Tyson.

Bonobo has dropped.

Ariel Pink.

11:05pm - 12:25am this Saturday. See you in the Sup.

Friday the 5th.

The 4:41 mark. Life changing.

His own best friends and parents didn’t even know this guy released what was dubbed one of the greatest albums of last decade. Boss.

R. Kelly combines the two greatest things in the world, disco and infidelity, to create a track which reinforces why is my favourite pervert.

Excuse me whilst I get my listing awwwn for my own personal benefit. If you’d like any albums/tracks mentioned here, hit me up and I’ll get them to you.

Tracks of the year:

(No order)

The Antlers - Bear
The Antlers - Epilogue
Washed Out - Lately
Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
Animal Collective - In The Flowers
Haruko - Mountain Song
Swan Lake - Settle On Your Skin
Andrew Jackson Jihad - We Didn’t Come Here To Rock
Ramona Falls - Melectric
Akron/Family - River
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Killers
Windmill - Song Metropolis Stars
Duck Sauce - aNYway
Ohbijou - Cannon March
White Rabbits - Percussion Gun

Albums of the year:

1. The Antlers - Hospice
2. Andrew Jackson Jihad - Can’t Maintain
3. Windmill - Epcot Starfields
4. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Vs. Children
5. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
6. Akron/Family - Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
7.Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer
8. Swan Lake - Enemy Mine
9. Ramona Falls - Intuit
10. Haruko - Wild Geese

Honourable mentions:

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
Washed Out - Life of Leisure
Real Estate - Real Estate
Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
St. Vincent - Actor
Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue
Various Artists - Dark Was The Night
Ohbijou - Beacons

Gigs of the year:

1. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone at the Northcote Social Club
2. Neil Young at the Big Day Out
3. Ghostface Killah at The Esplanade
4. Her Space Holiday at the Northcote Social Club
5. of Montreal at the Hi-fi Bar
6. Animal Collective at The Forum
7. Stars at The Corner Hotel
8. Mogwai at Golden Plains
9. Deerhunter at the Corner Hotel
10. TV on the Radio at the Big Day Out
11. No Age at The Corner Hotel
12. Jay Reatard at The Corner Hotel
13. Dan Deacon at The Esplanade
14. Pharoahe Monch at the Meredith Music Festival
15. The Tenniscoats at the Toff in Town

Most listened to artists:

(Configured using a combination of Last.fm and Normalisr).

1. Stars of the Lid / 385 Songs / 3259 Minutes
2. Animal Collective / 515 Songs / 2274 Minutes
3. Parenthetical Girls / 620 Songs / 2056 Minutes
4. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone / 658 Songs / 1754 Minutes
5. The Antlers / 191 Songs / 779 Minutes
6. of Montreal / 251 Songs / 736 Minutes
7. Andrew Jackson Jihad / 356 Songs / 723 Minutes
8. TV on the Radio / 160 Songs / 714 Minutes
9. Destroyer / 197 Songs / 702 Minutes
10. Final Fantasy / 201 Songs / 663 Minutes
11. mewithoutYou / 193 Songs / 656 Minutes
12. Wolf Parade / 184 Songs / 650 Minutes
13. Modest Mouse / 165 Songs / 583 Minutes
14. Laura Veirs / 164 Songs / 563 Minutes
15. Sufjan Stevens / 159 Songs / 556 Minutes
16. Ohbijou / 141 Songs / 540 Minutes
17. Why? / 157 Songs / 471 Minutes
18. Okay / 131 Songs / 436 Minutes
19. Devendra Banhart / 143 Songs / 436 Minutes
20. The Olivia Tremor Control / 92 Songs / 412 Minutes

Summer romance songs that just make you want to grab your sweetie and go do all this cliche garbage.

Either way, this album was great.

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops I-IV

Only post for the next ten days, basically because I want anyone who ever visits this blog to see this, read it, and listen to the above 6 minute extract of this 295 minute exploration.

Click for download links.

____________________________________

It’s September, 2001, and William Basinski - obscure New York sound-artist - is trying to salvage some gravely beautiful ambient recordings he made years earlier on magnetic tape, by transferring them to digital format. But the tape has deteriorated in storage, and as it passes the read/write head the ferrite (which holds the “imprint” of the sound) detaches from the plastic backing – it disintegrates. “I was blown away by what had just happened,” Basinski told me earlier this year, “And I was incredibly moved by the whole redemptive quality of what I’d just experienced: each of these loops had disintegrated in its own way and its own time, yet the life and death of the melody was redeemed in another medium.”

Two days after the fated analogue-to-digital transfer, 9/11 happened. A stunned and horrified Basinski was up on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment; he set up a static video camera framing the view of downtown, where the smoke was, and the towers had been. This haunting film was set to the prescient music of ‘Disintegration Loop 1.1’ and later released as a DVD – a cinema verité elegy to those who died in the attacks. The full set of The Disintegration Loops - almost five hours of haunted audio - was released across four audio CDs, using stills from the film as cover art. They amount to one of the most elegant and powerful art-works of the contemporary era; a harrowing but ultimately life-affirming compound of accident and intent.

____________________________________

It’s impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski’s four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and were disintegrating as they played and he recorded them. As he notes in the liner notes, “The music was dying.” But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops.

These recordings were made in August and September of 2001. Now, this is where the story gets impossible. William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. As I said, it’s impossible. The music, however, is beautiful, subtle, sad, frightening, confusing, and ultimately uplifting. What’s he created here is a living document: a field recording of orchestrated decay. It sounds like nothing else I’ve heard, yet, at its core, it’s the simplest and most familiar music I can imagine.

The four disks comprise six unique works. There is some overlap on the different disks; in fact, the first work (which Basinski calls “D|P 1”) begins on disk one and ends on disk four. Some of the works are very long (“D|P 1” is over 90 minutes), while some are relatively short (“D|P 4” is only 20 minutes). However, each of the six works employs a different, repeating loop that slowly deteriorates into oblivion. The loops are very simple: a lush string or synth melody backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. The melodies are, as Basinski notes, pastoral: lush, simple works intended as idealized representations of nature and beauty. In theory, then, this is ambient music: music designed to set a mood, evoke a feeling (like a cinematic score), but one that is not designed for deep listening. That, I’m sure, was Basinski’s initial design when he first created these loops in 1982.

But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What’s more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.

As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. “D|P 3,” for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise. By contrast, the longest piece, “D|P 1,” because it is split into three distinct parts (“1.1” on disk one; “1.2” and “1.3” on disk four), actually dies three separate deaths. Each one begins as soft, warm halos of sound, which then slowly mutates into muddled fragments. And then there’s “D|P 4,” the smallest work. It begins as a full-fledged melody but slowly devolves into chaos: silences slowly spreading across huge gaps in the loop, while the muddled melody struggles on, barely perceptible, until it, too, is silenced into oblivion.

This is not ambient music; this is not one melody played over and over to fill the background space of a Japanese restaurant. This is natural music: music created from the elemental forces of life and as a testament to those forces. This is the sound of entropy, the sound of life as it decays and dies before our ears. And like all living things, these sounds struggle and claw for life with their last, dying breaths. Their deaths are a memorial to Basinski’s past. That he dedicates these works to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is fitting. I can think of no better tribute, no better response to a tragedy of that magnitude than a work as beautiful and as fragile as this one.

Reviewed by Michael Heumann

Just created a flavors.me ?

Yeah, click on the picture to check it out. Hit me up if you’re looking for an invite code so you can make one.

It’s only been around for a few days, so of course the site is a little buggy and in testing stage. But I like it. Yup.

My favourite downtempo lounge track. Make sure you play this the whole way through, the final three minutes are absolute bliss. You will play it more than once.

It’s fair to say I’m a little addicted.

I’m going to call this as the best music video for the year.