PondaBlog

once again, a year has passed – and once again i seem to be the last saddo on earth putting forward his best-of-the-year list. what is it with all of these type-A personalities, anyways?

two things stuck out for me this year, and one of those was the continued ascendance of bass music in its myriad guises. no doubt, there’s been some fantastic listening that’s come out as a result – just check out some of my picks below. but as bass has infiltrated more nooks and crannies, and populated seemingly every other mix and podcast on the Interweb, there’s also been a flattening effect – to the point that “bass music” has entered the realm of the generic.

on a more personal level, 2011 was the year of the drift for pondablog. for whatever reason, i found myself increasingly seduced by the drawn out, the meditative, the soundscapes that lingered and looped and didn’t rush to endpoints. much of this tendency is reflected in my picks below – which appear, by the way, in no particular order.

 

James Blake – self-titled
Wasn’t quite sure what to expect from mr. blake’s debut. The earlier singles sounded fantastic, but i’d also come across rumours that the alb was going to be a bit of a soulboy thing – think style council with sub-bass. Thank the lords, that disturbing premonition was not to be; something much more spectral showers the listener. Blake undresses dubstep, takes the exolskeleton and concocts a weird, enthralling world. “I never learnt to share” was one of 2011’s most divisive songs, and one of the most astonishing.  Start with the lyric: “my brother and my sister don’t speak to me – but i don’t blame them…” it sounds ridiculously trite, it is ridiculously trite, a teenage confessorial bathed in martyr syndrome. but the song builds…and builds…and builds…all the while imbued by blake’s emptied falsetto and glowing baroque keyboards and, when it hits, a soul-shredding bassline that transforms the triteness into brilliant, black psychodrama. it’s followed by the sublime “lindisfarne I” and “lindisfarne II,” a  ghostly, playful, poignant duet that floats like John Martyn on ether. and beats. What makes this all the more impressive is the fact that blake is barely into adulthood. He turned 23 the night i saw him this past fall in Vancouver (a fab show, by the way). May he plumb depths and scale heights for many more moons to come, haters be damned.

Tim hecker – ravedeath, 1972

In which Vancouver-born tim hecker takes music written in montreal and Banff, hops on a plane, lands in Iceland and records a minimal-maximal masterpiece in a Reykjavik church. On a pipe organ. And the result is, well, magnificent. Hecker’s soundworld moves from ambient power drones to hypnotic, haunted motifs that float and dissipate like smoke in the air. 

Liturgy – aesthetica

At the very least, you’ve gotta tip your charred fedora to Liturgy – any band that can make intellectually challenged metalheads wet their beds in impotent rage is a more-than-welcome development. There was a whole lotta talking/moaning/whinging/finger-pointing that accompanied the release of Aesthetica – so much so that the music was often overshadowed by occasionally amusing and typically banal bombast.

That said, liturgy presents some pretty interesting talking points. They’re a quartet of young ‘uns from Brooklyn who look more scruffy indie urchins rather than corpse-painted scandos from the bowels of beelzebub. Aesthetica was also a coup for thrill jockey, a label that’s more associated with outre rock and electronica than it is with black metal histrionics.

On guitar is Bernard Gann, son of Kyle Gann, the erstwhile new music crit for the Village Voice. Then there’s the sadly departed Greg Fox, a titan on drums. And of course, there’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (yep, his real name), a theory-ridden metal aesthete who cites Xenaxis as an influence and wrote a magnum opus entitled transcendental black metal: a vision of apocalyptic humanism.

and yeah, the music’s pretty fantastic too – an ecstatic, roiling mass of momentum that melds extreme moves with a sense of metallic minimalism that brings to mind guitar eggheads such as glenn branca. hell, you know an album that credits current 93′s “great black time” ain’t gonna be some cookie cutter carnage. the stunner that really won me over is “generation,” an instrumental that sets the controls straight for the heart of the blackened sun, powered by Steve Reichian repitition and sheer force.

Destroyer – Kaputt

This one was a grower. At first, its moves seemed a bit too rich – cloying. But the more i listened, the more the silky grooves sank in, accompanied by a whole host of memories. Eno, Roxy, Bowie, Steely Dan. But more than all of those – and thanks to my better half’s astute ear – Al Stewart. The latter’s year of the cat has a special resonance for me, an album that sank into my consciousness due to my older brother playing out its grooves in a basement bedroom. Kaputt’s bruised yet beautiful offerings aren’t mere homage though – the prolific Dan Bejar inserts his own unique brand of ambience, melody and elegant weirdness, all infused with an anglo-pop yearning. As Bejar croons, “sounds, smash hits, melody maker, NME, all sound like a dream to me.” sounds like a dream, indeed.

Four Tet – Fabriclive 59

i’ve said it before, i’ll say it again: kieran hebden is, well, kind of a genius. he’s made enthralling electronica for years, including last year’s sublime there is love in you, which made my best o’ the year list. he’s put out albums with left-field jazzbos such as steve reid and mats gustaffson. and he’s responsible for fabriclive 59, a stormer of a mix dedicated to the halcyon sounds of prime UK garage/2 step that’s interspersed with live snippets from the crowd at legendary london club fabric.

the offerings are gloriously varied, merging current tracks with long-unearthed gems, and bringing unusual suspects such as caribou and ricardo villalobos into the mix. for me, the pinnacle takes shape about halfway through, when the spectral ambient tones of stl’s “dark energy” morph into the brutalized bass of “percussions one,” the messed-up machine brilliance of c++’s “angie’s fucked” and burial’s epic “street halo.”  fabriclive 59 floats like a butterfly and stings like a sizzle, and it feels and sounds ecstatic the whole time. so thank  you, kieran, once again. and kudos to fabric for continuing to put out fantastic documents of UK bass culture (see my next top 10 below).

Girls – father, son, holy ghost

the bruised pop of girls’ debut album (called, er, album) hooked me, and frontman christopher owens’s story deepened my interest. a former child member of the children of god cult, owens is a fucked-up peter pan character who comes across as brutally honest in songcraft and in print. as he told pitchfork earlier this year, “I struggle with an addiction to serious, very heavy opiates. Getting rid of this shit is literally the worst hell you can imagine. I don’t know why I always go back to it, but I do.” yet there’s also a weirdly obsessive upside, if you can call it that, to this struggle: “It fuels the music in a very serious way. It allows you to focus on one thing - I can pinpoint an idea or an emotion while very heavily medicated, which is how I write most of my songs. This is a reoccurring theme.”

not the healthiest approach, perhaps – but it’s certainly one that has reaped some sublime moments, especially on father, son, holy ghost. the album begins with “honey bunny,” a beach-boysesque paean to rejection of the female persuasion: “they don’t like my bony body/they don’t like my dirty hair,” etc. so far, so girls. but then “Alex” comes along – a melancholy, resigned beauty of a tune with a honeyed lick that channels fleetwood mac circa rumours (yep, it’s that good). elsewhere, the band rawk out on the happily titled “die” and “vomit,” whilst “my ma,” “just a song” and the epic “love like a river” breach the depths in a way that signals, dare i say it, a maturing voice. father, son, holy ghost is the sound of girls becoming (damaged) men.

Timber timbre – creep on creepin’ on

Are they from Vancouver?  Toronto? Montreal? I dunno. Apparently all three. But i do know that this canuckian outfit turned out a gem of an album this year, a subdued soliloquy bathed in gothic blues that goes down like narco-laden cough syrup. Their live show was ace as well – the players seated in a hushed atmosphere, drenched in blood-red lighting, lulling an entranced audience. 

Earth – Angels of darkness, demons of light

earth used to be the heaviest band on, er, earth. that’s not the case anymore, but it hasn’t stopped dylan carlson and co. (this time including perennial washington muso karl blau on bass) from composing spaghetti-western quasi-metal that marinates your brain like mushroom molasses. it’s a luxurious development, and one that first found its footing on 2008′s the bees made honey in the lion’s skull.

Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer - Re: ECM

nothing else that came out this year made me listen as intently and deeply as Re: ECM. A concept alb of sorts, the two-disc offering features left-field electronic auteurs ricardo villalobos and max loderbauer dipping into the revered ECM catalogue and re-interpreting the vast spatial sounds that have characterized the label’s free-floating and gorgeous output over the decades (you can read more about the project in an earlier pondablog post).

another aspect that’s intriguing is the duo’s choice of working material. many of the artists whose tracks they interact with hail from ECM”S more esoteric realms (Benny Maupin, Miroslav Vitous, the Christian Wallumrod Ensemble). the aim, if i may paraphrase, is to merge two sound worlds: the acoustic and the electronic. and Re: ECM does this beautifully. this is music that unfurls, the sound of exquisite particle physics, a tactile and emotional experience that resulted in some of the most seductive and truly haunting sounds to surface in 2011 (“Resvete” and “Retikhiy” (Alexander Knaifel), ”Rekondaktion” (Arvo Part)). i’ll leave the final words to villalobos and loderbauer, as quoted in the liner notes: “the most important thing is to harmonize these two worlds, without them aspiring to mutually deactivate each other, to keep both – the organic and the electronic – in balance. That is what it will be about in the future.”

Oneida – Absolute II

Absolute II appeared this year as the final album in a triptych from this Brooklyn outfit that includes 2008′s Preteen Weaponry and 2009′s Rated O. I haven’t heard the former, but the latter’s sprawling dubbed-out psychedelia, spread over three(!) albums, blew my mind (and made pondablog’s very first post to boot).

that said, if there is a connection between the second and third albs, i’d be danged to figure out what it is – other than a love of sound in its many guises and a spirit of addictive experimentalism. Absolute II is an electronic suite of four mesmerizing tracks, with nary a vocal – other than some heavily processed voicings that surface on the monumental “horizon,” only to be overcome by an airplane-engine drone and a pulsing motorik rhythm. if that sounds friggin’ awesome, well, it is. the rest of the album follows a similar electro-damaged template, with “grey area” evoking the abstract abysses of sunn o)))  or demdike stare. file this one under weirdly, wonderfully perplexing.  

 

10 more for 2011

Six organs of admittance – asleep on the floodplain

Wolves in the throne room – celestial lineage

SubRosa – no help for the mighty ones

The field – looping state of mind

Thurston moore – demolished thoughts

pearson sound/ramadan man - fabriclive 56

master musicians of bukkake – totem one

washed out – within and without

Zomby – Dedication

Panda Bear – tom boy

 

Mixes

Haxan cloak – fact mix

Maya jane coles – resident advisor mix

kryptic minds – fact mix

traversable wormhole – Resident Advisor mix

Justin broadrick – fact mix

2 bad mice – fact mix

Ben ufo – never been to blue note mix

Keith worthy – mnml ssgs mix

T Williams – xlr8r mix

Planningtorock – Resident Advisor mix

ikonika – summer mix

 

Finds

His name is alive – sweet earth flower: a tribute to Marion Brown

Riddim Box: excursions in the UK funky underground

Oren ambarchi – persona

windy + carl – drawing of sound

Swans – children of god

throbbing gristle – 20 jazz funk greats

miles davis – on the corner

main – Hz

can – monster movie

Six organs of admittance – self-titled

KTL – self-titled

Spectral Sound Vol. 1

Tog (inca ore and grouper) – self-titled

find o’ the year – a young person’s guide to Phill Niblock. two CDs, one dollar, rescued from a bargain bin buried in the jewel of vancouver (aka kingsgate mall).

 

Gigs

Kode9

Ikonika

Silkie/Addison Groove

Veryan Weston and Trevor Watts

Swans

Thurston Moore

Bumbershoot – the whole freakin’ thing

Gang gang dance

Tune-yards

Oren Ambarchi

Theo Parrish

The field

 

most disturbing trend of 2011

the “new americana”

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most disturbing trend of 2012

the horrific reanimation of guided by voices

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that’s it, 2011. peace oot.

dedicated to my little buddy Simon.