From the lilting, processed horns and clipped percussion on "Subverting The Memory Of Your Surroundings" to the noisy, slowly decomposing piano of "Drafting Foresight," there is a sense that Honig has a distinct story to tell, and that every track on the album is a unique part of the same object. Far from a random collection of tracks, "Folding In On Itself" is an introverted collection of musings on change and loss, and is as softly-spoken and moving as anything on Type to date. Handle with care."
Stream two full tracks & an album sampler below, plus a crisp recent-ish reworking of an old track & a sound design from a couple of years back that shares Folding's plaintive mood...
Finally, cough up your email below for an archetypically clicky, blurred new freebie, Hitching a Ride on a Sailboat...
Previous coverage (also here).
"
a reworking of elements from the first two parts (from my Scattered Practices album)
"
Friday, 18 March 2011
For Nihon
Admirable curation by Keith Kenniff (Helios, Goldmund) of an album to benefit Japanese relief efforts. This instant compilation on his Unseen label, featuring a raft of ambient/neo-classicists (Biosphere, Taylor Deupree, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sawako, Ryan Teague...), will already be out next week - with a physical release to follow.
Hear two lovely, unadorned contributions by Clem Leek & Kenniff as Goldmund below, plus a stand-out remix of Goldmund's 25 Thousand Miles (from Corduroy Road) by another participant, Rafael Anton Irissari. To these ears the subtly textured soundscape Irissari summons around the older, but similarly sober & restrained, piece - a very human patchwork of rustles & scrapes distilled from the original's accompaniment - makes it especially moving.
Note that Kevin Stephens (Saffron Slumber) is also curating a netlabel release for Japan...
Saturday, 19 February 2011
Saihoji Temple
Footnote to yesterday's look at O: a brief revisit - inspired by their coming joint jaunt round Japan with flau - to Sylvain Chauveau's solo work. Still struck by swelling filmic strings, measured piano delicacy, a little glitch & crackle (more, please), & amazing, lambent space around every note...
Des Plumes Dans La Tête [re-up]
Stream Chauveau's Type releases in full: the highly recommended S, Nuage & Singular Forms...
Friday, 18 February 2011
Story of O
No brainer to follow Steven Hess with On cohort Sylvain Chauveau. & while Chauveau's would still be a major body of work even without his collaborations & engagements - not least with Hess - you wouldn't want to do without them.
Besides the luminous On, Chauveau's involvement in Arca & the defunct Micro:mega, & his partnership with Felicia Atkinson, you'd be missing out on the playfully thoughtful/thoughtfully playful conceptualists O (sometimes Ensemble O, often plinkily percussive, & yes, of course, they've done versions of Cage's 4' 33). Newest from this source - which it's quite appealing to think of as a distilling step beyond On, though chronologically O seems to precede On & is as often as not macro where On is more or less always micro... - is for the black monk on Belgian netlabel etlefeucomme.
Recommended by Stephan Mathieu, a weighty endorsement round our way, these are three diverting rule-driven cut-ups. Their alternate lurking bleakness & alarm clock repetition is oddly rewarding - especially version 2.
Oh, & "for a realistic listening, please play those recordings at low volume"...
Blurb: « the black monk » is how some people used to name american painter ad reinhardt. from 1960, reinhardt had toughened his work to the point of only making black canvases in a square shape until the end of his life. those « ultimate paintings » were invariably divided in nine squares and three different but almost identical blacks. this composition by 0 is based on principles inspired by ad reinhardt's concept: nine juxtaposed fragments of 45 seconds, monolithic and dark, with three different musical colours. the three « colours » have to be created by the performers with the instruments they have chosen.
A gripping earlier piece is Passacaille, a buzzing, twangy encounter with the classical Passacaglia. Probably...
Background: 0 has started in 2004. the members currently live in bayonne (france) and brussels (belgium). the band can include new members for each project and also increase or reduce when needed: percussion ensemble, chamber music, fanzine, field recordings...we perform our own compositions as well as pieces by other musicians: from taku sugimoto to steve reich, from fritz hauser to the jackson 5.
O > version 2 / version 3 (from for the black monk, etlefeucomme) > Passacaille (Ensemble O, Idiosyncratics)
Lots more O video here...
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