SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON EVIAN CHRIST, PRE- AND POST-DIGITAL ABSTRACTION, ETC.

A few idle thoughts that spilled over from my review of Evian Christ's "Duga-Three" as I listened to that track again this morning. This is just me thinking out loud, but I'd be interested in seeing if anyone thinks this stuff has traction.

1) Part of what seems quaint/dated about it are its "abstract qualities"--the delayed and overlapping voices sourced from television and radio broadcasts, while a perfectly standard tool in this kind of music, feel like a sound from another era. Radio and television are obviously still a thing in today's world, but it doesn't seem like the kind of polyphonic/chaotic stream of voices and languages pouring into our consciousness primarily comes from television (and not at all from radio). From the graininess of the voices to the very conceit, the piece feels profoundly pre-digital in a way. The echoes of Boards of Canada's aesthetic in the first section are another example--that sound was meant to recall a specific material reality of the pre-digital world, the warping of tape and video by time.

2) The ascent of Glitch in the early parts of last decade (via compilations like the Clicks and Cuts series on Milles Plateaux) seems like a moment of transition into some new conception of abstraction in a digital age, one that has perhaps blossomed fully in the last few years via things like Oneohtrix Point Never's music and the New Aesthetic (and that had already started to come into existence several years before the millennium via time-stretching in jungle and drum'n'bass). 

3) Another sign of this transition might be Brian Eno's albums for Warp, Small Craft on a Milk Sea and Drums Between the Bells, which work in much the same way as his work in a certain kind of pre-digital abstraction (Discreet Music, the albums with Fripp, Bowie, and Cluster, the Ambient Series, Apollo, the Windows 95 theme, etc., etc.), but do so in a showy and frustratingly obvious digital way--each glitch feels designed to call attention to itself as a glitch, as if just to show that Eno has in fact listened to electronic music produced in the past two decades (needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of either of those albums). This also plagued his most recent album with Fripp, though not quite to the same extent (and at times actually wasn't a plague, but made for some quite lovely music).

4) Perhaps another example: the difference between the lines drawn in this list by Mark Richardson and this list by David Bevan about the manipulation of the human voice in music. That Burial and Four Tet are the common denominators seems possibly interesting (a sign of the apparently diminishing-in-value quality of "importance" in their respective musics?).

5) As a related thought on abstract qualities/pre- and (post-)digital abstractions/etc., Ghost Outfit wrote recently, in a piece on Richard Taruskin's The Danger of Music and the necessity of music having an explicit connection to human issues in order to avoid "formalist sterility:"

I still think [Tim] Hecker's music is great but its beauty exists entirely for and of itself. It isn't concerned with the human and, despite all its shimmering construction, suffers from an emotional blankness--a tabula rasa whose sound is gorgeous and unearthly but doesn't relate with the world outside it.

To an extent, I understand where such a reading of Hecker's music is coming from--its emotional content is often ambiguous at best and his catalogue's studied abstraction coupled with this seemingly emotionally distant/reserved nature has led some to call his music academic (read: formalist and sterile)--but I disagree. While I doubt anyone is finding his or her tales of personal tragedy/redemption echoed in Hecker's music the way that he/she might in the music of Xiu Xiu, Momus, or Wild Beasts (to pick the artists Ghost Outfit contrasts with Hecker), I think Hecker's own comments about his music suggest an equally real connection that his music has to the human, to the world outside of itself. His repeated invocations of secular church music is perhaps the big clue to how he conceives of this interaction, but I think his music also connects in its digital/(post-)digital abstract nature. Hecker's music in some ways reflects and in some ways reshapes a digital consciousness--this is attention as snow and static, lost and damaged transmission, corrupted files, bad data (it makes sense he would be obsessed with what he calls "digital garbage"). It's the beauty of those aspects, the way that their drone and thrum form not just a background of our lives, but a significant aesthetic component of them that can be equal parts beautiful and terrifying. 

6) Like the Jameson essay I referenced in my review of Evian Christ points out, though, the present, this (post-)digital realm, is unavailable to us. We cannot experience it directly. What makes "Duga-Three" so affecting, then, is not just the emotional pull of its elegiac tone, but the way that its reminder of another kind of consciousness, another form of abstraction (and I think the formal elements are key here), also allows the present to be set off in relief and experienced. Similarly, in his rendering of those elements that make up the backdrop of the digital world/consciousness into reflections on the very process that turns them into works of often profound power, Hecker's music also makes the present available to us. I understand the moment in which I am situated--and the way sounds function in the spaces of that moment--better because of Hecker's music. I find it "vital, confounding, and powerful" (to use Ghost Outfit's criteria) in equal measure to almost anything I can think of with lyrics.

7) All of the above points in 5) and 6) about why I find Hecker's music and "Duga-Three" so powerful seem related to the shifting sense and experience of time enforced by late capitalism, as outlined by Mark Fisher here.

REVIEW: CFCF - EXERCISES EP

CFCF - Exercises EP
Paper Bag Records, 2012

With the end of the semester comes a return to blogging, and what better way to kick things off than with a review of this gorgeous EP from Montreal artist CFCF. If you like Tim Hecker's Dropped Pianos (which I very much do), or, perhaps more tellingly, James Blake's Klavierwerke EP, then chances are you will find something to enjoy on this release. Mike Silver, the man who records as CFCF, is a talented enough musician to avoid simple repetition (or outright imitation), though. He trades in Hecker's chilly reverb and stark piano and organ sketches for much more fleshed out "exercises" (hence the EP's title) that utilize not only piano, but also a variety of keyboard and synth tones, some soft beats, and one rather arresting vocal turn. It's the latter that makes me think of Blake--along with the accomplished piano playing throughout--but whereas I found Klavierwerke to be hard, dull, and grey, a difficult piece of music to warm to, let alone to find a way into, Exercises is almost comically easy to fall in love with. Indeed, if the year were ending tomorrow and I had to make a year-end top ten, CFCF would sit in the number two slot (right behind another EP you might have heard...). With the possible exception of Four Tet and Burial's collaboration "Nova," Exercises is the prettiest music I've heard all year, a real treat for the ears that is, for all its potential for cold, academic abstraction given its instrumentation and genre, surprisingly warm and human when you get up close. In short, I'm bewitched.

In the press material surrounding the album, Silver offers a slightly different lineage for the EP's sound than the one I've suggested above, citing Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Perhaps more telling, though, than even this sonic heritage, is a description of the album's contextualizing cues--"institutional architecture and 70s Canadiana"--out which Silver constructs an album of "snowy walkways and long corridors, endless escalators ascending to desolate concrete plateaus . . . exploration[s] of lost memories, studies in nostalgia, exercises in spatial remembrance." It doesn't sound a million miles away from a release on Ghost Box or the Caretaker's latest project, and it wouldn't be hard, I'd imagine, to use the EP as a kind of tool for hauntological explorations. More importantly, in my opinion, these descriptions suggests the paradox at work in this music that makes it so bizarrely affecting: these tracks--"exercises" as they are called--are framed by their titles as at once miniatures, things on their way to becoming something larger and grander for which the EP is only practice, and evocations of large, emotionally resonant concepts like "School," "September," or "Loss." The contradictory tug of their relatively compact structures versus their large emotional payoff means that even those tracks that initially seem like interstitial moments searching for an album or pleasant meanderings missing a song bloom and blossom into something else entirely over the course of a listen.

Opener "Exercise #1 (Entry)" recalls to mind the score for Donnie Darko briefly, but the arcing synth lines behind the piano coat the track in a kind of graceful neon chill, arpeggiated lines twinkling away in the background and providing both colour and melody. Like the best minimalism, the piece feels at once static and incredibly mobile, shifting through its insistent reiterations. "Exercise #2 (School)" is one of the few beat driven tracks, and its clattering, panned percussion adds a propulsive thrust to the ringing, echoing piano at the track's foundation and the whistling, noodling synth leading the melody. It's the middle of the EP that's most impressive, though, with Exercises 3, 4, and 5--that's "Building," "Spirit," and "September" for those of you keeping score at home--offering the true highlights. "Building" is the most overtly Glass-ian piece here, riding a series of repeating piano motifs to an ecstatic climax, brash synth lines voicing a nagging, wistful melody, while "Spirit" takes the opposite approach: moving like sunbeams slowly filling a room with light, it is a graceful and meditative peak (and reminds me of Mogwai's "Tracy" and "Moses? I Amn't"). "September," meanwhile, is the lone vocal track, and, coming in the midst of the other instrumental pieces, its reimagining of David Sylvian's 1987 song of the same name feels almost too large next to the rest of the material here, a culmination of the emotional potency surrounding it in a moment of autumnal pop beauty. The instrumental refrain between vocal sections is unspeakably wonderful, shuddering and wheezing like machines drawing breath.

There's little let down in the EP's final three tracks. "December" opens like "Entry," but as its piano lines gain force and begin to expand, the kind of blooming and blossoming I mentioned above starts to occur. With the synths sounding like accordions, Silver picks out a lovely, falling melody before suddenly shifting into a hollowly metallic synth tone that offers its own weird, plastic beauty. The track slowly recedes, never quite seeming to vanish entirely, hovering on the edges of hearing like the afterimages from staring at a light. The buzzing synths in "Loss" offer the kind of retrofuturist air that would feel quite at home in a National Film Board documentary on institutional architecture, but it pales next to the final track, "Change." The only other piece to feature beats, the chopped and distorted opening gives way to a percussion line that sounds like a machine at work, pistons pumping and valves blowing off steam. As a clap begins to assert itself, the track reassembles into a minimal disco number before the synths return to close out the EP on its harshest, most discordant note.

At just over 26 minutes, Exercises might seem slight. It's a quick, enjoyable listen, though, and it doesn't outstay its welcome, which, for an album of instrumental piano and synth sketches, is a real danger. For all its listening in on a laboratory session set up (the EP as a form naturally serving as a kind of ideal testing ground for new styles or sounds), Exercises is a cohesive listen, a statement as much as it is a question. There's little sense of hesitancy or tentativeness on Silver's part, and he has a fine ear as a composer for both lush sounds and interesting melodic developments. "September" hints at just how malleable the kind of music being worked through here is, and if it's any indication of what's coming next from CFCF, then it bodes well for some real fireworks on his next full-length. In many ways, CFCF is here for me what Oneohtrix Point Never seems to be for others, though his nostalgia is never quite as palpable or overt as Daniel Lopatin's.  While the start of May, and here on the East Coast the return of summer-like weather, might seem a strange time of year for this release, Exercises is both light and airy enough to accommodate spring breezes and solid enough to cut through humidity. I know I'll be playing it a lot in the coming months.

REVIEW: TIM HECKER - "SUFFOCATION RAGA FOR JOHN CALE"

Tim Hecker - "Suffocation Raga for John Cale" off Extra Playful: Transitions EP
Double Six, 2012

It's no secret that Tim Hecker is a big favourite of mine. Though he's yet to put out a bad album--seriously, his hit to miss ratio is astonishing--last year did feel like something of a halcyon days for his fans, with both Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos offering some of his most rewarding, and challenging, music yet (to say nothing of this excellent concert set from Moogfest 2011 that NPR put up). This remix for Cale's Record Store Day release (Actress and Leyland Kirby have remixes on it as well) is a bit of a departure from most of the material on Ravedeath (outside of maybe "In the Fog"), though it fits comfortably alongside earlier works like "Atlas One" and "Atlas Two," or the noisier parts of Harmony in Ultraviolet. His usual signifiers--grainy distortion, clouds of static, submerged harmonic progressions--are all present, and in just the right amounts. If you were being uncharitable, you could say it's Hecker-by-the-numbers, but it's such a gorgeous piece of music that I'm inclined to give him a pass for not exactly moving outside his comfort zone here. In something of a strange twist, actually, "Suffocation Raga" sounds closer to Christian Fennesz's work than has been the case in some time, and the overtly pretty second half is not a million miles away from the likes of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis.

Opening with a metallic, buzzing drone--sounding a little like stretched out piano chords--before the layers of static and distortion shift the sound into slightly darker territory, the first half of the song is a feast of textures. Indeed, nothing here is nebulous or gossamer; Hecker gets so much of his effect from the physicality of his music, and this is no exception. There is weight and mass here, and it feels like you can reach out and touch what's coming out of your speakers. A little over halfway through, the track seems poised to drop into "Whitecaps of White Noise"-levels of distortion and static, but Hecker pulls back and allows everything to blossom in near-symphonic fashion. It's a little like hearing a deconstructed horn section, the swells of sound sitting somewhere between triumphant and melancholic. Piano creeps in around the edges at the close of the track, a trick used to great effect on Ravedeath, and the most obvious reference to Hecker's recent work to be found.

In an interview for The Quietus, Hecker describes his method in the studio as:

a mix of dull, bludgeoning, plodding, getting-nowhere feelings of hitting your head against the well, mixed with these amazingly crystallized moments of epiphany and revelation and vision. . . . [I]t's something that really comes with hard work and labour and time and patience, and being open to your music spiraling off on different tangents and going with it, and not being sentimental about music that's not quite there. Just destroying it.

At this point, reference to the sound of this process in Hecker's work is perhaps the most pervasive cliche in writing on his music, so I will gloss over how well this description of his methods matches with the experience of listening to that work (it really does!) and suggest that if there's been a development in Hecker's career, it has been a continued refinement and honing in on those moments of epiphany, revelation, and vision he describes. Aesthetically, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do it Again is not a million miles away from "Suffocation Raga," but the payoff, for lack of a better term, is consistently higher these days. This is not to say that his earlier releases suffer by comparison--they remain compelling listens even in light of his recent triumphs--so much as to point out that the richness of the material, the depth of his compositions, has grown without Hecker having to abandon what's brought him to this point. "Suffocation Raga," then, is more consolidation than evolution, a revisiting of gains made through the application of those very gains.

In that same piece from The Quietus quoted above, the interviewer describes a preview of some of Hecker's most recent recording sessions, noting that it's "more rhythmic than I was anticipating, but blossoms with the unmistakable flourishes of dense and percolating distortion that have become his hallmark." This description might be applied to last year's "The Piano Drop" (or even Harmony in Ultraviolet's "Chimeras"), and I can't help but wonder if an increased engagement with his minimal techno past (under the Jetone moniker) might be in the cards. I don't know, obviously, and if Hecker's career to date offers any hints, it suggests that what comes next will be more slow refinement, rather than scorched-earth reinvention. Regardless of what's to come, Hecker remains one of the greats in contemporary experimental music and any forthcoming projects will, I'm sure, be worthy of exploration and immersion. For right now, "Suffocation Raga for John Cale" is another piece of typically excellent work from a musician who, like Burial or the Caretaker, has excelled by becoming ever more like himself.

REVIEW: RADERE - I'LL MAKE YOU QUIET

Radere - I'll Make You Quiet
Future Sequence, 2012

Back at the start of the year, Big Shot put out an article on "75 Dance/Electronic Music Albums to Look For in 2012." One of the releases highlighted on that list that caught my eye was Radere's I'll Make You Quiet. Described as an album constructed out of "found sounds and processed guitar and electronics" that was "captured on single takes, a rarity in this cut-and-paste digital age," I marked the album down as a definite "must-hear." That description called to mind Tim Hecker, whose work I love, and I wondered if I'll Make You Quiet might be this year's Ravedeath, 1972. In many ways, Hecker is not a bad comparison for the music Carl Ritger makes as Radere. The physicality of his music, the weight and presence it seems to have in the room as it plays, certainly calls to mind some of the best attributes of Hecker's work, but the tension between silence and noise, the co-mingling of beauty and violence within both of those dynamics, also calls to mind the work of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk or Bark Psychosis c.Hex. Another recent touchstone might the Sight Below, whose It All Falls Apart used a similar tonal palette, though to more melodic (and ultimately more rewarding) ends.

While Radere calls to mind all of these artists, I'll Make You Quiet is not quite at their level. Most of the tracks here work not in terms of linear development or narrative, but through stasis and repetition. This can be quite an effective technique, but I'll Make You Quiet often suffers from a fatiguing insistence on its static qualities. Given the power and force of his sounds--even at its sunniest and lightest, nothing here could be called gossamer or be said to shimmer; this is solid music throughout--Ritger is often able to construct his tracks in a topographic fashion, using layers of sounds to construct worlds with a great deal of variance from top to bottom. The cover image, which is absolutely gorgeous and probably my front-runner for album cover of the year right now, describes the movement of sound on the album well: while there are often peaks and valleys, huge banks of cloud (in the form of drone, hiss, or hum) shift throughout, now obscuring those peaks and valleys, now revealing them. When this approach clicks, as it does on the album-opening title track--whose structure of a slow build to a monstrous wash of noise (aided by the grainy, lo-fi texture of the recording) that gives way to a brighter, almost angelic bit of melody reminds me a great deal of "Hex"--and the closer, "Stay Away," which uses dynamic shifts, feedback squall, and the arrhythmic propulsion provided by what sounds alternately like keys jangling or bits of broken metal and glass being dragged across a floor to great effect, Radere's music achieves a beauty and power that can breathtaking.

Those two tracks, at twenty two minutes combined, make up just under half the album's forty six minute running time. Unfortunately, the other twenty four minutes are not similarly thrilling. "Sometimes, I Can't Make Full Sentences" is the best of the rest, calling to mind the more interstitial moments of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (I half-expected a female voice to tell me about Arco AM/PM Mini-Markets), but there is a frustrating lack of development. An entire world is being constructed, one that sounds like what Arthur C. Clarke imagines might be beneath Jupiter's clouds in 2010: Odyssey Two, but nothing happens beyond that construction. That Ritger is able to create such vivid and detailed tracks in one take is impressive, but I can't help feeling that multiple takes might allow him to do more in the way of development. The remaining two tracks, ". . . So I Left" and "Good Evening, Ghosts (Version),"* suffer from the same fate. While ". . . So I Left" introduces a new colour to the album with its mock-organ guitar and chattering denouement (the most alien sounding moment on the album), "Good Evening, Ghosts" is nine minutes of static repetition, a swooning, swooping loop (a very pretty loop, to be fair) repeated while being swathed in noise and sonic debris. The materials are there, but Ritger seems content to put them together without asking them to do anything.

I'll Make You Quiet, then, is ultimately a missed opportunity. Its opening and closing tracks show just how strong and interesting Radere can be, but the middle of the album suffers from being neither ambient enough to serve as aural wallpaper (music this weighty and physical commands attention) nor active enough to repay close listening. At its best, the album suggests that Ritger has a voice distinctive enough to contribute to the kind of power ambient music that Tim Hecker has been the master of for the past ten years, which is high praise. That the longest tracks on I'll Make You Quiet are the strongest bodes well for Ritger's ability to make this kind of music appealing on a large scale, but for now, too much stasis and repetition and not enough development compromise his vision over the album as a whole.


*You have no idea how much I wanted to like a track called "Good Evening, Ghosts."

ON PERFECT SONGS

Mark Richardson's latest Resonant Frequency column is his usual mix of self-reflection and cultural insight. His description of "Flim,"* which I have to agree is a pretty fantastic song, is particularly nice:

[E]ach little pause, hesitation, and stutter is so perfectly placed, and . . . the drums plant ideas in my head about innocence, awkwardness, burgeoning confidence, and growth. . . . I picture myself sitting across from Richard James in his bedroom as he works over this material on his computer. It's an illusion, of course, but I like to imagine that I'm hearing what James was hearing at that moment, that the glass between us is completely transparent.

Part of what makes Richardson's columns such pleasures, though, is his talent as a writer for scenes that are so evocative of his subject matter--the relationship between memory, perception, music, and everyday life (his invisible music project is a really fascinating attempt to put those themes into practice). He has a doozy of a line to finish the second section of his most recent column: "All of these feelings are carried to me through the bass, so strong it's uncanny, like how the smell of a certain shampoo can instantly bring to mind a face you'd completely forgotten." The evanescent face that a smell conjures, the fleeting emotions that that note (right or wrong) calls forth, Richardson's one of the best at writing about those moments.

During his discussion of "Flim," Richardson linked to an earlier Resonant Frequency column in which he talked about "perfect songs." I'd thought about this idea for a long time, even before I read that column, how some songs that aren't my favourite songs are what I would consider to be perfect: nothing can be done to improve on these songs/performances of these songs. As Richardson puts it, "They cannot be improved; each has fulfilled its destiny and become everything it could hope to be." He lists a dozen such songs in his article, and I agree with several of them--"I Want You Back," "Crimson and Clover," "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough"--though I'm not sure if I'd put "Flim" down as my choice of a perfect song from the Aphex Twin. Reading these columns this morning (re)inspired me to surf through some videos on YouTube and poke around my music collection to consider what some of my perfect songs might be.

Aphex Twin - "Avril 14th," from Drukqs (2001)

It's simple and direct (sort of), without any of the flashy drum programming of "Flim," but Richard D. James found one of those magic chord progressions that makes your chest ache and that's more than enough in his hands. The final section is pure joy, the high notes leaping out and shining. The little details are what really make this special, though: the way the melody line in the first section gets doubled an octave higher, the surprisingly tricky syncopations in the middle that manage to avoid disturbing the elegance and grace of piece. I played it at a wedding once during the ceremony (long story) and it went over surprisingly well.

Bark Psychosis - "Eyes & Smiles," from Hex (1994)

The peak of one of the few albums I'm tempted to call perfect. Graham Sutton and co. absolutely nail the feel of three in the morning throughout the album (that one song opens with the line "It's 3 am..." can't be a coincidence), and there are several stretches that I just can't imagine anyone equaling, ever.  In eight and a half minutes, "Eyes & Smiles" piles all of the conflicting emotions of being awake and alone when surrounded by people on top of each other and shepherds them to a point of ecstatic desolation.

Boards of Canada - "Kid for Today," from the In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP (2000)

I remember finding the percussion on this song absolutely mystifying when I first heard it. What was the source of that click? Now that I know it's a slide projector--what could be more in line with their ethic, really?--some of the mystery is gone, but that only allows me to appreciate the combination of joy, innocence, melancholy, and menace all the more. Complex psychological portraits of childhood are tough--how can you avoid idealizing or overdetermining any aspect?--and I think that's why Boards of Canada's music is so enthralling: they get it all in their music, the good and the bad, somehow. 

Four Tet - "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth," from Rounds (2003)

Kieran Hebden has a knack for making beautiful music. He also has a striking ability to match sound with title (cf. "Circling" and "This Unfolds" from There is Love in You and "Ribbons" from the Ringer EP for more examples), as here the music does feel like it's gently rocking you back and forth. What's more, he's wise enough to get out of his own way when he has a good thing going, as he does here, letting the prettiest melody he's ever written spool and unspool itself for five minutes with minimal accompaniment. Some dusty percussion to give the track a little forward momentum and an unobtrusive background wash for added colour are all he needs to make something that could go on for years and ends at just the right time.

Kevin Shields - "Are You Awake?," from the Lost in Translation soundtrack (2003)

As rudimentary as the beat is on this piece, it works quite well as a kind of driving background that the bouncing, echo-drenched melody can play off of. Richardson actually reviewed this soundtrack for Pitchfork and faulted "Are You Awake?" for its brevity: "it's painfully short at a minute and a half. I get the sense that Shields is on the verge of tapping into something deeper here . . . but 'Are You Awake?' doesn't give much to go on." I think it's the perfect length; "Are You Awake?" gains much of its charm from seeming like a sketch that turned out to be the finished product. Shields has produced at least one other masterpiece post-Loveless (his "MBV Arkestra" remix of Primal Scream's "If They Move, Kill 'Em"), but "Are You Awake?" is what gives me hope that he really can top Loveless someday.

Stereolab - "Three Women," from Chemical Chords (2008)

I'm not unconvinced that this song won't make the sun spontaneously appear, and I would put it on this list even if it were just the horn chart. The added bonus of one of Laetitia Sadier's typically bouncing, playful melodies and a rhythm section that drives harder on this than on almost anything else they've recorded makes it almost unbearably great. I have had to forcibly stop myself from dancing down the street if this comes on my iPod while I'm walking somewhere on more than one occasion.

Tim Hecker - "Harmony in Blue III," from Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006)

Really, I could put the whole "Harmony in Blue" suite here, but there's something about those gentle clusters of notes that just cuts right through me (Fripp and Eno's The Equatorial Stars tried to do much the same thing on songs like "Meissa," I think, though they didn't accomplish it anywhere near as well). Like much of Hecker's music, this piece is profoundly ambiguous, it's emotional content straddling so many borders that you can't help but be drawn back in. I think even the least synaesthetic person when it comes to music can hear the blue in this.

So, those are seven of my perfect songs. What are some of yours?

*The disadvantage of YouTube videos (and I guess music videos generally, though that's a conversation for another day...): with the admittedly quite pretty and bucolic scenes that are included there, something of the grace and beauty of "Flim" is cheapened. The images are too direct and obvious, grasping at the feelings that emerge so naturally from the music (just like all the videos of Boards of Canada songs cut to footage from Planet Earth).

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #5 TIM HECKER RAVEDEATH, 1972

Albums of the Year 2011: #5

 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos

Ah, it's nice to kick off the top five with a Canadian (not that I'm biased or anything). Back in October, I said that "I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country." I would like to revise and correct that statement: Ravedeath, 1972 is every bit as interesting as either of those albums. It might even be better than them. Hearing his set at Moogfest 2011 (when "Chimeras" appears about 2/3 of the way through the set it feels as lighters-in-the-air as the appearance of any artist's hit song in concert) definitely helped change my mind*--as did the release of his excellent set of sketches for the album, Dropped Pianos--but what really won me over was just sustained, concentrated listening. More than that of any other artist on this list, I think, Tim Hecker's music demands deliberate and conscious engagement in order to achieve a kind of immersion. The meaning of his work seems to hang forever just beyond the limits of perception, by design: "I've always been interested in that threshold of being between, of hiding, obfuscating. It's so suggestive." This is not to say that his music is cold and cerebral: one of the best things about Hecker's work is how thrillingly physical it is--this is sound that moves you and that gains significant emotional impact from its very physicality. The album's opener, "The Piano Drop," has real weight and depth in its shimmering waves, but it's the rest of the album's foregrounding of the tension between the organic, material process of Hecker's piano and organ playing and the digital process of editing and treating those recordings that presents this physicality par excellence.

At the same time, though, and perhaps even more importantly, Ravedeath, 1972 is an example of how far Hecker has come as a composer. As reliant on multi-part suites as anything since his debut, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again, this album's "In the Fog," "Hatred of Music I"/"Hatred of Music II," and "In the Air" all take advantage of their extended length to work through several movements. In interviews, Hecker has consistently mentioned church music when describing his own work--he's described himself as "a guy who does things on the borderline between church music and new age" and his music "as something like fake church music"--and, in their immensity, these suites represent Hucker's most fully realized version yet of a kind of secular church music, what Hecker calls "intense saturated musical expression." Though he's been criticized in the past for being slightly too academic, his concern with "digital garbage" and "imploding and rebuilding from the fragments of things that have been kind of pummeled" takes on a new, visceral edge here, as the organ and piano are attacked by digital noise and treatments throughout "In the Fog" and "In the Air" (and attacked is the appropriate verb, as one listen to "In the Fog III" will make clear), exposing the violence of his composition process. Indeed, "Hatred of Music I" is probably the harshest thing he's released since "Whitecaps of White Noise I"--the power of the organ, even without his treatments is a thing to behold. Of course, as in the first few seconds of "In the Fog III" and "In the Air I" or the last few minutes of "In the Air III," his approach also makes for moments of breathtaking beauty. The standalone tracks are not to be outdone in that sense, and their patient, mournful melodies are heartbreakingly pretty, pushing the sounds and techniques of his last few albums to new levels. A decade on from his debut under his own name, Ravedeath, 1972 confirms that Tim Hecker's music is sui generis and, just like Burial's, keeps getting better by becoming ever more his own. 

*Go that link and listen to/download that performance. It's an amazing document of Hecker live and better than any of his officially released live stuff.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #6 SURGEON BREAKING THE FRAME

Albums of the Year 2011: #6

Surgeon - Breaking the Frame

Another album, another fantastic album cover (I swear I'm not picking these just because I like looking at their covers). If you'd told me at the start of the year that an album like Breaking the Frame would place this high on my year-end list, I'd have assumed you were joking. What draws me into this album? There's some truly great drum programming (I love that panning, skittering beat on "Remover of Darkness"), but there's also a very impressive sense of movement and development over the course of the tracks ("Presence" feels like Four Tet's "Ribbons" pulled inside out). So much of the album seem tied to some kind of birth of the universe narrative and, to a certain extent, it is quite easy to hear this music as bursts of radiation from stars or the remnants of the big bang. The melody in "Transparent Radiation," for example, seems like it's flickering before my eyes on a spectroscope, a tightly controlled blast of colours from up and down the scale. Indeed, tracks like "Dark Matter" and "Radiance" manage to give form and shape to intangible images in much the same way that the title of Tim Hecker's Harmony in Ultraviolet seems perfectly descriptive of the music found therein. Indeed, the opening of "Radiance"--and the middle section with its long climb through detuned swells of synths--is like a musical illustration of a star blowing out and throwing off its layers.

Unlike Black Sun, though, scarred and pitted with its images of decay and apocalypse, Breaking the Frame is (coldly) elegant, like a thirtieth-century court ball. Given the extremely tight control on display in this music (Surgeon's moniker is apt--everything here is razor sharp and incredibly precise), it's initially quite hard to reconcile the music with the title of the album. Listening to Breaking the Frame, I often get a sense of holographic grids and graphs flying around before my eyes, describing a universe of equations, of pure information (this is the same feeling I get when listening to something like A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology). What could possibly break this frame? The answer that gradually emerges, and what really makes this album something special, is twofold: the human presence that creeps in from time to time and the sheer scope of the cosmic grandeur described above.* The chopped and stuttering melody on "Presence" feels like it has a single balalaika player hidden in it somewhere.  When the steady kick drum of "Those Who Do Not" drops after the chilling tones of "We Are All Already Here" (a track that also brings to mind radiation), it's a reminder that, for all of its abstraction, this is an album made by a DJ, and the dancefloor beckons even in the midst of cosmic meditations. Similarly, the waves of crowd chatter that punctuate the start of "Not-Two" are a brilliant disruption in what had threatened to be a cold, sterile universe, and, if it's not miles away from the opening "Dark Matter," it's a fittingly celestial send off. Picture it as humanity's contribution to the background noise of the universe; it's lovely that way. 

*The same applies to Black Secret Technology, actually, although on that album it's the presence of those diva vocals and, uh, Finley Quaye. 

MORE STRUGGLING IN THE GENERAL DIRECTION OF YEAR-END THOUGHTS

Eventually, I will have time to write here on a regular basis again. I keep telling myself that in the hopes that it will magically be true. So far, it has not worked. Ah well, one final push through to the end of the semester and it may very well be true.

It's mostly been a week of irritations, highlighted by a spectacularly pointless meeting on Friday in which I had to endure someone claiming a) that an organization with less than 25% of its members participating (and probably a smaller percentage of its members voicing their opinions and voting) is an example of a democratic organization and b) that charging dues is, in and of itself, a threat to a democratic organization. Sadly, those were not the most ludicrous statements made in that meeting. It would be comical, but these are supposed to be intelligent people, so it's just sad instead. Had I any political ambitions (I don't), they would have died a slow and painful death in that conference room on Friday afternoon. More uplifting was receiving word that a panel I'd submitted with some colleagues to the Louisville Conference has been accepted. I got that email at the start of the week. Would that I could have switched Friday with Monday this week.

I'm starting to whittle down my list of albums of 2011. Initially I'd thought that this year would have less of an obvious pick at the top of the heap compared to last year. Nothing seemed quite as earthshaking as Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma. However, it turns out that there have actually been several such albums this year, they've just been more subtle about it. In fact, the problem now is distinguishing between a good album and a very good album. 2011 has been a surprisingly top heavy year: the albums that are good are very, very good, but there are a lot that seem pleasant and enjoyable now but that I can't see myself listening to next year (some of them haven't even managed to make it to the end of the 2011 without sounding a little tired to my ears). A few might yet have a resurgence, but, by and large, the best before date on some of what I thought were my favourite albums of the year turned out to be much sooner than anticipated. 

The other surprising thing for me has been the dominance of electronic albums in my preliminary lists. I'm by no means a rockist (or I at least stopped being one a few years ago), and I can say that there's been a general trend towards more electronic music in my listening over the past five or six years. I can easily see this year's list not containing a single "rock" album per se, though, which would be a first. I can't say that I'm any kind of connoisseur or that I have stellar taste--I've poked around a little bit on YouTube to listen to the "brostep" that Reynolds talks about here, here, and here: it sounds largely anonymous to me, like everything I tuned out every time I tried to get into electronic music earlier in life; certainly I don't quite understand the cause for celebration of one (often irritating) feature of the music, though this post is an enlightening read--but I'm definitely on board with the things I like.

Speaking of things I like, this is an old favourite (and I'm surprised I got into this as early as I did--I think that I mostly assumed it was of a piece with "Djed" and accepted it on those terms) that I've been listening to on repeat lately (in between a lot of Tim Hecker--I've got a post on him that I'm trying to finish up) as I read and write. Talk about holographic music! It sounds like a malfunctioning computer's idea of music for a tropical vacation.

Oval - "Do While" (1/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

 Oval - "Do While" (2/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

Oval - "Do While" (3/3) - off 94 Diskont (1995)

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.