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Best Music of the Year- Craig Taborn

Craig Taborn's progression as a premier, forward-looking pianist continuous with his superb Avenging Angel release. Experimental, yet emotional and raw this is one of those ECM albums that doesn't sound much like ECM. The shape of solo piano jazz to come.

From The Guardian:

American pianist Taborn plays from this unaccompanied album on 25 May at London's Vortex, the same venue he brought to awed silence with his trio 18 months ago. But for all that gig's cutting-edge fearlessness, it made regular references to the jazz tradition – even to Thelonious Monk. Avenging Angel is a much more private and detailed exploration of the sonics of the piano, but if that sounds like a scarily ascetic pursuit, Taborn's genius (there's no other word for it) makes a world of whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtones, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades as absorbing as if he were playing bebop's greatest hits. Some pieces slowly evolve as sporadically tapped treble notes ring out against quietly jagged chords, some are keyboard-sweeping torrents in which jazz phrases deviously lurk and wriggle, some foreground high sounds struck so hard that the aim seems to be to purge them of tonality, while others do the opposite and lose themselves in subtleties of texture, echo and harmonics. In Neither-Nor, the notes scuttle like startled insects, while Forgetful is close to a jazz-ballad sound. It's Taborn's private world, but it's irresistibly full of surprises and dramas.

From Pop Matters:

Pianist Craig Taborn hasn’t released a solo album since 2004, when Junk Magic put jazz and electronic music in a mix, playing with beats until something heady came out. He’s been busy as a sideman, and his explorations of different sounds and influences has led, perhaps surprisignly, to a solo piano album, Avenging Angel. The format makes perfect sense, though, as it allows him to focus on sound and space, putting his improvised experimentation into an isolated format where we listen to piano-as-piano, and think about what that actually means.

The album takes the listener through a range sounds and styles without losing focus. The transition between the title track and “This Voice Says So” represents the stretches Taborn makes in the process. “Avenging Angel” starts on a dark, percussive groove, with Taborn working far down the piano, using the timbre of that end of the instrument integrate mood with propulsion. As he explores with his right hand, the song further increases in both energy and tension. We never quite get a release, as the upper register brightens, the lower rhythm continues to grind and impose a darker tone. The song pounds at us for nearly seven minutes.

And then we get “This Voice Says So”, a cut that opens so quietly that the single, high-pitched notes are barely audible. Taborn skips from deep rhythmic playing to high, well-spaced notes that take most of their first minute to coalesce into anything coherent, and even then Taborn provides and initial challenge to reveal what he’s putting together. By the middle of the ten-minute track, we start to get a better picture, but his use of silence matches his tonal progression as the relevant composition, plinkings eventually submerged under crescendoing progressions.

From Jazz Wrap:

Stripped bear of the technology of Taborn's last few outings as leader and sideman, Avenging Angel (ECM) is simply put---PERFECT. Taborn has always been a musician who loves to play with space and technique and here you get to experience the heart and soul of his compositions.

Avenging Angel has the elements of a classic recital as well the energy of a intimate improvised session. Opening gently on the rolling patterns of "The Broad Day King", Taborn gives a good indication of the albums main themes--expressionism along on a journey of unknown discovery. Taborn is making a massive statement utilizing very little space. The notes are sparse but crisp. The intimacy and intensity of these pieces is gripping, chilling and enveloping.

"Glossolalia" with it's repetitive theme and roller coaster movements invites you on a trail that builds to great yet subtle highs and quickly disappears. "Spirit Hard Kick" is a similar movement in which Taborn exercises the space on the keys with fast paced rhythms and thoughts which eventually encompass the listener in a wash of beautiful sounds. "Forgetful" may be the most lush and focused piece on Avenging Angel. A romantic ballad with a European classical feel to it. Touching, drifting and affective.

The colonization of the Americas

From the New York review of Books blog:

Immigration detention, which is run primarily through DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE), is the fastest-growing system of incarceration in the United States. In 2006, approximately 250,000 people passed through it. This October the Obama administration, evidently determined to prove itself a strict enforcer of immigration law, announced it had deported nearly 400,000 people through the DHS system in fiscal year 2011. Immigration detention is considered civil or administrative confinement, rather than criminal or punitive, but in practice this is a thin distinction. Almost all immigration detention facilities were originally built as prisons and jails, and the atmosphere inside them is very much what is euphemistically called “correctional.”

Immigrants in civil detention actually have fewer legal rights than their criminal counterparts. Unlike people charged with crimes, detained immigrants do not have a right to a government-appointed attorney, and because few can pay for one, only about sixteen percent have legal representation. And DHS not only oversees the detention of immigrants, it decides their legal status and whether or not they are to be deported. If this were taking place within the criminal justice system, it would be as if the jailors of a man awaiting trial were then to serve as his judge and jury.

Terrified of deportation and separation from their families, immigrants in detention are often extremely reluctant to file grievances against facilities run by the very people who can expel them from the country; and there is little question that deportation is sometimes used as retribution against immigration detainees who complain, and sometimes as a way of forestalling investigations into abuses. And it’s clear that facilities holding people who do not feel able to complain are particularly fertile grounds for abuse, as are institutions that can easily deport witnesses against them.

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Photographs on the Brain

Adrian Hill from LPV Magazine

Best Music of the Year-Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer

Minimilally subtle sonic portraits of space and time in balance, these sounds  of other discs seem new and different. Atmospheric and outside the current norms and genres, this is music to accompany your 2012 by.

From Pitchfork:

Ricardo Villalobos is the undisputed winner of the last decade's minimal techno movement. He released two of the period's finest long players (Alcachofa and the still underrated Thè au Harem d'Archiméde) but also established himself as an in-demand festival-packing DJ. Unlike his incredible run between 2004 and 2006 (when Ricardomania was so obvious that Philip Sherburne made note of it, mid-review), his releases these days are thin on the ground, limited to a single here, a remix there. His work has grown more historical as it's grown scarcer. It's not his own history he's concerned with, but the varying strands of musical DNA comprising his ropey, winking techno. "Enfants (Chants)" featured communal chanting, while this year's excellent Joli Chat EP was conversational and punchdrunk. His last "album" was a pre-mixed LP of his own productions. He's collaborating more. It's as if, having found his perfect beat, he's seeking its perfect context.

Re: ECM sees Villalobos reach out to longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer (who has a host of credits to his name; recently and notably he has played in the Moritz Von Oswald Trio). At issue is the varied output of fabled Munich jazz/out music label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). The two artists were given full access to ECM's vast catalog, and label founder Manfred Eicher oversaw the mastering process. The "Re:" ("regarding") in the work's title is important: These are not remixes but rather compositions that suggest and converse with ECM's history. Villalobos and Loderbauer make no attempt to tie the works to beat-driven techno. The catalog is a quarry of sounds from which the duo extract loops and beats that range from ornament to animal.

From Blog Critics:

There have been plenty of unusual releases this year, but so far nothing has surprised me as much as Re: ECM. Berlin-based Djs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer have reimagined 17 tracks from the acclaimed label, to create a truly unique set. They use the term “sound-structures” rather than “remixes” to describe their work, but the terminology is academic. What the duo have achieved with these jazz and new music compositions is to cast them in a whole new light. The results are a striking blend of tape loops, minimal beats, instrument sounds, and silence.

“Immersing oneself in the productions of ECM, one learns a lot about the optimum sound experience. We too have the paramount rule of making no compromises where sound is concerned.” say Villalobos and Loderbauer.

Of the seventeen tracks contained on Re: ECM, I certainly do not hear any compromises. What the mixmasters have fashioned here could never be mistaken for dance music, but Re: ECM is quite possible the ultimate chill-out record.

This is by no means the first ECM album to utilize electronically manipulated sounds to achieve a goal. Nils-Petter Molvaer’s remixed Khmer from 2007 comes immediately to mind. There are are also catalog releases by the Music Improvisation Company and Karlheinz Stockhausen to be considered. But Re: ECM is the first to take a various artists approach, and to allow outside Djs to do as they please with the original takes.

The duo were careful in their choices. “We chose specific ECM productions that offered parts where instruments, voices/choirs, and atmospheres were self-sufficient and isolated in the room,” they say. The use of ECM as source material could not have been more logical then, seeing as how one of producer Manfred Eicher’s stated goals with each recording is to fully utilize the dynamics of sound and silence in the studio.

From Subsidio:

Convincing ECM mastermind Manfred Eicher of the validity of letting Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, known primarily for their involvement with linear minimal techno, loose in the ECM catalogue, one of the most aesthetically consistent catalogues there is, was probably never going to be a given, but the pair got his support early on after he visited them in their Berlin studio as they were just beginning working on the project. What the pair propose here are not so much remixes as entirely new contextualisations of sonic spaces. Each of the pieces presented is based on segments of a particular work lifted from the vast ECM catalogue, but Villalobos and Loderbauer essentially create new compositions out of the raw material at their disposition. Those familiar with the label will recognise fragments of works old and new by the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Paul Motian, John Abercrombie, Miroslav Vitous, Alexander Knaifel, Arvo Pärt, Louis Sclavis or Bennie Maupin. Working beyond the boundaries of jazz and classical, the two create pieces which, while often as minimal and bare as their respective work, also echoes the particular aesthetic of the label. Villalobos and Loderbauer assemble intricate sound formations and hypnotic rhythmic patterns which have very little to do with their usual work, apart for the minimalist approach. Using their sound sources almost as if they were instruments, they are careful to never overlay their compositions with too many elements, keeping instead to just a few. This re-conditioning process takes on a singular aspect with the pieces using vocal components. The stunning Reblazhenstva combines a gentle percussive loop and pulsating bass line, punctuated by occasional stabs of cello, with melancholic violin and choral motifs to create a piece which is at once deeply contemplative and hypnotic. On Retikhiy, the pair recontextualise the Eastern European harmonies of Uzbek composer Alexander Knaifel’s Svete Tikhiy into a sobering abstract haunting choir. Later, they develop this much further as they use segments of Knaifel’s Amicta Sole, placing Tatiana Melentieva’s voice at the centre of the composition and building extremely sparse walls of orchestral textures around it. It is as if they orchestrated silences as well as instruments here, and they manage to create a rather epic piece from an extremely restraint sound pool. The pair reach an entirely different ethereal level on the spooky Rekondakion, where they rework Arvo Pärt’s Kondation, part of the Estonian composer’s seminal Kanon Pokajanen. There is a level of intensity here which is obtained by pushing the vocals toward the back and constantly altering them, while surrounding them with deep vocal drones.

The Monastery

From A Cidade Branca:

The famous monastery of Sourb Thade (St. Thaddeus), or in Turkish, Ghara-Kilise, is located in the mountainous area of western Azerbaidjian, about 20 km from the town of Makou and is today in Iranian territory. Sourb Thade can be glimpsed from quite a distance thanks to the massiveness of the church, strongly characterized by 2 cuspidate tambours. The monastery is perched on a mountain ridge beside a stream sunken into the rock, thus giving it a natural fortified position. Nearby are several chapels, 3 on the hills east of the stream, 1 approximately 3 km south of the monastery on the road to Bastam, and another that also serves as the church for the village of Ghara-Kilise.

According to tradition (see the chronological history), the monastery was founded by the Apostle St. Thaddeus on the spot where a pagan temple existed in former times. Time after time it was destroyed by invasions, and struck by earthquakes, the most devastating of which occured in 1319. In 1329, the monastery was rebuilt, and further renewed and enlarged during the course of the following centuries.

General plan 1. the small church 2. the big church 3. portico 4. refectory 5. the abbot’s cells 6. the monks’ cells 7. work cells 8. courtyard of the monastery 9. courtyard for agricultural use 10. room for processing oil 11. mill 12. storerooms (?) 13. entrances 14. traces of the walls and other buildings

 

 

The Lost and Found

From London Review of Books, Belen Hernandez writes of Thomas Friedman's confusions:

In his most recent book, Thomas Friedman – New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner, presidential adviser – says of the Iraq War that he has ‘nothing but regret for the excessive price that America and Iraq have had to pay in lives and treasure’. The body count seems to be less cause for concern, however, than the fact that China, which has not been distracted from domestic infrastructure projects by pricey wars abroad, can now build a convention centre in approximately the same time it takes for the Washington Metro crew to repair two escalators in Friedman’s local subway station (the book is called That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back). Still, he’s come a long way since May 2003, when he said that the US military had to go ‘house to house from Basra to Baghdad’, wielding ‘a very big stick’ and instructing Iraqis to ‘Suck On This’.

This was necessary, Friedman explained, in order to burst the ‘terrorism bubble’ that had emerged in ‘that part of the world’ and posed a ‘fundamental threat to our open society’. Four months earlier he had said that the real threat to ‘open, Western, liberal societies today’ was not ‘the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables – the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life’. Iraq was nonetheless part of the ‘cement mixer that is churning out these undeterrables’, and in case anyone detected any inconsistencies in the argument that fighting a war against deterrables will deter people who cannot be deterred, Friedman later offered the broader assessment that ‘we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could.’

There was also the question of oil. In January 2003, Friedman conceded that ‘any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be – in part – about oil’. By October 2003, he had decided that ‘US power is not being used in Iraq for oil’. A year later, Hummer drivers in the US were somehow still to blame for the deaths of their neighbours’ sons serving in Fallujah – unlike New York Times columnists who sold ‘democratising a fractious Iraq’ by force as ‘the most important task worth doing’.

9-Eyes.com

9-Eyes.com

Best Music of the Year-Telebossa

 

An experimental and doleful melange of Brazilian sounds, this surprisingly wonderful and accessible group of mental sounds par excellence are what the music doctor order to cure your ills. Like all great brazilian music even when its sad it makes you smile.

From Tiny Mix Tapes:

Based in Berlin, Telebossa (Nicholas Bussmann and Chico Mello, both with connections to other experimental electronic and classical approaches) meld Brazilian forms with electronics processed through a minimalist/experimentalist approach. When I tell you that the credits on the sleeve are given for glasses and matchboxes (among others), you’ll hear me on that one.

But this is no exercise in inaccessibility for the sake of avant-garderie or alienation. Like Satie’s “furniture music,” Telebossa reward close listening, but at the same time lull the listener, with their shuffling rhythms and low-key melancholy, into forgetting to pay attention. There is something very gray about the piece (or perhaps that should be beige, after the studio in which it was produced), in the best possible sense. What we have here is a kind of mutant bossa (or samba, or choro), but not in the sense that mutant disco is disco gone crazy. Instead, this is bossa in the uncanny valley, refracted not only through strings and minimal(ist) electronica or through multiple mutations within tracks, but also, more fundamentally, in the way that the listener is seduced into a sense of recognition that is toyed with just enough to demonstrate the falsity of the listening experience, and indeed of the very nature of the ‘record’ (as Laurie Anderson, another noted experimentalist, put it: “this is the time… and this is the record of the time”).

Witness, for example, the way in which, on “Eu Sonhei Que Tu Estavas Tão Linda,” a melancholy vocal sung over acoustic guitar suddenly transforms — sustained, but just for a few moments — into an inhuman synthesized note, before we revert to the music, but continue to faintly make out that synthetic echo within the voice, as strings that at first seem comforting repeat a motif to the point of disequilibrium (and is it a coincidence that the space in which this occurs is also the only track on the album with straightforward lyrics that don’t even toy with romantic clichés?). Consider also the electronic — I can only describe them as ‘pops’ — on the opening tracks, which sync with the tempo; then, just as the ear is starting to recognise the strategy, so familiar from minimal techno and glitch, of turning the ‘non-musical’ element — the click, the tick, the crackle — into a rhythm, they disconcertingly stray ever so slightly from the beat. The combination of familiar samba and bossa tropes with this kind of Unheimliche underlay, and with prominent strings that waver, scrape, and dissonate before returning to their wonted role, provides a parallel to the auditory experience in that both are completely arresting, without being by any means obvious.

From NY Times:

hen take in “Telebossa,” which is both the title of a new album and of his duet project with the Viennese musician Nicholas Bussmann. It picks up where “Do Lado da Voz” left off. That’s the most important thing you need to know.   

It’s a little less well realized than “Do Lado da Voz.” Mr. Bussmann has worked with electronics in Kapital Band 1, a Viennese group that makes a weird spectral funk: beat-driven music with only the tiniest dusting of rhythm. (There are parallels with Mr. Mello’s samba deconstructions, which often subtract the drums.) But he’s also a cellist, and his playing here ranges from rhythmic and sensitive to slightly out of tune and bleating. If there’s an aesthetic being served there, I don’t know it.

Still, there are so many seriously good ideas here, made from such simple ingredients — usually just Mr. Mello’s voice and nylon-string guitar; Mr. Bussmann’s spare or layered and repetitive cello strokes; loops of ambient, everyday noises stealthily infiltrating the near and deep backgrounds; and occasionally a little double bass or percussion — that you can overlook it. The songs include “Ingênuo” and “Naïve,” by Pixinguinha, the choro composer; Noel Rosa’s “Século do Progresso”; and Mr. Mello’s own mesmerizing “Samba do Budista,” written with Carlos Careqa.

From Beach Sloth:

Rarely do I stumble across a group as enjoyable and unusual as Telebossa. A mixture of electronics, bossa nova, and chamber music, it is a real treat. Chico Mello and Nicholas Bussmann infuse a great deal of heart into these seven songs. I haven’t heard anything this inspired for quite some time.

Bossa Nova is considered a rather ‘conservative’ genre musically-speaking. Usually the greats like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Stan Getz, etc. are mentioned, referred to, and not expanded upon much. Having such a refreshing approach to a style I already adore is fantastic, and they succeed on expanding the palette of sounds without ruining what makes bossa nova enjoyable. 

“Feltro No Ferro” begins things off slowly: with a treated piano before flowering into a full song. Nicholas Bussmann is responsible for these subtle electronics and cello. Chico Mello provides the vocals and guitar. Few others join them, excluding some restrained drums. You’re basically left with these basic elements for the duration of the album.

 

Telebossa - Telebossa (album preview) by experimedia

Bianca Beck

Bianca Beck | Untitled, 2011, oil, ink, and burns on panel, 16” x 12”

From artcritical:

There is something deliciously grubby about the paintings and sculptures of Bianca Beck.  She favors distressed, punctured, encrusted surfaces, an earthy, at times visceral palette and painterly gestures that border on violence.  Lacerations, smudges and sgraffito incisions attack the paint as if in a last-ditch attempt to extract imagery from recalcitrant materials.

This debut solo commercial gallery show is titled “Body” and follows a spot earlier this year in the project room at White Columns. In but a couple of instances, the paintings are untitled, date from 2011, and are less than 2-1/2 by 2 feet.  The three oil painted sculptures – also 2011 and untitled – are roughly carved or perhaps found shapes of wood, arranged on pedestals, each not much more than a foot high.

Dance Painting is an exuberant aggregation of curlicues forming a web against what could register equally as a flower or an orifice, a red depression with a black and blue center.  A swirl of lines, seemingly dragged wet in wet through thin paint, sometimes sharp, sometimes smudged, is accented here by dabs and there by scratches.  Darker browns against the light tan of the panel support invite an association of pubic hair against flesh but without enforcing such a reading.  The painting has a compelling gestalt, an almost tantric center, and yet there is a sense of elements coming into being as we look at them, of wet, wayward squiggles coalescing into form.

 

Best Music of the Year-Wild Beasts

This has become one of the consistent, creative, innovative rock bands today. Why Wild Beasts aren't better known or recognize is perhaps a tribute to their originality and what the the mobs prefer. This outing is a mature step upward-more serious and certain than their past efforts. Certainly a band of the future if they let their imagination rule as Smother attests.

From Pretty Much Amazing:

Kendal’s pop experimentalists, Wild Beasts, found fame and critical acclaim after releasing 2009′s Two Dancers, a record that highlighted lead singer Hayden Thorpe and co-vocalist Tom Fleming’s remarkable falsettos. Known as an otherworldly, ethereal experience, Two Dancers celebrated dance and upbeat pop thanks to Chris Talbot’s exceptional art of percussion, but also had a few moments that were slower, and more elaborate (“When I’m Sleepy,” “Underbelly.”) It is in these songs that built the foundation for the outfit’s newest full length, Smother.

Smother explores the erotic downbeat, consisting of ten love ballads that are considerably more gradual than anything on Two Dancers. It is certainly a slower, more atmospheric album, allowing the band to implore methods as far away from rock as they’ve been since 2006′s “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants.” On Smother, the similarities it shares with its predecessor are notable, due partly to Thorpe’s indistinguishable vocals, but mostly due to the unearthly, fragile ambience that is carried from Two Dancers‘ more provocative songs. It is the sheer haunting beauty expressed on Smother that is its essence; the slight electronic candescence of “Albatross,” the mysterious nature of opener “Lion’s Share,” Thorpe’s soft cooing on “Loop The Loop.”

The band picked up some rather unorthodox influences for Smother as well, citing experimental noise-pop duo Fuck Buttons as in influence, directly referencing Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in “Bed Of Nails.” Fleming had stated that here, Wild Beasts “spread their wings,” that thanks to the success of Two Dancers they were entirely free to record in a manner they saw fit. As lead single “Albatross” was one of the first they recorded in the process, its dainty pop construction and soft demeanor helped form the aesthetic for the remainder of the LP. Though still ultimately a pop band, Wild Beasts continue to divulge further into the outer edges of the abyss, mastering their craft with another marvelous achievement.

From Pitchfork:

And while the dimpled electronic grooves of Smother do make for close listening, Thorpe's overtly sexual couplets provide a slinky analog to the sonics at play. In "Bed of Nails", a melodic marvel in its own right, he uses a skittering bridge to proffer a few grunts, howls, and moans. But again, what makes this all work so well is the remarkable amount of restraint and rhythmic know-how these four employ. This band has come long way in that regard-- it's not easy to integrate the sounds of sex into song without coming off like the kind of guy with a favorite tree from which to creep.

Additionally, all of these songs undress very beautifully on their own terms as well. The ribbons of guitar that bind "Loop the Loop" together at its halfway point are stunning, praises that can also be sung for the acupunctural textures of closing beauty "End Come to Soon". Wild Beasts have never been an especially easy outfit to connect to either forebears or contemporaries, but here they've found certain amount of kinship in the dusky, liberated grooves of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis. You can hear it in the somber tick-tocking of "Invisible", just as much as the orbit of single "Albatross". But that's about as strong a link as you're likely to find, a feat in its own right. This is gloriously layered music that opts to celebrate its quirks and cowlicks rather than suppress them. Organically. There's a great amount of comfort that comes in hearing something like that. Thorpe delivers a unforgettable line in the circular prowl of "Plaything", a new age sex jam if there ever was one. "New squeeze, take off your chemise, and I'll do as I please," he quivers. "I'm not any kind of heartthrob, but at the same time I'm not any kind of slob." He makes a good point.

 

Wild Beasts - Albatross by 1FTP

From Pop Matters;

There’s a moment on “Lion’s Share”, the opening track on Wild Beasts’ third LP, Smother, where a steady beat bubbles up in the low-end of the mix. The percussion slithers underneath Hayden Thorpe’s angelic falsetto and gentle piano melody, co-leader Tom Fleming lending his voice in harmony. Fans raised on the UK-based group’s past two albums, Limbo, Panto (2008) and Two Dancers (2009), know the signal: the rhythm section is readying itself to join the party in full, to work things into a lather in the way the band has already mastered.

Only—it doesn’t happen. Instead, the music drops away, leaving Fleming to coo, “What are you running from?” before Thorpe reprises his strangely comforting chorus: “Because it’s a terrible scare / But that’s why the dark is there / So you don’t have to see what you can’t bear / (The lion’s share).” The track ends where it began, the piano ringing starkly in the mix’s negative space. The band has wasted no time in letting us know that Wild Beasts will be doing things differently this time around. The musical restraint of “Lion’s Share” echoes throughout Smother, a not-entirely-minimalist record, but one that scales back every element of its songwriting enough that each note seems precious.