• Rick Lucy – Top of the Glass
• Yppah – Gumball Machine Weekend
• Thecocknbullkid – I’m Not Sorry
• Alan Wilkis – N.I.C.E.
• Beni – Fringe Element (Short Ends Edit)
• Felix Da Housecat – LA Ravers
• Body Language – Sandwiches (Body Language Edit)
• Moderat – Out of Sight

The Lee Fields album, My World, reminded me of Darondo’s Let My People Go, smoke laden and gritty in its emotionally raw masculinity. Love Comes And Goes is by far my favorite cut with shivering strings and shimmering guitar chords backed by brassy horn stabs, a jumpy bass line and a rock solid back beat. The chorus pulls me in and often I’m belting it out unabashedly regardless the company or place.

Let Me Be Your Man by Tyrone Ashley’s Funky Music Machine blew me flat with the opening chords of Come On Home. the album is deep, raw, sweet with a splash of skank to keep things in line. The cover of I Can’t Help Myself has this fantastic unpolished feel to the production that, while probably indicates the age and stress on the master copy, imparts a real sense of immediacy to the recording. The album has a taunt story behind it of loss, fire, and eventual rescue that makes it all more precious of a listen.

I have been riding Sounding Out The City for the better part of this year, savoring every bass jump, horn stab, and snap of the snare. Tracks like Behind The Blue Curtains become a private soundtrack for the minutia of my life, adding a little swing and soul to the most mundane of tasks. Slide Show sees the group taking the simplest of interplays between a jumpy bassline and an arpeggiated chord on the guitar and twists it into irresistible head-nodding hook. I just picked up their new release today and am really looking forward to spinning it up, especially after the countless listenings this album has offered.

The spin down of horns on Menahan Street Band’s Home Again! is sweetly offset by the acoustic guitar and offers a fantastic take on a upbeat Soul instrumental. Brass features prominently on Make The Road By Walking and the arrangements weave nasally saxophones and brittle trumpets into a surprisingly thick stew of sound. The group also very refreshingly draws from a variety of inspirations, in particularly a kinetic kind of Reggae anchors Montego Sunset but it still maintains a gritty industrial feel too it.

The show was muscular, sweaty, passionate, and ethereal. It was also my first concert that I brought my camera to and I now cannot imaging attending another without it. I shot over 500 pictures during the course of a hour and a half set, it worked out to around a snap every 10 seconds which means I watched the show through the lens.

Management and I had a brief discussion of what glass but decided to travel as light as possible: Canon EF 50mm f1.4, Canon EOS 350D, spare battery, spare memory card, and a cleaning cloth. The 50mm was the best choice as the lighting was tricky and most of the shots bounced around the 400-1600 ISO range but a little post work in UFRaw and Gimp help rescue some of the noisier images. The smaller aperture Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 would likely have been useless in that lighting and changing glass in tight quarters likely would have been a recipe for heartbreak on my part.

You can see the full set on Flickr.

It seems odd that I listen to music all day long, obsessively hunt for artists and albums that are completely new to my ears but don’t organize them into neat little packages to remember that place and time when they first crackled on the cheap speakers in my car on the way to work or swam out of my headphones late at night. Here’s my first crack at getting back into mixing and while it is a little disjointed and skips from Africa to Brooklyn to Jamaica it is a quick glimpse into what I have been listening to this past month.

C60 for May 2009

1. Miriam Makeba – Malouyame
2. Thomas Mapfumo – Mhondoro
3. Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics – Masenqo
4. Buraka Som Sistema – Kalemba (Wegue – Wegue)
5. Bronx River Parkway – El Resbalon
6. Chin Chin – Hotter Than Hot
7. Richard Swift – Lady Luck
8. King Khan & The Shrines – Welfare Bread
9. Holly Golightly – You Have Yet To Win
10. Mama Lucky – These Are My Tattoos
11. Sly & Robbie / Amp Fiddler – Black House (Paint The White House Black)
12. Culture – I’m Alone In The Wilderness
13. Dungen – Minda damer och fasaner
14. The Goretti Group with Dennis De Souza Trio – Of My Hands

Download

I’m hoping that each month I can knock out a mix of what might be dominating my ears at the moment with the goal of keeping those mixes to the reasonable constraint of a C60 tape. Enjoy!

My favorite track (video?) by far is I’m New as the vocalists are sublime…

Someday is a close second as Sarah Amstutz has a wonderful voice.

Seriously, 120 albums is a hell of an amount of albums to listen through and judge against those before and after.  So rather than make this an exercise in memory, or one with standards for that matter, I’m going to run this like an underground cock fight.  While it has all the appearances of being a free-for-all I’ll set up some basic boundaries, albums will compete intra-genre first then the victors will emerge to struggle against their peers.  What this is not is serious.  Like couples figure skating judgment will be capricious and on personal whim, whatever moves me at that moment will get the nod–come to think of it, this sounds like a Pitchfork review except without the literary torment and the rattling of Ivy League diplomas.

As my math skills are suspect, some of these brackets will have an album or two that do not fit nicely into a three-some (yes, I went there); those albums will wait on the sideline and get tossed into a sudden death with the finalist or be used to punt a pair into play.

Without further ad I bring you the first round of contestants: Genre Alternative!

Round One

1. Calexico    Carried To Dust
   Cordero    De Donde Eres
   J*Davey    The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost WINNER
   
2. Dengue Fever    Venus on Earth
   Thao    We Brave Bee Stings and All
   Scott Reynolds    Adventure Boy WINNER
3. The Gaslight Anthem    The ’59 Sound
   Hauschka    Ferndorf WINNER
   Hot Chip    Made In The Dark
4. Grouper    Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
   BLK JKS    Mystery EP
   Santogold    Santogold WINNER
5. Basia Bulat    Oh, My Darling*** WINNER
   Minus The Bear    Acoustics
   Lau Nau    Nukkuu
6. Firewater    The Golden Hour WINNER
   The Hold Steady    Stay Positive
   Gang Gang Dance    Saint Dymphna
7. Portishead    Third WINNER
   The Postmarks    By The Numbers
   Black Taj    Beyonder
8. Faraquet    Anthology 1997-98
   Fall Out Boy    Folie à Deux
   Elbow    The Seldom Seen Kid WINNER
9. Vampire Weekend    Vampire Weekend
   Plants and Animals    Parc Avenue WINNER
   Jack Peñate    Matinée

Round Two

1. J*Davey    The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost WINNER
   Basia Bulat    Oh, My Darling
   Hauschka    Ferndorf
2. Santogold    Santogold
   Scott Reynolds    Adventure Boy WINNER
   Firewater    The Golden Hour
3. Portishead    Third
   Elbow    The Seldom Seen Kid
   Plants and Animals    Parc Avenue WINNER

Round Three

1. J*Davey    The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost
2. Scott Reynolds    Adventure Boy
3. Plants and Animals    Parc Avenue

Read the other posts

Work In Progress: Top Albums From 2008

*** Wildcard initiated as eMusic had the wrong release date for Coptic Light encoded, and if I were a 1/3 as organized as Qyuen I wouldn’t be editing the fight list on the fly…

My first step is to figure out what from those 300 or so purchases was released in 2008 and then of that group which of that set are not re-releases–it is usually that latter part where I give up.  In my first pass I’m left with 1399 tracks and no real way to parse that into albums with Amarok except maybe counting but I don’t have that many fingers and toes.  Thankfully, I set Amarok up to use MySQL as it’s engine so with a quick query, and a little clean up for the freebies, I have 120 albums* to work through.

Now, my more purest readers and friends might exclaim, “Not all of these albums are actually 2008 releases! Cull! Cull!”  While I agree with that in principle I really am an individual governed by sloth and am truly unmotivated to verify the true release date of each album.  Either way it is going to take me a long while to whittle things down to a Top 10.

This is my playlist…

1. 2562–Aerial
2. 3 Na Massa–3 Na Massa
3. Al Kent Presents The Million Dollar Orchestra–Better Days
4. Ananda Project–Night Blossom
5. Aphex Twin–Classics
6. Aziza Brahim–Mi Canto
7. Baby Charles–Baby Charles
8. Basia Bulat–Oh, My Darling
9. Black Taj–Beyonder
10. BLK JKS–Mystery EP
11. Bombay Dub Orchestra–3 Cities
12. Booka Shade–The Sun & The Neon Light
13. Calexico–Carried To Dust
14. Carl Craig–Sessions
15. Cheb i Sabbah–Devotion
16. Chin Chin–Chin Chin
17. Coldplay–Viva La Vida Or Death And All
18. Cordero–De Donde Eres
19. Curtis Macomber–Asia: Sonata for Violin & Piano, Piano Trio
20. Dan Zanes and Friends–¡Nueva York!
21. Deastro–Keeper’s
22. Debashish Bhattacharya–Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide-Guitar Odyssey
23. Dengue Fever–Venus on Earth
24. Derrick May–Innovator
25. DJ /rupture–Uproot
26. Dub Trio–Another Sound Is Dying
27. Duffy–Rockferry
28. Elbow–The Seldom Seen Kid
29. El Guincho–Alegranza
30. Eliot Lipp–The Outside
31. Esperanza Spalding–Esperanza
32. Etran Finatawa–Desert Crossroads
33. Fall Out Boy–Folie à Deux
34. Fanatix–This Thing of Ours
35. Faraquet–Anthology 1997-98
36. Fenin–Been Through
37. Firewater–The Golden Hour
38. Gang Gang Dance–Saint Dymphna
39. Ghislain Poirier–No Ground Under
40. Gnarls Barkley–The Odd Couple
41. Grouper–Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
42. Grupo Fantasma–Sonidos Gold
43. Guillermo Klein–Filtros
44. Hauschka–Ferndorf
45. Headlights–Some Racing, Some Stopping
46. Health–Disco (V3)
47. Hector Zazou & Swara–In The House Of Mirrors
48. Hot Chip–Made In The Dark
49. Huun-Huur-Tu–Mother Earth! Father Sky!
50. Jack Peñate–Matinée
51. James Blackshaw–The Wolf Also Shall Dwell with the Lamb
52. James Blackshaw–White Goddess
53. James Hardway–L.A. Instrumental
54. J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science–Soul Vibrations
55. J*Davey–The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost
56. J-Live–Then What Happened
57. Josh Martinez–World Famous Sex Buffet
58. Joy Division–The Best Of
59. Juno Reactor–Gods & Monsters
60. Kasai Allstars–In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And A
61. Kaya Project–…& So It Goes
62. Kayhan Kalhor–Silent City
63. Kraak & Smaak–Plastic People
64. La Sonora de Lucho Macedo–Gozalo – Bugalu Tropical Volume 2
65. La Sonora de Lucho Macedo–¡Gózalo! Vol. 1 – Bugalú Tropical
66. Lau Nau–Nukkuu
67. Les Voix Baroques–Canticum Canticorum
68. Louie Vega–House Masters: Louie Vega
69. Luomo–Convivial
70. Lyrics Born–Everywhere At Once
71. Marco Benevento–Invisible Baby
72. Markus Schulz–Markus Schulz – Amsterdam 08
73. Melody Gardot–Worrisome Heart
74. Michael Nyman–8 Lust Songs: I Sonetti Lussuriosi
75. Michael Nyman–Mozart 252
76. Mike Ladd–Nostalgialator
77. Minus The Bear–Acoustics
78. Moby–Last Night
79. Natacha Atlas–Ana Hina
80. Natural Self feat. Andreya Triana–The Art Of Vibration
81. N.E.R.D.–Seeing Sounds [Explicit]
82. Niyaz–Nine Heavens
83. Nomo–Ghost Rock
84. Plantlife–Time Traveller
85. Plants and Animals–Parc Avenue
86. Portishead–Third
87. Q-Tip–The Renaissance
88. Quantic Presents…Flowering Inferno–Death Of The Revolution
89. Quiet Village–Silent Movie
90. Raashan Ahmad–The Push
91. Rainbow Arabia–The Basta
92. Ratatat–LP3
93. Rebirth Brass Band–25th Anniversary
94. Richard Swift–Ground Trouble Jaw
95. Santogold–Santogold
96. Scott Reynolds–Adventure Boy
97. Seun Kuti & Fela’s Egypt 80–Seun Kuti & Fela’s Egypt 80
98. Siah & Yeshua dapoED–The Visualz Anthology
99. Stanton Moore–Emphasis! (On Parenthesis)
100. Studio–Yearbook 2
101. Thao–We Brave Bee Stings and All
102. The Big Sleep–Sleep Forever
103. The Black Ghosts–The Black Ghosts
104. The Cat Empire–So Many Nights
105. The Gaslight Anthem–The ’59 Sound
106. The Herbaliser–Same As It Never Was
107. The High Decibels–The High Decibels
108. The Hold Steady–Stay Positive
109. The Matthew Herbert Big Band–There’s Me And There’s You
110. The Postmarks–By The Numbers
111. The Saturday Knights–Mingle
112. The Vandermark 5–Beat Reader
113. Thievery Corporation–Radio Retaliation
114. TM Juke And The Jack Baker Trio–Boto And The Second Liners
115. Vampire Weekend–Vampire Weekend
116. Vibesquad–Dawn Patrol
117. Yusef Lateef–Yusef Lateef
118. Zomby–Where Were U in ’92?
119. Zuco 103–After The Carnival

Time to turn up the speakers for the next 107 hours or so…

*edit–Found a straggler and culled it.

**edit–Culled Coptic Light because it was released in 2005 and my copy had the date encoded wrong.

It started late last summer when I stumbled onto Glenn Jones sublime Against Which The Sea Continually Beats, which was the tipping point where I slowly teetered until I tumbled into Steve Reich and David Lang this past December–a strange transition for certain. Usually when I’m out shopping for new music I have a list to work from of artists and albums that were recommended by friends or the media but lately I have been buying in a more free association manner and maybe this is why I’m listening to music so different from my “established taste”.

Free association listening is a liberating experience in that my itch for new, different, and novel is being scratched much more thoroughly.  There is something to be said for shutting out the noise of the world, closing your eyes and letting your heart and ears guide you.  Some of my most recent discoveries have been so counter-intuitive and have broken me of some deeply held musical prejudice.

Micheal Harrison’s Revelation, as well as being aptly titled, is a perfect example of the breaking of some long held views.  Dave Lewis of allmusic writes,

Harrison is regarded as an expert and creative mind in the field of tuning and the possibilities inherent in “just intonation” where the distance between pitches is derived from mathematical formulas rather than from the familiar system of equal temperament used in the tuning of most pianos.

A year ago I held a dim view of alternate tuning schemes and held twelve-tone in a contempt rooted in ignorance.  Honestly, I know nothing about tuning beyond a smattering learned in music theory classes I took some sixteen years ago.  That combined with my parent’s fervor for the compositions of Bach, Handel, and Mozart ingrained in me a belief that if certain musics do not adhere in some manner to the “Western Canon” that it is potentially flawed or misguided.  It is more gray and malleable than it sounds but it boils down to a knee jerk response to hearing instruments commonly associated with Western music working in micro-tonalities and alternate tunings.  While I’m being completely honest, I own a copy of Jorgensen’s Tuning which I had bought to complete my ruse of being knowledgeable about the field.  Seriously, I have never done more than flip through it.  Color me an asshat.

So what is blowing my mind at the moment?  The above mentioned Revelation is one.  At first listen the piano sounds brittle and woefully out of tune as if it had been sitting neglected in some abandoned schoolhouse being warped by rain, sun, and snow.  However, after sinking into its dense clouds and textures I found myself in a place where it made sense.  The harmonics that Harrison conjures are at once alien but familiar and as I continue to listen “just intonation” begins to make as much sense as equal temperament.

Following the path of piano music I am currently enamored with Hauschka who I’ve mentioned in passing before.  The Prepared Piano is an earlier piece but it too has served to break me of the long held prejudice regarding “prepared” instruments.  Before hearing Bertelman’s work my perception of this style was that it had more in common with a bag of hammers and wrenches tumbling down a flight of stairs than with what might be referred to as “music”.  I was wrong.  This album, along with last year’s Room To Expand is quirky, hypnotic, and beautiful and bears no resemblance to what I thought a prepared piano would sound like.

Additionally, I’m looking forward to digging into Ethel’s Light which at first pass was raw, romantic, and playful as well as getting deeper into Steve Reich’s work with Drumming performed by So Percussion.  Maybe these albums will open my mind further and see my ears drift deeper into sounds I have never experienced.

Gorecki: Symphony No 3 / Three Olden Style Pieces. Damn. I’ve mentioned this album before and it still stands as being one of my favorite pieces to date. Huge cathedrals of sound, aching melodies, and a glacial pace all conspire to create a feeling of wholeness and longing. Perfect for when you need to still your heart after being ripped from sleep by the chilling screams of a one year old looking for a bottle and a diaper change (a resounding endorsement if you ask me).

Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians was one of those “Hmmm, I’ll give it a shot” discoveries that seem to dominate my music purchases. I picked it up around the time as Gorecki and it instantly became one of my preferred late night albums. Reich layers rhythm and harmony like a painter might for texture or a baker for taste and in this composition those layers work together thos generate these long waves of melody that take minutes to unfold and reveal themselves. This is not to say that the music is a series of ponderous standing waves rather it is a breathless construction of rhythm that for me evokes long breezes coursing through tall summer grass.

Tehillim & The Desert Music is another album of Reich compositions that I picked up this past month. The first half of the album features great interplay between vocalists and percussion that possesses a sort of tribal feel that tickles the more reptilian parts of my brain while the latter half features compositions that sound much like the precursor to Music for 18 Musicians. In that regard the album is a little inconsistent if you are listening from beginning to end but each section is fantastic in its own right.

Biber: Soldiers, Gypsies, Farmers and a Night Watchman sees the playlist go for Baroque (…..really, I couldn’t let that slide). Biber is one of my favorite composers from this period as his work is impassioned and raw while making great use of folk traditions of Europe at the time which in many of the pieces leaves his work sounding some 200 years before its time. The attraction here is that the song cycle feels like a tour through a city contemporary to his time from raucous markets and back alleys to the closing of the city gates when all is beginning to lay down for the night.

J.S. Bach on the Lute is a collection of solo pieces performed by Paul Berget. There isn’t much I can say other than Bach is a giant and his work, for me, nearly always satisfies. Now I have always been a sucker for the lute and for the longest time I had wanted to purchase one and try to teach myself but life’s little conspiracies have kept me from it thus far. Berget’s work is a great substitution and it makes a very relaxing and enchanting listen when you are watching the clock round the corner to dawn.

Postcards From Gypsyland is the curveball of the bunch in that it doesn’t lend itself to meditative exercises nor does it possess the more somnolent qualities of the prior albums. Rather it is a toe tapping and feisty collection of Gypsy Jazz that is the perfect for washing the sand out of one’s eyes when their child is up and ready to run around. Think of it as the aural equivalent of Red Bull but without the rot gut. It is a fantastic collection evocative of an era that might have never existed but in romantic writings of people who might wish that it truly was happening and that they were there soul and body.

Aesop Rock – None Shall Pass
African Virtuoses – The Classic Guinean Guitar Group
Apparat – Walls
Beruit – The Flying Club Cup
Burial – Untrue
Dalek – Abandoned Language
Fanfare Ciocarlia – Kings and Queens
Glenn Jones – Against Which the Sea Continually Beats
Richard Swift – Dressed Up For The Letdown
Spanish Harlem Orchestra – United We Swing
Stars of the Lid – and Their Refinement of the Decline
Tinariwen – Aman Iman: Water Is Life
Waldeck – Ballroom Stories