4 of 2010: Rafael Anton Irisarri - The North Bend (Room40)

Runner up for Album Cover of 2010!

If you read the introduction of this album on Irisarri's own bandcamp site, you will read about the novel The Sound of the Mountain by Kawabata - the novel that later became a film directed by Mikio Naruse. What more need be said? Anything on Earth that can even thinly reference or parallel such sources is most definitely worth anyone's time. Here I thought I, the creator of this blog, was the only person around who would ever conceive of uniting such disparate concepts as ambient shoegaze and films directed by Naruse. It turns out that, firstly, maybe those themes really aren't so disparate if viewed simultaneously... and secondly, The North Bend would provide the perfect soundtrack to such scenes and themes. I only wish we heard such things more often, but I can definitely appreciate the rare times they do appear.

"Shingo Ogata, the aged protagonist of Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound Of The Mountain awakens from sleep in his family home one late-winter night, to a sound of uncertain source and unknown origin; "...like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth."

The sound queuing a vast, abstract and unconscious awareness, as though a tone had been struck deep within the self, harmonized, resonating in key, with one's sense of mortality. Ogata's epiphany, rather than a looking inward, as morbid obsession on the self as finite, was to instead to see out; to 'hear' the massive near-silent symphony who's volume dwarfs all things, on a scale that is the vocalization of all things in their totality, with the self recognized as an aspect of one's place within it, yet expressed unto oneself as their own.

It's the rare work that adeptly chronicles the inward tunings of that awareness. The reciprocation of the 'tone' struck within the self and the expression outward to the natural living world; not a simple matter to dedicate to canvas, celluloid, printed page, magnetic tape or the plethora of digital recording formats. The North Bend depicts a deeply personal, and at once universal resonating of/with that world, impressing sound upon it and charting what comes back; valleys, mountains, the nearly endless sea of trees - like furrows, peaks, dynamic points on the soundwaves. The vast natural splendour of the pacific northwest of the United States may just be the most sublime sounding board for such a dialog. Deeply rich in lore both ancient and current, that of the native Snoqualmie and Wenatchee people, David Lynch's television narrative redefining Twin Peaks, this is a region that has long-inspired these very same 'resoundings'. The North Bend being a continuance of, and contributing a new form to those traditions, that of neoclassical, spectral and ambient sublimity. Irisarri's depiction of that process, in the form of this recording, is a chronicle of just such a dialog between the self impressing sound on the natural world and it's resounding response expressed through the work in turn." - Jefferson Petrey


http://rafaelantonirisarri.bandcamp.com/album/the-north-bend
http://room40.org/store/rafael-anton-irisarri-the-north-bend

5 of 2010: Max Richter - infra (Fat Cat)

I've granted this one the additional award of Best Album Cover 2010.
Regarding the music itself:


The album rises out of distant radio signals and Morse code blips to the euphoric, homely chamber music of 'Infra 1', wrapped in warm strings and analogue crackle. A false start in many ways, since 'Journey 1' which follows immediately touches on the tone of uncertainty that epitomises Infra. This is reinforced by a segue into 'Infra 2', beginning with a ghostly synth line before introducing one of the core melodies of the piece, a sweeping minor key dirge that would fit nicely on a Godspeed record. This is Richter at his most intimate and spine-tinglingly sparse. Critics have latched onto his home at FatCat and his subsequent association with post rock acts like Sigur Rós, but much of this album features a restrained tension that does not rely on inevitable resolution, instead hanging mid-air and dissolving in front of your very ears. -drownedinsound

* * * * * * * * * *

Originally conceived as a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration between composer Max Richter, choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie, Max Richter’s gorgeous score to ‘infra’ is deservedly given life of its own in this album-length release from FatCat’s instrumental/orchestral imprint 130701 Records.

The initial setting for ‘infra’ was as a ballet - written in autumn 2008 and premiered in November of the same year at The Royal Opera House in London – although here Richter’s score is given the full scope of a standalone new album. Expanded and extended from the original piece, ‘infra’ comprises music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, including the full performance score as well as material that has subsequently developed from the construction of the album – more a continued reference to the ballet than as a “studio album” in the strictest sense. The composition resonates with Max’s characteristic musical voice – majestic, involved textures; fluent and sweeping melodies; an enigmatic and inherently intellectual understanding of harmonic complexities that compels and mesmerizes.

Richter’s work on the ballet came initially from McGregor’s invitation, a request for 25 minutes of music for his piece, inspired by T.S. Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ and named after the Latin term for ‘below’. This eventually became more collaborative as the project developed – Wayne would ask for Max to extend or alter certain passages of music in accordance with his own amendments to his choreography and concept, whilst logging the whole process for a BBC documentary (broadcast, along with the ballet in full, on BBC2 in November 2008). The dance performance was backed with digital images created by Julian Opie – observational scenes of street life, haunting and curiously balletic despite being of the everyday – and Max’s score is an appropriately close reference to the traveling theme:

“I started thinking about making a piece on the theme of journeys. Like a road movie. Or a traveler’s notebook. Or like the second unit in a film - when the scene has been played, and the image cuts away to the landscape going by. This started me thinking about Schubert's devastating and haunting "Winterreise" (Winter Journey), so I used some melodic material from Schubert as a found object in parts of my new piece.“

The recording of ‘infra’ took place in one day at London’s AIR Studios – recorded onto 2” tape, engineered by Nick Wollage and overseen by Max - before a return to the mixing studio (Max’s StudioKino and Trixx in Berlin) for Max’s typically intricate and lengthy process of crafting completed pieces from the recordings.

Max Richter studied composition and piano at the Royal Academy of Music before moving to Florence to study with Luciano Berio, and subsequently co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus - his principal musical output for ten years – on his return to the UK. As well as commissioning and performing works by several musical figureheads, including Brian Eno and Julia Wolf, Richter was largely responsible for the ensemble’s use of live electronics, which became one of the fundamentally formative elements of his own work.

An active collaborator in other media, Max received The European Film Award last year for his work on ‘Waltz with Bashir’, Ari Forman’s Oscar-nominated animated documentary. He has released four full-length albums with FatCat’s 130701 imprint - 2008’s ’24 Postcards in Full Colour’, ‘Songs From Before’ (2006), ‘The Blue Notebooks’ (2004) and last year’s ‘Memoryhouse’ (a reissue of his 2002 debut, originally released through the BBC’s short-lived Late Junction label) –‘infra’ is his first soundtrack piece to appear through FatCat.

Forthcoming scores include Benedek Fliegauf’s near-future Dystopia “Womb”, as well as ‘from The Art Of Mirrors’, a film/music performance with hitherto unseen Super-8mm films by Derek Jarman. - fatcat release page

http://drownedinsound.com/releases/15534/reviews/4140557
http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/release.php?id=321
http://store.easystreetonline.com/rel/v2_viewupc.php?storenr=375&upc=60011613112

6 of 2010: Tears Run Rings - Distance (Clairecords)

Great shoegaze/dreampop release with a few extremely strong tracks. The title track is a mournful, signature 7 minute buildup of everything the genres should be about. I actually somewhat prefer their first album because it has one track in particular that is just so damn cool, but this album lives up to the previous one in its own way. From the clairecords order page:

"Clairecords returns to the scene a full two years and one-and-a-half recessions since our last release, beaming with pride to issue the sophomore album from West Coast USA's Tears Run Rings. A collective of decades-old acquaintances spread from Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles, the quartet makes their magic in three separate studios, transferring tracks and files back and forth until the end result is achieved. Through such common projects as playing together in breezy mid-90's indiepop combo The Autocollants, to running indie label Shelflife Records, to a recent marriage, the band members have been together as friends for what seems like forever.

Tears Run Rings has a talent for marrying hauntingly beautiful textures and pop melodies. In Distance, their second album on Clairecords, they have refined their lush, melancholy sound and set it to a beat informed by Factory Records. For their second full-length album, the band proudly wear their influences on their collective sleeve. Chorus-laden and reverb-drenched guitars, breathy boy/girl vocals, and Madchester-via-Factory Records era beats are all common themes throughout Distance. The outright-blissful walls-of-sound in "Forgotten" and "Inertia" strongly recall the trailblazing tastemakers of Creation Records, circa 1990. "Reunion" kicks off with a Peter Hook style bass line, making way for perfectly-poised tambourine shakes and transforming into gorgeous melodies not unlike their Clairecords labelmates The Daysleepers. The album's title track recalls majestic 4AD moodiness - perfectly encapsulated in the package's artwork, which evokes yellowing nitrate film stock footage of oceanic tumult, simultaneously calming and brooding. The inveterate electronic soundscape that permeates "Divided" recalls pensive 80's cinematic moments from our youth. The driving full-on noisepop of "Forever" tentatively yields to a few gorgeous, breathy vocal interludes accompanied by a booming kick drum-led Madchester beat. "Innocent" maintains a certain uneasy psychedelia-meets-darkwave-dreampop akin to obscure late 90's northwesters The Emerald Down. The entire album is ideally bookended by the buoyant "Happiness 3" and "Happiness 4", continuing a tradition set by their debut album, 2008's "Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never".

http://www.tearsrunrings.com
http://store.easystreetonline.com/rel/v2_viewupc.php?storenr=375&upc=80880400802
http://www.tonevendor.com/item/31929