Annual hairshirt

Apple-cheeked scamps roasting on an open fire, chestnuts ripping open their stockings in the dawn's half-light & - to complete this touching yuletide scene - LMYE donning the annual hairshirt of our Festive 30...
 
As last year, we've constrained our compilation of this list of 30 releases that particularly touched us in 2013. To spread recognition as widely as possible (& to try in some small way to acknowledge the arbitrariness of singling out a fraction of the year's great music...), each co-author was restricted to no more than one pick per artist or per label.

At the risk of cold-shouldering exceptional albums that fall foul of one or both of these 'rules' (Chris Watson's In St Cuthbert's Time (Touch) & Richard Chartier & Yann Novak's Undefined for farmacia901 come immediately to mind...), this builds some breadth into our choices - while making room for our fairly complementary tastes to have alighted on different pieces in the same artist or label's catalogue.

This year both of us were mostly listening on the run & in the cracks between other commitments. Perhaps as a result, our overlap was minimal (unlike last year) - with only Tim Hecker's blinding Virgins appearing in both of our first CVs.

We'll acknowledge other notable releases in a follow-up post soon. We'll also be running a label of the year-type piece.





Benjamin Dauer :: The Pace of Which (Twice Removed) [al]

Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Roanoke (self-released) [al]

Boards Of Canada :: Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp) [al]

Bruce Gilbert & DAW :: Diluvial (Touch) [jl]

Christophe Bailleau & Julien Demoulin :: Outshining Memories (Time Released Sound) [al]

Cory Allen :: The Great Order (Quiet Design) [jl]

Dalhous :: An Ambassador for Laing (Blackest Ever Black) [al]

Eluder :: Through Horizon (Infraction) [al]

Francesco Giannico :: Luminance (Somehow) [al]

Hakobune :: Nebulous Sequences (VoxxoV) [al]

 

 

Jon Hopkins :: Immunity (Domino) [al]

Kenneth Kirschner & Tomas Phillips :: Five Transpositions (Sad) [jl]

Kiln :: meadow:watt (Ghostly International) [al]

Le Berger :: Variations on not too much really (self-released) [jl]

Main :: Ablation (eMego) [jl]

Maps and Diagrams :: Timbre (Dronarium) [al]

Mohammad :: Som Sakrifis (PAN) [jl]

Orphax :: Un Coeur, Deux Coeurs, Un Coeur, Sans Coeur (Broken20) [jl]

Pausal :: Sky Margin (Own) [al]

PITRELEH :: PITRELEH (Important) [jl]

Ruhe :: Easing (Cotton Goods) [al]

Savvas Ysatis & Taylor Deupree :: Origin (12k) [jl]

Secret Pyramid :: Movements of Night (Students of Decay) [al]

Simon James Phillips :: Chair (Room40) [jl]

Slow Walkers :: Slow Walkers (Peak Oil) [jl]

Stephan Mathieu :: The Falling Rocket (Schwebung) [jl]

The Necks :: Open (Northern Spy) [jl]

Tim Hecker :: Virgins (kranky) [jl]

Tomonari Nozaki :: Une Histoire de Bleu (Invisible Birds) [al]

William Basinski & Richard Chartier :: Aurora Liminalis (LINE) [jl]

 

 

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

Sound, gravity, water

Pro skater, experimental musician, & what next? A CV as varied as Duane Pitre's gives grounds to anticipate equally radical future shifts...so I confidently expect the man's first nanotechnology breakthrough or Bolivian cookbook in due course.  

In the meantime, though, his music stands out as some of 2013's most dazzling & notable (as it has been for some years, of course...). Both his keening, East-West colliding Bridges & the extraordinarily restrained, profoundly other-worldly PITRELEH (a collaboration with, you guessed it, ELEH that I struggle not to call spiritual & that summons a rare & deep musical language) will be seen here & surely elsewhere as obvious highlights of this year's listening. 

Below also hear a bracing, thrilling new piece (performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in June or thereabouts). Glib as it probably is to claim it seems informed by both of the recent releases, despite being significantly more abrasive than either, I'll say it anyway...

The suggestion somewhere that this is Pitre's likely next direction has to be worth a whoop or two, no? 

In other news: a worthwhile Village Voice interview (& an in full version) from a couple of months back, with a welcome reminder of that Cory Allen collaboration previously mentioned in dispatches...

pitreleh (eleh & duane pitre) - self titled (album preview)

IMPREC Podcast#5: Autumn Releases 2013 [features PITRELEH -Vibration: Sine Pools (excerpt) at 24:34 & Duane Pitre - Feel Free Live at Cafe OTO (excerpt) at 41:37]

Imprec Podcast#4: Summer Releases 2013 [features 3 Questions with Duane Pitre at 18:12, Duane Pitre - Bridges: Earth/Ember/Serpent (excerpt) at 25:45 & PITRELEH - Side A (excerpt) at 1:01:31, plus background excerpts from Duane Pitre - Feel Free Live at Cafe OTO]

duane pitre - bridges (album preview)

Bridges (album excerpt) by Duane Pitre

Bridges: Cup/Aether/Crane (excerpt)

Monolithic Youth (excerpt) by Duane Pitre

Music For Microtonal Guitar And Mallets by Duane Pitre

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

Our tidal flats

It's not just the national cricket team working up a head of steam down under as the year closes. Lately Australia's Room40, LMYE's label of 2011 (joint with Experimedia, trainspotters!), has unleashed a gleaming raft of essential 'editions' that add lustre not only to an already benchmark catalogue but to 2013's output more generally...

This new batch underlines the label's characteristic anti-generic open-earedness. From Eugene Carchesio's manic glitching to Heinz Riegler's therapeutic lullabies, via major statements from Simon James Philips (the gloriously, grandly pealing Chair) & Rafael Anton Irisarri (the crepuscular, clankingly pensive Unintentional Sea), this disparate outpouring somehow reaffirms the uniqueness of Room40's voice. 

Moreover, the label still has the great Chris Herbert's Constants to come (some earlier blather). A delectable, delicate freebie EP, Wintex-Cimex 83, only stokes the appetite for the return of an all too rare releaser - now due in February...

& that's not even to mention head honcho Lawrence English's magnificent collaboration with Liz Harris (Grouper), Slow Walkers - though that's a somewhat less recent vintage (even more so in the video below)... 

Simon James Phillips - Poul

moth to taper by simon james phillips  


Simon James Phillips - Set Ikon Set Remit

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Lesser than the sum of its parts


Rafael Anton Irisarri - Daybreak Comes Soon

rafael anton irisarri - the unintentional sea (excerpts)

Chris Herbert - Soft Quasars

 
Eugene Carchesio - Day 3

Eugene Carchesio - Day 12

Heinz Riegler - SLEEP HEALTH (Side A Excerpt)


Wake - Slow Walkers




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

Seismicity zones

Continental Drift could hardly imply earth much more (so too the album’s 'Geologist Monthly' track titles). But earth – in all of its worthy, grounded, lumpen-ness – is the least of the elements here. Rather, to these ears this is an airborne, grandly* soaring sound, mostly, with moments of timeless marine submersion & calm (particularly in the luscious, longer-form Asthenosphenic Movement trilogy) as well as of fiery crackle & roar. 



Each is at play in the thrilling high point, Magnetic Striping. A controlled, faintly abrasive rush provides a richly contrasting sound bed for a slower unfurling of trio trickery – a shimmering, glinting son et lumiere a trois. 

Faures - Magnetic Striping

Peeled out from behind their baffling Faures moniker (perhaps it means more in German?), Sam, René & Fuzz sound more like a scrubbed, marketing-friendly boy band than an ambient-drone supergroup (the trio’s tri-continentality another form of ‘drifting’ collision, of course). & in a way that’s fitting since a snappily melodic ear uncharacteristic of the genre underlies much of CD – particularly the two song-length Uplift pieces (Isostatic & Orogenic, as if you needed telling…). 



Another way of putting it: CD is a largely unexpected slab of pretty (though hardly cute or winsome) - a notably romantic excursion out across deep waters, vast skies, even beyond the horizon & up into the spheres – a soundtrack to ascension, or immersion. 

Sam is a brewer. So, finally, some tasting notes: rich, lingering body with only a touch of offsetting bitterness, not cloying, little spice, some intense top notes, elongated finish. 
    
*Grand, certainly, & occasionally grand-standing but rarely grandiose…

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

Language of the unheard

From a super-spare palette, pared-back martial rage from Gabriel Saloman - a key part of Miasmah's outstanding run over the past year (besides his fiercely poised, affecting Adhere, a highlight of LMYE's Festive 30 last year, & the forthcoming Soldier's Field, the label has also knocked out essential listening from B/B/S, Svarte Greiner & Kaboom Karavan lately...). 

Gabriel Saloman - Boots On The Ground









Gabriel Saloman - Mine Field (clip)

gabriel saloman - adhere (album preview)

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