aught music : 2000 : "mountain music," by momus

Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my first post for that project:

Rich Thomas and I occasionally debate which music-related events from the 1990s cast the longest shadow over the music of the Aughts. At the top of my list is usually the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's great Anthology of American Folk Music. Pretty much everyone who bought a copy of the reissued Anthology immediately went out and bought a banjo or a fiddle, and would end up doing at least a short stint in a freak-folk band by the end of the decade. Needless to say, this also led to a lot of engaging head-clutching about issues of authenticity and fake authenticity: i.e., is is OK to go around emulating the music of (say) hardscrabble West Virginian working-class people if you're (say) a white kid from some middle-class suburb somewhere? But issues of authenticity are awfully tricky, and this fact is nicely pointed out by cultural wag Momus on his 2000 album Folktronica. This track, "Mountain Music," points out (and embraces?) the oddity of appropriating old-time music for a modern context while simultaneously critiquing our entire notion of authenticity, pointing out the ways in which it's a distorting (and comforting) illusion. Representative verse: "It never was so simple / it never was so pure / the folks who made it never were / so ignorant and poor / They traveled round the world / and never stayed where they belonged / and if they had we'd never have / these lovely mountain songs."

Listen: Momus >> "Mountain Music"

the aesthetics of triumph

If I were ever to find myself in a position in which I needed to commission artists to write the score for a video game, one of the first people I might turn to would be Parts & Labor keyboardist Dan Friel. The noise-pop miniatures found on his solo release Ghost Town don't make direct use of 8-bit "chiptune" samples (there are enough other people doing that already, often to great effect) but a track like "Buzzards" nevertheless perfectly captures the essence of old-school video games, evoking an aura of propulsion, navigation, collection, and triumph.

geek apotheosis

Earlier this week:

...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like.

Caution: loud.

10 albums from 2007 (#2)

2. Fennesz / Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cendre

Ryuichi Sakamoto, perhaps best known for his film scores, has been quietly making a name for himself over the last five years or so as one of the traditional musicians best able to collaborate with laptop-types. His airy piano lines create a sense of nearly architectural spaciousness, allowing room for the textural subtlety of his collaborators to be heard: his albums with uber-minimalist Alva Noto provide forceful (and lovely) demonstrations of this. His earlier album with Fennesz, Santa Sala Cecilia, didn't work as successfully: it was an effective enough swarm of MSP noise, but there are a lot of those around, and from collaborators of this caliber, I had expected more. Cendre is precisely the album I wanted: ravishingly delicate playing from Sakamoto, kept rough-edged by the contribution of exotic, fine-grained silts and drones from Fennesz. A grand, beautiful, flawless record.

Listen: Fennesz / Ryuichi Sakamoto: "Cendre"

10 albums from 2007 (#3)

3. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver

On my top ten list from two years ago, I praised the LCD Soundsystem debut as being deeply enjoyable but mostly devoid of anything resembling significant content. Perhaps the exception on that album was "Losing My Edge," a song that got simultaneously funnier and more sobering the more you were able to recognize the aging hipster's lamentations as your own. Sound of Silver takes this intersection between irony and melancholy its central emotional ground, and it inhabits it brilliantly, crafting songs that are wry, moving, melancholy, and still (relatively) dance-floor friendly. If there's ever been a better pop album about adulthood, it's not coming to mind.

Listen: LCD Soundsystem: "All My Friends"

"i," by so

Earlier this year, I suffered through a pretty difficult period of depression-influenced musical disinterest: I wasn't seeking out much new music, and I wasn't listening to much of the music I already owned. Fortunately, the pendulum appears to have swung back the other way, and I've been back to picking up new stuff, listening through lesser-heard old stuff, swapping mixes with folks, etc.

So, this has led me to dust off the old policy of posting some notable track here every week. As a discipline, I've rarely followed this for more than a few weeks at a time, but hope springs eternal.

This week we visit So, an under-rated 2003 collaboration between Oval's Markus Popp and an enigmatic woman known only as "Eri," who hails from Mito-City, Japan. Fans of Oval's glitch-based electronica know that noise contains its own dimensions of sensory delight, and the So collaborations reveal this even more markedly by grafting Popp's brightly-colored, coding-error aesthetic to something more traditionally lovely: a female voice engaged in song. We fret, sometimes, about the monsters that may emerge from a fusion of the human and the technological, but a track self-evidently jubliant as this one ("i") reveals that that fusion may be just as likely to yield forms of beauty. Remember Donna Haraway's claim in her "Cyborg Manifesto": there is a pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.

wake up wake up

Getting up in the morning can sometimes be a challenge. And this challenge is complicated by the difficulty of finding the right sound to wake up to. I don't like the harshness of alarms, and the radio's not really an option either: I can't stand waking up to commercials, and the commercial-free alternative provided by NPR is... well, that's really a whole separate rant, that I'll spare you for now.

Determined to wake to music, I picked up a CD-playing alarm clock a few years ago, which kicked off a whole investigation of which CDs are better to wake up to than others. Recently, I've really been enjoying waking up to albums by the duo Lullatone.

As the name implies, this track, "Wake Up Wake Up," (from 2004's Little Songs About Raindrops) is just about a perfect song to hear first thing in the morning. It is absolutely gentle in every way, but it won't put you back to sleep either: it has an electronic glitchiness about it that delicately stimulates your ear until you're ready to rise.

Lullatone's newest release, Pajama Pop Pour Vous (2006), goes it one better by beginning with "Good Morning Melody," which has all the same strengths as "Wake Up Wake Up" only with the addition of breathy vocals, sung in Japanese-inflected English, about getting up and starting your day. It is so cute it makes me just about want to die of pleasure: your mileage may vary.