10 albums from 2007 (#7)

7. Rameses III, Honey Rose

Using a restrained and gentle palette (including steel guitar, banjo, hushed vocals, and what I'm pretty sure is a flute preset on a synthesizer), these British free-folkers produced a pastoral drone suite that became one of the discs I most frequently returned to over the course of the year. The five "themes" that comprise the album are built around a single, simple melodic motif, but it is elaborated on with such patience and confidence that the end result takes on a gravity that is both sombre and strangely lulling.

Listen: Rameses III, "Theme II

10 albums from 2007 (#8)

8. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

No one would claim that Amy Winehouse is a radical innovator, but her decision to dust off the girl-group / soul-diva song forms of the 60s and 70s is genius in its way. Call it homage or call it exploitation: either way, it turns out that a substantial amount of power still resides in those forms, and within the first thirty seconds or so of its opening track (the unavoidable "Rehab") this album has demonstrated that point swiftly, conclusively, and indelibly. The fact that the album maintains something close to that level of quality throughout its entire duration suggests that Winehouse may be a real talent to watch.

Listen: Amy Winehouse, "Rehab"

10 albums from 2007 (#9)

9. The Bird Names, Wooden Lake / Sexual Diner

Flat-out the oddest album I heard all year, which is saying something given the amount of odd music I listen to. Twinkly little bits of clockwork exotica, cartoon-falsetto sing-alongs, ramshackle pop structures, a Shimmy-Disc-esque drug haze pervading the lo-fi production: imagine the Residents importing some rubber-limbed anthropomorphic animals from an old-timey Max Fleischer short, and some self-replicating machine elves from one of Terence McKenna's DMT trips, and you're in the neighborhood. Refreshingly strange.

Listen: The Bird Names, "New Mexico"

10 albums of 2007 #10

End of the year is approaching, and that means it's time for end-of-year lists... I'll start with my albums of the year, which I'll try to stretch out over ten posts to build suspense.

10. Various Artists, Untitled

The idea of a three-disc, sixty-artist noise compilation might call to mind the old Monty Python sketch "Crunchy Frog"—that's the one that features a sampler of sadistic chocolates, each more violently unpleasant than the last. And it's true that for each track on Untitled that works with subtlety and restraint (like, say, Jason Zeh's "Scant"), there's another one that brings the pain: full-bore mind flayers like Teeth Collection's "1 Untitled Track." But the low barrier to entry plus an insatiable zeal for networking have made the noise scene one of the most fertile and relevant musical subcultures of the last half-decade—a big compliation like this one represents the perfect snapshot of that scene's richness, stylistic diversity, and occasional unevenness. A perfect place for newcomers to jump in.

Listen: "Scant" by Jason Zeh

Listen: "1 Untitled Track" by Teeth Collection

"if we can land a man on the moon, surely i can win your heart" by beulah

As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.

At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...

But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.

So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.

I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.

track of the week: " f/b (e) electric," by derek bailey

Anyone who comes to this blog for the music should already know Derek Bailey (1930-2005), famous for his idiosyncratic approach to free-improvisation guitar. Bailey spent his entire life relentlessly developing and re-inventing this approach, but ask someone to define Bailey's "signature style," and they're likely to describe something fragmented, discontinuous, flinty, and angular, like say, for instance, this track ("M9") from his representative 1975 album Improvisation.

But the Bailey catalog is forty-odd years of documentation of an especially rich creative process: consequently, it's also full of oddities, left turns, and intriguing digressions. One of the most compelling of these, for my money, is the 2000 album String Theory, a suite of experiments exploring the potential of guitar feedback. This track, "F/B (E) Electric," explores the dynamics of long sustained tones as finely as any drone I've heard, and would fit sublimely on a playlist of stark minimalist electronica.

"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.