That time Asha Puthli sang (gorgeously…) for Ornette! & later with Ornette's subsequent Prime Time bassman Jamaaladeen Tacuma...
Also a wild take by The Thing's Mats, who has a fine version too with (yes, really) Neneh Cherry - whose step-dad played on the 'Science Fiction' album where it first appeared & later explored the track (whose original he sat out from) with Bobo Stenson et al & separately with Nana Vasconcelos & Ingrid Sertso!
The Neneh/Thing got some trans-Nordic remix action as well, while she & her brother featured on a Swedish album that had a go at it too (though without them, regrettably).
Oh, & there's a whole Italian strand - from that, the Sabina Meyer-sung Agus Collective take.
Finally, if you do Spotify an ultra-nerdy collection of 'WRCIG's...
We can argue about whether the Bill Callahan songbook is worthy of it, but there can't be much dispute about the fastidious connoisseurship that already characterises Stephan Mathieu's new vinyl/FLAC-only label,Schwebung (down to details like its customised ringtone & the meaning of its lovely, apt name - "the beats producted by the simultaneous vibration of two sounds, especially in unisons & octaves when nearly, but not quite in tune"). This is true of his work more generally, of course - from the extraordinary care & precision of his live phonoharp placements, as Fluid Radio & The Liminal noted, to that shaping classics like Transcriptions (with Taylor Deupree) or A Static Place (the latter a mainstay of LMYE's Festive 50 + 50 of 2011's exceptional releases)...
A platform for Mathieu's "simultaneously vibrating" collaborations, as well as solo work, Schwebung starts life with an avant-pop encounter with Sylvain Chauveau & Adam Wiltzie. Callahan's "ballades" do little for these ears, but the treatments Mathieu & Chauveau (who has plenty of form in recontextualising pop - exhibits A & B) conjure are quite ravishing, if the the first two instalments from the again beautifully & aptly named Palimpsest, Chosen One& Prince Alone In The Studio, are anything to go by - their stately, swelling shimmers in somewhat other-worldly, even disorienting, contrast to the songs.
So even if Palimpsest seems like something of an outlier it is ultimately a sister to this year's revisit toRadioland (the scintillating Panoramica live workout with Caro Mikaleff on Line) or the pair's glorious-sounding & lookingConstellationor even an absorbing smaller-scale piece like Re-composition from bouzoukifrom late last year. & so too will be Schwebung's next release (the reference to it seems to have disappeared, but it's with a Japanese artist...) since Mathieu is plainly incapable of making anything not hugely alluring.
Lately all roads lead to, er, Roden. In just a few months as many as three essentialSteve Rodenreleaseshave surfaced. The solo Proximities (a retroactive staple of our 2011 Festive 50 + 50) (Line) & collaborations withMachinefabriek (Lichtung, Eat Sleep Repeat) & Steve Peters (Not A Leaf Remains As It Was, 12k) are each highly considered yet captivatingly fluid - & while quite different (Proximities spangling,Lichtung crunching, Leaf quavering) all exhibit an affecting contemplative beauty.
Oh, & in case this sudden burst of fecundity isn't enough for you there's a Champion Version 10" film soundtrack along shortly (or already gone, perhaps, since it's some ultra-limited lathe-cut thing...).
Also, among a global itinerary Roden is part of the ICA's Soundworks starting next month.
Blurbs: "Proximitieswas recorded in 2010 during my time as the artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. I began by recording a performance of a series of tones played on an old battery powered Paia Oz, that were determined by the letters A-G as found in a text by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. I recorded the tone sequence several times during sunrise, amidst 50 of Judd’s stainless steel sculptures in an old army barracks that has been converted into a museum. The performances were recorded with an H4 digital recorder, my iPhone and also a cheap Sony micro-cassette recorder. During several of the performances these small devices were emitting the sounds of previous performances from their tiny speakers. At times I also hummed. All of the processing in the recordings was generated by the extremely resonant physical space. The occasional popping sound, which can be heard at the end, are the sounds of Judd’s sculpture expanding while the sunrise changed the temperature within the space."
"‘Lichtung’ is a collaborative project centered around an audio-visual installation. Sound artists Steve Roden and Rutger Zuydervelt (a.k.a. Machinefabriek) composed the audio, while the video element was provided by the German visual artist Sabine Bürger.The installations exhibition was part of a series organized by Galerie Vayhinger revolving around the German concept of ‘heimat’ - the area in which someone was born or had their early formative experiences. Considering the artists’ far-flung locations it was decided that the gallery’s locale should provide them with a ‘temporary heimat’. The Mindelsee lake situated just a few hundred yards away from the gallery became the natural focus of the installation. During their stay, Sabine and Rutger recorded the video and audio footage that became the foundation which Steve Roden responded to with material inspired by his surroundings in the US. It resulted in an immersive four-channel audio-visual presentation, in a gallery space also showing additional visual works by each of the artists, and the floor covered with dried leaves."
"In 1995 Steve Peters and Steve Roden toured as a trio with singer Anna Homler; sometimes they would vocalize behind her, and they liked the way their voices blended together. They then spent about 15 years saying that “someday” they should record a voice-based project together. Aside from the physical distance between them, the problem was always: What would we sing? Neither wanted to write or sing lyrics.
Inspiration came in the form of a book of Japanese jisei – poems allegedly written by monks on their death bed – printed in both English translation and Romanized Japanese. Phonetically pronouncing the Japanese reminded Peters of the technique Roden has used of systematically chopping up the syllables in English texts to transform them into sound poems. Since neither of them speaks Japanese, it seemed like a good place to begin.
The two of them applied for a residency at Jack Straw, a non-profit recording facility in Seattle that gives grants of studio time. They had no exact plans other than they intended to avoid electronic instruments, or directly referencing the poems’ literal meaning, or imitating any Japanese musical idioms or “Zen” stereotypes. Culling some of the poems that made references to sound and noting them on 3x5 cards, Peters and Roden sorted the cards into four groups according to the seasons of the year that the poems represented, divided the cards between them, and taped them to their music stands. They then sang random fragments from the various cards - a word here, a line there, maybe backwards, maybe the English translation. They made no effort to keep the poems intact or retain any of their meaning, instead treating the material simply as phonemes to put in their mouths.All of the music was improvised in the studio, built up one track at a time. They worked intuitively, with no structural guidelines beyond using the texts."
Drawings from Roden's of frozen music and liquid architectureseries. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
It's probably not my lastmea culpa for an overlooked 2011 release, regrettably. Still, Felicia Atkinson's O-RE-GON (Home Normal; Spotty stream) is an indisputably great record that these ears only managed to connect with this year - & which has to be clumsily co-opted into our Festive 50 + 50...
Anyone who knows Felicia's mesmerising Aberdeen will recognise the ingredients of Green and Grey (stream in full below), O-RE-GON's jaw-dropping high point - breathy, repeating incantation, a simple, circling palette of faintly menacing texture, a hugely unsettling impact.
But where the earlier piece draws its huge power from an uncanny inhabitation of obsession, G&G's emotional range is somewhat different - less of an unfolding narrative, seemingly more directed to journeying & discovery, redemption & release.
& now her flurry of recent releases (besides O-RE-GONthe past year has brought Les Bois Rouges, The Driver, Venice is Falling, Crystal arrows for a cosmic king & the compelling microKORGed loveliness of The Owls...) leads to On Being Kind to Horses. These 25 minutes of "snowy drones" for Fluid Audio take flight from a touching Mayakovsky poem.
Not sure yet that there's much (anything?) to separate the Brugges & Ostende takes on the metallic, beautifully resolved Hooves Drummed (stream both in full below). Nor what else the release contains - both these takes & one more?
Delicious new Oneohtrix Point Never again paired with other Daniel Lopatin output - after FRKWYSlast time out, his rich body of collaborations, remixes, live takes & offcuts (almost all downloadable, by the way). & while his self-made video for the new release's haunting title track puts a kind of self-mocking emphasis on neo-kosmische's cartoonish side (drawing on the "saddest version of the most violen soviet cartoon ever", according to one YouTube commenter) - oddly, in a way, since Replica is an affecting, sober meditation - another film technique stands out from his off-piste collection.
Not that all is jump-cut. Streams below end with a trio of more trademark arpeggiated bliss-outs. As often with OPN/Lopatin, these - a Harold Grosskopf remake, an Emeralds collab &, especially, a "free looping" piece for radio - generate an unexpected emotional heft....
For all his digi-fidgety clicks’n’cuttings, Pleq is clearly a Proper Musician. Pleq’s effects come from felicitous juxtaposition of chilly and warm, sharp and delicate, warped and winsome, with a penchant for the addition of a peculiar or plangent ingredient. Bartosz Dziadosz, for Pleq is he, has been active only since 2008, but prolific enough to have accumulated a small pile, incl. releases on u-cover, Databloem, dataObscura, October Man, Basses Frequences, and Impulsive Art. Pleq's style is self-designated “Glitch & Melancholy,” which, however shorthand, effectively identifies - sonically and emotionally - much of what he’s about. His stock-in-trade is basically atmospheric minimal electronica, though with the addition of something somehow off-kilter, malfunctioning, be it a clunk, a pop, or some other errorist artefact.
Most recent offering, Sound of Rebirth (Impulsive Art) is in some ways a case study in contemporary post-digital stylistics. “Black Dog (feat. hiiro-tent)” sets the tone with a sulky and sultry combo of lounge-noir piano, wisps of smokey vocal, against which woody clunks and bits of digital grit rub up nervously.
This Pole may or may not know of Pole, but seems to like to traffic in a similar studied junkshop strategy of recycling of studio effluvia and offcuts of digital detritus to create spidery webs of percussive matter; these feature heavily as he ramps up his early patter into clatter in the slithery Autechresque machine-funk derivative, “Hackneyed Words.”
No, young Bartosz is not the cheeriest of souls, as the presence of titles like “A Very Gentle Death” will testify, and his signature sound is largely a glum downbeat affair, though undeniably enlivened with pared-back jazz-inflected tropes, queasy ambience and spectral pulse. The title track is an excellently evocative creation, ripe for plucking for a poignant film scene, plangent synth motif and sad piano (D minor?), lightly stroked and stoked by cymbaline infusions and digi-fizz:
Re: previously mentioned juxtapositional sleight of hand, see how the sweet and tuneful colludes with the glitchy’n’scratchy in an eerie’n’inky ambiance with crepuscular keys (ft. haunting femme vox) on “Raindrop”:
Before that, though, there’s the resonant cadences of “Swell Bliss (Downtempo Edition),” which takes its unsuspecting ‘downtempo’ tag and bypasses any headnod chillout areas to throw it into a drowning pool with a weighty ballast of sorrowful strings in Murcofian micro-mope mode:
Bonus (to a bonus...): FRKTL's Spöken - fine orientalist sort-of drone ("Cairene street field recording and overdubbed improv on a full-size electric violin with Whammy pedal") highlighted as Headphone Commute's track of the week.
Gig of the year in a city with a conspicuous, even woeful lack of live action isn't the biggest claim, granted. Still, the improbable news that the great Room40's 10th anniversary tour will be swinging close by the drastically less well endowed of LMYE's two home towns - & at a venue as sympathetic as Arnolfini - couldn't be more cheering. Hope to see you there on November 6...
The outstanding line-up comprises Grouper, label head Lawrence English, Rafael Anton Irisarri (who's also Ghostly's The Sight Below, of course - more to follow on his other guise soon) & Andrea Belfi. As the streams & videos below indicate, they operate across Room40's characteristically rich, undogmatic array of tones - by turns mournful & playful, crepuscular & sunlit, veiled & exposed.
