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]"

2004 : 39 "Game VI" by Motion Trio

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In 2000, the announcer of Krakow's prestigious Penderecki International Competition of Contemporary Music asked the members of Motion Trio, jokingly, if they were on their way to perform at a wedding party. This makes perfect sense if you know that Motion Trio is an accordion trio. Well, this accordion trio proceeded to take the "Grand Prix" in the competition and, in the process, establish the accordion as a serious instrument for 21st century composition, one for much more than weddings, ethnic food festivals, and reliving the Eastern Europe of 65 years ago. As the group;s primary composer Janusz Wojtarowicz puts it, "Accordion traditionalists have run out of ideas, and it is our goal to extract notes from the accordion which have never been heard before...." Using the bellows, keys, and buttons in triplicate, Motion Trio does just that on Live in Vienna. Surprising sounds abound—from didgeridoo-ish lower register rumbling to sweet sustained notes reminiscent of the conch. The most engaging way the trio (the other members are Pawel Baranek and Marcin Galazyn) expands the possibilities for the accordion is by layering timbres and repeating motifs—much as we hear in contemporary electronic music—in pieces that consistently highlight the "in motion" properties of the bellows-propelled instrument. Imagine buzzing along in a slight European coupe through a countryside of winding, narrow roads, past picture-perfect little doppelganger towns, and you have a sense of the energy of this music. Great stuff for a Sunday drive, one a little on the dangerous side and with some fine vistas. And in Bavaria, of course! Occasionally, the trio builds tension in predictable ways—think of a jam band "surprising" you with yet another full-step rise on a terraced ascent, or a Hollywood movie's soundtrack kicking into overdrive (mostly by just getting louder) during some climactic battle. But this is a minor gripe. These guys are oddball and ambitious and a lot of fun. If you've ever looked at the zillion buttons and keys on an accordion and wondered what peculiar sounds might be squeezed out of that squeezebox, please check out Live in Vienna. The track here is "Game VI." —Eric Burger Listen: Motion Trio >> "Game VI"

2003 : 29 "Cathnor" by Keith Rowe and John Tilbury

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One of the pleasures of Keith Rowe and John Tilbury's Duos for Doris is that we're invited to understand the double-album (comprised of three long, fully-improvised duets) through the situation surrounding its recording. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote that the universe is composed of stories, not atoms. I buy it. Or, at least, I buy that narrative-making is pretty high in the hierarchy of cognitive devices that make up subjectivity. But narrative-making is a double-edged sword for me when it comes to music appreciation. In my experience, the impulse to frame through story is irrepressible and automatic—like a Netflix pop-up. And sometimes it's almost as irritating as a pop-up. For instance, while I'm listening to my favorite recording of Beethoven's 9th—conducted by Furtwängler and performed by the Berlin Philharmonic during WWII—Nazis often crop up in my head. And it isn’t just generic Nazis—whatever those might be—it's usually baby-faced Nazi soldiers sitting in the audience in full regalia, scared straight by the paranoia & tenderness of the 4th movement, weeping at the full weight of their sins. Then one begins to slide his armband off involuntarily. And so on. Can I just get back to the music please??? But with Duos for Doris, framing the soundscape through narrative is encouraged as a way of getting closer to it; given my habits of mind, this pleases me immensely! The album is dedicated to John Tilbury's 96-year-old mother Doris, who, according to the inscription on the album cover, passed away two days before the recording session. Consequently, hearing Tilbury's Feldman-esque piano improvisation as an attempt to address his feelings on the passing of his mother, and honor her in the process, is better than acceptable—it's probably expected. The album is called Duos for Doris after all. Additionally, Keith Rowe (guitar/electronics) makes it clear in the album notes that his sense of musical space during the session was highly influenced by Doris' passing and his close relationship with John. So, the framing story is the passing of Doris and the musicians’ feelings about it. Understood in that context, it's quite moving to me how unsentimental Duos for Doris is. The album could be kitschy and fond; the story could be "devoted son expresses feelings for dear sweet mum," or "I’ll see you soon in the glorious dove-white kingdom of heaven." Instead, Tilbury and Rowe honor Doris with probing, pained, slowly unfolding pieces that come across as honest explorations of fundamentally perplexing and new terrain. What is this like? What do we see here? Feel here so soon after she left us? Of course, it's Tilbury's mother that died, and knowing that transforms his clean touch, in places, into a form of contact with Doris. It also transforms Rowe's detached wintry sheets of static into a kind of sophisticated caress. He keeps his distance, providing support by giving Tilbury the space he needs. And Tilbury takes it—there are long stretches of nearly quiet, meditative space on this double-album. Reviewers like David Toop and Brian Olewnick see overwhelming restraint in these stretches. I do hear restraint in them, a holding back, but mostly I hear their glacial tempo and spareness differently, more as a kind of intense, watchful, carefulness born of exploration in an emotional landscape that is shockingly new to Tilbury and Rowe, musicians who have played together since 1965 (since 1981 in the avant-garde ensemble AMM). They know each other so well... and yet here Tilbury and Rowe find themselves in a new place, one of anger and loss, heat and tremendous hollowness, Doris and John, Keith and John, excitement at the newness of it, sadness at the newness of it, and relief that they’re here together. This album is heartfelt and honest and, yes, a little bit strange—in the way all good eulogies are. It brings loss alive. The excerpt here is from "Cathnor," the first piece on Duos for Doris. —Eric Burger Listen: Keith Rowe and John Tilbury >> "Cathnor (excerpt)"

2002 : 14 "Naera Grensen" by Atomic

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It's fitting that Scandinavian jazz quintet Atomic named Feet Music, their debut album, after an Ornette Coleman composition. One of the fundaments of Coleman's musical philosophy called harmolodics is that harmony, melody, rhythm, tempo, silence, et al., should receive equal emphasis in a piece. This allows the harmolodic composer to get around some traditional modes in song writing—for instance, laboriously mapping out chord patterns—and it requires jazz musicians improvising harmolodically to pay serious attention. They need to be open to a wide array of options for improvisation at any given moment, open to the other musicians in the group bringing unexpected ideas into the mix, and, ideally, this produces a broader range of sounds and more surprising interplay. Though Atomic sounds little like Ornette and isn't harmolodically doctrinaire—if that’s even possible (the theory seems to change every year)—the band is made up of unique "options aware" composers, and their attention to each other when improvising is simply awe-inspiring. Many of the pieces on Feet Music wed the improvisational thrust of Energy (or Fire) Music—born in the '60s of avant-garde greats like Albert Ayler and Charles Gayle—with skillful, yet quirky, scripted passages reminiscent of so-called "European" American composers like Steve Lacy and George Russell. The first track on the album, "Naera Grensen," is a good example of this. It opens with each member of the band (save drummer Paal Nilssen-Love) playing a short take on a phrase. Directly following that, these takes get loosely incorporated into a complicated, but graceful, little horn arrangement. The piece peaks with inspired improvisation by Håvard Wiik on the keys, whose seemingly extrasensory connection with Nilssen-Love is especially gratifying. Feet Music isn't perfect—some of the later tracks (especially "El Coto") are derivative of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra—but I'm okay with that. It's a first album, after all. Feet Music is an impressive debut. —Eric Burger Listen: Atomic >> "Naera Grensen"

2001 : 27 "Endless Summer" by Fennesz

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Bruce Brown's 1966 surf documentary The Endless Summer opens with shots of a golden-orange sunset sparkling in the ocean's shifting striations. If I watch the first few minutes of Brown's documentary and then pop Christian Fennesz’s much-lauded 2001 album Endless Summer into the CD player, skip to track 2 (yeah, titled "Endless Summer"), and close my eyes, it's like that seascape has been translated into sound texture. A weave of warm digitally enhanced sounds glides over and through a temperate cycle of guitar chords. Sonic pulses thread through the mix, sometimes getting redirected, much as, I imagine, wave pulses or currents do in the ocean. This piece and the album as a whole (the album is named after Brown's documentary) consistently evoke both the complex waves-and-currents properties of the biggest thing on Earth and also that well-known Beach Boys-esque California-Edenic take on the ocean: it's the essential component of beach paradise and don't you worry, it wouldn't dare drown your daughter or stir up a storm so crass it smites your whole town. The sea giveth, and it does so with a smile. Period. At its most moving, for me, Endless Summer brings the idealized and the real into the same space. Fennesz's album suggests, as Brown's documentary does, that the perfect wave is actually out there in the real-as-rocks world, waiting for a rider. If you happen to be in the right place—it's South Africa's Cape St. Francis in Brown’s documentary—and it's the right time, you can live the synergy between real and ideal. Hell, you can ride it. Whatever you want. In this sense, I find the album incredibly affirming. Additionally, I'm impressed by the way Fennesz keeps the album from devolving into sentimental fetishizing of "golden moments on the beach," etc. Artfully setting the real and ideal in conversation goes a long way toward accomplishing this, but Fennesz also truncates the blissful arrivals on the album and—perhaps most importantly—almost always emphasizes a counterweight wistful quality, the same one that drives the best Beach Boys ballads, like "Surfer Girl" and "Caroline No." Indeed, Fennesz's album is typically discussed as a paean to the Beach Boys, rather than through connections to Brown’s documentary. The Beach Boys, of course, accomplish wistfulness with aching harmonies and lyrics about what could have been or should be (though we know it won't). Fennesz accomplishes his own gently melancholic, peering-longingly-at-something-so-pure-it-hurts quality by running lovely, modest melodic lines behind gauzy screens of digitized noise. He, time after time, track after almost every track, distances the listener from the beauty—suggesting that paradise isolated and (mostly) unattainable just might be richer for our yearning. And herein lies the central tonic quality of the album: paradise lost, paradise gained, and even paradise watched from across a busy street because you’re stuck behind a desk each carry the potential for redemptive, rich experience. Endless Summer really is the rare artistic document that deserves all the critical praise that's been heaped on it—and it's been plenty. If you've ever lived near the ocean or had a really good day or wanted to be somewhere else—okay, have I covered everyone?—you need to hear this album. —Eric Burger Listen: Fennesz >> "Endless Summer"

2000 : 23 "The Koln Konzert," by Vert (covering Keith Jarrett)

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For those unfamiliar with Keith Jarrett's solo piano performances, here's what you need to know: one man, one piano, a packed house—a date with genius, or not. Some of Jarrett's solo improvisatory performances are monuments to how a virtuoso bent on self-exploration can startle an audience into rapture and recognition (The Köln Concert, Vienna Concert), while some are monuments to how said virtuoso might never pass through fertile terrain on the journey (Paris Concert). What interests me about them is that—unlike Vert's stellar glitch interpretation/deconstruction/celebration of Jarrett's renowned '75 Köln concert—the solo performances exhibit a familiar (and comforting, I must say) orientation toward the self: we're repositories for discovery, 99% pure at the core, if not completely knowable then at least available where it counts if the vision-quest is vigorous enough. Very '70s, very Romantic—and not bad at all in my estimation. But Vert's The Köln Konzert takes Jarrett into the 21st century. And though it's less searching and dramatic, it's no less triumphant. Whereas Jarrett's tendency in the solo performances is to vamp for an extended period over one or two repeated chords until something clicks and he takes off in a flurry of improvisation, Vert, in his own solo Köln concert (FYI, performed in a Köln bar) isolates and simplifies critical Jarrett motifs, blends them with the requisite digital whirrs and glimmers of the genre...and produces entrancing music. The piece gets its power from the way Vert plays on the listener’s memory of Jarrett's Köln. Recognizable fragments drift into focus, sometimes disappear too quickly, sometimes get stuck and repeat. Vert's Köln also conjures a 21st century vision of mind-space, which makes it good fodder for this Y2K retrospective and an interesting contrast with its muse: the piece is full of floating debris, the partially glimpsed—and a few really important themes Vert won't let go of no matter what. This is why, when the primary theme from Jarrett's composition emerges cleanly at the end of Vert's, free of blips and sonic mirages, I tear up if I'm listening—rather than having one of my ADD moments. Vert plays it on something that sounds like a glockenspiel and the theme—impelled and yearning in the original, though fragile—is tender here, as if it survived the storm by getting smaller, like a Key Deer. It suggests to me that the core humanist ideals of the '70s—and our essential memories—haven't been obliterated by the march of time, they've just changed. Not bad at all. —Eric Burger Listen: Vert >> "The Köln Konzert: Part Five"