Last year I struggled to build up the enthusiasm to write a year end round-up blog. Thankfully this year has been crammed with so much adventurous, exciting, terrifying, cosmic, humourous and life-affirming music. So let's get right to the year end playlist - my longest yet!
With so much great music I don't have the strength to try and make yet another "albums of the year" countdown. No one wants to read another bloody list anyway. However, I would like to single out one release in particular that I thought was just phenomenal.
Let's Eat Grandma are a pair of teenagers from Norwich. They ostensibly make pop music but its draped in a thick layer of DIY sound-making and naive invention. The album seems to be all about playing in that blurry pre-teen phase of life and the instrumentation itself is strongly linked to conventional images of childhood (xylophones, recorders, the album even opens with a clapping game). Fairy-tale themes are prevalent throughout but they are tinged with dark, slighty Gothic edges think Roald Dahl rather than Disney. It's just so unabashedly unselfconscious.
I mean just watch this...
Love it.
If a pop record became my favourite of the year, albeit an off-the-wall one, then I shouldn't be surprised that 2016 broke another of my genre barriers. Hip hop has always felt rather alien to me but this year I finally got an in with the experimental soft rules from True Neutral Crew. I never thought hip hop could be so weird and inventive. This led to me exploring more of the acts on the Deathbomb Arc label and getting into new releases from clipping. and JPEGMAFIA.
While I'm on the subject of JPEGMAFIA that leads (rather uncomfortably) to the elephant in the room which would of course be the trials and tribulations of Western democracy in 2016. The 2nd Amendment tackled some of the, let's say, autocratic tendencies of 2016 politics. Moor Mother's Fetish Bones also feels like something that could only have been forged in this most turbulent of years. In one sense it's a harrowing listen and it's horrible that the hateful climate that fostered its creation is even allowed to exist. But on the other hand it's a real blistering gem that I feel privileged to have heard. Never before have I heard punk, noise and jazz combined in a way which is so bloodcurdlingly visceral. The noisy sphere was also served well by Puce Mary and the first new Pita release in far too long.
So what else was good... Well a bunch of What Was Music?'s old friends continued to produce the goods. Take a bow Matmos, Rashad Becker, Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi. Katie Gately had the best songs and Roly Porter seemed to do no less than simulate the birth of an entire universe in pure sound. The weirder end of electronic music (my bread and butter) was well served by the incomprehensible biomophic squelch of FIS; the uncanny synthetic voices of Matt Carlson and the Yorkshire sampling NYZ. At the acoustic end of the spectrum Eli Keszler hits things like no one else can hit things and Sarah Nicolls' vertical swinging piano was a joy to behold. I even managed to find time for a bit of reggae and some dub infused with a bit of J-Pop.
As tedious as the year end lists can be they are an incredible discovery tool. If I didn't pour through the year end lists from The Quietus, Wire, FACT, Late Junction, A Closer Listen and Boomkat. I wouldn't have discovered some truly outstanding sounds from Inventing Masks, Andrew Pekler, Billy Bao and Stian Westerhus.
Not making the playlist (mainly for time reasons) was Maja Ratke's epic Crepuscular Hour. It's well worth a listen (or ten). And I also can't miss out Andy Stott and Demdike Stare who released killer albums this year but their insistence on limiting themselves to releasing on physical media means they are sadly overlooked in the traditional Spotify playlist. It's worth remembering that Spotify is not the be all and end all...
On that note, this has been a great year for independent musicians/publishers with the Bandcamp platform going from strength to strength*. I'm afraid though I can't even link you to my favourite Bandcamp release of the year as it was a timed audio gag from Leyland Kirby's V/VM persona. A music hall inspired piano re-rendering of the deserving (if slightly po-faced) album of the year contender Love Streams by Tim Hecker. It put a huge smile on my face anyway as did the bonus "Christmess" album given out to fans. This kind of artist/fan connection is fantastic, let's hope this is the shape of things to come.
I also can't forget my own musical forays this year. As discussed in my few blogs from this year I've been inspired by the TidalCycles music software. Hopefully expect more sounds from me next year. I couldn't be more excited about the prospects of live-coded music making. The scene is open and friendly and despite the initial technical leap I think it could become a fantastic tool for amateur musicians. The pinnacle of the Tidal scene this year was this maximalist charmer from Tidal veteran Kindohm.
This E.P. from another live coder, Renick Bell, is also well worth anyone's time.
Right well 2017 is almost here so I'd better wrap this up. It's been such a brilliant year for music I almost don't want anything new in 2017 so I can pour over 2016's treasures a few more times.
Happy New Year!
* A negative footnote unfortunately, prompted by a somewhat unsavoury incident with Bandcamp and the publishers of the Dominic Fernow project Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. The album Green Graves was uploaded by someone other than the rights holders. Bandcamp seemed fairly slow to respond and so this unscrupulous person managed to profit for a short time from someone else's hard work. Hopefully, this isn't a common occurrence but just be mindful of who you're buying from.
Thursday, 29 December 2016
Sunday, 13 November 2016
The Disintegration Loops
There's a part of me that enjoys music on a visceral level. The groove, the noise, the fist-pumping euphoria. Running in almost direct opposition to this is a more nuanced appreciation. Metaphor, existential meaning... You know, the pretentious bit of me that likes to write wordy blog posts. It's this sphere of thought that knows William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops is the zenith of musical achievement.
A lofty claim, and one that becomes even more unexpected upon discovering The Loops' origins. In the 1980's Basinski constructed a number of loops sampled from an easy listening radio station. In 2001, wanting to preserve these loops, which were stored on magnetic tape, he fed them through a digital recorder and then left them running. What he soon discovered, however, was that the tapes were being worn away by the machine, the thin magnetized coating on which the audio was stored was flaking off. This physical damage was picked up by the digital recorder and gaps and silences began to appear in the sound as the loops were repeated. Each track on The Disintegration Loops charts the process of one of these strips of tape being put through this process. These tracks (across the 4 CD's on the box-set that I have) are between 20 minutes to an hour long.
My attention-demanding, primitive brain does not care much for the resultant sounds. It struggles with the patience required for ambient music. It craves jump cuts, dynamism, energy, surprise. The Loops give it none of that. The same 10 second loop repeated hundreds of time over the space of an hour, there's a part of me that will always find that tedious. But life is tedious and our 24-hour entertainment culture cannot mask that. I think I need to learn how to appreciate the pure Zen of boredom. However, there is very significant change in The Loops. Both sudden and gradual silences introduced by the decaying tape. When the thinky brain starts pondering on this aspect, wow do I love this music!
Listening to each track one's attention can dip in and out but come the end there is nothing quite as moving as realizing the journey you've just been on. You realize how much the loops decayed while you were listening to them. Some pock marks in the sound you barely registered and others you immediately recognized as momentous battle scars. You became accustomed to these changes and forget that they weren't even part of the original loop to start with. More appeared though, 5 minutes later, sometimes 10 or 20. They continued to accumulate until, like all things. the loop came to an end.
The Loops are the perfect music as metaphor. I often like to imagine each loop charts the middle-to-end stages of a human life. We go through our routines that are generally uneventful. Something changes however. We start to forget little things, a misremembered name here, a forgotten birthday there. These build up until our character starts begins to alter. We don't recognize ourselves or those around us anymore. We become a ghostly fragment of our previous selves.
Not all of The Loops' cycles of decay follows this Alzheimer's like degradation. The stuttering noise that encroaches on Dlp 4 is like an arthritic limb that becomes a frustrating chore to move. Other tracks are terrifying in their sudden and quite prolonged silences, on Dlp 1.2 they hit like a cardiac arrest. The Loops are poignantly sad when viewed like this but at the same instance they are incredibly optimistic. They soldier on despite their wounds. They accumulate character like the gnarled face of a village elder. Dignified until the end.
Non-human readings of change and decay are possible too. The Loops are essentially a memorial to the audio format that birthed them. A fragile means of storing data with none of the certainties of mass digital storage. That which we created will turn to dust just as we.
Credit to needs to be given to the original loops. They are stunningly beautiful and show that there is great art even amongst what might be considered by some to be the most artless music. But I'm grateful for the decay process that defines The Loops as otherwise listening them is like gorging on too much rich food. Crucially the loops are not Ozymandian. This music isn't mocking civilization or man's achievements but instead their somber melodies chart the inevitable decay of the individual. They are delicate but also sometimes humorously pompous, Dlp 1.1 for example conjures up the image of a Captain Mainwaring character or a faded portrait of a general of the British Raj. These are of course my own cultural impressions. I would hope that other people would have their own varied impressions.
A major factor that may have contributed to The Loops entering the pantheon of "great works" was the horrific 9/11 terror attacks which immediately followed the completion of the tapes' digitization. Basinski captured this with a series of moving photographs taken from his rooftop. These adorn the cover and accompanying art book of the box-set and so will forever attach The Loops to the immense tragedy of that day. Personally, though I will always appreciate the loops on a general, individual scale. An ode to any soul departing this Earth.
To me this music is truly remarkable but to where should my plaudits and appreciation go. While the original loops themselves were masterfully arranged, the music is little without the damage those tapes suffered. So I've essentially just spent several paragraphs attaching poignant metaphor and impressive compositional insight to a natural process. (Incidentally this was what John Cage was getting at, somehow all my blogs eventually link back to 4'33"...) The Loops are somewhat of a symbiosis, man steered by nature into creating a transcendent listening experience. It's this aspect of The Loops that fascinates me the most and has inspired me to want to create my own approach to it. I'll talk about this project in my next blog.
Everything must end and The Disintegration Loops are the ultimate celebration of the inevitable. Right, now I'm off to find something I can dance to...
A lofty claim, and one that becomes even more unexpected upon discovering The Loops' origins. In the 1980's Basinski constructed a number of loops sampled from an easy listening radio station. In 2001, wanting to preserve these loops, which were stored on magnetic tape, he fed them through a digital recorder and then left them running. What he soon discovered, however, was that the tapes were being worn away by the machine, the thin magnetized coating on which the audio was stored was flaking off. This physical damage was picked up by the digital recorder and gaps and silences began to appear in the sound as the loops were repeated. Each track on The Disintegration Loops charts the process of one of these strips of tape being put through this process. These tracks (across the 4 CD's on the box-set that I have) are between 20 minutes to an hour long.
My attention-demanding, primitive brain does not care much for the resultant sounds. It struggles with the patience required for ambient music. It craves jump cuts, dynamism, energy, surprise. The Loops give it none of that. The same 10 second loop repeated hundreds of time over the space of an hour, there's a part of me that will always find that tedious. But life is tedious and our 24-hour entertainment culture cannot mask that. I think I need to learn how to appreciate the pure Zen of boredom. However, there is very significant change in The Loops. Both sudden and gradual silences introduced by the decaying tape. When the thinky brain starts pondering on this aspect, wow do I love this music!
Listening to each track one's attention can dip in and out but come the end there is nothing quite as moving as realizing the journey you've just been on. You realize how much the loops decayed while you were listening to them. Some pock marks in the sound you barely registered and others you immediately recognized as momentous battle scars. You became accustomed to these changes and forget that they weren't even part of the original loop to start with. More appeared though, 5 minutes later, sometimes 10 or 20. They continued to accumulate until, like all things. the loop came to an end.
The Loops are the perfect music as metaphor. I often like to imagine each loop charts the middle-to-end stages of a human life. We go through our routines that are generally uneventful. Something changes however. We start to forget little things, a misremembered name here, a forgotten birthday there. These build up until our character starts begins to alter. We don't recognize ourselves or those around us anymore. We become a ghostly fragment of our previous selves.
Not all of The Loops' cycles of decay follows this Alzheimer's like degradation. The stuttering noise that encroaches on Dlp 4 is like an arthritic limb that becomes a frustrating chore to move. Other tracks are terrifying in their sudden and quite prolonged silences, on Dlp 1.2 they hit like a cardiac arrest. The Loops are poignantly sad when viewed like this but at the same instance they are incredibly optimistic. They soldier on despite their wounds. They accumulate character like the gnarled face of a village elder. Dignified until the end.
Non-human readings of change and decay are possible too. The Loops are essentially a memorial to the audio format that birthed them. A fragile means of storing data with none of the certainties of mass digital storage. That which we created will turn to dust just as we.
Credit to needs to be given to the original loops. They are stunningly beautiful and show that there is great art even amongst what might be considered by some to be the most artless music. But I'm grateful for the decay process that defines The Loops as otherwise listening them is like gorging on too much rich food. Crucially the loops are not Ozymandian. This music isn't mocking civilization or man's achievements but instead their somber melodies chart the inevitable decay of the individual. They are delicate but also sometimes humorously pompous, Dlp 1.1 for example conjures up the image of a Captain Mainwaring character or a faded portrait of a general of the British Raj. These are of course my own cultural impressions. I would hope that other people would have their own varied impressions.
A major factor that may have contributed to The Loops entering the pantheon of "great works" was the horrific 9/11 terror attacks which immediately followed the completion of the tapes' digitization. Basinski captured this with a series of moving photographs taken from his rooftop. These adorn the cover and accompanying art book of the box-set and so will forever attach The Loops to the immense tragedy of that day. Personally, though I will always appreciate the loops on a general, individual scale. An ode to any soul departing this Earth.
To me this music is truly remarkable but to where should my plaudits and appreciation go. While the original loops themselves were masterfully arranged, the music is little without the damage those tapes suffered. So I've essentially just spent several paragraphs attaching poignant metaphor and impressive compositional insight to a natural process. (Incidentally this was what John Cage was getting at, somehow all my blogs eventually link back to 4'33"...) The Loops are somewhat of a symbiosis, man steered by nature into creating a transcendent listening experience. It's this aspect of The Loops that fascinates me the most and has inspired me to want to create my own approach to it. I'll talk about this project in my next blog.
Everything must end and The Disintegration Loops are the ultimate celebration of the inevitable. Right, now I'm off to find something I can dance to...
Sunday, 9 October 2016
Neglected Currents
Wow it's been over a year and half since my last blog. Shame on me!
Although no-one was clamouring for it, for me these blogs are a very personal form of art therapy. The need to be creative always seems to oppress itself on my thoughts and so it's nice to have a place where it can just gush out.
What's roused me from my blogging slumber is a piece of music software I've discovered that I've completely fallen in love with, TidalCycles. TidalCycles (or just Tidal for short) is a way to make musical patterns with code. As earlier blogs attest, the mixture of art and technology is something I've always been passionate about and, slight techy detour here, the fact that Tidal uses Haskell means that I also have a vehicle for engaging with functional programming which quite handily benefits my day job.
Now this isn't the first time I've got excited by a shiny new toy, played with it for 5 minutes and then left it on the shelf to gather dust. I want to stick with Tidal though and so inspired by the Abandoned Art project I've decided that the way to force myself to practice is to upload a Tidal jam/session/mess to my Youtube account every 2 weeks. These will be my "Neglected Currents" immediately uploaded and forgotten about but will hopefully chart a history from humble beginnings to some quite interesting music.
Without further ado here's the first one:
As a first attempt, it's ok I guess. I managed to forget a lot of the syntax and had to keep stopping to consult my notes. That being said there's some interesting stuff in there, thanks mainly to the power of Tidal and it's pre-prepared sample library.
What I truly find revolutionary about Tidal is that this is the first piece of music software I've used where the main question is not "How do I make the sounds I want?" but "What do I do next?". My history with making music comes from using software that allows you to meticulously order and place sound in preparation for one finished piece. Tidal (and live-coding in general) focus on improvisation. It takes just a few lines of code to produce quite a complex rhythmic pattern and then the challenge immediately becomes focused around how this pattern should morph and change. I've always been interested in improvisation especially within the context of electronic music. Most electronic music I listen to is far too composed and introducing an improvised element into it I think can be a spark for the creation of more dynamic music that sounds, dare I say, alive. This also the first piece of music software I've used where the only barrier between brain and the music is how fast you can type.
Here's to what I hope will be a fruitful time with Tidal. See you in 2 weeks!
Although no-one was clamouring for it, for me these blogs are a very personal form of art therapy. The need to be creative always seems to oppress itself on my thoughts and so it's nice to have a place where it can just gush out.
What's roused me from my blogging slumber is a piece of music software I've discovered that I've completely fallen in love with, TidalCycles. TidalCycles (or just Tidal for short) is a way to make musical patterns with code. As earlier blogs attest, the mixture of art and technology is something I've always been passionate about and, slight techy detour here, the fact that Tidal uses Haskell means that I also have a vehicle for engaging with functional programming which quite handily benefits my day job.
Now this isn't the first time I've got excited by a shiny new toy, played with it for 5 minutes and then left it on the shelf to gather dust. I want to stick with Tidal though and so inspired by the Abandoned Art project I've decided that the way to force myself to practice is to upload a Tidal jam/session/mess to my Youtube account every 2 weeks. These will be my "Neglected Currents" immediately uploaded and forgotten about but will hopefully chart a history from humble beginnings to some quite interesting music.
Without further ado here's the first one:
As a first attempt, it's ok I guess. I managed to forget a lot of the syntax and had to keep stopping to consult my notes. That being said there's some interesting stuff in there, thanks mainly to the power of Tidal and it's pre-prepared sample library.
What I truly find revolutionary about Tidal is that this is the first piece of music software I've used where the main question is not "How do I make the sounds I want?" but "What do I do next?". My history with making music comes from using software that allows you to meticulously order and place sound in preparation for one finished piece. Tidal (and live-coding in general) focus on improvisation. It takes just a few lines of code to produce quite a complex rhythmic pattern and then the challenge immediately becomes focused around how this pattern should morph and change. I've always been interested in improvisation especially within the context of electronic music. Most electronic music I listen to is far too composed and introducing an improvised element into it I think can be a spark for the creation of more dynamic music that sounds, dare I say, alive. This also the first piece of music software I've used where the only barrier between brain and the music is how fast you can type.
Here's to what I hope will be a fruitful time with Tidal. See you in 2 weeks!
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