A Closer Listen
In each of the past six years, a female composer has taken the top spot in our overall year-end list. If this happens again next week, the eventual winner may come from the land of drone, as seven of our top ten albums in this category are from female composers (while three more lie just outside the top ten).
We’re also sure that we have never had an album from a puppeteer and accordionist appear on a year-end chart, which may make Yara Asmar’s Stuttering Music our favorite micro-category album of all time ~ and it was one of the last albums to be reviewed this year! There’s plenty more here, from a two-time EOY winner to an ode to female prisoners. These albums engage the mind as well as the heart.
Austyn Wohlers ~ Bodymelt in the Garden of Death (Geographic North)
“Time heals all wounds”, people claim. And so, Austyn Wohlers turns to sustained tones and gradual progression to process a difficult experience. This is detailed, immersive music where profound joy takes the hand of frustrated sadness. Death may be in the title, but a garden continues to teem with life. An entire insect society adds lush detail throughout, while Wohlers’ compositions gradually unfurl into bloom. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
C. Lavender ~ Rupture in the Eternal Realm (IDEAL Recordings)
When you spot an unexpected rupture in your eternal realm, the stakes are pretty high: the heavens, the Earth, the self, the divisions between. C. Lavender’s third record is a metaphysical expedition, with bold synth tones opening enormous swathes of reflective space. Kosmische, minimalism, classic ambient and new age sounds: all make their hovering appearance around the droning centre. This is a record understated in its quality, timeless in its style. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
Concepción Huerta ~ The Earth Has Memory (Elevator Bath)
Like all the best stories, Concepción Huerta’s involves a deep descent into the underworld. Early in 2024, we were confident her album would resurface for our year-end lists. This is an elemental record, capturing cold rock, red magma, and glassy obsidian. Darkness and claustrophobia share space with awe and wonder. Huerta is a skilled drone-smith, forging a captivating narrative in sustained tones and textures. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
Daniel Bachman ~ Quaker Run Wildfire (10/24/23-11/17/23) for Fiddle and Guitar (Longform Editions)
A single 25 minute composition made for the ever-excellent Longform Editions, Daniel Bachman’s restrained fiddle and guitar drones memorialize the 25 day Quaker Run Wildfire which nearly engulfed his home in Virginia. Field recordings of the forest bookend the composition, providing narrative structure along the way, as the quiet is alarmed and the blaze rages on, arrested only by the cold November rain. Longform Editions encourage deep listening, but not necessarily escapism; Bachman’s piece is somewhere between elegy and eulogy, a meditative reflection on climate change, colonialism, and our place in the wider world. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
Kali Malone ~ All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
Building from her 2023 record Does Spring Hide its Joy, All Life Long sees organist and composer Kali Malone branching out, engaging voice and brass as well as her trademark instrument across a series of tracks that explore texture, space, and of course the breathy tactility of the organ and its decay. Although the organ announces its timbre most vividly, the sounds of her collaborators’ instruments are also at the center of All Life Long. Like many albums that find their way to our pages, Malone’s is as much about space and silence as the “sounds themselves.” Malone is also, as we noted in our review of the album, one of many artists who are repurposing the sounds of the church, here the polyphony of Gregorian chant as well as the organ, towards secular ends. Nevertheless, All Life Long lends itself to a spiritual experience for the attentive listener. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
KMRU ~ Natur (Touch)
Recalling Maryanne Amacher’s claim that all cities have a key, on Natur the artist who records as KMRU responds to the sounds of place. Prompted by a move from one city to another, the album explores those qualities that soundtrack urban life in the 21st century. The sound of electricity, technology, electromagnetic frequencies begin almost immediately and extend throughout the over 50 minute run time of the album’s single composition. The result is a soundscape cum meditation on what we hear and what we don’t hear. The composition’s drone and haptic frequencies are occasionally interrupted by the occasional field recording of birds or a child, but those sounds are the exception. As we noted in our original review of the album, there are moments of beauty on the album, but the listener is primarily enveloped in the hypnotic swoon of the electronic soundscape, making those moments of interruption all the more remarkable. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
Maria W Horn ~ Panoptikon (XKatedral)
Maria W Horn’s album is a powerful work, even if the listener is unaware of its origins; however, it’s worth offering some context. Panoptikon takes its inspiration from the history of Vita Duvan (The White Dove) prison in Sweden, which kept most of its prisoners in isolation for the first three years of their sentence. The circular building enabled prisoners to be observed at any time by the guards; although it closed in 1979, these methods are still in use globally. Panoptikon was performed by multiple voices through speakers installed in the cells, capturing the loneliness, uncertainty and fear of those imprisoned, which must have been heartrending for the contemporary audience. The album version mixes the voices together into an intensely beautiful but chilling suite. (Jeremy Bye)
Original Review
Rafael Anton Irisarri ~ FAÇADISMS (Black Knoll)
Façadisms is an immense album. Purportedly inspired by brutalist architecture and a glitch in translation that transformed “The American Dream” into “The American Myth,” the album is one of several we reviewed this year that explores the melancholy at the heart of contemporary culture. With elements of both drone and post-rock instrumentation, the album is an immersive and at times euphoric journey through sound best played at high volumes. Amidst swaths of electronic ambiance, richly reverbed keyboards and strings, wordless chorus, and deep bass, Irisarri attempts to make a statement about the false promises of contemporary life even as he crafts a work of at times delicate and at others overpowering, feeling. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
Sarah Davachi ~ The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
The tenth album released on Sarah Davachi’s Late Music label continues a run of superb albums. The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir is the concluding part of sorts to a trilogy begun with Two Sisters and Antiphonals, which is a weighty trio of albums. This is slow music, perfect for the listener to let go and be carried along by the lengthy notes of the organ which seem to breathe in and out slowly, encouraging us to push distractions to one side and take time to appreciate the work. The non-organ pieces dovetail sympathetically into a complete 92-minute work. Make the time and the rewards are rich indeed. (Jeremy Bye)
Original Review
Yara Asmar ~ Stuttering Music (Ruptured)
Stuttering Music is one of unfolding doubles, of sounds two times incomplete, of daydreaming dissociation without an anchoring center. It is the wonder of memory, the humorous poetry of being both somewhere and elsewhere, the context collapse of broken sequences – musical, historical, vital. Is a remembrance a duplicitous invention? As Asmar extends the sounds of the accordion like wings, she draws our attention to the falling feathers, each a unity, and yet also a fragment. The levity of their form betrays profound connections with everything around them, a swirl of the kaleidoscope, every singular strand of self inherently an other. It is sad, and yet also funny, how memory fools us into thinking like one. Which is why a Stuttering Music is also always beautiful, first as presence, then as absence. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
Sat Dec 14 00:01:42 GMT 2024