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2004: the year in music
Nov. 14th, 2004 07:39 amWell, we're just six weeks or so from the end of 2004. I thought I'd get my 'year in music' entry in early.
This year it feels to me as if I've produced more than I've consumed. 2004 began with the release of 'Summerisle', the record I made last year with the amazing Anne Laplantine. Anne and I both love the record. I honestly expected it to sell 20,000 copies. (It didn't.) I spent spring and early summer recording my own new album, 'Otto Spooky', which saw a 'return of the repressed' in the form of relatively coherent pop songwriting. Mid to late summer was spent playing concerts in Japan and Hong Kong (the year also saw concerts in Russia and Spain) and for the last two months I've been composing and performing music for a theatre production with students of Berlin's Ernst Busch School.
My favourite album of the year is 'Random Veneziano' by Hypo (Active Suspension).
It's slightly embarrassing that I actually sing on this record, because it makes my endorsement look like self-hype. But you'll hardly recognize my voice, and even if Anthony Keyeux hadn't asked me to participate, I'd still love his record just as much. 'Random Veneziano' is a postmodernist pop masterpiece, a pleasure palace of illusory surfaces. Perhaps this fantastic tack-attack is retro-pomo; imagine My Bloody Valentine's 'Loveless' played on thrift store Casio and Yamaha sampling keyboards in a room in Venice filled with gaudy, angular acid blotch-applique Memphis furniture. Imagine the whole thing spliced and edited so much that instead of breaking the flow, the constant changes become a new sort of flow. Imagine horrible textures becoming something lovely. Imagine the cheap becoming the noble, and making everything else sound lame and cliched. Imagine a love for pop music that goes so far it comes out the other side, straight into hate. This record is great.
It's also embarrassing that the pop record I'm currently listening to more than any other is my own forthcoming 'Otto Spooky', which I think is terrific. It's much more poppy than 'Oskar Tennis Champion', and yet it retains Oskar's strangeness and pleasurable disorientation. The record is accessible yet challenging, with John Talaga's amazing morphs scattering an electro-magnetic paper trail between songs to bluff your radar. I'm sure it's destined to sell a measly couple of thousand copies here and there and get hardly any reviews, like most of my other records, and indeed like the records of the people I consider my peers: Hypo and Toog and Anne Laplantine. But whether the world listens or not, it's fabulous to live by music, and to make music you love. It's even not so bad being poor and relatively unknown, as long as you're fulfilled and free.
To be honest I didn't like Toog's 2004 album 'Lou Etendue' (Karaoke Kalk) as much as his previous records. I could hear too much Gainsbourg in this release, and the nice thing about Toog before was that he only sounded like Toog. I also prefer to hear him singing about cyclopses, shopping at the garden centre, or having sex with God than being in love and linking love with terrorism. It seems both too soppy and too topical, too personal and too apocalyptic. Toog used to be almost classical in his wry detachment, but he suddenly went romantic. Anne Laplantine's 2004 releases 'Dicipline' and 'Hambourg' (Tomlab) were incredibly strong. She's my favourite lo-fi baroque composer, and her compositions take me to strange and lovely worlds where clumsiness and grace rub shoulders.
I continue to think that the Paris scene around the Active Suspension and Clapping Music labels is one of the most promising in the world. New albums by o.lamm ('Hello Spiral'), My Jazzy Child and Konki Duet were enjoyable, if not so great that they made me want to steal any ideas (my ultimate mark of respect). New records from old favourites like DAT Politics and Kahimi Karie passed me by. Somehow I just wasn't terribly interested any more. I paid appreciative attention to the new folk scene -- people like Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and CocoRosie, but in the end found something suspect about them. I feel much closer to the folk generation that preceded them -- Adam Green, Kimya Dawson, The Moldy Peaches. It's something to do with irony and sincerity, and exactly where these artists locate them. It may be that I think of the Moldy crew as sharp art students, whereas I think of the Banhart gang as fuzzy trustfunded hippy kids. I might be quite wrong, though.
America produced some of the most innovative music on the planet this year in the form of bands like Animal Collective (and related solo projects) Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. Actually, I say America, but I mean the disenfranchised blue state coasts. If places like Brooklyn and Providence were producing a scene inspired by Japanoise bands, California had an equally weird take on hip hop in the form of the Anticon collective, with the CloudDead record being a highlight. And it was nice to welcome Brooklyn's Jason Forrest, aka sample insurgent Donna Summer, to Berlin as the latest American refugee. Expect a Momus / Forrest collaboration in 2005.
I noted a Shibuya-kei revival going on in Tokyo, but can't claim to be terribly excited by bands like Console, Plus Tech Squeezebox, Macdonald Duck Eclair, Dahlia, Migu, and Spank Happy. The latter approached me for some production work only to be told that I simply couldn't muster the required enthusiasm. The people I've been impressed with in Japan this year are on the experimental / noise scene. People like Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) and the Off Site collective, especially Toshi Nakamura. Rumour is that he's collaborating with Kahimi Karie now; Shibuya-kei may be coming back, but the original Shibuya-kei artists are way off in left-field. Actually, I have been experiencing some 90s nostalgia recently. I discovered a cache of old video 8 tapes made by a teenager in 1995. They mostly consist of shots of Pizzicato 5 records -- white vinyl, clear vinyl, plush graphics -- spinning on a Cornelius turntable. Sometimes the camera pans to the window, and the Tokyo skyline. It sounds boring, but in fact these tapes are the most beautiful thing I've seen all year, and bring back in a vivid rush the incredible atmosphere of Tokyo in the 90s; the transcendental glamour, the sophisticated irony, the sense that style could save us all. Although I don't think the Shibuya-kei revival can ever touch the original movement, my Tokyo blogger friends Jean Snow and Marxy have a different view and can keep you up to date on developments.
My favourite live event of the year took place in August in a traditional Japanese tea house in Omihatchiman, on the shores of Lake Biwa, Japan. It involved a fusion of tea ceremony and laptop electronica / performance art, and featured my current favourite Japanese artist, Yuko Nexus6. The event was organised by Phirip, who's also worth watching. The best demo I was given this year came from Kaori Mitsushima. There was something fresh, simple and experimental about the Mon Minou CD she handed me at my Tokyo concert. Since Kaori was moving to Berlin to live with her Finnish-American boyfriend Mika, I headhunted her to work with me on the music for the Martin Crimp play I'm doing. If you're in Berlin, come along and hear the results. Performances are on 16th 18th 19th, and 20th November, and then there are two or three shows between November 22nd and 28th and a few in early January.
Some other kinds of music impressed me this year. First, there were the snatches of Tatar folk music I heard when I was in Izhevsk, which had me thinking, for a while, of making my next album 'tatartronic'. Then there was the fabulous Cantonese Opera I saw at the Sunbeam Theatre in Hong Kong. I bought a lot of old vinyl in markets in both Japan and Berlin, and it was mostly of the horspiel type -- dramatic productions using kabuki music, or old German children's records on the communist Litera label. I downloaded a lot of contemporary classical music from a file sharing service I can't tell you about -- stuff like the unreleased Lamonte Young concerts from the early 60s. And I discovered that I really like Alejandra and Aeron, founders of the Lucky Kitchen label.
This year it feels to me as if I've produced more than I've consumed. 2004 began with the release of 'Summerisle', the record I made last year with the amazing Anne Laplantine. Anne and I both love the record. I honestly expected it to sell 20,000 copies. (It didn't.) I spent spring and early summer recording my own new album, 'Otto Spooky', which saw a 'return of the repressed' in the form of relatively coherent pop songwriting. Mid to late summer was spent playing concerts in Japan and Hong Kong (the year also saw concerts in Russia and Spain) and for the last two months I've been composing and performing music for a theatre production with students of Berlin's Ernst Busch School.
My favourite album of the year is 'Random Veneziano' by Hypo (Active Suspension).
It's slightly embarrassing that I actually sing on this record, because it makes my endorsement look like self-hype. But you'll hardly recognize my voice, and even if Anthony Keyeux hadn't asked me to participate, I'd still love his record just as much. 'Random Veneziano' is a postmodernist pop masterpiece, a pleasure palace of illusory surfaces. Perhaps this fantastic tack-attack is retro-pomo; imagine My Bloody Valentine's 'Loveless' played on thrift store Casio and Yamaha sampling keyboards in a room in Venice filled with gaudy, angular acid blotch-applique Memphis furniture. Imagine the whole thing spliced and edited so much that instead of breaking the flow, the constant changes become a new sort of flow. Imagine horrible textures becoming something lovely. Imagine the cheap becoming the noble, and making everything else sound lame and cliched. Imagine a love for pop music that goes so far it comes out the other side, straight into hate. This record is great.
It's also embarrassing that the pop record I'm currently listening to more than any other is my own forthcoming 'Otto Spooky', which I think is terrific. It's much more poppy than 'Oskar Tennis Champion', and yet it retains Oskar's strangeness and pleasurable disorientation. The record is accessible yet challenging, with John Talaga's amazing morphs scattering an electro-magnetic paper trail between songs to bluff your radar. I'm sure it's destined to sell a measly couple of thousand copies here and there and get hardly any reviews, like most of my other records, and indeed like the records of the people I consider my peers: Hypo and Toog and Anne Laplantine. But whether the world listens or not, it's fabulous to live by music, and to make music you love. It's even not so bad being poor and relatively unknown, as long as you're fulfilled and free.
To be honest I didn't like Toog's 2004 album 'Lou Etendue' (Karaoke Kalk) as much as his previous records. I could hear too much Gainsbourg in this release, and the nice thing about Toog before was that he only sounded like Toog. I also prefer to hear him singing about cyclopses, shopping at the garden centre, or having sex with God than being in love and linking love with terrorism. It seems both too soppy and too topical, too personal and too apocalyptic. Toog used to be almost classical in his wry detachment, but he suddenly went romantic. Anne Laplantine's 2004 releases 'Dicipline' and 'Hambourg' (Tomlab) were incredibly strong. She's my favourite lo-fi baroque composer, and her compositions take me to strange and lovely worlds where clumsiness and grace rub shoulders.
I continue to think that the Paris scene around the Active Suspension and Clapping Music labels is one of the most promising in the world. New albums by o.lamm ('Hello Spiral'), My Jazzy Child and Konki Duet were enjoyable, if not so great that they made me want to steal any ideas (my ultimate mark of respect). New records from old favourites like DAT Politics and Kahimi Karie passed me by. Somehow I just wasn't terribly interested any more. I paid appreciative attention to the new folk scene -- people like Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and CocoRosie, but in the end found something suspect about them. I feel much closer to the folk generation that preceded them -- Adam Green, Kimya Dawson, The Moldy Peaches. It's something to do with irony and sincerity, and exactly where these artists locate them. It may be that I think of the Moldy crew as sharp art students, whereas I think of the Banhart gang as fuzzy trustfunded hippy kids. I might be quite wrong, though.
America produced some of the most innovative music on the planet this year in the form of bands like Animal Collective (and related solo projects) Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. Actually, I say America, but I mean the disenfranchised blue state coasts. If places like Brooklyn and Providence were producing a scene inspired by Japanoise bands, California had an equally weird take on hip hop in the form of the Anticon collective, with the CloudDead record being a highlight. And it was nice to welcome Brooklyn's Jason Forrest, aka sample insurgent Donna Summer, to Berlin as the latest American refugee. Expect a Momus / Forrest collaboration in 2005.
I noted a Shibuya-kei revival going on in Tokyo, but can't claim to be terribly excited by bands like Console, Plus Tech Squeezebox, Macdonald Duck Eclair, Dahlia, Migu, and Spank Happy. The latter approached me for some production work only to be told that I simply couldn't muster the required enthusiasm. The people I've been impressed with in Japan this year are on the experimental / noise scene. People like Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) and the Off Site collective, especially Toshi Nakamura. Rumour is that he's collaborating with Kahimi Karie now; Shibuya-kei may be coming back, but the original Shibuya-kei artists are way off in left-field. Actually, I have been experiencing some 90s nostalgia recently. I discovered a cache of old video 8 tapes made by a teenager in 1995. They mostly consist of shots of Pizzicato 5 records -- white vinyl, clear vinyl, plush graphics -- spinning on a Cornelius turntable. Sometimes the camera pans to the window, and the Tokyo skyline. It sounds boring, but in fact these tapes are the most beautiful thing I've seen all year, and bring back in a vivid rush the incredible atmosphere of Tokyo in the 90s; the transcendental glamour, the sophisticated irony, the sense that style could save us all. Although I don't think the Shibuya-kei revival can ever touch the original movement, my Tokyo blogger friends Jean Snow and Marxy have a different view and can keep you up to date on developments.
My favourite live event of the year took place in August in a traditional Japanese tea house in Omihatchiman, on the shores of Lake Biwa, Japan. It involved a fusion of tea ceremony and laptop electronica / performance art, and featured my current favourite Japanese artist, Yuko Nexus6. The event was organised by Phirip, who's also worth watching. The best demo I was given this year came from Kaori Mitsushima. There was something fresh, simple and experimental about the Mon Minou CD she handed me at my Tokyo concert. Since Kaori was moving to Berlin to live with her Finnish-American boyfriend Mika, I headhunted her to work with me on the music for the Martin Crimp play I'm doing. If you're in Berlin, come along and hear the results. Performances are on 16th 18th 19th, and 20th November, and then there are two or three shows between November 22nd and 28th and a few in early January.
Some other kinds of music impressed me this year. First, there were the snatches of Tatar folk music I heard when I was in Izhevsk, which had me thinking, for a while, of making my next album 'tatartronic'. Then there was the fabulous Cantonese Opera I saw at the Sunbeam Theatre in Hong Kong. I bought a lot of old vinyl in markets in both Japan and Berlin, and it was mostly of the horspiel type -- dramatic productions using kabuki music, or old German children's records on the communist Litera label. I downloaded a lot of contemporary classical music from a file sharing service I can't tell you about -- stuff like the unreleased Lamonte Young concerts from the early 60s. And I discovered that I really like Alejandra and Aeron, founders of the Lucky Kitchen label.