1. Biophilia, Bjork
2. Replica, Oneohtrix Point Never
3. Street Halo EP, Burial
4. Kaputt, Destroyer
5. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver
6. Let England Shake, PJ Harvey
7. Far Side Virtual, James Ferraro
8. Director's Cut / 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush
9. The King of Limbs, Radiohead
10. Eye Contact, Gang Gang Dance
11. Hubble Drums, Hubble
12. Alien Observer, Grouper
W, Planning to Rock
Regifted Light, Baby Dee
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
Channel Pressure, Ford & Lopatin
Demolished Thoughts, Thurston Moore
On the Water, Future Islands
Ravedeath, 1972, Tim Hecker
Chopped & Screwed, Micachu & the Shapes
Hour Logic, Laurel Halo
I have written some excerpts on certain albums and tracks, and will update this post as I see fit
To start, I'd like to share with you a piece about Grouper's "Alien Observer," written by my friend Francisco (aka Motile), and some thoughts on Hubble's LP Hubble Drums
"Alien Observer," Alien Observer, Grouper
by Motile
The audience of “Sleep”, Liz Harrisʼ new transdisciplinary piece, is asked to lie down in
large pillows upon entering the performance space. An outer circle made out of
projection screens will provide faded, distorted and colorless images. Dozens of
walkmans form the inner circle, hours of field recordings conjuring up all the spatial
memories hidden in Grouperʼs catalogue. The goal is to induce a suspension, a
prolonged stay in the edge of falling asleep.
The experience doesnʼt introduce a whole new aspect to Grouperʼs output as much as it
makes it less solitary. That the same relief can be obtained in a room full of strangers
might confirm the music as dealing with a universal theme among its listeners –
countless definitions have been uttered by the press in the past few years to describe it,
from ʻlongingʼ to ʻnostalgiaʼ, or the ʻdrugged-out hazeʼ cliché.
Alien Observer, the first single from this yearʼs double LP A|A, could easily be thrown
into one of these categories, insinuating an unchallenging continuity from the Dragging a
Dead Deer Up a Hill LP (2008). Which, quite frankly, would be the predictable attitude
coming out of the lo-fi skepticism (which can be as ridiculous as the overexcitement over
the genre). Yet the aesthetic parameters that tie her discography together demand this
progression. The circularity between all the elements in “Sleep” coincides with the
movements of her music, sprouting always from the break between the conscious and
the subconscious, new fragments of that void added with each new release.
The specific fragments that concern Alien Observer are a lyrical shift and the
effectiveness of the melody. Past lyrics dealt mostly with a private, intimate space where
childhoodʼs lost dreams come to haunt present situations, both frightening and
melancholic. That closed space refers now to the terrestrial landscape, and itʼs
inescapability becomes the main concern. The hopeless subject is unable to exit the
sphere of itʼs own limits, left with undying memories that she cannot recreate.
Once again, a boundary is imposed between memory and reality, both undeniable and
often undesirable. Itʼs precisely the inability to assume a concrete line of action that
justifies Grouperʼs lo-fi aesthetics – in exploring indecision, the music loses the outlines,
it hovers, suggests through the reverb layers, whispers melodies of a new found
familiarity.
Distrust in the photographic image has led to distrust on perception in general. The
barriers imposed by specific modes of perception wonʼt ever allow a true knowledge, as
it will always be incomplete, subtracted. The amount of fascinating visual artists
distorting images and structures to express the impossibility of a clear and noise-free
message should be taken into consideration when pushing Grouperʼs music to the
amalgam of inconsequential and trendy bedroom music of the past few years. Her use of
reverb and delay remains one of the most coherent projects revealing this impossibility.
As it sets ground, nothing but the vocal harmonies remain, suspended in the last second
before reality captivates it all back into consciousness. The melodic traces becoming the
hymn for a possible breach, one last resource for the ever-so-hoped fresh starts, no
longer shaped by the insistence of memories. You play it again and itʼs now a memory
itself, a circle, a perfect ever fading object.
Hubble Drums, Hubble
Traveling through space, we encounter a spiral galaxy. M81, similar to our own Milky Way, is one of the brightest galaxies that can be seen from Earth. Its spiral arms wind all the way down into the nucleus and are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years, while the central bulge contains older, redder stars. Zooming directly into this red center, we wind up in the midst of the glowing gas ejected by a dying Sun-like star called a planetary nebula. We continue to explore other planetary nebula forms with amazing and confounding shapes. They dance for us, and morph into one another, entrancing and beautiful, inviting reflection on our place in the Universe, tenuous as it is. At the musical, physical, and emotional climax, we confront a light echo, the expanding illumination of a dusty cloud around a star, pulsating along with the music, echoing the grand celestial end, but also foreshadowing an inevitable and shattering re-birth. -Ben Greenberg on his video collaboration with NASA, "Hubble's Hubble"
Been Greenberg's way with guitar is an incredible thing- asymmetrical riffs tightly coiled around each other, bouncing around your brain in sharp, jagged waves- it sounds impossible at times, and there really isn't anything else quite like it. This great talent brought New Slaves, his most recent (and best) album with the incomparable Zs, a nuclear shell of dizzying dissonance and rhythm: his melodic lines, if you can even call them so, are so inconceivable upon first listen that it's hard to keep a straight train of thought. Your mind, your sentences run on. The sounds of cosmic explosions.
With his Hubble project, though, it's as if he's been able to shrink down to the subatomic plane, trace the paths of quarks darting around, and artfully transcribe them to sound. While New Slaves sounds decidedly macro, Hubble Drums sounds unquestionably micro. Each song is structured around a number of repeating cells- riffs as tightly compacted as they can possibly be, many of them barely one second long- that travel great distances by stretching, evenly and unevenly, across space. Each of these small cell-sets of notes are then cycled into larger clusters that also continuously replicate themselves, often with beautiful, delicate variation.
Earlier this year, as part of a grant collaboration with NASA, "Hubble's Hubble" was commissioned to soundtrack continuous images from the actual Hubble Telescope. The complexity of these compositions sets a wonderful tone for stargazing deep into the heart of a distant galaxy, and this audio/visual pairing is one of my favorites this year. For Greenberg, however, this certainly isn't just documentary music: "I’m looking for a cathartic relationship with energetic release in performance. Just getting it out, making myself sweat as much as I can." The somersaults of "Hubble's Hubble," the nervous tension opening "Glass Napkin," and that exhilarating first stomp of a far-off drum midway through "Nude Ghost" are moments as physically arresting as they are mentally. I recently saw Hubble perform a fantastic set in Boston, where the audience sat in a circle at the center of four large speakers positioned in each corner of the room, allowing even the tiniest strike of a string to spin orbits at blistering speeds around your head. It was the perfect setting for Hubble's music- each piece brought crisply into the physical world, given the ability to travel the space on their own. Even without the quadrophonic live setup, Hubble Drums's elegant exploration of physical space (and outer space!) grabbed a great deal of my attention this year- please give it a listen!
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