I'm a little late to this train but I just got hooked on this afro-beat group from Munich (?!) Karl Hector and the Malcouns. Their record, which came out during the summer, is called Sahara Swing out on Stones Throw and it's a fierce, lean piece of funk. It's not only that a group like this would survive in Munich, which probably isn't that surprising, I'm sure Kraut funk has been around at least since Can has copped to it, but that the record manages to sound both totally authentic and new. The authenticity is there in the breakbeats, wah-wahs, beefy bari sax solos, the overall tautness of the rhythm section, and the tubed up fuzz of the whole production aesthetic. But the newness, and really the real interest of this record is all in the details. Hear the organs far too fuzzed up and dissonant than funk would normally elicit (especially in "Nyx" and the title track "Sahara Swing"), way more Chick Corea than Art Neville. Hear the clave out in orbit on "Mystical Brotherhood", the polytonal wanderings of the organ in "Debere", trumpet runs fed through the psyche blender (also "Nyx"), or the 4 against 3 slow motion of "Sahara Swing" which seriously sounds like the whole rhythm section is trying so hard to slow down it's nearly reversing time. You get the sense they're much more into Bitches Brew era Miles or Brown Rice era Don Cherry than they are Africa 70 and I sincerely hope that they'll worry less in their next record about being the next Fela party band (cause we've already got Antibalas for that) and that they'll hire Danger Mouse or whoever produced the Battles record to make some truly weird afro-beat. But for now I'll settle for some subtlety in my funk.

Nyx
Sahara Swing
Mystical Brotherhood
Debere
Rush Hour

BONUS!

Don Cherry's Brown Rice

Amazing video from the No-Neck Blues Band who are out with a new cd called Clomeim released on Locust Music. It's pretty extreme noise folk and I've always felt previously that NNCK are a bit too indulgent for my tastes, especially when they went off the drum circle deep end, but this material is more thoughtful, harsher, and a lot more interesting with the addition of video. The video artist is Tom Thayer.

The video can be streamed here via the Wire.  

Julianna Barwick

I spent a huge amount of time growing up singing in choirs.  My dad was a minister so I sang in his church's choirs and then my grade school had a professional boy's choir which I sang in for 4 years.  I spent high school and college singing too, although in college I was in an a cappella group and couldn't stomach any more liturgical music.  Now, though, I find myself really only interested in pre-renaissance christian church music (which was all choral) and madrigals; Monteverdi, Mauchaut, Josquin, Gesualdo made some of most gorgeous, hypnotic, outre music in history.  I think it's great that so many new great bands (Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver) are getting interested in group singing and vocal harmony.  But with one notable exception - Panda Bear's Person Pitch, all of this singing has had little to do with this christian choral music and chant that I'm talking about. Most bands who sing in groups are much more immediately indebted to other pop, motown, and rock groups from the 60's. This absence is caused, I think, by the stigma against church music in general from a largely agnostic, or broadly ambivalent taste making youth culture that associates classical (e.g. stuffy) with liturgical (which are two very different things despite classical having been born of the former).  Church music can absolutely be stuffy, but this older, mysterious, ecstatic type is quite the opposite.  It's as unbridled, tortured, immense a music you'll find.  There's also a general fear in popular music of all varieties that singing in tune without forced inflection or affectation (which is the goal of choral singing) is plaintive at best, but really just boring.

Person Pitch had cultural signifiers from other lands in there to be sure and despite one track ("I'm Not"), it would be stretching to say that the choral influence for Person Pitch was western european christian. It could just as easily been african tribal, or south american tribal or christian. Julianna Barwick now adds one more name to this short list of exceptions who have embraced the christain choral tradition. Her album Sanguine, which came out this time last year but got buried, takes the premise of Panda Bear and places it squarely in the choir boy canon. The record is pretty poorly produced, and there are some tuning issues particularly in her highest range, which is a shame not a virtue (even though I get the sense she hopes it gives her indie cred). But it's still gorgeous and worth listening to not least of all for its expansiveness and innocence. There's a danger of course in emulating boy choirs that the thing will become precious or faux innocent, the way Bjork can sometimes get a little drippy, or worse the way Enya creates anything at all. In general, the record avoids this with the exception of the track that ended up garnering the most attention called "Dancing with Friends" which sounds like an all girl a capella group at Wellesley doing a warm up. There are things to be desired, I wish her voice had some more depth, that she didn't push so hard in her throat and let her chest do the work, and I wish she developed her pieces more instead of letting the initial loop be the whole story. This is why her remix for Radiohead's Reckoner is probably the best thing she's done, because the structure of the song was already there and all she had to do was beautify it, stretch it out. Even chant based music needs to move forward and develop. A procession has an important function other than being ritualistic, it gets you from one end of the church to the other.

Julianna Reckoner Remix
Untitled 3
Untitled 4
Dancing With Friends

Micachu is a fresh face from east London, her first record called Jewellery comes out early February on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Records, produced by none other than the man himself. The last time (I can recall) he anointed a songstress with his skills, Moloko's Roisin Murphy came out with an unbelievable record (Ruby Blue) and Micachu's will no doubt enjoy the same fate despite being a much weirder, more raw, and in lots of ways more interesting project (maybe than some of Herbert's own. Anybody bored of the whole big band thing?). Micachu's voice is really what carries the thing although the brutal eclecticism of these pieces really takes them elsewhere. Her voice is at first listen airy and dreamy, then you notice how strident it becomes, hardened by something unknowably badass. Plus there are flashes of hip-hop call and response, sort of like a less evasive CocoRosie, that fit in seamlessly. The production has elements of Herbert's micro house style, some grime, electro, which is all well and good, but what's really interesting about it is that Herbert has mixed it so that it sounds like a dirty garage band with all the tubes and tiny tweeters maxed out and driven to hell, with another digitally inclined doppleganger laid on top of the first, analogue band. With all the instruments squashed like a cheap Nuggets revival, and all the blips coming in technicolor, there's so much space between these two extremes that it makes you wonder what Micachu and Herbert are getting at (cause he's always got a manifesto right?). Is this a band that's been remixed? Why spend so much time perfecting the compression on the bassline but let the guitars sound like they're on some forgotten bedroom b-side? Ultimately, the really good thing is that Herbert's really NOT pushing an agenda, Micachu just has a stratified style and it feels by turns jumbled and intensely focused in all the right places (just as her voice is). It's not tremendously likely that she'll be able to hit big with this release (with the exception of Golden Phone which is just too fucking catchy), but for those who want a taste of the next thing here you go. P.S. I've heard someone in her band The Shapes, or maybe her, plays the Hoover Vacuum during shows. I wonder if Fishman knows about this...

Golden Phone
Abandon Ship
Lone Ranger

eR DoN (real name Robert Nelson) is a Seattle based glitch-hop dude with jazz tendencies on Fourthcity. Reminds me somewhat of the acoustic cutups of the Books, but with the boom bap programming of Anticon's back catalogue. In fact, Anticon shouldn't have invested so much in Son Lux who fizzled out in a minute, if they wanted cross genre instrumental weirdness they should have slapped this dude on their roster. Then again, they've got Dosh who gives jam bands a bad name and only sounds hip-hop if you think that hip-hop means hard down beats and shuffling snares. eR DoN is refreshing perhaps precisely because he's not really putting on a hip-hop face like everyone at Anticon is trying to do (except Why? who's past that and now is just the weirdest emo kid on the block). He's interested in clean jumps of timbre, a lean beat, and sudden formal left turns. It helps I think that his process is really putting a bunch of disparate ideas on an MPC and like a puzzle piecing them together. The album gets a little samey in all honesty partly because no section lasts longer than a handful of moments and you wish he'd change up the palette sometimes (no more melodica!!) or at least stick with one sound for a bit longer (sort of the same problem Girl Talk had with his early shit; just too ADD) but it's still a nice entry into improvisational hip-hop.

Havewards
Combs
Why Candy Thumbs
Two Nelsons and a Detachable Face

Lukid's new album Foma has had my head ringing (in a good way) since I heard it on sunday. It's a beat n' texture record, minimal in its musical elements but maximal in its admiration of spatiality. Everything has its right place in the mix, it's efficient, alluring, and totally evasive. Some of the record plays like a leaner, more vocally inclined Flying Lotus with his sense of a beat held back by a gluey gravity, and his penchant for soulful organ washes and disruptions of bleepy atari ejaculations (let's see how many posts I can mention semen in...on second thought let's not!) But Lukid is also playing around in sound design and modern classical electro-acoustic territory from much the same angle as Pole, or, in a different vein, Matmos (the synthy Matmos, not the concréte Matmos); weird tape hisses, Eno style drones, superannuated synth murmurs, and indecipherable voice samples. "Ice Nine" is a wintry, beatific thing, sort of like something of Kim Hiorthøy's. The piano is cavernous (and sometimes backwards), so are the high hats, but the casio congas are in the water closet, and somebody left the radio on, tuned to nothing, and every once in while there's an attempt to get a signal on Jupiter. In "Slow Hand Slap" a grimey bass is being tested out against a typewriter and eventually loses out to a flock of mermaids. They drown it, but it never really stops grindin. "Chord" comes from a more unanimous world, something out of Autechre's 90's playbook, an incessant, unnerving drone, insect wings, canisters, and relentlessness together with subtle shading. I hear 'Tri Repetae' but who knows... "Ski Fly" slinks closer to FlyLo or Hudson Mohawke than anything else on here - an EPMD beat pattern, Al Green guitars and backup singers, a horn section that got squashed into a synth or vice versa, and the feeling that if only D'Angelo could hook up with these dudes, we'd have an R&B we could be proud of. "Time Doing So Mean" is a summative anthem of the album which already feels like a critical release for beat heads and dreamers here in the first steps of '09. 

Ice Nine
Slow Hand Slap
Chord
Ski Fly
Time Doing So Mean

Scarface is pushing 40, and Emeritus is supposed to be his final record (we'll see), and if that does turn out to be the case, he should be thrilled that he finished with a record this good. Raw and dark (near existential) as usual but also breezy and almost valedictory. The production is a lot less stark and heavy (not that there's anything wrong with that) than I've heard from his last few. I've been revisiting the Geto Boys with some regularity these days (and getting into to a lot of other H-town rap too) but it's just unreal how certain rappers are capable of putting out solid shit for such an incredibly long time (Ghostface comes to mind). "Can't Get Right" has a soulful hook, organ punches, hyped up break and a nice melody in the chorus from Bilal. In different hands (ahem...uh, Common, your electropop album can't hide your lameness) this song would be a tearjerkoffing bigup yourself jizz parade. Instead it's got bite, realism, and honest hardwon optimism. "High Powered" makes me nervous, something about that hollering in the back of the mix, and who out there thinks Scarface is boasting when he says "I copped a Chrome 45 under pressure/And then address ya, now ya froze on tha stretcher"? Who?

Can't Get Right Feat. Bilal
High Powered Feat. Papa Rue

I figured there were at least double the amount of tracks I obsessed over than albums this year so here are my favorite 64 tracks of 2008.


64. Lindstrom - Grand Ideas
63. Invisible Conga People - Cable Dazed
62. Four Tet - Ribbons
61. Jay-Z - Jockin Jay-Z
60. Max Tundra - Which Song
59. Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone
58. T.I. - Dead and Gone (feat. Justin Timberlake)
57. James Pants - Finger on the Knife
56. Atlas Sound - Airedales
55. Air France - Beach Party
54. Kanye West - Robocop
53. Shugo Tokumaru - Parachute
52. Chromatic - Lady
51. Shugo Tokumaru - Parachute
50. Osborne 16th Stage
49. Tobacco - Truck Sweat
48. Stereolab - Three Women
47. Daedelus - Fair Weather Friends
46. Animal Collective - Water Curses
45. Yo Majesty - Club Action
44. Big Boi - Royal Flush feat Andre 3000 and Raekwon
43. Black Keys - Psychotic Girl
42. Low Motion Disco - Things are Gonna Get Easier
41. John Legend - Green Light (feat. Andre 3000)
40. Illa J - Timeless
39. High Places - Head Spins
38. Lonely Island - Jizz in My Pants
37. Alexis Taylor - Baby
36. Antony and the Johnsons - Shake That Devil
35. Pacific - Sunset Boulevard (Lord Skywave Remix)
34. Radiohead - Reckoner (Flying Lotus Remix)
33. Rye Rye & MIA - Tic Toc
32. Sebastien Tellier - Kilometer
31. Blaqstarr - Bang Hard
30. Syclops - Where's Jason's K
29. Takka Takka - Everybody Say
28. Philip Jeck - Fanfares
27. Brazilian Girls - Good Time
26. Kelley Polar - The Feeling of the All-Thing
25. Samamidon - Fall On My Knees
24. Little Joy - Don't Watch Me Dancing
23. TV on the Radio - Dancing Choose
22. Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
21. Blitzen Trapper - Furr
20. Jamie Lidell - Another Day
19. Hot Chip - Ready for the Floor
18. Dodos - Fools
17. Hercules and Love Affair - Blind (feat. Antony Hegarty)
16. Hotstylz - Lookin Boy
15. Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
14. Gang Gang Dance - House Jam
13. Q-Tip - Gettin Up
12. Sigur Ros - Gobbledigook
11. Yelle - Ce Jeu
10. M83 - Kim & Jessie
9. MGMT - Electric Feel (Justice Remix)
8. Bon Iver - Re: Stacks
7. Lil Wayne - A Milli
6. Raphael Saadiq - 100 Yard Dash
5. Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream
4. Vampire Weekend - M79
3. The Walkmen - In the New Year
2. Nic Xedro - Smells Like Teen Spirit
1. Fleet Foxes - Mykonos

Here are my top 32 records of 2008. Don't ask me why I put 32, I just couldn't give any of 'em up. Also, as a side point, as albums go, I don't think there's a single one that comes even close to the consistence of quality, songcraft, melodicism, and sheer beauty of my choice for number one. That record will remain a classic for me for a thousand more insane Lil Weezy joints to come (and you know there will be). Look out for my best tracks of 2008 coming in the next few days.



1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me
6. Samamidon - All Is Well
7. Q-Tip - The Renaissance
8. Hercules and Love Affair - Hecules and Love Affair
9. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
10. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
11. Philip Jeck - Sand
12. Raphael Saadiq- The Way I See It
13. Arthur Russell - Love is Overtaking Me
14. Nomo - Ghost Rock
15. Stereolab - Chemical Cords
16. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
17. Antony and the Johnsons - Another World EP
18. Santogold - Santogold
19. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park
20. Little Joy - Little Joy
21. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
22. Bonnie Prince Billy - Lie Down In The Light
23. Truckasaurus - Tea Parties, Guns & Valor
24. Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet - Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet
25. Autechre - Quaristice
26. Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends
27. Lukas Ligeti - Afrikan Machinery
28. Black Milk - Tronic
29. Underground Resistance - Electronic Warfare 2.0
30. Maryanne Amacher - Sound Characters 2
31. Gas - Nah und fern
32. Luciano - Fabric 41

Special Holiday Treat courtesy of Monsieur Johnny A.
Let's Paint, Exercise, & Blend Drinks TV! This extraordinary broadcast is brought to you by the folks at public access Santa Monica. The guy's name is John Kilduff, who's (I understand) an MFA candidate at UCLA and if this is his work then he's a certified genius. It's unreal how many cholos are watching enough public access to want to harass this poor jackass. If you're interested he's got around 170 you tube clips up at http://www.youtube.com/user/letspainttv. His activities range from painting pies, performing open heart surgery, playing chess, painting meatballs, and shaving. The fun does not stop there. Anyway enjoy this bliss filled entertainment and happy holidays.

Hecuba, a local L.A. band from a label now becoming sort of ubiquitous round these parts, Manimal Vinyl, has a weird accumulation of parts. Some part plain old indie pop, vocals a bit dead pan like Ms. Friedberger from Fiery Furnaces (who cribs it from Yoko Ono and Patti Smith anyway), playful repetitions of lyrics, kiddy toy noises, but with a tendency for some squonky glitch, some doomy dub, and a feisty temper that comes out of no where. Something darker lurking underneath to be sure, hard to place it exactly. They definitely like hip-hop but they won't flirt with high production values or fancy synths opting instead for old oscillators, a moog, and a roland juno or something. Irreverent as hell. But also completely quixotic and catchy as fuck, especially that arpeggiating bleepy synth lick in Tom and Jerry which is cut straight from Pharrell's book of tricks.

Tom and Jerry
YES
Sir

Barry Prophet's 'Synthecycletron'. Amazing installation/instrument from Toronto based composer and instrument architect, Barry Prophet. It's basically a pedal-powered synth that allows anyone (up to 4 people) to create improvised music by pedaling and moving their bodies to shape the sounds. Here's his own intro to the work which exhibited in Toronto over the summer and into the fall.
He gives this break down of the title of the piece:

synthesis: Combination, composition, putting together; building up of separate elements esp. of conceptions, propositions or facts, into a connected whole, esp. a theory or system.

cycle: Recurrent period. Cycle per second. One complete wavelength. What is technically a double vibration is conventionally called a vibration, cycle or oscillation.

bicycle: Two wheeled mode of transportation powered by foot or hand crank.

cyclotron: Apparatus for acceleration of charged atomic particles revolving in magnetic field.

Synthecycletron is a site specific pedal powered sound sculpture containing electronic sound components within structures of steel, sheet metal, rattan and wood. The dimensions of the sculpture are approximately 8 ft high with a 14 ft. square foot print. Four stationary bicycles serve as turbines to generate electricity to power synthesizer components housed in a metal tower. The bikes radiate out from the tower to connect with Theremin pedestals which house Theremin synthesizers. When a person pedals a bike, they will generate energy which powers the synthesizer components creating patterns of sounds. When they or someone else wave their hands in front of the Theremin Pedestals, pitch bending electronic sounds are generated from the Theremin synthesizers.
Visitors to the Synthecycletron will be encouraged to pedal and play with sound. From a distance, observers will see people pedaling and waving their arms at the base of something that looks like a wildly painted space ship. What they will hear will be improvised sound art.

Here's an example of the kind of sounds this thing will make:

Field Recordings of the Synthecyclotron

Here's a photo:



I kind of love the dorky 6 year old paint splotch job although if he was really going for a space ship, I think he could have done something a bit more technological seeming. But this is pretty lo fi technology that makes this thing work, I mean it's pedal powered and uses theremins...not that I could put it together or anything. Just sayin...

A kind of tribute here to the late George Brecht, who died Dec 5. One of the primary forces in the Fluxus art movement from the '60s, Brecht started out making chance oriented paintings and print work and then like so many, took a class from John Cage at the new school in experimental music and started making chance music and conceptual scores often with little or no reference to noisemaking whatsoever as a primary condition for music making. In that sense he really pushed the boundaries of what music could be defined as and at the same time opened up art making (along with Naim June Paik and co.) to a praxis of music score oriented work. His work is often modest in its size and use of materials, but has the conceptual punch of other great prankster provocation artists. I posted a couple of his event score pieces that have been really influential for some of the scores I've been working on, as well a video piece called entrance to exit that's about as spare and clean as you can get. It's really refreshing to get back to stuff like this, it reminds you how not to think when you're trying to understand.

Switzerland based band Low Motion Disco put out a dreamy downtempo record over the summer that I'm glad I'm finding midwinter as 08 closes down. God bless end of the year lists (I promise mine before the year is through). "Things are gonna get easier" is a reimagining of "O-o-h Child" for a a blissed out, airy perspective. It's like if you just decided to lay down in the middle of the dance floor: it's not exactly useful and it's a little embarrassing to all your disco friends who are dancing their ass off, but it produces EXTREME relaxation. And I'm all about extremes here people. Let's get sleepy y'all! Apparently Sebastien Tellier did a remix which is probably getting more play than the original. Unfortunately he must have decided that the original was just a little bit too sleepy so he basically cleared room for the vocals and Frenchified the beat and bam, the song loses all mysterious charm. So tough, I posted the original.

Things Are Gonna Get Easier

Hudson Mohawke is a precocious 22 year old kid from Glasgow making beats, soon to come out with his first record on Warp (not a bad start). He belongs with this newish subgenre of music that combines house and techno, early video game music, IDM and glitch, maybe some dubstep and hyphy, and all with sense of a hip-hop beat pushed so loosely on the backbeat that it almost sounds like a drummer making mistakes. The affect of this trait is a kind of humanization of beat programming (something some IDMers, those who weren't attempting to obfuscate the beat so much that it became alienatingly other, were after) in that it approaches the beat more in the way a jazz drummer would. Jazz drummers (or really any drummer with any sense at all) know that where you place your hit, either on top of the beat or behind it, changes everything about how the sense of the rhythm is conveyed. A beat on top pushes the piece forward, drives it, while being behind feels lazy, or halted. The way these beats seem to work (although it's frequent enough that one feels some other type of alchemy involved) is that there's enough going on before the beat as after it, and they 'errors' kind of cancel each other out. But they also call attention to themselves so the process of humanization isn't really that it sounds like a human playing a drum kit (badly), but rather human rebelling against and breaking free of the grid clock of computer programs. Tic toc tic toc boom.
The term that often gets used to talk about this is 'wonky' although the confusing thing is that 'wonky' came about in describing a music really more rooted in techno. It was dudes making techno with rubbery funk bass lines and a steadily shifting beat structure (mostly in London, Glasgow, and to a lesser extent Berlin) that were thought of as 'wonky'. These guys, on the other hand, owe their sense of rhythm and instrumentation to hip-hop - slow stoned tempos, big downbeats, shakers, pitched up high hats, claps, glossy synths and obscured soul samples. In particular, it seems that pretty much everyone (including LA's Flying Lotus and Mike Slott, SF's Lazer Sword, Montreal's Megasoid, and fellow Glaswegian Dustie) references J Dilla often enough that one could pretty safely call him a kind of absent dad unknowingly fathering a sort of freakish offspring from his blend of downtempo, soulful, hip-hop. The thing they share most with him isn't just the self conscious placement of the snare, or the warmth and depth of his mixes, but the underlying sense of a dorkish studio wizard, staying up too late drinking Dr. Pepper and taking bong rips and living a kind of hermetic lifestyle. In that sense, many of these artist's beats feel like an inside joke, or a tangential point in a stoned internal monologue in which the train of thought begins and ends without direct reference to anything except feeling high and happy and kind of dark, but mostly free. In the world of instrumental hip-hop, where the gloomy posturing of Burial marks one overbearing end, and the euphoric pop collage of Girl Talk who shuns any sense of crafting one's own sounds from scratch, marks another exciting but slightly vacuous end, with Prefuse 73 lying somewhere uninspiring for either moody or dance advocates in the middle, this emergence of...I read someone call it 'aquacrunk' but I had to get creative and think of something else and I vote that it start getting called 'thunk' - apparently thunk isn't just a funny way of saying thought (although that's not a bad connection either) but it's a word used in computer programming in order to describe a piece of code used to perform a delayed computation which I find fitting for numerous reasons (see above's discussion of rhythm)...this emergence is as fascinating as it is healthy for the future of hip-hop.
Hud Mo, the diminutive, puts together a banger with "Polkadot Blues", a soul sample squeezed into chipmunk territory, a lopsided but headstrong beat, and a very strong resemblance to a J Dilla production. Heralds of Change's "Spotted" is a glamorous anthem, blinged out bleepy synth, a cowbell hammering out "my drink and my twostep" like the drunk uncle joining in with the wedding band and playing way too loud, and a warm pad and some gauzy bass wrapping everything up in some secret sauce. And Mike Slott's 'Flunky' is a like a etude on this whole scene. I get the weird feeling he's gonna be the next to get heard.

Hudson Mohawke: Polkadot Blues

Heralds of Change (Hudson Mohawke's project with Mike Slott): Spotted

Mike Slott: Flunky