albums of the year ~ 2011

ok, here comes a list of my thirty favourite long players (including one re-issue and following my top 10 compilations) of 2011. like last year, i’m not that sure of the order beyond the first few, but these are the records which i’m still listening to, still enjoying and – in many cases – still astounded by. the only other thing to note is the lack of many bass/dubstep albums. efforts from kuedo, sepulcre and machine drum will all top many polls elsewhere on the web, i’m sure, but i just never quite sit comfortably when they are playing. necessarily then, in case you wondered, i’ve overlooked them. but it ain’t like i was short on choice…

 

 

read the rest of albums of the year (…)

published on December 6, 2011 2:40 pm.
filed under: 2562, acid, chicago house, cosmin trg, deep house, delsin, deniz kurtel, detroit, dial records, dub techno, electronic albums of the year, features, house, martyn, omar s, ostgut ton, review, rick wilhite, robag whrume, roman flugel, smallville, steffi, techno, zomby

heart the art volume 1

for no other reason than looking at them makes me feel… something, i thought i’d start irregularly highlighting some of my favourite sleeve designs of the moment. good ones and bad ones alike can certainly add context to the music contained within, and if you get yourself one of these ace frames they can even brighten up your living room. you don’t get that with an mp3, do you…

the first thing to note is 2011′s trend for including a picture of yourself, as a child, on your album cover.  the first to do so was nico jaar, with a picture of him in the no man’s land between east and west berlin shortly after the fall of the berlin wall. “a place at that time” he told me in a dj mag interview “with no ideology, dialogue, struggle or anything else… just a space lost in the middle of two worlds.”  as, you might say, is the album.. lost between the old and the new, the digital and the analogue, the simple and the complex…

then came a baby 2562 flicking through his parents’ music collection on the cover of fever

and most recently robag with mother and sibling in a nostalgic shot adorning his shit-the-bed good long player, thora vukk. did i miss any other taking this tact? will there be more this year i wonder?

elsewhere and unrelated, ali perc offers hints at the sort of aesthetics to expect from his forthcoming, brushed and scuffed techno full length… (fascinating notes from the designer here)

on the cover of his latest long player, tony surgeon throws together as many different elements as he does in one of his high-octane mixes with, somehow, just as coherent a result …

brendon moeller manages to capture the  same sense of subtle movement with the art work as he does with the sounds of his recent and excellent exploration, subterranean…

john beltran gazes through a damp and misty window which you could a) totally ignore or b) consider for hours, wondering what was behind it in much the same way as you do with the ambient sounds contained within….

and slow hands conjures an immediate sense of awkwardness with the cover of his recent and appropriately entitled ep for more or less.

that was fun, i might do it again…

published on June 9, 2011 6:37 pm.
filed under: 2562, heart the art, john beltran, nico jaar, perc, robag whrume, sleeve art, slow hands

robag wruhme – thora vukk on pampa

every year, there are but a handful of albums (out of thousands) which strike a pose a couple of steps left of centre, where centre is the torrid flow of ‘variation-on-a-theme’ house or techno.  the reason there are only a couple is obvious… not everyone can do it. sure, being semi-decent on ableton may well mean you cough up a beatport chart topper or even a passable full length of dancefloor tracks every now and then, but it will only get you so far. it takes something else altogether to craft a truly unique record; to draw from a previously undefined sonic palette as did, say, john roberts or actress back in twenty ten. 
thankfully, 2011 already has a few candidates for this year’s ‘now this, is fressssh…’ crown (blake, jaar, morposis) but with thora vukk, ex wighnomy brother robag wruhme also throws his hat into the ring.  it’s an album composed of sounds that aren’t familiar, where often beats, percussion and melody come not from instruments  – real or synthesized -  but from the looped and effected sound of closing scissors, or the rattle of a dropped bottle top, or the knocking of wood, or the sharpening of  a knife.  barely separable ‘tracks’ bleed into each other via more found sounds, voices, sombre piano solos (on which, incredibly pleasingly, you can hear the player’s nostril whistle slightly as he breathes in and out; the keys moving and clunking making almost as much noise as the notes themselves and even the hitting of a few computer keys as the recording is stopped) to form a delicate, tender, sombre stream of conscious from beginning to end. 
the structure-less segues (which beautifully seep to the surface between the thick, druggy, villalobos-style minimal house tracks which form the backbone) grow more and more ominous as the album goes on, eventually sucking the whole thing down into a dark and reverberating hole of sonic darkness at the midpoint.  of course, you emerge once again, this time at the hands of a warbling bassline, hugely nostalgic strings and a distracted man’s museful hummings … like the album over all, it’s music that’s super animated, fascinatingly alive.
whilst it’s close-up detail is perfect for attentive headphone listening, thora vukk’s more conventionally structured, humid and grubby grooves will also likely sound mighty nice in some dark basement somewhere.  i’ve already extolled my love for pampa on this blog… consider it now an infatuation.
buy it

published on May 6, 2011 12:31 pm.
filed under: house, pampa records, review, robag whrume

isolee/whrume – taktell/thora vukk on pampa

this isolee/robag whrume split release is exciting before you even hit play, simply because the two tracks included are mere pre-cursors of the respective full lengths to come (actually, isolee’s ‘well spent youth’ is already here and is already close to the top of my 2011 ‘best of’ pile). add into that pre-play excitement the fact it comes on koze’s fast flourishing pampa imprint and, despite the lack of any remixes, you have a genuinely semi-inducing prospect.

isolee takes the a side with ‘taktell’, a woozy, gently howling house number whose bottom end sways to-and-fro as diacritic strings and percussion add layer upon layer of deft intonation. its structure is so complex, unconventional and ever shifting that it’s hard to imagine the track being dropped into an average deep house set but, if it were, the way rajko müller hangs his grooves so effortlessly in murky 4/4 would have you wishing they lasted twice as long.

‘thora vukk’ is whrume’s contribution and is one which doesn’t sound out of place next to the work of isolee. it draws from the same sort of off kilter and unhinged sound palette as his, (as well as label mates axel boman and koze) but does so more sparingly. instead of constructing the track with myriad sonic flecks, the former wighnomy brother lays down a steady kick and has his quirky sounds (boingy synths, popping fx, plummeting harmonics) interlope recursively around them to make for an entrancing groove which forever seems to unravel as it goes. his full length can’t come soon enough…

published on February 8, 2011 7:32 pm.
filed under: house, isolee, pampa records, review, robag whrume