Top albums of 2012

Top 10 jazz albums of 2012 (roughly ranked in order of preference)

Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers

Tim Berne: Snakeoil

Darius Jones Quartet: Book of Mae’bul (Another Kind of Sunrise)

Fly Trio: Year of the Snake

Josh Berman and His Gang: There Now

Henry Threadgill: Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry

Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things: Clean on the Corner

Alexander Hawkins Ensemble: All There, Ever Out

Steve Lehman Trio: Dialect Fluorescent

Dans les Arbres: Canopée

Top 10 rock, pop, electronic, hip hop, etc. albums of 2012 (roughly ranked in order of preference)

Julia Holter: Ekstasis

Laurel Halo: Quarantine

Tatsuro Kojima: 16g

Burial: Kindred; Truant/Rough Sleeper

Beach House: Bloom

Flying Lotus: Until the Quiet Comes

Yoshi Horikawa: Wandering

Homeboy Sandman: Subject: Matter; Chimera; The First of a Living Breed

Lambchop: Mr. M

Japandroids: Celebration Rock

25 honorable mentions (alphabetical order)

Alcest: Les voyages de l'âme

The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald)

Cicada: Let’s Go

Dirty Three: Toward the Low Sun

Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Orrin Evans: Flip the Script

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Grimes: Visions

Benedikt Jahnel Trio: Equilibrium

Anders Jormin: Ad Lucem

Kyojaku: 孤高の画壇

Lapalux: When You’re Gone

The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth

Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble: Hasselt

Saint Etienne: Words and Music by Saint Etienne

Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio: Sources

The Ty Segall Band: Slaughterhouse

Serengeti: Kenny Dennis

Ballaké Sissoko: At Peace

Wadada Leo Smith: Ancestors

Colin Stetson and Mats Gustafsson: Stones

té: ゆえに、密度の幻想は綻び、蹌踉めく世界は明日を『忘却』す。

THEEsatisfaction: awE naturalE

The xx: Coexist

Himuro Yoshiteru: Our Turn, Anytime

Music journal, 10-11/2012

October

 

October 10. té: 音の中の「痙攣的」な美は，観念を超え肉体に訪れる野生の戦慄。[The “Convulsive” Beauty of Sounds; the Dread of the Body beyond the Idea to Visit the Open Wild.]; ゆえに、密度の幻想は綻び、蹌踉めく世界は明日を『忘却』す。 [Therefore, With the Illusion of Density Torn Apart, the Staggering World Will “Forget” Tomorrow.]. If my quick and rough translations of the album titles didn’t clue you in, té are a frenetically synchronized Japanese post/math-rock band. The first (the “convulsive” one--the title must be a reference to Breton's Nadja) is mostly live, capturing the raw immanence of the band, with three new studio tracks tacked on at the beginning; it’s not altogether essential. The second (the “forget” one) is a full-length studio album that works comfortably within the generic constraints to unleash a more tempered, thoughtful fury that even verges on beautiful; it’s worth the trip.

October 10. Kyojaku: 孤高の画壇 [Lone Art World]. Who says girls can’t do math (rock)? An all-female, mostly instrumental (high pitched J-pop sounding vocals invade the last track on this album) rock quartet from Japan whose melodic diction and poise form a nice counterpoint to té’s destructive impulse.

October 14. Steve Lehman Trio: Dialect Fluorescent. Lehman, a doctoral candidate in musical composition at Columbia who also just happens to play a blistering alto sax in his own bands and for such contemporary jazz notables as Vijay Iyer and Anthony Braxton, has an almost Dolphy-like interest in pulling his compositions apart until each bar, each meter, each note, becomes a singular occurrence (see “Allocentric,” “Foster Brothers”). The pleasures of this album are mostly academic, sure, but I, unlike some other music critics, would never use the adjective “academic” pejoratively. It should probably also be noted that the trio includes a wtf cover of “Pure Imagination” (yes, the one from the Willy Wonka movie).

October 14. Fly Trio: Year of the Snake. A glimmering, psychological work, whose highlights are the ten-minute center piece “Kingston” and the nine-minute title track, two masterful topological expeditions into Can-like inner-space. Interspersed throughout the album are a few shorter, ethereal tracks titled “To the Western Lands I-V,” which, collected and expanded, could have rivaled either one of these masterpieces. Elsewhere, the trio exerts more energy toward extroversion, as on the sultry “Salt and Pepper,” but nowhere do they fail to be interesting.

October 18. Neil Halstead: Palindrome Hunches. Four palindromes on the new Neil Halstead album:

1.      Ever rêve?
2.      Live, some sleep-pop peels emo’s evil.
3.      Top on, neve, one (et al) spin nips late Eno, even—no pot!
4.      No KOs, but still-lit stub's OK on.

October 20. Daedelus: Looking Ocean. A slight (not just because of length), collaborative effort.

October 20. Celer: Redness and Perplexity. I heard some humming and some buzzing and, at one point, a Japanese radio interview. I’ll grant the perplexity, but I didn’t hear much redness. Maybe colorblind people are also colordeaf.

November

November 9. Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers. This four-disk, four-hour plus masterpiece of neo-classical jazz is, quite possibly, the greatest musical achievement of the century (so far), though this is, granted, a somewhat misleading if not purposefully hyperbolic claim: many of the compositions date to the previous century and take as their subjects various events and servants of history from that century, and the entire album is obviously indebted to decades of study and application. The song titles are more than mere gestures, though; the compositions themselves, in their complex but spontaneous beauty, enact the resistance materially. In other words, the album is a stained act of democratic resistance as Jacques Rancière defines it, in its most excessive and scandalous form: not as a form of government or a principle of social organization but as concrete modes of action irrupting from ongoing emancipatory traditions through which the multitudes gain access to new temporalities, new materialities. This is why equal education (and therefore some principle of shared, equal intelligence) is one of the album’s most important themes. So calling this a jazz album is like calling Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance a novel, when both works express the will not to transcend artistic form itself but to reshape it as a servant of the ongoing struggle for equality. Both pose revolutionary pedagogy in opposition to the oppressive, exclusionary political machine whereby the dominance of the multitude is enacted by the few. Yes, I call it intelligence, and I am eager to hear yet more.

November 24. Flying Lotus: Until the Quiet Comes. The album forms a dreamy suite—crystalline pauses gap the tree-combing melodies as beats blossom and dip like acacias only to recede just as quickly into lowlight dreamscapes (these organic similes are an artifice of mine). Though it seemed fragmentary and thin at first, this album only came into focus for me as I sat in the back of a van driving into Chicago at 9:00 PM last weekend. The key was hearing the album (with good headphones) as one dense, spectacular lava flow of sound set against the blurred halo of headlights and taillights that flooded my vision.

November 27. Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Americana; Psychedelic Pill. A bit of everything on these two: doo-wop recontextualized as folk music; various re-writes of varying quality (of authorless ballads and Young’s own classics); Woody Guthrie; 15-30 minute guitar jams; nostalgia trips; cranky rants about hip hop haircuts; “God Save the Queen.” Both are enjoyable enough, but there’s no impetus for me to re-listen obsessively.

November 28. Homeboy Sandman: First of a Living Breed. Even though this album cannibalizes a great track each from the two EPs released earlier this year (Subject: Matter and Chimera), it is no replacement—all three are equally meaningful and essential. First of a Living Breed expands upon the artistic success of those two releases by emphasizing the true vocation of “the MC” in her or his role as cultural critic. “For the Kids” is hip hop as pedagogy, while the rest is just hip hop pedagogy: ethical, intelligent, vibrant, indispensable. See also Homeboy Sandman’s blog at the Huffington Post for intellectual context: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/homeboy-sandman.

November 29. Goat: World Music. Weird and sort of damp.

November 30. The xx: Coexist. With a brave title like Coexist, one has every right to expect more; indeed, we get even more less-ness than before. Such minimalism doesn’t necessarily signify subtlety, however, as the lyrics are eager to remind, and remind. It seems to me that the danger is not in stripping away more and more layers of sound or artifice until one is left there, bare, or just barely there. That’s playing it safe. And the xx playing it safe should only warrant passive, muted acclaim in keeping with the band’s trajectory, rather than the enthusiastic reception of the first, practically perfect album. So listen, I guess, but only if you want, if you think it won’t hurt you to do so.

Heteropoesis LP

1. Heteropoesis I
a. And So Ad Infinitum (00:00-02:01)
b. The Open (02:01-04:57)
c. Immunization (04:57-08:04)
d. The Void (8:04-16:23)

2. Heteropoesis II
a. The Museum (00:00-02:04)
b. Nausea (02:04-07:30)
c. Transposition (07:30-14:29)
d. Heterogeneity (14:29-16:16)

Harrison King: montage, electric guitar, malfunctioning tape unit, various sound objects
Carl Manchester: voice (1a)
The Void: voice (1d)
Unknown: voice (2a-b)

Track 1d recorded February and May/June 2012
Track 2c recorded May/June 2012
Tracks 1a/b/c recorded July 2012
Tracks 2a/b/d recorded July/August 2012
Edited September 2012

Face

hair hair hair

hair forehead hair

ear eye N eye ear

ose

mouth

A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 4)

To this effect, Hamid Dabashi has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema, examining both its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to earlier media, including forms of illustrated public storytelling, court paintings, and, especially, Persian miniatures, the illustrations that accompanied the classics of Persian prose and poetry.

Dabashi is not the only critic to note the connection to Persian miniatures, so allow me, if you will, to dwell for a moment on this mode in Persian painting. Typically, each miniature functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose, which may be incorporated into the miniature or set en face), the context (the position of this image as one in a series of images), and the reader’s interpretation of the relationships among the various figures and the landscape in which the painting is set. In an essay on the relation between Iranian cinema and Persian miniatures, Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan goes so far as to argue that Persian miniatures “foreground deconstruction and multiple narration…hidden meanings, symbolic iconography, and intertextuality are mediating mechanisms by which the private and public spheres are regulated” (113). In addition to the function of regulation, I would argue that there tends to be a sense in which what is public and what is private are relativized.

Here is a painting of a palace scene that dates to the mid-sixteenth century where we can see this relativization of boundary and private and public space.

Note the collusion of watchers and watched in this detail on the right, a visual unit in which we can see examples of three common types of animate figural representations in Persian miniatures. First, the principal actor, the focal point of a given scene, whom we can identify as the royal figure in the center; second, the attendant, whose function is to highlight the principal actor while also enabling, in some way, his or her action, whom we can identify as the man serving him on the lower right; and finally, passive observers, who typically have no influence on the action per say but serve to guide the eyes of the painting’s external observer—you, us—whom we can identify with the three women placed above them.

This visual unit is doubled here, above and to the right.

Finally, here are two enlargements of the very top and bottom of the painting that illustrate the use of horizontals to create narrative space in a way that seems to endow the painting with a sense of temporality.

Note the way, in the upper detail, that the palace walls almost seem to dissolve into the nature scene painted just beyond them. The formal constraint of flattening and abstraction that we witness in this painting serves to deconstruct the binary between inside and outside, between public and private—here, we have insides that are outside, outsides that are inside, outsides that are outside of outside, and insides that are inside the inside. (Or something like that.)

This relativization of public/private, which I think is inherent in any articulation that links a visual image to a textual image, is crucial for A Separation, so much of which takes place in a lacuna between the public and private spheres—a gap which I think is opened up particularly in the juridical context, in which both public and private incidents and relationships come under review and where the politicization of bare life leads to the experience of utter vulnerability before the production of legal authority. In the juridical setting, economic and social inequality especially serves to destabilize this binary and introduces the effects of power into both the public and private spheres. Thus, the question of class is integral to understanding the film, as is the question of gender and society; remember that this film was made under very strict rules governing the filmic representation of gender and sexuality, and think about what this film tells us about gender relations, especially across socio-economic divisions. In our film, I also want you to pay special attention to the use of space in constructing the narrative and characters, and think about what actions happen only in public, what details are revealed only in private. Furthermore, consider both juridical and religious enunciations—there are several examples of both throughout the film—and how people represent themselves in religious and legal contexts. Finally, think about how the technology of cinema can serve not only, as in the case of the beloved miniatures, to relativize but also to revitalize the boundaries between public and private. To this effect, I want us to have the opportunity to reflect on the enigmatic ending of this film, and think about what sort of experience this caesura leaves us with: the film seems to reach a hollowed-out experience of subjectivity that, I think, has implications for the notion of privacy in a biopolitical world; the film seems to me to reach an ethical suspension of judgment before the confluence of religion and law, and, indeed, before language.

References

Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. London: Verso, 2001.

Mir-Ehsan, Mir-Ahmad-e. “Dark Light.” In Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker, 105-114. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 3)

The Image

Iranian films have clearly enjoyed a fair amount of critical success in the West; yet when one reads Western film critics on Iranian cinema, it is difficult to discern why—there are too many contradictions, disagreements, and confusions brought on by inconsistent and flawed critical approaches. For this reason, I want to spend the second part of this presentation focusing on developing a working theoretical framework that will, I hope, serve us well when we watch the film. First of all, I would argue that there are, for all intents and purposes, two dominant critical approaches to Iranian cinema, which we can call, provisionally, the colonialist and the revisionist approaches. The colonialist approach to Iranian cinema uses a paternal hermeneutics of Western cinematic and cultural influence. While this approach does emphasize the specificity of cinema as a technological medium, it overestimates the impact of Western cinema on the contemporary vocabulary of Iranian filmmakers and, more to the point, projects onto Iranian cinema an oedipal neurosis rooted in the critics’ own sublimated triangulation of affection, dominance, and the anxiety over being perceived as other as a working paradigm for cultural exchange. The revisionist approach to Iranian cinema, on the other hand, is properly dialectical. This approach maintains some of the paternalistic overtones of the colonialist approach but simultaneously stresses the need to examine the political, social, and artistic history of Iran. Revisionist critics emphasize both the indigenous traditions which form the cultural milieu and the specificity of the cinematic medium as a machine that restates and restructures social concerns through a globalized technology.

The dialectical approach is obviously a much more mature and workable theoretical edifice, yet, even if its insights can be salvaged, it is, I think, insufficiently critical of its own terms. The dialectic that it positions as central and essential to understanding Iranian cinema is, in fact, merely the shadow of a much larger dialectic that has formed the paradigm for the entire Western scholarly apparatus when it comes to theorizing non-Western cultures—the dialectic of “tradition” and “modernity.” Though it is not fashionable anymore, and rightly so, to think of European culture or, we might say, even more perilously, “the evolution of European civilization,” as normative, the so-called “multiple modernities” thesis tends to re-inscribe this normativity in the newfound multiplicity of subjects. The thesis uses precisely this dialectic when it seeks to illuminate the way “modernization” as an historical process is, in some way, negotiated by “tradition.” There are several reasons to be dissatisfied with this dialectic of modernity and tradition. The concepts of “modernity” as a social condition or “modernization” as an historical process only make sense if we accept European history and the case of what we might refer to more vaguely as “European civilization” as in some way normative (rather than as a set of contingent economic, social, discursive, and technological processes that collaborated to condition the “modern European subject” as a unique historical actor). Similarly, the concept of “tradition” only makes sense if we take the concept of “modernity” as normative—for, as Hamid Dabashi notes, tradition is manufactured by modernity—perhaps I might be tempted to say, more cynically (and scatologically, I apologize), that tradition is a concept that is “excreted” by modernity.

To reframe this entire question of Iranian cinema—and that is how, honestly, I feel Iranian cinema must be left, as an open question—let us leave behind the dreadful clamor of “modernity” and “tradition” and instead investigate the vestige of another epistemological category, one that will undoubtedly better serve us in this context: the image. When discussing “the image,” even in the context of cinema, it is necessary to disabuse oneself of the notion that “images” are solely a visual mode of representation. Jacques Rancière, for example, emphasizes in his book Le destin des images that too often “the image” is associated only with visual media—this being especially the case in melancholic postmodernist discourse and its investigation of how “the isolated individual and the atomized crowd” become subject to manipulation by spectacular images of capital. But if we might start with a more practical, reductive, and optimistic definition of “image”—and of course practical, reductive, and optimistic definitions typically evade the postmodernist framework—let us say instead that to make an image is to form a concept of something (either an object or a subject) by representing it. We will speak of “the image,” then, as an artifact, the “thing,” so to speak, that is left behind after the act of representation. The first images were not “graven” but pertained, rather, to socio-cultural conventions, or conventional ways of representing an object or subject through language as well as through sculpture, painting, architecture, music, and so on; and later, of course, through photography and cinema.

In other words, a clear delineation between the various historical forms of the linguistic image and the visual image is unnecessary in this context. This goes some way toward explaining the insistence of many film scholars and Iranian filmmakers that the aesthetics of Iranian cinema begins not with visual representation but rather with the mystical imagery and evocative musicality of classical Persian poetry. In fact, it has become something of a scholastic cliché to say that Persian art and culture are primarily aural in nature and expression, and that visual media are consequently devalued in Persian culture. But, as we shall see, things are a bit more complicated than that formulation suggests, for Persia has a rich visual culture as well, one that, in various historical moments, has been intertwined with literary culture by way of various articulations and has been utilized to create works that traverse medial boundaries and produce images simultaneously based in word and picture. Therefore, Iranian cinema is not merely the product of (or response to) globalization and cultural imperialism, but it is a form of art that has gone through a process of re-conceptualization and re-contextualization by artists operating in dynamic cultural environments that are not reducible to a dialectic between modernity and tradition. Indeed, the filmic image calls into question the distinction between modernity and tradition and disrupts any theory of their interplay, leaving, instead, a discursive space in which the technology of cinema, just as any technology before it, organizes and reorganizes social concerns and aesthetic habits.

A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 2)

Khomeini’s tacit approval of cinema as an instrument for conducting religious and ethical discourse also allowed for the reestablishment of the film industry following a quiet period, now with an entirely new (and constantly shifting) set of censorship guidelines and the oversight of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The scholar Goli M. Rezai-Rashti wrote, "On the one hand regulations introduced by the government restricted foreign films (especially Hollywood movies) in an effort to purify the public space, inadvertently strengthening indigenous filmmaking; an increasing number of feature films were produced in Iran…On the other hand, the state placed different forms of restriction and political/cultural censorship on those involved in filmmaking" (191).

In other words, it is difficult to summarize the paradoxical position of today’s Iranian filmmaker. On the one hand, he or she is encouraged to point out incidences of institutionalized inequality, to criticize social injustice, to force the audience to identify with the subjectivity of the underprivileged and the oppressed; yet, at the same time, there are muddied boundaries that must not be crossed, lest the filmmaker commit (real or imagined) sedition against the state or religious authority. Censorship has become paroxysmal in the new regime of the “democratically elected” Mahmood Ahmadinejad, which has further restricted the ability of filmmakers to criticize the government or stray from a normative moral framework (often corresponding, unsurprisingly enough, with political authority). Several filmmakers have been imprisoned, while others have been banned from making films or saddled with other exorbitant penalties for expressing some imagined attack on Ahmadinejad’s regime.

It is in this difficult context, however, that thousands of filmmakers are trained every year and over 100 films are officially financed. The critical appraisal and international reception of Iranian cinema has grown as well; by the end of the 1980s, Iranian cinema became a fixture at international film festivals and art houses around the world, winning several prestigious awards and critical acclaim, followed by the top awards of Europe’s three most important film festivals in the 90s and 2000s: the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry;

the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival for Jafar Panahi’s The Circle;

and, most recently, the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.

References

Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. “Transcending the Limitations: Women and the Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16.2 (2007): 191-206.