The Wire's Best of 2008
a selection of the best records of the year 2008 made by theWire magazine
Sound Characters 2 (Making Sonic Spaces)
One of contemporary music's greatest and most elusive mavericks returns to Tzadik with yet another CD of ear-bending electronic sounds. A student of Stockhausen and close collaborator of John Cage and David Behrman, Maryanne Amacher has been creating acoustic art, electronic soundscapes and site-specific installation work since 1967. A new CD of Amacher compositions is a true cause for celebration and Teo! is one of her greatest works. The winner of Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics cat…
Imperial Distortion
**One of the most iconic ambient albums of the last decade, Kevin Drumm 'Imperial Distortion' had an extremely limited vinyl pressing a couple of years ago which some argued never quite captured the full depth and frequency range of the original material due to the way in which it was mastered. This brand new edition has long been planned by the label and has now been painstakingly remastered by Matt Colton, unveiling a filigree spectrum of microtonal flux and layers of atmosphere that were simp…
Concrete
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…
Resonant Spaces
****THE WIRE 2008 TOP 50 RECORDS OF THE YEAR WINNER****"A couple of years ago the promoters Arika invited John Butcher to tour a number of out-of-the-way spaces in Scotland. The venues, selected for their extreme acoustic properties, included a mausoleum, a wartime fuel-storage tank and a cave. This album grows out of Butcher’s evident interest in escaping the acoustic confines of conventional venues (work with resonant spaces is documented on the earlier Geometry of Sentiment and Cavern with Ni…
In the 7th moon chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the he
The debut album by the Kasai Allstars collective raises the ante & lifts Crammed's Congotronics Series up to the next level. An unbelievable mixture of traditional acoustic instruments, electric guitars, distortion-laden thumb pianos & soulful vocals.
Love is Overtaking Me
An outstanding release! "In the four years since Audika began releasing the much-loved but less easy to find music of composer and producer Arthur Russell, his popularity has soared. Particularly striking a chord with a younger generation of musicians, many have enthusiastically championed his progressive and influential sound. In 2007, Jens Lekman arranged the brief but tenderly constructed EP, Four Songs By Arthur Russell, which featured imaginative covers by Joel Gibb, Vera November, and Take…
Sand
This is Philip Jeck's fifth solo album for Touch. Sand was recorded live in Holland and England in 2006/2007 and edited in Liverpool in January, 2008 using Fidelity record players, Casio SK keyboards, a Behringer mixer and Sony mini-disc recorders. Following Philip Jeck's acclaimed collaboration with Gavin Bryars and Alter Ego on a new version of The Sinking of the Titanic, Sand is a set of seven new compositions that highlight Jeck's mastery of vinyl manipulation and personal and collective mem…
a sounding of sources
Malcolm Goldstein has been labeled an “improviser” and a “composer-violinist” (or merely a violinist). What this CD once and for all shows is that he is indeed those things, but encompassing them all is the fact that, profoundly, he is a composer. As he points out, “At the core of Baroque music was the integration of composition and improvisation,” and Goldstein brings the perspective and focus of a seasoned performer to this undertaking. In this way his music represents a further evolution of t…