Music

Top 10

1. Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me
2. Spring training
3. Waiting for new Venture Bros., rewatching old Venture Bros.
4. Flavors.me
5. Ableton Live
6. Heater Core 365 Ableton Live Tips
7. Lost
8. The Bugle
9. Top Gear on iTunes (they have the original UK versions that are 20 min longer than the ones they show on BBC America)
10. Boards of Canada possibly, maybe, perhaps releasing something in 2010

Bottom 3

1. California’s economy
2. Earthquakes
3. Republicans

It’s here!  It’s Joanna Newsom’s brand new 3-CD, 2 hour opus, Have One on Me.  Her last album, Ys, was one of the finest works of the last decade, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for new music from her to come out ever since I first heard “Emily.”  And now my wait is over, and now the listening begins.  Hopefully, I’ll have something to say about the work in a few days.

Go buy this now!  Now now now now now now now now now now!

Top 10

1. Ableton Live
2. Pitchers & catchers!!!
3. Lost final season
4. Moon Wiring Club
5. iPad
6. Heater Core: 365 Live Tips
7. Hauntology
8. Kiva
9. New Joanna Newsom
10. Caprica

Bottom 3

1. The voters of Massachusetts
2. Republicans
3. The Grammys (irrelevant since…forever)

“Everything You Do Is a Balloon” is one of the very best Boards of Canada songs, and it has been transformed into one of the best fan-made videos I’ve ever seen.  Check it out:

Top 10

1. Flavors.me
2. Burial, Untrue
3. The Mighty Boosh
4. Berklee
5. My new office (in a new building with new furniture–though same job)
6. Parks & Recreation
7. Avatar (hey, it’s good sf)
8. Novation SL MkII
9. The Bugle
10. Camacho’s Place

Bottom 3

1. Another fallen Angel: Rory Markas, RIP
2. Having a cold during vacation
3. Promos for all things reality (that’s as close as I come to watching them–and that’s just too close)

Top 25

1. Angels win 2002 World Series–At my father’s funeral in 2005, I talked about our shared love of sports, and the point I made to illustrate this love was him calling me after the Angels won the Series for the first time.  That’s how much this meant to me (and to him).
2. The Wire: When a postmortem is written about the American experiment, this show will be singled out as a perfect illustration of how the country fell.  The detailed way in which the show demonstrated corruption, complacency, and stagnation at all levels of bureaucracy and business, mixed with the systematic defeat of anyone and everyone trying to make things better, says more about the last decade than a million hours of campaign commercials and governmental panels ever could.  It’s the most essential work of art of this century, and it will be one of the lasting gifts of our generation to generations to come.
3. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and The River–I helped to generate interest in William Basinski’s work when I worked at the now-defunct Stylus Magazine.  All of his work is wonderful, but these two works shine above all other music from the last decade (even though they both are really over 30 years old now).
4. Children of Men: The best film of the decade is also the most amazing science fiction films ever conceived.  Clive Owen’s acting, Alfonso Cuarón’s directing, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography are the three pillars in this film, which takes us on a journey through a world without children and all the chaos and confusion that this fact produces.  It’s a spellbinding, amazing work of art.
5. Barak Obama–2nd best night of the decade (behind the night the Angels won the series) was the night that Obama won the Presidency.  And while he’s been attacked left and right for the past year, he’s still standing and he’s moving slowly but surely toward change.  I still believe.
6. Apple’s iPod and iPhone–When I used to carry around a portable CD player and 50 CDs, I would dream of a device that could store my music in my pocket.  And then I got an iPod.  And then I got another iPod.  And then I got an iPhone.  And then I gave my first iPhone to my friend and got a new one and we both started using ours together.  And it was good.
7. Tivo–Oh hell yes.
8. Idiocracy–Funniest movie of the decade, and the most accurate.  We don’t have to wait 500 years for this world to come into existence; I see this kind of stupid every single day.
9. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim–Band of the decade?  I think so.  Their music has defined much of the genre that is usually known as “post rock,” even as their emerging popularity has alienated the band from the critics, most of whom see the band as sell-outs because they are successful.  And yes their last album wasn’t as good as their previous work; but it’s still way better than 99.99% of all music ever, so I’ll give them some slack.  Oh, and Amiina is awesome too!
10. Joanna Newsom’s Ys–I put this CD in my car shortly after I bought it in 2007 and it’s still in there.  It’s one of the only examples of high-quality poetry brought to life through music.
11. The Venture Brothers–Poetry of an entirely different stripe, this series is the vanguard of Adult Swim, itself the vanguard of popular entertainment for quite some time.  It’s part Hardy Boys, part Superfriends, part Six Million Dollar Man, part dada, part I Saved Hitler’s Brain, and part…well, part everything else I can come up with.  Oh my flipping zombie Jesus is this show good.
12. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial–Decades in the making, this is a magnum-opus from an electronic music pioneer who never really had much of a chance to practice his art back in the 60s because he lacked the credentials to use the very rare and very expensive technologies found in some high-level universities and few other places.  This is an exceptional trilogy of albums that puts Dockstander front and center in the modern world of experimental music.
13. Netflix–It took me a while to get into this (their initial catalogue was rather minimal), but now it’s practically a religion, even for people like my mom who know next to nothing about computers.  She checks her email and her Netflix queue.  Oh, and they forced Americans to use the word “queue,” too.  That’s awesome.
14. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection–Unbelievably important music from the guy who was originally known as V/VM.  The entire catalogue is worth owning; more than that, it’s affordable.  This guy pioneered the online distribution of music.  Most of his catalogue was originally available for free download.  But I felt that I owed it to him to buy the collection and support this wonderful artist’s work into another decade (which has begun in earnest with Leyland Kirby’s latest release).
15. World of Warcraft–This is #1 on my wife’s “Bottom 10″ list for the decade.  I play it too much–and have for several years.  I got hooked when I saw that I could create a druid alchemist.  How cool is that?  Not that alchemy or druidism in WoW have anything to do with actual druids or alchemy, but it’s still fun to imagine living within a mythological world.
16. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase–Boards of Canada’s contribution to the music world in the last decade consists of two fascinating albums and some EPs.  These are exceptional works, and they extend the ideas from Music Has the Right to Children in interesting ways.  I still check BoC’s website every day to see if there’s news of their latest release.  I bet I’m not the only one.
17. Amazon Prime–I grew up in Riverside, about 60 miles from Los Angeles at a time when I had to go into LA to find any decent music or bookstores.  I dreamed of a day when I would live in a decent town where I could buy any of the weird stuff that I read about in magazines.  And then the Internet showed up and with it came Amazon, the first and still best stop for online shopping.  I now live in a town that is over 100 miles from the nearest pocket of civilization, and the only reason a place like this is even partially tolerable is Amazon Prime, which allows me to buy whatever I want and not pay for shipping (well, I pay $75 a year, but you have no idea how much stuff my wife and I get on Amazon).
18. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem–Read it recently and loved it.  I’ve loved all of his novels (though the Baroque Cycle is a tough haul).  I love the fact that the kernel of this novel’s story is taken from the Long Now project.
19. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country–I first got into Hecker because Amour was based around shortwave radio signals he recorded in Central America (shortwave being one of my fascinations).  But everything this artist has created in the past few years is truly beautiful and challenging (a difficult combination, indeed).  Highly recommended.
20. Stow, Scotland–My wife and I took our parents to the UK in 2006.  We spent a week at a small farmhouse in this town.  It was wonderful.
21. Ableton Live–This is the past, present, and future of electronic music composition.  This German company will dominate the next decade because of their wise decision to merge their software with Cycling ’74’s epochal Max/MSP.  Max for Live debuted in November 2009 and will be the basis for more music in the coming decade than the vocoder was in the Noughts.
22. Top Gear–I care very little about cars, but I love this show.  It proves that adult men can make fun of each other intelligently and with style.  Plus it’s one of the few things my wife and I enjoy watching together.
23. Lord of the Rings–The movies were fantastic, but what I love even more is the fact that these films spearheaded the interest in fantasy and mythology.  It’s partly because of this film that I’m able to teach a class on mythology at my college.
    
24. Patton Oswalt–I’ve been a fan since his 1996 HBO special (which I taped and watched over and over).  He’s more popular than ever now, and his comedy just keeps getting stronger.
25. Longplayer–A wonderful idea.  Here’s hoping it lasts!

Bottom 10

1. George W. Bush
2. Dick Cheney
3. Donald Rumsfeld (really, it’s a three-way tie for first)
4. Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/Fox News
5. People who don’t understand the difference between “were” and “where”
6. Terrorists of all stripes (from the 9/11 attackers to the Wall Street thugs to Republican fearmongers)
7. Boston
8. Reality television
9. 99.99% of all entertainment
10. Summers in El Centro, CA

Rather than pick and choose between different albums, I’m focusing on artists here.  Sigur Ros released a lot of music in the past decade, and it’s all (or nearly all) worthy, so I just lump it all together here in the #2 spot.  The same goes for Basinski, The Caretaker, Boards of Canada, and so on.  Mind you, I don’t add everything by these artists–only the cream of their crop (so to speak).   My attitude is: why focus on one work when so many great artists created multiple works of incredibly high quality?

As a result, I think you’ll find that the top albums list comes out to about 29 individual works (and more, if you count The Caretaker’s work individually).  That doesn’t include the multiple-CD releases here like The River and Kesto.  What does this mean?  Despite the near-death of the music industry, there’s still a hell of a lot of great music out there.

1. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops I-IV and The River
2. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim
3. Joanna Newsom’s Ys
4. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial #1, #2, and #3
5. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection
6. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase
7. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country
8. Pan Sonic’s Aaltopiiri and Kesto
9. The White Stripes’s De Stijl, White Blood Cells, Elephant, and Get Behind Me Satan
10. Radiohead’s Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order)

• The Advisory Circle’s Other Channels
• Amiina’s Kurr
• Antony & The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light
• Gevorg Dabaghyan’s Miniatures: Masterworks for Armenian Duduk
• Fennesz’s Endless Summer, Venice, and Black Sea
• Flying Lotus’s Los Angeles
• Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Without Sinking
• Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, Eldfjall, and Labyrinthitis
• Kode9 & The Spaceape’s Memories of the Future
• Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seed’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
• Random Inc.’s Jerusalem: Tales Outside the Framework of Orthodoxy
• Rechenzentrum’s Director’s Cut and Silence
• Stars of the Lid’s The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and And Their Refinement of the Decline
• The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan
• Tom Waits’s Alice, Blood Money, and Real Gone

I don’t review albums professionally any more, so my list is limited by what I’ve bought and what I’ve heard.  If I missed anything, it probably means I haven’t heard it (or didn’t listen to it very carefully).  In the end, though, “Best” lists are not the end of discussions; they are the beginning.  So enjoy–and add your thoughts at the end.

1. Leyland Kirby, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
2. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking
3. Antony & The Johnsons, The Crying Light
4. Tim Hecker, An Imaginary Country
5. Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age
6. Roj, The Transactional Dharma of Roj
7. J.G. Thirlwell, The Music of J.G. Thirlwell, Vol. 1 (Original Soundtrack to The Venture Bros.)
8. Jónsi & Alex, Riceboy Sleeps
9. V/A, 5: Five Years of Hyperdub
10. Belbury Poly, From an Ancient Star

Special Bonus: Top 6 Songs of 2009

1. Lily Allen, “The Fear”
2. Joker, “Digidesign”
3. Antony & The Johnsons, “The Crying Light”
4. Hildur Guðnadóttir, “Erupting Light”
5. P!nk, “Funhouse”
6. The Swell Season, “Low Rising”

Top 10

1. Max for Live
2. Theodore Levin, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond
3. Leyland Kirby, Sadly, the Future is No Longer What it Was
4. Venture Brothers
5. The Mighty Boosh
6. Huun Huur Tu
7. Dropbox
8. Dudeism.com
9. Kraftwerk, The Catalogue
10. Engrade

Bottom 3

1. Opponents of health care reform
2. Sarah Palin
3. UCLA basketball (wow, pretty sad, guys)

In my review of Jonsi & Alex’s Riceboy Sleeps project, I note:

This is definitely not Post Rock or whatever Sigur Ros’s music is called.  It’s far closer to the experimental work of someone like William Basinski or Jim Haynes (whose work Sever touches on similar decaying themes) or Peter Wright or The Caretaker or any one of a number of musicians experimenting with rendering into musical form the very real concepts of death and decay.  Riceboy Sleeps is prettier than those works, but it’s also not as complete a work of art as something as monumental as The Disintegration Loops.  Then again, Jonsi & Alex are rock musicians first, experimental artists second; by contrast, someone like The Caretaker has spent a decade imagining and perfecting his own world of memory and decay. [emphasis mine]

By comparing Jonsi & Alex to The Caretaker (among others), I wanted to draw a distinction between two different types of experimental artists.  Jonsi & Alex (and Sigur Ros) create music that is unusual and even a bit weird–but still popular in the sense that it is created with an audience (and with pleasure) in mind.  Riceboy Sleeps, although more experimental and difficult than Takk…, still falls into this “palatable” terrain.  By contrast, The Caretaker’s work (especially the later stuff like Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia) doesn’t bother with popular conventions at all.  There are no clear melodies, no discernible beats, no direct hooks to engage the listener.  It’s a journey of mammoth proportions, requiring hours of listening to pick through the intricate layers of meaning in each fragment of sound.  It’s a wonderful, emotionally drenching journey, but listeners are expected to find the trail for themselves.

All of this is to say that the first work under The Caretaker’s own name (more or less) is everything a Caretaker fan would expect–but also a significant enough of a departure to warrant the new moniker.  It’s long (almost four hours, spread over three CDs and twenty tracks), it’s intense, it’s maddening, and it’s exhausting.  It challenges listeners from the first moment and never lets up, never gives in to any semblance of conformity or audience expectation.  In short, it’s fantastic.

But it’s also surprisingly sparse.  The use of sampled or retouched material is absent here.  In its place is Kirby’s own piano work, which is twisted and mutated in ways similar to the ways old 78s were twisted and mutated on The Haunted Ballroom.  In the Caretaker work, there was always the hint of a ghost drifting through the soundscape (much like the ghosts that inhabit the hotel in The Shining, Kirby’s inspiration for The Caretaker).  The voices of long-dead singers warbled and floated through static and distortion.  It was, in many ways, the musical equivalent of a seance.  While the approach is similar here (music processed and treated to render it more opaque), the ghosts are gone.  There are no vocals or orchestra–just a lone piano accompanied by occasional synthesizer tones and stray, warbling distortion.

For this reason, it’s far sadder, far more melancholy than earlier works by this artist.  I figured this out after the first or second listen.  However, for the life of me, the more I listened to the work, the less I understood WHY this was a sadder, more melancholy album than the Caretaker stuff.  I actually listened to this work non-stop (or thereabouts) for over a week, trying to place this music, trying to wrap my head and ears around it.  However, it wasn’t until I read a review in the November 2009 of The Wire (by Joseph Stannard) that I finally understood why this work was so unique:

Whereas his work as The Caretaker acknowledges the possibility of magic–the source material deriving from songs which view love as capable of transcending even death–this new music confronts the listener with a sadness that cannot be escaped by earthly or supernatural means.  With its stately piano, ice-sheet synth and billowing clouds of all-enveloping Noise, History* offers nothing less than a complete immersion in grief, stubbornly denying the listener the comfort of catharsis.  Beautiful, but not for the light-hearted.

Whereas The Caretaker’s work hinted at ghosts, at the possibility of connecting with a “beyond,” Leyland Kirby’s work focuses on the absence of such ghosts, the absence of any meaningful link to another world or another realm.  At least, that’s what I think he’s saying here.  And he’s right.  There’s a distinct lack of comfort in this work, and while I wouldn’t exactly characterize the music as an “immersion in grief,” I would say that the music seems to exist in a world that is quite different from our own, a world that is uniquely alien to our everyday experience.

Or, to put it another way, if the “haunted ballroom” scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was the inspiration for The Caretaker, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the shots of the vast living ocean in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris was the inspiration for Sadly…  Like that ocean, this music seems to be both alive and beyond our understanding.  Like the ocean, the music here connects with its audience in ways that raise more questions than it answers.  There’s also a musical link between the works; there’s a hint of Edward Artemiev’s electronic score floating through many of the pieces in Sadly, filling in the otherworldly soundscape the way the ocean fills the minds and hearts of the characters in Tarkovsky’s epic.

In the end, though, this is a very personal album that, no doubt, elicits very personal, subjective responses from its listeners.  For me, this is a monumental work, the finest music to come out this year.  I don’t know what you will hear, so I encourage you to find out for yourself.  There are samples available at Kirby’s website, History Always Favours the Winners, where there are also links for places to buy the album.

* The Wire apparently reviewed the album under the title Kirby uses for his website.  Perhaps the work was renamed between the writing of the review and the CD release in October 2009.  Who knows and who cares?  It’s the same work either way.