For my podcast, I tried to represent the diversity of musics to which I am most drawn, as well as include several recordings which I consider to be “must-hears”. The selected pieces generally break down into one of three genres: contemporary composition, free improvisation, or intelligent dance music (“IDM”), with a track by Medeski, Martin and Wood thrown in at the end just because I like it. Of course, I listen to a lot of other types of music as well – Phish, James Brown, jazz, etc, etc, etc -but these three forms of music are the ones with which I feel most at home, and the ones which have the most direct bearing on my own musical activities.
A little about each track (please excuse the apparent hyperbole – I mean every word of it):
1) “54 Cymru Beats” (Aphex Twin) – This track is one of my favorite off of Aphex’s brilliant album “Drukqs”. Aphex has covered pretty much the entire range of electronic music, from the early ambience of “Surfing on Sinewaves” (released under the name Polygon Window) to the ground-breaking IDM of the Richard D. James Album, to the experimental music concrète of his work with videographer Chris Cunningham, an eclecticism which is fully represented on “Drukqs”. This track’s many twists and turns, effortlessly flowing from humor to melodic foreboding to full-on onslaught, embodies everything noteworthy about Richard D. James’ genius.
2) “Untitled (Second Track)” (Burkhard Stangl & Taku Sugimoto) – “An Old-Fashioned Duet”, the incredible album from which this track is taken, is one of the most fascinating and inscrutable examples of freely improvised music that I have ever come across. Stangl and Sugimoto are uncannily sensitive improvisers whose playing tends to focus on the sublimity of minutia, and their duets are often a series of delicate instances which are discarded almost as quickly as they are taken up.
3) “I, Purples, Spat Blood, Laugh of Beautiful Lips” (Aaron Cassidy) – Aaron Cassidy’s work deals primarily with exploring the results of an extreme separation of musical parameters on both sonic and notational levels. This piece for solo voice enhances such fragmentation by taking as its source material three concurrently running texts of various and sometimes tenuous relationships, as well as forcing the performer to relate their pitch to glissandi which are spontaneously generated by a Max patch in performance and which only they can hear. I’ve always found the result of all this to be horrifically humanistic.
4) “In Nominee a 3” (Brian Ferneyhough) – I hold Ferneyhough in the highest regard as a composer and aesthetic thinker; his writings and interviews are some of the most indispensable I have ever encountered. This piece is a great example of his small-form work, and the overt revealing of the plainchant source material before the work kicks off demonstrates how, unlike the more restrictive/generative methods of true serialists, with whom Ferneyhough is sometimes quite wrongly equated, his approach to composing allows him great freedom in manipulating or destroying the original material from which the work is derived.
5) “N/Jz/Bm (Re Mix)” (Derek Bailey & DJ Ninj) – “Guitar, Drums ‘n Bass” is one of the most improbably successful collaborations I have ever heard – Bailey, a legend of free improvisation with an incredibly distinct and abstract approach to playing his instrument, improvising over six straight-up jungle tracks by DJ Ninj. Somehow, Bailey is able to combine his free-wheeling and fractured approach to the electric guitar with the incessant melodicism of Ninj’s tracks. The sheer velocity of this, the opening track on the album, has made it a personal favorite of mine.
6) “6 Bagatelles – IV” (Anton Webern) – Webern is one of the giants of the early 20th century classical avant garde, and each ofthe 6 Bagatelles for string quartet demonstrates the delightfulness of his mastery of the miniature format.
7) “bliss viscera” (Nmperign) – Nmperign is for me the single most astounding free improvisation group. Period. Pretty much everything they do somehow pushes the boundaries of how musicians play their instruments and play them together, regardless of the success or failure of the example in question. I would place this track squarely in the “success” category.
8) “Tre Notturni Brillanti – III” (Salvatore Sciarrino) – I’m pretty new to Sciarrino’s work, and don’t find him as consistently astounding as some of his contemporaries. Still, the man knows how to write for instruments, and this piece for solo viola is a brilliant (pardon the pun) example of a decidedly personal yet intensely idiomatic approach to bowed string instruments.
9) “Augmatic Disport” (Autechre) – Besides Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, Autechre is the third member of what myself and a friend lovingly refer to as “the big three” in intelligence dance music. Whereas Aphex puts his personal stamp on anything he touches, and Squarepusher makes it a point to assimilate and destroy any genre that catches his fancy, Autechre began colonizing their own musical universe over twenty years ago and have never looked back. Still, occasional references to their musical roots surface, and the way in which this track from 2005’s “Untilted” distills chaotic repetition into an evil hip-hop chill never ceases to amaze me.
10) “Nervous Tic” (Bruckmann/Diaz-Infante/Shiurba/Stackpole) – A great example of the extremely free variety of improvised music which has developed in the West Coast United States in the past decade or two.
11) “.” (Burkhard Stangl & Taku Unami) – In “I Was”, the album from which this track is taken, Stangl’s cryptic melodicism is paired with Unami’s ascetic reserve. The often amazing results show that even musicians of such intensely disparate approaches and sound worlds can produce wonderful results.
12) “Drei Minuten Für Orchester” (Peter Ablinger) – Ablinger’s often bizarre experiments in the relationship between noise and ordered sound have been one of the more interesting musical discoveries of mine in the past few years. This tender weaving of the orchestra with ephemeral street sounds is a great example of some of his less sinister work.
13) “Off the Table” (Medeski, Martin and Wood) – This avant-groove trio will always have a special place in my heart, as they acted as the bridge between my interest in jam music and my love affair with jazz. This track off 2002’s “Uninvisible” makes for a grounded and reassuring outro to this often bewildering musical portrait of mine.
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