A CLOSER LISTEN weekly #47

ACL's Best Records of 2024

“ACL's Best Records of 2024.” Did I already make this joke? No, actually Rich gets the credit for that one, when we ran “the world’s earlier top ten list” earlier this year. Joseph here. We’re in the process of compiling our End of Year lists, other publications’ lists have already dropped, Spotify Wrapped are making the rounds, so once again everyone is seemingly reflecting on year end lists. I’ve found that I enjoy the excuse to catch up on records I missed and revisit records from throughout the year, but I always grumble about the process and the arbitrariness of it.

I’m always catching up on the many records in the to-listen queue, trying to balance submissions and other new music with, you know, listening to music for fun. This is probably a common experience as one gets older, especially for those of us that are music critics in whatever capacity, but I find I focus less and less on contemporary music. Not that I’m listening to the music of my youth (besides the occasional nostalgia trips), but I do spend a lot of time doing themed listening: this or that band’s entire discography, such and such a genre or region or format, or whatever organizing principle it may be. ACL only reflects a portion of our listening, and as we’ve explained before, there are a good many records we would write about if we had the time and space. We limit the blog to one post per day, so there’s only so many spots available, we often will opt to cover a lesser known artist if we know that all the other reviewers will have already weighed in on a record.

So our ACL end of year lists reflect our favorites from among what we’ve covered on the blog those previous 12 months. I’ll once again be sharing my own Sound Propositions year in review in early January, which includes my picks from a wider selection of records.

This time last year I shared some memes from friends that represented a spectrum of attitudes towards end of year season. With the recent sale of Bandcamp still on my mind, I’m feeling even more ambivalent this year. Yeah Spotify sucks, but everyone uses it. I think we’ve critiqued enough at this point. Our energy, as musicians, should be spent on organizing. As fans, we should purchase music from artists we want to support. And in general we should be more invested in communities and institutions and less focused on individual genius.

PLUS ONE

As with my last newsletter, I wanted to take a moment to highlight another record I’ve been listening to but hadn’t gotten around to shouting yet, in this case Fielded’s Plus One, released on Backwoodz earlier this fall. Some listeners will recognize Fielded’s voices from their contributions to records by billy woods and Armand Hammer, and Plus One delivers more of the R&B / soul vocals and contemporary songcraft with a post-hip hop sensibility. Some listeners will no doubt be attracted by the many guest verses (features include woods, ELUCID, Pink Navel, Fatboi Sharif, and PremRock), while others will enjoy the range of producers contributing to this project (including The Lasso, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, Child Actor, and Steel Tipped Dove). Plus One is a bit like a producer album (see Blockhead’s The Aux) but shepherded by a singer instead of a beatmaker or a rapper. This is Fielded’s album, afterall, and executive produced billy woods, so you know it’s going to be cohesive and well-sequenced.

Released the week before Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, during a crowded month of releases that also saw new records from Lorraine James, Laurel Halo, Irreversible Entanglements, Fly or Die and many others, I just wanted to highlight Plus One here as one that’s worthy of your attention, especially if you’re looking for fresh vocal music and the most exciting contemporary producers.

The most recent season of Open Mike Eagle’s What Had Happened Was (or podcasting as hip hip therapy) features Questlove of The Roots, and something he said last week made me think of Plus One. There was a time in hip hop, he explains, where every record had one pop song with an r&b singer, usually featuring a recognizable sample as the melodic refrain or main beat, but Bad Boy flipped the script by making whole albums like that, where the outlier was the track intended for the streets and barbershops. But Fielded’s contributions to others records was never about that. Their vocal contributions to billy woods and Armand Hammer tracks is always about vibe, mood, and texture, not simply delivering a hook. I’ll admit that the featured MCs attracted me to Plus One more than 2021’s Demisexual Lovelace, but hearing Fielded hold their own against the diverse range of rappers has given me newfound appreciation for their work, and given the variety of voices and producers, I’ve found myself returning to Plus One often.

BANDCAMP FRIDAY

This Friday is the start of a new month, and perhaps the final Bandcamp Friday. I have a new record, Archive Fever, under the monicker the new objective, set to come out if you’re interested in having a listen or supporting my work. It’s the second volume in my series Friperietronics, essentially a weird ambient/concrete all-tape DJ set in which all the music, samples and loops are sourced from thrift store tapes and mixed and effected live. I’ve done a few mixes in this style over the years, and developed a performance practice using two or more variable speed tape decks in an improvisational context. Just as in the first installment, the seven “A-side” tracks are all studio edits, while the “B-side” is a recording of a live performance. Two bonus tracks are included as well, both more straightforward reworks of more or less traditional pop songs. What sets this installment apart from the first volume is that I draw not only from my collection of thrift store tapes but also on my personal tape archive (cassettes recorded in my home studio mostly resulting from informal jams), granting some tonal and rhythmic glue to the proceedings. As I mention in the liner notes, I thank four specific spiritual guides on this installment: Esther Bourdages, for her creative improvised approach to the turntable; GENG PTP, for his approach to found sound, particularly his series Slowness as the Vehicle; Jason Lescalleet, for the window into his practice granted by his studio diary series, This Is What I Do; and Aki Onda, for the distancing approach he takes to his cassette memories.  There’s also apparently a very small Venn-diagram of folks who get the series’ title, so I might as well explain that Friperietronics is my dumb pun on friperie (French for thrift store) and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s “Frippertronics.”

Support me here.

This bear wants to have some flour milled by Mariia Prymachenko

Ukrainian Field Notes XXVIII

For this month’s episode of UFN, Dubplanet X aka Obriy explains how he transforms anxiety inducing sounds into sonic effects for tracks, Anton Malynovskyi draws a brief outline of the apocalypse, Sony Synth treads the thin line separating genuine from manufactured bayraktcore, and Walakos recounts dealing with blackouts by cooking on the balcony with a portable stove.

Meanwhile, seraphina & no justice reflects on the Ukrainian Nightmare, Artem Baburin (aka SEPTIM) composes a score for a Wounded Land, Oleksiy H / SITKA gives us his take on the hardware vs software debate, Igor Glushko explains why Ukraine being one the most corrupt country is a tired cliché and Nadnova goes all dark ambient on us.

For the current episode of our UFN Podcast we have a further selection of tracks from the VA fundraising compilation out now on система | system.

Read the entire piece here.

RECENT REVIEWS

Reviews are at the heart of ACL. Here are (excerpts from) a few of my favorite reviews we posted on the blog in the last few weeks.

Action Pyramid & Jack Greenhalgh ~ Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond
Oceans, lakes and streams get all the glory, but Action Pyramid & Jack Greenhalgh are interested in ponds: specifically, the ways in which ponds offer their own take on the dawn and dusk chorus.  In Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond, hydrophones capture sounds that are normally unheard, while amplifications expose surprisingly conversational plant life.  The disc comes with liner notes and a poster, which delve deeper into the subject of acoustic freshwater ecology. Mardle is a reminder that humanity is not the only civilization, nor is it one of the oldest; others preceded us, and will endure after we are gone.  Such realizations may spark a new appreciation for humble habitats like the freshwater pond: worlds within worlds, vital and teeming with life.

Cindytalk – When the Moon is a Thread
If you’re not familiar with the work of Cindytalk – a mostly solo endeavor, originated by musician Cinder in 1982, that explores sound, art, and identity through goth, “ambi-dustrial” and experimental music – then a glance at When the Moon is a Thread, their latest album on Richard Chartier’s LINE label, might suggest you’d be in for an austere, even chilly listening experience. The striking cover art is an image of the rim of the Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole, the interior of which has never been touched by the rays of the sun. And the song titles all point to inexorable transformation, loss, and the passage of time. If, however, you are familiar with the work of Cindytalk, then you know to expect the unexpected. The material on When the Moon is a Thread very nearly defies description while it expands the possibilities of noise and music, and the places where they intersect and cross-pollinate.

Flora Yin Wong ~ Cold Reading
It may have been a mere coincidence of the calendar that saw Flora Yin Wong release her second album within a few days of Halloween, but if a record captured the spirit of the spooky season this year, then it was Cold Reading. There are moments of disquiet, misdirection and shadowy atmosphere spread across most of its half-hour duration – the calm and beauty don’t arrive until the final tracks. This disorientation that the listener experiences with Cold Reading is, of course, intentional and stunningly realised. There are ghosts and spirits present throughout the compositions – whether it is the clattering metallic percussion of “Banjar” (the sound of a poltergeist throwing instruments across the room perhaps) or the disembodied voice that appears on “Hands”. The speech ends in silence – ‘the damage is done,’ he utters – and there’s more than a hint of accusatory menace in the voice.

James Bernard & anthéne ~ Soft Octaves
Each of these artists brings something distinct and complementary to Soft Octaves. Bernard’s ambiguous tonal washes cross the frequency spectrum, coaxed as they are from a six-string bass, augmented by a volume pedal and many effects. These single-take recordings maintain a sense of vitality that might be dampened by overworking them, but importantly they are given shape by anthéne’s lap steel guitar and other embellishments. Under the name Influx, Bernard has produced music in idioms including trance, techno, and IDM, where “ambient” serves a related but distinct purpose. Grounded by anthéne’s melodic gestures, the pair make use of the hypnotic powers of repetition resulting in a contemplative record that plays just as well in the background.

Marja Ahti ~ Tender Membranes
In a sign of what is to come, Marja Ahti’s album Tender Membranes begins with the striking of a bell, its decay manipulated and stretched to almost two minutes before it is abruptly cut off. The sound of rushing water emerges from the silence first, before another ascending sound of metal and some gentle radio static pans across the stereo space. Despite the ever-shifting combination of sounds, it’s all very still and quiet, in no hurry. And so it goes across the album’s four electro-acoustic compositions as Ahti plays with space, texture, and expectation. Her sonic palate is diverse— concrete sounds and field recordings mix with static, piercing signals, and steadier drones, sounds buzzing, rustling, creaking, and scraping, the lines between instrumental, electronic, and concrete often obscured. Ahti plays a lot with the envelope of her sounds— stretching them, abruptly cutting them off, and just as abruptly re-introducing them.  The primary through-line to her sonic collage is that each element have “a sense of inner stillness.”

Various Artists ~ Common Ground Volumes 1-3
The comforting concepts of safe ground and common ground could not be more timely, although one might argue that they have always been timely.  The first is the name of the Brussels label, the second the name of its yearly compilation series, which is now on its third installment.  In a way, the latest album mirrors the collaborative bent of Aho Ssan’s recent Rhizomes, and the artist is one of many ACL favorites to appear on the set.  While these artists are not sharing studios, they are sharing a pair of common causes: Help Refugees/Choose Love and Sea-Watch NGOs.

UPCOMING RELEASES

(complete list with Bandcamp links here)

The release slate always quiets down at this time of year.  After the autumn rush, labels and artists turn their attention to the following year and only a trickle of music flows through.  Late-year releases are often lost in the shuffle, which is why we gather them here for your listening pleasure.  New previews are added to this page daily; we hope that you’ll find your next favorite album right here!  In the meantime, we’re making our (year-end) lists and checking them twice; our year-end festivities are just around the corner. Happy holidays to all of our readers!

Katrina Niebergal & Bergur Anderson ~ come, Memory: fieldwork (Futura Resistenza, 28 November)

General Magic ~ Nein Aber Ja (GOTO, 30 November)

MOORIS ~ I (Holuzam, 30 November)

Toada ~ Slow-Paced Tangents (Pluma, 30 November)

Dellarge ~ INRI (Industria Nacional del Ruido Infinito) (Modern Obscure Music, 1 December)

Ensemble 1 ~ Delay Works (Halfmeltedbrain, 1 December)

Ghost Marrow ~ earth + death (The Garrote, 1 December)

GiGi FM ~ Kiwi Synthesis Diary Vol.2 (Sea~rène, 1 December)

Greg Nieuwesma & Antonello Perfetto ~ N0n-Rational Vending Machine (Submarine Broadcasting Co., 1 December)

Hochzeitskapelle + Japanese Friends ~ The Orchestra in the Sky (Alien Transistor, 1 December)

Jim Perkins ~ Imprints (Bigo & Twigetti, 1 December)

Joshua Marquez ~ Dirt (1 December)

JWPaton ~ Structures (Room40, 1 December)

Lavatone ~ Lunar Mining and Excavation (Lost Tribe Sound, 1 December)

Lea Bertucci ~ Of Shadow and Substance (Cibachrome Editions, 1 December)

Live Maria Roggen and Ingrid Breie Nyhus ~ Skymt (Lab, 1 December)

Meitei ~ Kofū III / 古風 II (Kitchen, 1 December)

ni ~ Fol Naïs (Dur et Doux, 1 December)

Piotr Wiese ~ I Will Keep Sailing (Moderna, 1 December)

R.A. Sánchez ~ L’Ottava Sfera (Lost Tribe Sound, 1 December)

Robert Honstein ~ The Real Charlie Chaplin (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1 December)

Roedelius & Arnold Kasar ~ Zensibility (7K!, 1 December)

Ryan Pollie Quartet ~ S/T (Perpetual Doom, 1 December)

Samu Hietainen ~ Withered Flowers (1 December)

Serpente ~ Cosmos (Discrepant, 1 December)

Sons of New Soma ~ Fluxus 2071 (Tonzonen, 1 December)

Various Artists ~ 20 Years of Phonica (Phonica, 1 December)

Various Artists ~ WIGS001 (Wigs, 1 December)

Xqui ~ melting ice with ice (1 December)

Christian Kobe ~ Aare (Cubus, 3 December)

Henrik Meierkord & Ni! ~ Ekosystem (Ambientologist, 5 December)

Teresa Cos ~ Karnofsky’s Score (Futura Resistenza, 5 December)

Carrie Frey ~ Seagrass: Works for Solo Viola (8 December)

December ~ Transform Part 2, An Accident in Favor of Human Life (Tresor, 8 December)

Emil Friis & Patricio Fraile ~ The Expected Sounds of Minor Music (Fatcat/130701, 8 December)

Gentle Stranger ~ Inner Winter (PRAH, 8 December)

Infant ~ sigla, sone (Warm Winters Ltd., 8 December)

Musique Infinie ~ I (~OUS, 8 December)

April Clocks ~ Rituals (Union Editions, 9 December)

First Snow of the Year ~ Awakening of the Pines (Whitelabrecs, 9 December)

Harry Towell ~ Infinite Light (Whitelabrecs, 9 December)

Jakob Heinemann ~ Opacity (Kashe Editions, 10 December)

Hannibal Chew IV ~ Loros Locos (Sinfonías Destrozadas en Tenerife) (Discrepant, 15 December)

øjeRum ~ Your Soft Absence (Room40, 15 December)

Scott Twynholm ~ Orbits (Bigo & Twigetti, 15 December)

Stars Without Light ~ Beneath and Before (Cyclic Law, 15 December)

Suspension Bridge Workshop ~ 001 (Fluttery, 15 December)

Ben Richter ~ Aurogeny (Infrequent Seams, 22 December)

Trem 77 ~ Vivid Vibration EP (1 January)

Benjamín Vergara and Amanda Irarrazabal ~ último sosiego (577 Records, 3 January)

Hourloupe ~ Opera of the War (12 January)

Annie Aries ~ It’s Not Quiet in the Void (Everest, 26 January)

V/A ~ Flux Gourmet OST (Ba Da Bing, 26 January)

Panghalina ~ Lava (Room40, 2 February)

Wil Bolton ~ Null Point (The Slow Music Movement Label, 8 February)

C. Diab ~ Imerro (Tonal Union, 9 February)

Hexorcismos ~ MUTUALISMX (Other People, 15 February)

Maya Shenfeld ~ Under the Sun (Thrill Jockey, 23 February)

Michael Vincent Waller ~ Moments Remixes (Play Loud, 15 March)