The Magic I.D.
Till My Breath Gives Out
Erstwhile, 2008

( I will sing my song / till my breath gives out / I will sing when they bury me / singing I come where the angels roam )

Dans Les Arbres
Dans Les Arbres
ECM, 2008

( Read more... )

Æthenor
Betimes Black Cloudmasses
VHF, 2008


( free black ambient )

Cath & Phil Tyler
Dumb Supper
No-Fi, 2008

( There was music and dancing on the day he was born/but Queen Jane, beloved, lay cold as a stone )

Heavy Winged - Feel Inside [aRCHIVE], On the Marble Cliffs [Trensmat], Blacc Lust [Three Lobed]

I'm sort of copping autumn__sweater's year-end system here, trying to stay away from lists and make this a little more personal.

Kevin Shea, Peter Evans, with a side of Moppa Elliott:


Talibam! - Ordination of the Gobetrotting Conscripts [Azul Discografica] and like 6 other CDs, records, tapes.  When I ordered stuff from them, it showed up via bicycle messenger in a scotch-taped brown paper bag.  One of their CDs came packaged in a cut-up Liberace LP sleeve with their name spray painted on the front.  Awesome.


The  Peter Evans Quartet - s/t [Firehouse 12] Also, Taylor Ho Bynum's Middle Picture on this label is some fantastic cornet work.


Mostly Other People Do the Killing - Shamokin!!! [Hot Cup]

These are some guys collectively devoted to giving jazz the Wile E. Coyote treatment.  Kevin Shea's a free jazz drummer (also with Storm & Stress, People and a whole bunch of other bands) and Peter Evans plays trumpet on all these, while Elliot leads them both in MOPDtK.  Talibam!'s the wildest of a the bunch, a free jazz noise trio sort of akin to Lightning Bolt in spirit and sound, but not afraid to step off that mold either.  The Evans Quartet is the closest to straight (serious) free jazz, but retains energy and fun throughout, never getting locked into anything too navel-gazing.  And the MOPDtK disc is like a slice of classic jazz and bop where everyone's so exuberantly pumped to be swingin' that they begin to trip over their own feet, roll down the hill and off the cliff.  All the tracks are named after towns in PA nobody in the band has ever been to, with the last one a twenty minute attack on A Night In Tunisia (I assume there's a Tunisia in PA perhaps?) kick started by several minutes of hilarious quotes from Shea on his kit (including U2, fer chrissake) before launching into the most balls out version of the standard they could muster, all M. Coyote with his rocketbelt on and the plateau fast approaching.

Talibam! - "Rambo's Passeggiata"
Peter Evans Quartet - "!!!!!"
MOPDtK - "Lover"

So this is way late now, but I'd meant to collect my thoughts on a couple shows I saw over two nights in early October, writing up not only the bands, but also the venues and the startling new experience of not going deaf at the rock show.

You've heard those tales, a few years ago now, about how maybe, just maybe, there is actual sex going down on the Brazilian dancefloors.  You've thought about it.  You've decried the puritanical state of North American dancefloors in comparison.  You've done double takes at the covers of those Baile Funk compilations, perhaps you even bought one hoping for more explicit goods inside.

Now, remember how you ate Pop Rocks when you were a kid, not so much for the taste or the fizzing (though that did put them a step ahead of Nerds, at least), but cause you heard the urban legend about how some kid had died after eating a bunch and drinking soda? And that essence of vague danger gave you a rush of power; here you were, eight years old and already staring death in the eye, maybe chasing down a handful with a swig of Dr. Pepper if you were particularly daring?

Much as you thought of that kid writhing away his final moments in stomach-ruptured agony, here's Tigarah, handing you a little package of fizzy sex and daring with her EP from last year.  The beat drops in and you think "oh yeah, actual sex!"  You can almost feel that dancefloor orgy in the kick drum alone.  She starts talking (I couldn't honestly call it singing or rapping), that particular commanding tone of the genre even enhanced by the syllabic structure of her Japanese.  She's ordering this shit around like a hypersexual square dance caller, flaunting the hell out of some serious cross-cultural exoticisms.  You can almost believe it!

There's a point in you life where you realize the great Pop Rocks danger is a myth but, having spent so long within that nebulous intrigue, you tuck the experience of it away in a sweet nostalgic place.  You stop eating Pop Rocks, cause they don't taste all that great and their fizz doesn't kick like it used to.  A similar thing begins halfway through the first song on the Tigarah EP, when she breaks into a little strummed acoustic guitar in place of the ass shaking.  Thirty seconds later she's doing the little "list the hip cosmopolitan international cities" bit and you realize this girl is straight Shibuya-Kei in a Baile Funk hat.  It's an assumption quickly confirmed by her total lack of vocal skills or charisma in general.  By the second track she's throwing in a little vocoded jpop, ala Utada Hikaru or whomever.  And you realize she's got all the burgeoning sexuality of a briefcase full of money on the way to the bank.  By the end of the EP, if you last that long, you wonder how you ever fell for it, and you're more than a little amused by the whole endeavor.  By next week, you'll have forgotten her entirely.

the first 3 tracks are plenty.

Current Music: Neubauten - Perpetuum Mobile

Here's a good one: I take a trip to Portland, new location of half my family and city of my heart of hearts, and just around the corner from my sister's house is another one for sale. It's a small perfection, with enough function to call it a home and enough oddity to make it special, and my girlfriend and I are both in love with it. It's no financial impossibility, but then her emotions dictate the situation more than money ever can, and so today it's back to tied down old new york, and the spell of that moment snaps entirely as she sets foot to pavement here. Goodbye, little balcony and yard with the potential for a small vegetable garden round the side. I nearly could have touched that.

Current Mood: floating right along

This is a weird judgement, see, mixing the technical merits of each with the ways in which they've impacted me and how much I actually enjoy them and the amount of time I've even spent with them. So if this was a movie list you'd probably Irreversible and The Princess Bride keeping close company, which is odd to think of. It also leans a little heavily on what I was listening to a few years ago; I just haven't spent much time focusing on any one thing recently. But then there's stuff like Whitman's Lisbon, which just cut through so cleanly that it's 3rd on my list after listening to it twice, and I'm pretty well scared to play it a third time for fear that I got something about it entirely wrong.

But all factors considered, I think I managed to do a pretty decent ordering of the first 30 or so, after which I gave up entirely. It all seems a little silly when I'm sitting here, with a 3 day foobar playlist of stuff I haven't listened to yet, knowing any or all of it could just blow me away and alter this whole thing.

David Sylvian - Blemish
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
Keith Fullerton Whitman - Lisbon
Shining - In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be a Monster
Dar Williams - Mortal City
Super Furry Animals - Guerilla
Bark Psychosis - Hex
Tujiko Noriko - Shojo Toshi
M. Ward - Transfiguration of Vincent
Keith Fullerton Whitman - Playthroughs

Smog - Knock Knock
Robert Wyatt - Shleep
White Flight - White Flight
TV On the Radio - Young Liars
P.G. Six - Well of Memory
Talking Heads - Remain In Light
Basil Kirchin - Abstractions of the Industrial North
Iron & Wine - The Creek Drank the Cradle
John Fahey - Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today
Mouse on Mars - Idiology

Sage Francis - Sick of Waging War
The Dismemberment Plan - Change
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See a Darkness
The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
Sole - Selling Live Water
Shalabi Effect - The Trial of St-Orange
Tujiko Noriko - Make Me Hard
Bjork - Homogenic
Smog - Dongs of Sevotion
Beck - Midnight Vultures

Caetano Veloso - Livro
The Books - Thought for Food
Richard Youngs - The Naive Shaman
Matmos - The West
Cat Stevens - Gold
Tyondai Braxton - History That Has No Effect
Sanso-Xtro - Sentimentalist
Roots Manuva - Awfully Deep
Asa-Chang & Junray - Jun Ray Song Chan
Brian Wilson - Smile

Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You
Broadcast - Haha Sound
Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
Christian Marclay - djTRIO
Circulatory System - Circulatory System
cLOUDDEAD - Ten
Dizzee Rascal - The Boy In the Corner
DJ Shadow - The Private Press

Edan - Beauty and the Beat
Current 93 - Black Ships Ate the Sky
Excepter - Throne
Fennesz - Venice
Led Zeppelin - II
Jamie Lidell - Multiply
Herbie Hancock - Thrust
Gastr Del Sol - Camofleur
Ghost - Hypnotic Underworld
Jackie-O Motherfucker - Liberation
Jackson C. Frank - Jackson C. Frank

Buck 65 - Secret House Against the World
David Sylvian - The Good Son vs. the Only Daughter
Jim O'Rourke - I'm Happy and I'm Singing and a 1, 2, 3, 4
Fog - Ether Teeth
Gang Gang Dance - God's Money
Hum - Downward Is Heavenward
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
Kid Dakota - So Pretty
King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
Kraftwerk - Minimum/Maximum
Led Zeppelin - III

Man Man - Six Demon Bag
Manitoba - Up In Flames
OOIOO - Feather Float
Patrick Wolf - Wind In the Wires
Soft Machine - Third
Susanna and the Magical Orchestra - Lists of Lights and Buoys
Quruli - Zukan
The Kinks - The Village Grean Preservation Society
The Wrens - The Meadowlands
Bjork - Vespertine

TTC - Batards Sensibles
The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
Boris - Pink
Super Furry Animals - Phantom Power
Cornelius - Fantasma
Spring Heel Jack - The Sweetness of the Water
Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
Boredoms - Super ae
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf
Juana Molina - Son

Pelt - Empty Bell Ringing In the Sky
Parts & Labor/Tyondai Braxton - Rise, Rise, Rise
Aceyalone - A Book of Human Language
Tricky - Nearly God
J-Live - All of the Above
Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
Pan American - For Waiting, for Chasing
Prefuse 73 - Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives
Windy & Carl - Antarctica
Lee 'Scratch' Perry - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle

Current Music: Six Organs of Admittance - Not on the list!