2006 : 19 "Morning Tones" by M. Rösner

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It's easier than ever to be a completist. The Internet makes it easy to track down a band's complete discography, and digital distribution hubs like the iTunes Music Store make it easy to cherry-pick far-flung tracks from B-sides, undesirable soundtracks, or weird compilations. But the completist bug never really bit me. There are lots of artists that I like, but no artist that I like with such intensity that I've felt compelled to track down everything they ever released. I did, however, feel glimmers of that completist feeling in my relationship to a record label in the mid-Aughts, specifically Apestaartje, a Brooklyn-based electroacoustic label with an unweildy name (I'm still not sure how it's pronounced). Apestaartje's release history began in 1998, and by 2006 they were essentially my favorite label: I owned most (but not all) of their back catalog, and I would unquestioningly purchase any new record that they released. M. Rösner's Morning Tones appears to be the label's final release (it came out in 2006 and nothing new has appeared since). Inasmuch as there can be a fitting way to close up shop, this album is it: it encapsulates everything that the label does well. Specifically: it arranges sounds that are clearly made by computers (sustained drones and busy chattering) next to sounds made by what I consider the most lovely of the acoustic instruments (acoustic guitar, piano, violin, and what may be an accordion). Specifically: it is minimalist, delicate, vaguely pastoral, a little bit sad. Even the title works as something of a small manifesto for the label, in the way that it uses the humble everyday beauty suggested by the adjective morning to humanize the slightly cerebral and abstract noun tones. I’m sad to see the label disappear, and sad to feel my nascent completist impulse come to an end, but every morning I wake to a playlist that contains most of the Apestaartje records, and I can confirm that they make a very satisfying set of morning tones indeed. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: M. Rösner >> "Morning Tones" PS: As I wrote this post, I used time-lapse screen capturing software to record my writing process. It may entertain some of you to see the thing claw its way into sense:

2005 : 56 "Gesine [Part IV]" by Giuseppe Ielasi

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In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, essayist and novelist David Foster Wallace presented the budding grownups with a question. How do you react when, in the context of a generally shitty day, you're at the supermarket and the place is packed with hideous shoppers, the muzak is denatured to the point that it shrivels your inner life on the spot, and the line is long, the injunction to have a nice day insincere, and your shopping cart has one super-cranky wheel that leaves black marks all over the floor? Most of us, of course, just get miserable and bitter. But DFW, in his wisdom, argues that this is where a real education comes into play. We all get to decide what has meaning and what doesn't. We don't have to be miserable in the checkout line. We all have the option of saying that everyday hellish moments are—in a very real way—not about us. In such situations, this enlightened approach can empower any of us to crack a joke or smile for real at the woman behind the counter. But that isn't always so easy. So when I have a day that's just garbage and gets me feeling down and a little sinister (and, unfortunately, I've had a few recently) I often turn to art (music and poetry especially) that's open in form, open in content—art uninterested in pushing me into feeling sad about the dead horsey, or okay about my undying interest in having big sexy blue eyes trained in my direction. When an artist hasn't made easy assumptions about my inner life, recognizes that I often don't want an answer or an escape, I can be moved strangely, lifted, rejuvenated. Bring on the supermarket! This kind of art is my route to knowing, in my heart, that what DFW says about choice is true and it matters tremendously. Guitarist and electronic musician Giuseppe Ielasi's 2005 album Gesine is one that brings me back into the realm of the emotionally capable. It's short (31 minutes long) but, in the vein of most instrumental electro-acoustic work, Gesine feels expansive. The album is also a study in contrasts: background versus foreground. The background, pretty much throughout, is composed of deliberately haphazard percussion and grinding static/feedback sounds, but the leading tone is that of Ielasi's acoustic guitar, front and center on most tracks. It's a complex tone, but mostly it's comforting. Ielasi draws on both the grounded blues-folk feel of John Fahey and Bert Jansch, and the silky, bright feel of Jim O'Rourke's playing on albums like Halfway to a Threeway and Eureka. Overall, Gesine does extremely well what a lot of electro-acoustic albums do pretty well: it allows the listener to get close to each piece as an aesthetic object/architecture. The stripped-down and roomy quality of the tracks, coupled with their self-possession, invites one to make genuine contact with their textures. Come on in. It's okay. You can let your guard down. Whitney Houston will not always love you here. Gesine, for me, is a good route back to generosity—so I can handle with dignity Sharon Stone's cellulite broadcast via tabloid cover. So I can chit-chat amicably with the bagger mashing my sesame seed rolls with the Drano. —Eric Burger Listen: Giuseppe Ielasi >> "Gesine [Part IV]"

2003 : 44-45 Two tracks from The Civil War by Matmos

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So around the time this blog first turned its attention to 2003, my sometimes-collaborator Laura Janine Mintz and I exchanged a few e-mails about doing a joint write-up on Matmos' The Civil War. We set up a collaborative Google document into which to post various fragments of commentary, with the idea that we'd somehow shape it into a finished product somewhere down the line. We never quite managed to finish this. A bit of a shame, really: it would have reflected nicely upon the record, which, made by partners / lovers M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, is as fine a piece of harmonious musical collaboration as this decade has to offer. Or is it? The album intially seems like an extended comment on life in contemporary polarized America—due in part to its sonic emphasis on militaristic sounds such as marches (listen, for example, to the album's opener, "Regicide") and due in part to the timing of its release (three years into the Bush presidency). But then you have Daniel himself claiming, in The Wire, that the album was at least partially inspired by "the domestic civil war between us as boyfriends and bandmates." So perhaps the creative dysfunction that de-engineered our fledgling roundtable was the more appropriate homage? Entropy saluting entropy? This is, after all, a band who has acknowledged a criticism that "all our songs are essentially the same: they start out with an orderly grid or set of patterns and then they fall apart and unravel." But The Civil War builds things back up as much as it tears them down. Look, for instance, at "Reconstruction," which begins with "a noisy, chaotic section" and then resolves into "a very tranquil, melodic end." I include it here not only to make a point about creative processes but also to do justice to a statement by Laura, salvaged from our broken-down notes, where she says "This album is one of the best examples of an albumy album that I can think of. Sure, you can listen to one track, but you can't understand any of them without listening to all of them, and all hang together superbly without really sounding very much alike, apart from the endless beat of the march." —Jeremy Bushnell (and Laura Janine Mintz) Listen: Matmos >> "Regicide" | "Reconstruction"

2003 : 1-2 Aught Music Roundtable: The Lemon of Pink by The Books

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Roundtable Part One: "The Lemon of Pink" Okay, so lots of bands use samples, snippets of movie dialogue, etc. in their music, but very few are able to do really interesting things with this material and surprise me during the act of listening. Songs with poorly used samples get old, fast. But in 2003, when The Books released The Lemon of Pink, they were firing on all four cylinders. This album combines conversational samples and repeated phrases with a strongly organic sound that includes acoustic instruments and simple melodies. The overall effect is that of finding faded photographs in the attic; the sense that you have stumbled upon an intensely personal history that transmits a message more about everyday life and less about historical relevance. When, at the end of the title track, a woman wearily sings "We went through hell... all is well," you believe her. —Nancy Pokrywka Roundtable Part Two: "That Right Ain't Shit" Jeremy gave me a copy of this album. I find the songs to be fascinating. I am usually a lyrics guy. I like to know what someone is singing about. I want to know what this song is trying to say to me. "That Right Ain't Shit" makes it easy for me to forget that need. There is something about how the song is put together. At some points it is choppy and dissident. At other points it is flowing and moving. I like how those two styles play off each other in the same song. It really appealed to me in 2003. It seemed to be like how my life was going. —Rich Thomas Roundtable Part Three: "PS" Thinking about mixtapes again. Back in the days when my mixtapes were actually tapes, I took obsessive pleasure in making sure that the mix "fit" precisely in the alloted space. No cutting songs off in the middle. No long stretches of emptiness that the recipient would need to fast-forward through before reaching the end of the side. It had to be perfect: if there was more than say, a minute of blank space left over, then there was room to fit in another song. Over time I developed pretty good mental repetoire of short songs, but I had also collected a library of other interesting fragments that could serve the same purpose: snippets of movie dialogue, sound effects, snatches of poetry, little pieces of radio dada, whatever. I made a couple of mixes on audio tape in 2002 (I still have my roadtrip mix from that year) but by 2003 I think I'd switched to making mixes on CD-Rs for good. Which is kind of a shame, because "PS" from The Lemon of Pink would have made a great mix-ender. It lasts for fifty-six seconds and it's not a song. It may once have been a fairly tender conversation, but the guys in the Books edited it down and then edited it down again until only uncomfortable interstitial bits remain—false starts, baffled laughter. In its final form, it's a model of yearning. It's a pure balance of the initmate and the awkward. And if that doesn't describe every single mixtape I ever made, then my name's not... —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: The Books >> "The Lemon of Pink" | "That Right Ain't Shit" | "PS"