Friday, December 31
Shuttle358, Chessa
Buy this Record
12k Records
More on this release
I like press releases. They're just so optimistic, so filled with the hope and promise of an expectant record company certain they are releasing a musical gem for all to hear. If we take press releases at their word, each one of the thousands of releases every year is destined to become a classic work by one of the truly great artists working today, certain to engage your senses and change your outlook on life. You have to admit: there's something engaging about such manipulative optimism. Of course, all this falls away once you actually listen to most albums and realize that only a handful can even come close to living up to those marketing expectations.
The 12k press release for Shuttle358's Chessa includes its share of hyperboles and horn-tooting, but within those accolades lurks an unusually lucid and honest voice. This voice speaks loudest when describing this work directly: "Chessa is the third release from [Dan] Abrams' Shuttle358 moniker on 12k and he continues to do what he does best: attempt to move microsound away from the world of theory and towards absolute real life."
Two phrases stand out for me here. The first is "do what he does best." While it trumps up Abrams' talent, it also admits that Chessa isn't groundbreaking; that is, you won't find anything here that you haven't heard before. The second phrase that stands out to me is the reference to moving "towards absolute real life." This is a bit abstract, and it makes more sense in the context of the full release, but it can be neatly summed up by saying that Abrams electronic experiments are grounded in human emotions. Again, however, the subtext here is that his previous works were also grounded in conveying particular emotional states. In short, the press release is telling us that Chessa is basically the same as the first two Shuttle358 albums released on 12k (OptimalLP and Frame), only better.
And you know what? That's absolutely right. I've long admired Abrams' ability to transform the various clicks and snips that comprise the "microsound" palate of sounds into sweeping, delicate audio portraits. His earlier works were, indeed, very emotional efforts in the sense that the sputtering, elliptical drones and gurgling waves of, say, "Lyndon Tree" work less as ideas and more as living, breathing entities capable of being interpreted in different ways depending upon how and why one listens.
Chessa continues these emotion-laden atmospherics. The eleven songs here are replete with the same spinning sine waves, sputtering bleeps and clicks, and (especially) lilting synthesizer melodies that effectively comprise the "Shuttle358" sound. However, each of these elements have been refined, fleshed-out, and improved upon here, so that the transitions from the delicate melodies to the sputtering noise and sweet guitar fragments on the title track seem even more effortless here than on (say) Frame's "Sequence." There's a maturity here that is lacking on Abrams' earlier efforts, as though he's taken all that he finds most favorable about his own sounds and cut away all the rest. What's left is the same emotional heart that ran through his earlier works, only richer, sharper, and more distinct.
Take the fourth track, "Duh." It begins with echoing thumps and some aberrant sprinkler sounds bouncing around. At first, the thumps are rhythmic while the sprinkler sounds are all over the place; at some point, however, these two sounds change places, so the sprinklers are rhythmic and the thumps are all over the place. This repeats several times, as other sounds (long synth lines and other stuttering fragments) float above and around the core dance. And that's what it is: a dance, each sound taking turns leading. It's incredibly simple in structure and execution, but understanding how the song is put together is far less interesting than experiencing and feeling this dance. It brings to my mind images of sleepy summer afternoons, naps under a cool tree, and distant children playing with water (a sprinkler?). It's a song that suggests playfulness, joy, optimism, and even a little hope. When was the last time you heard those words associated with 12k Records?
"Duh" is just one example of the many ways that Chessa takes Abrams' core musical ideas and refines them and improves upon them to create works that are beautiful, fascinating, and greater than the micro-sum of their parts. This is the work of an artist entirely comfortable in his medium, eager to apply the lessons of past efforts but aware enough of his own strengths and weaknesses not to reach too far or aim too high.
12k Records
I like press releases. They're just so optimistic, so filled with the hope and promise of an expectant record company certain they are releasing a musical gem for all to hear. If we take press releases at their word, each one of the thousands of releases every year is destined to become a classic work by one of the truly great artists working today, certain to engage your senses and change your outlook on life. You have to admit: there's something engaging about such manipulative optimism. Of course, all this falls away once you actually listen to most albums and realize that only a handful can even come close to living up to those marketing expectations. The 12k press release for Shuttle358's Chessa includes its share of hyperboles and horn-tooting, but within those accolades lurks an unusually lucid and honest voice. This voice speaks loudest when describing this work directly: "Chessa is the third release from [Dan] Abrams' Shuttle358 moniker on 12k and he continues to do what he does best: attempt to move microsound away from the world of theory and towards absolute real life."
Two phrases stand out for me here. The first is "do what he does best." While it trumps up Abrams' talent, it also admits that Chessa isn't groundbreaking; that is, you won't find anything here that you haven't heard before. The second phrase that stands out to me is the reference to moving "towards absolute real life." This is a bit abstract, and it makes more sense in the context of the full release, but it can be neatly summed up by saying that Abrams electronic experiments are grounded in human emotions. Again, however, the subtext here is that his previous works were also grounded in conveying particular emotional states. In short, the press release is telling us that Chessa is basically the same as the first two Shuttle358 albums released on 12k (OptimalLP and Frame), only better.
And you know what? That's absolutely right. I've long admired Abrams' ability to transform the various clicks and snips that comprise the "microsound" palate of sounds into sweeping, delicate audio portraits. His earlier works were, indeed, very emotional efforts in the sense that the sputtering, elliptical drones and gurgling waves of, say, "Lyndon Tree" work less as ideas and more as living, breathing entities capable of being interpreted in different ways depending upon how and why one listens.
Chessa continues these emotion-laden atmospherics. The eleven songs here are replete with the same spinning sine waves, sputtering bleeps and clicks, and (especially) lilting synthesizer melodies that effectively comprise the "Shuttle358" sound. However, each of these elements have been refined, fleshed-out, and improved upon here, so that the transitions from the delicate melodies to the sputtering noise and sweet guitar fragments on the title track seem even more effortless here than on (say) Frame's "Sequence." There's a maturity here that is lacking on Abrams' earlier efforts, as though he's taken all that he finds most favorable about his own sounds and cut away all the rest. What's left is the same emotional heart that ran through his earlier works, only richer, sharper, and more distinct.
Take the fourth track, "Duh." It begins with echoing thumps and some aberrant sprinkler sounds bouncing around. At first, the thumps are rhythmic while the sprinkler sounds are all over the place; at some point, however, these two sounds change places, so the sprinklers are rhythmic and the thumps are all over the place. This repeats several times, as other sounds (long synth lines and other stuttering fragments) float above and around the core dance. And that's what it is: a dance, each sound taking turns leading. It's incredibly simple in structure and execution, but understanding how the song is put together is far less interesting than experiencing and feeling this dance. It brings to my mind images of sleepy summer afternoons, naps under a cool tree, and distant children playing with water (a sprinkler?). It's a song that suggests playfulness, joy, optimism, and even a little hope. When was the last time you heard those words associated with 12k Records?
"Duh" is just one example of the many ways that Chessa takes Abrams' core musical ideas and refines them and improves upon them to create works that are beautiful, fascinating, and greater than the micro-sum of their parts. This is the work of an artist entirely comfortable in his medium, eager to apply the lessons of past efforts but aware enough of his own strengths and weaknesses not to reach too far or aim too high.
Monday, December 27
Coming Soon...
Friday, December 24
A Different Top 20
Each year, Forced Exposure compiles Top Ten lists from all their employees and posts them on their site. These top tens aren't necessarily albums or even musically-related, and they certainly didn't all come out this last year. They are, instead, ten things that each employee enjoyed over the course of the year. I think that's a more interesting way to do a list, so I'm copying the idea and expanding it to twenty things that I enjoyed this year. The lists contains music, films, DVD collections, books and other weird objects that entertained me or inspired me over the course of 2004. And so here it is, my Top Twenty of 2004, in alphabetical order (for alphabetical reasons). Happy Festivus!
Alchemy & Mysticism—The Hermetic Museum (I purchased my copy at the British Library)
William Basinski--Everything (including Silent Night, which I just got and haven't reviewed yet)
The Battle for Algiers (Criterion release)--DVD release of the year
"My Father, My Heart" from Bosavi, Rainforest Music From Papua New Guinea
Dead Like Me
MC Chris' "Fett's Vett"
Taylor Deupree & Christopher Willits's "Seasons Centers Studies"
Egschilgen's "Eruu Cagaan Bolimor"
Father Ted—The Complete Scripts (found a copy in Dublin)
Daniel F. Galouye's Dark Universe
Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Virðulegu Forsetar"
Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Bob Odenkirk's "The Happiest Place on Earth" from Beth Lapides' Un-Cabaret
Patton Oswalt's "The Apocalypse" and his bit on Robert Evans from Feelin' Kinda Patton
Pan Sonic's "Säteily / Radiation" (disk 4 of Kesto)
My brand new Powerbook G4
The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (Brian Browne Walker's translation—the best I've encountered)
"The End of an Act" from the Team America Soundtrack
My Tivo
Upright Citizens Brigade—Complete First Season DVD
Wednesday, December 22
Michael Heumann's Song of the Month
I'm going to start a new feature here at Haunted Ink. As some of you might know, I create music. It's mostly a hobby, but I'm quite proud of some of the results, and I'd like to share them with others. Hence, I'm going to post a new song here every month. It'll be available to download free of charge during that month; then I'll remove the song and replace it with a new one. I'd love any feedback you might have.
As a sneak preview, I offer a song that has been up on my site for quite a while (and will remain on the site for the foreseeable future). It's called "Mothuk." I created it using my duduk, Ableton Live, and some funky equalizer settings. I think it's one of my better songs. I hope you enjoy it.
Coming in January: "Lighthouse Road" (my 17 minute attempt to sound like William Basinski)
As a sneak preview, I offer a song that has been up on my site for quite a while (and will remain on the site for the foreseeable future). It's called "Mothuk." I created it using my duduk, Ableton Live, and some funky equalizer settings. I think it's one of my better songs. I hope you enjoy it.
Coming in January: "Lighthouse Road" (my 17 minute attempt to sound like William Basinski)
Disintegration Loops at #15
William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops was #15 on Stylusmagazine.com's Top 40 Albums of 2004--thanks, almost entirely, to the fact that I voted it #1 on my own list (which was included in the web site's calculations). For those nit-pickers out there, yes, the album wasn't released in 2004--in fact, disk one was actually released in 2001. But the other three disks were released in December, 2003, and since the Stylus list had to be turned in on December 5 of this year, all albums released last December were eligible for the 2004 list. Besides, it was also listed on Pitchfork's top 50. My question is: why hasn't everyone in the world gone out and gotten this record? What's taking you people so long? Move!
Monday, December 20
Three Wise Songs
Happy Holidays, everyone! As a special treat for you all, here are three songs that I've written about in the past, each one representing one of my three musical obsessions: experimental electronic music, reggae/dub music, and traditional Central Asian music.
[UPDATE: You're too late. I've removed these from my server, so you'll have to get the disks yourself--NOW!]
William Basinski, "D|P 2.1" [The Disintegration Loops]
Here's the shortest track (a mere 10 minutes) from Basinski's epic, four-disk masterwork. Like all the other tracks, this one is a combination ambient musical loop and field recording. Basinski played this track as a loop and then recorded the sounds created as the original tape disintegrated into nothing. The loop used for "2.1" is strange: tentative, incomplete, and frightening. It's similar to the music played in horror films when the heroine is walking through a dark, empty house, fully expecting the monster or killer to jump out of nowhere and kill her. Since it's a loop, however, the monster never actually shows up; it's all build up, again and again, until, as the song goes on, the nerve-wracking loop begins to disintegrate (like the sanity of a horror victim, really). It's an amazing song from the most amazing album of the 21st century.
[visit Basinski's website here; buy The Disintegration Loops here]
King Tubby,"Dubbin' of the Ten Thousand" [The Sound of Channel One]
In my "Perfect Moment in Pop" article on this song, I noted, "I've been a fan of reggae for a long time, but the first time I heard this song was the first and only time I've ever sensed what reggae might sound like in Jamaica, in a culture submerged in music and poverty, where music and expression are the only things that keep some people alive. There's a deepness in this song that I've only glimpsed in other works. It's as if this song was not a few decades old but a few hundred, a few thousand years old, performed by the earliest musicians, sitting around a fire at night, wondering if the sky would ever return." Here's your chance to listen for yourself. Let me know what you think!
[read about Tubby here; buy The Sound of Channel One here]
Gevorg Dabaghyan, "Anush Garun" [Miniatures: Masterworks for Armenian Duduk]
Finally, here's one of the signature songs in Armenian musical culture, performed by one of the founding members of the Shoghaken Ensemble (Armenia's foremost folk group) and a true masters of the duduk. The duduk is a small, flute-like instrument made out of apricot wood and played in many parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. However, Armenians claim it as their own, and the instrument dominates most Armenian music. There's something about the warbly, melancholy tones of the duduk that speaks to the pain and suffering of the Armenian people. Many claim that the instrument's sound most closely resembles the sound of a human voice in pain. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I can tell you that "Anush Garun," which means "Sweet Spring," is an unbelievably elegiac song. I don't know the context for the song, but I'm guessing it is about loss and memory. Perhaps the "sweet spring" in the title is a hint of a place that the composer remembers fondly from his childhood but is now lost, thanks to politics, age, or culture. I've heard a lot of music from Central Asia and the Caucuses, and this is one of the finest works I've encountered.
[visit Dabaghyan's web site here; buy Miniatures here]
[UPDATE: You're too late. I've removed these from my server, so you'll have to get the disks yourself--NOW!]
William Basinski, "D|P 2.1" [The Disintegration Loops]
Here's the shortest track (a mere 10 minutes) from Basinski's epic, four-disk masterwork. Like all the other tracks, this one is a combination ambient musical loop and field recording. Basinski played this track as a loop and then recorded the sounds created as the original tape disintegrated into nothing. The loop used for "2.1" is strange: tentative, incomplete, and frightening. It's similar to the music played in horror films when the heroine is walking through a dark, empty house, fully expecting the monster or killer to jump out of nowhere and kill her. Since it's a loop, however, the monster never actually shows up; it's all build up, again and again, until, as the song goes on, the nerve-wracking loop begins to disintegrate (like the sanity of a horror victim, really). It's an amazing song from the most amazing album of the 21st century.
[visit Basinski's website here; buy The Disintegration Loops here]
King Tubby,"Dubbin' of the Ten Thousand" [The Sound of Channel One]
In my "Perfect Moment in Pop" article on this song, I noted, "I've been a fan of reggae for a long time, but the first time I heard this song was the first and only time I've ever sensed what reggae might sound like in Jamaica, in a culture submerged in music and poverty, where music and expression are the only things that keep some people alive. There's a deepness in this song that I've only glimpsed in other works. It's as if this song was not a few decades old but a few hundred, a few thousand years old, performed by the earliest musicians, sitting around a fire at night, wondering if the sky would ever return." Here's your chance to listen for yourself. Let me know what you think!
[read about Tubby here; buy The Sound of Channel One here]
Gevorg Dabaghyan, "Anush Garun" [Miniatures: Masterworks for Armenian Duduk]
Finally, here's one of the signature songs in Armenian musical culture, performed by one of the founding members of the Shoghaken Ensemble (Armenia's foremost folk group) and a true masters of the duduk. The duduk is a small, flute-like instrument made out of apricot wood and played in many parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. However, Armenians claim it as their own, and the instrument dominates most Armenian music. There's something about the warbly, melancholy tones of the duduk that speaks to the pain and suffering of the Armenian people. Many claim that the instrument's sound most closely resembles the sound of a human voice in pain. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I can tell you that "Anush Garun," which means "Sweet Spring," is an unbelievably elegiac song. I don't know the context for the song, but I'm guessing it is about loss and memory. Perhaps the "sweet spring" in the title is a hint of a place that the composer remembers fondly from his childhood but is now lost, thanks to politics, age, or culture. I've heard a lot of music from Central Asia and the Caucuses, and this is one of the finest works I've encountered.
[visit Dabaghyan's web site here; buy Miniatures here]
Tuesday, December 14
New 12k/Line
12k and Line release music like clockwork--every few months, there will be new releases, and almost every release is a must-own. Well, I opened my mailbox today and found my latest 12k/Line fix waiting for me (I paid for them, by the way). The 12k release is Shuttle358's latest, Chessa. This is Shuttle358's (aka Dan Abrams') third release on Taylor Deupree's label. The first two releases, Frame and Optimal.LP, are considered two of the high points for this most respected of labels. I've only listened to the disk once--and intermittently at that (I was watching the Liverpool-Portsmouth match--great game, Pompey eeking out a tie with seconds to go). Hence, I don't know whether this latest release deserves to be lumped in with those earlier works. I can tell you that the work is supposed to be the companion to a book, also called Chessa. There are photos from the book in the digipack housing the disk. I'm going to take a stab and say the book is primarily photography, not text, but I could be way off on that. A lot of electronic musicians gain inspiration from the visual arts--in fact, many (like Abrams and Deupree) are actually graphic artists. I don't know whether the music on this disk is connected to the pictures, or if it was visually inspired, but I can tell you that the 11 tracks share many things in common with earlier Shuttle358 releases: subtle, melodic progression and abstract, propulsive rhythms, for example. But there are also some new touches here--at least, I think they are new. I need to listen more carefully. I'll try to write up a review later this week.
The Line release is Mark Fell's Ten Types of Elsewhere. I'm not very familiar with Fell's work, save for his tracks on the two 12k/Line compilations, Between Two Points and Two Point Two. I've only listened to the first track or so, but the album is a first for Line or 12k in that it contains a full-fledged essay in the liner notes. The essay is on topographical mathematics (what were you expecting, Dave Barry?), which is (I'm guessing) a key theme in Fell's music. In general, I like interesting liner notes, but there's usually a disconnect between the ideas purported in the notes and the music I hear on the disk. Here's hoping the notes and the music are in harmony here (I'll say more when I've heard more).
If you're interested in buying either of these releases, just zip over to the 12k/Line Shop. They're well worth the $13 or $14 apiece you'll pay for them, and Deupree uses Paypal, making it very easy to purchase the works.
The Line release is Mark Fell's Ten Types of Elsewhere. I'm not very familiar with Fell's work, save for his tracks on the two 12k/Line compilations, Between Two Points and Two Point Two. I've only listened to the first track or so, but the album is a first for Line or 12k in that it contains a full-fledged essay in the liner notes. The essay is on topographical mathematics (what were you expecting, Dave Barry?), which is (I'm guessing) a key theme in Fell's music. In general, I like interesting liner notes, but there's usually a disconnect between the ideas purported in the notes and the music I hear on the disk. Here's hoping the notes and the music are in harmony here (I'll say more when I've heard more).
If you're interested in buying either of these releases, just zip over to the 12k/Line Shop. They're well worth the $13 or $14 apiece you'll pay for them, and Deupree uses Paypal, making it very easy to purchase the works.
Saturday, December 11
Organum, Vacant Lights/Rara Avis
Buy This Work
Die Stadt Music Web Site
More on David Jackman / Organum
David Jackman has been creating music since the 1960s, either as a member of the experimental group The Scratch Orchestra, as a solo performer under his own name, or as part of his own group, Organum. His music is decidedly eccentric and remarkably varied, from ambient drones to industrial noise to metallic percussion. His work as Organum, however, adds something rather unique: spatial context. Many of the tracks he recorded as Organum were recorded in real time in particular locations, in order to make use of the acoustic space of each location. One of these location recordings was Vacant Light. It was first released in a very limited edition back in the 1980s, but Die Stadt have been gracious enough to re-release this work, giving more people a chance to hear this wonderful music.
Vacant Light was created by Jackman and Dinah Jane Rowe in the backyard of a recording studio in Shepherd's Bush, London, in 1986. Four recordings were made, but only two remain, and it is these two that appear on disk one of this set. Both recordings were created live using a variety of metallic objects, lilting pipe music, traffic and other industrial sounds, and natural sounds (wind, especially). On the first track (17 minutes long), these sounds combine to create something weird and creepy, like the prototype soundscape for a more urban version of Myst, in that it offers up something that manages to combine everyday sounds with eerie atmospherics, thus rendering the ordinary world slightly creepier. The second track (15 minutes long) retains that creepy edge while adding the faint whiff of human voices echoing around in the freaky urban Myst world. These are two really fascinating compositions that seem to effortlessly create vivid and even frightening emotional landscapes out of everyday sounds.
For this re-release, Die Stadt have included a second work by Organum, Rara Avis, which is a collection of five pieces, three of which having been released as singles and one of which (the title track) having been reworked for this collection. It sounds weird to say it, but I consider these works to be more in line with what I consider "experimental music" to be. That is, they use lots of droning screeches, long, elliptical noises, and other types of things I've heard from a lot of different artists (including the Scratch Orchestra, Tony Conrad, John Cale, and many more). They're interesting, but I'm much less interested in these types of experiments than I am with experiments like Vacant Light, which seem imbued with a certain emotional power that long screeches just can't reach.
Really, though, the Rara Avis disk is a bonus. The real prize here—and the reason to purchase this work—is Vacant Light, a piece that was created quickly but which possesses a power and a depth that few musical works can match. Moreover, as the Myst analogy suggests, this is music that was well ahead of its time in 1986 and deserves closer examination today.
Die Stadt Music Web Site
More on David Jackman / Organum
David Jackman has been creating music since the 1960s, either as a member of the experimental group The Scratch Orchestra, as a solo performer under his own name, or as part of his own group, Organum. His music is decidedly eccentric and remarkably varied, from ambient drones to industrial noise to metallic percussion. His work as Organum, however, adds something rather unique: spatial context. Many of the tracks he recorded as Organum were recorded in real time in particular locations, in order to make use of the acoustic space of each location. One of these location recordings was Vacant Light. It was first released in a very limited edition back in the 1980s, but Die Stadt have been gracious enough to re-release this work, giving more people a chance to hear this wonderful music. Vacant Light was created by Jackman and Dinah Jane Rowe in the backyard of a recording studio in Shepherd's Bush, London, in 1986. Four recordings were made, but only two remain, and it is these two that appear on disk one of this set. Both recordings were created live using a variety of metallic objects, lilting pipe music, traffic and other industrial sounds, and natural sounds (wind, especially). On the first track (17 minutes long), these sounds combine to create something weird and creepy, like the prototype soundscape for a more urban version of Myst, in that it offers up something that manages to combine everyday sounds with eerie atmospherics, thus rendering the ordinary world slightly creepier. The second track (15 minutes long) retains that creepy edge while adding the faint whiff of human voices echoing around in the freaky urban Myst world. These are two really fascinating compositions that seem to effortlessly create vivid and even frightening emotional landscapes out of everyday sounds.
For this re-release, Die Stadt have included a second work by Organum, Rara Avis, which is a collection of five pieces, three of which having been released as singles and one of which (the title track) having been reworked for this collection. It sounds weird to say it, but I consider these works to be more in line with what I consider "experimental music" to be. That is, they use lots of droning screeches, long, elliptical noises, and other types of things I've heard from a lot of different artists (including the Scratch Orchestra, Tony Conrad, John Cale, and many more). They're interesting, but I'm much less interested in these types of experiments than I am with experiments like Vacant Light, which seem imbued with a certain emotional power that long screeches just can't reach.
Really, though, the Rara Avis disk is a bonus. The real prize here—and the reason to purchase this work—is Vacant Light, a piece that was created quickly but which possesses a power and a depth that few musical works can match. Moreover, as the Myst analogy suggests, this is music that was well ahead of its time in 1986 and deserves closer examination today.
Thursday, December 9
Leadbelly
Amazon sent me my copy of The Definitive Leadbelly today. It's a three disk collection of the great folk/blues artists' greatest work. The best part of the release is the high sound quality. Most of the crackles and other irritations that are a staple of country blues recordings have been excised, and all of the fidelity remains intact. It's odd that this release didn't get much fanfare, especially considering the resurgent popularity of the blues, thanks to a bunch of rereleases, compilations, and projects like Martin Scorsese's Blues miniseries (or whatever you call the documentary equivalent). This Leadbelly work is pretty excellent; check it out if you're so inclined.
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.
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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.
