Nonwrestler Blog

2008 Music Round-Up

This is roughly in the order I picked them up, excepting the first one. Can't be bothered writing a lot this year, so have gone overboard on links. Here was me thinking people loved reading volumes of text on computer screens... ;)

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours (Modular )


Definitely my favourite album of the year, from the vibes, your honour, as well as from a quantative angle.

My previous write-up of the thing.
Free songs to stream and download
Free mixtape by Cut Copy members
Artist page at Modular
Virb page
Myspace page

Kelley Polar - I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling (Environ )



Second album cranks up the cheddar and is, well, fucking ridiculous in places. A friend dismissed bits as like Liberace in outer space. Bring it on.

My previous write-up of the thing.
Free song to stream and download
Artist site
Artist page at Environ
Myspace page

Kapital Band 1 - Playing by numbers (Mosz )



Much more accessible than their first album, while no less distinctive.

My previous write-up of the thing (at the bottom - obviously it's grown on me further)
Artist site
Amie Street - where I bought my copy
Artist page at Mosz
Myspace page

Koushik - Out My Window (Stone's Throw )



Quite a big shift from what I thought of as his first album, but which I guess was just collected tracks pre-this. Drums etc. are pared back and Koushik's washed out spacey vocals take this off into a majorly Spiritualised zone, with a bit more kinda ... I dunno... sunny California psychedelic vibes? More acid than heroin?

Free song to download
Amie Street - where I bought my copy
Artist page at Stone's Throw
Myspace page

Fennesz / Dafeldecker / Brandlmayr - Till the old world's blown up and a new one is created (Mosz )



If you know Fennesz but are unfamiliar with the others, this is the kind of computer-hacked guitar shimmer (with acoustic bits) Fennesz has been doing recently, with acoustic bass and drums (largely played with brushes). Brandlmayr is the drummer in Radian among many other acts. Was very pleased to see that Fennesz was working with him, and equally pleased to hear the results.

The label and/or artist are disappointingly stingy on downloadable or even streaming morsels... Mosz's link to an MP3 fragment of one of the tracks doesn't work. :| Stink.

Artist page at Mosz
Amie Street - where I bought my copy

Morgan Geist - Double Night Time (Environ )



I love Morgan Geist as a producer - closing on 12 years ago a man called Ben handed me a copy of his first album in a Wellington record shop and told me to listen - but this could be flippantly described as the Junior Boys album for 2008 given their vocalist, Jeremy Greenspan, appears on well over half the tracks here (and no other singers are present). It's a pretty and low-impact listen, which is a bit shit for a dance album, because a million people will shelve it. More's the pity.

Free songs to stream
Amie Street - where I bought my copy
Artist page at Environ
Myspace page

Fennesz - Black Sea (Touch )


He keeps impressing me. After the collaboration listed above and the massive influx of slushy, noisy ambient that has come in the intervening years since his last album, I took to this with low expectations. It's really, really good.

Artist site
Myspace page

Other comments

• Downbeat / wonky / whatever saturation point was reached sometime mid year. Acclaimed releases on that front by bods like Flying Lotus, Kelpe, Lukid, Lone, etc. etc. left me fairly cold. Did the dodgy download, didn't care for any of them, deleted them. Flying Lotus does definitely get the silliest, most filthy, not exactly filthy video of the year award.
  
• Close as I get to New Zealand faves this year is one of the tracks on Fennesz's album being a collaboration with Rosy Parlane... It is possibly the best track on there, though. Only album by a New Zealander I bought this year was Eru Dangerspiel's Great News for the Modern Man, but given I picked that up today, on the last day of the year, I would feel a bit wonky putting that on my end of year list.
  
• Definitely been a big year for downloads from Amie Street. Manage to score a lot of stuff while it's free, due to it being relatively unpopular stuff...
  
• ... the corrolary of this is I've pulled back on downloading so much free-to-download stuff. Partly that's reaching saturation point for clicky ambient-ish techno-ish stuff, I guess.
  
• Another of the big threads of the year for me was tracking down a whole lot more stuff related to Radian and specifically their drummer, Martin Brandlmayr. He gets two mentions in my end of year list, but I picked up lots of older releases by connected artists and could also put in Autistic Daughters' 2008 album but wasn't that thrilled (oh, that would be another Kiwi connection too - Dean Roberts is their singer / guitarist). Very impressed by Radian's second album, Juxtaposition.
  
• Listened to shed loads of disco and house stuff this year, but that tends not to lend itself to album-length good times. Should pull finger and do a best individual tracks of the year award, but given the top two would be free MP3s I've already linked to it's probably not worth doing.
  

Labels: music

Posted at 5:33 PM  3 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #37: Jodi Cave - Flotsam and Jetsam

Last of these for the year - and last Malty Media show on tonight too. Here's something rocking for your New Year's Eve celebrations... OK, not at all. :P

This is another artist I'd assumed I'd posted about long ago. He was definitely in the top of my mind when I started doing this. Anyway, I stumbled upon this particular track in two places - Fat Cat Records demo archive and Frozen Elephants Music put this on their first net release, the compilation The Map Is Not The Territory. Both spots are worth a browse.

A long instrumental piece, starting out with chattering guitar harmonics and sounds of scuffed and scraped surfaces, sweeping about your ears. Slowly develops into something a bit louder and rolls out on a wave of distortion.

Jodi Cave is a British producer doing his thing in an essentially electro-acoustic vein, but his penchant for friendly tones and guitar harmonics makes his music more accessible than academic electro-acoustic composers tend to be. He's released two CDs so far, both of which I'd recommend. He also has a free EP on Term, the (net-)sub-label of the rather good 12k.

As an aside, people using "electro-acoustic" to describe pretty electronica with some acoustic instruments may be a nice example of folk etymology in action, but ... get your own term!

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Gardening is OK sometimes, I suppose.

Homegrown organic strawberries just pulled out of the garden. Bit nervous as to why the birds haven't ravaged them. :) Random theory: tuis don't eat strawberries and their massive resurgence means bugger all sparrows.

Labels: life

Posted at 12:15 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #36: Paper - Underground

Get this tune on Paper's Virb page ...

Lovely Kraut rock throwback stuff... bone dry drums, bass and muted electric guitar lay out a groovy but still very much rock-feeling rhythm, while spiraling 'Fly Like An Eagle' keyboards echo about... shimmering layers of guitars build up as fragments of lyrics pop up all over the stereo field. The mood hints at menace before heading into super nice-nice land for a one-chord coda. ;)

Paper are a husband and wife duo, two members of another rather nice band Landing, who get compared to Low quite a bit. It's all slightly unambitious feeling, but part of that might be superimposing assumptions based on what biographical stuff I know. I imagine this couple from a small town in the USA jamming when their baby's bedded down, stumbling upon some of the sounds they love from old records and trying to emulate that kind of feeling again. Still, I really like the album.

"But it's not that I hate [this band]: I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgement" - Werner Herzog (originally talking about the Amazonian jungle, but near enough)

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #35: Owusu & Hannibal - What It's About

Another tune I love offered up by the almost-as-ugly-as-myspace RCRDLBL. I guess I shouldn't complain about the site too much, because I do find new music I like via their RSS feed.

My fave tune on DJ Dixon's excellent contribution to the Body Language mix series. It's a mid-tempo soul-y number that starts off with a descending falsetto vocal line that makes me 'Iko Iko' but keeps switching into 80s Michael Jackson territory. Rolling, tom-driven beat, dense vocal harmonies, crazy ESL lyrics that sound all the more dirty when a) sung so sweetly and b) being hard to understand ("we danced French for far too long"!?). Goes all inexplicably gospel at the end, with more inexplicable lyrics.

Owusu & Hannibal are basically a Danish soul duo who do some fairly tweaked shit. Their album is much weirder than a lot of that "nu [adjective]" smoothness. Mr. Owusu also added a touch of joy to the last Metro Area release, on the glorious 'Read My Mind'. Num num num.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  1 Comments Links to this post

Music Collecting Nerd-out

So with the help of the music player on my PC I calculated how much music I have to listen to on my computer.

Total: 5 weeks 1 day 15 hours 27 minutes 7 seconds

CDs ripped: 3 weeks 4 hrs 13 minutes 34.995 seconds

Bought downloads: 6 days 9 hours 8 minutes 77.988 seconds

Free downloads: 5 days 22 hours 59 minutes 46.254 seconds

Vinyl recorded: 2 days 1 hour 22.987 seconds

Illegal downloads: 1 day 4 hours 4 minutes 4.917 seconds

... yet I still want to hear more. I probably spend 30 minutes to an hour a day on average investigating new stuff. James Holden has remixed Madonna? Madness! Have to check it out! What's this new London scene "funky"? It's not "funky house"? What's the difference then? Who are the big artists? What do they sound like? Kuduro? Kwaito? Cumbia hip-hop mash-ups? I wonder if anyone's made music they call "ambient disco"? Let's try Google... Plus all the RSS feeds of new free stuff...

It's mental. I feel like this is the most ridiculous way to consume music. But however I rationalise it, I can't pretend I'm about to change my behaviour. Got 2 CDs last week, 6 came in second-hand this week, another one on order, downloaded probably 30-40 new free tracks and 2 hour-long DJ mixes. Gah.

Labels: music

Posted at 12:19 PM  3 Comments Links to this post

Genetic programming of Mona Lisa

Some guy has made an application that throws out 50 polygons, compares them for fit to a picture of the Mona Lisa, and if the fit's better than the one before the script updates itself accordingly and tries again.

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa

Labels: misc time-wasting

Posted at 9:07 AM  0 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #34: Entsound - Dormancy

The Mood Gadget label site has links to one track off each of their release, including one from Entsound's Growth EP.

Probably no surprise from either the name or where you're reading this that this is an instrumental, ambient track. Gets pretty tricky to describe most in any terms that sound anything beyond generic - like saying of a rock song "starts with just a guitar, then bass and drums join in, quite fast, then the arrangement quietens down while a man sings, then the guitars come back in for a chorus" etc. But, yes, this starts with a sustained note and builds from there, with very subtle hints at rhythm in the background courtesy of some kind of shaker sound, creating the aural equivalent of squinting. After a few minutes waves come in and somehow (I promise) that doesn't sound even remotely cheesy. Maybe it's cos they sound like they're coming in via a shortwave radio?

Mr Reid Dunn, aka Entsounds, seems a bit low on the internet radar, so here's a link to his discogs entry.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #33: Animals on Wheels - More Of The Same

Andrew Coleman / Animals on Wheels has offered up this track over on his own website.

Semi-improvised acoustic guitar and piano wanderings with some sudden bursts of electronic noise to break up the rustic (maybe rusty? no less ridiculous an adjective..) loveliness.

Andrew Coleman's been making music under this alias and his own name forever and ever. His site's really nice and I found his musings on what the hell to do about releasing music nowadays strangely familiar... sometimes I feel like only musicians are buying each others' stuff these days. :) Which may be fine for those of us who are hobbyists.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post