2014

Yes it's that time of year again. Time to ring in the new by reflecting on what has been. I must admit that getting motivated to write my yearly music round-up has been a bit of a struggle. Somehow 2014 hasn't felt like a bumper year for music. I think Pete Swanson summed this up best with this tweet from a few days ago:

Kind of feel like a lot of music stayed in their designated corners this year.. I hope 2015 is WAY messier
— Pete Swanson (@pete_swans) December 19, 2014

Outside of music there has been one concept that has dominated my thinking and outlook on the world this year. That would be the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of curiosities. The wild, over-the-top miscellanea of the natural and ethnological worlds curated by eccentric characters. Something about it just hits home. Maybe because I've moved into a good-sized flat with a lot of room (for London anyway) and I just want to fill it with stuff. This year I've marvelled at the surreal juxtapositions of Svankmajer's cabinet at an exhibition in Barcelona; discovered puzzling collections of magick artefacts at the Pitt Rivers museum and swooned over the sublime and ridiculous collection of modern dandy Viktor Wynd.

Anyway, back to the music, I've decided to spice up this year's list of my favourites albums by constructing my own little Wunderkammer pairing some cool albums with some similarly themed pictures I've taken at displays in Barcelona and the Pitt Rivers in Oxford.

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A breastplate made of feathers and a shrunken Orang-utan head

Kemialliset Ystävät - Alas rattoisaa virtaa




A multi-coloured, bonkers confection that is just the right side of weird.

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Erotic figures hidden in ceramic fruit

The Soft Pink Truth - Why Do the Heathen Rage?



Matmos' Drew Daniel returned to his Soft Pink Truth project, mapping aggressively male musical genres to the sphere of more inclusive dance and club musics. This time it's the sometime racist and misogynist elements of black metal that are lambasted by funky synths and satirical sampling. Subversive, without ever losing it's sense of sheer fun. Put on your corpse paint and start raving!

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A mask made of broken kitsch

VHS Head - Persistence of Vision



VHS Head (as the name suggests) makes music by splicing together audio from old VHS tapes. As such it is dripping with that classic Carpenter-esque sound of grimy straight-to-video horror movies. It's the aural equivalent of binge watching David Cronenberg films in a disco. Yes the touchstones are 80s and 90s nostalgia but when the music is this ridiculously fun and enjoyable who am I to argue.,


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The desecrated skull of our enemy

Pharmakon - Bestial Burden




Another year, another crushingly powerful release from Pharmakon, although this very nearly never saw the light of the day. This album was forced to be born after a truly terrifying emergency surgical procedure had to be performed on the artist. As such, this is blunt, direct music about being a mass of flesh and blood that threatens to fail you at a moment's notice. Take heart though, as gruelling as Phamarkon's pained screams are the more art reminds us of death and disease, the more we can feel truly alive.

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Sentient dust

Actress - Ghettoville



What may be the last album from the Actress outfit, Ghettoville represents little more than the dust and rubble of a blitzed civilization. Dancefloor beats reduced to funeral dirges and wailing elegies. Brixton after a nuclear war perhaps. However, there are shafts of light that pierce the darkness. From the ruins we can re-build.

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...uhhhh

Ok I've given up on this mental exercise now. As consumers of art one of the greatest joys to be had is that of establishing connections between thoughts and ideas, such as my painfully laboured idea of linking obscure, musical ephemera to weird and magical objects. We like to ascribe deeper meaning when perhaps in reality there is nothing more than surface. There is no greater example this year of a piece of music so caked in possible meaning that we could barely even attempt to unravel than Valerio Tricol's Miseri Lares. A strange, poetic horror story told only through veiled sounds and mumbled voices. Infinitely fascinating.



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That's it? Only 6 top albums this year?

Although I've been a bit down on choosing what I deem empirically the "best" albums of the year - hey, maybe that's a sign of emotional maturity -  there has still been a lot of music which I've really enjoyed. And any good Wunderkammer needs to be filled with lots of stuff. So further plaudits need to go out to some other bits of beautiful shelf clutter:
- Richard Dawson for making an epic mythology based on teenagers getting drunk at Featherstone Castle.
- Klara Lewis for the most impressive debut release of the year, already a master sculptor of sound.
- Susanna & Jenny Hval for their hauntingly beautiful songs. See my taste is not always just abstract noise.
- Scott Walker & SunnO))). While I wouldn't rank this collaboration as highly as either Scott's Bisch Bosch or SunnO)))'s Monoliths & Dimensions, anything from these masters of gloom is always something to be cherished.
- Russell Haswell, Kemper Norton, Flying Lotus, Afrikan Sciences... oh wait you're expecting my 2014 playlist.



Wishing everyone all the best for 2015!

You will soon be able to judge me like I judge everyone else

As you may have noticed from a distinct lack of activity from me this year, music has not really been at the forefront of my life. Maybe that's fatigue from the listening excesses of previous years or perhaps it's because this year I've taken more of an interest in the visual arts. So while my yearly summary blog is going to be somewhat light-weight (I actually think I'll struggle to name 10 truly exceptional albums for this year) I'm determined to rectify this next year.

One of the ways I think I'll get better engaged with music is by returning to actually trying to make some of my own. In fact, I have become quite obsessed with the idea of spending my time producing things. Maybe I want to see us, as a culture, move away from mass consumption (perhaps best epitomized by the phrase binge-watch entering the Oxford English dictionary) toward a culture of home production (which in typical 21st-century-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fashion is also a growth industry). Or perhaps my motives are a purely solipsistic attempt to justify and extend my existence... Or maybe I'm just a bit bored. Anyway, like it or not, I want to make more blogs, more little pieces of music, more ideas, more...stuff.

So what kind of music am I going to be making I hear you ask?

Well, I believe that is the very question that has stopped me making any music since I left university 4½ years ago. Thanks to the digital innovations of the last few decades there is a nearly endless array of possibilities for music making. Not to mention the various levels of skill, or lack thereof, required for your various modes of production. But that's an idea for a future blog... The point being I felt suffocated by choice into a position of complete inaction.

To cut my long-running dilemma short I decided that I just had to pick something and stick with it. What I settled on in the end was to create electronic music using SuperCollider a programming language built for "real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition." Yep, I, perhaps intentionally, have chosen one of the most in-depth and challenging tools for making computer music when I could almost certainly achieve the same results on my phone. So why SuperCollider? Well I'm very attracted to the complete flexibility of having total control over the entire sound synthesis process. Also, being a professional software developer, I just quite enjoy coding and it is a default state that I'm comfortable with. This means learning a new programming language (something coders generally love doing) which requires an investment of time and effort that brings us back to my initial idea that I'm interested in crafting something, albeit a digital something (nothing?). Finally, I was particularly inspired by this collection from the SuperCollider community whereby they created fully formed musical pieces in SC in the space of a Tweet (and it seems the practice continues). It's little ideas and constraints like that that I find particularly inspiring and don't be surprised if you see a few Tweet-sized compositions from me in the near future. 

So there you have it. I've laid out my intentions. Hopefully I can stick to them. Posting them here on my blog should keep me honest and if you don't see updates here then feel free to yell at me. 

Right, now I've fulfilled my blogging obligation I'm off for a cheeky binge-watch.

Fingerhut And Terry Day - Exegetes Of Riot

Greetings all!

I've emerged from my ursine slumber into the cold, harsh light of the Blogosphere in order to review an album I recently picked up from my friendly, neighbourhood electroacoustic improv group, Fingerhut. I say only but then again I do live within spitting distance of Café Oto so I doubt they're the only one. Ah, one of the many perks of living in cultural North London. Full disclosure, I'm friends with one of the band so that explains why, in what has been an incredibly lazy year, I've actually gone out to see some live music. Recently I went to see Fingerhut & Friends perform a thoroughly entertaining set at Ryan's Bar in Stoke Newington for the release of their first CD. So in order to get my own creative juices flowing, here's a little review I've knocked together.

Fingerhut And Terry Day - Exegetes Of Riot

Fingerhut are a 4-piece improv group consisting of saxophonist and keyboard player David Kaplowitz, guitarist Paul Lucas, electric bassist Ryan Sarver and Martin Klang on electronics. The group are joined on drums by heavyweight veteran Terry Day. While the band themselves are relative unknowns on the improvising circuit (at least from my limited knowledge of the scene) Day's presence adds a definite weight to proceedings, having a CV touting collaborations with such luminaries as Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. As may be expected Day's firework percussion is impressive throughout. The rest of the band can hold their own though, especially the muscular saxophone playing that is equally capable of picking its way through more intricate patterns.

Exegetes of Riot appears to the group's first, independently-released full length album and is easily available from the band's Bandcamp page. Its baffling title, which sent me scurrying to my dictionary, seems quite apt if we're talking exegesis in a religious sense. The venerable discipline of improvised music has, in recent decades, splintered off into its own warring sects praising holy texts of ultraminimalism and lowercase. This from a musical style that, in theory, is the free expression of any of an infinite number of musical ideas. Fingerhut do not strike me as a group to subscribe to one particular doctrine, instead the core of their riot is a central juxtaposition that pits electroacoustic free jazz against a somewhat post-rock back line. One need only compare the cyclical riffs and hazy wah-guitar of Chilpancingo to the glitchy assault of neighbouring track Sidi Bouzid to appreciate this central dynamic.

It's not just between tracks that this conflict can be felt. On the few tracks which feature the group as a whole the music finds itself pulling between rhythmic grooves, abstract electronic soundscapes and atonal melodies. All of this achieves an uninhibited swagger and a charming "Let's just see where it goes" attitude. This can be felt especially on closer Hackney where an almost prog-rock like opening salvo is dissolved by an eerie-electronic wail. Later on in the same track I find myself practically head-banging away as the band reach maximum freak-out only for the rug to be pulled dramatically from underneath me as we tumble into an alien sea of electronics and threatening staccato guitar. This is then followed by a riff one could actually dance to! When the band achieve the right balance of these discordant stylistic elements the effect is sumptuous. True body and brain music. However, this effect is often quite fleeting, perhaps an indication that the band are still establishing themselves but is probably more to do with the ephemeral nature of such music.

It is somewhat surprising that the band performs as a whole on only a couple of tracks. Instead the majority of the album is made of different permutations of performers whose performances are a lot more consistent stylistically. This, combined with the lengths of some tracks, gives the album the impression of a highly detailed sketchbook rather than a completed, singular artwork. That is not intended as criticism although some of the tracks do feel as if they are lacking the presence of the rest of the band either to fill out the sonic space or to contribute to some of the musical ideas. That being said stand-out track Marikana is performed by one of these reduced ensembles. It's a duo but between what it's actually quite difficult to say. We have sax and some wheezing monstrosity. This ambiguity of the sound source makes the track intriguing but it's the interplay between, what I'm guessing is a processed reed instrument, and it's flesh-and-brass counterpart that elevates this performance. What results is a dynamic and humourous dialogue between the acoustic and electronic worlds.

I've always imagined that arriving at a satisfying ending is perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve in improvised music. Somewhat disappointingly, Fingerhut get out of this problem by fading out a couple of tracks, teasing us somewhat as the music continues into silence. This is most prominent on Goiânia where a blasted soundscape of bleak, washed-out electronics and the animalistic skiterrings of Day's percussion produce one of the most timbrally intriguing tracks on the album. But its barely 4 minute runtime fades into silence before its ideas can be fully explored. Perhaps, with these (seeming) edits the band are attempting to avoid any accusations of onanism. However, the track times probably would accommodate a more mainstream audience who perhaps aren't used to half-hour long jams. Maybe I'm just a purist. Throughout the album Fingurhut bombard us with ideas and I believe at times they should allow themselves the time to linger on them for a while, whether it be atonal squall or distorted bass groove.

The whole experience of listening to Exegetes Of Riot brought to my mind a story about how Schubert composed music, which is probably apocryphal and/or woefully misremembered. Anyway, the majority of his compositions, particularly his song cycles, were not intended for the grandeur of the concert hall, but essentially were there to entertain his mates in intimate salon settings. Music made by people who just love playing music for people who just love listening to music. People who enjoy the spontaneous and ultimately human act of creation. It's this vibe that makes improvised music truly engaging, that home-grown feel means there is a connection made with the performers that is much deeper than the endless dreck of militaristically, over-rehearsed identikit music that will seemingly continue to proliferate in our globally-connected, YouTube-whoring, Post-Internet age.

In summary this is a very enjoyable record that was obviously a lot of fun to make. The band are mining the hinterland between abstract electronics, free rock and more traditional improv and have plucked out a few gems in doing so.