A Year of Music

Writing this blog is leading me into interesting terrain, as this recent batch of additions to my library shows:

• The second half of Mordant Music's The Tower has been banging its way into my head far enough to make me take a leap of faith and buy the rest of their diverse and aggressively eccentric catalog.
• I realized that I was entitled to download a bunch of Severed Heads' Op series outtakes due to having bought Op 2 a while ago, so I grabbed those.
• Talking about Surgeon's awesome DJ sets reminded me to check his site to see if he had a more recent set than the ones I have, and indeed he did.
• Finally, I've been accumulating a pile of crud from Mutant Sounds, so I added all that to my iPod so I could get to know it better. There is some amazing music that's been dug out of obscurity by that blog:
  • Tappi Tíkarrass, Björk's first foray into the post-punk sound that she refined in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, before she decided to become the most avant garde pop star ever;
  • a bunch of long out of print Hirsche Nacht aufs Sofas (HNAS) records from a parallel universe where Nurse With Wound were actually German, instead of merely being obsessive fans of Krautrock;
  • a whole pile of European art-damaged gothic post punk (Claustrofobia, Dark White, Epitaphe, Tango Luger);
  • some early records by the fucking tremendous Wall of Voodoo, whose Call of the West combines the miserably American, empathy-drenched humanity of Raymond Carver or Robert Stone with Ennio Morricone's expansive sound and Kraftwerk's electronic pulse – anyone who thinks the Wall of Voodoo story starts and ends with "Mexican Radio" is very much missing out;
  • a couple completely sui generis Japanese electronic / prog / jazz / avant garde records from the 70s, one of which was a collaboration between most of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the one Japanese Pop artist whose work I know well (Tadonori Yokoo – there was a semi-exhaustive survey of his work up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when I was there);
  • and a pile of random singles from the Mutant Sounds archives, including an awesomely out of character John Duncan track and a deeply weird couple of tracks by Duppi, a Japanese band I'd never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Mutant Sounds is so awesome that there's no way it's going to last.

Here's the full list. I've appended links to sources for most everything. Downloading the albums posted by Mutant Sounds requires you to deal with quasi-filesharing services like Rapidshare, Zshare, Bodongo and Megaupload; these services' wack-assed stabs at business models make getting at the archives a pain, but I assure you that if you like boundary-pushing music, it's worth jumping through the requisite hoops. A lot of this stuff is begging to be put back into print, if only by somebody like Hyped2Death.

• Claustrofobia: Arrebato (Fobia) [ms]
• Dark White: The Grey Area (private) [ms]
• Epitaphe: Syndrome (private) [ms]
• HNAS: Melchior (United Dairies / DOM) [ms]
• HNAS: Music für Schuhgeschafte (Dragnet) [ms]
• HNAS: Willkür Nach Noten (Dragnet) [ms]
• Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo: Cochin Moon (King) [se]
• Mordant Music: Baud With You / Shot Away (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Carrion Squared (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Fallen Faces / Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Filthy Danceheng (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Petri-Dish (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: The Tower: Parts I-XVII (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Travelogues: A Beautiful Vesta (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Severed Heads: Op 1 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.3 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.9 (sevcom)
• Surgeon: Neck Face (www.dj-surgeon.com)
• Tango Luger: s/t (Invisible) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Bítið Fast í Vítið (Spor) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Miranda (Gramm) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Ring of Fire / The Morricone Themes (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Tsutsui Yasutaka & Yamashita Yosuke: IE (Fiasco) [ms]
• whacked-out singles from the Mutant Sounds archives:
  • Drinking Electricity: Shaking All Over / China (pop:aural)
  • Duppi: Velvet Night / はつねつのみやこ (Night Gallery)
  • Électric Max Band: Mick and Max / Knives, Feathers and Fire (Reprise)
  • Electro Static Cat: Lethologica (Freedom in a Vacuum)
  • Eskaton: Musique Post-Atomique (Eskaton)
  • John Duncan / Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann: The Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem / Old Hive (Die Stadt)
  • Kevin Dunn: Nadine / Oktyabriana (dB Records)
  • v/a: Earcom 3 (Fast Product)

I’m obsessed with musical metainformation, but I don’t really have much use for lists. Whenever I see those “random 10” postings that pop up on political blogs on Fridays like verbalized daydreams of leaving the office and drinking beers, I sort of sigh and click on to the next post. I need some context and some motivation to care about somebody else’s musical taste, and lists are more about the compulsive recapitulation of something that probably only means something to the person making the list.

Best-of lists are a compulsory ritual of music nerddom, though, and they do often provide a useful frame for a year, so I generally make some kind of gesture in that direction. Every year ends up being a little different: sometimes I list my favorite records that I bought that year, regardless of when they were released. Sometimes I list the most interesting records released that year (which can run upwards of 50 or 60 records in a year where I buy a lot of CDs – I tend to only buy music I know is going to be interesting in the first place, after all). I experiment with ranking schemes. I try to write reviews for everything (and inevitably fail).

This year, when my friends at Aquarius sent out their yearly call for best-of lists, I figured I’d keep things relatively uncomplicated. Here’s a few lists of albums released last year. Each one’s unranked and sorted alphabetically by artist, and each one consists of albums that were released, in some sense, in 2007. Each one gets a single sentence to explain why it’s on the list. Every release is wholeheartedly recommended, by me if by nobody else.

11 very interesting new releases from 2007

A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Scribble Mural Comic Journal

Simultaneously a sparkly pop record and a bent experimental playground without sounding at all artificial.[*]

Bloody Panda – Pheromone

The interplay between Yoshiko Ohara’s theatrical, dissonant singing and the rest of the music’s hollowed out doom-sludge continues to fascinate me.

Burial – Untrue

Burial takes every cliché of 10 years of UK dance music and uses them to produce something deeply moving and enveloping. [*]

Dälek – Abandoned Language

Even El-P’s most claustrophobic hip-hop soundscapes have never been this bleakly downbeat and close, nor this evocative. [*]

KTL – KTL 2

“Theme” is 27 minutes of slowly building drone that crescendos in a solid wall of shimmering, awe-inspiring noise.

Larsen & Friends – Abeceda

Larsen have always been careful craftspeople with a penchant for concept-driven work, and this musical depiction of a dada abecedary is their most cohesive and affecting album in years.

MIA – Kala

Like the Burial, this warps a lifetime’s (and a world’s) worth of dance, punk and b-boy culture into a set of meditative ass-shakers that neatly balance the personal and the political. [*]

Nadja – Touched [remastered]

Womblike doom metal that is heavy like the sun.

Neurosis – Given to the Rising

Another immaculate album of world-weary pagan hymns from my favorite metal band.

Skull Disco – Soundboy Punishments

Still the only collection of unmixed dubstep tracks I’ve heard that’s interesting all the way through, with tons of micro-variations in the percussion and non-gratuitous samples of Eastern music.

Xasthur – Defective Epitaph

Depression made manifest in sound; an apotheosis of its style. [*]

13 only slightly less interesting new releases from 2007

Colleen – Les Ondes Silencieuses

Naïve chamber music from a gifted amateur. [*]

Dødheimsgard – Supervillain Outcast

I love the way Dødheimsgard are able to just barely keep their bonkers and mean heavy metal under control.

Dopplereffekt – Calabi Yau Space

Contemplative, meditative and cold space music that’s rhythmic without being repetitive. [*]

v/a – Dubstep Sufferah, Volume 3 (mixed by Grievous Angel)

A tightly-edited mix of dubstep and grime that takes a disparate collection of sounds and makes them work together like meshed gears (and free).

Durrty Goodz – Axiom EP

Inventive rhymes coupled with tailor-made backing tracks; I’m hoping this is a promise of things to come in grime.

Earth – Hibernaculum

Dylan Carson’s been around for a long time and tried a lot of different things, so this collection of old tracks in his current style – a kind of rarefied instrumental country – is a fascinating glimpse into the development of an artist who’s had more than his share of ups and downs.

Every Time I Die – The Big Dirty

This album rocks hard and loud and is a hell of a lot of fun. [*]

PJ Harvey – White Chalk

Harvey always takes chances, but this is a big experiment in self-restraint, and it pays off handsomely. [*]

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

James Murphy has a talent for making his professional, sophisticated Steely-Dan-meets-Talking-Heads-in-CBGBs-Bathroom-in-1979 schtick sound easy, which is a very neat trick.

Neil Landstrumm – Restaurant of Assassins

Neil Landstrumm goes back to 1992 and comes back with the freshest, most loose-limbed collection of messed-up breakbeat techno and bleepy dubstep he’s made in the 21st century.

The Necks – Townsville

Sublime and trancy minimal jazz; every album from The Necks is one of the most interesting in whatever year it’s released.

Six Organs of Admittance – Shelter from the Ash

The most focused and song-based Six Organs album, which works both despite and because of its marked restraint and conventional take on droned-out psychedelic folk.

Weedeater – God Luck and Good Speed

Pissed off, drunk and really loud.

4 notable reissues from 2007

Current 93 – The Inmost Light: Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song

Beautifully summarizes David Tibet’s preoccupations while broadening them; compiles All The Pretty Little Horses: The Inmost Light, Where The Long Shadows Fall (Beforetheinmostlight) and The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (Theinmostlightthirdandfinal).

Nico – The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970

A nearly complete archive of the haunting voice and harmonium work Nico recorded with John Cale and Joe Boyd (her best period).

Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers – Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969

“Cosmic American music” is right; it’s hard to believe these immaculate recordings of folk- and rock-inflected country standards were made live.

Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth [expanded]

Nearly everything released by a singular group whose minimal sound created a world of its own. [*]

The Björkiest album from 2007

Björk – Volta

This album confused and (seemingly) upset a lot of people, and it’s hard to love, but there are few artists (none of them popular) who surpass Björk’s rigorous and deeply creative engagement with their work. I really enjoy it sometimes and respect it all the time.