While Animal Collective is a huge band and Panda Bear has recently gained attention as a solo artist with his off the cuff album Person Pitch, my favorite work by these folks is the first album by Avey Tare and Panda Bear Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (2000).
I like this album more for a variety of reasons. The first is that it is heavily piano based. I like piano and I especially like these stylings. As is fitting for the instrument, it’s used to either brighten a sonic overload and make it more rich or to elegantly pace and restrain a song until it’s ready to really pop. All the songs here are much more experimental in spirit than the more popular Animal Collective / Panda Bear material, but the piano balances the songs out well and reveals that there’s actual songcraft at work.
Second, I enjoy the fact that the lyrics are imaginative. I prefer this rambling storybook Animal Collective lyrical style above their vaguely spiritual / inpirational-toned lyrics in their breakout albums Sung Tongs and Feels – though I do feel like Panda Bear did a better job, though not perfect, with this style in his Person Pitch. Perhaps that spells good news for future Animal Collective works.
If you enjoyed Person Pitch, I think this is the perfect time to revisit or discover Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished.
With all the get-hip-with-Roky revitalizing going on and leading up to the documentary You’re Going to Miss Me, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t highlighting his best and, as it mostly goes, routinely underacknowledged recordings.
Never Say Goodbye – comprised of six tracks recorded in 1971 during or shortly after his time at Rusk State Hospital, four home recordings from 1974, and a few from the 1980′s – reveal him as the songwriter who best typifies the free-love side of the rock’n roll spirit. These are recordings that sound as if you’re overhearing a performance of a grassy-knoll hippy who has a genuine claim to his attitude and don’t come across as self-centered or too high. I can’t say I’ve heard too many of those. Even Judee Sill is over the edge style-wise a lot of moments in her brief, but impressive career. Though they’re both known for drug use in some manner, Roky transcends that here.
Even if you just picked up the CD of Colin Blunstone's first solo album, One Year, without hearing the LP, you'll be rewarded. What you may miss, though, is that the album was designed thusly: each side of the record begins with an upbeat song and then moves into the more 'suite' oriented songs. So, for the first side we've got "She Loves the Way They Love Her" and the second side "Mary Won't You Warm My Bed." I find that without the flipping of the record involved these songs are a distraction. Do yourself a favor and rip that CD, take out tracks 1 and 6, and burn a proper CD edit of One Year. How good of a song is "Mary Won't You Warm My Bed," anyway? Now you've got one of the sexiest EPs available to man. Listen to that thing flow.
The CD of Luciano Cilio's complete recorded works on the Die Schactel label is one of my all time favorite records. I think of this as a textbook example of aura. The original (cropped) Nonesuch cover art is pictured right.
Ever wondered what's all the fuss with Michael Nyman? Aside from being credited with being the first to use the term minimalism to define a movement of music (done while writing about "The Great Learning" by Cardew's Scratch Orchestra), it's not readily apparent what real chops Nyman displayed to gain his own reputation as a force in minimalism. Decay Music is most likely it.
The LP was produced for Brian Eno's Obscure label, a subsidary of Island. The music was for an early Peter Greenaway movie, like many of his works, but it didn't make the cut.
That's fine. I like the music on it's own. Some music for Greenaway that also counts as good Nyman, though not as good as Decay Music, is Drowning by Numbers.
The Center for Visual Music has recently released a great DVD of Oskar Fischinger films. These are the films that, from what I can tell, started it all off — the work of Harry Smith, Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage.
If there’s any problem with this it’s that its greatness has also created a large following of people partaking in the creation of “Visual Music” that, in aspiring to this sort of perfection, must ultimately fail. A good example of this being the gathering in Boston this month for the Visual Music Marathon.
It’s not that that’s going to be an all bad event (there’s a posthumously completed Len Lye film, and I’m curious to see what Philip Sanderson has cooked up) it’s just that contemporary Visual Music doesn’t seem to be recapturing the exquisite craftsmanship and beautiful simplicity that Fischinger’s films possess, or the celestially controlled mania of Brakhage. And if it is elegantly created, it’s hard to tell behind all the technology. In other words, the whole process seems to be lacking a uniform elegance, which the early Visual Music definitely had.
The best recent example of Visual Music I’ve seen recently is the SNL short “Dear Sister.” While it’s a satire of the O.C., the reference is not implicit in the short. What you do get is a simultaneous breakdown and exploitation of classical as well as recent-popular film elements that is notably artful in its timing, personality, and sensitivity. It’s also so unentertaining in where it goes and how it finishes that it feels like a serious work.
Harold Budd’s self proclaimed final album from 2004, Avalon Sutra, is one of his finest and I return to it often. It was a real steal at $12.99 for two full discs, but the real beauty is in its expansive concept.
The first disc is the album of songs, Avalon Sutra. The second disc, As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, is a disc-long work done with the help of label-mate Akira Rabelais transforming the sophisticated, elegant tracks of Avalon Sutra into a meditation something like Basinski’s Disintigration Loops I.
I usually find remix discs to be overkill, but the lush quality of Avalon Sutra is so high and, for ambient music, relatively fleeting that it is perfectly rewarding to move on to the sustained, meditative beauty of As Long As I Can Hold My Breath.
I should mention, too, that the saxophone playing is by the great Jon Gibson!
links to: Jon Gibson artwork, opera (which I’m super curious about!)