As I wrote in my previous post covering 2008’s releases, music increasingly has to strive – heroically or otherwise – against its own past to be heard. In light of this and my ramblings down music’s assorted thoroughfares and byways, the following is a list of the music that’s meant most to me in 2008. For quite a bit of the time it’s, perhaps inevitably, been of greater significance than the current year’s crop.

The Drift by Scott Walker was my soundtrack to 2008. It finally made sense to me after 20 or so partial listenings in 2007. In all seriousness I now view it as the greatest work of the new millenium, riven as it is with the personal and political. Tilt, Climate of Hunter, the Pola X soundtrack and the rare Scott rarities (the Nite Flights quartet, the Ute Lemper songs and Darkness) kept it frequent company.

Charley Patton’s delta blues haunted me, initially in the budget set then with renewed strength when I caved in and paid the bargain price of £40 for the unutterably great Revenant box, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ The Blues, soon to be featured on Hard Format.

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was an autumnal favourite, its sense of voices heard through time, their wealth of testimonial resonance a source of wonder to me. I’m saving up the pennies for Victrola Favourites and Goodbye Babylon too…

2008 was the year that I finally began to listen to Miles Davis again after a hiatus of something like four or five years. Before that I’d listened mostly to his ’70s recordings (bootlegs and official releases) intensively to the point of exhaustion. Now I find myself listening mainly to the best bits of the Jack Johnson and On The Corner Complete Sessions, i.e. the first three CDs of each. Also, the ’60s Second Great Quintet, the studio recordings and the Live At The Plugged Nickel and the Miles and Gil Evans Complete Columbia Studio Recordings.

I rediscovered snd to my great pleasure. I’d bought makesnd cassette on its release, but not followed its successors, Stdio, the brilliantly entitled Tender Love and this year’s vinyl only 4, 5, 6.

I finally got round to listening to Disco Inferno whose Lost In Fog I’d meant to follow up on for years. I’m glad I did, their blizzard/chaos/melody/(un)familiar approach is strikingly resonant.

Mark Hollis‘ one and only solo album I’d heard occasionally before, but this year it struck an almost silent, but deeply felt chord.

I stopped listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark/OMD at Architecture and Morality. This year I discovered Dazzle Ships. Precursor to so much, including Dubstep’s hidden echoes, it’s a hugely ambitious and sadly overlooked work.

Other discoveries this year: Schubert’s Winterreise, .O.Rang, The Conet Project, Sly and Robbie’s Stripped to the Bone, Morton Feldman, Terje Isungset’s ice music, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Morgan Packard.

Perennials: Kraftwerk of course, Rhythm & Sound, múm, King Tubby, Jon Hassell

Musically 2008 didn’t feel like one of the best. With so much amazing music from the past to compete with, the present has a lot to do just to keep up.

End of year perspectives seem to popping out of the woodwork, who am I to blow against the wind? Few of them, however, share much in common with my own preferences. Almost no-one seems to have valued Carl Craig and Moritz Von Oswald’s Recomposed which is strikingly ambitious in scope and impressively realised. Von Oswald’s involvement in Francesco Tristano’s Auricle / Bio /On and his live trio seem to point to fascinating new paths ahead for him (and us). Let’s hope he makes a full recovery from the stroke he suffered a couple of months ago. Likewise, I’ve seen little mention of Arve Henriksen’s Cartography, perhaps because it was released so recently – shame his move to ECM hasn’t resulted in much sign of improved promotion. Portishead’s been written about enough elsewhere.

I’ve departed from the format of the past couple of years by breaking releases up into albums I believe are in some way significant and that I’ll still value in years to come and records I’ve listened to a lot, but either aren’t groundbreaking or that aren’t entirely my taste (valuable). The other categories are surely self-explanatory…

If I’ve missed anything, let me know!

Enduring

• Arve Henriksen – Cartography
• Carl Craig and Moritz Von Oswald – Recomposed
• Portishead – Third

Well worth hearing

• Alva Noto – Unitxt {techno electronica with attitude, clear linkage to Kraftwerk pleasurably discernible)
• Autechre – Quaristice {less an advance than a fictional retrospective, but enjoyable nonetheless}
• Benge – 20 Systems {soundtracking machines approaches the sublime}
• Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago {lots of coverage for this one elsewhere}
• Box – Studio 1 {Bjorkenheim and co thrash, crash and pulverise}
• Bruno Pronsato – Why Can’t We Be Like Us {sensuous minimalism awash with sighs and honed beats)
• Byetone – Death of a Typographer {superior electronica}
• Fennesz – Black Sea {stormy, beautiful pulchritude}
• Gas – Nah und Fern {feeling the edges of it, I’m yet to inhabit its centre, joke is of course there isn’t one}
• Headhunter – Nomad {excellent dubstep/Berlin techno hybrid}
• Johann Johannsonn – Fordlandia {Icelandic string-drenched loveliness}
• Morgan Geist – Double Night Time {delightful disco pop}
• Murcof – The Versailles Sessions {Murcof turns to Last Year In Marienbad}
• Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Raising Sand {gorgeous Lanois-esque roots dream bought for Is and enjoyed by me a lot}
• Scorch Trio – Brolt {scorched earth}
• Shed – Shedding The Past {brilliant minimal with more than a nod to Chain Reaction heritage}
• Skyphone – Avellanada {welcome second episode of Danish loveliness, I suspect overlooked by too many people}
• snd – 4, 5, 6 {snd jettison ukg, retain basslessness}
• Steinski – What Does It All Mean?
• Terje Isungset – Ice Concerts {sublime warmth from ice}
• Thomas Brinkmann – When Horses Die… {fascinating vocal electronica project}

Fun

• Beck – Modern Guilt
• Flight of the Conchords
• Jazzanova – Of All The Things
• LindstrØm – Where You Go I Go Too

Disappointing

• 2562 – Aerial
• Dusk + Blackdown – Margins Music
• The Bug – London Zoo
• Ø – Oleva
• Ryoji Ikeda – Test Pattern

Nothing new

• Kraftwerk, David Sylvian, Jon Hassell, not enough from T++ (where’s the Chain Reaction-style aggregate CD?)

Wish I could hear it, but not for £67.99…

• Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto w/ Ensemble Modern – UTP (apparently they’re getting new distribution so this’ll be available at a more affordable price next year)

Need to hear, but haven’t yet

• The Caretaker, Philip Jeck/Sand, Soundboy’s Gravestone Gets Desecrated By Vandals, Janek Schaefer/Extended Play, Eivind Opsvik, Dubstep Allstars vol.6

Coming next

• Looking back at 2008, Part The Second, being music released before the year in question, but favoured these past 12 months

Other noteworthy lists

• Mapsadaisical, Milkfactory, Boomkat

Previous years

• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003

My daughter is 10 years old already. Last night I attended her last evening as a Brownie (Is stayed in bed unwell). Next week she’ll be starting Guides. The troop is small, no more than 8 or so little girls. They performed to earn their entertainers badges. Sweet, corny jokes were recited from children’s annuals and parents dutifully groaned, the Sky Boat Song was tapped out on a little keyboard and we clapped and my daughter… my daughter sang Neon Lights a capella and her dad was so utterly, utterly touched.

Forgot to tell you also: my boy: he asked me what could he write in his News so I do long description of what we did yesterday at seaside so when I finish long description he say: ‘mum, it has to be INTERESTING’. bless. I suppose.

Yes I thought of you as I drove past that main building. Amy ridiculously sweet with that awful electronic journal thing that doesn’t work. She has a cold poor love so please go easy on her. Jim bob also sweet – standing in line for school, aphid lands on his tee shirt – he’s very pleased with it – Cosmo is trying to blow it off him – Jim bob very cross and moving away to avoid Cosmo’s blowings as Jim bob likes aphid on t shirt. Bless. Jim bob told off by mum (in line for school) for strange gyration he does when parts of his body are doing god knows what. hmm. really not sure how to approach this one. I wonder whether it’s involuntary to some degree – some kind of nervous/excited reaction to things? (am wondering this because he didn’t seem to have done anything with his hands at the time…and the gyration coincided with cosmo and michael arriving at school…?

Lord, lord. Do not doze off to the latest Scott Walker. I did and then kept being woken up by sudden stabs of sound that disintegrated back into seemingly endless nightmare landscapes. It was all too like those bad dreams when you try to wake yourself up, but keep falling back asleep. It was a gorgeous sunny afternoon and I was pretty tired – on impulse I put on The Drift. Why did I have that impulse, why did I act upon it? The only other comparable experience that springs to mind was many years ago when, in the middle of a rather strong trip, I decided to put on my favourite Ligeti CD. It was the Wergo one with all the biggies, Lux Aeterna, Atmospheres, etc. Never has an hour passed so slowly. I cowered under a duvet, but wasn’t able to reach the CD player to turn it off, or escape from the room. I just lay under that security blanket (blue on the underside, a washed-out ’70s red and purple flower pattern on top) until it was over, at which point the world brightened up no end. To be honest, yesterday’s Scott Walker experience wasn’t as powerful as that, but it wasn’t exactly a picnic either…

The above image is from Ligeti’s website where there are some other fine pictures of the man.

Until I can find the time to fix the **()&)!@!@ commenting, please email any responses to this or future posts to me: enquiries + the a with a circle round it + eleventhvolume + full stop + com. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks.

The above images are from a 90 minute ‘Live Tomato Jam’ on the Underworld DVD Everything, Everything. A colleague at work – Scott – lent it to me. At that time – the mid ’90s – I only heard Second Toughest In The Infants and DubNoBassWithMyHead, neither of which clicked with me at the time. I wonder now whether I just wasn’t ready for it or whether I listened to it in the wrong way. The loveliness of the typographic-based treatments on the Tomato Jam segment was really striking. Their collages were my favourite work, I think, which had a real gestural/textural sense to them. From their website, Tomato are clearly still active, but perhaps their time has passed. The Everything, Everything DVD is mostly a record of an Underworld concert in front of a huge crowd. The music is remarkably warm, evocative, binding even – as the best rave was. Scott told me that he’d gone along to an Underworld gig on his own because he knew his partner wasn’t particularly into the group and he didn’t want to feel responsible for her. He said he loved the music, got lost in it unaided, no pills, no alcohol. I’ve never been to any big raves, just smaller clubs and lots of gigs, but for a moment I shared the memory of a sublime enthusiasm. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to feel that now, but it’s mostly that I feel a communion with the performers rather than the crowd that surrounds me.

Out to see Little Axe with Dan last night. With a lineup of Doug Wimbish on bass, Keith Leblanc on drums, Adrian Sherwood invisible but present on treatments and Skip McDonald on lead vocals and guitar, it was an excellent, but all too brief set. Review to follow. One little rant though – people taking pictures in gigs. Good lord, you say, what a blinding hypocrite you are. And I bow my head in shame, but… there was this man next to me with a very long lens like a snout (or male member) continually intruding into my field of vision. He was balancing his camera on a tripod, but wasn’t using flash and I suspect was an amateur (the pros had all bagged the spaces immediately in front of the stage and were knelt down there). Thing is, I don’t mind someone taking a few shots, but this guy spent the whole time either endlessly snapping Skip McDonald or reviewing the shots he’d taken. How many bloody pics can you take? He was really irritating, but in the end the music was so good and I was dancing a lot of the time with my eyes closed that he didn’t spoil it for me. After all, a gig’s for enjoying the moment isn’t it, not for spending looking at an LCD screen? Which reminds me of the most extreme/amusing experience of this sort I’ve had, which was at the Laibach gig a couple of years back. This tall, shaven-headed chap was standing next to us, dressed in standard issue military dress jacket and absolutely obsessively taking pictures with his fairly old-looking Nokia cameraphone. So far, so what. However, a little later I spotted him right in the centre of the moshpit in front of the band (we were just outside the main ruck). He was still busy with arm aloft, taking and reviewing his blessed pictures as he was violently pushed this way and that like a weeble in a storm. Heh heh.

Joy Division is the human condition more than it is pop. Pop’s history is a late fifties one, and the spirit of Joy Division goes outside of that. The Coliseum is pretty inspiring, isn’t it? Not the Marquee. For me there are two Joy Divisions. Unknown Pleasures is an underpass with iodine streetlights through Manchester at night. Closer and Atmosphere are the city’s gothic revival cathedral and the moors around the Pennines.

Peter Saville quoted in Designed By Peter Saville. (It’s clear that the chilling elegance of Unknown Pleasure’s cover puts the cover of Kate Bush’s Ariel in deepest shade.) The book is a fascinating look at the deepening quandary of Saville’s position. A minor, but arguably important note is the extent to which only the front covers are reproduced – it’s as though each design were a single sided painting rather than the double-sided, twice over integral design that a record cover really is (if it has an inner sleeve of course) – and let’s not forget the all important spine…
When I were a wee bairn, the talk was always of which was somebody’s favourite Bowie’s Heroes or Low. The next generation, mine, would debate over the relative merits of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer. On the former question I tend towards Heroes, having, as an adolescent, walked fogs accompanied by its soundtrack. As to the latter, I can more easily choose Closer, particularly for its amazing second side: Heart and Soul, Twenty Four Hours, Decades, The Eternal. I wonder whether a more recent generation has the same problem with Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kid A, or maybe The Bends.