Plus it's just so different from his earlier records, which are just as short but sound more like early SST stuff. Who knew he was harboring an affection for early Nilsson and Curt Boettcher all this time?
best album of 2018 so far? The Magpie Salute : High Water 1!!!!!! The word needs to go out, these guys rock.
I am willing, but cautious, the debut started as a rocker, but got too too 70s smoove. Is this one cover tunes also?
Also digging the new Magie Salute and looking forward to High Water 2 early next year. Saw them in Chicago last year and loved the Crowes stuff, but excited to see how far this project goes...
Found several gems tonight through sleuthing on Rateyourmusic.com. You can search the charts by genre and year. There’s literally thousands of albums in each main genre each year, and you can look at avg listener rating, listener reviews (many have these), etc.
Out soon (tomorrow?) The Lemon Twigs - Go to School, a concept album about a chimp raised as a human boy. Saw them do an instore earlier this week and the new songs sound great!
Susso Seki Singh – Orange Sunshine Jally Kebba Susso - Kora Andrea Seki - Celtic Harp Kiranpal Singh - Santoor Very interesting combination of instruments and beautiful music Spotify: Orange Sunshine
I've reinstated the beautiful album cover as my avatar. My favorite of the year by the widest of margins is Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves. I am completely in love with it and I have played it endlessly. A wonderful, dreamy, breezy album of love and hope packed with nothing but songwriting gems. The production is lovely and understated and lets the songs breathe. Kacey is in love and it's an album packed with optimism and positive vibes. She has nothing but great albums but this one is her best. It is becoming an all-time favorite for me. Don't fear it if you steer clear of country. It feels like Laurel Canyon sunshine.
Djrum - Portrait With Firewood (R&S Records) Taken from Bandcamp Portrait With Firewood' is Felix’s most personal body of work to date, the product of an emotionally turbulent 2017, capturing the range of feelings and emotions he went through in vivid sonic beauty. By putting aside his previous sampleadelic approach he returned to his childhood instrument of the piano as a core starting point. "It's a confessional record… I realise that's a word mostly used to describe singer/songwriter rather than (largely) instrumental music, but I think it's apt. There's a sort of emotional candour.” Felix is classically trained in the jazz tradition and influenced by the likes of Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane. Previously he was shy at the prospect of fans hearing his piano playing but determined to overcome this fear he has brought forward a new honesty to his work. "Finding the confidence to work with my own piano improvisations was a big part of that. Once I had figured out how I was going to make the music, it actually fell in to place rather quickly.” Felix's goal was to create something "overwhelmingly beautiful", but also to capture the "inherent melancholy in beauty in all its impermanence and fragility". He took inspiration and solace from performance artist Marina Abramovic. "She has an incredibly deep understanding of the human condition and expresses it in such a poetic way. Many of the themes of her work had particular resonance for me over the course of 2017 as I worked on the album. I was moved to tears on several occasions watching her videos or reading about her work.” Felix collaborated with cellist Zosia Jagodzinska and vocalist Lola Empire. Jagodzinska recorded several takes of improvisations over the track 'Creature' which Felix would chop, pitch and layer into new melodic lines and seed throughout the album. Felix's new approach expanded to experimentation with field recording, contact micing his beloved piano and purchasing his first hardware synth, all in service of enriching the personal, humane quality of the record. "Music helps me to communicate the sorts of things that I find almost impossible to put into words. I think the process for this album has helped me create a richer and emotionally complex body of work than I have managed before.”
Steve Hauschildt - Dissolvi (Ghostly International) Taken From Bandcamp In search of the sublime, contemporary electronic musician Steve Hauschildt has designed grids and panoramas of sound across multiple releases through the rise and dissolution of his former band, Emeralds, an American touchstone of 2000s home-recorded psychedelic noise music. Consistent with his solo work is Hauschildt’s ability to coil his craft in precise, varied, and distinctly physical forms. Gently spinning arpeggios converse with post-industrial decay. Sonic fibres sway like pendulums from static melancholy to motorik bliss. Dissolvi, the artist’s first full-length with Ghostly International, engages sublimation from an ontological perspective: by dissociating the self. Hauschildt steps out from the singular path, for the first time in a traditional studio, to compose and arrange contributions from friends. As a result, his most collaborative work to date extends a vast, vibrating framework in which to consider the state of being. The album's title — a reference to cupio dissolvi, the Latin phrase meaning "I wish to be dissolved" — needn't be taken one-dimensionally or as purely solipsistic. It does, however, serve an apt reference. Physiological phenomena are of interest to Hauschildt. These back-of-mind ruminations find their way out. Songs are cerebral in orientation, but beyond explanation, the music is truly visceral. Involuntary eye movement inspires the serene, sanguine-nearing-suspicious "Saccade." Hauschildt feathers soft percussion beneath the echoed refrains of Los Angeles musician Julianna Barwick, together shaping a svelte suggestion of the anxieties brought about by modern-day surveillance; if everyone is being watched constantly, there is no individual, no self, only a broadly monitored and clumsily catalogued populous. The work of Chicago poet Carl Sandburg comes to mind: “I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.” The individual dissolves into the taxonomic crowd. Minimalist techno impulses provide a stylistic through-line for Dissolvi. Understated synth phrases and drum grooves take hold in selective moments, like synchronistic structures onto which nebulous mists, like the rapturous voice of Gabrielle Herbst aka GABI on "Syncope," cling to and cloud, producing a dazzling rift in consciousness. The 7-minute centrepiece "Alienself" reiterates this creative logic, burbling like an amorphous body of water on a low-gravity planet, on the verge of dissolving, but never fully dematerializing. The album was constructed in Chicago (where Hauschildt now resides) and partially in New York. "Much of it was recorded in a windowless studio which removed elemental or seasonal references to time in the music," says Hauschildt. "The focus this time was on mixing the album and incorporating a broader set of instrumentation. I describe my compositional approach as being quasi-generative." Embracing new methods and philosophical curiosities, and in turn, expanding the range of his repertoire, Hauschildt proposes a fascinating and profoundly rich experience in listening, being, and deliquescing.
The Midnight Hour - The Midnight Hour (Linear Labs) Taken from Bandcamp The Midnight Hour is Black excellence: an ode to the cultural sophistication that the Harlem Renaissance established for its people. The Midnight Hour is comprised of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, alongside a tight rhythm section and a full orchestra. The album has features from CeeLo Green, Raphael Saadiq, Marsha Ambrosius, Bilal, Eryn Allen Kane, Karolina and more. Adrian and Ali began working on this album back in 2013, but put the project aside as they would score the hit Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage (the two even perform in an episode of the upcoming second season). The Midnight Hour is a soul/jazz/hip hop album which continues the conversations started by yesterday’s jazz and funk pioneers; those that created the bedrock of samples for hip hop producers in the 80s/90s. The Midnight Hour is sophisticated hip hop that fans will enjoy, capturing their jazz rhythm section, and a full orchestra, to analog tape. One of the seminal compositions, “Questions,” originally began as an unfinished Midnight Hour demo with Cee-Lo Green. However, Kendrick Lamar heard the track and wanted to sample portions for his GRAMMY-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly (the song ultimately made it to Kendrick’s 2016 compilation Untitled Unmastered as "Untitled 06 | 06.30.2014."). The full, completed version of “Questions” is now the lead single on The Midnight Hour. “So Amazing” is a reimagining of Luther Vandross’ 1986 single. Ali and Adrian took Luther's original vocal stems and composed new music, as if they were in the room with Luther originally. This transcendental recording is something that really makes The Midnight Hour special.
I have waited a long time for this one since loving her earlier single releases with the first dating back to 2016. This certainly won't be for everyone as Mica Levi's music isn't always the most accessible but I've always found the tracks she does with Tirzah to be incredibly infectious. Its great to finally have an album from them both and I'm sure this will pop up on a few end of year lists. Tirzah - Devotion (Domino Recording Co) Boomkat Product Review Tirzah pursues the slowest-burning soul feels on Devotion, the London-based singer-songwriter’s humbly singular début album, produced by Mica Levi and providing us with total life affirming summer listening - most probably the record we've listened to most this year so far, and one that lingers on and on... Since her first solo 12”s and thru frequent collaborations with Mica Levi - including the Taz And May Vids [2016] for DDS - Tirzah has quietly blossomed into one of the UK’s most precious and peculiar artists working at the fringes of experimental pop, post-grime and R&B, and Devotion is set to bring her love to a wider audience. Plaintive and low key, Devotion presents Tirzah’s vocal in the most evocative light, framed by backdrops of bleary-eyed and bent vibes and the kind of half-finished, permanently work-in-progress production style that's become a calling card of her music and her tight knit crew including Coby Sey, Mica Levi and Brother May. Album of the year? Aye, quite possibly.
This is a 30th Anniversary reissue but being completely new to me and not being aware of how known this is I felt I should post it in case it may have passed anyone by. David Sylvian & Holger Czukay - Plight & Premonition Flux & Mutability (Groenland Records) Boomkat Product Review Four beautiful, exceptional ambient nocturnes bloom again on a very welcome 30th anniversary reissue, newly packaged together by Grönland for the benefit of your health... David Sylvian and Holger Czukay’s Plight + Premonition [1988] & Flux + Mutability [1989] bouquets remain some of the most enigmatic ambient recordings of the ‘80s since their conception at Czukay’s converted cinema studio in Köln, 1986. But, while Sylvian was ostensibly coming to record vocals for the last track on Czukay’s Rome Remains Rome LP, the legendary Can figure ended up surreptitiously recording Sylvian improvising on whatever was at hand, only stopping the recording when the results started to become too “structured”, in effect capturing moments of less conscious, more freeform expression, and preserving them for what would become some of the most spellbinding and transportive recordings in either artist’s catalogue. Recorded during their fateful first meeting just as glasnost was beginning to thaw the cold war, the two parts of Plight + Premonition tentatively mirror this transition from the shadow of nuclear war towards open windows of possibility in the dawning mists and gently windswept synths of Plight (The Spiralling of Winter Ghosts), and the again with a genteel flush of harmonic colour perfusing shortwave radio signals and glimmering keys hinting at the promise of seductively warmer uplands in Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel). On the follow-up side, Flux (A Big, Bright, Colourful World) that horizon comes clearer into view with the earthy percussion of Jaki Liebzeit joining Czukay and Sylvian to beckon the light along with Can’s Michael Karoli and woozy, Hassell-ian Flugelhorn by Markus Stockhausen, son of Karlheinz, before the lead pair calibrate a mutual vision of reserved but quietly optimistic lushness in Mutability (A New Beginning is in the Offing).
Jon Hassell - Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (Ndeya) Taken from Bandcamp First new album in nine years by a musical visionary and hugely influential figure in new music. Forty years since its creation, Jon Hassell's Fourth World aesthetic remains a powerful influence on modern electronic music. Continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing, fragments of performance are sampled, looped, overdubbed and re-arranged into beguiling unexpected shapes. Hassell applies the painterly technique of ‘pentimento’ to the arrangements, teasing out texture by the overlaying of sound upon sound, or a carefully timed reveal of the delicate bones pinning the frame of a track together.
