2008 : 22 "L'effaçage" (excerpt) by Radu Malfatti

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Literally, the erasure, the deletion, the suppression, the annulation, the invalidation, effaçage, effacement, etc. Radu Malfatti L'effaçage (b-boim, 2008) What happens when you erase not just lyrics, melody, solos, harmony, rhythm, but also pitch, notes, technique, tone, touch, and dynamics? Is a piece "music" that is constructed entirely out of a series of bass drum tympani rumbles that arise from and melt into large stretches of silence? Does boredom and extended repetition have a place in music? Can sounds be bland? What happens to the listener and the music between (the) sounds? "In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting." - Peter Schmidt Radu Malfatti has been working with these questions for the better part of two decades, releasing most on his in-house CD-R label, available primarily by emailing him directly. And yet despite this extremely limited niche he works with (visually, think Barrett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Rauschenberg at their most ultra-minimal), he has produced work of some range: works for bass drum (L'effaçage), piano, string quartets, sine waves, saxophones, and string orchestra. "Innovations be damned, it's a boring century." – Morton Feldman Malfatti's possibly dogmatic dedication to an intensely precise and austere soundworld, will strike many as cold, sterile, and moreover, a conceptual dead-end, musical entropy. But for others, it may seem like a needed antidote to the practically overwhelming busyness ("gabbiness" to quote Malfatti himself) of almost all forms of contemporary music. "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." – John Cage See also: Taku Sugimoto– Italia (A Bruit Secret, 2001) —Darren DeMonsi Listen: Radu Malfatti >> " L'effaçage (excerpt) "

2007 : 36 "Intro" by Graham Lambkin

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You move into a new apartment, and you find that the former tenants have left behind a box of old cassettes, they are tattered, with labels peeling, and faded writing, and you put one in the boombox, and press the button hard to place the head firmly on the magnetic tape, and the sounds on it are masked and decrepit and slightly warped, and there is some unidentified classical music which actually sounds nice behind the patina of dust and age, and then there is a sharp garbled transition to another moment, and at some point in the life of the cassette someone tried to tape over it (perhaps accidentally) and you hear on top of the piano and strings and song (which is Shostakovich going about its business) the sounds of laughter and breathing and the pitter-patter movement around the house of a person, a child, a family, a life, along with birds chirping in trees and distorted wind and windchimes hanging from the window over the vase, near the sink with water running and voices, and you wonder what the former tenants were like and what they did for a living and what their life was like, the little gestures, and the bigger movements, and if they were happy living here, and if they were happy. See also: Nmperign & Jason Lescalleet – Love Me Two Times (Intransitive, 2006) —Darren DeMonsi Listen: Graham Lambkin >> "Intro"

2006 : 51 "A Catalogue of Sounds" (excerpt) by Jakob Ullmann

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A dry wind of fine dust particles. Hushed. A forgotten scientific textbook. Railroad clack. Motes. Indeterminate position. Upstairs neighbors rearranging furniture. Rust. Long discrete. Dull thump. Carved in wood. Scratch. Long continuous. Dry temp. A barely legible faded graph. A chart with no key. Flattened. Muffled conversation. Suspended solids. Table. Listen closely. Rustle. Rubbing produces static concentration. Smoke on the horizon. Relationships between unique elements. The bones of animals. Silence. Null columns. Erosion of stone and rock through slow processes. Etched in black. Motionless. A rock with blue scrapes. Sub-micron guest particles. The origin of language. Shutter click. A single index structure quickly degrades as time progresses. Location. Chair groan. Footfalls. Smudged stamp in a passport. Grit. Blurry sepia photographs. A bare branch. Relations between discrete objects. Fonts. Pitch tuning an instrument. Seed. A hierarchy of sounds. A joist where two lines meet. Fingers tapping. Silica. Dial tone. Shells and fossils. Minute. Chalk on your hands. An error in data. A broken fan. A thicket of trees. Boredom. Taking a longview. Decaying matters. Friction. Fallen branch. Amplify and multiply. Logos. Map of Clayoquot. Detrius. Resolution. Shadings of dark lantern shadows. Whimper. Creaky floorboards. Dead stars. Paint chips. Distant sigh. Oxidize. Wet bark. Peeling posters on a public wall. Frayed rope. Scribbled in the margins. A spade sliding in soft earth. Hissing desert wind. Hunger pangs. Grain. Curious buzzing. Bleached kite. Condensation. The outline of fog. Grey patterns in chipped metal. Hieroglyphs. Smell of cardamom. Fragments of brown glass. Calculations. Weeds never uprooted. A violin whispering lost memories in your ear. —Darren DiMonsi Listen: Jakob Ullmann >> "A Catalogue of Sounds" (excerpt)

2005 : 40 "I Can See For Miles " by Petra Haden (covering The Who)

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Petra Haden put together a project where ten women sang The Who Sell Out. They don't just sing the vocal parts, but they sing all the instrumental parts also. It seems like the revenge of the high school choir girls. I had the same reaction to seeing them live as I did to listening to the album: a sense that this technique works really well as a way to adapt one song, but gets old when extended to a whole album, especially The Who Sell Out. Maybe I would have felt differently if they picked a better album, like Who's Next or Who Are You. With that said, I like "I Can See For Miles." This version really breathes new life into the song. They show a connection to the orginal materal and make it new all at the same time. My advice is to listen to this song and forget the rest of the album. —Rich Thomas Listen: Petra Haden >> "I Can See For Miles"

2005 : 13 "The Guilt of Uncomplicated Thoughts" by Brian McBride

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Brian McBride may be better known for his contributions as one half of the drone duo Stars of the Lid, a concern which produced some very excellent work this decade (perhaps most notably The Tired Sounds Of..., from 2002). Still, nothing in their discography adequately prepared me for an album with the impact, consistency, and emotional force of McBride's solo debut, When The Detail Lost Its Freedom. These songs are mostly instrumentals, but they convey a sense of grand sadness, profound yearning, and inconsolable loss more indelibly and expressively than the output of any number of the decade's mopey singer-songwriters. The lack of lyrical content invites speculation—was McBride coming out of a relationship? Was he leaving a place that he loved? Maybe both? Ultimately, however, not knowing gives the music a more universal appeal: it permits us to use these songs as soundtrack to our own woundedness, regardless of cause. This is potent stuff, however, so apply with the utmost caution. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Brian McBride >> "The Guilt of Uncomplicated Thoughts"

2004 : 43 "Burntwood" by Deathprod

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2004 saw the release of a great four-album box set from Rune Grammofon producer Helge Sten, who records under the name "Deathprod." As the moniker suggests, this is music intended to be disquieting: it's mostly monochromatic Norwegian drone, made by grim electronic devices, raggedy violin, and some process of in-studio desecration that Sten refers to as the "audio virus" procedure. Even an adventurous listener might regard the prospect of four discs of this material with some degree of trepidation—but there are real rewards to be had here. Specifically, I'd point to the first four tracks on the Imaginary Songs From Tristan de Cunha disc, a suite of songs posing as field recordings from the remotest place on earth. Weathered and weird, the resulting tunes are finely imagined: they're recognizable as sounds produced by humans but they're alien enough that they can't be associated any existing genre of "music" ("world" or otherwise). Ultimately, they join the short list of great fake-ethnomusicology gags from this decade (a list that only contains one other item: the hilariously phony music that ran over the closing credits of Borat). —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Deathprod >> "Burntwood"

2004 : 38 "Giga Dance" by Deerhoof

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I tend to see things in bad sci-fi terminology; so when I say this song would be great theme music for a villain, take it with a grain of salt. Deerhoof is very often loud and noisy, but rarely as HEAVY as this. This music makes me wanna walk around like a tornado, kicking garbage up and down the street, like I should go to a bar and poison the drinks. If I ever get the chance to tie damsels in distress to railroad tracks while twirling my mustache, this will be my exit music as I'm kicking the hero in the throat. Not music for a bad mood per se, but for a mood to act rotten accordingly. —James Specht Listen: Deerhoof >> "Giga Dance"

2004 : 37 "Exeter Ending" by Food

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I was introduced to this track by the poet (and Aught Music contributor) Eric Burger at one of our "listening parties," and I've been forever grateful. Eric and I both have an interest in the "moves" that pieces of artwork can make, especially those slippery artworks that change from one shape to another. Jazz and improvised musics are great for this purpose, and if asked to produce an example I might point to this piece from Norwegian quartet Food. For its first few minutes it sounds like a soundtrack to the Mesozoic Era: all primordial slime and calls from weird insects. But a few minutes in it's found its way into a strange metallic groove: it's as though a band of automata have emerged from the swamp to thrill the dawning world with funky robotic jazz. And then in its final moments it transforms again, into some kind of squawking contraption: the automata folding up and lifting off into space, perhaps. Watching this piece "move" from the uber-primal to the weirdly futuristic, makes it feel a little bit like you've just spent seven minutes looking out the window of a very nicely designed time machine. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Food >> "Exeter Ending"

2004 : 36 "Where Is the Line" by Bjork

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Before Bjork released Medulla, I used to joke with my friends about starting a techo-pella band. The idea was that we would be creating all the sounds and loops with our voice. While we were joking about this, Bjork was doing it. I am happy that the idea was out in the world instead of just in my little world. The song "Where Is the Line" is perfect for the project. The lyrics are simple, but this is a case of simplicity being the best. The song can be personal or it can be about an artist's ideas. Where is the line in music? Where do you put this song? Is genre important or not? What will you think of this song? What can be done with just a voice? There are lines all over the place and Bjork does a great job playing with those lines. —Rich Thomas Listen: Bjork >> "Where Is The Line"

2004 : 21 "Corkscrew" by Oren Ambarchi

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As a fan of experimental guitar music, there were three artists whose work I followed closely throughout the Aughts: Christian Fennesz, Keith Rowe, and Oren Ambarchi. These players used a variety of unorthodox methods to expand the guitar's atmospheric and textural vocabulary, establishing the instrument's continued relevance to "post-guitar" genres like electronica, ambient music, minimalism, and drone. All three of them were well worth watching—and the 2006 album Four Gentlemen of the Guitar where they jam together with non-guitarist Toshimaru Nakamura is essential—but I wanted to give Ambarchi a post of his own (this blog has already looked at Rowe and Fennesz, after all). And Ambarchi, comparatively, is no slouch: he released a string of great albums in the Aughts, beginning with Suspension (2001) and running up to In The Pendulum's Embrace (2007). The one that really stands out for me, though, is Grapes From The Estate (2004), a collection of four fantastic tracks which showcase Ambarchi at his best. "Corkscrew," the lead track, is like a black leather sofa made by an avant-garde designer: it can be appreciated either intellectually (for the originality and solidity of its structure) or sensually (for its lushness, richness, physical presence). This music is directed, stunningly confident, and highly recommended. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Oren Ambarchi >> "Corkscrew"

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 : 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)"

2003 : 20 "b" by So

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One of my favorite musicians of all time is Markus Popp, aka Oval, who memorably explored the aesthetics of glitch, digital error, and algorithmic noise through a string of excellent albums in the late 1990s (most notably Systemich (1994), Dok (1998), and Szenariodisk (1999)). For most of the Aughts, however, he's been laying low: there's been no release under the Oval name since 2001, and the only other release Popp's been involved with since then is a 2003 collaboration with vocalist Eriko Toyoda, released under the name "So." There are rumors that he's got something new in the works, but if he'd hung it up for good So would be a fitting swan song: it's perhaps the most delicate and affecting of any of the projects he's been involved with. Toyoda's vocals are wispy and fragile, and using them as source material has the effect of tempering Popp's tendency towards fragmentation. The aesthetic of sonic disassembly is still very much at work, but here it feels gentle, tender, maybe even romantic—less at exploding and more at undressing. The result is a vaguely erotic atmosphere of sound, a kind of polymorphous haze, through which we can glimpse mingled elements of men and women, ghosts and machines. A very fine, very beautiful, very human album. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: So >> "b"

2003 : 08 "Form" by Martin Siewert & Martin Brandlmayr

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Martin Siewert acoustic & electric guitars, lap steel, electronics, synthesizers Martin Brandlmayr drums, percussion, vibraphone The West Pier is a pier in Brighton, England that was built in 1866 and destroyed by fire, waves, and wind in 2003. Originally the West Pier had an open deck with only six small ornamental houses of oriental design, two toll houses and glass screens at the pier head to protect visitors from the wind and sun. In 1875 a central bandstand was added. It remained essentially intact for 100 years until 1975, when it was closed off from shore due to safety concerns. After a partial collapse in 2002 due to a winter storm, it caught fire twice in 2003, both times arson was suspected. The first fire came only three months after a walkway connecting the concert hall and pavilion fell into the sea after being battered by storms. During its heyday in the early part of the century, the pier had its own resident orchestra (Elgar conducted it). The theatre presented plays, pantomimes and ballets all year round. New landing stages in 1894 made it possible for steamboats to use the pier as a terminus for travel to France, the Isle of Wight, Bournemouth, Weymouth and Dover. The pier also employed divers and aquatic entertainers. Two noted early West Pier divers were Professor Reddish and Professor Cyril. Professor Cyril was "the great exponent of High, Swedish and Fancy Diving". In May 1912 as he was performing his "sensational bicycle dive" in which he cycled off the end of the pier, he fell sideways and cracked his skull, dying instantaneously. Later, a manacled strongman also dived into the sea on a bicycle, this time his clothes aflame. He later drowned as hundreds of onlookers watched. The last famous West Pier diver was the Great Omani who, during the 60s, performed the "death dive", based on an original Houdini act, which involved jumping into the sea from the pier, hooded, bound and padlocked. The physical decline of The West Pier started with the damage it sustained during the World War II. The pier was closed during the war and large chunks were cut out to prevent it from being used as landing stages by the Germans. In the 60s and 70s, the pier began to fall into decline. Trade ebbed away and visitor numbers declined as the pier's income fell. In the 1970s, it became a popular for recreational fishing, and several greasy spoon cafes opened, complete with cracked teacups. The pier soon fell on hard times, as did most English seaside towns. People started to go abroad more, to exotic places on package holidays. Seaside towns in the postwar period failed and piers failed in consequence. The flames have left just the cast iron and metal skeleton of the derelict pier standing. Begin with a single note, a single flame. References: http://www.mmhistory.org.uk/students/samglen/!past.htm http://www.regencybrighton.com/pier/ See Also: Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann – Schnee (Erstwhile, 2000) —Darren DeMonsi Listen: Martin Siewert & Martin Brandlmayr >> "Form"

2003 : 06 "Mika Rasvaa Maan Sisalla (Part VII)" by Uton

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When trying to describe the one-man Finnish act Uton, I sometimes refer to it as "forest drone." But what the heck does that even mean? Imagine it like this: you're deep within a Finnish forest, surrounded by whatever kind of old-world botany they've got there. Mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns. At dusk, you come upon a dark grove which contains has a weird cairn of slime-coated stones grouped around the base of a metal apparatus, which looks like a set of organ pipes with some kind a crank attached to it. It might be some forgotten European municipal project from the 1960s; it might be three hundred years old. Tough to tell. The crank is badly corroded, but you're still able to turn it. After you've given it one complete revolution, expecting nothing, the pipes tremble, cough out some brackish water, and then start to emit this music. Darkness continues to fall, and all at once the bioluminescent slime coating every surface around you begins to glow. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Uton >> ""Mika Rasvaa Maan Sisalla (Part VII)""

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"

2002 : 45 "Endless Happiness" by Black Dice

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Beaches & Canyons retains its patina in a sonic memory for me. It came to me as a gift from a kind friend who thought I would enjoy it, as a replacement for a limited CD he lost. I would flip through its sides in my studio kind of listening, kind of not, normally preoccupied by something else. Fixing some drawings, making some zines, it wasn’t until the C side that I even really focused. "Endless Happiness" came on caught in a Ashra groove, looping its flute, bass drops and chimes in a familiar kosmiche music way that was entirely its own. Black Dice were familiar to me through the waning days of hardcore in the late 1990s: they seemed to be doing something interesting in comparison to the pallid wash given the genre by emo's emergence, empty tough guy posturing, and boring lectures set to sound by ideologues. Black Dice began as an assault both sonically and physically in a live setting, and this did get carried over in the recorded media; Beaches and Canyons, however, offered little of that repetitive, stabbing, garbled intensity. Instead, it seemed at times more open and more broad, improvised, and sometimes, unfortunately, painfully derivative of a lot of other suitcase-gazers. Stepping back from their impetus and seeing the trail they left behind always made them way more interesting. Make no mistake! Though I began my journey through this 2xLP disengaged, I was halted with "Endless Happiness," its ferocious drumming and blinking electronics; its swelling bass and melancholic melody overtaken by the sea's surf was perfectly hypnotic. I must have listened to this side alone about 10 times the first night I heard it. It finds itself in rotation continually. My attention toward that band hasn't been piqued since drummer Hisham Baroocha departed, but in my opinion this track is a great part of 2002. —Terence Hannum Listen: Black Dice >> "Endless Happiness"

2002 : 29 "Ghost Plants Part VII" by Thuja

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Back in 2002, I picked Thuja's Ghost Plants as my album of the year, and I wrote that it sounded like music composed by a tribe of mutants from the post-apocalyptic future, fiddling with the ruins of our industrial society. The truth of that is embodied nicely in this representative segment (the tracks are all untitled), which jettisons mostly everything about Western song structure and replaces it with little more than ominous electronic oscillations, clattering, grinding, sticks, stones. If you wait for something to "happen" in it you're liable to be disappointed, and yet if you listen to the crenellations and complications of its anti-formal forms with real attention, you will find that they are enormously rich in aesthetic interest, even beauty. Same as anything, I guess, but if that lesson is one that this album can teach then it's well worth the price. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Thuja >> "Ghost Plants Part VII"

2002 : 27 "Insomnia" (excerpt) by Maja Ratkje

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The subculture of "noise music" exploded during the last ten years, producing waves of output so challenging and vast that it's difficult to make even a partial listing of what might be the "best" noise tracks of the decade. That said, I definitely have my favorites, and if I were asked to direct someone to the peculiar pleasures that noise music can provide, I might choose this passage from Maja Ratkje's "Insomnia" (from her fantastically weird album Voice). Its primary sonic element is Ratkje's unnervingly delirious witch-howl, and you can brace yourself for that, but no amount of bracing will really prepare you for the moment that happens about twenty seconds in, when Ratkje's witch-woman abruptly multiplies into an entire armada, which proceeds to flay every living thing on the planet in an orgy of interstellar fury and glee. Terrifying stuff, but also undeniably exhilarating, and (if I'm to be completely honest) more than a little bit sexy. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Maja Ratkje >> "Insomnia (excerpt)"

2002 : 12 "Azure For Beginners" by Mike Adcock and Clive Bell

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World Music is a phrase that comes loaded with different connotations. For some it means any non-Western music. For others, it means intercultural "fusion" experiments, often involving musicians and instruments of different backgrounds, and smoothed over with pop beats and dance electronica. Graceland and Enya. Sleep It Off (Emanem, 2002) is not a World Music disk according to either of those definitions. Mike Adcock and Clive Bell are improvisers from the European scene, specifically London. For much of the past 25 years, European free improvisers have sought to expand the color palette of traditional jazz instruments, like the saxophone, drum kit, and trumpet by employing "extended techniques" such as playing inside the piano with mallets, scraping drum skins with bows, and breathing through the mouthpiece of the trumpet, to create textures and sounds beyond the standard tonal spectrum. On this recording Bell and Adcock play "ethnic" free reed instruments, as well as prepared piano, Indian harmonium, the khene, and pi saw in a series of doppelganger duets. However the untraditional, extended ways they play them highlight the unusual textures (to Western ears), timbres, and microtones of these instruments. What happens when you have skilled improvisers play non-Western instruments in non-traditional ways? Musical tourism, or worse, imperialism? Westerners "going" native? Perhaps musicians simply using whatever materials are on hand to create a fragile and sensitively sketched recording? The moments of wondrous discovery and sublime juxtaposition that occur throughout this album erase any doubt about its worth. See also: Gul 3 – Singlar 2005 (Headspin, 2005) —Darren DeMonsi Listen: Mike Adcock and Clive Bell >> "Azure For Beginners"