I usually wait until the end of a Junto project to comment on it, but this one is special, so I want to get some thinking out while it is still in progress. It is is worth thinking of the Chamber Symphony as a remix unto itself, because the symphony is an arrangement by another man, Rudolph Barshai. With Shostakovich’s blessing, Barshai took the contours of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 and expanded them into something orchestral. Likeiwse, with the full permission of the Los Angeles chamber ensemble wild Up, the Junto participants are extrapolating from the wild Up recording of the Barshai’s symphonic version of Shostakovich’s quartet. If that sounds meta, then I am accomplishing at least part of my goal.

This 13th Junto project is a particularly special one, because it’s only the second time we are working from not only a commercial release, but from constituent parts of a track on that release. (The previous time was when Marcus Fischer, for the fourth Junto, provided stems — that is the music-production terms for individual subparts — of a song off his Collected Dust recording.) This is an essential distinction. Much “remixing” these days means working with the commercially released version of a piece of music, a single track: cutting it up, moving pieces around, transforming it, adding to it, subtracting from it. But in the case of both the Fischer project and, now, the Shostakovich project, the Junto participants were provided the pieces from which the commercial track was constructed. The wild Up recording of Shostakovich was done live, so the “parts” are in fact 10 simultaneous recordings of the symphony, recorded on variously placed microphones. The folder containing these parts looks like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2293299/WildupForRemix.zip
http://junto.havesomemusic.com/WildupForRemix.zip
http://lownote.net/audio/WildupForRemix.zip
http://vuzhmusic.com/junto/WildupForRemix.zip

To hear the performance 10 times from different vantages is to get a Rashomon version of the piece. In part, it is simply an opportunity to hear it akin to how the performers hear it: if you listen to the woodwinds, then you’re hearing it sort of how a member of the woodwind portion of the ensemble heard it while it was being performed. But more importantly, to listen to it is to hear different parts of it come to the fore. Because it was recorded live, there is no clear “isolation” between parts. In each of the tracks you hear the entire work, just with different sections given different relative prominence.

Listen to the original recording, also streaming below, at: wildup.bandcamp.com

And for comparison’s sake, here is a performance of the String Quartet No. 8 by the Kopelman Quartet, via youtube.com:

The remixes are unfolding at this very moment at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

More on wild Up at wildup.la and wildup.tumblr.com.

(Stencil of Dimitri Shostakovich up top generously provided by Chris Hutson, of chrishutsonart.com. He is based in Peoria, Illinois.)

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The eighth project in the Junto series was the first to actively employ voices. Voices had appeared in some of the earlier projects, but entirely at the decision of an individual musician. Here, words were the subject.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 27, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0008-voice. As of this writing, there are 51 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0008: Giving Voice

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 27, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The eighth Junto project is the first to focus on the human voice. It is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from roughly the same source material, though there are choices to be made. You will select a single sentence (or extended, self-contained clause) from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It is Franklin’s own Junto Society that provided the name for our association. You will either extract the single sentence/clause from this public-domain recording of Chapter 11 from the book:

archive.org

Or you will record your own version of a sentence/clause of your choice (again, as long as it is from Chapter 11). The free text of the autobiography is available here — the link goes directly to the 11th chapter:

gutenberg.org

Whether you use the provided MP3 or you elect to record a section yourself, you will use that recording as the sole audio source material in your work. You can do with it as you wish — cut it up, slow it down, process it, otherwise transform it — so long as at some point, the sentence/clause is comprehensible to the listener. You will not add any other sounds.

Length: Please keep your piece to between two and five minutes in length.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0008-voice” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post the track, please include this information if you use the MP3:

The underlying vocal sample is from this public-domain recording of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, from LibriVox:

archive.org

And use this information if you record your own sentence from Franklin’s book:

Text made possible thanks to:

gutenberg.org

And either way, please include this:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

Many of the participants opted to use the MP3 from the public domain recording of the autobiography, while some did employ an original recording of the text, and at least one participant uses a text-to-speech software approach. Particularly effective were tracks in which the musicians emphasized the meaning of the spoken text, and several singled out sentences in which the word “Junto” appears (Franklin’s Junto is the society from which our Junto takes its name).

As an additional side benefit of the project, many of the participants saw fit to rework portraits of old Franklin, with particular attention paid to his various likenesses that have adorned the $100 bill. The images up top are just four examples. They originate in tracks by, clockwise, from upper left: Matt Nix, Naotko, Stringbot, and DJ Kaboodle.

As of now, the podcast has had over 4,000 listens, which is a rewarding experience. It is helping to get word out about all the amazing work that the contributors to these projects have produced — and, perhaps, expanding the participatory base for the Junto:

Welch is himself a musician. He records as Seams, and he participated in the sixth Junto project, in which people were asked to remix the sound of three archival Edison cylinders (in his case yielding the track “Ebb”). He brought this personal experience to the conversation. (He also tweeted about the production process of the podcast audio, including at one point linking to a screenshot of his efforts.)

It turns out, our conversation was the first in a new podcast from the service, called SoundCloud Speaks. Welch asked great questions. Perhaps the most intriguing thing he said, though, came in the form not of a question but an observation, when he mentioned how there was a “narrative” to the Disquiet Junto. He’s quite right about that. For all the extent to which the individual projects are intended to stand alone, there are various threads connecting them. One of the enjoyable challenges of organizing the series is sorting out what sequence of projects will be most rewarding for the participants and a broader range of listeners.

The podcast is housed on two pages: on the company’s blog.soundcloud.com page, and on its soundcloud.com/community-team page.

There is much to enjoy and appreciate in So Percussion‘s freely released remix project, Amid the Noise Remixes, a collection of reworkings of their album Amid the Noise enacted by three of the four members of the group: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, and Jason Treuting (only member Adam Sliwinski isn’t credited on the collection’s dozen remixes). The first remix on the record makes for helpful comparison with the original, because the original is also available for free download, from cantaloupemusic.com, the website of the releasing record label. The original record came out toward the end of 2006. The remix collection came out in December 2011.

The original, “June,” is a percussion (but not percussive) exploration of tone, thick ringing globules of tone that announced Amid the Noise as something other than So Percussion’s listeners had come to expect. To upend expectations, they opened the album on a track essentially lacking in plosives: in verbal terms, it’s all extended vowels, virtually absent of consonants (MP3). Even at a narrative level, it is willfully remote, a stretch of concentrated stasis in place of thematic development. It is splendid.

The remix, by So Percussion member Quillen, upends the upending. It takes the original and gives it the jitters, and then once the jitters have set in but good, it adds a heavy thud of a beat that builds over time. If the original version refuted development, this one welcomes it, altering as it proceeds, transforming at a swaggering and geometric pace. Like the original “June” on the original album, the “June” remix announces the remix album’s intentions. In this case, that would be a fun night out.

Get the full set for free at sopercussion.bandcamp.com. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The seventh Junto was by far the most restrictive. Everyone shared a track, and the restriction wasn’t merely a matter of not being able to work in additional sounds. The goal was that everyone would create a new track only through the process of removing material from the existing track. Hence the name: “Subtraction and Sculpting.”

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 16, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 20, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0007-subtract. As of this writing, there are 72 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0007: “Subtraction and Sculpting”

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 20, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The seventh Junto project is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from the same source audio, which is provided below. You will take the provided sound sample and from it make an original work. You will do this only by subtracting sound from the sample. You won’t add anything to it. You won’t slow it down. You won’t speed it up. You won’t cut it up, and you won’t otherwise reorganize its contents. You won’t play it backwards. You will only “remove.” The word “remove” is up for interpretation — but generally speaking, I’d say that it means various acts of lowering the volume of a narrow or wide band of the audio spectrum for either a short or long period of time. And, of course, “lowering the volume” can mean be interpreted to mean “muting.” The act here of “removing” is the sonic equivalent of sculpting something from a marble block.

Please use the WAV file at the following URL:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

Length: Your piece will, due to the nature of the assignment, be the exact same length as the original recording on which it is based: two minutes (02:00).

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0007-subtract” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post the track, please include this information:

The source audio for this composition is a recording by Luftrum of waves crashing on the shore of Kalundborg Fjord at Røsnæs, Denmark:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

The results were interesting — not just the sounds, but the context in which those sounds arrived. On the one hand, it was by far the most active of the projects thus far, at least in terms of number of tracks. Within 24 hours there were as many tracks, and it was almost the case again after 48 hours. Some contributors of tracks noted that there may have been less comments for this project than previously, and it appears that the individual tracks were listened to less than in the past. That is all quite possible, and not contradictory.

I probably listen to too much of the more arid regions of the catalogs of musicians such as Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto to be a fair judge of such things, but I found the minor variations between tracks to be very interesting to observe, especially as they proceeded in sequence in sets of ten down the search-return pages of Soundcloud. A contributor named High Tunnels managed to get a groove in his (“Erosion”), and the contributor jet jaguar (in “Tide’s Out”) managed to get beats by shaping, as it was put in the track’s liner note, the volume.

The notes in Stamper’s piece will be familiar to anyone who has turned on the first of the Buddha Machines. It is a rare melodic moment from the device, designed by the duo FM3 to emit swaying drones and drone-like effluence until its batteries run out. In the brief note appended to the track, Stamper mentions that the sounds we’re hearing are “A first generation FM3 Buddha Machine left to run through my Pure Data performance patch.” (Pure Data is the name of a graphic programming environment.) That patch appears to be the same software process that he employed in the production of a recent contribution he made to the Disquiet Junto project, when the collective remixed a track off the recent Marcus Fischer album, Collected Dust:

Listening to both tracks is to let the mind slowly reverse engineer what it is, exactly — well, more to the point, inexactly — Stamper’s patch is doing. It isn’t a destructo approach. It’s more of a thickening and quickening agent. It speeds up the material in a manner that it loops back on itself, accruing layers into a sonorous denseness that, somehow, doesn’t fully lose the gentle qualities of the original source material.

Both tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/bitsnibblesbytes. More on Stamper, who is based in London, at bitsnibblesbytes.wordpress.com and
twitter.com/bitnibblebyte.

This is a short essay I wrote at the invitation of musicians Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer to accompany their new split single, Two / Twenty Two. The single was released today, February 22, which happens to also be both of their birthdays. In keeping with the theme, the essay has 222 words.

02.22

The Internet is a congruity engine. The ceaseless churn of online databases aligns any two or more things found to have in common any one thing.

Cities with similar names require clarification from mapping systems. Faces of people with similar names appear together in image searches, forcibly conflated into one extended family.

Congruity is especially powerful regarding individuals with the same birthday. Factors such as seasonal attributes and development relative to classmates are widely accepted to explain perceived similarities between individuals otherwise born years, even centuries, apart.

‘Two / Twenty Two’ by Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer occurred because the two musicians acted on their shared February 22 birthday. Both live in cities considered artistic outposts in otherwise rustic states (Allen: Austin, Texas; Fischer: Portland, Oregon), both have professional experience in visual design, and both explore gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient. All coincidence, certainly.

Allen and Fischer stacked the deck in congruity’s favor by providing each other with a set of samples from which to devise new music. The result is two rough fragile recordings. They have the burnish of delicate objects that survived significant tumult. As for the tremulous piano in track two, perhaps it’s a nod to Chopin, who was, according to various databases tracking such things, also born on February 22.

Marc Weidenbaum
disquiet.com

These are the two tracks:

The split single is a hallowed tradition, but all too often is just an opportunity for two bands to appear together. I remember purchasing the Nirvana / Jesus Lizard single (19 years ago last Wednesday, February 15, an online database tells me) and being disappointed that, well, it was “just two songs”; the subjects of the single’s cover art, a Malcolm Bucknall painting titled “Old Indian and White Poodle,” interacted more than the songs did, in that the poodle puts a hand (hand, not paw) on the shoulder of the Indian. A year later, Mudhoney and Jimmie Dale Gilmore did it right when they covered each other’s songs on a Sub Pop 7″ (18 years ago next Thursday, March 1). Those are just two contrasting examples among many. The beauty of the Allen-Fischer project is that both songs are the efforts of both individuals working together but separately, leaving it to the listener to tease out, to wonder, who did what.

Get the full Two / Twenty Two release, for $2.22, at twotwentytwo.bandcamp.com. More on Allen at cory-allen.com. More on Fischer at mapmap.ch.

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The sixth Junto project was another shared-sample situation, but not all shared-sample situations are the same. They each use the shared sample, or samples, to different ends. In some cases, the musician is left to his or her own devices, so to speak, as to what they elect to do with the sample. In others, not only are the musicians restricted to specific pre-existing sounds, they are restricted in regard to what they can do with them. (This is especially true of the project that followed 0006, project “0007-subtract,” more on which when it is complete.)

In this sixth Junto project, the musicians were provided three public-domain recordings and told they could only use them — and, furthermore, they were to select just one element from each of the tracks and combine them. The audio comes from if not the dawn of recording, then certainly when it was still early morning: the sound is all from Edison cylinders from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 9, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 13, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0006-cylinder. As of this writing, there are 58 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0006: “Spinning Cylinders”

Plan: The sixth Junto project is a shared-samples project, in which the participants all work from the same exact sonic resources. Select one distinct element from each of the three following recordings and construct something new from them. (Do not add any other sounds, though certainly use any sorts of processing that you might choose.) All three tracks are archival songs originally released on antique Edison cylinders in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. Their rich surface noise is arguably as much a part of the recordings as is the music they contain.

http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

Length: Keep your finished piece to between two and five minutes.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0006-cylinder” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post the track, please include this information:

All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:

http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The results varied widely, which is not only natural, but the point. For some participants, the sounds of the cylinders were subsumed into a drone haze of their own imagination. In others, the selected sounds were given the spotlight — but even then, variety meant that some musicians focused on the more self-evidently musical material in the original cylinders, while others embraced the rough noises inherent in the ancient technology.

One particularly great thing that occurred this week was that the Discussion section got more active, thanks to a query, by Brian Biggs, about what exactly constitutes a “remix.”

(Photo via Creative Commons from flickr.com.)

Featuring music by Steve Roden (aka In be tween noise), Pedro Tudela (aka Johnny Days), Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner), Kate Carr (aka The Frigatebird), Shawn Kelly (aka Y?Arcka), Marielle V. Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch), Paula Daunt (aka Agnosie), and João Ricardo (aka OCP), all working from a shared set of sounds collected and constructed by Elvis Veiguinha. Veiguinha’s field recordings originally served as the score for an installation of photos of modern urban Lisbon by Jorge Colombo.

. . . . .

. . . . .

The full album is available for free download as a Zip file of MP3s, and as individual files, at freemusicarchive.org.

A 16-page PDF including images from the exhibit of Jorge Colombo’s photographs, Lisbon Revisited, that inspired this project is available for free download from archive.org.

Below are a handful of those photographs. More on the exhibit at jorgecolombo.com/lr.

. . . . .

Heteronyms Reconsidered

Unlike Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa may not have contained multitudes, but he had a tidy set of alter-egos. He wrote under a variety of names, each with a unique biography and aesthetic. These alter-egos are referred to as “heteronyms,” and among them was Álvaro de Campos, whose poetry inspired Jorge Colombo’s photography exhibit, Lisbon Revisited, which in turn inspired this compilation album.

Heteronyms—in the form of pseudonyms and monikers—are commonplace in electronically manipulated music. Matters of identity are routinely amplified and distorted by various factors: by the semi-anonymity inherent in online communities, by the rampant splintering of genre taxonomy, by the manner in which authorship is complicated by reliance on third-party (and often emerging) technology, by the prevalence of sampling and remixing.

In tribute to Pessoa and Campos, eight electronic musicians were commissioned to explore the sounds of the city of Lisbon, as well as the creative opportunity inherent in the concept of the heteronym. The eight musicians and their eight adopted heteronyms each took a single shared sound source and created from it sixteen new audio works. The shared sound source is an ambient soundtrack of field recordings of urban Lisbon created by Elvis Veiguinha for the installation exhibit of Colombo’s photographs. This project gave each participating musician the opportunity to explore not only the sounds of the city, but also their own internalized multiple viewpoints.

Marc Weidenbaum
disquiet.com/lx-rmx

. . . . .

Hometown Revisited

In January 2009—just a few weeks before I started finger-painting NYC on an iPhone—my exhibition Lisbon Revisited opened at Casa Fernando Pessoa, a museum in Lisbon, Portugal. Based on the early 20th century poems by Portuguese poet Pessoa (writing under the name Álvaro de Campos), the show consisted of Lisbon photographs of mine in which I tried to forget all personal associations and memories of my hometown, focusing instead (like Pessoa/Campos, a fervent futurist who worshipped the splendors of Progress) on the most contemporary, most technological, most globalized aspects of my hometown. I shot today’s Lisbon like Campos would have, were he not a fictional poet stuck in he 1920s.

The exhibition’s soundtrack was created by Elvis Veiguinha, a Portuguese sound artist, music producer, and filmmaker, who used his recordings of Lisbon’s aural atmosphere. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum has been forever perceiving Pessoa as a 21st century artist who happens to be have been dead since 1935. Veiguinha’s soundtrack became the natural link to revisit Pessoa’s Lisbon through the more recent vocabulary of remixing.

Jorge Colombo
jorgecolombo.com/lr

. . . . .

Track Listing

01. “i’m wrapped by it as by a fog” by Steve Roden (aka In be tween noise)
02. “i have in me like a haze” by In be tween noise (aka Steve Roden)
03. “Falha” by Pedro Tudela (aka Johnny Days)
04. “RYLY” by Johnny Days (aka Pedro Tudela)
05. “Marginal Notes” by Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner)
06. “A Heart Wound Like Clockwork” by Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud)
07. “Sing, Sing On for No Reason” by Kate Carr (aka The Frigatebird)
08. “Noone Wonders What Lies Beyond My Local River” by the Frigatebird (aka Kate Carr)
09. “The Magic in the Music” by Shawn Kelly (aka Y?Arcka)
10. “A Working Plain” by Y?Arcka (aka Shawn Kelly)
11. “the squealing of rats and the squeaking of boards” by Marielle V Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch)
12. “last remnants of a final illusion” by darwinsbitch (aka Marielle V Jakobsons)
13. “In Praise of Absurdity” by Paula Daunt (aka Agnosie)
14. “Prelude for a Lost Disguise” by Agnosie (aka Paula Daunt)
15. “Paz” by João Ricardo (aka OCP)
16. “Desassossego” by OCP (aka João Ricardo)
17. “Original Installation Field Recordings” by Elvis Veiguinha

. . . .

More About the Contributors

Steve Roden & In be tween noise: inbetweennoise.com

Pedro Tudela & Johnny Days: pedrotudela.org

Robin Rimbaud & Scanner: scannerdot.com

Kate Carr & The Frigatebird: soundcloud.com/katecarr

Shawn Kelly & Y?Arcka: arckatron.us

Marielle V. Jakobsons & darwinsbitch: mariplasma.com

Paula Daunt & Agnosie: pauladaunt.com

João Ricardo & OCP: ocp.pt.vu

Elvis Veiguinha: vimeo.com/elvisveiguinha

. . . .

A Disquiet.com Project
February 2012

Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Audio Assistance by Taylor Deupree

Photography/Jorge Colombo

Design/BoonDesign.com

This release is licensed/ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

There has likely been less commercial music discussed on Disquiet.com in 2011 than in any previous year since the site’s launch, almost exactly 15 years ago, in December 1996. This relative absence wasn’t intentional. It doesn’t even particularly reflect my daily listening habits. But it does, in retrospect, reflect my imagination. I listen to enormous amounts of commercially released music, much that is sent to me for promotional purposes, much that I hear online, and much that I myself purchase. My email inbox is overrun with inbound, unsolicited, but often welcome, invitations to listen to the commercial music for free (un-commercially, as it were, though in the end, the whole act of promotion is itself a commercial enterprise).

Yet still, there is something about a commercial record that felt inherently stolid in 2011 — not all commercial records, and not the music specifically. The music can be dynamic, adventurous, but the enterprise can still feel rote or calculated or misguided, or some combination thereof.

I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, and interacting with, the music than emanates from generative sound apps (those based in Internet browsers, and those that come in the form of mobile-device apps). I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, the music that emerges from various outposts of the “free music” movement/phenomenon (from netlabels in particular, and also general Creative Commons work, as well as work that is released for free with no apparent tie to or, perhaps, even knowledge of either of those philosophically informed communities). I spent a lot of time listening to commercially released music, but rarely this year did I think about it with the energy that I did my other listening.

All of which is in no way intended to diminish the 10 (or 12) commercial recordings listed below. Nor is it my sense that following list could easily be swapped out with two or even four more lists of fascinating sets of 10 albums from the past year. These were selected because any other such lists would still have some sense of absence. The music here touches on a variety of approaches, which is part of what makes it feel whole. There is voice-infused music, and sound art, and something not too distantly related to dance music, and noise, and elegant ambience, and contemporary classical, and remixes — and more. There are small-scale recordings, and recordings for which institutional financial support was necessary. In two cases two albums are listed, because they are by the same artists and were released this year and feel of a piece with each other. (And it at least one of the two cases, they were subsequently packaged together by the releasing record label.)

All of which is to say, in a year when I didn’t write about much commercial music, when it came time to list my 10 favorites, the list expanded to 12. They are listed here in alphabetical order by musician. Yes, “musician,” singular. One thing that struck me when I completed this list is that all these albums are, with the exception of the ECM remix collection, solo records.

Julianna Barwick‘s The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty): Julianna Barwick is a choir of one. She makes music in which layer upon layer of her singing, vaguely druid in its tonal quality, form slow cascades of seemingly wordless invention. The effect is both meditative and cathartic. Other elements make themselves heard, including a minimalist piano that sounds like Harold Budd at work on one of Tom Waits’ detuned barroom favorites. This is music that could all to easily lapse into treacle, but it shows restraint, not in its ambition, but in its affect. … More on Barwick at juliannabarwick.com. Listen to the album in full at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More on the record at asthmatickitty.com. There’s also a collection of remixes, Matrimony Remixes, which I cannot recommend; the beats just make all the songs sound like the closing music to a Disney animated film.
 
Jefferson Friedman‘s Quartets (New Amsterdam): The collection contains two complete string quartets and a pair of remixes. The quartets (which date from 1999 and 2005) are alternately fierce and pastoral, and they distinguish themselves with the extent to which the instrumentalists are treated as equal partners, and the extent to which the arrangement is the music: theme and melody rarely stand out above the musical interplay. They are performed here by the Chiara String Quartet, for whom they were composed. The Matmos remixes are some of the duo’s strongest recent work, especially the closing track, “Floor Plan Mix,” which achieves a spectral quality in its distillation of the source material. … More on the musicians at jeffersonfriedman.com, chiaraquartet.net, and brainwashed.com/matmos. Listen to the album in full at chiarastringquartet.bandcamp.com. More on the album at newamsterdamrecords.com.
 
Grouper‘s A I A : Dream Loss and A I A : Alien Observer (Yellow Electric): Between their titles and approach, these are at least companion collections and more like parts of a whole (think how with the final two thirds of the Star Wars or the Lisbeth Salander trilogies, neither half is particularly satisfying without the other). Grouper is Liz Harris, and her two 2011 full-length releases, though available separately, deserve consideration as a whole, not simply because their titles and covers suggest them as halves of a pair, or entries in a series, but because they similarly eke songs, or song-like formations, from quiet accumulations of vocals and supporting sounds. There is a lot of freak folk, or “drone folk,” out there in drone world. These recordings are closer to “drone singer-songwriter.” … Both albums are sample-able at the boomkat.com music retailer, among other places: Alien, Dream.

Tim Hecker‘s Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky): Hecker took source recordings he made of a pipe organ in Iceland and then went to work on them. Each glitch is a synapse-firing crisis of faith. Each echo maps the architecture of the place. Each mass of synthesized material fills the empty church in your mind. The cover shows a piano being pushed off the edge of the building, which makes for a colorful (or, in this case, black-and-white) polemic. There is tension in this music for certain, but it’s more likely to instill in experimental musicians the desire to explore pipe organs than to dispose of them. … More on Hecker at sunblind.net. The music is sample-able at boomkat.com, among other retailers.
 
Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly): In traditional terms, this is the prettiest album on this list. It is built from harpsichords and string sections and other classical instruments, which in combination lend it a storybook quality. It’s less fragile than it is dainty, but the daintiness is undergirded with filmic tension, like something out of the Quay Brothers at their most romantic yet mischievous. And the “traditional” instrumentation is just part of the sound design, mixed in with all manner of knocking and general acoustic haze. … More on the album at ghostly.com, where it is also available for streaming. More on the composer at the somewhat out of date
jacaszek.com.

Eli Keszler‘s Cold Pin (Pan): Based on a massive sound-art installation by Keszler, the album comes in two parts: a recording of his invention (“14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables”) and a recording of Keszler performing freely improvised jazz alongside the sculpture with Geoff Mullen, Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son, and Benjamin Nelson. The artwork is impressive, and the album is a model for documenting site-specific installations. … More on the album (including sound and video) at pan-act.com. More on Keszler at elikeszler.com.
 
Israel Martinez‘s El Hombre Que Se Sofoca (Sub Rosa): Six tracks of resplendent noise. The pieces range from deep washes of grey haze to jittery and anxious scattered samples. Melodic and cinematic washes give way to harsh deadspace. The impact is true to the title’s depiction of suffocation. A major album by the Mexican sound artist and musician, who is also a co-founder of the adventurous record label Abolipop. … More on the album, including two sound samples, at the record label’s website. More on Martinez at israelm.com and abolipop.com.
 
Andy Stott‘s We Stay Together and Passed Me By (Modern Love). Two albums of closely related yet disparate takes on club music. At its essence, this is the most minimal of minimal techno, but it seems more interested in exploring aridity than dankness, a rare and particularly welcome variation in this arena. … Listen to Together and Passed at their respective Soundcloud set pages.
 
Amon Tobin‘s ISAM (Ninja Tune). It was almost as tempting to list this album under “best scores of 2011″ as it was to list Kid Koala’s own recent Ninja Tune release (a soundtrack for a graphic novel he wrote and drew) simply as a commercial album. ISAM, in essence, is a recording of the music to Tobin’s audio-visual concert performance of the same name. It is brash and moving and, more than anything he has done previously, free of riffs intended and required to signal affiliation with a particular techno genre. … More on Tobin and the release, including streaming music and video and a free download, at amontobinisam.com.
 
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer‘s Re: ECM (ECM): The repeated use of the “re” prefix on this album — every one of the 17 tracks on its two halves — suggests that someone at the company still thinks of remixing as a purely post-production undertaking, rather than part of the artistic process. But still, it is a good thing that the estimable ECM label let DJs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer wander through its back catalog, unearth samples, and render from them sonic tapestries. The music, with its constant presence of dust formations, has the texture of affectionate archival research. (It’s very close in spirit to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa stroll through Miles Davis’ work.) … Discussion and music at youtube.com. More on the record at ecmrecords.com