Koyaanisqatsi

So I discovered that the entire groundbreaking, timeless, brilliant film is free on youtube.

Instructions for those who have not seen Koyaanisqatsi:

1. Stop what you are doing immediately.

2. Turn volume up high.

3. Watch Koyaanisqatsi.

4. Bask in silent astonishment.

5. Thank me.

Honestly, this is one of those life-changing works of art which you will simply and honestly never forget.  I fondly recall my first viewing, laying prone in front of a laptop in a cabin on a mountain at night and feeling my astonishment overtaking all physical sensation.  This truly begs for the big screen, or at least a reasonably large one, with a reasonable sound system accompanying the visuals.  Yet its artistry thrives in any time, place, or size.  Which is exactly why I am sharing the profound discovery that it is free to anyone willing to pay only time and curiosity.  Hell, if you have firefox with adblock plus, you won’t even see the ads (and honestly, get it – I couldn’t imagine this seamless dream interrupted by commercials) and the only thing you’re missing is the absolute clarity of the original high fidelity print.  You’ll undoubtedly recognize certain elements within this time travelling all-encompassing slice of Life Itself, both stylistically and culturally.  From the frenzied time-lapse shots of nature and city life contrasting with assembly lines and traffic patterns to the impossibly slow motion glimpses of astonishment and banality, the style and content of this film has influenced more than a generation of visual art and storytelling.

The best part is that I haven’t even gotten to the music; the reason this stands 30 years on as the timeless accomplishment it is:  Philip Glass‘ score is the 10 ton monolith blocking out the sun, the elephant in the room, the absolute gravitational pull of this work.  If you are at all familiar with 20th century minimalism via Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich, Terry Riley or their contemporaries, or especially Glass’ emotive, often romantic take on the sound, you are likely already familiar with some or all of these sounds; if not you are in for a warm embrace of what will likely become a hermetic world you’ll find easily inhabited and unequivocally addicting.  Call it lazy, but having the film here and ready to watch makes me reluctant to begin ascribing descriptors to the music.  It must be experienced to be grasped.  The marriage of sound and picture is essential for direct, uninhibited understanding, for knowing the intrinsic appeal of minimalism itself, for laying bare the nature of conceptual ourboros, the cyclical existence we’re evolved to respond to.  This score is meant to evoke the cosmic design of life itself from violent beginning to violent end and all of the impossibly close and personal yet gigantic moments in between.

Note: Do not listen before viewing.  Although entirely gorgeous, worthy, and entrancing on its own…  divorced from the imagery at birth, Glass’ score will never reach the same affection and thus should be saved for after-film experience.

James Blake

My first album of 2011.  So infectious, I’m giddy with the prospect of holding its vinyl in my hands on release day – still a month off.  James Blake set the blog frontier ablaze last year with two progressive leaps beyond the dubstep fray – the CMYK and Klavierwork EPs – but never gripped my attention, making my ears perk up, my spine tingle, quite like this.  This self titled debut is easily this year’s (first) benchmark.

 

Holy hot shit.

Sorry.  I just had to get that out.

This is a crystalline monstrosity, a tsunami flash frozen in place, looming overhead like a malignant glacier as we zoom in ever closer.  To listen is to move across its surface, close enough to observe the essence of each facet like a diamond under microscope.  Stripping his ‘post-dubstep’ production to its core and reflecting and amplifying each empty space against its sonic counterpart, the elemental touch only serves to enhance his latest evolution of vocal manipulation.

Leaving behind the extracted shards and melodic strings of vocal samples of prior releases, Blake’s voice runs the center of every track in a hall-of-mirrors chase with its own distorted reflection.  Alternately disintegrating and exploding, submissive and dominating, his new showcase instrument even rises above digital manipulation entirely in rare moments of acoustic grace.  On my first listen, this was akin to the moment your plane breaks through cloud cover, uncorking the brightness of the blazing sun on a rainy day.  The final track in particular reaches an ascetic ideal, almost wholly a capella in execution.  This isn’t what normally sates a beat-fiend looking for the newest fix, but it’s an exquisite rush all the same.

Speaking of a rush:  second track The Wilhelm Scream is probably the key to my instant affection for this album.  Opening with a plaintive synth line and echoed-at-God-level darkly winsome vocals, the song gradually fills in like final details on a vast canvas, a blueprint in miniature of Blake’s signature austerity.  From an embryo of muted drum stabs and compressed guitar lines, Blake inflates a billowing dirigible, ascending past the atmosphere at its peak before swinging low with his most resonant phrase:  I’m falling, falling, falling.. This shredded my perception of the artist and sent me hurtling towards the explosion that is Never Learnt To Share.  When it hits for the first time, you’ll know what I mean.

If I had to place this album in a given context it would look like this:  The detail oriented tactile feel of Mount Kimbie‘s exquisite production, taken to the spare extreme of The xx‘s striking debut last year.  Multiplied by 50 on each side.  Each click and hum, synth flutter, bass surge, and twisted vocal hook is used as if it were the last Blake would ever grasp.  The soaring gospel towers this man constructs with so few pieces will take your breath away, and keep it.  Nothing has sounded this meticulously airtight in a long while, and for good reason.  It takes a  rarefied amount of control to keep the plates spinning this way, and James Blake stands coolly alone for now.

Watch this and stay on the lookout by February 7th.

Best of the Rest of 2010

My Best of 2010 was basically an attempt to carve my musical experience of the past year down to its most essential, most ingrained elements.  An attempt to sum up the music I feel had the largest impact on my listening, on my life.

I left out a lot of great albums.  Thankfully, they were drawn from a text file kept on my desktop throughout the year, chronicling each album I decide, at a given moment, is awesome.  Yes, it’s that simple.  As time passes I remove the fleeting infatuations, anything not holding up.  So I’m left with a solid list I can refer to in search of everything I really, truly enjoyed this year.  This is it, in order I heard them.

• Bullion – Say Goodbye To What EP

• Four Tet – There Is Love In You

• Arrington De Dionyso – Malaikat Dan Singa

• Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Kollaps Tradixionales

• Autechre – Oversteps

• Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

• Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh

• Ikonika – Contact Want Love Have

• Take – Only Mountain

• LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening

• Boris – Heavy Rock Hits Vol. 3
  

• Connect_icut – Fourier’s Algorithm

• Janelle Monae – The ArchAndroid

• Rollo – 3

• Yellow Swans – Going Places

• Sightings – City of Straw

• Guido – Anidea

• Lorn – Nothing Else

• Teebs & Jackhigh – Tropics EP

• Infinite Body – Carve Out The Face Of My God

• The-Dream – Love King
  

• The Sight Below – It All Falls Apart

• Deepchord Presents Echospace – Liumin

• TOKiMONSTA – Midnight Menu

• Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal 7″

• Scuba – Triangulation

• Sepalcure – Love Pressure EP

• Imbogodom – The Metallic Year

• Singing Statues – Outtakes EP

• Flying Lotus – Patter + Grid World EP

• Seefeel – Faults EP

• Mark McGuire – Living With Yourself

• Efdemin – Chicago

• T++ – Wireless

• Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner

• Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

• Balam Acab – See Birds EP

• Gonjasufi – The Caliph’s Tea Party

• VHS Head – Trademark Ribbons of Gold

• Marcus Fjellström – Schattenspieler

• Zach Hill – Face Tat

• Games – That We Can Play

• Zs – New Slaves

• Fenn O’Berg – In Stereo

• Richard Skelton – Landings

• James Blake – Klavierwerke EP
  

• Fursaxa – Mycorrhizae Realm

• Dimlite – My Human Wears Acedia Shreds EP

• Kurt Weisman – Orange

• Clubroot – II MMX
  

So there it is.  Something to remember is that any one of these albums may end up defining the year as much as the ‘true’ list – and that something I haven’t even heard yet may best them all.  It’s happened before.  This is why Optimistic Underground will soon post its first Music From Before 2010 But Discovered This Year list.  This will cover the much wider range of music I was into this year, since there is already much more music out there than is being released at any given time.

[This post is subject to change.  Like I'll probably add one or two more by January.]

Oneohtrix Point Never – Scenes With Curved Objects

Scenes With Curved Objects has become (possibly) my 2nd favorite release by Oneohtrix Point Never.

Well, this brief cassette release is at least tied with the two LPs preceeding the possibly-album-of-the-year Returnal.  Yes, like those psychotropic soundscapes, it is indescribably gorgeous.  Pulsing with an alien life unique in Oneohtrix Point Never‘s oeuvre, these two live-sourced tracks foreshadow the drifting-cloud majesty of Returnal while rumbling with the some of the most concrete rhythms he (Daniel Lopatin) has yet recorded.

It begins with what sound like marimbas via a familiar-enough repeated melody, simply growing in intensity – never changing – throughout the 9 minutes of Melancholy Descriptions of Simple 3D Environments.  The draw here is how Lopatin slowly cocoons this spine, draping layer upon layer of undulating synth washes, echoed laser effects, and eventually the swelling heart of warming drone takes everything right off the ground.  Side B opens with what can only be described as The Caretaker (aka Leyland Kirby) riffing on something more triumphant than haunting:  a hollowed out and dispatched-from-the-past orchestral section valiantly tries to break through the corrosion.  Then we abruptly cut to a short murky collage which feels like bumping through a science lab in the dark before drifting directly into the triumphant heart of this piece: The Trouble With Being Born.  An oscillating fuge of an (uncharacteristically) optimistic dystopian anthem, this largest cut of the side’s 9 minutes feels like the true contemplative center of the release, a space where all conscious thought lifts up and outward.  In other words, it’s 5 minutes that will totally “expand your mind,” man.  Then a proverbial sudden-record-scratch moment happens and we cut to an Ariel Pink damaged-AM-pop sound refracted in the same manner as the previous collage, fading toward silence.

It’s quite a ride.  Short but intense.  Listen.

Tracklisting:

A Melancholy Descriptions of Simple 3D Environments

B Adagio In G Minor Screw/Piano Craft Guild Edit/The Trouble With Being Born/Let It Go

[get the mp3 edition at boomkat or try and pick up the tape via discogs..but good luck with a fair price.]

[see also on Optimistic Underground: Antony and Fennesz on Returnal 7″ and Oneohtrix Point Never and Days of Thunder]

Brock Van Wey – White Clouds Drift On And On

Brock Van Wey took a headfirst leap off the end point of dub techno last year into the oceanic swells of ambient bliss on this first album under his given name.  Instead of crashing into the waves and sinking, the man usually known as Bvdub simply took flight and never looked down.  This is White Clouds Drift On And On.

Let’s start at the cover art; talk about evocative.  That image, combined with the none-too-subtle title, sufficiently hints at the feelings unleashed by this album.  Opening with a melodic beckon skyward, White Clouds eases the passage from the paces of reality into pure atmospheric headspace with it’s most concrete segment.  Once at cruising altitude, that cover art truly delivers on its promise.  Piano, synths, guitars and the hiss of soft spoken digital percussion are treated with gauzy abandon.  Everything expands in all directions at once, infiltrating and taking over all sense of place and time.  Vocals flit in and out of the mix and are seemingly heard before they appear, yet register only once they’ve gone.  More than a quarter of an hour can slip away in the blink of an eye, with only the fleeting silence between tracks reminding of the outside world.

Each of the six excursions come on like a nagging thought, stealing focus away from whatever is at hand.  Novel elements build upon the notion, expanding to fill the entire consciousness.  The immediate surroundings completely dissolve and an internal journey has begun.  Only the end of this album can now serve as the hand on my shoulder to shake me to attention.  You know how this ends, like a transportive dream after waking.  Something profound was felt, but the details are lost.  Thankfully this transcendent experience is a tangible thing, available for replay as soon as the listener is ready.

Covering a strange land where the nations of Basic Channel and Quantec overlap with Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley, Van Wey departs heavily – but not unexpectedly – from his solidly minimal, dub techno background.  Instead of moving laterally, he’s simply found a higher ground, and that deep foundation remains.  Thus, fans of anything from Fennesz and Tim Hecker,  Stars of the Lid and Windy & Carl, to Gas, Loscil, and Deepchord Presents Echospace, to  The Caretaker, William Basinski, Black to Comm [see my take on Alphabet 1968] or even my recent favorites Oneohtrix Point Never [see my love here], need to pay special attention here.  I wouldn’t go on a name-checking spree if it weren’t necessary, so here’s the deal:  This album accentuates all that I love about these profoundly varying artists and their sounds, yet never succumbs to their respective gravities.  It weaves between, above and below, insular in its movemnt and pulsing with a life all its own.  I like the notion that when a dream is over, a whole world ends.  That’s how this album feels, every time.  I mean that in the best way possible.

One of the most unique aspects of this release is the presence of a second disc featuring a full album deconstruction by producer Intrusion (dub techno wizard  Stephen Hitchell), mirroring the dream like a bent parallel universe.  Keeping true to the ethos and atmosphere, the percussive dub feel is heightened to an almost head-nodding level while the billowing atmosphere is drenched in cavernous echo.  Built on a descending order of the original six songs, this set brings us full circle by the end.  It is truly a reflection, a perfect accomplice, urging the body to follow the mind.

Despite having since moved back to making records under his former moniker, his music shows no signs of reversing course.  Bvdub‘s new album The Art Of Dying Alone, out on perfectly complimentary label Glacial Movements, is the obvious next step beyond White Clouds.  In other words, keep up with the man.  He’s conjuring something special.

[unfortunately out of stock at most vendors, forced exposure and soundfix seem able and willing to spread the love.  buy this if you can.  by all means.]

Skyramps – Days of Thunder

Skyramps is the combined efforts of Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never – loved here recently) and Mark McGuire (Emeralds), spinning electric gold through a tight 33 minute set.  If you’re picturing the homespun sci-fi synthesizer burblings of the former soaking in the ethereal guitar ambience of the latter project, you’re on the right path.  This is basically mana from heaven for those of us who happen to be fans of both.

When I heard about this release, I practically shat myself.  2009 saw the rise of a more user-friendly, nearly pop natured breed of drone music the likes of which had never yet crossed radars.  Drone for the masses?  Not quite.  But this is, for instance, far more palatable to your radio listener friends than a Final or Scorn, or even latter day Seefeel album.  There’s more dynamic movement than the Gas discography and an airy, inviting tone accompanying the head-nodding foundation.  Intertwining lush guitar melodies with Lopatin’s signature synth histrionics, the album soars and soothes in all the right places.  The first two tracks feel almost like personal intros for the artists, opening with the prominent sounds of one and slowly adding a dose or two of the other until a fine balance arrives at the end.  The second half of the album is where the alchemy truly shines with a blend unique to this recording, and is the gut-level satiating reward for those venturing into this eerie place.

The two obviously know their audience and the images these sounds tend to conjure:  warm memories of genre films on tattered VHS (or better- Betamax!) tapes, doodling pictures of Spinners and Darkness, and the unshakable knowledge that anything electronic and/or spacey was the definitive way of the future.  These four tracks evoke the optimistic pulse of accelerating full-bore into a strange land of colored light and skyscraping wonder.  Maybe it’s not utopia but it’s different than here.  More interesting.  Lopatin and McGuire also seem to be acutely aware of how this earnestly nostalgic sensibility lends itself to parody and have pre-empted the inevitable jokes with a wonderfully tongue in cheek title:  Days of Thunder.  There aren’t many more emphatically day-glo versions of 1980s Western hubris than the eponymous Nascar thriller and another certain flick by director Tony Scott.  Thankfully the album’s palette hews closer to brother Ridley‘s then-unparalleled visions of alternate realities.

Folks of a certain age, eat this up.  You’ll be digging through dusty childhood crates and pre-ordering tickets for that new Tron movie in no time.

[although printed in a limited run of 75 cdr copies, there are a couple available via discogs for reasonable price, and of course, *elsewhere* in digital form]

*And seriously, watch that Tron trailer.  It looks quite a bit more than alright!

Oneohtrix Point Never

‘It will astound you.’

The Korgis may not have been prophesizing the likes of Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, but that doesn’t stop me from employing the lyric in prelude to this fantastic adventure.  So come on.  Open up.  Change your heart.

When a tonic this refreshing comes along under strange and rare circumstances, the first impulse is to bottle it up and zealously guard what we can, keeping the secret inside – lest the surprise and wonder be spoiled once the wider world is clued in.  The exuberant thrill of something so foreign and new, mainlining into that place where awestruck dreams and hazy childhood memories  intersect, is a thing to behold.  After burrowing deep into the material and subsisting on the sound alone, though, we emerge with the burning desire to shout about this revelation from the nearest hill top.  We want to place it in the hands of our friends and loved ones, imploring them to give it a try.  We get on the internet and write a blog post about it.

But first, we live in the belly of this beast for a while.  The world inside is warm, coated in a futuristic glaze and resting on a plate of brittle nostalgia.  The illusion of inhabiting my greatest preadolescent sci-fi fantasies threatens to crack at any moment, but the dream sustains over any running time.  The most inviting synthesizer tones on the planet mix with an untethered, noisy veneer to coat the entire sonic range from genteel new age to corrosive heavy drone, spiked with the best and brightest futuristic love letters the past has had to offer.  From Vangelis‘ darkly soaring Blade Runner score to the paranoid stabs of The Terminator, Terry Riley‘s groundbreaking dreamscape A Rainbow In Curved Air to the stark electronic shores of Manuel Göttsching (Ash Ra Tempel), this territory is clearly the province of an indelibly spacey imagination.

Zones Without People, my personal introduction to the artist, is the most obvious place to look now.  In a league populated by a select few contemporary dreamers and astral drifters like Emeralds and White Rainbow (see New Clouds and Best of 2009), Lopatin grasps the sonic galaxy whole cloth and spirits it away to his lab where every star, planet, and asteroid belt is shot through and wrung out with the latest in mind-bending laser technology.  Like the lush oxygen garden aboard the Icarus on its journey to reignite the sun, the entire work is suffused with the gritty footprint of organic life – bird calls, frogs, bubbling rivers, wind and all manner of insects echo from the depths – and organized into a most efficient delivery system for aural dopamine.  Channeling the aforementioned musical gods and hinting at further realms yet unexplored, the half hour recording transcends and transports far beyond its modest borders.  This is a monumental trip, in every sense of the word.

Next we have A Pact Between Strangers, a beguiling triptych of the most effervescent, liquid shapes Lopatin has worked with.  Sandwiched between two 12 minute throbbing drone epics, the title track strikes a soft nerve between the yawning pulse of Gas, the hard lines of straight Detroit techno, and the subtly sampledelic nature of Zones Without People‘s most tactile passages.  Beginning as a relaxed sequel to the opener, When I Get Back From New York floats from the most gently narcotic river bed upwards to find a maelstrom on the surface, a dervish of synth rapids and hissing meteor showers.  As the piece winds to a close and the solar winds exhale, total surrender has been achieved.  This is music to offer oneself up to completely.  Embrace it, climb inside.  Once acclimated, the journey outward is harsh.  The dials here are always pegged at elation, so it’s best not to make a move in that direction.

[with the originals impossibly hard to come by on their limited vinyl and CD-R releases, the majority of OPN's output has been remastered and packaged into the 2cd Rifts compilation, available at boomkat, amazon, or directly through the man himself at pointnever.com]

Music For Our Future

So apparently to help promote the prequel series to Battlestar Galactica, Syfy channel has worked with Pitchfork and XLR8R to curate a far-better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be compilation “inspired” by the new show, Caprica.  Rather than toss together a random selection of indie pop hits aimed at moving units, those responsible have created an ostensibly futuristic sounding mixture of left-field beat excursions, austere psychedelia, and blissed out ambience – and released Music For Our Future completely FREE of charge.

That’s right, this sublime collection is just a click away.  The best part is that the selection is of such uniformly high quality, containing several tracks unavailable elsewhere, that it would easily warrant a purchase price if they so chose.  Thankfully, their commercial impetus for appearing generous is a freewheeling invitation for those of us more into music than television to indulge in something we don’t get every day: an official mixtape that’s not only surprisingly eclectic and deep, but coherent and fluid unlike all but the best of film soundtracks.

Basically comprised of several key satellites orbiting the modern avant electronic landscape with a foot or two firmly in more well known indie territory, this playlist promises to release listeners from the shackles of gravity and set them adrift somewhere outside the oort cloud without a tether in sight.  Sliding through warm drones, cold glitch, crushing dub, rapid space grooves and minimal-everything, we’re right on the cusp of anything conceivably fitting for this particular title.

The tracklisting:

1. Lusine – Gravity

2. Atlas Sound – Walkabout

3. Hudson Mohawke – FUSE

4. White Rainbow – Raw Shanks a Million

5. King Midas Sound – Outta Space (Slow Version)

6. Low Limit – Turf Day

7. Willits and Sakamoto – Toward Water

8. The Field – I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet (Gold Panda Remix)

9. Tyondai Braxton – Uffe’s Woodshop

10. Untold – Luna

11. Nice Nice – See Waves

12. Richard Devine – Matvec Interior (feat. Otto Von Schirach)

13. Peter Kirn – Anaxagoras

[once again, this is completely FREE.  so grab it and enjoy]

White Rainbow – New Clouds

White Rainbow (née Adam Forkner) recently tore through the autumn skies to drop this bomb, blowing away expectations, surpassing anything I could have anticipated after the already-excellent 2007 LP Prism of Eternal Now.  Expanding on the warm, nebulous nature of his live jam constructions, New Clouds is an impossibly appropriate title for one of this year’s best records.

Transcendent, overwhelming, hypnotic bliss.  Building layer upon layer of drones, stretched and echoed vocals, muted tribal percussion, and gorgeous synth swells, each track is a towering confection allowed room to naturally develop and breathe.  The four tracks comprise an hourlong running time, every moment feeling palpably open and inviting.  This album inspires and propels further listening, rather than demanding it.  Songs begin focused on a singular element, be it delayed acoustic guitar strums or rubbery hand drumming, and evolve with such grace and intuitive logic that final assembly is nearly imperceptible.  This music simply happens, while the conscious mind is busy absorbing the amorphous beauty like a pillow swallowing a blissful dreamer.  Informed by a wide range of greats, from Terry Riley to Can at their most euphoric, Forkner has finally broken through to a plane where his art exists on its own terms, immaterial of time or place.  This album raises hypnagogic exploration to new heights.

[pick this brand new album up at boomkat or amazon, or directly from kranky, a label fully deserving of your support]