Barrie's Big Best-of 2006 List: Part Five
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Here we go, the end of the album reviews! Now that it's April I feel embarrassingly late posting this, but I'm glad I got it all done.I'll upload my top 10 favouring songs of 2006 in separate tracks, each with an mp3 embed!1. Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet
What more about this album can I say than I already have? Well, a lot actually - and that's a testament to how incredible this album really is. It keeps speaking to me and keeps on revealing new things about itself. Hecker's miasma of spectral drones and fuzz is like a transmission from silent but alive radios, it's like the music machines make. On one hand it is cold but on the other it's a present, glowing, and warm cyclic hum. Machines are after all human creations, and this music sounds like the detritus of our culture, or the approximation of it that machines might be making. That which is always swirling around us, Hecker's music is remembering. Things are forgotten and mashed together, like a language of loss. It's dirty and scratched from age. This music feels special, like we have peeked through a door or caught something at the right time, just coming in to or fading out of being. Like a washed out photograph, this music suggests so much with so little. It also speaks, for me, to the landscape in which I live - the vast, cold industrialized prairie - and it is perhaps that aspect that makes me feel so close to this album. It approximates my personality so closely I find it hard to believe it even exists. But this music is so gauzy, hazy, and temporal that maybe it's not that hard to believe at all - it could blink out at any moment. This is more than just the album of the year for me. It's made me think so much about myself and the world around me that it has engraved itself like a phonograph cutting lathe into my life.I do feel the need to poo on Conspiracy records. They released the album on vinyl in a super-expensive limited run, which my local record store tried very hard to acquire. Once I did get the record in my hands, I was disappointed to discover they did not even press the entire album! The final two tracks are missing. When you're dealing with an album such as this, which mirrors itself at the end, it's incredibly poor form to not finish the job. Lame.2. Supersilent - 7
My favourite jazz band around puts in an absolutely stellar live album (DVD actually; the black-and-white visuals are lovely, too). Their jazz is wooly and experimental, wobbly, taking surprising directions, and seemingly free of the annoying, indulgent noodling and honking that plagues almost all modern jazz. Yet at the same time as being wobbly, it is incredibly sure of itself, propelled forward by amazingly scattered yet determined percussion, straight up into the sky, a transcendent - almost religious - culmination of elegiac improvisation. While most their works end up in the same place (transcendent scatter-noise), I think that is for the best. Their music has a purpose beyond self-indulgent virtuosity and ends up at a destination, and on the way there they will dazzle you with nigh-incomprehensible stuttering rhythms and ominous, brooding electronic atmospheres. Perhaps they are channeling something mysterious - if you watch the video, you will see them all rocking to a beat that you can never associate with a sound they're making... strange...3. Scott Walker - The Drift
While I admit the album is a bit beyond my grasp, it has still affected me deeply. It's one of those albums that could only be made by an old person... lots of experience, lots of detail, lots and lots of knowledge. I'm sure there are things going on here that are simply going right over my head. But that's not important, because the things that do hit my head are fantastic, wonderful, and challenging. "The Drift" is like a one-man play, an intense-looking man standing on a dark stage with a few symbolic props half-lit, singing his sorrows and scaring you half to death with them. You want to run, but he is so magnetic that you are affixed by your sickly curiosity. This is a seriously dark, twisted sonic world of classic vocals, stabbing strings, bleating horns, skin-like percussion and cavernous darkness. Sort of like a gaping maw that will swallow you whole. It's a hard album to listen to, but it will provide you with many hard-earned rewards each time you come back to it.4. Volcano The Bear - Classic Erasmus Fusion
This British band puts out one of the best sprawling-yet-concise definitions of the genre-destroying new folk/free jazz/electronic/etc trend occupied by the storied likes of Jackie-O Motherfucker and No-Neck Blues Band. The music played is so varied and colourful, it would take far too many adjectives to describe it through words. Needless to say it sounds like something that a group of brilliant child prodigies (or maybe idiot savants) would come up with having been given full access to the last century of musical history within easy grasp. Really truly bizarre songs that warp and drone and squeal sit next to gorgeous droning raga-like spirituals replete with found sounds and unusual studio tricks. A lot of the tracks sound "stupid" in a brilliant way, and never does that stupidity sound forced or put-on. They are an intelligent, irreverent (in the real sense of that word), innovative group of musicians who have no concerns about melding styles and sounding weird. It should also be noted that they do none of this with chips on their shoulders - they are not trying to prove anything beyond the fact that they like to make music. Not only amazing but will probably stand as an important document of current musical genre-collage/collapse concepts.5. Current 93 - Black Ships Ate the Sky
Not much else can be said that has not already been said about this mammoth of an album. David Tibet's apocalyptic (literally) opus, the newest result of his years and years of research into various odd corners of gnosticism, catholicism, and all manners of religious discourse led by his own personal visions of the great Revealing. Tibet has amassed an impressive group of guest musicians as well, making this an incredibly rich musical experience. Current 93 has always been a bit of an acquired taste, especially Tibet's often difficult vocals, but this album simply cannot be ignored. For C93 newbies, this is not his best album but it stands near the top of his output. He's reached an interesting point of maturity where he doesn't sound quite as intense or edgy as he used to, but Tibet is such a consummate artist that a very good album from him can show up almost anything released the same year.
What more about this album can I say than I already have? Well, a lot actually - and that's a testament to how incredible this album really is. It keeps speaking to me and keeps on revealing new things about itself. Hecker's miasma of spectral drones and fuzz is like a transmission from silent but alive radios, it's like the music machines make. On one hand it is cold but on the other it's a present, glowing, and warm cyclic hum. Machines are after all human creations, and this music sounds like the detritus of our culture, or the approximation of it that machines might be making. That which is always swirling around us, Hecker's music is remembering. Things are forgotten and mashed together, like a language of loss. It's dirty and scratched from age. This music feels special, like we have peeked through a door or caught something at the right time, just coming in to or fading out of being. Like a washed out photograph, this music suggests so much with so little. It also speaks, for me, to the landscape in which I live - the vast, cold industrialized prairie - and it is perhaps that aspect that makes me feel so close to this album. It approximates my personality so closely I find it hard to believe it even exists. But this music is so gauzy, hazy, and temporal that maybe it's not that hard to believe at all - it could blink out at any moment. This is more than just the album of the year for me. It's made me think so much about myself and the world around me that it has engraved itself like a phonograph cutting lathe into my life.I do feel the need to poo on Conspiracy records. They released the album on vinyl in a super-expensive limited run, which my local record store tried very hard to acquire. Once I did get the record in my hands, I was disappointed to discover they did not even press the entire album! The final two tracks are missing. When you're dealing with an album such as this, which mirrors itself at the end, it's incredibly poor form to not finish the job. Lame.2. Supersilent - 7My favourite jazz band around puts in an absolutely stellar live album (DVD actually; the black-and-white visuals are lovely, too). Their jazz is wooly and experimental, wobbly, taking surprising directions, and seemingly free of the annoying, indulgent noodling and honking that plagues almost all modern jazz. Yet at the same time as being wobbly, it is incredibly sure of itself, propelled forward by amazingly scattered yet determined percussion, straight up into the sky, a transcendent - almost religious - culmination of elegiac improvisation. While most their works end up in the same place (transcendent scatter-noise), I think that is for the best. Their music has a purpose beyond self-indulgent virtuosity and ends up at a destination, and on the way there they will dazzle you with nigh-incomprehensible stuttering rhythms and ominous, brooding electronic atmospheres. Perhaps they are channeling something mysterious - if you watch the video, you will see them all rocking to a beat that you can never associate with a sound they're making... strange...3. Scott Walker - The DriftWhile I admit the album is a bit beyond my grasp, it has still affected me deeply. It's one of those albums that could only be made by an old person... lots of experience, lots of detail, lots and lots of knowledge. I'm sure there are things going on here that are simply going right over my head. But that's not important, because the things that do hit my head are fantastic, wonderful, and challenging. "The Drift" is like a one-man play, an intense-looking man standing on a dark stage with a few symbolic props half-lit, singing his sorrows and scaring you half to death with them. You want to run, but he is so magnetic that you are affixed by your sickly curiosity. This is a seriously dark, twisted sonic world of classic vocals, stabbing strings, bleating horns, skin-like percussion and cavernous darkness. Sort of like a gaping maw that will swallow you whole. It's a hard album to listen to, but it will provide you with many hard-earned rewards each time you come back to it.4. Volcano The Bear - Classic Erasmus FusionThis British band puts out one of the best sprawling-yet-concise definitions of the genre-destroying new folk/free jazz/electronic/etc trend occupied by the storied likes of Jackie-O Motherfucker and No-Neck Blues Band. The music played is so varied and colourful, it would take far too many adjectives to describe it through words. Needless to say it sounds like something that a group of brilliant child prodigies (or maybe idiot savants) would come up with having been given full access to the last century of musical history within easy grasp. Really truly bizarre songs that warp and drone and squeal sit next to gorgeous droning raga-like spirituals replete with found sounds and unusual studio tricks. A lot of the tracks sound "stupid" in a brilliant way, and never does that stupidity sound forced or put-on. They are an intelligent, irreverent (in the real sense of that word), innovative group of musicians who have no concerns about melding styles and sounding weird. It should also be noted that they do none of this with chips on their shoulders - they are not trying to prove anything beyond the fact that they like to make music. Not only amazing but will probably stand as an important document of current musical genre-collage/collapse concepts.5. Current 93 - Black Ships Ate the SkyNot much else can be said that has not already been said about this mammoth of an album. David Tibet's apocalyptic (literally) opus, the newest result of his years and years of research into various odd corners of gnosticism, catholicism, and all manners of religious discourse led by his own personal visions of the great Revealing. Tibet has amassed an impressive group of guest musicians as well, making this an incredibly rich musical experience. Current 93 has always been a bit of an acquired taste, especially Tibet's often difficult vocals, but this album simply cannot be ignored. For C93 newbies, this is not his best album but it stands near the top of his output. He's reached an interesting point of maturity where he doesn't sound quite as intense or edgy as he used to, but Tibet is such a consummate artist that a very good album from him can show up almost anything released the same year.
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