kagablog

Jeff Kaiser – Quartertone trumpet and laptop
Michael Moore – Clarinets and saxophones
Michael Vatcher – Percussion

Wednesday September 9, 2009

“Don’t just forgive, you must remember”
— an interview with Arthur Mafokate

This is the transcript of an interview with Arthur Mafokate as it appears in SHARP SHARP!, a documentary film about kwaito culture written and directed by Kaganof.

SHARP SHARP! was first broadcast in April 2003 on R.A.M. and was televised in South Africa by the sabc.

Arthur Mafokate: When I released the song Kaffir, which was always referred to in media circles as Don’t Call Me Kaffir, I took the song to radio stations, most of them were scared to play it, most of them banned it, they felt it doesn’t belong to the South African radio stations, but people out there went to shops, went to parties, went all over with the tapes, CDs, and said no matter what you say radio stations, this is the music which we need to play, which is why maybe the whole media, not just radio, the whole print media and everybody, might have felt, kwaito is not the right music format because already it was making it without their participation because I went to where people were and played my music and people would say, no no no wait a minute what’s this song, don’t call me a kaffir, it’s a funny song, it’s a strange song, it’s scary, but at the end of the day it’s right on point, people understand what I’m tallking about and they started buying the music and it was just unstoppable. Then I was invited to do it on tv, I was invited to do radio interviews talking about it I mean even talk shows that were like not featuring music had to call me to try and comment about that song and that was the real birth of kwaito because then there was no turning back because the music genre was known because of this song that was politically linked because of we were still celebrating our freedom and here’s this black kid coming from the townships still continuing to express himself in a manner that people felt was strange because we were free as a country but because I always grew up trying to say that what they’ve always done to us as Africans was not good I need to teach people that the struggle will continue. Till we are united as human beings regardless of whether the colour is black white green or whatever.

Aryan Kaganof: How come in New York in the sixties the Last Poets took up the word nigger and made it their own such that niggah is now how all the hip hop generation refer to themselves, but the kwaito generation have not taken up the word Kaffir in describing themselves?

I would say with Americans it might have been easier to turn nigger into a normal word because the majority there is white people, blacks are the minority. Here it’s vice versa we are the majority and whites are the minority. At the end of the day we are a forgiving people we don’t want to make people feel out of place. It doesn’t mean because I was expressing myself that way I was really pointing a finger saying as a white person you are my enemy, no no no. I was not saying that. You see.

Hit after hit followed Kaffir and last year you signed up with the biggest and oldest major label in South Africa, Gallo. What was your reasoning behind this decision?

I started off selling my stuff from the boot of my car, from my first album to Aba Shante to everybody. Then EMI got interested and they signed me and I was with them for ten years. And I needed to grow to face the challenge of the industry and Gallo was a company that was too much criticised in the music circles and for different reasons but for me I looked at it from another angle that yes we might criticise them but they have the South African music heritage with them, they have been around for over 75 years and I need to tap into that music heritage and try and fuse it with my kwaito. How do I best do that without having to wait for responses that take three months to come, six months to come before a track is cleared, let me go and tap into the heritage of my grandfathers and mothers and try and re-invent it into the latest trend. Again the other reason was that Gallo was bought by a black empowerment company and I felt somehow they were going to give me an opportunity to express myself in the best way possible and it was just about expanidng wings, getting a better deal and trying to see how far I can take 999, because it hasn’t been easy for me to build triple nine because I come from a very poor family and I didn’t have any budget in my pocket to start up a company so I started from zero.

And taking kwaito into the international market?

Taking kwaito into the international market depends on how ready are countries out there to receive us as Africans, regardless of the music in the first place. Because they have to say ok we’ve been having Indian music we’ve been having whatever whatever let’s go tap into African music and see how we can fuse it with our music. Because as far as I’m concerned music is music, seven notes, and a couple of ornaments out there, because you play all those twelve notes and it’s the white ones and the black ones and it depends on how you fuse them you know you can even see it on the piano, all of them are fused so black and white music, countries whether Africa Asia or America or Europe we must just fuse and create something. At the moment there is still this thing of we are going into Africa to fuse the music but honestly speaking they are doing it without crediting us. So it would be better if they did it with us in the studio rather than just taking it away from us, because that might make it but it still lacks the real feel of us being involved.

What is kwaito actually?

Kwaito is basically South African ghetto or township dance music and it came about in the sense that we, as the youth of South Africa feeling that there’s a lot that we need to say that hasn’t been said before through a music format, you know expressing our own selves in the best way possible for ourselves because we’ve always had music genres before our time but it was for their age and period, but people like me, when we were born we saw things differently and we saw things happening in front of our eyes and we felt we need to express ourselves in a way that would be more appropriate for ourselves.

When you say earlier genres are you referring specifically to bubblegum?

I wouldn’t even say bubblegum music, I would say everything that happened before me, you know all the music genres expressed people’s lives in their own period but when my period came I felt I have to express myself in my own way.

That period you speak of isn’t merely a period in music history but also in the political history of this country. So how does for example, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the democratic elections, help shape the development of kwaito culture?

I would say it’s a music format that had to come about because of the South African youth feeling they needed to have a voice of their own and coincidentally it happened whilst he was in jail, so you might find that the influence arose because Mr. Mandela was still in jail and obviously we got influenced because we didn’t see him go to jail so we didn’t feel that process but when we grew up we were taught that this is how we were supposed to be living and it was up to us to take charge and say we need him back we need to express ourselves in a way that would be more appropriate for us as human beings. Rather than being under the apartheid rule and following whatever lifestyle that was existing then. We felt we needed to express ourselves in the best way possible for ourselves. So I would say somehow yes it’s got a political contribution because if Mr. Mandela was not in jail or other people were not in exile we wouldn’t have been brought up the way we have been brought up. We had to grow up knowing that we were under apartheid, we were not free as a country, we were not free as the youth and there was a difference between the black and white youth and we felt we need to express ourselves so that we can feel comfortable about who we are. Other people who hurt, more specially me, when I did that song Don’t Call Me Kaffir, because they felt that I didn’t have a right to do such a song but for the black youth and the black people they felt yes, here’s a hero speaking for our rights, but other people were affected that felt they still needed to use that word kaffir.

What is interesting about that song is that it was released after the democratic elections, in other words saying that change doesn’t happen overnight and there are still issues to be adressed, despite the new democratic dispensation.

For me basically the struggle continues which is why I say somehow there was a political contribution to kwaito or we contributed vice versa you know. We contributed to politics, politics contributed to kwaito being there, but one wouldn’t say it came about because of Mandela was relased because you cannot just think of an idea overnight. Mandela was released at the time when already the youth were affected in this country, we felt we needed to have a voice. Because I started dancing at an early age and by then I wanted to be out there and be seen and I asked myself how do I get to be on tv? From the moment I started as a dancer I was already affected as a black kid in the townships and I grew up knowing that I need to be a star I need to be exposed. But what channels do I use? And I felt it’s a bit difficult because of the apartheid regime making things difficult for us. So somehow you grew up knowing that it’s difficult for you. For you to make it as a black kid you have to triple your effort. It wasn’t going to be easy for me because of the regime that was existing, so I had to work three times harder than any normal South African kid that was not black. So that gave me the will to win and made me realise that I’m living in a country that’s got a problem. And somehow it’s my duty to change that. So I had to triple that effort and then started hustling and trying to make things happen for me.

You came to fame when you won the title Mr. Soweto.

It wasn’t my fault. I was asked by a friend to enter that competition. I was just a frustrated somebody in the township trying to make it in music and dancing but there were no channels and I thought here’s an opportunity of being famous, maybe one can be a model, whatever, and a friend pursued me, she said you must go enter for these things because she was already a beauty queen. So I went and luckily it helped me because somehow I managed to get contacts, be exposed you know.

Aside from your role as a pioneer of the music genre, what sets you apart from musicians of the earlier period is your astute business practice, creating and industry around your talent, and owning and controlling that company, 999 Records.

When I started as a dancer I danced for one group, I didn’t last for a month I think. And I felt I just needed to be on my own and do my own thing from then I knew that I can make it in life if I keep on being the leader I am, because in life you just have to believe in yourself and I felt I’m going to be something one day and believed in my dream and pursued it. I think with me, talking about business, it had nothing to do with colour, it was just an idea of me being exposed and doing what I wanted to do. The only time colour comes in is because I was underprivileged as compared to whites but apart from that I just had this business sense in my heart that I just need to make it in life and help other people if I can. For me to really succeed I had to create my own kind of employment and by so doing I decided I’m going to have my own genre of music express myself in my own way. Even my dance routines were something different from what was existing. We would watch Michael Jackson and Bobby Brown but still come with our own things that would be mixed with our own township pantsula.

Do you see any parallels in your life with that of Godfrey Moloi, in the sense of being a black entrepreneur and being a legend in Soweto?

There have been role models in my life, people that came into life before me, and there’s a whole lot of them, the list is just endless but any black hero in the country just motivated me to be a leader and a proper business man.

Tell us about the formation of Aba Shante.

The reason I decided to really go straight into business and make 999 the force that it is today was because I was getting successful as a solo artist. I had dancers behind me and I felt they also deserved a chance to be in the forefront. And then I took some from the streets that would be good in music, and not good in dancing, and tried to create groups, like for example Chiskop. The group that Mandoza comes from. I discovered them from the streets they were just guys doing breakdancing whatever, they were not that good or well choreographed but I felt vocally they had talent. With Aba Shante what I did was auditions where I said to people go look for these people for me. I announced all over that I was looking for a group of people. I was looking for dancers, I was looking for singers, rappers and whatever. And people started coming to me and I had to choose them one by one. I was not in a hurry because I was making it as a solo artist and I was not sure if it’s the right decision to make but as soon as I found people that clicked I put the group together. They all met through me and I created the group that was never to be stopped up to today.

Did you produce them in the studio as well?

After getting everybody together the next thing was to make them understand what the industry was about. How to handle interviews, even before going into the studio, and they started moving with me to shows all over the country, experiencing what I was doing. Because I felt it would be better for them to experience the real feel of the industry before even getting into the studio. By the time they got into the studio they were hyped up. They knew that people were expecting things from them and by the time they did their album they knew how to express themselves. So it wasn’t just about discovering them. It was about discovering them, teaching them how to perform, teaching them how to handle interviews and teaching them how to be stars on their own.

What characterises you and is quite exceptional in the industry is a marked sense of discipline.

I think my sense of discipline comes from my parents because me and my brothers and sisters we grew up under the apartheid regime and it was difficult for my parents to really make it in life so they had to make it a point that we survived. And by making us survive they were teaching us things along the way that you don’t do this, you do this, you respect people, nothing that comes easy is worthwhile, you have to be a hardworker, persevere and be disciplined. And the other fact is that my father, not being educated, and my mother not being educated, they had to still raise seven kids and had other relatives in the same house so it wasn’t easy for them and my father for the will to win attitude that he had! He was the first black show jumper in South Africa and as we all know that show jumping is an expensive sport, but he still made it. He went to compete in Wembley then to Italy, he went all over the world. So for somebody who didn’t even go to school he was a motivation to me so I had the nearest role model next to me, somebody that I can say, I need to be like him. But I’m not going to do what he’s doing, I cannot ride horses, it’s too expensive for me, for me I just need my body and my voice to make it.

With the possible exception of Kaffir, your music is jubilant, celebratory, uplifting. This despite the harsh history that you’ve lived through. What is it about South African music that it remains so positive despite all that the South African people have been through?

I would say South Africa is a forgiving country, or maybe I would say Africans are forgiving, respectful, they’ve got a proper sense of humanity, you know we understand that regardless of colour we have to live together. Even if somebody did wrong, obviously we don’t have to forget, but we have to forgive and move forward because if that was not the case there would just be chaos in Africa, because we are in the process of rebuilding Africa so somehow we feel we have to unite with other people in order to move forward, that’s how I’m looking at it. If we were always to express sorrow in our music I don’t think people would really appreciate that because then what we would be saying is we don’t appreciate them appreciating us. We have to welcome them by being happy, rejoicing the way we are, we know we’ve had hard times before but we’re in the process of rebuilding. But we are happy. We have achieved our goal. People might think because we achieved our goal late we might be hurt and have hatred in us. We don’t have hatred, we know maybe it had to happen, maybe it was God’s plan but now that we are achieving we have to let people into our hearts and rejoice with them and that way they will appreciate us and start buying into our ideas so our only form of marketing ourselves as Africans is just by being comfortable with who we are.

Would you call the post-apartheid generation the kwaito generation?

Yes you can call them that depending on what you would be referring to. Because so far I’ve seen in papers people writing different stuff about kwaito and for me that has been behind the whole thing of kwaito, I always feel bad, which is why I sometimes refuse to do interviews unless if it’s a sensible interview that does justice to kwaito because we are proper human beings and we know our story and we know what we want to achieve out of life. There may be diffeences between us here and there but that happens in any industry. And if you have a mission and a vision of why you are in kwaito I am sure you will succeed. Yes, we are a kwaito generation, but not just as a format to give you money, but as a format to try and rebuild the whole African continent.

The media has indeed often focused on kwaito in a negative way, why is that?

The most popular person that brought kwaito into being at some stage had to be aggressive and arrogant and the reason I was like that was because of the criticism I got when I released Don’t Call Me A Kaffir. Because people were starting to dissociate me from the proper community of South Africa and I felt I had a right to express myself because what I was tallking about was existing and people started buying into my story. I would say that people don’t like to hear the truth if it’s something that they failed to pick up. I had to do Kaffir in an aggressive way without holding anything back. For me it was like Mandela is free, I’m a free person, I’m going to say what I need to say and people will learn out of what I’m saying and they’ll put it in the history books. Apart from what we achieved as Africans there were still those brave ones who continued with the struggle the struggle to now educate other people. Don’t just forgive, you must remember.

Morricone is a great musician ‘in assoluto’ (in absolute terms) even if we are used to thinking of him in terms of cinema but he has all his life been involved in research, taking part in a group called Nuova Consonanza. He felt all his life that, in a certain sense, he betrayed his master who said about him that he could become a good musician. One day a friend of mine who was a composer of musique concrete and electronic music, Vittorio Gelmetti, met Morricone and the latter started to complain saying ‘You are free, you are the one’, and Vittorio, who had not a penny said ‘What are you talking about? You have everything you want.You have a house just in front of the Piazza Venezia. Leave me free!’ Sometimes it is difficult to be objective. It is certain that everything has a cost, as much if you are free but poor, as it is if you are a prisoner in a castle.

Dark Grooves. The Spoek Mathambo band is Can’t-Stand-Still rhythmic. It whispers motion into your bones. Dark dance music concocted of Funk Rock instrumentation and Elsewhere syncopation, Spoek Mathambo’s is not the groove of escapism or flights of sunshine. It is the groove of survival, of persevering in the face of a corrupt, decadent world.

Following the delightful and profanely neon excesses of previous outfits Sweat.X and Playdoe, the hushed beats and ghosted melodies of first solo outing ‘Mshini Wam’ was confounding. What we didn’t know was that this was Mathambo for the first time approaching his own sound. “Some tracks on ‘Mshini Wam’ and ‘Father Creeper’ were written in the Sweat.X days. Obviously they wouldn’t work in that project, so it was great to finally give them life,” notes Spoek.

‘Father Creeper’, and, most crucially, Spoek’s current circle of conspirators, sees said Spoek Mathambo sound finding potent fruition. Contrary to the popular platitude, there are new things under the sun. This. Is one of the more rewarding ones. Deeply recommended.

mick raubenheimer

1. Gillian Welch – The Harrow and The Harvest (Acony)

- eight long, if by no means entirely publicly barren, years after their last album under her name (the David Rawlings Machine included contributions by Welch), a full band affair that briefly hinted at a different direction, Welch and her musical shadow, extraordinarily sympathetic guitarist, harmony singer and co-writer David Rawlings, have returned to the stark and spare Appalachian inspired brilliance that first picked them out and set them apart with a darkly mysterious but stunningly beautiful set of original songs that prove a match for the ancient ones from which they borrow ideas, refrains, a sense of plainspoken magic that’s often just out of reach, and even titles, yet leave most of the contemporary songwriting competition trailing in the dust

2. June Tabor & Oysterband – Ragged Kingdom (Topic) / June Tabor – Ashore (Topic)

- either of these albums might have made the top ten of this list on their own, and together might have topped the list had it not been for that misjudged version of Dark End Of The Street, one of the greatest of all soul songs; as a double header, their coverage of all that is wonderful about English folk music is extraordinary – the Oysterband collaboration, following up at last on the outstanding “Freedom And Rain” of 21 years earlier, when the group still spelt its name as two words, is the one that turned heads, turning Joy Division’s classic Love Will Tear Us Apart on its own head in the process, getting to emotional grips with Bob Dylan and Shel Silverstein and electrifying traditional English folk in a way that has hardly been imagined, much less heard, since the heyday of Sandy Denny and Fairport – “Ashore”, recorded with her own group, whose restraint and taste are the perfect foil for Tabor’s dramatic if occasionally slightly mannered vocals, is a carefully chosen, majestically sung set of sea-themed songs, from Finisterre, out of that early Oyster Band alliance, via Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding to a truly epic Across The Wide Ocean; I saw the concert, and the record is as spellbinding

3. Tinariwen – Tassili (V2) / Tamikrest – Toumastin (Glitterhouse) / Terakaft – Aratan N Azawad (World Village) / Bombino – Agadez (Cumbancha)

- trouble in the northern Mali desert meant that Tinariwen had to set up in the Algerian region after which the record is named for their fifth album, but, like the Sahara that is their home, the shifts in their music, though constant, are no more than incremental; so, while they appear, on the face of it, to have undergone something of a radical change by restricting themselves to just acoustic instruments, calling in Wilco’s Nels Cline to provide a little electrical ballast, collaborating with members of TV On The Radio and utilizing a couple of Dirty Dozen Brass Band horns on one track, in fact the results are as hypnotically timeless as we’ve come to expect, yet sufficiently different to be interesting and fresh – the other three albums demonstrate that, despite their similarities there is enough room in the Tuareg version of the desert blues for more than just one fine band – Terakaft, formed out of Tinariwen, rock a little more raggedly and rowdily than their more famous relative, and Tamikrest and Bombino represent the next generation, the latter, an especially fluid guitarist, having an attractively light touch, albeit one that reduces some of the music’s sense of gravitas, producing a kind of Saharan acid folk-rock, while the former are almost psychedelic in their sonic intensity

4. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)

- I have two, separate but related, points to make about this album – firstly, having made Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut my album of the year for 2008, I was initially somewhat disappointed in this one … and remained that way for several months; it was quite obviously a good record, but my concern was that it sounded too much like its predecessor and, what it does having been done before, it lacked that startling first impression – secondly, when Fleet Foxes first appeared, everyone rushed to the harmony rich folk-rock sections of their record collections and decided that this was CSN and the Beach Boys for a new generation; I wasn’t so sure, tending towards the first David Crosby album and the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” for touchstones, but for feel and texture rather than for actual sound – what Fleet Foxes had done, I decided, was perfectly synthesize their influences (and it turned out that “Surf’s Up” was indeed one of them) into something that was actually quite new and eminently worth pursuing, which is, of course, precisely why my initial response to “Helplessness Blues” no longer makes sense – it’s the fact that it sounds just like Fleet Foxes, but not just like “Fleet Foxes”, that makes it a great record – “If I had an orchard I’d work till I’m sore” … has any line better summed up a band’s approach?

5. Josh T. Pearson – Last Of The Country Gentlemen (Mute)

- 2011 seems to have a been something of a year for, if not quite earth-shattering comebacks, then at least striking re-emergences, with that of the now possibly even more physically and emotionally dishevelled Texan Josh T. Pearson, more or less missing since he led his erstwhile band Lift To Experience through the astonishing “Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads” a decade earlier, among the least expected – seven songs, recorded over two Berlin studio nights, is all we got (unless, like me, you bought the Rough Trade Shops edition with an additional EP of Christmas songs, not as unusual as it sounds considering Pearson’s upbringing in religious fundamentalism), but four of those songs, rambling, shambling, painfully raw, occasionally arcanely, archaically phrased and sometimes sounding like they’re being made up as he goes along (they surely could never be perfectly accurately repeated) are each more than ten bleakly gripping minutes long – it’s just Pearson, his voice, his acoustic guitar and a few desolate strings under the baton and bow of Bad Seeds/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, and an immediacy, intensity and honesty that is almost shocking – and the three shorter ones simply take less time than the others to do all of that

It is difficult to identify the exact moment when an idea is born, and impossible to predict the journey that such an idea might make.

In May of 2010, I had met and collaborated with Aryan Kaganof on a screening and live performance of ‘The Exhibition of Vandalizim’, where the musicians Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd performed in a scrapyard outside of Stellenbosch. The experience was inspirational, to say the least, not only because of the integrity and professionalism of the musicians, but also because of the visual impact and power of Kaganof’s film. In the aftermath of that experience – with which I was involved both creatively and in terms of organization – I began thinking about other ways in which to combine film and music in creative processes, and my first ideas for tonight’s performance began to take shape.
On 5 May 2010, I wrote the following email to Aryan Kaganof:

Dear Aryan,
I had a thought this morning, and I’m wondering what you would think about it.

How about (yet another) collaboration idea: I commission a series of ‘miniatures’ or short pieces for piano, something like 5 or 6 pieces of about 5 minutes each. Each ‘miniature’ should portray a specific atmosphere, emotion or psychological situation. Then I commission 5 (or 6) short films from you to fit with the ‘miniatures’ soundtracks.

Or perhaps it can go both ways – you make films based on compositions, and the composer writes three miniatures based on film material provided by you. We then pre-record the music – for the ‘performance’, I have an idea which might be logistically impossible, but potentially very cool. We find a huge space, and we place six monitors in succession, far enough apart so that the sounds of each recording can be heard, but so that the recording next to which the audience member finds themselves is the most prominent. We play the film with the compositions, and audience members are asked to walk from installation to installation, to experience each ‘production’ separately.

Does this sound like something you would be interested in?
kind regards
mareli

Luckily Aryan was interested, and the project was born, raised and is ultimately performed this evening. Of course, what is being presented to you tonight is a far cry from the initial concept, and I would like to spend some time tracing the intellectual and creative development of the idea from its inception to how it came to exist in its current form.

Originally, my primary interest was in the ways in which different types of material or media could influence and cross-pollinate each other; intermediality, therefore, was the main focus. Intermediality occurs in works that are created across the boundaries of different media and disciplines. ‘Media’ refers here to the material or form used by an artist, composer, or writer, and can apply to artistic practices such as music, dance, theatre, film, installation and written text. In intermedial works, different media are combined, fused or productively co-related.

In the initial conceptualization of tonight’s performance, the media involved included the materials of film and musical composition. I soon began to theorize ways in which this initial conceptual model could be expanded to include live performance, rather than being limited to pre-recorded material. This would necessitate a reconsideration of the roles of the composer and performer. At first, I had envisioned myself as a performer, recording the composed music, which is then presented with the film material in a way similar to an art exhibition: static and pre-fabricated. It became clear that, in order for me to be an active participant in this performance, I would have to be able to respond musically in ‘real time’ to the film material being presented.

This could happen in several ways. I considered the possibility of simply having a composer write music for film material provided by Kaganof, which I could perform while the film was being shown. I soon discarded this idea, though. There are several precedents for compositions for piano and film – Dutch composer Michel van der Aa is an example – and I wanted to explore possibilities that move conceptually beyond this model.

Another option would be for me to improvise on the piano while viewing the film. I have, however, scant experience with improvisation, and felt the need for a more structured approach. Without training in or familiarity with improvisation, I was worried that I would not be able to react satisfactorily to the film material upon first viewing. I did feel, however, that I would be able to give some form of real-time response, if I had pre-composed material to work with.

The issue of the ‘hierarchy’ of creative material also needed to be considered. If music is composed to supplement an already existing film, the musical material can be seen as subordinate to the film, an accompaniment to the visual material or a reinforcement of the film’s message. The opposite could also be true if the musical composition would precede the manufacturing of the film material. My next step was therefore to try to conceptualize something which could facilitate the active participation of the performer, and present a challenge to the hierarchy of created material.

Aryan Kaganof was my creative collaborator throughout the conceptualization process. The model that we finally came up with would function in the following way: a film created by Aryan would be given to a composer, who would write music in response to the visual material. The brief to the composer would be to write music that could be performed in ‘fragments’; in other words, musical material that would allow the performer to respond to the film by ‘sampling’ sections from the composition in response to the visual content. The performer would not see the film beforehand, allowing for a quasi-improvisational, real-time response during the performance, without being required to engage with free improvisation. I felt satisfied that this model could be used to interrogate most of the above-mentioned issues. Aryan suggested involving composer Michael Blake, with whom he had collaborated in the past. Fortunately, Michael was willing to join our experimental project, and in February of 2012 I received the score for 20 Fragments in the Form of a Serial.

In this conceptualisation, the performance could engage with several issues simultaneously. The intermediality would apply to the materials used – film and composed music – as well as to the form that is employed for the performance. The form in which the film- and musical materials are presented is the result of the creative and practical decisions that were made during the process of conceptualizing the project. Not only does the form require the interpretation of musical material, it also requires an emotive response to visual material. The performer engages with the musical medium as well as the visual medium, and interprets both: in the preparation for the performance, the musical material is first interpreted without visual stimuli, while in performance the material is interpreted both intuitively and emotively as a real-time response. The interlocking, overlapping agencies of film, composition, improvisation and musical performance therefore provide the formal structure for the performance.

Intermediality in this performance extends to three aesthetic perspectives: the filmmaker, composer and the performer. In this model, the performer interprets two types of medium – the film as well as the musical composition – and presents the material in the form of a real-time response. It would also have been possible for me to have pre-viewed the film, and there is an argument to be made that this could have provided a more cohesive performance scenario. But, tonight’s performances are experiments, and were designed to test, among other things, my capabilities to give immediate responses to media other than composed musical material. Presenting two or more performances tonight therefore provides the opportunity to test both my musical responses upon first viewing and subsequent reactions after becoming familiarized with the film.

Michael Blake composed a single work, which he then divided into twenty fragments of varying lengths, one fragment to a page. At my initial reading of the text I was not aware that the composer had conceived of the music in one individual structure, but I did immediately become aware of a strong interconnectivity in the musical material. I did not receive the music in its original sequence however, and the musical journey during which I discovered the several musical links added to the level of the experience. I was intrigued by the fact that one piece of music could be equally coherent both in a through-composed form and when heard in a fragmented way. It is possible that one of the major strengths of this work lies in the fact that Michael Blake is a master of the miniature form and could, in the conceptual framework provided for this composition, engage with macro- and micro-forms simultaneously. The conceptual framework within which this work was conceived provided part of the creative input of this composition. This suggests to me that creative collaborations between different types of artists could facilitate and encourage new work, an idea which I find enormously exciting.

I began studying the musical score in a way similar to my usual methods for assimilating new music, beginning with a basic reading of the text, identifying potential technical issues and trying to gain an understanding of the musical language. I also decided to memorise the music, to free me up as much as possible to respond to the film. I came to the conclusion early on that the music that Blake had composed was coherent, innovative, and actually strong enough to exist completely independently from the film, a point which I will return to presently.

Studying and assimilating the musical text opened up from the outset interesting issues for me as a pianist and performer. Whereas the ‘narrative’ of the work or the sequence of musical events would normally guide my process of learning the music, I here had to resist creating any form of linear narrative, or risk being unable to break free of the sequence established in my mind when eventually responding to the film material. In terms of memorizing music, I generally find it much simpler to commit music to memory when there is an identifiable narrative structure or sequence of musical events, for in such a case each section of music is suggested by the material preceding it. In the case of Blake’s Fragments, however, I could not rely on macro-structure to aid my memory. The way Blake structured the music was, of course, exactly what I had wanted for the piece, and being confronted with complications such as those I just mentioned lent the entire project a feeling of being an organic process, which I enjoyed and struggled with in almost equal measure.

Each of the fragments has, however, a very specific character, another indication of Michael’s skill and insight into the requirements of this project: the composer realised that my reactions to the film will be driven by emotive responses, which means an easily identifiable character association with each fragment would aid the process enormously. In addition, I found that Blake’s composition is written in a way that the inner structure of each individual fragment could, without the trigger of visual material, also suggest a larger musical sequence. Several chord structures occur in more than one fragment; sometimes, these chord structures are written out to form a melody, and the chord is disguised. There are recurring melodic and rhythmic sections, sometimes reoccurring with only an alteration in tempo but remaining the same both rhythmically and in terms of register. Sometimes, sectional material is transformed in terms of character so that it becomes barely recognisable. These factors attest to a strong musical coherence in these Fragments in the Form of a Serial, and I experimented with performing them without visual stimuli, using the inner structures and materials of each fragment to create a unique version of the composition, a process similar to that followed by Stockhausen in his Klavierstück XI.

Eventually I came to the realization that, for this performance at least, I would have to approach the fragments as individual character pieces, rather than try to imagine them as a purely musical aggregate. At the time of writing this text, I had not seen Aryan Kaganof’s film, but I felt secure in assuming that the material he provided the composer to work with had to at least match the substance of the music that was created in response to it. Because I had no idea what the film material would be like, and because Aryan did not know what to expect from the music, we were both required to engage with a new level of creativity and creative response.

I would like to, at this point, say a few words on collaboration. According to the dictionary definition, to ‘collaborate’ is to ‘work jointly on an activity or project’. Its roots are in Latin: to labour together. According to this definition, therefore, tonight’s performances should not be viewed as the result of collaboration per se. While the three role-players in tonight’s performance event all had some level of interaction with each other, each created and interpreted materials individually, and without necessarily consulting or including the others. Aryan Kaganof and I were conceptual collaborators on this project, because the idea ultimately came to exist in its current form as a result of our joined creative efforts in conceptualising it. We did not, however, collaborate on the conceptualising and creation of the film itself. While Blake and Kaganof have a history of collaboration, in this instance they had little or no interaction, and before this evening Kaganof did not hear the music that Blake had composed. I had the opportunity to work with Michael on the Fragments and he made several suggestions, some of which I have incorporated, and some of which I have ignored because they were contrary to my own creative and musical instincts and some performative decisions I had made. Michael and I could not collaborate on the interpretation of the Fragments on a larger scale or intermedial level, of course: an essential feature of this concept was that I would not see the film or know what it contains, which meant the discussions we could have in terms of interpretation were limited.

There is also the question of personal dynamics in a collaborative project. The expertise and specializations that each individual brings to the table in such a project comes with specific personality traits, work methods and creative approaches. The negotiation of different media and creative processes go together with a negotiation of different personalities, artistic impulses, approaches and aesthetics. All these must be negotiated on some level by the collaborators. My instinct throughout this project was to allow as much personal and artistic freedom for each of the role-players as possible, and to try not to exercise too much control over the individual creative processes. Departing from the knowledge that the choice of individuals to participate in this project was a creative decision as much as a practical one, I felt secure in the knowledge that the result of the collaboration would be artistically viable, perhaps even more so if each creative personality was allowed maximum freedom.

I would suggest that Kaganof, Blake and I indeed laboured together to create tonight’s performance; it could only have existed in its current form with the presence of these specific collaborators, their specific skills and also personalities. It is my belief that the question of ‘ownership’, a recurring issue with collaborations in music and art, is circumvented in this project: all the creative material is substantial enough to exist on its own, even though it forms a coherent whole in performance. I would posit, therefore, that tonight’s performance is the one moment where the essential collaborative aspect of this conceptual performance project is revealed.

The performance you just heard, and the one which will be presented to you following this presentation, could therefore be seen as experiments in collaboration, as well as a venture into the as yet uncommon territory of conceptual music.
Contrary to the term ‘conceptual art’ which has been pervasive in art discourse since the 1960’s, conceptual music has as yet not been clearly defined, nor do many examples of this type of music exist. Conceptual art can be loosely defined as art in which the concept or idea that underwrites the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic norms and practices. Sol LeWitt, an important early exponent of the conceptual art movement, wrote in 1967 that ‘in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’ (LeWitt 1967).

I would argue that in conceptual music, contrary to conceptual art, the execution is not a ‘perfunctory affair’ but rather an essential part of the final product; while the conceptual decisions and planning is done beforehand, the concept only fully comes to fruition in the performance of the music. A feature of conceptual music, in my view, is that new music is created and performed as a result of a process of rational argument first and perhaps even foremost, and creative engagement and artistic imagination second. The idea or concept drives the creative process, leading to a performative result. The field of conceptual music is as yet still wide open and, I believe, ripe for exploration.
The process of conceptualising this project, assimilating the music and ultimately presenting it in performance has opened up many questions about my own processes of engaging with music, performance, different media and creative response. These issues will be elaborated on in my PhD thesis. I thank you for joining me this evening for this experiment – it is any artist’s dream to have an interested audience available willing to be subjected to her experiments, follies and fantasies.

from “Dual Unity” – 1972 (Freedom) –

Annette Peacock: electric bass, piano, voice -
Paul Bley: synthesizer, electric piano -

Mario Pavone. bass -
Han Bennink: drums -
Laurence Cook: drums.

6. Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down (Nonesuch)

- having successfully completed his so-called Californian trilogy Cooder continues the unexpected solo resurgence it announced by reasserting his musical pedigree in folk, blues, gospel and Tex-Mex infused roots rock as he summons the spirit of Woody Guthrie, vents his considerably enraged spleen, makes a series of pertinent political points about US foreign and financial policy via an unflattering comparison between bankers and Jesse James, a brutal Christmas protest song and, for light relief, an inch perfect imitation of John Lee Hooker, and comes up with what must be close to his best album ever

7. Juju – In Trance (Real World)

- English guitarist and desert blues producer Justin Adams and Gambian singer and riti ace Juldeh Camara made two outstanding albums as a duo, with 2007’s “Soul Science” and 2009’s “Tell No Lies” setting a benchmark that was going to be hard to keep hitting; so they formed a band, with added bass and drums, expanded the 2010 “Trance Sessions” EP to full album length without wasting a single note, even on the 15 minute Deep Sahara, and hit it again, focusing even more closely on the wailing, sawing, seemingly eternal groove and letting Camara’s ecstatic one-string fiddle take their driving, droning West African trance-blues deeper into the music’s psychedelic heart

8. P J Harvey – Let England Shake (Island)

- Harvey says that, each time she makes an album, she gets as far away from its predecessor as she can, so don’t be expecting another “White Chalk”, or even another “A Woman A Man Walked By”, actually a duo record with long time collaborator John Parish – “Let England Shake”, which features Parish, former Bad Seed Mick Harvey, a drummer (sometimes) and almost no-one else, is therefore not much like any of its predecessors in the Harvey catalogue (Polly Jean or, for that matter, Mick), even though it’s still somehow archetypal Harvey (Polly Jean) – kicking off with a title track that features a combination of auto harp, xylophone and trombone (don’t worry, guitars, drums and keyboards are just around the corner) expresses a concern that England’s “dancing days are done” because its “blood won’t rise again”, it takes a long, hard and unflinching look at England itself, its place in the world, and Harvey’s own place in it (England and, therefore, the world) and, with multiple references to war in general, and several to World War I and Gallipoli in particular, possibly to emphasize the unending cycle it represents, doesn’t much like what it sees

9. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo (Matador)

- Vile, whose cool name, which is apparently his real one, and ultra cool album title ought immediately to attract your attention, seems to have left The War On Drugs in favour of his solo career, although he plays a little on their latest record and his War On Drugs partner Adam Granduciel is in his live band (and all over this album) – the move appears to have worked well as both produced outstanding, and arguably even exceptional, albums during 2011, with Vile’s a considerable advance on his previous three and well worth the investigation that the name and title might provoke – his laconic drawl reminds me a little, despite myself, of a young, American Lloyd Cole without the studied intellectual insouciance, but his connection to an earlier pop/rock time seems more casually achieved and his indie-folk nonchalance less forced than some of those with whom he has been compared

10. Fatoumata Diawara – Fatou (World Circuit)

- Nick Gold’s unfeasibly consistent World Circuit label continues its highly impressive and almost inevitable winning streak with “Fatou”, the debut album by one of Oumou Sangare’s backing singers, born in Ivory Coast to Malian parents but relocated to Paris against their wishes to pursue a career in acting – she doesn’t wail with quite Sangare’s explosive intensity but rather tends, with great assurance, towards the more classy, pop-conventional, internationally inclusive guitar-picking singer-songwriter approach of another acclaimed European resident Malian, Rokia Traoré, as she criticizes a variety of questionable societal and cultural approaches towards women and dispenses sound advice, sometimes in parable, that appears to have been personally tested

11. Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise (Circus Company) // Ricardo Villalobos / Max Loderbauer – Re: ECM (ECM)

- Jaar is the young American/Chilean electronic musician son of a well-known visual artist, whose full length debut (there have been shorter form releases that those with greater knowledge of this music might have heard) identifies him as essentially experimental techno laced with skewed electro-pop at tempos to which it’s surely impossible (well, definitely quite hard, no matter who you are or what you’ve heard) to dance, which gives him plenty of time and space to mess around, intriguingly, attractively and, ultimately irresistibly, with a range of influences broad enough to encompass Golden Age Ethiopian jazz and a line in affecting pop melody – perhaps principal among these influences is the German/Chilean Villalobos, who was given access, with experimental musician Loderbauer, to the storied and often stunning ECM catalogue of modern, mainly European jazz and contemporary composition, ostensibly to produce a remix album – rather than attempting to be inclusive, which would have been impossible, the resultant double disc takes a relatively small coterie of ECM artists (for example, textural Norwegian pianist Christian Wallumrød, guitarist John Abercrombie, French free jazz horn player Louis Sclavis, Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, Estonian holy minimalist composer Arvo Pärt) and doesn’t so much remix their compositions as completely reinvent them, focusing on their sense rather than their specifics – Miles Davis used to talk about finding the spaces between the notes; these guys find the spaces between the spaces, and the results are as wonderful in their own way as anything else in the label’s catalogue

12. Bill Callahan – Apocalypse (Drag City)

- “Apocalypse”, Callahan’s follow-up to the brilliant “Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle”, is fairly typical … the understated baritone drawl, the strikingly melodic snatches all but buried in the deadpan delivery, the superficially simple but often impenetrable lyrics, and that’s what we would want from a man who has been ploughing this furrow for as long as he has, either in/as Smog (sometimes a band and sometimes just Callahan) or more conventionally solo under his given name – of course, that means that the quality is assured, if not for all tastes, Callahan’s acoustic singer-songwriter method having less than most of his troubadour ilk to do with conventional folk, blues, country or other rootsy tropes and more to do with art, and even arch, rock – this seems to be a kind of concept album, with songs referencing each other as he calls on Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, George Jones and Johnny Cash to help him understand what it means to be American, “derided for things I don’t believe and lauded for things I did not do”

13. Tom Waits – Bad As Me (Anti-)

- although Tom Waits’ first studio album for seven years appears to engage, and even indulge, in a certain amount of stock taking, reaching back, with a mighty gang of musical conspirators who include Keith Richards, Charlie Musslewhite and Augie Meyers who clearly just love to play this kind of battered R&B and bent out of shape rock ‘n’ roll, beyond “Swordfishtrombones”, the album that most recognize as the place where the boozy barroom philosopher-poet grew wings and the drunken midnight choir became a junkyard angel’s marching band formed by Captain Beefheart to play music composed by Harry Partch, when Waits takes stock like this sparks fly, bells ring and grown men weep for joy – according to one of the songs, “I’m the last leaf on the tree, the autumn took the rest but they won’t take me”; for the good of music itself we better pray he’s right

14. White Denim – D (Downtown)

- one of Austin, Texas’s White Denim’s defining strengths has been their ability to play the notes, beats and challenging rhythms of prog and even jazz-rock with the energy and attitude of punk and the angles of postpunk, so that the intellectually and technically complex becomes as satisfyingly straightforward and emotionally engaging as the best rock is surely meant to be – for this, their third album, they have gained a second guitarist and recorded in a proper studio for the first time, and there’s just enough of a general cleaning up that “D”, parts of which are quite breathtaking, sounds like exactly the album the first two were headed towards, so that White Denim now sounds even more like several great bands from between about 1969 and 1973 tacked onto a Meat Puppets/Mission Of Burma hybrid, only with better developed chops and ideas to burn

15. Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (Constellation)

- there’s the merest hint of the breadth of saxophonist Stetson’s musical CV in the guest appearances here, in the briefly sung and spoken sections, by Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, who has herself sung with Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists, but it doesn’t really come close to adequately paraphrasing a resumé whose credits include cross-generational rock and post-rock (Tom Waits, David Byrne, the Arcade Fire and Godspeed You! Black Emperor), folk and free jazz (Bon Iver and Anthony Braxton) and, no doubt, free range chicken squawks when the Zornian mood takes him, but, academically interesting as all that may be, it doesn’t capture, describe or adequately explain the emotional, intellectual and sheer gut response which this album is capable of generating as Stetson, his treated sax and his Evan Parker-like circular breathing and multiphonic techniques shift and drift, sonically, between the cello and the chainsaw, epic grandeur, avant-noise both human and alien, and spontaneous composition that sometimes comes close to spontaneous combustion

16. The War On Drugs – Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)

- Kurt Vile’s solo rise and apparent departure from the band, except for two guest guitar appearances here, might have the effect of drawing attention away from the fact that this is, and always has been, essentially his mate Adam Granduciel’s vehicle (Granduciel wrote everything on its debut predecessor, with just three co-writes from Vile) for expressing his admiration for Springsteenesque, Pettyish, Dylanesque classic songwriter rock and then filtering it through blissed out psychedelic layers of out of focus sonic textures, as though a thin film of My Bloody Valentine/Spacemen 3/Sonic Youth ambience had been applied to “Basement Tapes” era Bob’s vocals – Granduciel’s great advantage is that he writes songs to match

17. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints (Souterrain Transmissions)

- I suppose it’s inevitable that Erika Anderson, previously guitarist with Gowns and Amps For Christ and now recording as EMA, will be compared with Patti Smith and her many acolytes, probably because, at some level, and to those of us who remember the impact of “Horses” all those years ago (and even often to those who don’t, but understand that impact), this kind of album was once unthinkable pre- Smith that is – it’s a strikingly original solo debut, brave, powerful, confrontational, cathartic, emotionally real, raw and stark, not an easy listen, certainly, despite a musically compelling stylistic range from lo-fi acoustic through a cappella voices to enraged and distorted rock, but one that draws you in and then back again and again – whether Anderson will transcend those comparison remains to be seen, of course, but, even if she doesn’t, this was an album worth making

18. Destroyer – Kaputt (Dead Oceans) / Metronomy – The English Riviera (Because)

- I see that “Kaputt” is Canadian Dan Bejar’s ninth (or ninth-ish) album in charge of Destroyer, but I had not, consciously at least, heard them before, which seems odd given my attraction to the skewed power-pop of the New Pornographers, with whom Bejar has also been involved – the upshot of that is that I can’t compare “Kaputt” with any previous Destroyer album; I can, however, compare it with several albums from the ’80s that I once liked quite a lot in the days when sonic polish used to impress me, as long as it wasn’t being applied to disguise a lack of substance … albums like Steely Dan’s “Gaucho”, and perhaps even their earlier “Aja”, Roxy Music’s “Avalon” and the first couple of albums by Prefab Sprout – these are, for the most part, “Kaputt”’s templates in sound and style, and it copes extremely well, both in reproducing their sonic and stylistic essence and in avoiding sounding like a mere imitation or pastiche – the album, whose long closing track Bejar has described as “ambient disco”, is elegant and indulgent (particularly if you get the edition with the additional 20 minute track), but packed with musical and lyrical wit and intelligence and the realization that, if you apply too much polish it’s hard to get a foothold – this, along with the lesson that too much sugar eventually hurts your ears as well as your teeth, is one that Metronomy, who operate in vaguely similar terrain, except that their sheen is usually electronically applied, and their languid West Coast is England’s west coast … Devon, to be precise, where Joseph Mount grew up, have also learned well – electronic pop, even electronic pop with the accent on the songs rather than the dancefloor, always seems to me to be on the verge of becoming something I’m not going to like, yet I have liked “The English Riviera” from the moment I first heard it

19. Panda Bear – Tomboy (Pawtracks) / tUnE-yArDs – W H O K I L L (4AD)

- voices, celestial and visceral, intuitive and instinctive, solo or stacked, raw and untended or looped, treated and irretrievably altered, and used as much for their own sake and because of the sound they make as in service of the song on which they’re making it, are what connects these albums – Panda Bear is Noah Lennox of the Animal Collective, whose previous, Brian Wilson saluting “Person Pitch” remains a favourite and whose “Tomboy”, with some of the most gorgeous harmonies anywhere, is headed that way too, with the only concern being that, because the sound is so fantastic, I find myself allowing the songs to run into each other and approaching the album rather as an overall sonic experience rather than a collection of discrete songs, which could be my fault rather than that of the songs – Tune-Yards is Merrill Garbus of, well, of tUnE-yArDs (which is how she insists on writing it; so, too, that letter-by-letter spelling of the album title – the fact that she and her album easily overcome such foolishness is a measure of their excellence), a ukulele playing percussionist and live and studio sound manipulator with one of the most honest to God stop you in your tracks voices of the year (I had not heard her before this, her second release) whose varied, pop-hybridized sonic and rhythmic approach has some wanting to call what she does World Music – I’m content simply to regard it as terrific music

20. Yuck – Yuck (Fat Possum)

- according to a message scratched into a Smiths’ vinyl run-off groove (and yes, I do know that it wasn’t originally theirs), talent borrows, but genius steals – that these Pavement (and Dinosaur Jr, and several others from that general musical era and area) soundalikes make this list when the new and perfectly fine album by Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus doesn’t (and the one by Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis probably only did as a bracketed companion with Thurston Moore’s) might say less about the music itself than it does about the way I listen to it, but I can’t help loving the way these young Brits have arrowed into to the very essence of ’90s independent American rock and borrowed not only enough to make their influences absolutely obvious, but to have created something that stood out from the 2011 rock landscape as fresh and thrilling, if not entirely new and original – not quite genius, then, but talent, certainly

21. Aziz Sahmaoui & University Of Gnawa – Aziz Sahmaoui & University Of Gnawa (General Pattern)

- once a member of both Paris’s highly regarded North African music ensemble, the Orchestre National De Barbés, and Joe Zawinul’s world/jazz fusion Syndicate, Moroccan multi-instrumentalist Sahmaoui draws on both for his first solo album, in the company of Senegalese musicians, the University of Gnawa, who, allied to his use of the distinctive Malian ngoni as virtually his default instrument, emphasize the West African roots of the Moroccan gnawa trance music that he combines with desert blues, reggae, surf guitar, Maghrebi pop and several other styles to produce pan-African music of the highest order

22. Joe Henry – Reverie (Anti-)

- where the concern was once that everything Henry did might be eclipsed by his family connection with Madonna, the fear must now be that his fast growing production CV (Bettye LaVette, Mary Gauthier, Allen Toussaint) might overshadow his superb songwriting, evident on a dozen albums over 25 years, once country rock but now a jazz-tinged take on folk, blues and pop noir, and getting better all the time – for “Reverie” he simplifies things sonically by sticking to a small acoustic group (he says this is his first album for a while that he has been able to play right through on guitar) as his skill behind a desk ensures that the album sounds wonderful, while his talent for making wise, sharp and frequently poetic observations about the world and his (and our) place in it ensures that the songs more than match the production – when he says that he was listening to Ellington and Sinatra in preparation for this album, there’s absolutely no sense that he might have been aiming too high

23. Beirut – The Rip Tide (Pompeii)

- having loved both the idea and the execution of Zach Condon’s first two albums in a Beirut disguise that has always sounded like a band even when it wasn’t, I did wonder how long he/they would be able to sustain what was a very particular sonic concept, that of an American musician’s memories, principally via Mexican mariachi and Eastern European tonalities filtered through Italian romanticism and French flavour, of living in New Mexico and visiting old Europe – this gorgeous album, Beirut’s third, whose overall feel may best be summed up in the line from East Harlem quoted in the booklet (“she’s waiting for the night to fall / let it fall, I’ll never make it in time”), comes after a lapse, interrupted only by a couple of EPs, of four years, and what is most noticeable is that, although the more obvious foreign influences have gone, the sound of the band and the focus of the clearly maturing songwriting seems pretty much the same, suggesting either that these were always Beirut’s to begin with or that the band has so completely assimilated their effect and moulded them to its own purposes that those influences have achieved precisely what influences are meant to

24. Thurston Moore – Demolished Thoughts (Matador) / J Mascis – Several Shades Of Why (Sub Pop)

- Moore, with Sonic Youth, whose future seems uncertain following the end of his marriage to band member Kim Gordon, and Mascis, with Dinosaur Jr, were at the forefront of extreme guitar volume in independent rock in the ’80s and ’90s; however, Moore’s previous major solo release, “Trees Outside the Academy”, saw him exploring a quieter, acoustic approach, while still admitting a certain amount of noise, some of it made by Mascis’s guest guitar, into the mix, but his principle collaborator on the record was violinist Samara Lubelski, once of intriguing but short lived ’90s band the Sonora Pine – Lubelski’s is once again the main supportive instrumental voice on “Demolished Thoughts”, an album that concentrates even more closely on Moore’s quieter side, albeit one that still features strong textural links with Sonic Youth, but whose exceptional Beck production (he also produced the year’s Stephen Malkmus album) makes it a significant sonic advance on its predecessor – Mascis himself gets plenty of assistance, from Kurt Vile and members of Band Of Horses and Black Heart Procession and others, for his own second acoustic solo disc, which reveals, all over again, his considerable melodic abilities, still delivered in that trademark laconic, half-stoned drawl and as attractive without the earsplitting guitar attack as they were with it

25. The Low Anthem – Smart Flesh (Bella Union)

- I understand how some might find this group insufferably precious … the glacial tempos and sepulchral harmonies, the sepia tinted memory of an imaginary but easily imagined past, the use of arcane and archaic instrumentation as implements to provide colour rather than to really play, the vacant pasta sauce factory that served as a studio, the appropriation of Leonard Cohen style (Burn) and Gram Parsons tune (Apothecary Tune), even the out of focus lisp (Smart Flesh) – then again, all of that’s exactly what convinced me that the Low Anthem might be a group with legs and that this album’s predecessor, the gorgeous “Oh My God, Charlie Darwin”, wasn’t an exquisite flash in the pan

26. Dawes – Nothing Is Wrong (ATO/Loose) / Jonathan Wilson – Gentle Spirit (Bella Union)

- the first time I heard Dawes (support act for Jackson Browne and backing band for Robbie Robertson) and was immediately drawn to the first two songs on “Nothing Is Wrong” I wondered whether this wasn’t Counting Crows all over again … you know, instant response to their apparent grasp of and facility with a certain area of ’70 rock classicism, followed quite quickly by the realization that this isn’t such a clever trick after all – well, by the time I got to the last track, A Little Bit Of Everything, I was completely hooked, and have remained that way ever since, and that’s even though it deliberately sounds like (but isn’t) mid ’70s Warren Zevon on piano and David Lindley on lap steel; in fact, it’s because their songs are so good that they easily get away with that sort of thing – they’re beautifully produced by Jonathan Wilson whose own album suggests that there might be nobody around who understands the bittersweet tunefulness of that classic Laurel Canyon sound better, or can reproduce it more accurately without resorting to trope or cliché – though its length still makes me wonder if it doesn’t drift and float just a little too much, its evocation of David Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name …” and even parts of Gene Clark’s “No Other” while retaining its own character bode extremely well for young men coming to the Canyon

27. Zomby – Dedication/Nothing EP (4AD) // SBTRKT – SBTRKT (Young Turks) // James Blake – James Blake (Atlas)

- from the point of view of an outsider, labels seem extraordinarily important in electronic music; every minute shift in the landscape seems to generate a new sub-category (alter the bpm by one or two, the model sampler you use by a few months or perhaps as little as the key and everybody’s running around looking for a new way to describe what you’re doing) – these three are all British musicians working in a field known as post-dubstep that many commentators agree is too broadly encompassing and ill-defined to be a meaningful characterization, even for electronic music, but none of this has changed the fact that Zomby (mainly instrumental, lots of techno references), SBTRKT (some songs, but mainly fairly conventional pop/soul vocals by outside guests) and James Blake (all songs, including a great cover of one by his father, ’60s/’70s jazz rocker James Litherland – Colosseum, Mogul Thrash etc – but using his own heavily treated and manipulated vocals) have taken up an inordinate amount of my listening time, and that each time I listen the imagination at work impresses me more

28. Megafaun – Megafaun (Crammed Discs)

- Megafaun, formed by the band members left behind when Justin Vernon left DeYarmond Edison to become Bon Iver, have taken three albums and an EP to settle into a style that really suits them on a fairly consistent basis, but I wouldn’t dare to predict that this record’s unassuming, open air, rolling country flavoured rock (some have suggested “American Beauty” era Grateful Dead though one song uses the exact tune of Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer) will necessarily be the way of the Megafaun future; the undeniably skilful use of melody and harmony is still leavened, though not as much as previously, by free noise, found sound and primitively plunked banjos, Scorned pays tribute to the Staples Singers without making Megafaun a soul or gospel outfit, the horns on Isadora suggest there might be another new direction in the offing, the closing Everything is gospel and who knows what to make of the hidden track in the context of a career path – for now, though, it’s more than focused enough

29. Aurelio – Laru Beya (Real World)

- the untimely death, a few years ago, of Andy Palacio from Belize robbed Garifuna music of its most internationally visible ambassador just as he was becoming internationally visible but, on the strength of this record, his third, Aurelio Martinez from Honduras, also the first black man to become a deputy in that country’s National Congress, who contributed backing vocals to Palacio’s breakthrough album “Watina”, is more than ready to take up the mantle – the Garifuna are a Central American people descended from shipwrecked West African slaves and their music is an intoxicating mix of West African (there are telling guest appearances from Youssou N’Dour and members of his band), Caribbean (including reggae) and Latin American styles – all it needs is exposure

30. Laurie Levine – Six Winters (Rhythm)

- in the year when the rest of the business made Adele the broken relationship queen of the world, my own favourite break up album was made by Laurie Levine, a Johannesburg singer-songwriter whose previous musical career was as an ethnomusicologist specializing in South African traditional music (she published a book on the subject) and, for two albums, as a purveyor of decent quality local pop that never suggested for a moment that she might have a “Six Winters” in her – an inch perfect production by Dan Roberts sees to the album’s sound, but it’s the startling leap in maturity and consistency of the material Levine gave him to work with that brings me back to it over and over again – whether or not they’re deliberate, there are distinct traces, and sometimes more, of the likes of Julie Miller, Mary Gauthier and especially Joanna Newsom in a Levine delivery that gets the balance between confidence and uncertainty, fragility and steely resolve exactly right, and which demonstrates, if nothing else, that she has found, in folk, country and general roots orientated styles, a context that fits her writing like a glove

31. Barn Owl – Lost In The Glare (Thrill Jockey) / White Hills – H-p1 (Thrill Jockey)

- there’s nothing that invigorates the soul (or syringes the ears) quite like guitars turned up as far as they’ll go and being allowed to drone and feed back symphonically and in accordance with some greater musical plan that will possibly only be revealed on the Day of Judgment; a friend calls it voice of God guitar and Barn Owl, with more than a cursory nod to the influence of Alice Coltrane, have a plentiful supply of it and, more importantly, an understanding of what to do with it so that it ultimately all coheres in a huge, hypnotic roar that, cosmic though it clearly is, is as much Anglo-American space rock as German kosmische musik – White Hills have been memorably and perhaps aptly criticized by somebody else as “running a marathon around a riff” … which they do; “H-p1” is a long, intense album consisting of long, intense tracks and my version comes with an additional disc containing more of much the same but, if they might be able to stand some editorial intervention, that might defeat the point – White Hills have much to say about the state of the world, and say it mainly through their guitars while delivering several moments of epic, if noisy, magnificence amid the commotion and clamour

32. Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx – We’re New Here (XL) / Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (Sub Pop)

- this entry could conceivably be considered a representation of the future of hip-hop as seen through the eyes of its past as Jamie Smith of London’s the xx doesn’t just remix, but, in some respects, deconstructs rap forefather Scott-Heron’s final album, the dark, claustrophobic but still hopeful “I’m New Here”, rebuilding it into something that, as the title submits, is in fact new and shiny (sadly, Scott-Heron died shortly after its release), and turning it into something of an electronic music primer as he runs the gamut of styles and beats, while the brooding, ominous, at times downright menacing Shabazz Palaces, the new musical home of Seattle rapper Butterfly from early ’90s favourites Digable Planets and the first hip-hop act signed by renowned hometown indies Sub Pop, use a vast array of traditional (including the jazz favoured by the Planets) and electronic but mainly abstract sources and effects to fashion a superb if unpredictable and unsettling record that retains just enough rootedness in the past as it points the way to a sonically adventurous future

33. Dub Colossus – Addis Through The Looking Glass (Real World)

- former Transglobal Undergrounder Nick Page’s first album in this incarnation, which seamlessly and superbly mixed reggae and dub rhythms with the Ethiopian music of that country’s musical Golden Age, was a cultural exchange so obvious it came as a shock to realize it might not have been done before – terrific reworkings of reggae classics the Abyssinians’ Satta Massagana and Althea & Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking notwithstanding, this second, influenced perhaps by the recent Western profile of the so-called Godfather of Ethio-jazz, pianist Mulatu Astatke, seems more like a jazz record – either way, a great idea is once again matched by nearly flawless execution

34. Bon Iver – Bon Iver (4AD / Jagjaguwar)

- the much anticipated successor, more than three years down the line, to the remarkable “For Emma, Forever Ago”, has caused a fair amount of division among both critics and Justin Vernon’s long standing fans – it’s a far more polished affair, a factor that no doubt contributed to its No 2 US chart placing and subsequent, if still unexpected, Grammy (although his presence on a Kanye West record won’t have harmed his prospects there) but, equally, it’s also a much more prosaic affair, from the title down to the deliberately AOR/MOR production on the last track, which always leaves me feeling at least slightly irritated but might have been what hooked the Grammy voters; to combine two views I have heard expressed, it sounds like David Foster producing Bruce Hornsby – but, all of that aside, and even if it doesn’t have the backwoods back story of the debut, it is, nevertheless, an extremely attractive record with several songs of real quality and a good deal more flesh and blood about them than might have been expected of the artist

35. Arbouretum – The Gathering (Thrill Jockey) / Wooden Shjips – West (Thrill Jockey)

- for their third album for Thrill Jockey and their fourth overall, Arbouretum have replaced one of their guitarists with keyboards, adopting a somewhat more textured feel to their open structures and simple, droning, distorted folk-infused melodies – clothing allegorical lyrics influenced by the writings of Carl Jung and Jimmy Webb (there is an unexpected and unexpectedly convincing rethink of Webb’s The Highwayman) in equally dense and mysterious arrangements set to a relentless tread that is deliberate but never ponderous, the album represents an important, if incremental, advance on its predecessors and, heavy as it is, it never seems excessively loud, something that the band apparently rectifies in live performance – the Wooden Shjips, whose own keyboards are garage psychedelic rather than atmospheric ambient, are now on their own third full length album, but their first in a proper studio with a proper engineer – driving their riffing, snaking guitars to levels of intensity and volume that match anyone you can think of, they churn rather than rumble, channelling their inner Elevators (and Stooges) a little like the Black Angels do, for example, but with Suicide (who didn’t even have guitars) and krautrock (which did, but not where the Wooden Shjips put them) replacing the Doors as the other critical stylistic component – the added clarity and focus provided by the more conventional recording experience has made a significant difference

36. Wilco – The Whole Love (dBpm/Anti-)

- six and seven studio albums in, Wilco, once a band that promised the earth, moon and stars (the brilliance of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and “A Ghost Is Born”), seemed to be settling for the first mentioned as it drifted too far from its promise, and premise, for comfort, even though it still made records that were eminently worth hearing and owning – this eighth at least suggests, without quite demonstrating it conclusively, that they haven’t forsaken experimentation, noisy extemporization or the employment of edge in the service of the kind of comfortably sturdy songwriting that Jeff Tweedy appears to be able to do with his eyes closed

40. The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (History Always Favours The Winners)

- electronic musician James Kirby took the Caretaker moniker from the Jack Nicholson character in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”, using the ghostly ballroom scene as the template for his fascination with describing musically the way that memory works – this album, inspired by a study that suggested that Alzheimers sufferers remember things better in the context of music, arranges and layers excerpts from pre-war ballroom and parlour music 78s, treats them ever so slightly, draws attention to their physical deterioration by emphasizing their clicks and pops and then invites us to listen – the fact that contemporary listeners will probably never actually have heard this music before, other than as some sort of imagined soundtrack to somebody else’s life, is unimportant as the eerie, hauntological results nevertheless produce a strangely satisfying sense of nostalgia and, oddly, a desire to listen again and again

37. The Decemberists – The King Is Dead (Rough Trade)

- the last couple of Decemberists albums have probably been too elaborate for their own good – pretentious was becoming a fairly easy way for the unconverted to describe them and arguments pointing out Colin Meloy’s lyrical erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge of British folk and folk-rock were beginning to sound hollow, even to believers, so “The King Is Dead”, which kicks off like an old fashioned Neil Young record, references American music not too far from the interesting mainstream, and has songs you can actually sing along to, is a welcome change, perhaps even a breath of fresh air – the jangling presence of Peter Buck ensures that a couple of the songs sound like classic R.E.M., or at least bands like 10 000 Maniacs when they sounded like R.E.M., while the backing voice of Gillian Welch and, occasionally, David Rawlings add country-folk cred to what was becoming a bit of a prog-folk band – Meloy still writes lyrics that are impenetrable without a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to hand but, as arguably the year’s most penetrative lyric (by Dawes, not the Decemberists) points out, there’s no point in trying to make out every word when you should simply hum along – at least you can this time

38. Paul Simon – So Beautiful Or So What (Decca)

- heading towards his 70th birthday Simon hooked up again with veteran producer Phil Ramone and, with a judicious mixture of old fashioned craftsmanship and modern production, Indian and West African musical references, old time blues and gospel samples (including, memorably, a seventy year old Rev JM Gates sermon) and some of his best lyrics for years, which reflect on where he’s been (there’s a brief but obvious nod to his early I Am A Rock), where he is (in a world where a damaged Vietnam vet regrets the path his life has taken while a new generation spends Christmas in Iraq as those at home face an uncertain financial future) and where he’s headed (The Afterlife, with eyes on the prize but tongue firmly in cheek), made possibly his best album since “Graceland”

39. Drive-By Truckers – Go-Go Boots (ATO/PIAS) / Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – Here We Rest (Lightning Rod)

- hard on the heels of “The Big To-Do”, the Truckers continue to impress as a remarkably prolific and consistent source of some of the best rock in the American South – “Go-Go Boots”, which states its business by featuring a tribute to Patterson Hood’s father David’s brilliant but underappreciated Muscle Shoals country soul mate Eddie Hinton, is a mite slower and more soulful, but no less searing, than its predecessor, with Hood the younger continuing to contribute from an apparently endless well of fine songwriting, Mike Cooley pitching in, as ever, with a couple of plainspoken standouts and the ever improving Shonna Tucker impressing more with each outing – the problem with former Trucker and Tucker spouse Isbell seems to be that there’s only one of him and, while he apparently has two or three killer songs in him per record, he tends then to fill them up with tough and well played but somewhat generic roots rock – not at all bad, therefore, but anybody expecting him to repeat his top Truckers form of Outfit, Decoration Day, Danko/Manuel and The Day John Henry Died all at once is going to wind up disappointed

41. Joe Lovano / Us Five – Bird Songs (Blue Note)

- not quite a straight tribute to the bop genius (Bird played alto), veteran tenorist Lovano and his exceptional young band investigate, instead, without resorting to a single bop cliché, a few of the possibilities of music composed by or for Charlie Parker, or closely associated with him, reinventing Donna Lee as a ballad, mercilessly messing with the classic Moose The Mooche, playing three short Parker themes as a round, trebling the length of Yardbird Suite through a cornucopia of melodic, rhythmic and stylistic variations, and playing the Aulochrome, the first horn designed to harmonise with itself

42. Nils Økland / Sigbjørn Apeland – Lysøen: Hommage à Ole Bull (ECM) / Andrew Cronshaw – The Unbroken Surface Of Snow (Cloud Valley)

- Norwegians Økland (violin and his country’s wonderfully resonant Hardanger fiddle) and Apeland (piano and harmonium, including one that belonged to Norway’s great 19th century composer Ole Bull) pay tribute to Bull and Lysøen, the island which he owned, where he lived in idyllic contemplation and where this album was recorded, by way of the folk music that inspired him, and mainly by way of meditative reflection that suggests rather than flaunts the vast sweep and grandeur and allegedly unparalleled beauty of the place – English composer and multi-instrumentalist Cronshaw, a much admired figure on the fringes of the British folk scene for many years, irregularly emerging from the shadows into the half-light to release intriguing and often sonically audacious albums (this is his first for seven years, since the splendid “Ochre”), is not on the ECM label but, on this evidence, shares many of its sensibilities; a regular writer about Scandinavian music, he accurately evokes the album’s title here by combining the folk tunes of Finland with those of Armenia, interrupted briefly for a solo meditation, on zither, on an old Scottish tune, in a series of long, languid and lovely compositions (the title track lasts more than half an hour) in the company of Armenian duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan

43. Derek Gripper – The Sound Of Water (New Cape)

- perennially nurtured and nourished by the sounds and moods of its Western Cape surroundings, Gripper’s nylon string acoustic guitar finds a kindred spirit in the traditional folk-fuelled compositions of the brilliant Brazilian Egberto Gismonti, compositions which it seems to have been born to play – still more impressively, Gripper’s own explorations, especially Joni, Copenhagen and Anna Magdalena, referencing Mesdames Mitchell, Madosini and Bach respectively, mine an equally rich seam, uncovering similar depths of soul in the process

44. Martin Simpson – Purpose + Grace (Topic)

- “Prodigal Son” and “True Stories”, which lifted him, once and for all, into the very top tier of folk artists, were always going to be hard, if not impossible to top, so Simpson, whose dual command of British and American styles has few, if any, peers, has consolidated instead – confining his writing to a couple of banjo jaunts this time, he invites along three mighty mates in Dick Gaughan, June Tabor, with whom he reprises and even surpasses an earlier collaboration on Richard Thompson’s Strange Affair, and Thommo himself, and then gets the first two to sing while he plays, something that only someone with supreme confidence in his own abilities would have dared, and only someone with the ability to match that confidence would have pulled off – as if that wasn’t enough, he also finds new and bright gold in the frequently tarnished In The Pines, Little Liza Jane and Barbry Allen, so ,while this might be something of a holding pattern for Simpson, if aeroplanes adopted holding patterns this engrossing you’d never want them to land

45. Okkervil River – I Am Very Far (Jagjaguwar)

- having struggled for months to get a proper handle on this album despite the fact that I had never met an Okkervil River record I didn’t end up loving, the fact that the band’s previous effort had been as the great Roky Erickson’s backing band and the not unimportant consideration that a couple of trusted Okkervil River fans of my acquaintance rated it highly, I decided to stick it on the short list for this exercise anyway and give it another shot later – having done so, but with proportionally reduced expectations, I found myself starting to fall in love with it after all and now it at least sounds like a really good collection of songs, if not quite a great album – some of it still sounds big and bombastic and overwrought and unfocused and it’s still no “Stage Names”, but who has more than one of those in them anyway?

46. Chris Thile & Michael Daves – Sleep With One Eye Open (Nonesuch) / Andy Statman – Old Brooklyn (Shefa)

- the level of sheer, barely believable brilliance on these two albums (Statman’s is a double) from arguably the two hottest pickers in the business will have mandolin fans salivating, once they pick up their jaws, but the quality of the overall musicianship will impress even those who can’t tell a mandolin from a ukulele from a cittern, even from a banjo – the Thile/Daves disc is as heartfelt a tribute to the brother duets of pre- and early bluegrass as, oh, probably “Skaggs & Rice” at least, fashioned with fun, love, respect, energy, enthusiasm and skill levels you can hardly credit; Statman, almost as breathtaking on the clarinet as he is on the mandolin and one of my favourite musicians anywhere, kicks off like Albert Ayler has joined the parking lot pickers at Merlefest and then broadens out into an ever-changing, ever-imaginative mélange of bluegrass and old timey, blues and free jazz, klezmer, Jewish religious music and New Orleans funk, a ’50s R&B hit and a cross-denominational hymn by the composer of Amazing Grace, all in the company of a stellar musical cast and a tea kettle – astonishing!

47. William Elliott Whitmore – Field Songs (Anti-) / Frank Fairfield – Out On The Open West (Tompkins Square)

- what sets Whitmore and Fairfield apart from many similar artists using the Old, Weird America as their musical template is not only that they really do sound as though they recorded their songs during a day or two’s sabbatical from some ’20s medicine show, though with better recording equipment, but that this isn’t any kind of shtick … it’s how they naturally sound – Fairfield, whose songs feel like they come from the same seemingly endless supply of “Unheard Ofs And Forgotten Abouts” that he collects and has released under that title, could be the direct musical descendant of Frank Hutchison, generally considered the first white recorded bluesman (as long as you accept that white blues was a forerunner of country), except that he’s also a fine fiddle and banjo player – Whitmore’s entire approach might be summed up in two of his album titles, his musical range by “Hymns For The Hopeless” and his basic philosophy by “Ashes To Dust”, except that there’s a whole lot we can do between ashes and dust to make the world a better place, if we only have the faith, the foresight and the fortitude – if it’s not too much of a contradiction, this kind of authenticity often sounds fake but, if the young John Fahey could fool the blues community into believing that his alter ego, Blind Joe Death, was in fact an ancient bluesman, you get the impression that Whitmore and especially Fairfield could do the same to old time rural music collectors looking for long lost recordings by bootleggers or fire and brimstone preachers holed up in impossibly remote Appalachian hollers

48. Mary Hampton – Folly (Teaspoon) / Bella Hardy – Songs Lost And Stolen (Navigator)

- Hampton and Hardy are two young English folk musicians whose debut albums, released in 2008 and 2007 respectively, arrived more or less like bolts from the blue (although real cognoscenti will tell you that the singing, writing, fiddle playing Hardy had been a BBC Young Folk Awards finalist a few years earlier) and received uncommon praise, Hardy being compared with a young June Tabor and Hampton drawing a rave review from no less than Eliza Carthy – so, these follow-ups have been eagerly awaited, and very nearly live up to expectations, the difficulty being that, when the debuts are as startling as theirs were, those expectations can be unrealistically high – just as the most impressive song on Hardy’s first, among her outstanding renditions of mainly traditional material, was one she had written herself in a traditional style, so The Herring Girl stands out here, though this time its companions are all self written – Hampton’s songwriting has always come from a weird and ethereal place, to match her arrangements and delivery, so it’s no surprise that the only traditional song here, accompanied by sampled birdsong, sounds like one of her own – it’s therefore perfectly in keeping that she also sings an Emily Dickinson poem and a spiritual learned from Blind Mamie Forehand that sounds nothing at all like its source

49. Dave Alvin- Eleven Eleven (Yep Roc) / Steve Earle – I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive (New West) / Joe Ely – Satisfied At Last (Rack ‘Em) / Tom Russell – Mesabi (Shout! Factory)

- sometimes you just have to trust what you know – I’ve been listening to these wonderful folk/blues/country/roots rock songwriters for so long that I sometimes find myself taking them for granted, particularly when it comes to compiling lists like this one, so let me correct that – Alvin, who reunites for one rowdy, roughneck song with Blaster brother Phil, makes his best for a decade or more; I had the good fortune to hear Russell play some of these songs live and his remarkable consistency never falters as he uses the background of his youthful discovery of Bob Dylan (Bob’s hometown of Hibbing is in Mesabi iron ore country) and the career choice this spearheaded to split his record between growing up near Hollywood and living in a Tex-Mex border town; Ely’s album, the high point of which is a superb version of Leo And Leona, one of Flatlander compadre Butch Hancock’s best story songs, re-establishes him as lord of the Texas highway; and, if Earle, whose decision to name his after Hank Williams’ last single was either brave or plain reckless, seems to be treading water, where that water is in The Gulf Of Mexico, one of the year’s best protest songs, or the post flood New Orleans, that’ll do nicely as well

50. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine (Domino) / Richard Buckner – Our Blood (Merge)

- after agonizing for days over which of these was going to occupy the final place on the list and finding myself completely unable to make a decision as to which to drop, there was really no option but to include both – actually, they do have a few things in common: firstly, both are by independent songwriters who have made a lot of albums, although the darkly introverted American Buckner’s ten (but his first for five years) can’t compete with King Creosote, who owns a record label, Fence Records, is therefore a member of the Fence Collective of independent Scottish folk singers and of the Burns Unit and whose real life identity, Kenny Anderson, estimates that he might have released forty or more records in less than a decade and a half, although this collaboration with the much higher profiled electronic composer and producer Jon Hopkins is the first to have really been noticed; secondly, both feature a considerable amount of unobtrusive but highly effective electronic intervention, Creosote’s by virtue of his collaborator’s pedigree, Buckner’s homemade version a little more primitive by virtue of the fact that the first and second versions of the recordings for the album were lost due to mechanical breakdown and computer theft; thirdly and most crucially, they are both among the most gorgeously melodic and lyrically compelling of any I heard during the year

1. Mickey Newbury – An American Trilogy (Saint Cecilia/Drag City)

- the Nashville transplanted Texan Newbury, who once said (despite possessing a really fine, if typically understated voice) that he was a writer who sings, rather than a singer-songwriter, was certainly more heard about than heard, best known for writing hits for singers like Kenny Rogers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Jones and dozens more, for stitching together the American Trilogy that turned into an Elvis Presley Vegas showstopper, for providing a way into the business for Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt and for having had his songs covered by Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson , Solomon Burke and hundreds of others – according to him he was successful enough by 1970 to have retired, but he continued to put out albums of his own anyway and, between 1969 and 1973, he released three, each soulfully restrained, impeccably crafted and beautifully written, “Looks Like Rain”, the truly exceptional “Frisco Mabel Joy” and “Heaven Help The Child”, that have been hard to find more or less ever since, but that have hardly been bettered by any American songwriter I can think of – this box set remasters all three of them from tapes previously thought to have been destroyed and adds a fourth disc of demos for what, for me, was easily, with the Beach Boys’ “Smile”, which falls into a category all of its own, the reissue event of the year

2. The Beach Boys – The Smile Sessions (Capitol)

- it used to be possible to claim that the best pop album ever conceived only really existed in its composer’s head, Smile legendarily being the post Pet Sounds record that Brian Wilson was never able to complete because, not to put too fine a point on it, it drove him mad – well here, at long last, following the use over the years of various excerpts on official Beach Boys albums, the reasonably wide availability of several bootleg versions of varying degrees of quality and “completeness” and Wilson’s own 2004 re-recording of it (an event, certainly, but one that had to be viewed against the realization that the singer was 37 years older and the musicians were entirely different from those for whom the music had been conceived), here it is, in all sorts of versions detailing various portions of the recording process all the way up to a massively expensive multi CD/vinyl and fancy artwork set for which you’ll have to take out a second bond – in fact the double disc box does the trick, containing all the songs, a lot of the groundwork, a bit of the studio discussion and a Smile button – and the music? – well, it’s both all anybody could seriously have hoped for (I have to confess to having owned an almost complete bootleg of it for years, though the sound here is, of course, radically improved) and yet, inevitably after four or more decades of hype, a trifle disappointing; however, if some of it suggests that Wilson may already have been mad when he recorded it, enough of it displays the mark of real pop genius to make it, even now, a crucial part of any decent record collection

3. Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Tell My Sister (Nonesuch) / Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Odditties (Querbeservice)

- the McGarrigle sisters’ eponymous 1975 debut album seemed just about perfect and, if anything, time has treated its mixture of French-Canadian/Appalachian/other American folk and nostalgic pop and parlour song inspired originals, where unfathomable sadness turns into and unrestrained joy and back at the pluck of a banjo, the bleat of an accordion or a blast on the tenor saxophone, so well that it seems absolutely timeless – because perfection is impossible to top, the follow-up, “Dancer With Bruised Knees”, which was nearly as good and not just a repeat, has always struggled in the light of the expectation generated by that debut – but the sound of perfection can be bettered, as demonstrated by “Tell My Sister”, a beautiful remastering of the two records that adds a third disc of 21 demos and previously unreleased songs and versions that clearly reveal the remarkable quality of the as yet unproduced raw material and contextualize the debut in a way that arguably even enhances it – “Odditties” is a decent if inessential collection of the kind of songs the two would sing together for fun, or for the occasional side project that might present itself

4. The Smiths – Complete (Rhino)

- all eight albums (four studio, one live, three compilations), each superbly remastered, packaged in a replica of its original vinyl cover and housed in a box; there’s nothing more to know, except that this is unquestionably now the only way to own the output of Britain’s most important band of the ’80s

5. Amédé Ardoin – Mama, I’ll Be Long Gone: The Complete Recordings 1929-1934 (Tompkins Square)

- according to some, the historically crucial but biographically mysterious Ardoin, whose relatives continue his name and his accordion legacy in Louisiana today, the younger Ardoins combining it with funk and hip-hop, may have lost his mind following a racist beating and died in 1941in the same institution that saw the end of unrecorded early jazz icon Buddy Bolden twenty years earlier, but, in just a few sessions, across five years, he recorded 34 timeless songs, full of lonesome blues and high, keening longing, and pulsating dance tunes, many with white fiddler Dennis McGee, that are little short of Cajun music’s Rosetta Stone – you can easily imagine this sound issuing forth from the porches, prairies, swamps and especially the dancehalls of south-west Louisiana as far back as even oral history can remember

6. Home Service – Live 1986 (Fledg’ling)

- quintessentially English, with a Northern brass band styled horn section replacing the usual fiddle in their electric folk lineup, the fiercely political Home Service, out of the Albion Country Band and led by the wonderful voice and songwriting of John Tams and the slightly rockist, almost prog-folk electric guitar of former Gryphon man Graeme Taylor, Home Service were made for ’80s Britain, where theirs, notionally at least, was the perfect anti-Thatcher soundtrack, anthemic but dignified, uncompromising without being rabble-rousing, an implacable voice of reason amidst the inflamed and inflammatory polemic – this recording, from the 1986 Cambridge Folk Festival, rescued from a cassette that remained forgotten and deteriorating in a cupboard for a quarter of a century, has led to the group’s triumphant reformation; its naturally flawed but perfectly acceptable sound quality only adds to the atmosphere and to the story

7. Various – This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel On 45rpm 1957-1982 (Tompkins Square)

- 72 songs, mainly from the ’60s and ’70s, recorded cheaply and released and distributed privately, locally or, at best, to a significantly limited audience, across three CDs and nearly four hours that present, not only raw, but also raucous, real, rare and devoid of any artifice whatsoever, gospel music before it wimped out in abject genuflection at the altar of the mainstream record industry – these largely unknown voices, unshakably passionate, fantastically soulful, fanatically convicted but also driven sometimes from the very peak of ecstasy to the very brink of despair, and waging constant war with the devil, might just change your life

Hansel and Gretel are alive and well
And they’re living in Berlin
She is a cocktail waitress
He had a part in a Fassbinder film
And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin
And she says: Hansel, you’re really bringing me down
And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch
He says: I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend
When my one and only love was the wicked witch.
She said: What is history?
And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress