2012

This year, for the very first time, I've kept track of all musical happenings so I can indulge my fetish for making lists. And a list I did make. I've picked 10 albums, released this year, which I've (slightly arbitrarily) deemed better than any others. It was a great year for music for me, probably because I have a job where I can get away with listening to music while I work. A daily commute that lasts roughly an album in length doesn't hurt either. So these albums are my highlights and really there have been very few lowlights, well except for pretty much all music everybody else likes.

I also decided to write some of my reasons for my choices to make this list a bit more interesting. Then I discovered that trying to write down why you like a piece of music is ridiculously difficult. So forgive my inane ramblings and let's get down to it.

10 Favourite Albums of 2012










Animal Collective - Centipede Hz
Rarely do I get the impression with contemporary rock/indie/pop music that any kind of forward movement is being strived for. Centipede Hz however feels like what 21st century pop music should be and it's amazing. The whole album is awash with a myriad of strange, kaleidoscopic burbles and noises. Dense, hypnotic textures form a hyper-modern maximalist aesthetic. Which is a nice change to the more prevalent trends of nostalgia and minimalism. Personally, I never found this style overwhelming although many have had their issues with it. Surely that just shows that we really are dealing with something unknown and thrilling! The songs themselves are brilliant, who knew lyrics about childhood road trips, growing old and child birth could be so beautiful. But that doesn't mean there can't be a kick-ass sing-along chorus here and there. I've chosen to sort this list into a bland A-Z order but if I had to pick just one then it would be hard to pass up Centipede Hz.

Daphne Oram/Andrea Parker/Daz Quayle - Private Dreams & Public Nightmares
The work of pioneering British electronic/radiophonic composer Daphne Oram is reinterpreted by a pair of musicians from in electronic music scene she and her contemporaries helped establish. While I'm not an expect on Daphne Oram's music what's really remarkable about this album is how fresh it all sounds. Rather than becoming a history lesson or wallowing in nostalgia (as has become de rigueur), Andrea Parker illuminates the timeless quality of the source material, altering and repurposing it along with her own sounds. A mystery and haunting strangeness pervades the music with snippets of dialogue taken from radio broadcasts adding even more layers of intrigue. Not knowing their true source just makes it more incredible...
"Have you called your Mother today?"
...(garbled response)...
 "You'll have to leave it til next week then. You'll be away at the football match!"
Contained within the album's run time are haunting interludes, moving semi-biography and an excerpt from a live performance placing Oram's work into a larger historical narrative of electronic music including ambient and minimal techno.

Hanne Hukkelberg - Featherbrain
While a Grammy winner in her native Norway, it baffles me that Hanne Hukkelberg hasn't made a bigger impact on our shores. Her voice is in turns delicate and powerful. She sings over tea kettles, thumb pianos and creaky instruments, bringing a much welcome touch of experimental creativity to a genre swamped in the familiar and predictable. But these aren't just novelty noises, they give these songs a truly magical quality.

Laurel Halo - Quarantine
Laurel Halo's full length debut is no less than stunning. Laurel's voice is pushed to the forefront throughout but its hard to think of these tracks as songs, they're so much more than that. The soundscapes she conjures are strange and dangerous, yet inviting. Humming with strange electrical power and hinting at some dark digital forest. I won't shame myself or this album any further by trying to describe it. Just listen.

Liars - WIXIW
Of all my picks this is the one that really seems to grow on me the more I listen to it. I didn't know what to make of it on first listen but I find myself more engrossed with every new hearing. Part of this is that every Liars album is quite stylistically different so adjusting to each new release takes some time. This year they've transitioned from the finely crafted rock of Sisterworld into realms electronical. However there is no real familiar reference point in Liar's use of synths and electronic soundworlds. Yet again theirs is a unique and thrilling vision. There's a nice range of pace too with the electro-punk swagger of Brats sitting against the hypnotically dreamy Octagon and the constantly yearning WIXIW.

Mouse On Mars - Parastrophics
You know, I don't always have to enjoy weird, experimental or envelope-pushing music. Sometimes, believe it or not, I just like music that's joyous and fun, and that sums up Parastrophics perfectly. It has all the elements of a lot of electronic dance music (unintelligible vocal samples, driving dancefloor-ready rhythms) but it's all put together extremely well with huge helpings of playful creativity. You can tell they love what they do and so do I.

Oren Ambarchi - Audience Of One 
Its been a good year for the antipodean guitarist who released a lot of really great music this year. However, Audience of One manages to act as a kind of mini-retrospective encapsulating a number of Oren's styles and influences. Delicately teased tones, inspired collaborations and even a beautiful cover of a glam rock footnote (Ace Frehly's Fractured Mirror). The album is all centred around the half hour long masterpiece of psychedelic freakout, Knots. Who said guitar music was dead?

Raime - Quarter Turns A Living Century
It's the sound of empty dancefloors. 3am drives through industrial estates. It's bleak, miserable and was released on a label named Blackest Ever Black. Perfect!

Scott Walker - Bish Bosch
2006's The Drift easily ranks among my favourite albums of all time and while not quite reaching the same unnerving heights, Bish Bosch is another masterpiece. Or at least, I think it is, I probably need to listen to it another 30-50 times before I can even scratch the surface of what's going on! But that's all part of the fun of late Scott. There seems to be a more stream-of-conciousness style to the music than before which gives the impression of some grand musical drama. No more is this so than what is perhaps the epitome of Scott's career, the awkwardly titled SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter). A 20 minute epic containing multiple characters, stand-up comedy, freezing planets and obscure historical references that form an unknowable but devastating narrative. Its amazing. Scott's voice too has never been better. Oh and we didn't even get to the musical farting...

Swans - The Seer
Recent trends in popular language have pretty much ripped the word 'epic' of all its weight. However, there really is no better word to describe this album. A juggernaut of raw primal hypnotic energy. Who knows the true meaning behind their dark, mythic Americana but when Michael Gira intones 'I see it all' you know you're in the presence of some ancient omniscient god.


Special Commendation:

Icarus - Fake Fish Distribution (version 73)
I've already talked about how much I loved the concept of this album, both technically and in terms of digital distribution in the post-Napster world. If more musicians can come up with such unique and engaging ways to distribute their music then let the major record labels burn! I would have loved to name Fake Fish Distribution among my top 10 albums but since technically I have the only copy of the album and only 1000 unique versions exist it seems somewhat unfair. See here for a full and proper review.

Best Short Album/E.P
This is a bit of a cheeky category but come on, 20 minutes is not an album. Saying that though I basically created this category just so I can praise a particularly stunning 20 minutes of music.

Emptyset - Medium
If ever there was a record to make you buy a mutli-thousand pound set of speakers, this is it. I don't think I've heard a recording where every single frequency felt precious. Bristolians Emptyset set-up shop inside Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire and by scattering micro-phones, pre-amps and speakers throughout the building the Gothic house becomes an instrument in its own right, colouring the sound with reverberation you could drown in. Emptyset's music was strongly architectural to begin with, monumental walls of disintegrating noise over foundations of rumbling low frequencies, but they took a step in a very literal direction here. This is the 21st century Gothic.

Best tracks of 2012

As well as keeping track of albums I've also maintained a playlist (get it here) of some of the best songs I've heard this year. Rather than waffle on as I have done in the past, here are just a few of my impressions:

- I could listen to the synth from that Grimes song forever.
- Ditto for the synth in WIXIW.
- Is that Azerbaijani? What a funky language!
- Golden Diskó Ship, best obscure find of the year...?
- Burial can do nothing wrong.
- Prince Rama are brilliant at channelling a post-apocalyptic alternate dimension pseudo-Abba.
- Black Dice can out-squelch anyone!
- Death Grips are better when phalluses aren't involved.
- Scott Walker does jazz!...albeit briefly
- And the best individual track of the year is over 30 minutes long and completely renews my faith in the power of the electric guitar.

Still Crawlin' In My Skin

So next month I'm planning on a 2012 retrospective where I talk about my favourite music of the past year. However, I'm pre-emptively going to give some fodder to those who would bitch at me for loving album by a band no one has heard of (and trust me that will happen). I'm basically pretending that I had hipster-cred in the first place and then destroying it anyway. What could I possibly say to prevent me ever getting this blog published on Pitchfork or Wire? Well it is this... the most important band in my life is Linkin Park.

Go on, read that again. I mean it. Its going to be pretty hard for me to pretentiously criticize the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album now!

But before the mockery begins in earnest let me try and explain. Notice I used the word important and not best or talented. In all honesty I can't stand Linkin Park and haven't listened to any of their albums since the first one. So we're not talking about all Linkin Park here, in fact we're mainly talking about just one song. Crawling.

I first heard this epoch-defining tune on Top Of The Pops (a quick search tells me this must have been March 2001). At the time I was actively searching for a musical identity. All my friends were getting them so why couldn't I. I wanted to join their conversations rather than continuing my existence as ostensibly classroom furniture. Despite the fact that I had been playing the violin for about 4 years by then I still didn't really get what music was, save for a relatively small number of CDs I would request on long car journeys. These included such delights as The Backstreet Boys, Savage Garden and the soundtrack to the loathsome Super Mario Bros. movie.

My general indifference to music at this point was great and it may have stayed that way had I not tuned into Top Of The Pops to see what all the fuss was about (because I honestly thought that that was the place to go to discover trendy music!). What greeted me however was not the jaunty melody or boastful rap that I was expecting, but a yell, a roar the likes of which I'd never heard. Exploding from a benign verse was a crash of guitars and an angst-ridden cry of Crrrawwwwling in my skiiiiiiiiiin... I felt a tingle in my spine, a spark, the shocking thrill of the new. You can chalk it up to bog-standard teen-angst and pubescent catharsis all you want but it was the first time I'd heard something that to me felt different. I'd also found an identity that, like it or not, probably defined me right up until I left for university - rocker, metalhead, geek with the long hair. I'm not sure how aware I was of rock music before that time. All I really remember is being terrified of posters of Iron Maiden's Eddie when following my Dad into record shops. So maybe this was why I hadn't gotten into music before, I just hadn't discovered what I would respond most to.

The ball was now rolling. Its speed increased faster than I could have imagined or expected. While my intentions were to just know something about music to share with friends instead my tastes began to pass theirs. I remember returning to school one summer, surprised to learn that no one else had gone on to discover Rage Against The Machine like I had. They were still listening to Limp Bizkit and Feeder! Eventually, I found other friends into heavy rock music, but of course I couldn't stop. Next, I was amazed that none of them had made the seemingly obvious progression from American hard rock to Scandinavian death metal. Amongst all this, Linkin Park, like any good Messiah, would come to be forsaken. It didn't take me long to move away, idealogically, from their drop-D riffs and nu-metal rapping, but the killing blow was an interview with guitarist Brad Delson in which he claimed to hate guitar solos. Seeing as I was knee deep in learning to play Metallica's One at the time I obviously considered this a huge betrayal. Ironically, Delson would go on to introduce guitar solos in future Linkin Park albums whereas my opinion these days is that they contribute to some of the blandest heavy metal music around. Go figure!

Nevertheless, that electrifying thrill I felt when Chester Bennington first wailed at me through my TV screen would later appear again as my exploration of music continued. I felt it the first time I heard a bit of vocal screaming from the Lostprophets; the intricate, yet bludgeoningly heavy guitar riffs of In Flames and Meshuggah; the primal violence of The Right Of Spring; the colours of Messiaen; the digital chill of Autechre; the visceral noise of Wolf Eyes and even this year *SPOILER ALERT* in the kaleidoscopic future pop of Animal Collective.

To me this progression of leaps in taste seems obvious - nu-metal to rock to melodic death metal to classical to avant-garde to IDM to noise to... well, everything. I can trace it all back to Linkin Park, and it still genuinely baffles me that other people haven't made similar journeys, just as much as it amazes me that Slipknot are still making albums and teenagers are still buying them. Well that's growing up for you! Today I'm always searching for new music, trying to regain that spark like a heroin addict (...I imagine). That's why I can go from listening to extreme noise to avant-garde classical music; minimal techno to Japanese folk song.

It's also hard to imagine that I would even be where I am today without Linkin Park. Sure I never did find myself a niche in the music industry as a performer/composer/writer/programmer, but my taste in music determined what I studied at school and the friends, or lack thereof, I kept. It led me to idly pursue dream careers like writing film music, and it took me to London where I still live today. As an aside, before I discovered music my other great passion was video games. I wonder where that interest might have taken me... although ironically my current skill set means I'm more qualified to work for a games company than sound designing the new Star Wars trilogy. Oh well, maybe it seems like I'm exaggerating the effect of one song on the last 11 years of my life, nay who I am as a person. Of course friends, family and teachers played a huge part, but every great journey starts with a single riff!

Listening to this life-defining song once again I notice how quite atypical it is of most nu-metal with little rapping or DJ scratching and with only a few sparse electronic loops to underline the vocals in the verse. The choruses are in stark contrast, though, with full rock crunch. There is a barely song with a more binary form, there's not even a bridge. Maybe this black and white structure is what really got me moving. A verse - this is what it was like before - simple, safe, nice, but now a chorus - this is what it will be like from now on - noise, violence, uncertainty. Those words still ring true. That scream is still crawling in my skin. These wounds they will not heal. Anyone who I've bored in person or through this blog will tell you that! Yes, those wounds of musical obsessiveness refuse to scar. Fear is how I fall... uh, yeah... I guess? Confusing what is real. OK, that's enough now.

As a fun bonus I've made a little playlist filled with some nostalgic treats from my awkward teen days. Feel free to wallow in the detritus of my past with this playlist which I post here with absolutely no shame!* You can't change your history so might as well embrace it. Thanks for reading!

*Some of it is still good today but in general these are quite embarrassing picks. Have you actually listened to Papa Roach recently. Ugh!

Star Wars, Slime and Spectromorphology

The way I consider it there is an inherent problem in modern, but especially academic, electronic music. Essentially, it's a problem of sameyness between composers and within their own body of work. I feel that, in theory, though this should be nearly impossible when a composer is not constrained by an instrument. Using computers as a compositional tool allows almost infinite possibilities. We can control things at the microscopic level; sample any real world noise and create entirely new, unimaginable sounds. Hell, if we wanted we could re-create the entire works of Mozart by manipulating the sound of alarmed cat. But I still can't shake that feeling that the students of our university system, myself included, continue to produce music that is almost indistinguishable from that of their learned lecturers. Whereas their 'less enlightened' or 'mainstream' peers are walking all over them in terms of popularity and sonic invention. You can wrap it up in as much academic theory on spectromorphology as you want but if you're not innovating and nobody is listening what exactly is being achieved. And as a big fan of this kind of music I'm quite concerned. (More popular forms of electronic music have their own issues of course, mainly that of nostalgia, but that's for better writers than me to examine).

I believe the main problem is actually the infinite canvas itself. With so many possibilities is it any wonder that composers will stick close to what they know. But more importantly, these guys should just go play with some Lego or play Minecraft. Or, to reference my own wasted childhood, Nickelodeon 3D Movie Maker.

As you may be able to guess Nickelodeon 3D Movie Maker was a PC game that let you make little movies with 3D representations of Nickelodeon characters, some props and a limited number of pre-recorded catchphrases. And slime. You could make these characters perform simple movements and move them around simple pre-rendered backdrops. However, the fact that is was in 3D allowed so much more creative opportunity than similar games like The Simpsons Cartoon Studio (which I also spent many hours with). My favourite effect was the ability to grow, shrink, stretch and squash objects and characters. Playing with scale in this way was incredibly fun, but my proudest discovery involved one of the many props, a slab of raw meat. By severely squashing the meat I noticed that its colour and shape matched that of a pool of blood. Squashing it even further gave the impression that the gore pool was spreading. Lovely!

What did I achieve by doing this. In needlessly pompous terms, I had transcended the tools I was given. I had discovered a trick that the developers had never intended (especially for a kids game) and as a result I could make the kind of violent movies I wanted. I quickly moved on from re-enacting my favourite episodes of Ren & Stimpy to directing Tarantino-esque epics and surreal sports coverage (I think I used a hamburger as a basketball at one point). This all culminated in an attempt to make a shot-for-shot re-make of Star Wars. A project so epic I think the game ran out of memory before the end of the first scene. (This was back in the days of floppy discs, how's that for nostalgia!) These films were weird, fun and unique.

How does this relate to writing music, I hear you cry. Well I love music which is weird, fun and unique. As far as tying this to a manifesto for composition, I believe that innovation requires restriction. One has to limit both their materials and their tools. In the Nickelodeon game I had limited characters/props and limited 3D effects but I still tried (and sometimes failed) to fulfil ridiculously ambitious ideas. Basically what I'm getting at is that it's no good if for a composer to say she can use any sound/noise possible in her music as she'll already be swamped with options and would then be more likely to choose the most comfortable solution. Likewise, its no good for her to limit her sound source to, say, a dripping tap as she can then use any and every sexy plug-in available. Again, the temptation will be to use the tools that she feels most competant/comfortable with. This is not to say that all music composition should be approached in this way but I personally I think this is good stance to take when creative block hits.

This is never really an issue with instrumental performers as their material (say a guitar) and tools (their fingers and amps) are already limited, although there are plenty of musicians who love to nestle in their cosy comfort zones. Certainly the last 50 years of electronic music have been awash with invention and new discoveries but it feels like we are now entering a settling down period and its time for the electronic equivalent of Hendrix setting his guitar on fire or John Cage emptying his toolbox into his piano.

For those wanting a working example, for me the American duo Matmos epitomize this approach I'm suggesting. These guys relish the chance to limit themselves. Take A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure for example. It has limited material - medical sounds including liposuction and LASIK eye surgery - and limited tools - mostly editing and relatively little processing. And guess what that album is very weird, loads of fun and rather unique. Or maybe try their Supreme Balloon album played entirely on synths of their own design.

A more experimental example, and one potentially closer to academia, is the glitch/hacking scene. These musicians take functional machinery and push it beyond its limits to a sometimes literal breaking point, harnessing the new sounds which spew forth. This may explain why groups like alva noto, Wolf Eyes and FennO'Berg are (relatively, I grant you) more well known than academic heavyweights such as Francis Dhomont and Jonty Harrison.

People have made amazing stuff with blocks of Lego and I made some odd animated videos. Childish exploration and creativity is extremely important. However, somehow I don't see a project in Minecraft getting put on a PhD composition course...

Playlist Anatomy 101

As a follow-up to our chat on playlists last time, I'd like to take look at the subject in more detail. Specifically, I'd like to show you how much obsessive thought goes into making one of my playlists. So maybe this blog won't be the most amusing or embarrassing (don't worry I have more teenage confessions planned for the future!). But who knows, you just might learn something.

Now shut up, class is in session.

I made the playlist we're going to analyse about 4 years ago. If I remember, I made it for my dad in order to try and get across the sheer wealth and diversity of sound possible through electronic music and also to celebrate my favourite muiscal instrument; the humble computer. I'm going to closely examine 5 key areas of this 22 track playlist. The full tracklist is at the end of this post and I've also tried to re-create it as much as possible in Spotify here.

1) Track 1: Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier - Psyche Rock
Instantly recognizable to Futurama fans, the playlist begins with this upbeat psychedelic prologue. This song encapsulates the most prevalent theme in the playlist that of the combination of electronics with traditional instruments. It also sits in the space between academic/experimental (Pierre Henry being one of the pioneers of musique concrète) and popular music, in this case 60's rock, which in my opinion is the space where the most interesting and vital music is produced. But most importantly it just rocks!

2) Track 2: Stockhausen - Studie II & Track 21: Pierre Schaeffer - Etude Violette
Acting as bookends to the almost entirely 21st century meat of the playlist are pieces by two of the most important composers in the development of electronic music. Each represents two of the most prominent approaches to using electronic machinery in the creation of music. Schaeffer and musique concrète in France made music by processing the sounds of everyday objects while Stockhausen in Germany favoured purely electronically generated material. (And their positions in the running order are clustered around modern artists with similar ideologies). While it would be hideously inaccurate to state that Schaeffer and  Stockhausen were the founders of all electronic music, their influence cannot be ignored and I thought it'd be quite neat to give any listening ears some historic context

3) Track 5: Autechre - Tankakern & Track 6: Aphex Twin - Vordhosbn
Oh how far we've come in the years since old Karlheniz's Studie II, where a mere 3 minutes of music took months of cutting and splicing magnetic tape by hand. Now I can make something just as complex on my phone on the way to work! Yes I'm talking about music software and the vast amounts of producers/musicians/DJs of the current age. I only had so much room in this playlist and my prediliction for IDM at the time meant that most popular electronic music had to be represented by just a few tracks in this sub-genre. No doubt if I made this playlist again there would be a Burial track in there somewhere. Anyway these 2 tracks sit nicely between some of the more academic and experimental stuff, if nothing else just to up the tempo a bit! And the fact that Stockhausen famously could not appreciate the music of Aphex Twin makes it all the sweeter that I've stuck them on a playlist together.

4) Track 9: Biosphere - Spring Fever
Under represented in this playlist, but important in highlighting the diversity of the computer in modern music, is the genre of field recording. While predominantly working in the genre of ambient music, here Biosphere's Geir Jenssen captures the sounds of a pack arctic wolves. Their mournful, sonorous cries in Spring Fever are just as powerful as any man-synthed tones. Here we see the computer not as creator or destroyer but as editor. Its ironic that the music of the natural world is only brought to us through these most synthetic means.

5) Track 11: Four Tet - Spirit Fingers; Track 19: John Wall - Construction I & Track 20: Bernard Parmegiani - Accidents/Harmoniques
Briefly discussed earlier, the relation of traditional acoustic instruments with the computer is one of my favourite topics. These 3 tracks approach that relationship from popular, experimental and academic standpoints. Four Tet's sampling retains some of the original acoustic character and creates a piece that is far more energetic and detailed than any acoustic arrangement could ever be. Equally detailed is Wall's composition which is much more destructive with its material to the point where a symphony orchestra sounds like its been ground down into sand. Finally, Parmegiani seeks to blur the lines between instrument and computer by mixing real instruments with carefully synthesised facsimiles.

6) Track 22: Peter Rehberg - Black Holes
An epilogue rounds the playlist out into a neat 2 hours (yes mild OCD helps when making playlists) which is mainly here just because I love the album this track came from. Written for performance to the theatre work of Viennese puppeteer Gisèle Viene, the words denote distressing scenes of psychological trauma and domestic violence. As our sojourn through electronic music ends we see computer music as high-drama competing on the same level as operatic and film scores.

There is even more I didn't get to talk about. Like improvised music created by the interplay between acoustic instruments and live electronics vs the powerbook scene or the joys of putting "high" academic acousmatic music next to drum and bass. Subjects for another day perhaps...

Although I probably imposed all these themes onto this playlist after the fact, its a lot of fun to draw these kinds of connections. Anyway I hear the bell ringing. I hope you've all been taking notes. There'll be a test next week.

Full Tracklist:
1) Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier - Psyche Rock
2) Stockhausen - Studie II
3) Pita - Resog 45
4) Pan Sonic - Mayhem I
5) Autechre - Tankakern
6) Aphex Twin - Vordhosbn
7) Satanicpornocultshop - Some Velvet Morning
8) Matmos - For Felix (and all the rats)
9) Biosphere - Spring Fever
10) Colleen - Everyone Alive Wants Answers
11) Four Tet - Spirit Fingers
12) Tanja Orning & Natasha Barrett - Anchor Synthesis
13) a_dontigny - Tatline
14) Marcelle Deschenes - Big Bang II
15) Fenn O'Berg - Fenn O'Berg Theme
16) Fennesz - Endless Summer
17) Amon Tobin - Triple Science
18) Asa-Chang & Junray - Tsuginepu To Ittemita
19) John Wall - Construction I: Stat/Unt/Dist
20) Bernard Pamegiani - Accidents/Harmoniques
21) Pierre Schaeffer - Etude Violette
22) Peter Rehberg - Black Holes

There Will Be Playlists

As far as I'm concerned, making playlists is a dead - or at least dying - art. While I'm not quite the right age to have lived through the glories of cassette swapping in the 90's, some of my fondest musical memories from  my teens involve sitting on the floor of my dad's study crafting my own mix CDs. My efforts were childish but damn if they weren't fun to make: designing album covers (with hideous clipart); thinking of a witty title; I even had a device for printing onto the non-shiny side of the CD!

My epic; my saga was the Anti-Pop series. It was born, it died, it went on a world tour and was gloriously resurrected over a quadrilogy (or maybe a qunitrilogy) of compilations. A messiah formed of rock and metal arisen to smite all that chart, pop and dance rubbish.
Naive as these compilations were I put a lot of effort into ordering them just so. The mood of one track would flow almost seemlessly into the next - although to be honest they all followed the same pattern of increasingly heavy songs culminating in whatever was the most extreme music I can could handle at the time.

The format of the CD with its laughable 74 minute - or sometimes 80, oh the joy of squeezing in one last song! - running time, forced care and careful consideration of content. Maybe I wouldn't choose that monster anthem, maybe instead a sneaky B-side or track from an unsigned band could nestle between Master Of Puppets and Raining Blood. Themes, leitmotifs, 3 songs in a row with the word METAL in the title, all was possible with just a CD and an idea. But in these mp3 days, size is of no concern. Why indeed cut anything from your list of monster tracks? Why not just pile them all in a big heap and hit shuffle? Which is what I did with when I first got an iPod, like all the rest of you did too, and a small part of us all died. The Anti-Pop was never seen again...

My creative yearning for putting songs in a sequential order reared its head again, however, about 2 years ago. I decided to embark on a playlist making experience once more, the only catch was that I could only include bands/musicians I'd discovered on Spotify. This was of course during the 4th great era of my musical development (a theme for future blogs) where I bought a Spotify subscription and set out to listen to as much as I possibly could while pretending to work*. It took me nearly a year to create an epic 100 track playlist, named after a quirky track by Black Dice. Despite its 100 track length - no more, no less, thems the rules - I had considered each transition carefully, moving almost seemlessly between all the genres I was interested in: avant rock, synth-pop, contemporary classical, world music, pseudo-world music, noise, glitch, ambient. That's the most beautiful part of playlist making, drawing links between such disparate and different musics.
Then Spotify decided to fuck things up and remove stuff from its library, this included the title track of my most precious creation. So I thought screw it, I'll chop it in half and declare it the official What Was Music? playlist.

What Was Music?

It doesn't fit on a CD though. And also its almost 4 hours long... Enjoy!

The Anti-Pop lives!

*Dear current employer, I swear that this was during my last job.

What's in a name?

Hello again.

So it occurs to me that last week I kinda launched straight into a fairly long album review without properly introducing the blog. I guess now is as good a time as any...

It's a blog.

About music.

Now that that's out of the way I thought I'd explain the nature of the blog's title. I nicked it from an album by noisy husband and wife duo Harry Pussy. In their case What Was Music? is a statement of anarchic destruction. Their blistering and abrasive 30 second "songs" aimed to take apart rock and roll with the very tools of its creation, leaving nothing in its wake. Incidentally What Was Music? (the album) is probably too anarchic - or at least anarchy manifested as crummy sound quality - for its own good. For the real phenomenal HP experience I really recommend the late period You'll Never Play This Town Again! compilation.

This title stuck with me though, like some breed of parasitic idea worm boring into my brain until it burst forth as a half-arsed idea to write a music blog. In the end I decided my interpretation of the eponymous question would be archival in nature. I want to record for history how truly inventive and amazing music can be, before it all melts into the homogeneous sludge of mainstream Western culture. Of course, I don't really believe this is happening - although the 2012 Olympic Closing ceremony didn't help - but its nice to think I'm railing against something.
There also seems to be this pervasive idea - at least among some of my friends and relatives - that everything has been done before and there is no new music anymore. Everybody is ripping each other off or gorging heavily on nostaliga. I guess this is something else I want to take a swipe at.

So historians of the future. This was music!

Oh, and there will be playlists. Lots of playlists and maybe a few more free albums. Music writing is essentially meaningless without the music itself. So each week I'll try my hardest to include something you can wrap your ears around. Most, if not all, of these playlists will be on Spotify, which, if you're not aware, is amazing! (and sort of free).

First Issue with Free Album

Back in the 90's before the internet was the font of all knowledge we had these things called magazines. When a new one dared to appear on shelves it had to make itself instantly attractive
to the grubby fingered youths of the day. Often the way to do that was a super low introductory price and a free gift, most commonly some inferior chocolate such as a Dime bar.

Well following in that grand tradition, my blog is going to sucker you in with a free album of glitchy electronica. Fake Fish Distribution by Icarus; specifically version 76 of 1000. Each version of the album is one time only and completely unique to the buyer. The liner notes describe why no two versions of the album should sound the same:

"Fake Fish Distribution (FFD) uses generative and parametric techniques to create a musical work that draws on contemporary electronic music, algorithmic software processes and designed variation."

Despite that fairly daunting mission statement, the album itself is very well paced and not as exhausting as previous "glitchier-than-thou" efforts such as 2004's I Tweet The Birdy Electric. Of course it's fun for geeks like me to endlessly ponder what these music altering formulae could be, but like any good magic trick I'm sure these tracks would lose their appeal once the secrets have all been revealed.

It could all be one big con of course. What better way to entice collectors who salivate over the thought of owning the only copy! Well, the cynic loses out here because I have listened to
other versions of FFD posted by fellow Icarus fanboys and I can assure that alternate versions ARE all different. The variations rarely account for massive changes in tempo, sound sources or structure though. Instead they add a much more subtle flavour: an extra whoosh here or time-reversed percussion there. At its most extreme this can lead to shaving minutes off track times. I must say I'm quite pleased that my version of Old D is much longer than any other I've heard.

Without full knowledge of the intricate processes involved, I can understand why these variations seem so minimal. No matter the randomness, the tracks keep their individual flavour and the results never sound like random garbage and always come across as being thoroughly composed. Dumptruck Cannibals and Colour Field are the best examples of this but for me its the tracks that seem a bit "off" that are the most interesting. The overall impression of tracks like Shallow Tree and Old D is of an alien ecosystem burbling and frothing with strange life. The album title and track names too all add to this sense of falling down the rabbit hole into a 21st century vision of Wonderland. I mean Spineez of Breakout...what the fuck does that mean? And closing track Two Mbiras doesn't even feature one eponymous African thumb piano.

This is perhaps glitch-electronica at its finest. Powerful beats sustain momentum for background listening, but those willing to delve into its depths will be rewarded with a wealth of detail. For its inventiveness in distribution and composition, Fake Fish Distribution is one of my favourite albums of the year so far.

Welcome to the blog!!!

And here's the link to your free gift:

https://rapidshare.com/files/273475253/Fake Fish Distribution (76).zip