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.
