To listen live on line go to: www.radio.adelaide.edu.au from 10pm South Australian time.

Part 1: 

*1. We No Who U R / Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds / We No Who U R

*2. Unwelcome Company (feat. Alison Mosshart) / Henry Wagons / Expecting Company?

*3. Bad Things Too / Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk / Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk

*4. Honeychild / Cal Williams Jr / Honeychild

*5. Price We Pay (Live @ Studio Couch Freo) / The MERRg / Just Sign Here Folks……

*6. Prometheus / The Mad Pride / Advice To The Wayfarer

*7. Black Lightening / Stompy and the Heat / Stompy and the Heat

*8. Easy Come, Easy Go / Diafrix / Pocket Full of Dreams

*9. Rise Of The New (Ft. Damajah, Jeswon & Tuka (Thundamentals)) / Chasm / Beyond The Beat Tape

*10. Wannadoo / The Ray Mann Three / Sketches Vol. 2

*11. Shoulders / Darryl Beaton Band / Darryl Beaton Band ‘From The Ground Up’

*12. Nightfall / PVT / Homosapien

*13. Days of Boredom / Lowrider / Black Stones

*14. Electric Alice / Grinderman / Grinderman

*= Australian Artists

Part 2: 

1. Dilla Soldier (Josh One Edit) / Sade / J Dilla / Frank & Dank / 2010

2. Running Around with Another / Madvillain / Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix

3. Suns Out (Studio) / Choklate / To Whom It May Concern

4. Play (Josh One Remix) / Goapele / Play Remixed

5. I Can’t Cry No More / Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics / Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics – Single

6. Dead Vets / The Gaslamp Killer feat. Adrian Younge, MRR / Breakthrough

7. Veins / The Gaslamp Killer feat. Gonjasufi / Breakthrough

8. Holidays / Gonja Sufi / A Sufi And A Killer

9. me Yesterday//Corded / Flying Lotus / Until The Quiet Comes

10. Catch Me Riding Dirty / Samiyam / Man vs Machine

11. Loner / Burial / Kindred

12. Trying / Cooly G / Playin’ Me

13. THERE WE GO (CLEAN EDIT) / Cadence Weapon / Hope In Dirt City (CLEAN)

14. 10 / Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland / Black is Beautiful

Click below for the Spotify playlist.

While there are albums that have proved most effective at blocking out the outside world, they haven’t all become favourites in the normal sense. The three albums that I’ve loved most this year have one thing in common: collaboration. They all take simple forms which become convoluted and unpredictable through introducing chaotic elements.

The big three

Since April I’ve had Carter Tutti Void’s album Transverse on constant rotation. There’s something beguiling about it, with an appearance of little going on but actually serving as a template for the listener to imagine all sorts of hidden melodies. That it’s a live performance is staggering. I wish I’d been there.

Philippe Petit’s Cordophony is either an album that went under the radar for most music publications, or it’s one that just appeals specifically to me. In 45 minutes it covers a vast spectrum, short soundtracks to all sorts of imagined scenes. According to the press release, Petit plays ‘processed acoustics/field recordings/foundsounds + electronics + turntables & glass manipulations + percussions + synths/piano + balloons’ and there are 17 other musicians involved, including Nils Frahm. The album is a swirling mix of cello, electric harp, vibraphone, tibetan bowls, flutes, gongs and prepared piano, but sounds like something from another world.

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland’s ‘Black is Beautiful’ is another shimmering oddity. More a collection of sketches than songs, it gives the impression of flicking through radio stations. This is my understanding of what hauntology should be – I could convince myself that I’d heard any number of these pieces in my childhood, complicated by the inclusion of an unlabelled cover of Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 track, ‘Baby’. Totally alien and totally familiar.

The rest of the top ten

Mature Themes, by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, didn’t capture the attention of the music press in the same way as 2010’s Before Today. But it’s a really strong record and the move to less a lo-fi production might make it endure longer. It’s a terrific mix of styles, sounding like Beefheart, Zappa and Gong. The title track and ‘Only In My Dreams’ are perfect pop, ‘Early Birds of Babylon’ surprises me each time I hear it, and there’s another cover of Donnie and Joe Emerson’s ‘Baby’, making a nice link to Blunt and Copeland’s album.

I’m not sure what kind of status Purity Ring’s Shrines has by popular consensus, but it’s the electropop album I’ve been waiting for for a long time. Megan James’s vocals are sharp, memorable melodies but it’s Corin Roddick’s backing work that makes it. The pitchshifted, choppy samples remind me of a more clubby take on The Knife’s Silent Shout. His synths saturate the album, often overwhelming the vocals. The effect is like examining intricate artworks with the low summer sun blinding your eyes.

Cellist Hildur Gudnadottir’s album Leyfdu Ljosinu is a single 40-minute track, recorded live with no post-production. It’s staggeringly beautiful.

The best albums often don’t fit neatly into particular genres. Dance Classics Vols I & II from NHK’Koyxen don’t match my normal tastes, and yet I’ve listened to them both endlessly in the second half of 2012. Something about these short, skittery bursts really puts me in some kind of flow state.

On its release, I fully expected Liars’ WIXIW to top my list of 2012 favourites. Seeing them perform live in Berlin cemented my love for the band’s new direction. The standout track, ‘Brats’, is still the most anarchic, infectious thing imaginable.

Unlike the immersive Splazsh, Actress’s R.I.P is a weird collection of vignettes. On some listens they can seem insubstantial, on others they seem to stretch out, hinting at something far broader. A really eccentric but compelling album.

The Seer by Swans is a late entry to my top ten. I’d struggled for a long time to get around to devoting full attention to the 2-hour opus, in the knowledge that it would be demanding and no kind of background to any other activity. It’s an amazing album, huge in ambition, and it’s hard to believe it’s an album release and not a retrospective of a lifetime’s work. I suspect I’ll love it more and more with time.

Honorable mentions

• Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin – Instrumental Tourist
  Beautiful drones. This is what I write to.
• Au – Both Lights
  Colin Stetson’s addition to the lineup makes a great band greater. At it’s best, it sounds like Animal Collective playing Steve Reich.
• Fieldhead – A Correction
  Not as firm a favourite as 2009′s They Shook Hands for Hours, but still sublime.
• Andy Stott – Luxury Problems
  Hypnotic and overwhelming.
• Fenn O’Berg – In Hell
  Another terrific collaboration. ‘Christian Rocks’ and ‘Omuta Elegy’ are outstanding.
• Mouse On Mars – Parastrophics
  The most fun, and funniest, album of the year.

The arrival of the summer solstice does strange things to bloggers’ minds. The axial tilt aligns perfectly with the crack in their damaged psychosis and warm pagan vibes rush through their mental chambers, like the sun flooding Newgrange’s passages, except that this merely provokes the mysterious need to do out a list rather than light bonfires. Here are some of my (non-ordered) favourite albums of the first half of 2012.

Albums of 2012 (0.5)

Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light II

Earth – A Multiplicity Of Doors

Part one of drone messiahs Earth’s latest recording project was released last October, but I haven’t listened to it. What I can tell you though, is that part two is a slow-burning march over some pretty dark musical marshland. Look at that amazing artwork – it’s exactly what the music sounds like. A sinister procession through the fog. While those looking for signs of significantly evolved or mutated sounds from Earth would be advised not to look to AOD,DOL2 for much progression, anyone searching for a good dollop of instrumental drone will be ecstatic with this record. That cello.

Liars - WIXIW

Liars – Who Is The Hunter

The thing about Liars is that they’ve been around for longer than you may first think. Maybe that’s got something to do with the sort of unexpected stunts they’re capable of pulling of so seamlessly – like WIXIW. Five albums on from 2000 and I was still surprised at how much of a departure this new one is from 2010′s Sisterworld. This is thoroughly electronic fare. In interviews, band member Aaron Hemphill has spoken about those thrilling moments in recording when, while messing around with some synths, drum machines and software programs, some amazing new sound emerges from the speakers, and there’s a scramble to take note of how it was arrived at. It’s sort of nice thinking that that sort of joyful wonder was going on during the recording process, but if it gives the impression of a band simply ditching the power trio front in favour of fashionable beep-bloops, it’s unjustified. This album is consummately professional.

Cloud Nothings - Attack On Memory

Cloud Nothings – No Future, No Past

Steve Albini produces albums for a living, and by his own admission he’s done thousands in his time. So it’s always a bit disingenuous to point to the sleeve notes of an Albini-produced record as reason for a record to be particularly noteworthy – but that doesn’t stop speculation as to where exactly the line was drawn with his involvement in the recording  or generally exciting hardcore, garage and indie fans. Anyway, he produced Cloud Nothings’ third LP, and it’s good. Make of that what you will. While I’m inclined to criticise the at-times weak lyrics (if they were read as a spoken word performance, audience members would likely wonder how they had ended up at an emo poetry reading session), there are enough tight jams and refined angst here to make it work.

Levon Vincent - fabric 63

Rainstorm II (from fabric 63)

When it comes to certainties in life, there are a few things we can count in straight away. Death, taxes, despondent feelings of personal inadequacy – all these are things which have been well documented, but there is also another, less well-known certainty. That’s the certainty that when it comes to reviewing a mix CD, the writer will inevitably raise the question of the ‘relevancy of commercial mixes’ in a post-.zip file world. If they don’t just straight-up demand to know why they’re still pretty popular despite the whole internet thing, they will at very least draw attention to the fact that music writers are constantly doing so anyway in a very droll, dry-humourously ironic and eyebrow-arching manner, which (as you will now have noted) is the method that I have opted for here. fabric 63 makes a mockery of the need for that certainty. Delicately mixed and lethally presented, with fabric 63 New York house producer Levon Vincent has provided 2012 with a decisively fresh selection of house and techno. I hate constantly reducing music writing to onomatopoeia on this blog, but this mix seriously fucking bangs.

Voices From The Lake - Voices From The Lake

Voices From The Lake – S.T. (Vftl Rework)

This album opens with the sound of running water, which is supposed to be one of the most universally appealing sounds out there, so theoretically at least it should initially appeal to all. The rest of the album flows on much like an underground waterway, swirling through unmapped gully holes and over mysterious subterranean karst formations. Speleogenesis, the way in which caves form, is a mysterious and erosive process which carves incredible natural sculptures from limestone rock and Donato Dozzy and Neel, the two Italian techno producers behind Voices From The Lake, are the closest example you can get to musical speleologists. Their debut collaborative LP is a monumental and thriving techno ecosystem, which sounds so carefully constructed that it touches the very outer bounds of the concept of ‘beat-driven’ techno. Geophysical music from way beneath our feet, Voices From The Lake is almost as exciting as a third class school trip to the Ailwee Caves.

Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland – Black Is Beautiful

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland – 11

I’ve already posted on this slice of the bizarre, but since then I managed to catch the esoteric duo play live in Barcelona. I only recognised one song from their hour-long set, an abrasive and startling romp of a spectacle that scared upwards of 80% of the audience. It’s confusing music. Your body wants to move, but every fibre of your intelligence system questions your ability to do so in at least an only semi-embarrassing manner due to the bewildering rhythms. How the fuck do you dance to this? Thing is with a lot of these guys’ music is that you don’t realise the potency of their bass undertones until you’re camped right in front of several gargantuan stacks of sonic steroids and the concrete plinth you’re standing on is shaking so bad that it feels as though it might crumble to nothing at any moment. So yeah, this might be ‘bass music’, but it’s the weirdest branch of that particular tree that you’re ever going to swing out of. This is home-grown.

Burial – Kindred EP

Burial – Loner

I’m sorry. I love Burial’s music but I hate writing about it. So instead, here’s a list of the top ten phrases used in conjunction with his February EP; underground, ethereal, disembodied, public transport, drift, crackle, broken, urban/city soundscape, abandoned, emotions. And my own; fucking class.

Julia Holter – Ekstasis

Julia Holter – Goddess Eyes II

Julia Holter makes music in her bedroom in Los Angeles, but she’s very far removed from the blog-friendly term of ‘bedroom producer’ that’s become so familiar over the past few years. Her second album, Ekstasis, has echoed and reverberated through empty marble chambers in my head since I started listening. It’s regal music, but not in an elitist sense. If you give it time to set sail from its experimental jetty and float gracefully into the sunset, passing coastal landmarks on the way - ecclesiastical, mythological, synthesised - Ekstasis will eventually reaches its destination, your favour.

Evian Christ – Kings And Them

Evian Christ – Fuck It If None Of Y’All Don’t Rap

The first thing that’s useful to know about Kings And Them is that it’s most decisively not an album. It’s a ‘mixtape’, and if you’ve ever been confused about that term vs album, here’s a perfect example of the former. Kings And Them’s eight tracks almost all draw heavily from two sample sources (drone band Grouper and obnoxious ‘swag’ rapper Tyga’s ‘Snapbacks Back‘ from last year, which is cut into about five separate tracks), leading to many critics’ lukewarm reception of the tape as an ‘album’. Twenty-three year old Joshua Leary (apologies, can’t bring myself to write ’23 yo Christ’s music’) started making his music known to the general public via an anonymous and weird YouTube channel last December, and by February, he had a record deal and official release with respected witch-house-y label Tri-Angle. The music might fit into the fold of what’s been referred to as ‘cloud rap’ (think Clams Casino, ASAP Rocky, Main Attractionz), but Leary didn’t even know what that term meant when interviewed by Pitchfork a few months back, so it’s not as though he’s making a conscious effort to latch onto music of the now, rather, it just happened to sound like some of the more progressive collection of tracks of the first six months of the year. And it doesn’t hurt that this absolutely goes off too. From all out banger ‘Fuck It If None Of Y’All Don’t Rap’ to more expansive moments such as ‘Horses In Motor’, Leary showcases a gifted ear for melody and beats. Not everything on this tape comes together as well as they might, but then again, it’s supposed to be a showcase and hints at greater things to come.

Evian Christ – Kings And Them - Free Download

Clams Casino – Instrumental Mixtape II

Clams Casino – Palace

I must admit to being somewhat biased with this release, given that some of my favourite rap instrumentals of last year came via this tape’s tracklist. It doesn’t really feel like new music, but it’s still great. A lot of writers and general internet people will consistently claim that the music of Clams Casino is the perfect stuff to sit back to and just blaze some illicit green plucked carefully from the pot between the tomato plant and the bag of peatmoss in the glass house, but I don’t really get that so much. This music makes me want to go outside, see mountains, climb mountains, see the city from the mountains, and wonder about the city and the mountains. Just me? Decide for yourself I ‘spose.

Clams Casino – Instrumental Mixtape II – Free Download

Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music

Killer Mike – Big Beast

“I don’t make dance music/ this is R.A.P/ opposite of that sucker shit you hear on TV”

Sure, but you can still move to rap, right? On R.A.P. Music, 37 year-old Killer Mike is in top form. He raps about Reagan’s Contra scandal and economics, he raps about Muddy Waters, literature, lobster…essentially it’s a nice spread. The album does hark back to a much earlier era in rap, but it’s immaculately executed, and besides, that particular period in rap gave us some of the genre’s finest records. El-P produced the whole thing, then dropped his own album Cancer For Cure, a few weeks later. In the meantime, they managed to put together the above video, a grisly nod to Drive. This is one of the finest rap releases of the year. The lyrics and samples are both seriously thought-provoking, exemplified in ‘Don’t Die’, an angry portrait of what Killer Mike sees the hate and fear that exists between many policemen and segments of the African-American community – made all the more potent by the recent death of Rodney King. Manic, southern, political – all these things are great ingredients for a soup that’s so thick you could bounce a bowl of it off the floor. Like many of the sick riddims on this album, then. Meanwhile, Drake is still the biggest rapper in the world.

Killer Mike – Reagan

Chief Keef - Back From The Dead

Chief Keef – I Don’t Like

I don’t know what would have happened if I had been put under house-arrest at my Grandmother’s aged 16 for pointing a gun at a policeman. I can say for certain though that it probably wouldn’t have resulted in me getting a major label record deal. Good job Chicago teenager Chief Keef’s life in no way resembles mine then, cos that’s exactly how it went down for him in the past few months. In a sequence of events destined for big-screen biopic drama fifteen years from now (when, Keef, now a bloated label boss, raises his red-bottomed loafers onto his teak desk, withdraws the ‘Child’s Arm’ brand cigar from his mouth and points it at an aide. “Ya know what? You should get someone to make a movie of my life. The truth.”) Chief Keef became involved in some sort of stand-off with Chicago police, was duly tagged and placed under house-arrest at his Grandmother’s, had a load of his friends round to make a mixtape, and shot the above video in his Granny’s front room. Said video went semi-viral, Kanye West does an official (and awful) remix of the track, and suddenly Chief Keef is someone important. Back From The Dead certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes. If Killer Mike’s latest one is the well-read social activist from across the street with the cabinet of ancient brandies, Back From The Dead is that reviled teenage mob that slinks around drinking Buckfast under the bridge, setting off fireworks under windows and ruining the town’s flowerbed by standing on it to piss. But that mob isn’t all bad, is it? They can be sort of fun sometimes. Like this tape. It’s mercifully free of commercial influence, and although most of the lyrics are about aspiring to stack loads of paper and such, it’s less obscenely greedy and more juvenilely visceral than a lot of other rap releases out there. It’s Flockaveli for 2012, fun music that hits hard and doesn’t mean all that much, but brazenly sprawls there in your iTunes, smirking at you, until you play it all again.

Chief Keef - Back From The Dead - Free Download

Other strong 2012 albums which I haven’t listened to enough yet/got too lazy to write any more on, but might still end up in ‘Albums of 2012 (1.0)’;

Death Grips - The Money Store, Chromatics – Kill For Love, Shackleton – Music For The Quiet Hour, Actress – RIP, John Talabot- fIN, ScHoolboy Q - Habits And Contradictions.

DOWNLOAD

Oxalá pudesse dizer o mesmo deste blogue, mas a consistência da faixa Haute Contre Bas na minha vida nos ultimo ano/ano e meio tem sido duma solidez que me deixa desconfortável. A procura quase cientifica pelo desconhecido confortável do left field e outros amores ameaça foder o gozo, quando descubro que precisamos – periodicamente, absolutamente-  de voltar à box. E por box entenda-se aquele som, aquele refrão, aquele qualquer coisa que se demora que nos toca a corda primal, nos leva de arrasto a nós próprios há muito, em treino mas já o suficiente para nos sentirmos nós. E é desarmante pensar que o eclético pode ser afinal só uma viagem coninhas, com constantes voltas a casa, e que venha o ambient drone que vier estaremos sempre presos ao chão dum quarto quente, rodeados de posters mal colados, pressionando com força uns headphones enormes contra os ouvidos para termos a certeza que não nos escapa nada daquilo. Que afinal a viagem não é pelo desconhecido, mas sim por um novo local de conforto. Não estou a dizer que é um esforço absurdo ou muito menos infrutífero, tive pelo menos duas novas boxes nos últimos dois anos, mas o resto, sinceramente, parece-me cada vez mais palha de ouro.

A sessão desta semana destaca dois dos vários projetos simultâneos da enorme Laurel Halo, autora de outra das minhas boxes, o regresso de Dean Blunt e Inga Copeland, o belíssimo novo single de Major Lazer. Ao redor algumas insistências e recordações, sequências distendidas em contraste com um inicio a prometer assustar uma ou outra mente que se queira assustar.

Ultima chamada também para Walter Benjamin e amigos, já amanhã 21 no Auditório Padre Carlos Alberto Guimarães (ver caixa para pormenores) em apresentação do ultimo The Imaginary Life of Rosemary and Me.

Para stream e download. TRACKLIST.

Agora uma surpresa luxo.

Escapou um vídeo oficial para Sleep Dealer, uma das faixas viciantes do excelente novo Oneotrix Point Never. A novidade é que foi feito por Inga Copeland e Dean Blunt, até agora “conhecidos” pelo nome Hype Williams.

O resultado é tão ou mais bizarro quanto se esperava, na medida em que se restringe a uma primeira ideia central e nem sequer se dá ao trabalho de seguir a totalidade da duração da faixa. Mas para um álbum como Replica, cujo conceito pressupõem a mistura numa ceifeira debulhadora dos velhos símbolos televisivos e outros otovermes da memória, recriar as imortais batalhas entre a Coca-Cola e a Pepsi e envolvê-las em fumo demente parece uma decisão pelo menos interessante e se calhar mesmo à medida.

Não esquecer Oneotrix Point Never a 1 de Dezembro, na Galeria Zé dos Bois.

Ainda a fazer musica perdida no nevoeiro matinal, os Hype Williams lançam novo tema mas sob outro nome, o deles próprios.

Auto-proclamados “artistas acima de tudo” – que se expressam “também através da musica” -  o duo pode ter decretado o fim da vida útil à aura de mistério que cultiva desde a edição de High Beams em 2009, optando agora pelos nomes reais Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland.

Ou então não fizeram nada disso e foi uma vez sem exemplo, para lançar nos tubos But Life Goes On Nahmean, uma nova faixa dentro das ideias e ambiências pré-produzidas habituais de obras primas como o ultimo One Nation (um dos álbuns do ano por aqui), mas agora com um recurso mais proeminente à voz de Inga, num registo atonal e descomprometido mas com fortes propriedades otovérmicas a partir de uma segunda audição. Vício.

via Fact Mag