Glenn Marshall’s distinct style of abstract computer animation blends modern art, eastern mysticism, mathematics, nature and science.
[via http://www.butterfly.ie/ ]
David Sylvian - Emily Dickinson
Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek - Plains
Hildur Gudnadóttir - Elevation
Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek - Sessions
Ben Frost - Leo Needs A New Pair Of Shoes
Adrian Klumpes & Shoeb Ahmad - Her Lovers And My Letter Hand
Rachel Grimes - Every Morning
Cobalt - Stomach (metal)
Tiago Sousa - Movimento
Animal Hospital - His Belly Burst
Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar
We Were Promised Jetpacks - It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning
Russian Circles - Geneva
The XX - Crystalized
Burial & Four Tet - Moth
Vampire Weekend - Cousins
Ben Frost - By The Throat
Thomas Köner - La Barca
Kreng - L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
ON (Sylvain Chauveau and Steven Hess) - Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night
Svarte Greiner - Kappe + A Night Without Harm
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
Khate - Pareidolia
Health – Get Color
Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions
Hildur Gudnadóttir- Without Sinking + Iridiscence
Rachel Grimes - Book of Leaves
Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek - Blank Grey Canvas Sky
Tiago Sousa - Insónia
Adrian Klumpes & Shoeb Ahmad - In Bed We Trust
Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - Ensemble Modern
Nils Frahm - The Bells + Watermusik
Leyland Kirby - Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
Heather Woods Broderick - From The Ground
Aaron Martin - Grass Wounds
Simon Scott - Navigare
Jasper TX & Anduin - The Bending Of Light
Dakota Suite, Peter Broderick, Deaf Center, Various - The Night Just Keeps Coming In
William Basinski - 92982
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Out Of Noise
Danny Norbury - Light in August
Ólafur Arnalds - Found Songs
Hauschka - Snowflakes & Carwrecks EP
Black to Comm - Alphabet 1968
Animal Hospital - Memory
David Sylvian - Manafon
Russian Circles - Geneva
Pelican - What We All Come To Need
Do Make Say Think - The Other Truths
Mono - Hymn To the Immortal Wind
We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
Arms and Sleepers - Matador
Heather Woods Broderick - From The Ground
Grizzly Bear - Veckitamest
Planning For Burial - Leaving
The XX - xx
Laia - Viva jesus e mais alguém
Piano Magic - Ovations
Sweet Billy Pilgrim -Twice Born Men
Japandroids - Post Nothing
Antony & The Johnsons - The Crying Light
Cloudkicker - Portmanteau + The Map is Not the Territory
Zu - Carboniferous
Bats - Red In Tooth & Claw
Cobalt - Gin
Latitudes - Agonist
Isis - Wavering Radiant
Converge - Axe to Fall
City of Ships - Look What God Did To Us
Giant Squid - The Ichthyologist
Baroness - Blue Record
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Horseback - The Invisible Mountain
Kylesa - Static Tensions
Battlefields -Thresholds Of Imbalance
Altar Of Plagues - White Tomb
Black Cobra - Chronomega
Bennie Maupin Quartet - Early Reflections
Aaron Parks - Invisible Cinema
Portico Quartet - Isla
The Thing - Bag It!
Gonzalo Rubalcaba - Avatar
Brad Mehldau Trio - Live At The Village Vanguard
Jóhann Jóhannsson - And in the Endless Pause there came the Sound of Bees
Murcof - La Sangre Iluminada
Clint Mansell - Moon
Ólafur Arnalds - Dyad 1909
Matt Elliot - Failed Songs + Howling Songs + Failing Songs + Drinking Songs
Benoît Pioulard (2006) Précis + (2008) Temper
School of Emotional Engineering (2005) - School of Emotional Engineering
Swod - (2007) Sekunden + (2004) Gehen
Amenra (2008) - IIII
Ben Frost (2006) - Theory of Machines
Zoe Keating (2005) - One Cello X 16: Natoma
Adrian Klumpes + Triosk + Roam the Hello Clouds
A great 2010 for all!
Adriano E.
This is probably the last music related post (and biggest ever) I’ll be doing here. It’s always strange to post personal tastes on a collective blog, so i’ll be starting a personal blog for all my stuff and this will be just design/buro related for all Buro team, and most likelly it will evolve into something more usefull and we’ll leave all the fun and useless posts to the burocratik’s facebook group. Check it here.
It’s important to give you reasons why I’m doing all this, after all I’m no music critic: I do it for FUN, pure FUN of discovery. Music is my life’s fuel and in my very own process to understand why things are important to me, I found out that on the recent years, blogging through several interests of mine (type, music, design, others) the main factor was to get the feeds from someone that has some simmilar tastes rather that know EVERY blog on the whole Internet or download everything it was available.
Simmilar tastes point us to compatible new directions and extends our horizons. So as everything in life, the relevance of something is not dictated by my our own tastes, but by what it manages to accomplish by pointing out other people the relevance by trying out new sounds. Typographic speaking, it would be silly to point out HELVETICA’s killer’s features that makes it an excelent typeface, as in music it would be to point out RADIOHEAD’s brilliance. Everybody knows Radiohead and Helvetica, and that doesn’t make them futile, only predictable and overused (and heard) besides their unquestinable top notch qualities. But a new font is always more exciting when we see so much details put upon something we already know.
If on this decade we saw consensual bands revisiting and extending Joy Division’s legacy as a starting point (Interpol, Editors), on my book Godspeed you Black Emperor and Sigur Rós influenced hundreds of other bands generating the Post-Rock scene that starts to fade away. The two last years are pointing to new directions such as the minimalism of Michael Nyman, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and the contemporary classicism of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt and Erik Satie whose work is well known to the public. A friend of mine keeps reminding me that several stuff I show is nothing new. Of course that most of the new stuff (being music, art or type) is not as good or brilliant as older classics that directly influenced them (because em compare to the roots), but as in science you gotta know the classics to extend your work, after all brilliance is not on every corner or mind.
With an example, as brilliant as Galileu, Einstein or Newton were, knowing their work in science is as important as the ones who rethink it, and re-write it in new theories, with a different context and new light. New music has a paralelism with this, sure several stuff reminds you older stuff that you like and enjoy more (you already know them for years so that’s easy), but that’s just a sign that the people who did the music learned they lesson with the best and that are writting their own interpretations with a new fresher context. That’s why fresh blood is so important on every context.
The internet is all about experience knowledge and sharing, so maybe this lists can be usefull for people to look for new bands based on their tastes or quests, I know I would smile if I got this list with some bands I like and have them mixed with 50 others that I don’t know. Good material to explore and digest. So here’s my take on this years music releases that really excited me.
Musically speaking, 2009 was a medium year for metal, nothing really stands out as a great release, except Zu’s Carboniferous (a band from Italy that merges jazz/metal/hardcore) and the one man band Cloudkicker (progressive/instrumental/math metal) that leaves a lot of other releases behind and it’s free (he gives away his music). Converge takes almost every metal list #1, and it’s a great cd but as everything in my life I don’t agregate things by it’s value or potential, I rather collect things by excitement, if I get excited by something’s really bad it will be listed. This is how I made this List, this is what excited me music wise this year.
We witnessed the return of great band such as Mastodon and Baroness with good (but not that great) albums, a new competent Isis release, and some good surprises with bands that toke an important role on their genre such as Bats, Latitudes, Battlefields. Some value confirmations stood out like Kylesa, Giant Squid and City of Ships; and we got very interesting new blood of acts such as Cobalt with a great CD and Horseback that point out for me directions for what we’ll see in 2010 in the metal scene, some raw avant-garde black/war metal with more sludge drone and experimental - bands like Krallice and Wolves in the Throne are also evolving this but I’ve never been a huge black metal fan anyway but Cobalt is sure making it right and caught my attention.
After revisiting my music list from 2008 where the ambient drone, experimental, ambient, psychedelic, stoner rock was starting to get merged with real ambient / experimental projects, this year we also saw that happen to the metal industry with bands such as Jodis, Greymachine and Sunn O))) (that don’t give me real excitment, but the good Horseback release The Invisible mountain are merging my two favourite styles of music: metal and ambient/experimental and the Altar of Plagues release is also notable for being something new for a black metal band.
Instead, releases outside metal like Kreng, Ben Frost, Svarte Greiner and Thomas Köner are doing this so much more effectively that blows away the dark experimental setups of the metal Industry. So, there’s a lot to learn here for the metals bands for 2010 and i’m waiting for values to come up on this next big thing of drone/doom metal/dark ambient/minimalism, for sure it will be explored even further on the following years.
This is where the real excitement hangs: this year was colossal for new acts on Dark Ambient/Done and Home Listening/Ambient/Modern Classical. I would say that after the 2008 post-rock saturation, the listeners and bands point their guns to other other stuff and eve if we have good pos-rock releases that gives up the final chapter on this saturated trend (Mono, Caspian, Do Make Say Think, Russian Circles and Pelican) acts like Animal Hospital - Memory and Arms and Sleepers - Matador (Light Ambient with Post-Rock elements) sounded so more fresh and lead new directions for 2010 that colds down the enthusiasm of excellent releases such as Mono’s Hymn to the Immortal Wind that without this new context would/could be album of the year for sure.
On this Alternative/Indie/Post-Rock tag, I was blown away by the astonishing, multi-layered epic from Animal Hospital Memory’s, with extraordinary arrangements that keep you at once transfixed and disturbed. Also David Sylvian is revisiting Scott Walker’s work and transposing it to a new level of discomfort that surely doesn’t get into everyone’s skin, but when you get a Comfort Point to hear it and understand what he’s trying to do you’ll easily consider this effort as a beginning of something that can induce a trend for the next years of more difficult music transverse to every experimental genre.
It was an amazing year for the Home Listening/Ambient/Modern Classical fans. So much good releases of notable music that it was difficult to point out my favourits. Rachel Grimes is of course a personal favourite of mine, but the Portuguese Tiago Sousa is picking up he same road and made the beautiful Insónia that is among my indespensable records of 2009. I’ve decided to merge this genre with Ambient/acoustic for the sake of easing up my job, and the best CD’s on this were Hildur Gudnadóttir (a cellist and composer best known for her collaborations with múm and guest appearances with Pan Sonic), that has made the most beautiful album of the year for me, and Thomas Köner with La Barca, a trully mesmerizing work with field recordings and drones no other field recordings based album has touched my heart so deeply. If you must check any album of this list, this would be one of them.
One obvious extension of this Ambient/Cinematographic vein are the OST’s, and we really got great OST’s this year, Jóhann Jóhannsson (And in the Endless Pause there came the Sound of Bees), Murcof (La Sangre Iluminada) , Ólafur Arnalds (Dyad 1909 ) and Clint Mansell (Moon) all dit it sublimely.
Special mentions to Adrian Klumpes & Shoeb Ahmad with a mesmering In Bed we Trust, Leyland Kirby with a colossal triple CD/LP release, and Nils Frahm that seems to gather some expectations for his next releases ater the truly excelent Bells Music & Winter Musik, taking the podium along with Nico Muhly that haven’t release anything under his own name in 09, but sprinkled his talent for so many works that feature on this list that he’s just a mandatory reference for all the stuff we are still to hear over the next decade.
Type Records is still making a notable job by picking notable musicians on the last years on this new genre that has absorved the over saturated pos-rock fans that went to this more mature music that gathers classic influences to minimal electronic glinches. Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto were my introduction to this world, and they still do it better than anyone else, but Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek took it to another mesmerizing level of minimal classical/electronic beauty with Blank Grey Canvas Sky. I bet 2010 will be deeply influenced by them.
William Basinski released 92982, an album that seems to match perfectly this current trend, but was written on the 80’s (that’s what I call trully ahead of his time), with other equally good releases from Aaron Martin, Hauschka and Simon Scott. This is where the new blood is, and what will be matured on 2010 until we get this saturated again and go on to something else. But for what’s really worth,we never had a common trend was so much beautiful and mesmerizing, people that only listened to Metal or Post-Rock are really enjoying good music (from ambient to minimalism to modern chamber music with minor glints of electronic processing), and this can only be a good thing.
Jazz is not really my thing, but a few releases took my attention such as the exquisite Bennie Maupin Quartet release and the Portico Quartet (besides ZU and The Thing that merged it into metal real).
Fuck Buttons and Fever Ray are also notable for their releases. The XX also deserve to be mentioned as the “band that everydody will love”, and indeed it’s something unique. You can also try Arms and Sleepers work Matador’s - taking the “What’s there not to like award”.
Last note on my findings on previous brilliant albums prior to 2008: Nico Muhly, Benoît Pioulard, School of Emotional Engineering, Zoe Keating and Swood are just to good, dig them out and enjoy they music.
Of course as in 2008, Clogs and Rachel’s were the band I listened the most. They are really the most fundamental bands of the recent years for me. Check the airplay infographic here:
You can catch up my daily discoveries soon on my blog, for now follow me on Last FM and twitter. -
Be a Bürocratik fan @Facebook. We’ll continue to post a lot of stuff in there, the blog will evolve to a more serious Tech/Design/Folio thing in early 2010. Cya @FB.
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