I believe that this Ambient Tea Party, on the YouTube channel Den Pat, took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as that is where the associated Bandcamp page is based. Den Pat is, I think, the Denis Vladimirovich Patrabaev (or Патрабаева Дениса Владимировича — thanks, online translation tool!) listed in the label’s description as its founder. This solo set, which I listened to on repeat while working, is a treat, an admirably consistent, nearly hour-long mix of modulated tones and gently abrasive intrusions. Highly recommended. I’ll be working through the label’s catalog shortly.
My Favorite Albums of 2024
Hey, I got it done this year
I voted in this year’s Pitchfork “best albums of 2024” list (and The Wire’s), and was asked to hold off on publishing my personal list until the full Pitchfork list went up on their website, which it now has, and the issue of The Wire with their look back came out today, too. (The Wire does a cool thing when listing the contributors to the voting: they list each contributor’s #1 album of the year.) So, here are my favorites. I have friends and colleagues who actively refine and adjust their lists of the best albums over the course of the given year, and even continue to do so, revising years and decades as time passes. I am, quite simply, not one of those people. Were I not asked to make a list, I would likely not. But I was, and I have, and I recognize these lists are very useful to people, so I share here happily. These are 25 records I enjoyed (or: appreciated, admired, got lost in) the heck out of this year:
- Bill Frisell/Andrew Cyrille/Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook Records)
- Jeff Parker / ETA Vtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem / Nonesuch)
- KMRU: Natur (Touch)
- The Necks: Bleed (Northern Spy Records)
- Taylor Dupree: Sti.ll (Greyfade)
- Sarah Davachi: The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
- Dialect: Atlas Of Green (Rvng Intl.)
- Lia Kohl: Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
- Prefuse 73: New Strategies for Modern Crime (Lex Records)
- Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist (Drag City)
- Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything (Drag City)
- Eli Keszler: Live 2 (LuckyMe)
- Christopher Bissonnette: In a Second Floor Window (12k)
- Seefeel: Everything Squared (Warp)
- Kali Malone: All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
- Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score) (Milan)
- FourColor: Lightscape (12k)
- Max Richter: In a Landscape (Decca)
- Tristan Perich & Ensemble 0: Open Symmetry (Erased Tapes)
- Michael A. Muller: Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
- Kenneth Kirschner: Three Cellos (Greyfade)
- Patricia Wolf: The Secret Lives of Birds (Nite Hive’)
- Nonkeen: All Good? (Leiter)
- Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal (Kranky)
- Zimoun: Dust Resonance (Room40)
Back at It with Hannes Pasqualini
More four-panel comics are coming
During the first year of the pandemic, Hannes Pasqualini illustrated and I wrote a half dozen four-panel comics: “Foghorns” (March 18, 2020), “Megaphone” (April 6, 2020), “Mentors” (April 13, 2020), “Eavesdrop” (June 15, 2020), “Room Tone” (March 25, 2020), and “Mnemonic” (October 5, 2020). Doing so was a highlight of that dreadful and stressful year. I’m happy to report that we are back at it, and I hope to have a new comic to share soon, and others soon after that. (The above image is a tiny detail of a work-in-progress.)
Meanwhile, Hannes, who is based in Northern Italy, is also at work on some solo material, and here, with permission, is a peek at what he is up to. You can follow his always interesting activities at instagram.com/hannes_pasqualini_illustrator. If you make music with synthesizers, then you may have used modules Hannes worked on, such as those from Mutable Instruments.
Communities in Code
Back to izzzzi.net in 2024
I initiated a digital semi-break starting on the Friday before (American) Thanksgiving, but then this nifty tool, izzzzi.net, popped up, and I made a brief exception — not a breach, not a betrayal, just a matter of curiosity leading the way. The flourishing of code that encourages community amid a community in which software is a core component — well, that is a very specific place where my head (which is to say: my writing) happens to be at right now (alternative firmware, reciprocal repositories, gardens of forks), so the public announcement of izzzzi was especially well-timed for the current resting state of my receptors. I’m digging izzzzi plenty, both conceptually and practically. I’m not totally offline at the moment, but I have muted much of my digital social life for the remainder of 2024, with izzzzi now included in that self-imposed pause. I’ll be back at it sometime during the first week or so of 2025.
On Repeat: Hanlon, Lula, Kjartansson, Beat
Home/office playlist
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Backwaters is an excellent collection of experiments that Christopher Hanlon recorded “over the last year or so.” The emphasis is largely on the ambient and atmospheric, which is to say the emphasis is on a lack of emphasis.
[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=1723589358 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
▰ I mentioned this album a couple weeks back in a different context, and when only one pre-release track was available. Now all of Chloe Lula’s deeply reverberant Oneiris — which combines her techno and cello experiences into something that is quite different from merely those two elements amalgamated — is out, and it’s dramatic, rich, and just plain fantastic.
[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=3098417072 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
▰ I have no idea how long this video will remain online, but on the YouTube account of a James Lee there is a complete take of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, all nine screens edited into one compelling rendition. Lee has put the nine screens as insets shaped like an L — that’s 5 down, 5 across, with Kjartansson in his bathtub at vertices’ intersection. And then in the space that L frames, there are alternately one or two details from the overall performance given more space. For some reason the video embed isn’t working, so go to the video’s YouTube page to check it out.
▰ I really enjoyed the Beat tour when I caught it a couple weeks ago in San Jose (that’s Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Steve Vai, and Danny Carey doing songs from King Crimson‘s legendary mid-’80s trio of records: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair). The evening’s second set was when the band sounded less like a recital and more like a thoroughly engaged ensemble, and it opened with this great arrangement of “Waiting Man,” from the Crimson album that gave the tour its name. This video was recorded back in mid-September. Levin has a long-running photo album on his own website, and if you know what I look like, you can find me a few rows back stage right in some of his shots of the concert I attended.