Muzman on 21/12/2009 at 07:15
I said I was flat out coming up with ten. Well I have gone flat out! And maybe got nine, so hurrah for me.
I used to do weird things like check the ever-so-hip Pitchfork annual lists for interesting new stuff. But I haven't done that kind of thing in years. So most of my stuff is from early in the decade. I also haven't bought an entire album in forever. So this list is, like, stuff that's memorable and will probably define the decade when the past turns to interesting soup (even moreso) leaching through the sediments of the unconscious. Man
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http://www.last.fm/music/Arovane/Tides) Arovane - 'Tides'
Autechre inspired IDM-er, ditches most of the tricky stuff he knows and sticks with a couple of wailing synths, a couple of drums and harpsichord. It's like a year in the life of a walk along the beach.
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http://www.last.fm/music/Tim+Hecker/Haunt+Me%2C+Haunt+Me%2C+Do+It+Again) Tim Hecker - 'Haunt me, haunt me, do it again'
Could well be the most spacious album ever made. Although, criminally, I still haven't checked out his more recent stuff.
What do you call it? Glitch ambient? That's a pretty good description anyway.
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http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+Adamson/The+King+Of+Nothing+Hill) Barry Adamson - 'The King of Nothing Hill'
As any review usually points out, there aren't many places you can get a little tour of gangster jazz, surf guitar, soul, french jazz etc etc except on a Baz album. I am a little surprised 'The Crime Scene' hasn't shown up in a film by now. 'That Fool Was Me' ought to be a damn standard too.
He's got new stuff I have yet to check out as well (actually I think everyone does. Sheesh)
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http://www.last.fm/music/Goldfrapp/Felt+Mountain) Goldfrapp - 'Felt Mountain'
I'd been following Alison since the Orbital days. She does have a name and vocal style that's difficult to forget. It gets mostly filed under (post) trip-hop and most of the singles had extra drums mixed in to highlight just that. But it's not really. Anguished string ballads do put you in Portishead's neighbourhood, but it's somehow even more oddly oldschool than that. The band kinda wore it out and moved on to other things, which is fine (a little too eighties-bait for me a lot of the time). Kinda makes it all the more unique.
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http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/1249/boardsofcanadageogaddibt7.jpgBoard of Canada - 'Geogaddi'
Yeah, them again. I'm not even going to bother linking this one.
If I had to name my ten favourite Boards tracks, there's probably only one or two on this album. But it's only one I listen to, top to tail, without skipping anything. It's almost as though they took only the hiss from some late seventies TV show and put it over everything, and that's enough to make it seem like some fractured memory.
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http://www.last.fm/music/Cliff+Martinez/Solaris) Cliff Martinez - Solaris, the original soundtrack
(and I was gonna put soundtracks before all o' ya, so ner)
This is probably my favourite film score ever. Passing
Heat and a lot of Thomas Newman stuff isn't easy, let me tell you.
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Prefuse 73 - 'Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives' or 'One Word Extinguisher'
In the age of the playlist, a lot of stuff becomes hard to separate into discrete albums. I noticed this a lot, thinking on this list. I had forgotten which tracks went where (if I ever really knew in the first place).
What can you call this? Glitch-Hop? Hip-DM? Dunno really. Groovy though
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http://www.last.fm/music/Four+Tet) Four Tet - 'Rounds' or 'Everything Ecstatic'
This stuff seemed to define mid 2000s 'alternative' culture for me; the 'fractured childhood' design styles that were big at the time, odd lo-fi found sounds of tin whistles and kid's harmoniums and so on.
A lot of people seemed to arrive at this glitch-folk or laptop-folk via the sound of it rather than the technique, if you know what I mean. They were folk heads and hippies branching out. The other half of the equation were all us techno and IDM weirdos in it for the tech and the rhythms. It reminds me of how
Thief brought together a lot of fantasy rpg nuts and FPS-heads unlikely to meet otherwise. People start chatting and saying "Hey, if you like this thing we like, you'll probably like this-artifact-that-got-me-here". this is usually a mistaken impression. And so lo-fi fans and IDM geeks tried to to swap back catalogues. Hilarity ensues.
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http://www.last.fm/music/Something+for+Kate) Something for Kate - 'Echolalia' or 'The Official Fiction'
I'm honestly not sure if I ever really sat down and listened to these records, but I'm terribly familar with them all the same. They were always around, circumstantially, up until a couple of years ago. Without me ever really listening to the radio in that time. Particularly a lot of terribly sad tunes about being a strange convolution of physics are right up my alley.
I'll leave the also-ran's for a moment (maybe completely). It's mostly an Autechre or two anyway.
