REVIEW: THE SPACEAPE - XORCISM EP

The Spaceape - Xorcism EP
Hyperdub, 2012

Twelve minutes and fifty two seconds. That's the sum total of Xorcism, the Spaceape's first solo release (available for free at his website), according to its run time. It would seem scant prior to listening, but, as the press release accompanying the EP notes, "Everything that needs to be there is here and nothing more." The backstory: the Spaceape, né Stephen Samuel Gordon, a vocalist whose powerful, resonant vocals have injected post-millennial tension into Kode 9's productions on two excellent albums (2006's Memories of the Future and last year's Black Sun) in addition to guest spots on Burial's first album, Martyn's Ghost People, and Redshape's Square among others, has for the last three years dealt with a rare form of cancer. Xorcism details this struggle across seven tracks, channeling the percussive, unsettling, ghostly presence of Haitian music in order to tell of his experiences. Harrowing enough on its own, then, but even more engrossing (and, somehow, braver) in the context of what's come before: label Hyperdub explains that

[t]his intense experience was behind the sonic fictions of bodily malfunction and radiation that surrounded The Spaceape's collaboration with Kode9 on 2011's Black Sun album. Relisten to the lyrics such as 'Black Smoke', 'Neon Red Sign' and 'The Cure' and you'll understand the context to this new batch of The Spaceape's solo material. 

The cover art--itself a still from the brilliant video for "On the Run"--perfectly captures the mood, suggesting the otherworldliness common to the Spaceape's words and voice and the darkness, pain, and terror suggested by the release's title.

Of course, high concepts and compelling personal stories don't guarantee good art. Xorcism could have been nothing more than a curio--that guy from the dubstep tracks with the deep voice made a solo album--but the tracks here arguably work even better with the Spaceape's approach than his Kode9 collaborations. On those two albums, and the singles and one-offs he's featured on, the Spaceape proved himself to be a master of dread. What kept him from self-parody--which, for a man with as distinctive a voice as he possesses, would seem both all too easy and too quick to slip into--was his ability to reveal that dread is a layered emotion, a whole space or affect that enfolds and discloses a reality. The solemnity with which he enunciated his words, though, could be suffocating over the course of a whole album, the timbre of his vocals becoming a black hole, swallowing all light and air. Xorcism sidesteps this problem both through its brevity--the EP is ruthlessly efficient, pared to the bone--and its tempo, the full sprint suggested by "On the Run" the rule rather than the exception, allowing his vocals to stretch their limbs in a way that the pitch-black dubstep of Memories of the Future or the science fiction miniatures of Black Sun often denied.

For all the temptation to view this solely through the Spaceape's words and vocal performances, though (cf. Robert Darnell's excellent look at "He Gave His Body Over to Science" for Dummy for a nice write-up that avoids this), it's the music behind and around them that makes this release feel so striking and new. The weird, undulating vocals behind "Spirit of Change," for example, are as haunting as anything that Ghost Box has released, and the urgent, insistent horn parts that cycle through "On the Run" and "The Sound" ratchet the tension up to almost unbearable levels. "Up in Flames" prominently features a violin part that sounds almost Acadian along with its drums and bells, and as a literalisation of the Black Atlantic subtext to the release, it's a striking moment. Ultimately, though, the masses of drums throughout are what really drive these songs. Pulsing with rhythmic force, though infinitely more pliable than four-to-the-floor kicks or dubstep's half-step lurch, the drums shift and swirl and blur, all motion, energy, and heat. Where the Spaceape plays with his vocals are also thrilling moments--from the pitched-up and modulated backing vocals on "Your Angel Has Come" to the female (?) backing vocals on "On the Run," the juxtaposition of calmness and anger on the multitracked "He Gave His Body Over to Science" to the chorus of vocals that close out the EP on "Up in Flames"--highlighting his command, but also his versatility.

As a spoken word artist's EP, though, eventually it comes back to the words, and the ones intoned by the Spaceape throughout Xorcism are evocative and arresting. The opening stanza to "Spirit of Change" burns with apocalyptic fervour as it sets the scene of "a man / Looking up at a weeping sky / Rain splinters down / His burnt charcoal skin." The depiction of radiation therapy in "He Gave His Body Over to Science" is almost too stark to bear, full of invasive technology that attacks (and constitutes) a soul in a person, its chorus ("He gave his body over to science / He said from now 'I'll be compliant' / No change of heart or acts of defiance / He gave his body over to science") and the assurance that "It won't be long before he's a believer" offering a kind of Foucaultian terror. Ultimately, it might be the mantra-like lines of "Up in Flames" that stay with me most: a song that "rallies against man's complacency in a world we inhabit so briefly" according to the notes that accompany the release, the repetitive structure of the lines give its exhortations an uncanny power. Pick a song on the release and you're bound to find a line that grabs you, though, that shakes you and that makes the demons exorcised in these songs dance into life in the corners of your eyes.

Twelve minutes and fifty two seconds. It goes by in a heartbeat, except when it doesn't. Xorcism has the curious power to dilate time. In the moment with these songs, the intensity is almost too much, the words, the sounds, the details accruing too quickly and proving quietly devastating. No song seems like it will ever end--the spell is too powerful, too hypnotic for you to be released from its grasp. Then, as soon as it's begun, the song is over, the EP sprints on to its next tale, anxieties brought to light and hanging heavy in the air from track to track. In its singular world, Xorcism reminds me most of Gonjasufi's work. Perhaps too easy a comparison--intensely focused and meditative words paired with immediately recognisable voices--but one that I keep being drawn back to. I've often tried to describe the Spaceape (and sell him to friends) as a force of nature: his voice is something big, his presence is something that takes you over, that demands your attention and your vision, like a massive storm. That's doubly true here. The ghosts in these stories will hound you and chase you through your unconscious, equal parts frightening and carnivalesque. Nothing about Xorcism makes for an easy listen, but it's a rewarding one, the sound of an artist boldly asserting his identity by giving voice to his deepest doubts and fears in order to find some measure of spiritual reassurance. In so doing, the Spaceape offers up one of the most compulsively listenable releases of the year even as it challenges you anew with every play.

RIP "THIS MONTH IN GRIME/DUBSTEP": OR, WHY IT MATTERS WHEN PEOPLE STOP WRITING ABOUT MUSIC (EVEN IF IT'S JUST ON THE INTERNET)

I just noticed this post on Blackdown last night, so I'm a few days behind here. I was pretty disappointed to read that "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" would be no more. It's even more distressing to read Martin Clark's narrative of events:

Before we get into any light messenger shooting, the column is being retired, I did not choose to stop writing it. I've been invited to pitch to other sections on Pitchfork but my grime/dubstep column doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy. I'll be honest and say this isn't something I really understand but naturally recognise their authority to make this call.

While Clark goes on to point out that in some ways the end of the column comes at a very opportune personal moment, something about the phrase "doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy" bothers me. Does this herald, not too far down the line, the end of "Show No Mercy," also (Pitchfork's metal column for those unfamiliar)? What about something like "The Out Door" (a column focused on outre/experimental music)? Is that destined to fall afoul of the "new editorial strategy?" I understand the desire to move away from a single genre/scene focused column--if that is what this new editorial strategy entails--but surely first grime, then dubstep, and now UK bass music more generally have demonstrated over the past seven years (the length of the column's lifespan) their vitality, vibrancy, and importance to contemporary electronic music. If nothing else, Clark's voice has been an energetic, excited (and exciting), and informative one. He closes his sign off with "If you took the time to read [a "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" column] in the last seven years and came across someone you'd not noticed, well then bigup: my work here is done." Trust me, Martin: your work here is definitely done.

I feel as if I've written about this a dozen times on this blog--I'm too lazy to check and see--but when I first got on the internet, my exposure to new music came primarily via reviews, interviews, and, had they existed (or I been smart enough to find those that did exist), columns exactly like "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." Sites like Pitchfork and Allmusic (and later Stylus) were incredibly important to me because they gave me access to new music even if I could only read about it. Up until just before I went away to school, getting music that I heard about online was an incredibly time consuming and expensive proposition, usually limited to a CD as a Christmas gift or a trickle of music found on bad P2P networks, music that was difficult to access given the speed of dial-up modems. Reading about music, then, and imagining what it sounded like, piecing it together slowly through networks of references, was what I spent most of my time doing. I didn't get to listen to a lot of this stuff for a long time, but in some weird way I knew it backwards and forwards.

In high school, probably as a result of the amount of time I spent reading about music on the internet, I decided I was going to be a music journalist when I grew up. What could be better than writing about music for a living? Not only would I still be able to read and talk about it, but, I gathered, as an actual journalist, I would get to hear it. I'd sort of vaguely had ambitions about being a writer before this, but puberty led me to the distressing realisation that reading, writing, and talking about science fiction weren't activities that were likely to impress girls (plus I was, and am still, pretty rubbish at writing SF). Obviously, I was not in any way farsighted enough to see that the idea of becoming a print music journalist was not the smartest career ambition for any number of reasons. That didn't stop me, though; I even remember asking my grandfather, with whom I don't particularly get along, about being a journalist (he was one--a financial columnist, I believe). He told me he didn't think that music journalists made good money on the scale of journalists' salaries. I ignored this.

This desire to be a journalist continued on and off throughout undergrad, and to a certain extent it shaped how I listened to music (and what music I sought out). I spent a lot of those four years catching up on all the music I'd only read about before. It was a little like doing my homework. I listened to (almost) all the things I'd seen referenced and tried to get myself familiar with them. I discovered a lot of the music that I now love and consider central to my concept of myself as a music listener by doing this. Equally important, I discovered a number of music writers whose work I found to be both inspired and inspiring as I sought out information on the bands, genres, and movements I felt I needed to become an expert on. I was taken with Stylus' "Soulseeking" column, especially those by Nick Southall, many of which seemed unutterably elegant and eloquent. Pitchfork's features like Tom Ewing's "Poptimist" and Mark Richardson's "Resonant Frequency" were also playing an important role in shaping how I was thinking (and how I wanted to write and talk) about music. Nitsuh Abebe's article for Pitchfork on early British and American post-rock was then and remains now one of the best pieces I've ever read: dense with information, but accessible, full of obvious affection for its subject matter and welcoming for those less familiar. It also introduced me to the work of Simon Reynolds, the man who coined--for all practical purposes--the term "post rock," and whose Energy Flash and Rip it Up and Start Again! proved essential reading (again, part of that idea of "doing my homework"--I'm still waiting to get a chance to read Retromania).

The upshot of all this was that from high school to the end of undergrad, I started and abandoned (usually pretty quickly) a number of music blogs designed to emulate what I was reading. I was not successful about this, largely because the people I mentioned above are all quite good writers. In my final year of undergrad, I wrote a (pretty terrible if I'm honest) thesis on music, memory, and the interaction between the two for both musician and listener.* It was my last attempt at doing what I saw the people I admired doing. I did not find it an enriching experience, and I gave up the dream of becoming a music journalist, or even of writing about music. Clearly, I couldn't do it--at least not as well as the writers I admired could--and if I wasn't up to their quality, there was no point in writing. I still read and talked about music all the time, but I wasn't going to make that the central goal of my life. I was starting grad school and the idea of being a writer of any kind, but especially a music writer, sort of faded away.

Concurrent with all of that, I started listening to more and more new music. It's not that I ever stopped doing that, but now it was the primary focus. Starting about four years ago, I began to try to keep up to date and current with what was happening in the genres and styles I liked, rather than catching up on what had been going on five, ten, or twenty years before. This coincided with a move away from rockism toward more catholic listening practices (a move that had begun during my undergrad years but that has intensified over the past few years). I started to listen to (and, more importantly, to enjoy) things that I never would have considered in high school (electronic/dance music and electroacoustic/noise stuff) at the same time that I grew tired of some of the enthusiams of my teenage self (namely prog rock and krautrock, both of which sound pretty tired to me now, by and large, though perhaps I just need a break. I listened to a lot of that stuff). The fall of 2009 was a time of pretty significant changes for me, and my relationship to music--what I listened to, how I thought about it/talked about it, what I used to listen to it--was not immune to those changes. In a lot of ways, it was the point of maturation of the developments of the previous two to three years, and what led to me writing these words today.**

To bring this back to where I started, "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" was an important part of helping to shift and develop my tastes in that period. I would dip in and out of it, but at some point over the past few years I started reading each installment. I saw Burial's name pop up on a number of year end lists in 2007, so I picked up Untrue.*** I'm by no means an expert in grime, dubstep, or UK bass music, but they've been a healthy interest of mine ever since. I've found other sources since to discover more of this music--Fact, Resident Advisor, The Quietus, Boomkat's product reviews--but I've always looked forward to Clark's columns. They were expertly curated, and guaranteed to turn up something interesting even when talking about things I otherwise didn't enjoy. I know there are Rinse FM podcasts and a simple search will turn up loads of people talking about this stuff, but that monthly digest was handy. It helped me feel like I was at least somewhat keeping up with what was going on half a world away.

So, RIP "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." You will be missed. I'm glad to hear that Clark plans to continue writing over at Blackdown. All I can say at this point, I guess, is bigup, Martin. You've done a fine job these past seven years. Thanks for all the music.



*This is obviously why hauntology so grabbed me. It was like a more interesting, less regressive version of everything I wanted to talk about in that thesis.
**I started this blog (in its first form, before I moved it to blogger) in the summer of 2010. I didn't know then that it was a blog--it was mostly just a bunch of stuff in a long word document--but I decided to formally make it one in the early parts of 2011. A couple months (and a few posts) later, it ended up here. Actually, the first thing in that word document was an anecdote about listening to "Hyph Mngo" (which I discovered via "This Month in Grime/Dubstep") with some friends while in the middle of the Redwoods.
***It feels very appropriate that I'm listening to Burial's Kindred--which I'm enjoying even more this time around--as I write this.

REVIEW: BURIAL - KINDRED

Burial - Kindred EP
Hyperdub, 2012

New music from Burial is rare. In the four and a half years since he released Untrue in November 2007, he has released nine collaborative tracks and four new Burial songs: "Fostercare," from 2009's 5: Five Years of Hyperdub and the Street Halo single last year, which included the title track, "NYC," and "Stolen Dog." The release of this single brings that total up to seven with the title track and b-sides "Loner" and "Ashtray Wasp," or just over half the number of tracks on Untrue.

I make this point not to find fault or criticize. To say that Burial's sound is distinctive would be an understatement: for all that artists have attempted to imitate his omnipresent crackle and hiss, his ghostly, androgynous vocal samples, and his syncopated, aqueous drums, there's something that Burial's music brings to the table that is uniquely his own. His name has become shorthand for a certain palette, so familiar at this point, in much the same way that My Bloody Valentine or Boards of Canada have become widely used shorthands for certain combinations of sounds and emotions. What's amazing, then, is that given the relative paucity of his output over the last few years, and given the similarity in terms of sounds and elements that Burial's music has favoured since Untrue, that familiar palette and the emotions it evokes still resonate.

Without ever seeming to change, Burial's music has developed over the past few years, becoming more nuanced and subtle while avoiding any hint of insularity, which would be death for his sound. His music is intimate as a touch or a whisper, but as elusive and ephemeral as a shared glance as you pass someone on the street. The tension between the titles of the songs on this single--"Kindred" points to togetherness and community while "Loner" signals isolation, alienation even, on top of loneliness--is a perfect encapsulation of his music.

This tension between community and isolation is reflected in his rare statements about his music and the purpose behind it. He's talked about making music that reflects his sense of London, a city full of "distant lights, down the end of your road" and how his songs need to be "faith restoring somehow to me." He constantly refers to the idea of his music glowing, of its appropriateness for:

when you come back from being out somewhere; in a minicab or a night bus, or with someone, or walking home across London late at night, dreamlike, and you've still got the music kind of echoing in you, in your bloodstream, but with real life trying to get in the way. I want it to be like a little sanctuary. It's like that 24-hour stand selling tea on a rainy night, glowing in the dark.

Taken together, these ideas all form the Burial aesthetic: unidentifiable voices heard through the walls, late-night walks in the rain, glowing angels watching over us.

Kindred is Burial's biggest leap forward since Untrue, a release that finds him working with the developments in bass music over the past two years without abandoning his signature elements. The upfront and aggressive drums of "Kindred" might be relatively free of hiss and hard and menacing as jackboots, but they're recognizably Burial, resembling more than ever the fishbones he's referenced when discussing drums. Similarly, "Loner's" first half, although ostensibly one of Burial's most club-friendly moments is full of odd touches: the mix seems inside out, the vocal samples trying to escape the bright arpeggiated line that dominates the track, the drums occasionally skipping or stuttering, explosions of ghostly hum and fog-like hiss disrupting the momentum. When the unaccompanied vocals sing out at the end of the track, it's a relief from the crushing, driving music that's come before. Their eerie melody is shaded with ambiguous meaning, at once comforting and hopeful and forbiddingly alien.

It's on "Ashtray Wasp," though--which Scratcha DVA previewed a few minutes of back in December--that demonstrates the amount of progress present on this single, as it synthesizes the new and the old and suggests just how potent Burial c.2012 is. The track begins with a nice, excitement generating buildup that sounds like "classic" Burial--the hushed, shuffling drums joined by an attention grabbing vocal sample. After a few movements, though, the track really takes off in its second half. The gently knocking rhythm and synth pulses that open up into a beautiful world of Four Tet-ish twinkling and truly warped vocal sampling is both unbelievably virtuosic and arresting. It's my favourite moment here; I can only hope that Burial chooses to develop this particular strand further at some point.

Not everything on Kindred is perfect and not all of Burial's experiments work, but that's what is so exciting here. When one of these developments clicks--like the euphoric moment that starts "Kindred" and recurs throughout or the eruptions of hiss and fog that periodically swallow these tracks up--it sounds genuinely thrilling, an artist delighting in his own power. What's more, it changes the tone of the most frequent question surrounding Burial's music--how far can he take this sound?--from incipient weariness to anticipation. The Quietus knew this back in December when they said "Burial gets better with each release by becoming more and more like Burial." It turns out that identity and the music that surrounds it is more rich and varied than anyone expected.

Back in 2007, Burial talked about his music--and music in general--having a kind of social function:

You see people and you're disconnected from them, they mean fuck-all to you, but other times you can invest everything in someone you don't even know, silently believe in them, it might be on the underground or in a shop or something. You hope people are doing that with you as well. . . . It's easy to fall away and fuck up and for many people there's no safety net. Sometimes one tune can mean everything, it's like a talisman. . . . When you are young you are pushed around by forces that are nothing to do with you. You're lost, most of the time you don't understand what's going on with yourself, with anything.

In the face of this confusion and loss, music offers a haven, a place of solidarity. In 2012, with a world of precarity and austerity being all that we (but especially youths) are commanded to expect, Burial's music seems more important than ever.

"YOU REMIND ME OF..."

In the aftermath of 2011, many of the music websites I read on a regular basis are covering the last of the 2011 releases that got lost in the rush of the usual year-end lists, etc. There are a few 2011 releases I've picked up in the new year that I'm listening to and enjoying (Pitchfork's review of Jacaszek's Glimmer led me to that album, and after a few listens I'm very impressed), but nothing has really altered my conception of the best releases of 2011--even chopped & screwed versions of The Weeknd couldn't make me love those albums any less.

There were a few 2010 releases that I picked up in 2011 that changed my view of music released in 2010, though. While I encountered most of them right at the start of 2011, some of them (most notably Darkstar's North) didn't get a listen until a large part of the way through the year. The Darkstar album is one I make note of because it is, outside of Four Tet's There is Love in You and Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma and Pattern+Grid World EP, the release from 2010 that I played the most in 2011. Had I heard it before the summer of 2011, North would easily have been my number three on my list of top ten albums of 2010 (behind Flying Lotus and Four Tet). I have to admit that I don't really find "Aidy's Girl is a Computer" as amazing as everyone else, but "Gold" is pretty much perfect: a truly revelatory cover that transforms the original and adds heretofore unknown dimensions to it. However, my two favourite moments on North are the introduction of James Buttery's vocals on "In the Wings" and the first forty five seconds of "Under One Roof" (the rest of the song is also great, but those forty five seconds get to me in a way I'm not really able to explain--the emotion is entirely different, but the strength of response is not dissimilar to the entry of those chords right before the vocals in "Hyph Mngo"): 

Darkstar - "In the Wings"

Darkstar - "Under One Roof"

The critical consensus on North seems mixed, with a lot of middling reviews, and Zone Styx Travelcard offers an interesting critique (set off against an interview with one of the members of Darkstar) of North in relation to Darkstar's earlier work (which I've got to be honest and say I haven't checked out, mostly because it is supposed to be so different from North). I understand Mike Powell's point that the album seems suffused with nostalgia for the feelings that synth-pop can evoke, rather thanwith  those feelings themselves, and that this makes it a conservative album--points that Zone Styx Travelcard also makes ("There's a patina on every sound: they keys and Buttery's vocals are all fractionally distorted, as if they were working on the assumption that that would [add] character, backstory, fallible humanity to the sound. But what about the poignancy of cold machined perfection? They seemed to know what that was before")--but while the album might not push the boundaries of synth-pop, I find that I respond to the emotions expressed, loneliness, longing, alienation, distance, coldness, much more directly and with greater empathy than with someone like Depeche Mode. If it's derivative of the 1980s, it has at least purged from those sounds some of the aspects that make me self-conscious and unable to respond to synth-pop with anything other than embarrassment. For me, the fact that the music on North, in addition to whatever else it might be, is "familiar . . . [and] beautiful, too," according to Powell, is enough. As cold as the album might be, as much as it might suck the light out of the room, I find in it something (and whether it's sonic or emotional I couldn't say) relatable. In its own way, North is much more three-dimensional and redemptive than people seem to give it credit for being.

This is really apropos of nothing other than a grey and rainy day reading Virginia Woolf (whose writing makes me feel grey and rainy) and North coming on in the middle of it and entrancing me just as it did the first time I heard it. I hope there will be great music that comes out in 2012--and I have faith that there will be, despite all doomsayers' predictions--but even if nothing is "important" or "great" in the grand scheme of things, I'm fine with there being some albums and songs that can be great and important for me on rainy days while I'm reading. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm over the holiday slump, so bring on the tunes, everyone!

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #7 KODE9 & THE SPACEAPE BLACK SUN

Albums of the Year 2011: #7

Kode9 & the Spaceape - Black Sun

First of all, look at that cover--it's just absolutely gorgeous. In my list of Honourable Mentions, I said that Pinch & Shackleton's self-titled album sounds like the kind of thing that would play on the sound system in Hadley's Hope. Well, Kode9 & the Spaceape's first album, Memories of the Future, sounds like what would play after the nuclear blast wipes it out. Saying that you can see the smoke rising from tracks like "Victims" and "Sine" is almost an understatement. The relentless doom and dread can be a little much at times, though, and I find it hard to listen to Memories of the Future front to back. Dip in, get your daily dose of anxiety, and move on is my general approach. With that being said, Kode9 & the Spaceape's ability to set and sustain a mood is an impressive feat, one that's certainly helped by the Spaceape's singular voice: it seems somehow weighty, ancient, elemental, a voice that a mortal shouldn't possess. Hearing that Black Sun was to be a little more varied, even if it still contained the requisite doom and gloom, had me quite excited to hear this album.

Black Sun, as you can probably guess from its appearance on this list, delivers the goods. Aside from a brief dip in momentum during the title track and "Hole in the Sky" (which is no Black Sabbath), this album is driving without being as relentless as Memories of the Future. This is still tense music, but it's danceable, albeit at a dance club somewhere/time after the apocalypse. It's also surprisingly hooky (the police sirens in "Am I" are brilliant), and the Spaceape's voice does more to lead the songs rather than just build atmosphere (which, to be fair, he is really, really good at). Cha Cha adds a nice vocal counterpoint on the tracks she's featured on, especially on "Black Smoke" and "The Cure." Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects is the chipmunk vocals on "The Cure:" they sound so metallic and bitcrushed, so primitive in a way. This, to my ears, is the sound of the adjective "cyber," and I find it fascinating that my idea of what "technology" sounds like is so dated (does this depend on the time at which you first become aware of signifiers of technology like sound?). Black Sun doesn't entirely abandon Memories of the Future's blueprint, and the second half of "Bullet Against the Bone" is as unnerving as anything on that album, particularly with the Spaceape's deadpan repetition of the "defend us we said" line. "Kryon," the album-closing collaboration with Flying Lotus, returns me to the questions of technology raised by "The Cure." It's as astral as anything on Cosmogramma, but set in a universe that's falling apart--this is a universe that's not transcendental, but rather desperately struggling with the forces of entropy. So, the heat death of the universe, or maybe just a melting hard drive; a fitting pair of images to close Black Sun. I can't wait to hear what these two do next. 

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: HONOURABLE MENTIONS

And so it begins! Today I offer five albums that just missed my actual album of the year list. More charitably, you could say these are #15-11 on my album of the year list. These are in no way, shape, or form bad albums; they simply didn't quite strike my fancy the way some other albums did this year. Listening to these alongside the ten, uh, eleven songs I listed in my last two posts would make for a great morning/afternoon/evening. Common threads that emerge from this list? It was a good year for hazy, dreamy music that inspired a vague sense of anxiety and dread. Also, all of these albums fit into existing conversations and conventions (some of them starting to seem well-worn at this point), but managed to transcend or expand the boundaries of those conventions and introduce new topics (or at least pleasing variations on old topics) into the conversation.

Albums of the Year 2011: Honourable Mentions

Pinch & Shackleton - Pinch & Shackleton

This album shares a lot of characteristics with other albums you'll see throughout this list. Ominous, creeping dread? Check. Hazy clouds of reverb? Double check. Vocal samples that have been treated and played with? Triple check. I'm not familiar enough with either Pinch or Shackleton to comment on where this lies in the spectrum of their respective bodies of work, but this is fantastic mood music. This album reminds me of the albums that I used to try and make sense of when I first started reading/hearing about "dubstep" via online music publications (c.2006/2007). It's certainly one of the most alien sounding albums on the list; the soundworld it describes is monochromatic, but it's a dense landscape, scored with furrows, deeply textured--an LV-426 if you will; the album that would play over the soundsystem in Hadley's Hope. An album that rewards close, repeated listens, I can see this retaining its potency for some time to come.

Com Truise - Galactic Melt

With the name and the cover art, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was going to be an exercise in the worst of chillwave c.2009. Com Truise skips the whole half-remembered, hazy recreation of the 1980s, though, by going straight to the source: his sound is pristine and straight out of 1985, with immaculate synths spinning out endless glistening arpeggios. When he relies on vocal samples, like in "VHS Sex," the album does get a little too comfortably chill and kind of sub-Neon Indian, but for the most part Galactic Melt delivers wonderful electro that's perfect for hot summer days and cold winter nights. The album is at its most effective when Com Truise is content to let the synths and melodies drift out into space, like on "Hyperlips" and "Ether Drift."

Shlohmo - Bad Vibes

With its woozy rhythms and decaying machinery sound, you could almost call Shlohmo's Bad Vibes Brainfeeder-by-the-numbers. There is something powerful in Shlohmo's melodies and production that transcends its surface similarities to that label's house sound, though. When the kind of cyborg dance music that Bjork's "Pluto" suggests takes over the charts and all the machines that make it are slowly starting to malfunction, this is the sound they'll make. It's as sensuous as the best R'n'B, but at the same time there's something strangely unreal and dreamlike about it all. There are two competing idioms on this album: the crackle and hiss of vinyl and the slightly overdriven sound of a decaying signal that has come to signify the past, ghosts, and melancholy (via artists like Boards of Canada and Burial) and a kind of futuristic, mechanistic sound (one that is rapidly becoming as much a part of the past as the vinyl crackle it ostensibly faces off against here). It's in his exploration of this tension that Shlohmo really captures a lot of what is fascinating in music in 2011.

The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

The Caretaker has been mining the combination of reverb, repetition, and edits for some time in his exploration of the aesthetic that would accompany the figure who gives him his name as he danced to the house band at the Overlook. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World takes these elements to a new level, though, purposefully repeating songs, focusing on only tiny snippets of old jazz recordings to evoke the feel of memory and its frailties (memory disorders like amnesia and Alzheimer's disease have been a constant reference point for the Caretaker's music). The narrative told by his song titles--"All You Are Going to Want to Do Is Get Back There," "Moments of Sufficient Lucidity," "I Feel as if I Might Be Vanishing," "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine," "The Sublime Is Disappointingly Elusive," to name a few--is heartbreakingly human: a longing to return to our happiest moments even as they vanish when we attempt to recall them. By no means "easy listening," An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is as profound a meditation on life as you'll find in music.

Pure X - Pleasure

This album sounds something like a cross between Real Estate's Days and Deerhunter's Cryptograms. The music is as viscous as cough syrup and just as slow as that image implies. Like dreams during a nap on a humid summer afternoon, these songs seems oppressed by the close, heavy atmosphere, with vague hints of menace colouring the innocence of their structure. This is the most an album has reminded of Loveless in a long time, and if it's not quite up to its level, Pleasure is still an enchanting listen. It's a haunted take on 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll that's refreshingly free of Lynchian grotesqueness--feverish, hallucinatory, neon, psychedelic, yes, but not macabre or uncanny. The guitar work is fantastic, too: dig that feedback that twists back in on itself at the end of "Surface!" In a weird way, the lo-fi production can make some of Pleasure's tracks seem like cousins to songs like "Parties" and "Seriously" on Shlohmo's Bad Vibes.

  

This should give you some hints as to what'll be coming up in the top 10. I'll be posting my albums of the year list over the next ten days, starting with #10 tomorrow and finishing with #1 on Christmas Day. Feel free to join in the conversation with your own takes on these albums, lists of your favourite albums, and/or suggestions for things to check out.

AND ANOTHER SONG I'VE LOVED IN 2011

As I continue getting some year-end lists in order (I'll hopefully have the first round of album of the year stuff up tomorrow--honourable mentions/things that just missed the cut of the actual list), I came across an absolutely unforgivable omission to my "Ten Songs I've Loved in 2011" list. I didn't even consider this because for some reason I forgot it came out in 2011 (I was convinced it had come out in 2010). Anyway, here's an eleventh for my list of ten songs.

Burial - "NYC" off Street Halo EP

It's heresy, I know, but I have to admit that I've always found Burial's music kind of boring (though I've loved the idea behind his music since I first heard of him). I understand why everyone went crazy over his first two albums--and Untrue definitely has some great songs, like "Archangel," "Endorphin," and "In McDonalds"--but it was all a bit same-y for my tastes. I have no such complaints with this EP, though, and "NYC" is far and away my favourite thing Burial has ever released. As The Quietus put it today in their discussion of the preview of his new track "Ashtray Wasp," "Burial gets better with each release by becoming more and more like Burial, not a statement it's possible to make about many modern artists." Here, that's more than enough--it's quintessential Burial. There's nothing that I can really put my finger on to say what sets it apart from his other songs: it hits that Burial mood with all of his familiar sounds, but rarely have desolate wraiths of forgotten joy been so seductive (especially in the quiet moments with just those voices and the vapours of his synths). The hitches in the beat that crop up every now and again are quite nice, too, providing a kind of propulsion-through-hesitation that amplifies the sense of this sonic world falling apart before your ears (reinforced by his omnipresent crackle and ghostly hums). 

DROPPED PIANOS AND STRETCHED VOICES: TIM HECKER AND JAMES BLAKE

Up at Altered Zones you can stream Tim Hecker's forthcoming Dropped Pianos, his collection of piano sketches recorded during the same sessions that produced this year's Ravedeath, 1972. I strongly recommend checking out the stream: it's just absolutely gorgeous music from someone who, when he decides to make pretty music, is extremely good at it. The music itself is very evocative, and while not settled enough to be ambient music (has anything he's released ever really been ambient--I think his "power ambient" term might be closer to the truth...), it does a fantastic job of building a new environment for you out of its sound.

I was complaining about this on Twitter, but I guess I'm not through with this topic yet: I don't understand the fawning adoration that James Blake receives from so many critics. I think that his music, for all its supposed forward-looking trappings, is oftentimes boring piano music with some gimmicky electronic flourishes. The vocals that have been pulled and stretched are a neat trick the first time, and are interesting the second, but are tired by the third listen, for me at any rate (this is precisely why, no matter how hard I try, I find Burial's "vocal" tracks much less affecting than the tracks on which he buries those disembodied, androgynous moans like wraiths in the depths).

I know that cross-genre comparisons can be tricky, and I know that this isn't some teenage pissing contest (my favourite band could beat up your favourite band or whatever), but I find Hecker's music infinitely more interesting than Blake's releases so far. I'll acknowledge that I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country, but it's still a work that excites on a visceral, emotional level and also inspires me to ask "How'd he do that?!" Even knowing that the bulk of this album came from improvisations on an old organ in a church in Reykjavik does not always reveal how a sound is coming into being. Hecker's pushed the suites he's constructed on his albums since Harmony in Ultraviolet to impressive levels here: "Hatred of Music I" and "Hatred of Music II" really do seem to use their drones to suffocate the melancholy pianos underneath; "In the Air I-III" is twelve of the most engrossing minutes of music to emerge this year; and if neither suite (or the opening trio of "In the Fog I-III") quite matches the heights of "Harmony in Blue I-IV," they also cover more ground and expand Hecker's sound in often thrilling ways.

With Blake, I'm only ever inspired to wonder how he accomplished something--for all the supposed "soul" imbued in his music, I find it largely mechanical and stilted. That trope, too, Blake's soulful vocals, is disturbing: as Mark Pytlik pointed out in his interview with Blake earlier this year, "when people say 'soulful,' it feels like they're saying, 'Oh, it's a white person who can sing like they're black.'" The fact that Blake is an attractive, articulate, young white male seems to be of great comfort to a lot of critics. I don't think that Geoff Barrow's question--"Will this decade be remembered as the Dubstep meets pub singer years?"--is necessarily "a defense of dubstep--the gesture . . . [of] a purist, an elitist, or both;" I think it's a valid aesthetic question. Of course, Blake himself seems like something of a purist and elitist: speaking of contemporary artists gaining mainstream recognition for their take on dubstep he said "Those melodic basslines are insultingly simple and aggressive and annoying. That is now a valid genre, but it certainly isn't dubstep. It's turned into something else. That's cool, I'm happy about it. . . . It's just something different now." Blake is clearly interested in patrolling and defending the borders of dubstep at least as much as Barrow.

If, as Simon Reynolds recently suggested, "generalizing a bit wildly, black music seems to be what pushes the major structural aspects of music forward," does the mating of the largely white coffeehouse singer-songwriter tradition and dubstep really represent a move forward for either genre? Or is this a retreat, dubstep brought within safe critical parameters for which aesthetic criteria are already firmly established? Is it a coincidence that Blake's noteworthy covers--of Feist and Joni Mitchell--are of artists working very much in that singer-songwriter tradition, and that his biggest collaboration to date is with another singer-songwriter, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon? For all the talk of Darkstar's North being a sideways move for a genre that's been known as particularly restless and forward-looking, Blake's entire output feels equally sideways (if not retrograde). Now, I'm not suggesting that Hecker's Dropped Pianos is the future of music (it isn't), nor am I suggesting that his body of work is so singular that it represents some kind of vanguard (it's well situated within any number of genres and artists, like Fennesz for a start, and Eno to a certain extent), but it certainly feels more exciting to me than James Blake, and I'd have to agree with Altered Zones that Hecker is "truly one of the greats."


Incidentally, given Reynolds' recent comment that "the eighties is proving to be to this-time (i.e. 2000s + 2010/2011) what the sixties was to the actual eighties, i.e. near-inexhaustible resource" and the spectre of nineties revivalism looming ever larger, I was surprised to hear during my first listen to Bjork's new album, Biophilia, an explosion of drum programming that wouldn't have sounded out of place on something like Black Secret Technology and several beats that seemed to have been copied/pasted in from Homogenic ("All Neon Like" and "5 Years" seeming to be particular touchstones). I'm not sure how I feel about these things yet, but I will say that Biophilia is the first album she's released since Vespertine (back in 2001!!!) that I've actually enjoyed without having to force myself to like it because it's Bjork.