Hey there readers/world - I hope you didn't think this blog was necessarily dead forever! With great pleasure I'd like to unveil a new album that has been in the works since late 2009. Granules is my open-ended music project with Sepehr Nabi and Niv Bavarsky. Sepehr lives in Oslo, Norway, and Niv and I are based in California (though Niv was attending MICA in Baltimore when his parts for this album were recorded), so this music was all made from material sent back-and-forth over the Internet.
Granules is an experimental workshop - Sepehr, Niv and I have unique musical backgrounds, artistic interests and tastes, and we never once sat down to discuss specifically what our "sound" or aesthetic should be like, though we did discuss tracks in the works. The music developed naturally out of the constraints of our recording capabilities and what we were interested in playing and hearing. Many influences have made deep impressions on all three of us in different ways, including experimental electronic music, jazz, 20th century composition, ambient music, and even hip-hop. We want to abandon genre idioms and explore new expressions through experiments in texture, color and form. We also want to evoke unusual images. Unfolding began as somewhat of a jumble of ideas, but as we worked together for over a year, scrapping and revising tracks, a sense of movement and unification started to come together. I don't want to make any comment as to the emotional qualities of the music, save for that I've honestly never heard anything quite like it.
We present Unfolding on Bandcamp for download in most any file format, free of charge. Note that the album was designed as a continuous musical trip, and several of the track transitions are seamless, so make sure to hear it on a gapless playback device!
This album put Sufjan Stevens firmly back on my radar. I had kind of lost interest by the time Illinoise had been out for a year, and it seemed like his material after that was rapidly declining in substance. An album of lesser Illinoise outtakes; a Christmas collection. Then eventually came The Age of Adz, which totally defied my expectations and found Stevens exploring a much more electronic sound, full of urgency, anxiety and doom. Melodramatic this is, to the extreme, and the closing track exceeds 25 minutes and finds Sufjan busting out the vocoder, a regrettable last-minute miscalculation in my opinion. The best moments of the album though are mind blowing arrangements on the level of Tyondai Braxton's crazed Central Market.
39. Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea A slightly uneven bag, but the better tracks are the best Eno has released in decades, equal to his classic recordings. I think Eno should leave the beat-driven techno-esque tracks to younger souls and play to his strengths, namely creating mesmeric soundscapes tinted with direct melodies. Fortunately, the majority of the tracks on this album are of the latter type, and they are exquisite.
38. 1000names - Illuminated Man
1000names are a Bulgarian duo who sound a little too close to pre-Cosmogramma Flying Lotus for comfort. That said, this album is undeniably jammin', without one wasted track. Their craft is superbly polished, with all the tricky syncopations and lush textures that define this genre. Unfortunately it sounds a little too much like a product of its times to get higher on my list. Still, if you're a fan of this type of music, you won't regret having this one in your collection.
37. Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
First let me admit I haven't listened to this one enough times. It's a tough pill to swallow, even though individually just about each song is quite strong. Three disks is a lot of music to push on anybody, even if it's really nice music. I just can't muster the endurance to figure out the plan of this album, its structural arch. But when I pick a song at random, I'm reminded of all the reasons I love Joanna Newsom, and plus, her voice has gotten better than ever. I think this could click for me in a big way yet, but for now Ys remains her masterpiece.
36. Asura - Asura Here is another album with some slight potential to be confused for early Flying Lotus, but fortunately Asura mostly works in a pallet that is distinctly softer and cooler than Mr. Ellison's, resulting in an album that is more laid-back and impressionistic than any by FlyLo. It's gotten to the point that a lot of people are producing impressive sounding beats, so this is no longer enough to declare a musician as artistically relevant. Good thing Asura can go beyond that and make a tightly-focused album with a sense of movement from start to finish, always accessible and groovin' but with an introspective edge. This impressive debut clearly has a honed statement behind it (though I won't attempt to translate it into words), and it promises great work in the future.
35. Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal
I had the great pleasure of seeing Oneohtrix Point Never rearrange gray matter at the Low End Theory, a most unlikely venue for his music. There are no beats here whatsoever, and he didn't drop a single one that night, either. I heard one guy shout "Play some real music!"; he clearly didn't appreciate or understand the trip OPN was taking the rest of the club on. To my great amusement, one couple standing right up by the stage was making out for almost his whole set. This is visual music that will show you worlds you didn't know you could dream about. The opening track is a burst of ultra-intense noise in dozens of colors (brace yourself!), and from there things settle down into much more dreamlike territory for the rest of the ride. The sound of an astronaut with dementia dreaming of an artificial intelligence disintegrating into an accretion disk of blue-hot plasma - that is something not too far from OPN's sound.
34. Shigeto - Full Circle
Another instrumental hip-hop album, and there are more to come. This stuff has just been exploding the last couple of years. Once again, a lot of the tropes you find here were essentially pioneered by Flying Lotus, but it's important to consider that nowadays the beat situation is like what happened with jazz and its great innovators - a figure like Bill Evans comes along, and suddenly everybody is playing stacked fourth voicings. Now, people still make effective use of those voicings today, and it isn't really fair to say they're ripping off Bill Evans, just like it would be unfair to call this album a ripoff of Flying Lotus. Shigeto is blazing his own intriguing trails, prioritizing lyrical melodies and nonstandard instrumentation (I hear some traditional Asian sounding instruments, hearkening to Shigeto's ancestry). Importantly, this album easily elevates itself above being a "collection of beats" and sounds like an artistic statement.
33. Gang Gang Dance - Kamakura
Only 15 minutes long, the single track on Gang Gang Dance's Kamakura EP covers more interesting territory than your typical band has recorded in their whole career. The first 10 minutes are a whirlwind ride through various mutations of funky breaks, fragmented hip hop, grime, dub, and general psychedelia. Things then wind down to an elegantly lyrical and melancholy finish, as Lizzi Bougatsos provides her singular vocals for the first time on the recording. People accustomed to her frenetic whoops and tribal babble won't find any of that here, only beautiful restraint. GGD have been on a serious roll with God's Money, Saint Dymphna, and now this. I regard them as the finest band of the weirdo-indie Brooklyn scene; they're certainly the hardest to pigeonhole.
32. Jason Moran - Ten
This album sees Jason Moran pulling out a lot more stops and displaying more baffling inventiveness than Lost In A Dream, album #47 on my list. This kind of jazz isn't to everybody's taste, because they do a lot of crazy things with time signatures and tempo changes and unusual scales, that might be regarded as being mostly for fellow musicians to appreciate. As I hear what they do, it always serves a greater purpose, not to show off chops. "Gangsterism Over 10 Years" is bliss in groove form - I don't hear too much jazz that makes me go "this just rocks so hard". Backed by a high-caliber and very dynamic band, Jason Moran displays his full potential on this thrilling record. Jazz is so far from dead!
31. Guilty Simpson - OJ Simpson
Another Madlib invasion, this is one of the least conventional rap albums of the year. It's bloated at 24 tracks, and only about half of those have rapping. The rest aren't disposable skits, however, but a collection of great Madlib beats with thought provoking spoken word samples that tell a story. This makes OJ Simpson an unabashed "concept album", and a somewhat challenging listen - Guilty's rap tracks are so good, one almost wishes it was a more straightforward collaboration. But with Madlib on deck nothing is ever straightforward, and repeated listens reveal this to be a deep, robust and nuanced journey, even if it seems unfocused at first.
Samiyam is Sam Baker, lifelong resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan (not Detroit!) until the City of Angels claimed him in 2008 in a coup that solidified LA's status as the world's nexus for contorted future-funk mutations. We have MySpace to thank for this - it was through that site that Flying Lotus found Samiyam and took him under his proverbial wing. Now the two are close as kin, with FlyLo even referring to Sam as his little brother in a video online. Somewhere in an unseen zone of Los Angeles, they make unbelievably crazy beats as FLYamSAM and ignite a lot of resinous plant material - mostly the latter.
Unfortunately FLYamSAM's debut, the Precious Cargo EP, hasn't seen the light of day yet. Look out for it on Brainfeeder in the near future. Meanwhile, Samiyam has three great solo releases under his belt. Rap Beats Vol. 1 is his full length debut from 2008, an instrumental beat collection with 23 tracks, all under 2 minutes.
The album was self-released, and each copy has a personal message or doodle scribbled on it. If you're a fan of Madlib, J Dilla, and video games circa 1990, and if you happen to have a short attention span, you will probably love this. On the other hand, some listeners might find it too ADD. They should check out the EPs Return (2008) and Man vs. Machine (2009), released more recently and featuring more developed tunes.
Among the numerous groundbreaking beat makers on the scene in LA at the moment, Samiyam delivers a sound with distinctly more nostalgia and humor built into it, which makes him one of the most enjoyable to listen to.
It's high time Giraffe Kingdom goes live again. Axolotl is the free-form sound project of experimental violinist/vocalist Karl Bauer, as well as his collaborators William Sabiston and Brian Tester. Memory Theatre, released in 2007, is a compilation of several of their hard-to-find releases, with quite a wide variety of atmospheres and moods. But if you haven't heard those releases, Memory Theatre will sound more like a unified album than a compilation, so it's the perfect introduction to the band. The music is extremely lush and evocative, bringing to my mind things like swarms of particles in Brownian motion, the frenzied yet precise movements of an ant colony, the boiling innards of a star, or a malfunctioning Tesla coil. Each piece is a wall of unfamiliar sounds, teeming with controlled chaos, never quite settling on any single idea, always subtlely evolving. At the same time there is a certain amount of stasis to each piece, in that a given song rarely strays particularly far from the texture it establishes at its beginning.
Aesthetically the pieces gracefully blend mechanical/technological sounds with those of a more organic/biological nature. For example, "Anamalon" bubbles with electric energy and prickly static over unsteady, wooden sounding thuds. This is followed by the gorgeous "Natura Naturans", which sounds like a field recording from some kind of magical forest with will-o'-the-wisps hanging in the air. Farfetched, perhaps, but this kind of music lends itself to such extravagant visual interpretations. Axolotl have put together a refreshing collection of sonic organisms, and aside from the last track (11 truly challenging minutes of noise) it is quite accessible, at least when approached with an open mind.
Like his contemporaries Christian Fennesz and Tim Hecker, San Francisco based Christopher Willits digitally processes his live guitar improvisations to create compelling electronic music. In contrast to the former artists, however, on Surf Boundaries Willits combines his abstract digital textures, unsteady glitch rhythms, and alien noises with a huge pop component - live drumming, gorgeous dreamy singing, short songs with verse/chorus structures, and a general sense of boundless joy and energy. It would be an understatement to say many influences went into the making of this album, and it is truly staggering how well they all came together to form something so coherent, unique and accessible.
This 1999 album marked Japanese DJ savant Nobukazu Takemura's debut into highly experimental, difficult to classify music, which had previously been primarily club oriented or at least closer to the traditional side of IDM. "On A Balloon" kicks things off ambitiously with more than 20 minutes of utterly alien, amorphous sounds, whose original sources we can only guess at. His process for generating these sonic wonders involves sending some of the outputs of his mixing board back into the inputs, creating a feedback loop with many exotic possibilities. The palette of sounds constantly changes, but many melodic and textural themes do recur - Takemura's use of building up and breaking down patterns keeps the careful listener in constant attention and surprise. His use of stereo panning is also very impressive here; headphones are recommended to appreciate all the detail present.
Next is "Kepler", the most accessible song on the album and arguably the highlight. It finds Takemura in a minimalistic setting reminiscent of Steve Reich's most textural pieces, with beautiful warm synthesized melodic figures repeating in a meter that one would rather just cruise with than hope to count. Soon micro-aural vocal samples enter, unpredictably fracturing and interacting until they form steady rhythms. All the while the underlying harmony undergoes sudden modulations, drastically changing the mood from serene to ominous and back. This song is a gem among the best electronic creations this author has heard.
The remaining material maintains a high standard, though much of it is a good deal less accessible. On "Taw", many jarring, dissonant, awkward, and confusing sounds are juxtaposed in complicated ways that many listeners may not find musical in any traditional sense. This is not music to tap one's foot to. Nevertheless, Takemura's imagination is always at full force, and even the most bizarre moments have a sense of humorous invention to them. There is also beauty to be found all the way through, especially on "Icefall", in which a fuzzy opening melody is joined by bubbling bleeps and bloops to create a joyous, frenetic texture of bouncing notes. Closing the album is "Tiddler", a sluggish, good natured piece with the feel of a hymn or lullaby.
Tim Hecker is one of Canada's foremost experimental ambient artists, and many of the track titles on this seamless album reflect the cold atmosphere of his country. Names like "Music for Tundra", "Arctic Loner's Rock", and "Boreal Kiss" evoke strong images, and the music itself does the same; it would be a fitting soundtrack for a desolate expanse of ice or slowly flowing glacier. The songs are constructed mainly from purely digital means, with beautiful shimmering drones, crackles, pops, hisses, creaks, clicks, and synthesized melodies. Occasionally we also hear recognizable instruments and vocal samples, which make the album more emotionally accessible. Most of the material has a melancholic and nostalgic feel to it, perfect to accompany oneself during a solitary night under a sky full of stars.
optimal.lp draws heavily from the microscopic and ostensibly souless world of digital electrons, giving them loose structure, warmth and life by way of stunningly arranged sound patterns. In this most impressive debut, shuttle358 (a.k.a. Dan Abrams) has constructed a definitive ambient/electronic blend. For further insights, see this month's interview with Taylor Deupree of 12k.
Generating its own bio-mechanical atmosphere, a hazy, rhythmic echosystem opens swarm, to be joined by thinly hovering rays, muted notes and occasional insectoid electronic accompaniment. Sweeping over bug-like sound patterns and a bed of static, slowly in... casually drones in a straight line, with further accents from smooth bell-tones. Airy synthflow adorned by a faint shuffle, and slightly disruptive microbursts is next (1:49).
Echoing with self-replicating patterns and just a bit of grit, gone goes peacefully amidst a radiant electron mist, overlain with synth strata. A thin, computerized techno-tribal beat penetrates the free-floating dronecloud of optimal, which simply basks in its lovely radiation field. A distorted voice twice questions the listener of floops which proceeds to sing a story of abstract electronics which pulse, drone, warble and waft oh-so-beautifully.
Beginning as an evolving sonic protoplasm, emergent eventually spawns small beats which rise from its densely simmering miasma. A cyclic techno-mechanical backdrop is draped with lushly swelling synth sheets in system (8:35), which receives additional visitations from electrically warbling fly-bys, muffled notes and precise, tinny syncopation. From a random gel, tank grows into something a bit more active, as its dully chiming notes begin to cascade and multiply in a gorgeously geometric soundsculpture; eventually the form suffers entropy, fading away and falling apart, though achingly lovely all the while.
Operating as shuttle358, Dan Abrams proves that the "cold" mechanics of computerized sound can be given distinct warmth and beauty. optimal.lp absolutely radiates with a dazzling blend of precision and passion, evoking a hearty 9.4. Seriously, you'd best be getting over to the 12k website and getting your copy of this masterpiece; it's limited to 500 copies...
...and those 500 copies have long been sold. Today the album is only available for download.
Artists, send any requests for the removal of album download links to TheSoftWatch@gmail.com and I will do so immediately. Note that no albums are hosted on Giraffe Kingdom, and the links are only shortcuts that anybody could find elsewhere with a little work. We believe from the heart that online media sharing ultimately benefits artists.
Artwork by Sepehr Nabi
