best of 2007 (so far), pt. 2

Yesterday I posted some of my absolute favorites of the year. Let’s move on to that shakier ground where the numbering is a bit unsure and a spot in a year-end list is probable, but by no means a sure thing.

Kathy Diamond – Miss Diamond to You

Best electronic full-length this year. What many people seem to miss in this record and that eMusic reviewer Andy Beta gets is that the production is nominally indebted to disco, soul, and funk. But the bigger deal is how Maurice Fulton inserts flashes of dub or King Sunny Ade. Dance all you want, but once you sit down and listen to this thing you’ll be amazed at the density of an album that is as spacious and empty as anything you’ll hear all year.

Tinariwen – Water Is Life

Speaking of empty, Tinariwen (whose name means empty places) is a band that I actually hadn’t heard much about until this year. With the release of Water Is Life, though, I’ve gotten a bit more familiar with the group that BrooklynNative calls the Rolling Stones of the Arabic world. Try the last track, “Izarharh Tenere.” Absolutely haunting stuff.

Panda Bear – Person Pitch

Yep.

Alva Noto – Xerrox Vol. 1

If there was a genre of music that I’ve ever been obsessed with as much as I am with minimal techno these days, it’d have to be IDM back in the late ‘90s. I’m pretty sure this is why I’m really digging this. Here’s Boomkat’s typically effusive review (which, for once, I totally agree with:

Together with Christoph Brünggel, Carsten Nicolai [Alva Noto] designed a ‘sample transformer’ which would take audio fragments and manipulate them beyond recognition, taking something familiar and de-familiarising it. Samples were taken from the most obvious sources; advertising jingles, airport tones, telephone hold music and film soundtracks, but the resulting album manages to sound totally unlike any of these things. Rather this is the most haunting and intricately realised work that Nicolai has produced to date, re-contextualising his token ‘glitches and bass’ sound into long, organic and sometimes almost orchestral pieces of work. The digital elements are beaten into a submissive static whine leaving only traces of radio static and white noise, and underpinning this is the sampled theme - building and falling graciously.

Exactly. What makes this so amazing, especially from Noto, is the fact that this is so warm and enveloping. It’s a huge opposition to his previous work, in which the draw was its austerity.

Ben Frost – Theory of Machines

This definitely won’t make the year-end list because it was released late in 2006, but I feel like it bears talking about again because by virtue of it’s December release date will be lost to the “list” ages. I reviewed this disc for another site and in that review I talked about how Frost seemed to be one of the few artists that are able to bring “noise” music to the mainstream. Theory of Machines sounds a little bit like what might happen if Mogwai were asked to remix Trent Reznor – long, epic tracks of delicate beauty get gnarled and distorted into heaping masses of sound information that, if you were brought into them without the help of that introduction, would be totally horrible. But because he leads you so slowly into them, you’ll end marveling at how easily you can enjoy such “terrible noise.” I’d tentatively call this new genre Milgramcore.

Also!

Various Artists – Grand Cru
Coming soon on eMusic, hopefully, and we’ll have a post at that time about how the Connaisseur label is one of the best things going these days.

And!

A lot of my favorite records so far this year have been reissues:

Selda / Sarolta Zalatny

Amazing funk/rock from two women who were stars in Eastern Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The Trees Community

Cult-like religious group makes some of the most ridiculous genre-busting freak folk there ever was…thirty years ago. Scroll to the bottom of the linked page and check into the single disc reissue of The Christ Tree.

Toni Iordache

More Eastern European stuff. This time, though, it’s traditional wedding music from the best tzambal player that ever lived. Grit Friedrich writes:

Iordache’s genius was recognised by important people; it is said that during one of his Bucharest visits Sergiu Celibidache, the world-famous Romanian conductor, heard Toni Iordache, and on leaving embraced him with tears in his eyes.