Wednesday, December 8
Michael Heumann's Best Albums of 2004
Welcome to the revamped Haunted Ink. This used to be Liner Notes, an offshoot of my 25 page; now it's the main portal into the whole site. I'm planning to update this page daily, so I wanted to give it a prominent place on the site as a whole. In fact, I plan to post the reviews I used to post on 25 and Almaty or Bust right here, along with all the other stupid, weird, and wonderful insights into the mysteries of the universe that both of my loyal readers expect of LN. To kick things off, here are my choices for best albums of 2004. Enjoy!
mh
1. William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV: This four-CD work began life in the 1980s as a series of pastoral tape loops. By 2001, however, the tapes had started to disintegrate. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." So Basinski decided to record the disintegration. He released the first disk in late 2001 in honor of the victims of 9/11, and the other three disks were released this year. The loops are very simple: lush melodies backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. As they disintegrate, however, the melodies slowly gurgle and sputter into static and noise. Boring? Depressing? Never. This is music created out of the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. This is pain and love and hate and fear and hope and struggle and life and death all compressed into an entropic work of found music. It is as essential as anything I've ever heard.
2. King Tubby, In Fine Style: The three most important names in Jamaican music of the 1970s are Bob Marley, Lee Perry, and Osbourne Ruddock, otherwise known as King Tubby. Whereas Marley's story and his music have been chronicled ad infinitum for three decades now, and whereas Perry's music and his legacy have, in the past ten years, finally been given their proper respect, Tubby's contribution to the development of reggae and dub (not to mention hip hop, punk, and all shades of electronic music) still remains largely underappreciated. Sure, a number of Tubby reissues have surfaced in the past few years (like the wonderful Dub Gone Crazy and The Sound of Channel One), but those disks tended to focus on one specific aspect of Tubby's career, rather than offering the uninitiated a complete overview of the artist's musical genius. Where's his boxed set? Where's his Songs of Freedom or Arkology? Well, Trojan's two-disk collection In Fine Style might not be as comprehensive as Marley's and Perry's respective collections, but it does compile just about every key track from this master of Jamaican music. As such, it's probably the most essential Tubby disk you're likely to find.
3. Pan Sonic, Kesto: With one fell swoop, Pan Sonic (Finns Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen) has not only doubled its recorded output but has also secured its position among the greats of electronic music. Kesto is a sprawling four-disk, 238-minute journey that manages to take elements from the group's earlier albums (the punchy beats of Vaiko and Kulma, the esoteric minimalism of A and Aaltopiiri, the noise of V and Rude Mechanic, and the Teutonic horror of Vainio's solo work) and fuse them together with new and unexpected sounds (Erkki Kurrenniemi-like space noises, Throbbing Gristle-like industrial waste, and William Basinski-like droning ambience) to create a work that resists all attempts at simplification or categorization. In short, they've created a monster, and it's eating my brain.
4. Jóhann Jóhannsson, Virðulegu Forsetar: This is a rich, beautiful work crafted out of strings and atmospherics by one of the many wonderful artists to emerge from Iceland in recent years. Jóhannsson's aesthetic here is quiet contemplation, as four fifteen-odd minute works slowly spread over the canvas of our ears and lift us into the heavens. It was first performed, logically enough, in the largest church in Reykjavik. I will try to say more about this work in the near future.
5. William Basinski, Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive: This work consists of eight lengthy pieces (the shortest is 9:18 and the longest is 23:15) spread over two disks. Each work is very simple. A piano loop is created and then cloned. The identical loops are then played randomly against one another, creating feedback that slowly transforms the initial loop into brand new "variations" on the originals. Whether these variations are, in any way, "chrome" or "primitive" probably depends upon one's definition of chrome and primitive. Personally, I don't find them all that primitive, except that they are less complete, more muddled than the more civilized piano piece parents. However, there is a shimmering quality to each of the pieces, a metallic undercurrent that bubbles up as the feedback grows increasingly complex, that suggests bright, shiny chrome (at least, in the classic 50s car sense).
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seed, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus: I first heard Nick Cave's music in Wim Wender's film, Wings of Desire, where he sings "From Her to Eternity," an early, brutal song. I remember enjoying that song so much that I bought the album, only to find that the rest did not match up. Now, I've since heard that album again, and I appreciate it a bit more, but it's still not on the top of my list of things to play on an everyday basis. However, Cave's latest, two-disk (and, really, two album) release is equal to just about anything I've heard this year (save Basinski). This is a rich, mature work filled with wonderful songs and deeply moving moments of grandeur.
7. Taylor Deupree & Christopher Willits, Mujo: Taylor Deupree and Christopher Willits released an album earlier in 2004 on the Audiosphere label. But, in reality, Mujo is their first fully realized collaboration. The earlier album was a mixture of solo performances by the two artists and an experimental collaboration shortly after the performance. It was an interesting work, but it did feel like a test run for something bigger and better. Well, Mujo is that bigger and better work. This is an amazing album, one that manages to combine the best elements of each artist's work into a perfectly realized collection of interconnected tracks that bristle with life, energy, and joy.
8. Patton Oswalt, Feelin' Kinda Patton: Oswalt is, first and foremost, smart; this comes out not only in the rich variety of topics he covers in his sets but in the intelligent, surreal wordplay that he often indulges (like when he describes the apocalypse as volcanoes spewing menstrual blood in the shape of Avril Lavigne's face). Yes, he tells the occasional midget joke, but his midget jokes are not only funny but also weird—and, to me, comedy isn't comedy unless it's twisting your brain with weirdness. Or, as he says, "If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins."
9. Taylor Deupree, January: This is a delicate, stretchy work, consisting of four rather long (eight to fifteen minute) tracks and one relatively brief (six minute) one. Each track begins as an incredibly simple repeating loop ("Skimming") or an incredibly elongated note ("Shibuya_9"). Over the course of each track, that simple foundation is subtly modified by stray noises or overnotes (if there are such things), but the fundamental, core sound is always present and (nearly) always dominant. Deupree used this same formula on his 2002 release, .Stil . That earlier work twisted the foundational sounds more severely, using digital decay and fractured bits to color long passages of emotional, haunting sounds. That's basically what January is doing, as well, except that here, the focus is less on glitches and more on stretching simple sounds to their breaking point. To me, this is a bit less compelling, but it's still pretty impressive.
10. Various Artists, Spire: Organ Works Past, Present & Future: 2004 was a good year for the Touch label; I count four different Touch albums on this list. This is one of them, a great experiment in the musical dimensions of the organ. This work contains traditional (well, sort of) organ pieces and about a dozen different ventures into weird organ universes, where the pipes are used as much as rhythm instruments as wind instruments. Not all the tracks are compelling listens, but the work as a whole is fascinating. Wind instruments are the last frontier of digital manipulation. While most of these tracks are not really manipulating the organ sounds digitally, enough are to suggest that there are some really amazing possibilities available for anyone who wants to plug pipes into computers.
11. Oren Ambarchi, Grapes from the Estate: Yet another Touch release, this one a very delicate foray into the world of tones, clicks, and lumpy guitar and bass sounds rendered organic. This is electronic pastoral music, lilting along like a summer afternoon in Italy.
12. Fennesz, Venice: I've never written a Fennesz review. I think it's because someone at Stylus always beats me to it. But I fully enjoy every Fennesz release, and while this work is not nearly as impressive as the earlier Endless Summer (generally considered one of the two or three best experimental electronic works of the last decade), there's enough beauty and shimmering, golden noise here to satisfy any digital geek (like me). As an added bonus, there's even a David Sylvian vocal track here, "Transit."
13. Brian Wilson, Smile: Probably the best thing anyone can say about this album is that, if Wilson had finished this when he should have (in 1966 or 67), it would have been considered a richer, more interesting work than Sgt. Pepper's. As it is, it's a great work, though considering all the time that has passed since it was first imagined, a lot of the stuff that was once considered so wild and experimental actually seems pretty tame in comparison to modern recording tricks. Then again, two things that most modern music seems to lack are great songs and a sense of humor, and this work is filled with both.
14. William Basinski & Richard Chartier, William Basinski & Richard Chartier: This is an impressive work by two of the best electronic artists performing today. It's vastly different from what the two have created separately, yet it meshes their individual styles perfectly. Basinski is known for sweeping, epic ambient works that manage to take simple, repeating sounds and transform them into something grand and wonderful. Chartier, by contrast, takes a lot of little sounds and examines them in all their minute splendor. He likes to play with intensities: shifting from soft to loud, infinitesimal to exponential. On this album, these two styles—grand, sweeping melodies and fluctuating sonic experiments—are combined into something truly unique and truly memorable. This is really great stuff.
15. Frank Bretschneider, Looping I-VI: The album is one of death and rebirth, new musical life growing out of the embers of the old. I glimpse at least four sets of deaths and rebirths spread over 42 minutes. I like to imagine that each of those clicks and melodies revealed a different face or contour to a cavernous, dark world, and that the music, taken as a whole, tells the story similar to the one Galouye tells in his novel, of a character who spends his life searching for an elusive entity known only as "light." In this case, perhaps each of the magical melodies that surface here are glimpses of light, or what he thinks is light, revealed in the only language he knows, sound. But the content of the story is immaterial. The key to the success of the music on Looping I-VI is that it gets me thinking, wondering, imagining. This is inspiring music, and it's one of the best works in Bretschneider's impressive career.
16. Tu m', Pop Involved [Version 3.0]: Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli take the name Tu m' from Marcel Duchamp's last painting . Of course, Duchamp is one of the true visionaries of modern art—and that includes music (a collection of Duchamp musical pieces is available via Sub Rosa). So there are ample reasons for these two Italians to pay homage to Duchamp's legacy, not only by naming themselves after a work of his but by creating music that embodies his desire to push his audiences to reconsider not only what art is but what life is as well. That's what these two Italians are doing on Pop Involved [Version 3.0], released as part of Fällt's "Ferric" series. As far as I can tell, they are using many of the same ideas, sounds, and techniques currently in vogue in the electronic music world (glitches, fusion of acoustic instruments with digital processing). However, they manage (like Duchamp did 80+ years ago) to take these common elements and create something fresh, interesting, surprising, funny, and entertaining out of them.
17. Various Artists, INstruments: List is a relatively new electronic label based in Paris that is probably best known for releasing Sogar's Stengel record (aka, Sogar's non-12k release). The label's releases generally fall in the abstract, minimal side of electronic music, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, based on who is creating the music. Luckily, List has somehow managed to work with a lot of excellent artists, including Komet, Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier, 0/R, *0, and the aforementioned Sogar. So I was excited to get my hands on the label's latest compilation, entitled INstruments. The title does a good job of encapsulating this compilation's theme: the fusion of acoustic instruments and digital processing. I'm not exactly sure why the "IN" in "instruments" has to be capitalized, but no matter. This is an exciting work featuring artists I'm familiar with (Sebastien Rioux, Steinbruchel, Herve Boghossian, and Mitchell Akiyama) and artists I've never heard before (Werner Dafeldecker & Martin Siewert, Mou, Lips!, and Colleen). It's a first-rate compilation, partly because of the high quality of the music and partly because the music is so beautifully integrated together that it sounds like the work of a single person.
18. Richard Chartier, Set or Performance: In a way, the work reminds me of nothing more than that early scene in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, when Kyle MacLaughlin finds the ear in the field and stares at it for the longest time. As he stares, the camera slowly moves in closer and closer to the ear until we see inside, at which point the ear is replaced with close-up images of bugs and maggots crawling around in the wet dirt. In a sense, that's what listening to Set or Performance is like--a microscopic examination of the sonic life that surrounds us every day. It's an amazing work, one of Chartier's best.
19. Björk, Medulla: Really, though, what brings everything on this weird album together is Björk's Icelandic aesthetic. There's something guttural, primal about the human voice, especially when it's doing something other than singing. The grunts, chirps, hums, whistles, and moans here all speak to the primal power of sound that has been a part of human history since the very beginning. Thousands of years ago, human beings lived in a dangerous world of animals and spirits and nature. Everything made a sound, and every sound was the product of either a demon or a god. The human body's ability to create its own sounds, even to mimic the sounds made by these supernatural forces, was perhaps the first step towards civilization: a chance for humans to master and control the world. The realities of Iceland put Icelanders closer to this natural, primal sense of the world: a world of nature and noise and all sorts of scary things. To me, Medulla is an experiment in transforming the primal power of the human voice into a 21st century context. It's an amazing effort, and it's one of the best albums of the year.
20. Shoghaken Ensemble, Traditional Dances of Armenia: Listening to Traditional Dances of Armenia is a little like traveling (via time machine) to an historical moment that never quite existed: a moment when Christian and Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew, nomadic herdsmen and city dwellers, artisans and warriors all lived together, hung out, exchanged recipes, and otherwise partied and danced the night away. The oddness of Armenia--its proximity to both Christian Europe and to Islamic Arabia, not to mention Turkey, Russia, and Jerusalem--makes Armenian culture an incredibly vibrant melting pot of musical tastes from all over the world. On this collection, the Shoghaken Ensemble, the preeminent traditional music ensemble in Armenia, manage to make all of these different musical forms and styles come alive.
mh
1. William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV: This four-CD work began life in the 1980s as a series of pastoral tape loops. By 2001, however, the tapes had started to disintegrate. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." So Basinski decided to record the disintegration. He released the first disk in late 2001 in honor of the victims of 9/11, and the other three disks were released this year. The loops are very simple: lush melodies backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. As they disintegrate, however, the melodies slowly gurgle and sputter into static and noise. Boring? Depressing? Never. This is music created out of the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. This is pain and love and hate and fear and hope and struggle and life and death all compressed into an entropic work of found music. It is as essential as anything I've ever heard.2. King Tubby, In Fine Style: The three most important names in Jamaican music of the 1970s are Bob Marley, Lee Perry, and Osbourne Ruddock, otherwise known as King Tubby. Whereas Marley's story and his music have been chronicled ad infinitum for three decades now, and whereas Perry's music and his legacy have, in the past ten years, finally been given their proper respect, Tubby's contribution to the development of reggae and dub (not to mention hip hop, punk, and all shades of electronic music) still remains largely underappreciated. Sure, a number of Tubby reissues have surfaced in the past few years (like the wonderful Dub Gone Crazy and The Sound of Channel One), but those disks tended to focus on one specific aspect of Tubby's career, rather than offering the uninitiated a complete overview of the artist's musical genius. Where's his boxed set? Where's his Songs of Freedom or Arkology? Well, Trojan's two-disk collection In Fine Style might not be as comprehensive as Marley's and Perry's respective collections, but it does compile just about every key track from this master of Jamaican music. As such, it's probably the most essential Tubby disk you're likely to find.
3. Pan Sonic, Kesto: With one fell swoop, Pan Sonic (Finns Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen) has not only doubled its recorded output but has also secured its position among the greats of electronic music. Kesto is a sprawling four-disk, 238-minute journey that manages to take elements from the group's earlier albums (the punchy beats of Vaiko and Kulma, the esoteric minimalism of A and Aaltopiiri, the noise of V and Rude Mechanic, and the Teutonic horror of Vainio's solo work) and fuse them together with new and unexpected sounds (Erkki Kurrenniemi-like space noises, Throbbing Gristle-like industrial waste, and William Basinski-like droning ambience) to create a work that resists all attempts at simplification or categorization. In short, they've created a monster, and it's eating my brain.
4. Jóhann Jóhannsson, Virðulegu Forsetar: This is a rich, beautiful work crafted out of strings and atmospherics by one of the many wonderful artists to emerge from Iceland in recent years. Jóhannsson's aesthetic here is quiet contemplation, as four fifteen-odd minute works slowly spread over the canvas of our ears and lift us into the heavens. It was first performed, logically enough, in the largest church in Reykjavik. I will try to say more about this work in the near future.
5. William Basinski, Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive: This work consists of eight lengthy pieces (the shortest is 9:18 and the longest is 23:15) spread over two disks. Each work is very simple. A piano loop is created and then cloned. The identical loops are then played randomly against one another, creating feedback that slowly transforms the initial loop into brand new "variations" on the originals. Whether these variations are, in any way, "chrome" or "primitive" probably depends upon one's definition of chrome and primitive. Personally, I don't find them all that primitive, except that they are less complete, more muddled than the more civilized piano piece parents. However, there is a shimmering quality to each of the pieces, a metallic undercurrent that bubbles up as the feedback grows increasingly complex, that suggests bright, shiny chrome (at least, in the classic 50s car sense).
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seed, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus: I first heard Nick Cave's music in Wim Wender's film, Wings of Desire, where he sings "From Her to Eternity," an early, brutal song. I remember enjoying that song so much that I bought the album, only to find that the rest did not match up. Now, I've since heard that album again, and I appreciate it a bit more, but it's still not on the top of my list of things to play on an everyday basis. However, Cave's latest, two-disk (and, really, two album) release is equal to just about anything I've heard this year (save Basinski). This is a rich, mature work filled with wonderful songs and deeply moving moments of grandeur.
7. Taylor Deupree & Christopher Willits, Mujo: Taylor Deupree and Christopher Willits released an album earlier in 2004 on the Audiosphere label. But, in reality, Mujo is their first fully realized collaboration. The earlier album was a mixture of solo performances by the two artists and an experimental collaboration shortly after the performance. It was an interesting work, but it did feel like a test run for something bigger and better. Well, Mujo is that bigger and better work. This is an amazing album, one that manages to combine the best elements of each artist's work into a perfectly realized collection of interconnected tracks that bristle with life, energy, and joy.
8. Patton Oswalt, Feelin' Kinda Patton: Oswalt is, first and foremost, smart; this comes out not only in the rich variety of topics he covers in his sets but in the intelligent, surreal wordplay that he often indulges (like when he describes the apocalypse as volcanoes spewing menstrual blood in the shape of Avril Lavigne's face). Yes, he tells the occasional midget joke, but his midget jokes are not only funny but also weird—and, to me, comedy isn't comedy unless it's twisting your brain with weirdness. Or, as he says, "If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins."
9. Taylor Deupree, January: This is a delicate, stretchy work, consisting of four rather long (eight to fifteen minute) tracks and one relatively brief (six minute) one. Each track begins as an incredibly simple repeating loop ("Skimming") or an incredibly elongated note ("Shibuya_9"). Over the course of each track, that simple foundation is subtly modified by stray noises or overnotes (if there are such things), but the fundamental, core sound is always present and (nearly) always dominant. Deupree used this same formula on his 2002 release, .Stil . That earlier work twisted the foundational sounds more severely, using digital decay and fractured bits to color long passages of emotional, haunting sounds. That's basically what January is doing, as well, except that here, the focus is less on glitches and more on stretching simple sounds to their breaking point. To me, this is a bit less compelling, but it's still pretty impressive.
10. Various Artists, Spire: Organ Works Past, Present & Future: 2004 was a good year for the Touch label; I count four different Touch albums on this list. This is one of them, a great experiment in the musical dimensions of the organ. This work contains traditional (well, sort of) organ pieces and about a dozen different ventures into weird organ universes, where the pipes are used as much as rhythm instruments as wind instruments. Not all the tracks are compelling listens, but the work as a whole is fascinating. Wind instruments are the last frontier of digital manipulation. While most of these tracks are not really manipulating the organ sounds digitally, enough are to suggest that there are some really amazing possibilities available for anyone who wants to plug pipes into computers.
11. Oren Ambarchi, Grapes from the Estate: Yet another Touch release, this one a very delicate foray into the world of tones, clicks, and lumpy guitar and bass sounds rendered organic. This is electronic pastoral music, lilting along like a summer afternoon in Italy.
12. Fennesz, Venice: I've never written a Fennesz review. I think it's because someone at Stylus always beats me to it. But I fully enjoy every Fennesz release, and while this work is not nearly as impressive as the earlier Endless Summer (generally considered one of the two or three best experimental electronic works of the last decade), there's enough beauty and shimmering, golden noise here to satisfy any digital geek (like me). As an added bonus, there's even a David Sylvian vocal track here, "Transit."
13. Brian Wilson, Smile: Probably the best thing anyone can say about this album is that, if Wilson had finished this when he should have (in 1966 or 67), it would have been considered a richer, more interesting work than Sgt. Pepper's. As it is, it's a great work, though considering all the time that has passed since it was first imagined, a lot of the stuff that was once considered so wild and experimental actually seems pretty tame in comparison to modern recording tricks. Then again, two things that most modern music seems to lack are great songs and a sense of humor, and this work is filled with both.
14. William Basinski & Richard Chartier, William Basinski & Richard Chartier: This is an impressive work by two of the best electronic artists performing today. It's vastly different from what the two have created separately, yet it meshes their individual styles perfectly. Basinski is known for sweeping, epic ambient works that manage to take simple, repeating sounds and transform them into something grand and wonderful. Chartier, by contrast, takes a lot of little sounds and examines them in all their minute splendor. He likes to play with intensities: shifting from soft to loud, infinitesimal to exponential. On this album, these two styles—grand, sweeping melodies and fluctuating sonic experiments—are combined into something truly unique and truly memorable. This is really great stuff.
15. Frank Bretschneider, Looping I-VI: The album is one of death and rebirth, new musical life growing out of the embers of the old. I glimpse at least four sets of deaths and rebirths spread over 42 minutes. I like to imagine that each of those clicks and melodies revealed a different face or contour to a cavernous, dark world, and that the music, taken as a whole, tells the story similar to the one Galouye tells in his novel, of a character who spends his life searching for an elusive entity known only as "light." In this case, perhaps each of the magical melodies that surface here are glimpses of light, or what he thinks is light, revealed in the only language he knows, sound. But the content of the story is immaterial. The key to the success of the music on Looping I-VI is that it gets me thinking, wondering, imagining. This is inspiring music, and it's one of the best works in Bretschneider's impressive career.
16. Tu m', Pop Involved [Version 3.0]: Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli take the name Tu m' from Marcel Duchamp's last painting . Of course, Duchamp is one of the true visionaries of modern art—and that includes music (a collection of Duchamp musical pieces is available via Sub Rosa). So there are ample reasons for these two Italians to pay homage to Duchamp's legacy, not only by naming themselves after a work of his but by creating music that embodies his desire to push his audiences to reconsider not only what art is but what life is as well. That's what these two Italians are doing on Pop Involved [Version 3.0], released as part of Fällt's "Ferric" series. As far as I can tell, they are using many of the same ideas, sounds, and techniques currently in vogue in the electronic music world (glitches, fusion of acoustic instruments with digital processing). However, they manage (like Duchamp did 80+ years ago) to take these common elements and create something fresh, interesting, surprising, funny, and entertaining out of them.
17. Various Artists, INstruments: List is a relatively new electronic label based in Paris that is probably best known for releasing Sogar's Stengel record (aka, Sogar's non-12k release). The label's releases generally fall in the abstract, minimal side of electronic music, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, based on who is creating the music. Luckily, List has somehow managed to work with a lot of excellent artists, including Komet, Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier, 0/R, *0, and the aforementioned Sogar. So I was excited to get my hands on the label's latest compilation, entitled INstruments. The title does a good job of encapsulating this compilation's theme: the fusion of acoustic instruments and digital processing. I'm not exactly sure why the "IN" in "instruments" has to be capitalized, but no matter. This is an exciting work featuring artists I'm familiar with (Sebastien Rioux, Steinbruchel, Herve Boghossian, and Mitchell Akiyama) and artists I've never heard before (Werner Dafeldecker & Martin Siewert, Mou, Lips!, and Colleen). It's a first-rate compilation, partly because of the high quality of the music and partly because the music is so beautifully integrated together that it sounds like the work of a single person.
18. Richard Chartier, Set or Performance: In a way, the work reminds me of nothing more than that early scene in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, when Kyle MacLaughlin finds the ear in the field and stares at it for the longest time. As he stares, the camera slowly moves in closer and closer to the ear until we see inside, at which point the ear is replaced with close-up images of bugs and maggots crawling around in the wet dirt. In a sense, that's what listening to Set or Performance is like--a microscopic examination of the sonic life that surrounds us every day. It's an amazing work, one of Chartier's best.
19. Björk, Medulla: Really, though, what brings everything on this weird album together is Björk's Icelandic aesthetic. There's something guttural, primal about the human voice, especially when it's doing something other than singing. The grunts, chirps, hums, whistles, and moans here all speak to the primal power of sound that has been a part of human history since the very beginning. Thousands of years ago, human beings lived in a dangerous world of animals and spirits and nature. Everything made a sound, and every sound was the product of either a demon or a god. The human body's ability to create its own sounds, even to mimic the sounds made by these supernatural forces, was perhaps the first step towards civilization: a chance for humans to master and control the world. The realities of Iceland put Icelanders closer to this natural, primal sense of the world: a world of nature and noise and all sorts of scary things. To me, Medulla is an experiment in transforming the primal power of the human voice into a 21st century context. It's an amazing effort, and it's one of the best albums of the year.
20. Shoghaken Ensemble, Traditional Dances of Armenia: Listening to Traditional Dances of Armenia is a little like traveling (via time machine) to an historical moment that never quite existed: a moment when Christian and Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew, nomadic herdsmen and city dwellers, artisans and warriors all lived together, hung out, exchanged recipes, and otherwise partied and danced the night away. The oddness of Armenia--its proximity to both Christian Europe and to Islamic Arabia, not to mention Turkey, Russia, and Jerusalem--makes Armenian culture an incredibly vibrant melting pot of musical tastes from all over the world. On this collection, the Shoghaken Ensemble, the preeminent traditional music ensemble in Armenia, manage to make all of these different musical forms and styles come alive.
