We’re wrapping up 2019 by looking back at some of our favorite records of the year! Jefferson’s list is below. He’s our long time experimental music buyer and general fountain of knowledge on global out-bound sounds across genre. Here are his favorites from the past year along with his thoughts and copious additional reading linked:
Various Artists Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980 - 1990 (Japan Archives)
Following on the first edition, the second and third volumes of Light in the Attic's Japan Archives arrived with a sublime assembly of Japanese "interior music" on, "Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990", and later that summer, the rarefied City Pop sound collected together on "Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1975-1985". In the excellent liner notes supplied by Visible Claoks' Spencer Doran for the edition, he rightly sites that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, John Cage and their 20th century contemporaries. By bridging modernist and postmodern modes of composition with the then-concurrent forays into "musical furnishings" supplied by Brian Eno, these musicians invented the wholly new sound of, "Lullabies for Air Conditioners: The Corporate Bliss of Japanese Ambient".
Zonal Wrecked (Relapse)
Another great piece from The Guardian this past year, "Blood, Terror and Bass: The Heavy Return of Dub Poetry", digs deep into one of the genre's longest and most consistent producers, Kevin Martin, and the array of projects voiced by Roger Robinson, Moor Mother, Miss Red, and Flowdan. Including the release of "Wrecked", on Relapse Records, a collaboration Justin K Broadrick as Zonal.
Swans Leaving Meaning (Young God)
For their 15th album, Michael Gira and band turn in a hypnotic recording of gradual shifts and harmonic richness, it stands in contrast to the bombast and unrelenting qualities most often associated with Swans. Paradoxically, there's a forcefulness and transcendental quality to these recordings that few other artists working in electro-acoustic rock, folk, psych and Americana could achieve.
Various Artists Nigeria Soul Power 70: Afro-Funk, Afro-Rock & Afro-Disco (Soul Jazz)
JK Flesh & Orphx Light Bringer (Hospital Productions)
The Comet Is Coming Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery (Impulse!)
Covered in The Guardian's "The British Jazz Explosion: Meet the Musicians Rewriting the Rulebook", Shabaka Hutchings acts as a pivot around which numerous players move through the scene. One of the more striking paths away from the central core of jazz tradition is his The Comet is Coming. In the three years since their 2016 "Channel the Spirits", been brought under the wing of Impulse!. With their debut for the label, "Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery", the group take a startling turn, with much of the album sculpted in post-production, highlighting the shifting mixtures of drummer Max Hallett and keyboardist Dan Leavers.
Ryuichi Sakamoto Thousand Knives Of Ryuichi Sakamoto Reissue (WeWantSounds)
Julius Eastman The N*gger Series Reissues (Blume)
Like some of his African American contemporaries, such as Charles Burnett and Bill Gunn working in film in the 1970s, Eastman's work was largely marginalized during his lifetime. As a member of The Creative Associates, a prestigious body of classical music academics at SUNY Buffalo's Center for the Performing Arts, Eastman was also a founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble in the mid-70s, alongside composer Petr Kotik. Often overlooked in the histories of modern composers and the avant-garde, features this past year in The New Yorker and this great "Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon", for the New York Times, go some way to offer corrective consideration of Eastman's contribution to 20th century classical music.
Coil Stolen & Contaminated Songs Reissue (Cold Spring)
What was initially a odds and ends assembly of tracks and castoffs from the rather legendary and rave-fueled sessions that produced 1991's "Love's Secret Domain", instead became one of Coil's mostly richly elusive collection of tracks. In a decade where many of Coil's lost and abandoned projects from the 1990s have finally resurfaced, it's only fitting that this release would come back into print. While less kaleidoscopic than 1995's deluge for Trent Reznor's Nothing label that is "Backwards", "Stolen & Contaminated Songs" may be a more perfect introduction to the "The Strange and Frightening World of Coil".