Category: reports/essays

What Instrumental Hip-Hop Looks Like

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some of the best electronic music is hidden underneath rapping. The instrumental versions of rap singles and albums provide a direct means to access the sonic foundation of those songs — sometimes they’re simply interesting; often they make for excellent listening on their own. From the physical cutting, splicing, and looping of tape that went into Public Enemy’s early work, to the advanced digital production that’s central to the contemporary efforts of Timbaland and Kanye West, just to name a few, there’s an enormous catalog of funk-laden, often deeply abstract studio concoctions out there.

Full-length instrumental hip-hop albums remain something of a rarity, though they’re becoming more commonly available (the retailer fatbeats.com specializes in them, and even releases some on its own record label). Much of my instrumental hip-hop collection is comprised of 12″ singles, which generally include the vocal-free version (and the a cappella) along with the actual song. For those just venturing into this field, producers worth seeking out include Alchemist, Just Blaze, DJ Muggs, and the late J Dilla. Dilla died at age 32 in 2006, and has become something of a martyr for old-school hip-hop production, and more broadly helped elevate the status of the instrumental.

As I’ve accumulated full-length albums in instrumental form, I’ve become fascinated by how the instrumental editions distinguish themselves visually from the original versions. Below are six examples of, in essence, what full-length instrumental hip-hop looks like:

The cover on the left is to the original, commercial release of Pete Rock and CL Smooth‘s The Main Ingredient (1994), their final album as a duo. The cover on the right is a collection of the instrumental versions of The Main Ingredient. Like many full-length hip-hop instrumental albums I’ve collected, the latter is not the most professional-looking item. The typography looks like an internal document from an Eastern European bureaucracy, and the jacket is as generic as white could be. At the risk of sounding naive, it’s quite likely a bootleg, though some independent record retailers have told me that rappers and hip-hop producers are often involved in funneling the instrumentals through other channels, with a DJ consumership in mind, when the labels that released the “proper” version decline to bring out a vocal-free version. The majority of full-length hip-hop instrumentals in my collection, heavy on the DJ Premiere (of Gang Starr) and various Wu Tang endeavors, look like The Main Ingredient.

When albums do get a proper label release, the art is often just affixed with an “Instrumentals” banner. For Dr. Dre‘s 2001 (1999), the “Instrumentals” notice replaces the “Parental Advisory” notice, which makes sense, since it’s the words, not the music, that caused the advisory to be there in the first place. What isn’t clear is why that Matrix-green marijuana leaf was removed at the same time.

One of the many benefits of an instrumental album is that the listener can focus on aural details that are masked when the rapping is present. Sometimes it’s the same case with the album covers, as with Pharcyde‘s debut album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (1992). The instrumental version divulges that the amusement-park ride depicted on the original cover is a detail of a larger illustration. When Pharcyde’s second album, Labcabincalifornia (1995), was released as an instrumental set, a similar graffiti-style “instrumentals” was scrawled across the original cover, and the group’s suits went from yellow to blue, likely to make a connection to the hue of the prior instrumentals collection. The instrumentals version of Labcabincalifornia retains the “Parental Advisory” notice, which seems odd.

Rapper Black Milk gets extra points for doing up a separate cover for the vocal-free version of Popular Demand (2007), in which he absents himself, along with his massive tour bus, from the proceedings. The shots were taken at the State Theatre in his native Detroit. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t leave behind his drum machine, which is tucked under his arm on the original full-length, since that no doubt is still heard on the instrumental version. He also dispenses with the telephone pole, which brings up the question as to whether it was really there in the first place, or was just drawn in for effect. (Plenty of images of the theater are available via Google, and while there are some trees and poles nearby, there’s doesn’t seem to be anything with that telephone-pole girth.) Furthermore, since Black Milk did much of the album production himself, it arguably wouldn’t have been misleading for him to have stayed in the picture. That’s in contrast with, say, the instrumental version of Common’s album Be, which minus Common’s rapping is, in essence, a solo album by Kanye West, who produced the majority of it.

At present time, this is my favorite cover to an instrumental hip-hop album. The jacket for Jurassic 5‘s Quality Control (2000) shows the rap group sitting on milk crates around a tree stump near a busy intersection. (Presumably the logo carved into the tree is a Photoshop trick — perhaps the stump itself is a prop.) The way the wide-angle lens frames the shot brings to mind Dr. Seuss’s classic story “The Jax” (from The Sneetches and Other Stories), in which freeways are constructed around two stubborn characters whose paths intersect (“In the prairie of Prax”). Anyhow, for the instrumental version of Quality Control, the band vacated the set, leaving behind the milk crates, which does a better job than the Black Milk album to telegraph that even though their voices aren’t present on the album, they are. It’s all the more funny that they left their headphones hanging on the stump.

Best of 2008: 10 Albums, 10 Downloads, 8 Processes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Three lists this year — two of highly recommended music (one each of 10 commercial full-length recordings and of 10 freely downloadable recordings), and one of 8 cultural processes that came into their own in 2008.

Picking favorites, making lists, is something an individual either is drawn to, or is loathe to participate in. I fall into the latter camp, and each year when I select 10 albums, I do so knowing — and feeling it’s necessary, yet again, to couch the list in a deep, cushioning bed of caveats — that another set of 10 albums, another 10 sets of 10 albums, could bring just as much pleasure, and reward just as much curiosity, as those listed here.

In my experience, a given list is valuable primarily as a chore, a chore that provides an impetus for reflection. The process is a kind of practice. And the end result is less important to me than is the time and effort required to produce it — the effort involves looking back at past posts and unpublished notes, at correspondence, as well as at the writings of friends, colleagues, and other writers and musicians, and flipping through stacks of recordings, both physical and virtual. But that’s exactly the sort of effort that I don’t think I could exert if I didn’t have a goal in sight, and these lists are that goal.

Of course, considering the ever increasing amount of music and sound art being produced, it’s also nice to offer up a tidy, if inadequate, window on a given year — a list that can be of use to others, much as their lists are of use to me. And so, presented below, are three such windows, each with sufficient introductory remarks that it’s best to just get on with it.

One last comment, though — if anything came into focus as I sorted these items, it was a single, insistent question: What elevates one drone above another? Much of the music heard here, from the entirety of Kevin Drumm’s aptly named Imperial Distortion, to several key moments on the equally appropriately titled Ghosts from Nine Inch Nails, to the audio cumulus of Ryonkt, qualifies as a drone. A drone is precisely the sort of sound that is easily dismissible as background noise in our ever more electronically enhanced and mediated society. It is also the artistic territory of a wide range of musicians. The seemingly fungible nature of drones may give the lie to the whole act of distinguishing between (or within) any types music. But the fact of the matter is that for me, personally, these drones — as well the other drone-like music heard here, not to mention the music that is utterly un-drone-like, such as the prickly beats of Alva Noto and the computer-brutalized metal of Drumcorps — were, simply, the recordings to which I repeatedly returned over the course of the past year. In the end, what distinguishes a drone is that it distinguishes itself.

 

Part 1/3 — 10 BEST COMMERCIAL FULL-LENGTH ALBUMS OF 2008: They appear here in alphabetical order, as an iPod might list them.

1. Alva Noto
Unitxt
(Raster-Noton)
The sound on Unitxt is even more stripped down, more rarefied, more concise, more brittle, and more compelling than on previous Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) records. Take the mix of percussive patter and static that plays between stereo speakers on “u_06,” which is so spare that it’s almost weightless. On “u_03,” there’s a contrasting sense of density, if only by comparison with “u_06,” though what stands out isn’t the heaviness of the occasional beat, but the vacuum-like silences that punctuate what in any other music would be the punctuations.

2. Fennesz
Black Sea
(Touch)
At some point, we’ll no longer use the word “orchestral” to refer to the deep, swelling immenseness of music such as what Christian Fennesz perpetrates with a mix of emotional exuberance and composerly circumspection, but for the time being that word, along with the related image of dozens of musicians working in unison, remains the primary model for a sound that is at once expansive and coordinated. Fennesz achieves his slow-build compositions through heavily altered sourced audio, much of it, famously, derived from guitars. Not everything here is as consuming as, say, the white-noise turmoil of “Saffron Revolution,” or the heavy, encrusted feedback of the title track. There is, in “Vacuum,” a telling absence; the piece is like a field recording of a discarded industrial site, so remote and fragile that the grandeur of the other tracks becomes all the more evident by inevitable comparison.

3. Ill Insanity
Ground Xero
(Ablist/Fat Beats)
Three members of the great turntable crew the X-Ecutioners debuted this year as Ill Insanity. Perhaps that makes them X-X-Ecutioners, but in any case, DJs Rob Swift (aka Robert Aguilar), Total Eclipse (Keith Bailey) and Precision bring a seriousness to their collective endeavor that occasionally eluded their previous unit. (If you know Precision’s given name, please let me know.) Gone, for the most part, are the showy calisthenics by which the X-Ecutioners expressed their skills, an old-school approach to entertainment that at times brought to mind the exhibitionism of the Harlem Globetrotters. In its place is a dense dread, from the molasses-slow sway of “Sound Science,” to the cut-up vocals of “Break Ill,” to some funky processed-jazz sqwonk (courtesy of saxophonist Dave McMurray) on “Nonverbal Communications.” Digital studio production has long since supplanted the turntable as the backbone — the back beat — of hip-hop, and what that’s done is freed up turntablism to pursue its own ends. (Guests on Ground Xero also include DJ QBert, DJ Excess, and Roc Raida — the latter aka Anthony Williams, another X-Ecutioner alum — and on the album’s sole vocal track, rapper Dashah.)

4. James Blackshaw
Litany of Echoes
(Tompkins Square)
If James Blackshaw’s head-bowed, mantra-like solo acoustic guitar has, rightfully, earned him comparisons to the late John Fahey, then Litany of Echoes — with the flamenco tinge of “Echo and Abyss” and the clanging textures of “Shroud” — will do little to divert attention from the comparison. However, the album’s opening and closing tracks, both built around intensely repetitive piano, will add La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley to Blackshaw’s list of strong precursors.

5. Kevin Drumm
Imperial Distortion
(Hospital Productions)
The six lengthy drones, upwards of 20 minutes each, that comprise Drumm’s album distinguish themselves by being so clearly distinct from each other. The album could serve as a drone primer, so individual are the works. They include the pad-like textures of “Romantic Sores,” and the hovering, quavering tones that give way to organ-like drama on “We All Get It in the End.” That two tracks share a title (“Snow”) and little else is a useful bit of programming that brings the whole matter of sameness to the fore.

6. Mira Calix
The Elephant in the Room: 3 Commissions
(Warp)
This is less an album than it is a monograph, a document of several artworks produced in recent years by Mira Calix, whose given name seems like it was already sufficiently colorful: Chantal Passamonte. These include excerpts from an opera and sound from a video. The most beautiful work is the material for strings and electronics, in which gentle digital effects flicker amid the lulling chamber music. The scenes from the opera admirably mix field recordings and vocals in a manner that deserves comparison to the work of Gavin Bryars.

7. Silences Sumire
Return Is Selective
(Ropeadope)
Not everything acoustic mixed into the digital samplers of Silences Sumire (aka Thomas Faulds and Charles Gorczynski) on Return Is Selective is jazz, but it’s the jazz, and the jazz-like elements, that stick with you. These include the carefully arranged horns of “Afterglowdust” (heard above puckering drum beats that serve as a grid of sheet music on which the notes are arranged), and the more sublimated fusion of “The Mental Environment” (horns and beats again, but with the emphasis rebalanced, so the acoustic elements color the electronic ones), as well as the rapid-fire “Strongsender” (in which the inhuman percussion strives to keep up with the scale-running, human-powered instruments).

8. Spring Heel Jack
Songs and Themes
(Thirsty Ear)
Once upon a time, Spring Heel Jack (the duo of John Coxon and Ashley Wales) made noir-touched electronica, performing an advanced lounge music in clubs, their erudition sometimes peeking out from under the party-friendly tempos. If there was jazz in what they did, it was based on a model in which soft strings and mournful horns worked in tandem to effect a mood. Well, interest in entertaining nightlife-seeking audiences has long since been dropped from Spring Heel Jack’s modus operandi. Here, they work with a host of free-thinking free-improvisers, including saxophonist John Tchicai (a John Coltrane alumnus) and Roy Campbell, Jr. (who gigged with Don Cherry), as well as Spirtualized member J Spaceman, among others, to produce an introspective but outward bound amalgam of digital production and live performance.

9. Stephan Mathieu
Radioland
(Die Schachtel)
It doesn’t hurt to enter into the soundworld of Stephan Mathieu’s first full-length recording since 2004’s The Sad Mac with the knowledge that the source materials for all of these sounds — the shimmering orchestration of “Raphael,” the eerie chimes and insectoid noise of “Licht und Finsternis zum Auge,” the infernal buzz of “Gabriel” — were plucked from the ether. Mathieu’s album, all seven tracks, was made from “real-time processed shortwave radio signals” — which is to say, he took a spectrum of unheard sounds around us and turned them into something audible and yet, still, beyond reach.

10. Wayne Horvitz Gravitas Quartet
One Dance Alone
(Songlines)
Since the early days of the Knitting Factory, back when it was the hub of lower Manhattan’s enterprising new-music scene in the late 1980s, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz has explored the intersection of (and tension between) composition and improvisation. The material on One Dance Alone leans heavily toward the former, with well-delineated themes that are played straight — underplayed, you might say — by Horvitz on piano, Ron Miles on trumpet, Peggy Lee on cello, and Sara Schoenbeck on bassoon. The result fits somewhere between Charles Ives and Lennon/McCartney, especially the loose horn part on “A Fond Farewell.” Restrained to the point of crystalline, this is chamber jazz at its best.

 

Part 2/3 — 10 BEST DOWNLOADS OF 2008, LEGALLY FREE: As I’ve done for the past few years, I am singling out 10 free, legal downloads as my favorites. These are all selected from the 220 some odd entries posted on Disquiet.com in its Downstream department during 2008. To constrain the field, to make it knowable, this list is limited to recordings that are “of the web.”The following were not considered for inclusion: individual promotional tracks (and excerpts) posted from existing or forthcoming commercial albums (special “mixes”were considered for inclusion, as were situations in which entire albums were available for free download, as with Nine Inch Nails and Drumcorps), downloads that were placed online for a stated limited period of time (like Monolake’s generous “download of the month”series at monolake.de), audio that is streaming-only (such as the ever-growing Other Minds catalog at archive.org), and dated archival material (work that would be considered a “reissue” in the commercial world, such as the majority of what is housed at ubu.com). Also not considered for inclusion were tracks whose links have subsequently gone offline.

All of which is to say, everything on this list is of recent vintage and is available to download, for free, right now.

Click through to each original Downstream entry for more information. These 10 are listed here in the reverse chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com. Given the fluid nature of publication, attribution, and collation on the Internet, I cannot be certain that these audio files first appeared online in 2008, but many if not all of them did. And if some of them are older than that, at least this mention might gain them a new audience.

1. Slow-Burn Guitar Quintet: Following a coy opening chord, “Funnel Cloud”by a guitar quintet that goes by the name the Family Tapes quickly descends into details of the instrument that rumble below the familiar techniques — in the absence of strumming and finger-plucking, what’s left are feedback, drones, squelches, tactile noises, and pizzicato pulsing. The overall sense is that each of the five members of Family Tapes, aware of the energy potential inherent in a guitar, is holding back, so as not to overwhelm the others. And the resulting detente is therefore just as full of tension as it is of quietude (MP3).
Downstream: December 5, 2008

2. Broken Beats, Spliced & Fragmented: The broken beats and contorted melodic moments of the album Gamma by Craque (aka Matt Cooke-Davis) have their strongest showing on “Matterbuss,”the fourth of its six tracks. There’s a rotating, purposefully clunky rhythm that sounds like it might have been spliced together from snippets of a recording of an out-of-breath dog. The rhythm is later repeated on what could be chopsticks tapping out a sketch of the work on a restaurant table. Above it, throughout, fragments of spoken word and gestural acoustic guitar hover like filigrees and decorations (MP3).
Downstream: November 5, 2008

3. Live Digitally Processed Jazz Performance: The Australian trio Roam the Hello Clouds works a laptop into the mix. Lawrence Pike on drums and Phil Slater on trumpet collaborate with their third member, Dave Miller, who is billed with laptop, and whose primary sound sources are the live performances by Pike and Slater, which he augments in real time. The scenario recalls the role of Brian Eno during the early stages of Roxy Music, when he was, among other things, emphasizing the use of the mixing board itself as a part of the creative process. The result, as evidenced by a lengthy performance posted courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio show Sound Quality, brings to mind everything from late-1960s Miles Davis to the more recent digitally augmented work of Nils Petter Molvær. Miller’s efforts are both subtle and trenchant. They’re inherent to the playing, but generally linger in the background. For example, about 14 minutes into the hour-and-a-half Sound Quality posting, an extended tone can be heard in the background, as if a note played by Slater had been plucked from thin air and then magically wrapped around the trio like a blanket, suggesting an impossible effort at circular breathing, as if Rhasaan Roland Kirk were reborn as an ambient guru (MP3).
Downstream: October 22, 2008

4. Massive Birdsong Megamix: Back in May, San Francisco”“based musician Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) filled the gaps between acts at a concert headlined by krautrock legends Cluster with several DJ sets, two of which he has posted at his website, detritus.net/wobbly, for free download. Wobbly took as his theme for one of them (titled “Pastoral”), as he describes it, “music that modelled or sampled birdsong or insect calls, from the 50’s to present day,”which traces from the Barrons (composers of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack), through David Tudor, on to Wendy Carlos, up through Florian Hecker and Christina Kubisch and beyond. Thoughtfully, he’s also provided not only a set list, but one with detailed time codes, so listeners can follow along — or birdwatch, as it were (MP3).
Downstream: September 23, 2008

5. Computer-Mediated Metal: The act Drumcorps (aka Aaron Spectre) has long been a Disquiet Downstream favorite for his having located the exact sonic space where chaotically implemented digital noise is indistinguishable from the whiplash riffage of metal bands like Slayer. Each of the three songs on the Altered Beast EP is a technologically enabled dissection and reanimation of death metal by the San Francisco-based band Animosity, inserting stop’n’start instances, warping noise into the ether, and emphasizing the pummel. (Available as Zipped archives at wearemanalive.com/abdownload. The EP was also released on limited-edition vinyl pressings of wildly varying color combinations.)
Downstream: August 29, 2008

6. A Sky Full of Audio Bliss: The slowly circulating drones of “Gray Sky,”a free download by Ryonkt, supply 17 minutes of audio bliss. Layers of sound appear occasionally with some suddenness, only to be absorbed immediately into the cloud-like whole. Brief pulses surface above the bellows-like sine waves, but there’s never enough of a pattern to them to approximate or otherwise suggest a proper melodic structure; they’re more like accent marks than notes, mere glints on the sonic windshield. This is a beautiful track, far more detailed than might initially appear to be the case. It’s likewise more dynamic: there are moments when sounds quickly spiral off into the distance, and when swells of tone play with your ear drums. There is modulation down and up, and a quieting toward the end that provides a natural, soothing close (MP3).
Downstream: July 15, 2008

7. Remixed 78-RPM Recordings: We know what Alan Morse Davies did to construct The Last Summer. The brief liner note on the project’s home page states it plainly enough: “An album of manipulated recordings from 78RPM records recorded between 1905 and 1931.”He’s taken outmoded recordings of once popular music and transformed them, courtesy of the creative license inherent in the public domain, into his own deeply felt renditions. The shortest of the three tracks, a version of the Debussy favorite “Claire de Lune,”is extended to over 17 minutes, at which point it is almost pure choral gossamer; each of the other two, “The Last Rose of Summer”and a rousing “Ave Maria,”clock in at over 23 minutes. It’s a testament to Davies’s approach that he doesn’t get hung up on the needle-in-the-groove clicks or dusty residue of the 78s. He doesn’t need to reproduce the rough surface texture of the original medium in order to telegraph to today’s listeners that this stuff is, plain and simple, old. His versions don’t merely extend the content of the originals until that material is ready to evaporate into thin air; they amplify both the richly melodious songs that were a dominant style of that period, and the archaic echoes inherent in that time’s sonic-reproduction technology. (Get the full set at archive.org.)
Downstream: July 7, 2008

8. Transformed Field Recordings: Sounds sourced from the real world and transformed into something either unreal or hyperreal serve as the foundation of a new compilation from the furthernoise.org netlabel. It is titled Explorations in Sound, Vol 3: Music of Sound and was curated by Roger Mills. Field recordings subjected here to digital modifications include rubber bands (yanked and flicked into numerous variations by Solange Kershaw), the electric hum of a lamppost (investigated for all its subtlety by Rebecca Mills), and the rush of traffic (modified to approach something melodic by Gail Priest). Those are just three of the album’s 11 tracks. Other participants include Thanos Chysakis, Robert Curgenven, Dithernoise, Iris Garrelfs & Douglas Benford, Derek Morton, Lea Piontek, John Kannenberg, and Phil Hargreaves. (Get the full set as a Zip archive at furthernoise.org: ZIP.)
Downstream: June 23, 2008

9. Pixelated Guitar Single: Fubsan’s “I Wish I Had a Watermelon” is built around a guitar line, pixelated and sparkling, locating that perfect spot where digital mediation merely amplifies the effect of strings in sympathetic vibration. To that is added a smattering of clicky, glitchy percussion and a background of whispery noises. From the Yoyo Pang! netlabel, which admirably traffics only in single-song releases. (Available not as an MP3, but as an OGG file.)
Downstream: May 29, 2008

10. Nine Inch Nails Leaves Listeners Speechless: Following quickly on the heels of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, another rock band with a strong following and abstract-electronic leanings posted its music online as a sliding-scale download. Nine Inch Nails made available for free a nine-track collection titled Ghosts I-IV, and a variety of purchasing options got you the full, nearly two-hour, 36-track version, ranging from a five-dollar download-only set to several disc-based physical objects. While the big entertainment-industry news at the time was the business plan involved in NIN’s Ghosts collection, what went underreported was the fact of the music itself: arguably the biggest selling album in the world at that moment was a lengthy set of experimental electronic instrumentals. The album opens with a contemporary, atmospheric spin on Satie’s piano — a hazy, lazy melody milked for its romantic echoes as a whorl of droney tones fills in the spaces between the notes. Then, on track two (the full album consists of four sets of nine tracks, each set titled Ghosts I, II, III or IV), comes the reverse: a quietly roiling fuzz box that’s eventually lent shape thanks to a well-crafted piano line. (Still downloadable for free at ghosts.nin.com. Just go to the Listen page, which includes instructions.)
Downstream: March 17, 2008

 

Part 3/3 — 8 KEY PROCESSES IN 2008: Any ambivalence about singling out a few key recordings should be easily offset by a list of general cultural activities. Or so you might think. If it feels wrong to say that one person’s drone, or modified field recording, or synthesized percussion is markedly better than another person’s drone, or modified field recording, or synthesized percussion, then it should be more comfortable to investigate drones, field recordings, and synthesized percussion as semi-distinct fields of creative effort in which a variety of individuals are making interesting noise and news.

The problem being, of course, that to focus on key fields is, in effect, to talk about trends — “trend” being one of the more troublesome words in cultural criticism, precisely because it threatens to suffocate anyone who embarks on (or works within) a supposed trend, by suggesting that whatever personal stake they might have in their work — be it circuit-bent children’s toys, generative software, or the digital processing of live instrumentation — is dwarfed by some broader cultural movement.

Last year (see: disquiet.com) I avoided the word “trend” by tying individuals to certain fields of activities: Kanye West, for the “producer as star”; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, together serving as a symbol for “sound art”; Toshio Iwai, creator of Electroplankton and the Tenori-On, personifying the convergence of video games and music-making. In other words, I avoided the word “trend” by focusing on “people.” In the end, though, I traded one error for another, because singling out any individual in a given field inevitably misrepresents their centrality, even if you list runners-up, as I did.

This year I hope to avoid the word “trend” (even if that’s now the fourth time I’ve typed it in as many paragraphs) by simply offering an alternative: “processes.”

1. Video Games Are the New Disco (or the New Power Ballad): It’s arguable — whether you find it sad, as a commentary on the decline of the pop song, or merely inevitable, as a statement about how video-game consoles are the new electronic hearth, or exciting, as an example of how digital technology is transforming entertainment — that the primary means by which a mass audience participated in a single musical experience in 2008 was via video games, notably Guitar Hero and Rock Band. That is to say, the manner in which a mass audience once rotated around a single arena act, be it R.E.M., Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, or the Who, has been relocated to the intimacy of the living room (and, in the case of Guitar Hero, the portability of the Nintendo DS). Of course, it’s also arguable that those same acts have simply seen their monetary channel shift, because all of them are part of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and the games wouldn’t have been as popular without them.

2. Netlabels Hit the Mainstream: It was in late 2007 that Radiohead dove headlong into the realm of freely downloadable music, with the release of the album In Rainbows. And in 2008, Nine Inch Nails followed suit, with Ghosts I – IV and The Slip. Gauging by the financial success of those endeavors, there’s no way this is the last we’ve heard of large-scale acts making their music freely available — which is to say, following a big-media variation on the netlabel model. In related news, record companies are in effect becoming radio stations, as their home pages are — with increasing uniformity — coming to feature streaming audio.

3. Casual Musicianship Has Become Gestural: Electroplankton was a small hit on the Nintendo DS, but one factor kept its audience (and its immediate influence) from expanding further: it was on a platform by definition already being used by gamers. But with the arrival this year of Brian Eno’s Bloom, and FM3’s virtual Buddha Machine, and other such generative and otherwise music-making software applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch, the casual creation of sound has become a mass-market cultural experience. That many of these tools are ambient — sound-based, rather than song-based — is all the more exciting, because it means a broader audience is appreciating sound for its own sake. (This emphasis on the iPod isn’t intended to detract from earlier efforts on other mobile technology, notably the Palm, but that’s been more a matter of musicians hacking unintended uses, rather than individual consumers making sounds as a matter of choice.) When Google’s Android operating system debuts its fee-based application marketplace in early 2009, as has been reported, it will be interesting to see if iPhone-based music software is ported over, and if anything inherent in either system (interface, hardware) spurs platform-specific development.

4. Ambient Movie Scores Are Normalized: In years past, a core group of film composers has served, time and again, as models for crafting movie scores that break with the melodic overstatement of earlier film composers. They dispensed with those larger-than-life, heavily orchestrated, self-evidently melodic pieces of theme music that were the aural equivalent of the decorative velvet curtains that frame a cineplex’s screen: superfluous, garish, and a throwback. This newer generation of composers includes Lisa Gerrard (Whale Rider), Cliff Martinez (Solaris), Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream), and David Holmes (Ocean’s Eleven). But if in 2008, no single score truly stood out, it’s perhaps because the techniques employed by those four — among others — have become more generally part of the movie-going experience. From The Dark Knight to Wall-E (and on television from House to Heroes), their impact is being felt in how score and sound design are becoming one, singular whole.

5. Sound-Art Ubiquity: Museums and galleries are noisier than ever, and that’s a good thing. Sound has long been an element in art, but 2008 was a year in which its prominence in the formerly hushed, cloistered confines of fine-art venues seemed to have become irreversible. One additional note: among the biggest technological shifts in 2008 is the arrival of low-power, low-cost laptops, deemed “netbooks”by the tech press (though the company Psion has been sending out cease and desist letters in regard to that moniker). Much as inexpensive MP3 players have allowed artists easy access to digital sound as part of their work, these netbooks, which are generally priced between $100 and $400, offer affordable processing power for installations in galleries and museums.

6. Fetishized Sound Objects: This comes in two forms — recordings and instruments. Regarding recordings, it’s useful, when tracking the shift to MP3s (and equivalent) from CDs, to note that acts such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, along with Brian Eno and David Byrne on their recent full-length collaboration, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, are producing expensive, limited-edition, physical-object versions of their releases. In essence what they’re saying is, “If an MP3 is sufficient for music, then we’ll have to provide something else you can hold in your hands,”suggesting that anyone with a desire for the tangible vestiges of pre-MP3 music purchases can find an alternative in the equivalent of a single-album box set. Regarding instruments, it’s fascinating to watch new gadgets-as-instruments gain in popularity, notably the Tenori-On, the Monome, and the Buddha Machine (version 2.0 of which was released two months ago). But much as software-based synths have largely supplanted hardware synthesizers, the ongoing development of numerous commercial-realm, physical-object, use-specific instruments seems unlikely. (Software’s a whole other realm — see #3, above.) However, in the DiY world (well documented by various sites, notably the music section of Make magazine’s blog, at makezine.com), the activity is really taking off in the form of instrument hacking and instrument invention. How many garage bands have been kicked out of the garage to make room for the resident hacker?

7. A Decade of Portable MP3s: It’s been 10 earbud-laden years since the Diamond Rio became available commercially, and the “MP3 player” is now the norm, even if a majority of MP3 players are iPods, and even if a substantial percentage of those players aren’t playing MP3s but, instead, Apple’s default AAC (aka M4A), with its concomitant “digital-rights management” (or DRM) tools. Whether the devaluation of the physical product has resulted in a devaluation of the music itself is something many people continue to debate. What isn’t debatable is that music, more than ever, is an abstraction; it is increasingly removed from the tangible world (except, perhaps, in how it affects one’s ear drums), and the shift from CD to MP3, from tangible to intangible, promises a future in which more musicians are interested in exploring that very abstraction, the disembodiment and ethereal quality that is inherent in much ambient/electronica. Which brings us to …

8. Sonic Stasis: For all the progress being made in digital audio, sound art, generative software, personal technology, and mobile/cloud computing, the end result — the music, the art — is not necessarily making steps commensurate with the changing environment. There’s a lot of promise, especially in #2 (netlabels), #3 (gestural music), and #5 (sound art) above, but at the moment, the general understanding of music and sound has not shifted as significantly in popular perception as has the means by which that music/sound is transmitted and distributed. In that regard, we’re still in the early years of commercial cinema, when many movies were little more than filmed theater. Closer to home, it took a long time for rock musicians to distinguish what they did inside the studio from what they did on stage. We’ll see what changes 2009 brings with it.

Best of 2007

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cut to the chase, the clock’s ticking on 2007 as I type this. That previous sentence is intended to provide an alibi: making note of the circumstances under which a “best of” list is produced gives me an out down the road, when I might change my mind. In any case, this year’s “best of” is, in fact, four separate lists. How’s that for a hedge? Part 1/4 is of “commercial full-lengths,” what we usually call “records” or “albums,” which are reportedly a dying species though I feel like there were more released in 2007 than ever before. Part 2/4 is a list of five key reissues. Part 3/4 is a list of my favorite 10 freely, legally downloadable MP3s (and MP3 albums — and, in one case, an OGG file).

Finally, part 4/4 is a list of 10 “key people,” and they’re really less individuals than individuals who stand for — and, in one case, stand apart from — trends in technologically mediated and otherwise ambient contemporary music. That sums it up. Oh, just one more thing — some of the best music I heard this year came on a CD stuck inside the back of a book, including Robert Scotto’s Moondog biography (with tracks featuring Steve Reich and Philip Glass, among others), the anthology Radio Territories (with tracks by Kode9 and Disinformation, among others), and Alan Licht’s Sound Art: Beyond Music, Beyond Categories (with tracks by Bill Fontana and Bernhard Gal, among others). But four lists were enough — probably more than enough.

Part 1/4 — BEST COMMERCIAL FULL-LENGTHS: They appear here in alphabetical order, as an iPod would alphabetize them.

1. Alva Noto
Xerrox Vol. 1
(Raster-Noton)
Alva Noto is Carsten Nicolai, who is as much a sound designer as he is a musician, and as much an installation artist as he is a performing or recording one. This album works as a pair with Cue, the Andrew Pekler release also on this year-end list, in that both take as their source material the un-music that fills the background of our public and private lives. In Nicolai’s case that means “samples from Muzak, advertising, soundtracks and entertainment programs,” though the end result is entirely his own — background, yes, rendered as a variety of drones and textures that you’ll welcome into your home as you might custom wallpaper or an evening breeze. It’s promised to be the first in a series of five. It’s available not only as a CD, vinyl LP, and digital download, but as an SD memory card (the latter pictured at left). How’s that for modern living?

2. Amon Tobin
The Foley Room
(Ninja Tune)
It’s not that music is becoming conceptual art, necessarily, but concepts play a stronger and stronger role in recorded music with each passing year, especially in electronic music. Perhaps such concepts simply provide useful, self-imposed constraints, which are welcomed as technological progress increasingly frees musicians from previously existing constraints. Whatever the cause, the concept at the heart of Tobin’s Foley Room is to work from real-world samples, like the Kronos Quartet snippets from which “Bloodstone” is stitched together and the motorcycle that fuels “Esther’s.” The result has all the drive, all the “post-drum’n’bass” momentum, one expects from Tobin. A pre-release single of “Bloodstone” included a track titled “Here Comes the Moon Man” that’s the closest Tobin has come to indie-rock, with utensil percussion and a mournful bass line; its interesting narrative structure, from that bass line to something more ethereal, is no doubt attributable to its role as part of the soundtrack to the film Taxedermia. A subsequent single collected remixes of “Kitchen Sink,” the original built from globs of water and masterfully elastic efforts in pause and release; the remixes are by Clark, Sixtoo, Noisia and Boxcutter.

3. Andrew Pekler
Cue
(Kranky)
Andrew Pekler reportedly constructed Cue, as the name may suggest, from library music — that is, from music bought and sold by the yard for commercial use, music made and heard anonymously, invisibly. What he’s made from it is an endlessly listenable post-rock album of tidy little grooves, pop-minimalist counterpoint, everyday exotica, and warbly turntablism (or at least, on a warped track titled “Dust Mite,” what sounds like avant-garde turntablism, all loopy and drowsy). Like all good background music, it works well in the foreground — and vice-versa. … Also: Along with the Alva Noto album Xerrox (listed above), the 2007 album Lifestyle Marketing by Thes One (aka Christopher Portugal, of the group People Under the Stairs) explores similar territory and is also worth checking out; the double album includes advertising and other background music by Herb Pilhofer on one CD (or LP) and, on the other, music that Thes One built from those themes, leaving much of their source material intact but updating the beats and the feel and enjoying a bit of a goof tweaking the original’s commercial intent.

4. Broken Consort
Box of Birch
(Sustain-Release)
Recommending anything released in a strict limited edition kinda goes against my politics, my prejudices, and my general sensibilities. But Box of Birch, along with other releases by British artist Richard Skelton, who records under several names, including Broken Consort, helped me realize that this sort of hand-crafted package in any other artistic realm — artists books, photography, and sculpture — wouldn’t raise an eyebrow; it would simply draw praise for its attention to detail and to the overall care that went into its production. And that each Sustain-Release release comes with an implicit promise of a more cost-efficient edition down the road helps. But enough about the box, what about the birch? The four tracks here are glistening, rumbling layers of seemingly infinite acoustic instrumentation; the album persistently explores the ecstatic space between melody and drone, absolutely beautiful stuff that brings to mind the Boxhead Ensemble (mentioned in previous Disquiet.com year-end best-of’s), Colleen (mentioned directly below), and John Fahey (a father figure to this sort of thing). For further reading, there’s an excellent interview with Skelton at digitalisindustries.com. … Also: A very close runner-up was the new recording of Gavin Bryars‘s dark, claustrophobic sound-work The Sinking of the Titanic, featuring Bryars on bass, Philip Jeck on turntables, and the ensemble Alter Ego, whose instrumentation ranges from bass, viola and clarinet to bottles, tape recorder and sound design. It was released on Touch, a record label synonymous with elegant packaging and limited editions, but this set looks downright utilitarian compared with Skelton’s. The music is tremendous — a deeply felt rendition of a work, originally composed in 1969, that deserves to be as central to the minimalist canon as is Terry Riley’s In C, which was composed five years prior. I’d love to hear what Kronos, Alarm Will Sound and the Warp roster, for that matter, would do with this composition, which needs no further description than its title.

5. Colleen
Les Ondes Silencieues
(Leaf)
Two years ago I included in my top 10 an album, also on the Leaf label, by Colleen (aka Cécile Schott) built from guitar, 19th-century glass harmonicon, and glass glockenspiel, all of those instruments manipulated in one way or another. This time around the materials are no less analog, but the sound maintains considerably more fidelity to their natural state: viola de gamba, spinet (a harpsichord predecessor), and clarinet. Heard from a separate room, this might be mistaken for courtly music of another century, but on repeated listens the melodies take a back seat to texture and tone. On “Le Labyrinthe,” it’s how each plucked spinet note supplants its predecessor that’s at the heart of the listening experience, a kind of cascade that goes up and down. On “Blue Sands,” it’s how the viola de gamba can work itself into a hypnotic, loop-like reverie. And on “Sea of Tranquility” it’s how the clarinet can alternate between the visceral quality of its player’s embouchure to the enveloping warmth of its held tones.

6. Common
Finding Forever
(Geffen)
I don’t wish the future to arrive too quickly, but we will look back, some day, at the collaborations between producer Kanye West and rapper Common as a remarkable union. Today, most rap albums are collections of songs that were composed in isolation by producers, purchased like bespoke luxury goods by hit-hungry rappers after the fact, and then given vocals with more of an eye than an ear toward maximizing chart positioning. A single rap album can have more production credits than it has tracks. That’s not a criticism, just an observation; heck, most of the 12″s I buy are the end product of the well-oiled (if economically jittery of late) rap-industrial complex. What’s essential about the West-Common union (and excuse me for putting West’s name first, but the fact of the matter is that this is a lovingly produced album and it’s only standard industry practice that keeps him from getting co-billing, let alone top billing) isn’t just that West has Common’s smooth, earnest delivery in mind when he makes these backing tracks, but that the albums — this one and last year’s Be — are singular listening experiences, helmed (almost entirely) by one individual from start to finish. West knows that nostalgic grooves, percussionist flair, and extended instrumental breaks are the perfect setting for Common’s voice. And a guest cameo by one of hip-hop’s greatest producers, DJ Premier — albeit at the turntables, not the mixing deck — on “The Game” just tops it all off. As always, West’s productions (he did all but a small handful of the tracks) are eminently enjoyable on their own — if you can locate ’em, just try the martial beat of “Drivin’ Me Wild,” shorn of Common and guest Lily Allen, or the hypnotic lounge music of the instrumental edit of “Start the Show,” with its hoarse flute and off-kilter loops and fades.

7. Floratone
 Floratone
(Blue Note)
Floratone is a four-man group: guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and producers Tucker Martine and Lee Townsend. Together they’ve quadrangulated a musical space where groove and atmosphere are one, from the opening dub of the title track to the slow-burn drive of the appropriately titled closing track, “Threadbare.” It’s a strong follow-up to a similarly studio-hewn Frisell record, 2004’s Unspeakable, and it is in the tradition of such material as the 1994 Los Lobos/Mitchell Froom/Tchad Blake collaboration Latin Playboys and, of late, the more outward-bound work of Galactic and Medeski Martin & Wood.

8. James Newton Howard
Michael Clayton (soundtrack)
(Varese Sarabande)
Don’t let the heightened pulse toward the end of the “Main Titles” of James Newton Howard’s score to the film Michael Clayton fool you. This is an album, much like it was a movie, of sublimated anxiety. Both are virtually thrill-less thrillers that thrive on subtle tension, existential longing, and occasional respite. Where the movie explored the back rooms and moral logic of corporations, the score explores the mechanisms of mood, from the dappled clank of “Drive to the Field,” to the economic mallet work of “Arthur and Henry,” to the rising drone of “Horses.” If this had been released on the Chain Reaction record label or played by, say, Plastikman or Monolake during a DJ set, no one would blink an eye — they’d just nod their heads and applaud its atmospheric achievement.

9. Madlib
Beat Konducta Vol. 3-4: Beat Konducta in India
(Stones Throw)
How can you not love an album of would-be hip-hop instrumentals built from Bollywood samples that opens with a track titled “Enter: Hot Curry”? Madlib is so prolific he’s less a person than an algorithm; in this case he takes the hyperbolic sounds of Indian films, locates beat-ready nuggets, and cuts them to suit. The best track, or at least my favorite, “Indian Deli,” could be a lost Neptunes jam, or an ancient recording of a Talking Heads concert on some forgotten Indian leg of their Remain in Light tour.

10. Steve Roden
 Dark Light Over Earth
 (New Plastic Music)
A musician who works with some of the most infinitesimal sound sources imaginable, Steve Roden was the perfect choice to provide sound for an exhibit at MOCA in Los Angeles of paintings by Mark Rothko, whose naked color fields are some of the most monolithic yet minimalist, epic yet personal, paintings of the 20th century. Rothko is also bonded by name to the composer Morton Feldman, whose interest in silence and simplicity is the foundation for his Rothko Chapel, as well as for much of what we think of today as “lowercase,” “microsonic” or otherwise hyper-minimalist music. Roden’s recording, with its emphasis on quietude and its introduction of violin, played by Jacob Danziger, is a half-hour distillation of his highly process-driven compositional strategies at their most effective.

Part 2/4 — BEST REISSUES OF 2007: In the past, I haven’t singled out reissues at year’s end, but since the poll at idolator.com included a reissues section (I participated, as well, in the villagevoice.com poll), I gave it some thought and selected the following five, based even more specifically on my own listening than on some sort of even vaguely semi-comprehensive look at the field.

A true reissue fever occurred during the first decade following the introduction of the CD, and though that initial surge of activity has faded, it has given way to a deeper second (or third?) wave that’s unearthing many more unusual and elemental recordings. Only one of the following five, the Miles Davis, was released prior to the 1982 commercial introduction of the compact disc. In defense of Nonesuch, which originally released the Scott Johnson score to Patty Hearst, it’s fairly common for soundtracks to go out of print not long after a film’s theatrical run comes to an end. Also in Nonesuch’s defense, that label this year picked up for reissue an album, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, that Warner Bros. had let languish. And this being a small world, the music collected on the Miles Davis box set mentioned below marks the end of Davis’s career at Columbia before he moved to Warner Bros.

1. Scott Johnson
Patty Hearst (soundtrack)
(Tzadik; originally Nonesuch, 1988)
This score to the under-appreciated Paul Schrader film about an American celebrity-terrorist (played by Natasha Richardson) was one of several key moments at which the American film industry took full advantage of the downtown music scene in Manhattan (other examples include Jim Jarmusch’s use in Stranger Than Paradise of John Lurie, who also starred; John’s brother Evan’s work on Trees Lounge, Joe Gould’s Secret and many other films; and countless Philip Glass scores). As is characteristic for Johnson, the Hearst score takes spoken phrases, in this instance from the film itself, and mines them for their interior melodic content; the melodies inherent in what is spoken then become the basis for the music, whose instrumentation includes Johnson on electric guitar and Michael Riesman, longtime music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, on keyboards. Schrader, by the way, has incredible taste in music, up there with Michael Mann’s. Glass scored his Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, released three years prior to Hearst; Thomas Newman did some of his earliest professional work on 1987’s Light of Day; Angelo Badalamenti scored Comfort of Strangers, which followed Hearst; and Anne Dudley, of the group Art of Noise, did Schrader’s most recent, this year’s The Walker.

2. Miles Davis
The Complete On the Corner Sessions
 (Columbia; originally Columbia, 1972-1975)
The closing period of Miles’s so-called electric era — leading up to the hiatus that preceded his move from Columbia Record to Warner Bros. — gets boxed. (What does that make his Warner Bros. period? The “pop” era?) Includes a dozen previously unreleased tracks.

3. Christina Kubisch
Night Flights
(Important; originally ADN, 1987)
Collages by a path-breaking sound artist.

4. Pauline Oliveros
Accordion and Voice
(Important; originally Lovely Music, 1982)
Meditative recordings by the American maverick.

5. Laurie Anderson
Big Science
(Nonesuch; originally Warner Bros., 1982)
A year after Laurie Anderson had a surprise hit with her “O Superman” single, that song served as an anchor for this full-length, whose full band included horn player Peter Gordon and percussionist David Van Tieghem. (So, when will Gordon’s great 1986 album Innocent get reissued?)

Part 3/4 — UP WITH THE DOWNLOAD: As I’ve done for the past few years, I am singling out 10 free, legal downloads as my favorites of the year. These are all selected from the nearly 170 entries posted on Disquiet.com in its Downstream department during the course of the past year.

To constrain the field, to make it knowable, this list is limited to recordings that are “of the web.”The following were not considered for inclusion: promotional tracks posted from existing or forthcoming commercial albums (that goes for individual tracks or excerpts — special “mixes” were considered for inclusion, such as Prefuse 73’s “self-mashup” [disquiet.com], though none made the cut), downloads that were placed online for a stated limited period of time (like Monolake’s generous “download of the month” series at monolake.de), audio that is streaming-only (such as the work sponsored by the Tate Museum at tatetracks.org.uk), and dated archival material (such as the majority of what is housed at ubu.com and in the Other Minds catalog at archive.org). Also not considered for inclusion were tracks whose links have subsequently gone offline (like si-cut.db’s excellent remix of Jem Finer’s “Longplayer” [disquiet.com]).

All of which is to say, everything on this list is of recent vintage and is available to download, for free, right now. Click through to each original Downstream entry for more information. The 10 are listed here in the chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com. Given the fluid nature of publication, attribution, and collation on the Internet, I cannot be certain that these audio files first appeared online in 2007, but most if not all of them did. And if some of them are older than that, at least this mention might gain them a new audience.

1. Four Quartets, Three Turntables: Using three turntables, Janek Schaefer mixes the voice of T.S. Eliot, heard reading an excerpt of his own “Burnt Norton,” one of the poet’s Four Quartets. The 30-minute Schaefer piece was recorded on January 20, 2007, as part of the Sound:Space sonic arts symposium in England, and was uploaded as an entry in the Gene Pool Podcast series of the Digital Media Centre (MP3).
Downstream: February 20, 2007

2. Luxurious Arrival: “Landing,” a track by the Russian musician Polina Voronova, was collected at least twice this year, first as part of the Arrivals and Departures various-artists compilation from the Electro Sound netlabel, and later on her own Luxurious, on the Musica Exentrica netlabel. The disarmingly simple piece features small bell-like tones that repeat over and over against a gauzy synthesis (MP3).
Downstream: March 19, 2007

3. Trio of Turntablists: The act djTRIO is three turntablists: Jonas Olesen, ErikM, and, by far the best-known, Christian Marclay. In this live recording at the Spor Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, in May this year, they have more in common with the chaos, clatter, and attention to detail of European free improvisation than with the scratching and beat-matching of hip-hop. (The recordings are available not as MP3s but as OGGs. Try the opening salvo [OGG] before visiting Four Directional Doubt to dive into the complete piece.)
Downstream: August 1, 2007

4. Remix the Night: Back in 1996, British musician Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) got some young British men and women together to talk about, as the nightjam.org.uk project website puts it, “how the city at night looks and sounds to their ears and eyes.”Among the results was “Sleepless City,”a maudlin track opening with dolorous piano that, characteristic for Scanner, places spoken word, by his young subjects, amid a soundscape that lends drama and emotional context. He subsequently invited various musicians to remix the work, and one highlight is a “Sleepless City”remix by American sound-art figure Stephen Vitiello (MP3) that adds percussion and ups the ratio of music/noise to voice, but without jeopardizing Scanner’s initial narrative intent.
Downstream: August 2, 2007

5. Argentinean Steampunk: The two tracks on Buenos Aires, Argentina-based musician Juan José Calarco‘s Plano Vertical are built from familiar sounds, including rusty gears, telescoping echo, industrial groans, auracular rings, surface noise, the vertiginous rumble of what could be an elevator shaft, the distant cacophony of what could be a plane coming in to land, the clack of equipment functioning. In other words, Calarco has taken mechanistic noises inherent in daily life and built something sad and worn and scary and often beautiful out of them. On the two pieces, “Extension Activa”(MP3) and “Plano Vertical 2″ (MP3), most of this sound is yanked from its original context, which makes the occasional water drip stand out like a photorealist painting at an abstract expressionist exhibit.
Downstream: August 27, 2007

6. Grid Lock: One of the musical highlights of 2007 was the commercial release of the Tenori-On. A grid of light-emitting buttons, the Tenori-On is a new instrument by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai, best known for his groundbreaking Electroplankton sound-toy, or audio-game, cartridge for the Nintendo DS. Robert Lippock (of To Rococo Rot) was among the musicians commissioned to produce musical testimonies on the Tenori-On, along with Jim O’Rourke and Atom Heart. Lippock seems, admirably, the least inclined of those three to create music that bears the imprint of the machine’s product design; his “Little Collector”is a surge of billowing waves of sound, like a hall-of-mirrors performance of some Philip Glass organ piece (MP3).
Downstream: September 9, 2007

7. Echo-Chamber Music: The composition “I Am Sitting in a Room”by Alvin Lucier is so ripe for adoption, it’s surprising that the work isn’t revisited more often. In the 1970 original, Lucier recorded himself stating something plainly and then recorded that recording being played, and so on and so on. This year, musician C. Reider updated “I Am Sitting in a Room”using audio-transcription software. Reider’s rendition seems natural enough. After all, Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”always resembled a conceptual-art game of telephone. The results of his experiment are listenable to at his vuzh.livejournal.com webpage. Or if you want a shortcut, here are the first iteration (MP3), the fifth (MP3) and the final/eleventh (MP3).
Downstream: September 10, 2007

8. Gold Standard: Perhaps as many artists have pursued truth in the golden ratio as entrepreneurs and adventurers have sought gold. Martin Neukom’s 13-track collection on the domizil.ch netlabel, Studie 18, is among the most recent such investigations. Each piece plays out as the result of one of Neukom’s investigations of patterns. Many have the pointillist detail of data in motion, like the water-drop effect of “Studie 18.11” (MP3) and the Lilliputian xylophone of “Studie 18.3” (MP3). The held tones that distinguish “Studie 18.7,”for example, are multiplied and varied, but occasionally overlap so as to become indistinct from each other (MP3). And the romper-room glissando of “Studie 18.10” is attributed to the Doppler effect (MP3).
Downstream: September 24, 2007

9. Killer Serialism: The pianist for the group Bad Plus, Ethan Iverson, created a sort of remix of work by 20th-century classical composer Milton Babbitt. It’s just over a minute long, but Iverson has taken the jazzy inflections of Babbitt’s 12-tone original, “Semi-Simple Variations,” heard here with Monk-ish drums added in a live performance by fellow Plus member Dave King, with some subsequent editing in the audio program Peak to clean it up (MP3). The fact of a jazzy, electronically mediated rendition of a piece of fairly hardcore serialism is exciting, certainly. But even more exciting is the expansion of the idea of a remix: the MP3’s basis in an original, impromptu recording; the use of software to warp a proper performance.
Downstream: October 24, 2007

10. Another Country: The Coen Brothers’s film No Country for Old Men, adopted from the Cormac McCarthy novel, updated the Western in many ways, key among them in its use of sound. Carter Burwell‘s score for No Country is among his most quiet — and, even more noteworthy, his most brief — ever. After seeing the movie, I wondered just how much music is present in No Country for Old Men, so I got in touch with Burwell, who answered my question. He replied:

There are 16 minutes of music in the film, almost 6 of which are in the end titles.

Burwell posted two No Country MP3s on his website, carterburwell.com, and they evidence the film’s sublimated passions and arid exterior. One is an exercise in tonality nearly as distant and flat as the horizon (“A Jackpot,”MP3). The other is the music that runs under the movie’s end titles; it builds slowly from a meager set of footsteps to a forlorn swagger (“Blood Trail,”MP3).
Downstream: December 3, 2007

Part 4/4 — KEY PEOPLE IN 2007: Usually I close my year-end lists with a mini-essay on themes and, for lack of a less inherently offensive term, “trends” that I hadn’t managed to touch on in my descriptions of the recordings I’d singled out. This year, that essay is given form thanks to the poll at idolator.com, which called for participants to list five key “things” from 2007 — which, the instructions read, “means anything you want it to: musicians, producers, videomakers, biz folk, websites, trends, etc.” In the interest of parallel structure, I limited myself to human beings — and they’re listed, as the explanations below I hope make clear, not so much for their individual (or group) achievements, but for how they serve as leaders in particular realms of cultural activity. Also listed, in most cases, are related other people active in similar areas. And once I began fleshing out the rationale and the categories, 10 proved a more useful field than five.

1. The Sound Artists: With a massive, career-marking exhibition at the Miami Art Museum (through January 20, 2008), Janet Cardiff and her constant collaborator, George Bures Miller, are arguably the most ubiquitous “fine artists” today employing sound in their work.
Also: Christina Kubisch, Steve Roden, Steven Vitiello

2. The Audio-Gamer: The media artist Toshio Iwai rebooted the Nintendo DS with his Electroplankton audio-game, and followed it up this year with his Tenori-On instrument. What could be next?
Also: the creators of the Monome; artist and musician Walter Kitundu; circuit-bending godfather Reed Ghazala

3. The Organization Musician: If high among the main categories of activity for electronic musicians today are (1) recording artist, (2) performing artist, (3) installation/sound artist, and (4) software engineer, then no one beats Monolake (born Robert Henke) — minimal-techno figure and Ableton Live staffer — for multi-tasking. Also: the crews behind Max/MSP and Final Scratch

4. The Star Producer: From Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips to pop legend Phil Spector to Miles Davis colleague Teo Macero to ambient godfather Brian Eno, there is always a producer who is working in the popular realm to extend the studio’s role as an instrument unto itself. In 2007, that was, foremost, Kanye West. That he happens to also be a performer just sweetens the deal. … It’s a tie, really between West and the late J Dilla (born James Yancey), who passed away two years ago this coming February, but who reportedly left behind enough instrumental tracks to keep rappers busy for several years to come. The saliva-rich Busta Rhymes had his best album in — well, it’s rude to count — many years with 2007’s Dillagence, but what Dilla really gave the world with his passing wasn’t so much a hard drive of slacker (call ’em “old school,” if you must) beats, but a wake-up call about the essence of hip-hop.
Also: Alchemist, Just Blaze, Muggs, 9th Wonder, Pharrell, Mark Ronson (I should add that I’m a little hesitant about including Ronson, whose Version and Amy Winehouse productions don’t really hold up without the vocals), Timbaland

5. The Recording Angels: Even if they never recorded or performed again, Kronos Quartet (led by violinist David Harrington) would have a continuing impact on contemporary music thanks to their ambitious commissioning of new works. And in 2007, further expanding their reach, they recorded with Amon Tobin and Tom Waits, released covers of Sigur Rós, and remixed (along with Enrique Gonzalez Müller) Nine Inch Nails.
Also: the ensembles Alarm Will Sound, Arditti Quartet, Del Sol String Quartet, So Percussion

6. The Sampler’s Siren: Singers have a more conflicted relationship with electronic music than with rock’n’roll or classical. It’s one of the many ways that electronica is like jazz, in that the music with vocals sort of has its own separate corner. Recent efforts in so-called dubstep have resulted, promisingly, in finding more common ground between electronic music and vocal electronic music, but dubstep remains largely a producer’s showcase, not a vocalist’s. As shown on her 2007 album, Kala, the British rapper-singer M.I.A. (born Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam) simply gets singing in a digital realm better than do most of her peers — much like Leonie Laws (of Breakbeat Era) and Tracy Thorn (of Everything but the Girl) before her.
Also: Björk, Thom Yorke

7. The Lab Band: Thomas Edison is reported to have said that his most prized invention was his laboratory — that is, the invention that allowed for other inventions. As the years go on, the band Radiohead is proving to be such a laboratory. This year the band scared the heck out of major record labels by not only self-releasing In Rainbows, but putting it up for online auction so each buyer could set his or her own price. And somehow member Jonny Greenwood found time to score the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, There Will Be Blood. And at the very end of the year, member Thom Yorke released a heap of guest remixes off his 2006 solo album, The Eraser.
Also: Medeski Martin & Wood, N.E.R.D., Sigur Rós, Wu-Tang Clan

8. The Public Classicist: This long after Leonard Bernstein’s death, you don’t land a book about classical music on the best-seller list without setting off ripples that will take years to fully recognize let alone gauge and appreciate. Especially if it’s a book that neither tells readers that Mozart will enhance their neurons nor that charts the end of civilization based on the decline in sales of Haydn recordings. New Yorker critic Alex Ross‘s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is that book.
Also: None, and that’s sort of the point

9. The Mogul Producer: As 2007 came to an end, rap star Jay-Z announced that he was stepping down as head of the fabled hip-hop record label, Def Jam. All I could think was, they’d put the wrong man in the chair in the first place; they should have given the gig to a producer, not to a rapper — that is, to someone who organizes sound around artists, not to someone who organizes the universe around himself. Fortunately, another company made the more informed decision: Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Slayer, Johnny Cash, and soon Metallica) now runs Columbia …
Also: No one else comes to mind, though I do think there’s something similar going on with Gilberto Gil’s work as Brazil’s Minister of Culture — and with Camilo Lara, who leads the group Mexican Institute of Sound while holding a day job heading up EMI Mexico

10. The Cineplex DJ: There isn’t a composer working at this moment whose music for films so perfectly seeps into the sound design of those films as James Newton Howard, especially this year in The Lookout and Michael Clayton. At least since 1994, when he introduced the piping theme to the TV show ER, he’s been a leader in the field of underscoring.
Also: Carter Burwell (whose No Country for Old Men edged self-effacing toward self-erasing), Danny Elfman (who surprised listeners with his understated work on The Kingdom), Lisa Gerrard (who’s increasingly focused on documentaries), Clint Mansell (for whom a reunited Pop Will Eat Itself was in no way a distraction), Cliff Martinez (the sleeping giant), Lou Reed (the Velvet Underground member, who produced the unexpected 2007 album of yoga background music, Hudson River Wind Meditations — as theplaylist.blogspot.com has noted, we’ll see what comes of his work on forthcoming Nanking), Thomas Newman (who had a slow year, following 2006’s The Good German and Little Children), Gustavo Santaolalla (if only he were more prolific), Garry Schyman (whose largely acoustic score to the video game Bio-Shock may have rewritten the rules for shoot-’em-ups)

Tokyo Sound Diary, May 2007

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

While visiting Tokyo for 10 days in late May of this year, I kept a “sound diary.” I didn’t record sounds, except, so to speak, with my pen and with a digital camera.

1. The Tokyo Dome roller coaster sounds exactly like there’s a military jet flying overhead. I wonder if it has speakers playing a recording of a jet, or if it just happens to sound like that.

2. A photo of the entrance to the Loop-Line gallery and performance venue, near Sendagaya Station:

Loop-Line gallery entrance

3. In the Suidobashi district of Tokyo, the sound of the crosswalk signal, a two-beat motif that is all attack and no denouement, sounds exactly the same when you’re on the street, surrounded by traffic, and when you’re 20 floors up in a hotel room, the world otherwise muffled by bedding, sheets, plate glass and so much distance. Continue reading “Tokyo Sound Diary, May 2007”

Best of 2006

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The year 2006 marked the 10th anniversary of Disquiet.com. It was a year when rural electronica was more than a notion. When a modest battery-operated device could inspire a dozen-plus tributes. When a visit to Africa could result in an inspired work that blurred the line between documentary and sound art. When recordings from geographically remote festivals were uploaded quickly to the Internet for a global audience. When video games doubled as musical instruments. When musicians more often than ever before made their work available for remixing by friends and strangers alike.

Yes, 2006 was a very good year for music, especially for music that falls into the vaguely defined territory of ambient/electronic. What follows is my favorite music of 2006, divided into two categories: commercial recordings and free, legal MP3 downloads.

This is the first year in a while that neither list has much in the way of instrumental hip-hop or contemporary classical, which along with film scores are the primary realms of electronically mediated music beyond what is more commonly thought of as “electronic music.” I listened to a lot of both, but nothing (no Krush, Koala, K Def, Dilla or Daedelus; no Part, Glass, Reich, Ashley or Adams) stuck with me the way these 20 recordings did.

Much more surprising to me is the prevalence of something that’s often entirely absent in my favorite listening: the human voice. At least half of the commercial recordings listed here have a vocal element, including Karl Hyde’s moans on a movie soundtrack, a country singer’s surprise guest appearance on an album of sludge metal, and spoken text on albums by Matmos and Max Richter. Likewise the list of free downloads, which includes, among other things, a lengthy mix of choral music.

Nothing marks the sea change in music during the past 10 years so much as the conception of obscurity. A decade ago, when albums on labels such as Basta, Hearts of Space and Vague Terrain were among my favorites, that music was often difficult to locate for purchase. This year, all the commercial CDs listed here are available via one (sometimes more than one) online retailer and many are sold as digital downloads.

Best CDs of 2006: To begin with, my favorite 10 commercially released albums of 2006, in alphabetical order by recording artist. Links are provided, where available, to the websites of the musicians and record labels.

1. Boxhead Ensemble
Nocturnes
(Atavistic)
The Boxhead Ensemble plays a kind of rural ambient chamber music, what Morton Feldman might have written had he been raised a Quaker. This set of eight supremely attenuated pieces milks the textural capacities of leader Michael Krassner’s cello, Fred Lonberg-Holm’s harmonica, Frank Rosaly’s drums, Jacob Kolar’s prepared piano and other instruments.
Label: atavistic.com

2. Drumcorps
Grist
(Ad Noiseam/Cock Rock Disco)
Drumcorps, aka Aaron Spectre, fills his sampler with metal riffs and computerized drum’n’bass percussion and lets ’em battle it out like a genre Celebrity Death Match. Spectre thoroughly comprehends the tribal nature of great metal, not to mention what gives a thrash guitar swipe a Zen-like intensity when set on repeat, and how the rhythms of dance music can rock as hard as any live drummer. He’s the true heir to the grindcore of Godflesh.
Label: adnoiseam.net
Label: cockrockdisco.com
Artist: drumcorps.cc

3. Tim Hecker
Harmony in Ultraviolet
(Kranky)
The found sounds that serve as the primary instrumentation of Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet are both self-evident and sublimated throughout. Hecker has a rare ability to mine the real world and leave it both untouched and utterly altered. Thus the deja vu sense of recognition that occurs repeatedly amid compositions that are variously water-logged with sonic density and ethereal in their fragility.
Label: kranky.net
Artist: sunblind.net

4. Jan Jelinek
Tierbeobachtunger
(~scape)
A cursory misreading of the title of Jan Jelinek’s latest might suggest the word “turbocharger,” but “Tierbeobachtunger” actually means “animal observations” in German, and the set of six loop-based meanderings is anything but fast-paced. The pieces investigate the meditative quality of circular sounds, from the slow seesaw of “Happening Tone” to the tamped down vocals of “Palmen Aus Leder,” all nestled on aural foundations that share a rich, hazy abundance.
Label: scape-records.de
Artist: janjelinek.com

5. Matmos
The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
(Matador)
The ever-conceptual duo Matmos (M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) works with a small set of associates (Kronos, Laetitia Sonami, Maja Ratjke, Bjork) to pay sonic tribute to 10 prominent, and not so prominent, gay figures, from disco legend Larry Levan, to writer William S. Burroughs, to producer Joe Meek, to Germs singer Darby Crash. The tracks share a rhythmic intent that often verges on the pointillist, but are otherwise as distinct as the individuals to whom they pay tribute, and so too are the sound sources, which include burnt flesh, adding machines, lasers and snails, just to name a few.
Label: matadorrecords.com
Artist: brainwashed.com/matmos

6. Mountains
Sewn
(Apestaartje)
Mountains is the name of Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp when working in tandem, and their dual affinities for string instruments and sound design bring to mind the film scores of Gustavo Santaolalla and the studio experiments of John Fahey. The use of guitar ranges between being closely recorded and being almost unrecognizable. Just compare “Sewn Two” and “Bay,” in which the plucked strings are front and center, to “Simmer,” in which they are but one among many scintillates.
Label: staartje.com
Artist: myspace.com/apestaartjemountains

7. Max Richter
Songs from Before
(FatCat 130701)
Max Richter is either the classical minimalist most informed about contemporary electronic music, or the electronica figure most schooled in classical minimalism. Better yet, his growing body of work makes the case that such distinctions are meaningless. His Songs from Before mixes nostalgia-tinged sound design with lovely string and piano arrangements for a contemplative cycle. Robert Wyatt guests on a few tracks, reading segments from the work of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Murakami was a natural choice, given the source of the spoken text on Richter’s previous album, The Blue Notebooks: Franz Kafka.
Label: fat-cat.co.uk
Artist: maxrichter.com

8. SunnO))) and Boris
Altar
(Southern Lord)
Two alpha-bands of sludge metal worship together at the altar of the drone, plowing steadily through undulating powerchords in which the drums routinely founder, wild animals caught in quicksand. A guest appearance by Jesse Sykes proves that the gauzy female vocal is the universal solvent of pop music; her turn on “The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)” melts dark metal into a shoegazer tune. Guests also include Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil on some abstract guitar, the Melvins’ devilish Joe Preston on nearly inaudible vocals, and members of Sykes’ band, the Sweet Hereafter.
Label: southernlord.com
Artist: inoxia-rec.com/boris
Artist: myspace.com/sunnodrone

9. Underworld and Gabriel Yared
Breaking and Entering: Music from the Film
(V2)
What were the two remaining members of high-concept techno act Underworld to do when their DJ, Darren Emerson, left the band? They found a willing, if temporary, third member in estimable film composer Gabriel Yared (The Talented Mister Ripley, Cold Mountain) and together scored director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering. The result features an abundance of what one might expect (and, more importantly, hope for) from such a pairing (a mix of screen-ready strings and effervescent digital beats), but also much more, notably the closing suite, a marvel that moves from light percussion to acoustic guitar over the course of 13 meditative minutes.
Label: v2music.com
Artist: underworldlive.com
Artist: gabrielyared.com

10. various artists
Jukebox Buddha
(Staubgold)
One of the most remarkable recordings of 2005 wasn’t just a recording. It was the Buddha Machine, by the duo FM3, who packaged nine short sound loops into a cheap little machine that looked like a Soviet-era AM radio. Given a year to reflect on those loops and on the ingenuity of FM3’s lo-fi accomplishment, 15 acts pay tribute with a series of remixes, including Blixa Bargeld’s chirpy “Little Yellow,” Alog’s loopy “A Dragon Lies Listening” and Adrian Sherwood and Doug Wimbish’s dubby “Karma-Cola.” Robert Henke (aka Monolake) was so into the process that in addition to the quiet piece included here, he separately released a full album of Buddha Machine remixes, the 10-track Layering Buddha (Imbalance Computer Music). Two acts listed elsewhere in this year’s top 10, Jan Jelinek and SunnO))), also contribute to Jukebox Buddha.
Label: staubgold.com
Artist: fm3buddhamachine.com

ON THE DOWNLOAD: As I did last year for the first time, I am singling out 10 free, legal downloads as my favorites. These are all selected from the (nearly) daily Downstream entries posted on the Disquiet.com website.

To make the field a bit more knowable, this list is limited to recordings that are “of the web.” The following were not considered for inclusion: promotional tracks posted by record labels from commercial albums, downloads that are online for a limited period of time, audio that is streaming-only (such as the work sponsored by the Tate Museum at tatetracks.org.uk) and dated archival material (such as that housed in the Other Minds catalog at archive.org).

All of which is to say, everything on this list is of recent vintage and is available to download, for free, right now. Click through to the original Downstream entry for more information. They’re listed here in the chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com. Given the fluid nature of publication on the Internet, I cannot be certain that these first appeared online in 2006.

1. Chain of Tools: Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s ongoing “Chain Music” project is the classic Exquisite Corpse in musical form. One after another, individual musicians and bands are given an existing work and asked to tag on their own addition, drawing from and building on what came before. When I posted an entry on “Chain Music” in January 2006, the most recent contributor was Christopher Willits, having been preceded by Fennesz, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Carsten Nicolai and Sakamoto himself, just to name a few. Since then, three more have participated: groopies, O.Lammm and sutekh (MP3).
Downstream: January 19, 2006

2. Goulash Cook-Off: For each Iron Chef of Music competition, musicians are provided the same sound sample from which they each build a unique composition in a set amount of time. A Bela Bartok piece as played by clarinetist Benny Goodman (and Bartok himself, on piano) was the key ingredient for the 43rd such Iron Chef showdown. Entries include Mike Shusta‘s deliberate investigation of some pizzicato sections, Butternuts‘ pushing it into industrial-techno overdrive, and Xmark‘s tweaking a clarinet riff into the stratosphere.
Downstream: March 3, 2006

3. Bush of Samples: To promote the re-release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, David Byrne and Brian Eno‘s 1981 sample-laden experiment, the duo approved a remarkable feat of open-source music, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix. They posted the constituent parts of two full-length tracks (20 for “A Secret Life” and 24 for “Help Me Somebody”) and allowed fans to upload their own versions. By the end of 2006, over 270 songs had been contributed, by musicians anonymous, unknown and renowned, including one by Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud. (In response to this project, I asked a dozen musicians to produce their own remixes, and I posted the resulting compilation, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, at archive.org.)
Downstream: May 18, 2006

4. Let’s Go Tokyo: When Darren McClure and Hiroyuki Ura were to perform at the Loop-Line gallery in Tokyo, Japan, they decided upon a site-specific set, and recorded sounds from the neighborhood, which they mixed with electronic effects.
Downstream: June 14, 2006

5. The Long Sample: For his 1,000-year mix of choral and other vocal music, Wobbly (born Jon Leidecker) begins with early-music heroes Hildegard von Bingen and Perotin, makes his way around the globe, stopping in Japan and Kenya, before leaping into the recent present, courtesy of Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Downstream: June 30, 2006

6. Out of Africa: Alessandro Bosetti went to Africa and, like many travelers, he brought along some CDs. He also brought along some recording equipment. He played the CDs (which contained largely abstract music by the likes of Kevin Drumm, Ryoji Ikeda and Harry Partch) for locals and he recorded their responses. Then he grafted the two sets of audio together, playing simultaneously what his test audience heard and how they responded, often with imitative zest.
Downstream: August 21, 2006

7. Broken Beats: To promote his new Body Riddle album on the esteemed Warp record label, Clark created a blog and posted, as promoted in advance with a calendar, three tracks, one from the album and two not. The last of them, “Dusk Raid,” was the best of the bunch, less rhythmically succinct than what came before, and rich with plucked instrumentation and broken beats that suggest DJ Krush’s machine-molested shamisen, not to mention muddled horns that bring to mind Robert Wyatt’s solemn art-pop.
Downstream: September 19, 2006

8. Water Music: This piece makes a good complement to the Tokyo entry mentioned above. Chris Herbert, who’s based in Birmingham, England, was invited by Resonance FM to create an original sound collage stitched together from field recordings near the city’s waterways. The realworld noise was taped in what’s been described as a series of “sound walks” around his place of employment. Herbert released the excellent album of timbrally vague texture-music Mezzotint on Kranky this year.
Downstream: October 4, 2006

9. Life After Metal: Drumcorps also made the best-albums list this year with Grist (see above). This live set (like the Chris Herbert track, courtesy of London broadcaster Resonance FM) mixes analog and digital rock noise, the slashing guitars of deathmetal and the broken beats of digital hardcore, into an event-packed, pulse-quickening, imagination-challenging, synapse-pummeling mash of maddeningly cross-hatched cadences.
Downstream: October 10, 2006

10. High Wire Act: The October 2006 Instal festival hosted three days of experimental music, and much of it has been uploaded for a broader audience than was able to make it to Glasgow. Among the many MP3s is a 45-minute set that pairs Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan. Fullman is a master of an instrument of her own devising, a series of long (like, room-length) strings that allow her to produce music whose simplicity is so dense that, counter-intuitively, it becomes opulent: single notes resound as if from a gargantuan sitar, wave forms become almost visible, harmonies take on a macroscopic lushness. In an inspired bit of programming, she played with Meehan, who focuses on one of the simplest instruments imaginable: a single drum.
Downstream: November 30, 2006

REEL WORLD: As always, some of the best, and least noted, electronic music of the year was heard in high fidelity in movie theaters (and, to a lesser if growing extent, in video games). The teaming of Underworld and Gabriel Yared for Breaking and Entering may have made for the best listening outside the theater, but it’s just one of numerous excellent scores to surface in 2006… or, more to the point, to simmer just below the surface of public awareness.

Arvo Part‘s music was heard in at least two films. BT continued his transition from raves to multiplexes with Catch and Release. Clint Mansell brought together Kronos Quartet with the rock group Mogwai for The Fountain. David Torn could be heard in The Departed and the Diane Arbus biopic, Fur. Gustavo Santaolalla closed Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s trilogy with Babel, which managed to use his mix of composed music and sound-for-sound’s-sake to root three stories on three different continents. Philip Glass‘ music appeared in several films, including The Illusionist and Notes on a Scandal. The record label Winter and Winter released Ernst Reijseger‘s music for two Werner Herzog films, The Wild Blue Yonder and The White Diamond, under the collective title Requiem for a Dying Planet. And Romantico, with music by Raz Mesinai, finally saw a limited release.

Composer John Tavener (whose Ikon of Light is one of the few contemporary works recorded by Tallis Scholars) stepped out of his personal abbey to compose original music for Children of Men; the audience’s ears are particularly engaged by this film, which early on replicates the ringing that follows the explosion of a bomb, a sensation that never really fully ends until the film does.

Segments from Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks were reportedly included in this year’s Stranger Than Fiction and The Night Listener. Looking ahead to next year, Richter, whose Songs from Before is singled out above as one of 2006’s best commercial recordings, is working on at least two film-score projects, writer-director James Strouse‘s Grace Is Gone (Strouse previously wrote Lonesome Jim, which Steve Buscemi directed and for which Evan Lurie wrote the music) and director Stanislaw Mucha and writer Krzysztof Piesciewicz‘s Hope (Piesciewicz wrote Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy).

Director Michael Mann revisited Miami Vice with some original music by John Murphy, but true both to the pop nature of the originating TV series and to the quick-draw, digital-video style of the movie, much of the soundtrack consisted of pre-existing tracks, including work by Moby, Nina Simone (remixed by Felix Da Housecat) and, in a nod to the self-remix, segments from previous Mann films Heat and Collateral.

A cineplex DJ much like Mann, Sofia Coppola furnished her Marie Antoinette with a hodgepodge of songs, including ones by Aphex Twin, Air, Kevin Shields (remixing Bow Wow Wow) and Squarepusher.

And while 2005’s best recordings included a video-game soundtrack, Amon Tobin’s for Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3, many of 2006’s best video games doubled as musical instruments, most notably Electroplankton (created by Toshio Iwai), which made use of the Nintendo DS’s many user interfaces.