Night After Night

Playlist.

A weekly tally of memorable things Steve Smith has stuck in his ears.

Tom Carter - 58 Minutes Over Brussels (self-released Bandcamp subscriber exclusive; 2018)

Bobby Previte - Rhapsody (RareNoise; 2018)

Sonar with David Torn - Vortex (RareNoise; 2018)

Kassel Jaeger - Retroactions (Éliane Tapes/Moving Furniture; 2018)

Dante Boon - Düsseldorf recital (Rhizome.s; 2017)
> Coleman Zurkowski – Die von Blumen reich ich dir; Gil Sansón – untitled (for Antoine Beuger); Anastassis Philippakopoulos – piano piece; Eva-Maria Houben – lose verbunden; Assaf Gidron – Dim.; Jack Callahan – Blue Dream Excerpt with Proportional Ending

The Residents - Meet the Residents (Ralph/Cherry Red; 1974/2018)

Graham Lambkin - No Better No Worse (Vol 1) (self-released; 2018)

Simon Cummings - Studies, Vol. 5 (Interrobang; 2017)

Kevin Drumm - Frozen Pipes (self-released; 2018)

Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Cello Concerto "en forme de pas de trois" - Heinrich Schiff, SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden/Michael Gielen (Philips; 1993)

Eva-Maria Houben - Breath for Organ (Second Editions; due Feb. 8, 2018)

Helmut Lachenmann - Salut für Caudwell - Wilhelm Bruck, Theodor Ross; Les Consolations - Schola Heidelberg/Walter Nussbaum, WDR Sinfonieorcheter Köln/Johannes Kalitzke; Concertini - Klangforum Wien/Johannes Kalitzke (Kairos; 2008)

David Garland - Verdancy (Tall Owl Music; 2018)

Sannhet - So Numb (Profound Lore; 2017)

Portal - ION (Profound Lore; 2018)

Graham Lambkin - Salmon Run (Kye; 2007)

Aaron Cassidy - The Crutch of Memory - Elision Ensemble (Neos; 2012)
> The Crutch of Memory; Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion; I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips; metallic dust; asphyxia; songs only as sad as their listener

Aaron Cassidy - A Painter of Figures in Rooms - EXAUDI/James Weeks (NMC; 2012)

Enno Poppe - Arbeit I; Wespe; Arbeit II; Trauben; Arbeit III; Schrank; Salz - Daniel Gloger, Ernst Surberg; ensemble mosaik/Enno Poppe (Kairos; 2013)

Radu Malfatti - One man and a fly (Cathnor; 2015)

Jennifer Higdon - Viola Concerto; Oboe Concerto; All Things Majestic - Roberto Díaz, James Button, Nashville Symphony/Giancarlo Guerrero (Naxos)

Dave Douglas - "The Power of the Vote" from Uplift (Greenleaf Music Bandcamp subscriber exclusive; 2018)

Playlist.

A weekly tally of memorable things Steve Smith has stuck in his ears.

Sarah Hennies - Fleas (Ultraviolet Light; 2018)

Muyassar Kurdi - Travelling (No Rent; 2018)

riverrun - Lilliput (self-released; 2018)

Sylvie Courvoisier Trio - D'Agala (Intakt; 2018)

Seth Chrisman & Nathan McLaughlin - Earth Tones at the Metal Show (Full Spectrum; 2018)

Unidentified - Mystery Tape #1 (Colour8/ACR; 2018)

Ben McElroy - 1,000 Sewing Machines (Unknown Tone; 2017)

Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes - …city flexure… (Buffalo) (Irritable Hedgehog; 2017)

A Thousand Other Names - A Thousand Other Names (Birdcage/tone drop; 1996/2018)

Taku Unami - cloud of unknowing (Tenseless; 2017)

Tetuzi Akiyama/Magnus Granberg/Henrik Olsson - Whose Words? (Meena; 2017)

John P. Hastings - minimal music (self-released; 2016)

On (Daniel) Land.

Daniel Land

One of the things I've always cherished about Brian Eno's 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land is the sense it gives of occupying a space that's somewhere and nowhere at once. Like Ambient 1: Music for Airports, its better known predecessor, On Land is part of Eno's classic sequence of four albums denoted with the word "ambient," signifying music intended to be as well suited to not-listening as to listening. (The other two volumes – Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror, by Eno and Harold Budd, and Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, by Laraaji – are more instrument-focused and personable, to my mind, and thus considerably harder to relegate to a background condition.)

But where Music for Airports conjures (for me) a pleasant sensation of agreeable disembodiment, what I love most about On Land is its sense of place—in particular its evocation of places lost to time. Eno made the album by "composting" recordings, previously unused and otherwise: "…not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work," he stated in a 1986 liner-note essay. What results is a sequence of weightless vignettes in which curious noises frequently surface through murmuring surfaces, like unidentifiable shapes floating in a sluggish, squelchy swamp.

That same sensation is what I'm responding to most in Lilliput, newly issued in digital formats by riverrun, the ambient alter ego of the British composer, songwriter, and performer Daniel Land. Throughout the 57:50 length of the version of Lilliput posted on Bandcamp, you get a feeling of weightlessness and disembodied drift. At the same time, though, there's always something bubbling underneath. The sensation reminds me quite a lot of what I love about Eno's On Land, which made Lilliput a compulsory purchase in mere minutes.

Looking at the notes on Land's website, I notice that he refers explicitly to Eno's mode of generative music. Elsewhere on the site, he cites that same curious notion of creating riverrun music by "composting" previous recordings:

The riverrun project is a series of heavily composted landscape recordings that I have been working on for nearly two decades in parallel to my songs. In the process of recording, I often become sidetracked by a new sound I have made - some peculiar, unrepeatable combination of instruments and effects - and spend a while exploring the ramifications of it. These experiments hardly ever end up on a "band" record, but over the course of nearly twenty years, I have build up a large library of sounds and textures. The riverrun pieces are what happens when I try to blend these little fragments together, a painstaking process that involves slowing down tapes, matching key signatures, and looking for interesting contrasts and juxtapositions.

One more thing about Lilliput: evidently the complete piece is 50 hours long. In addition to the "standard" 57:50 version of the piece now available on Bandcamp, Land is offering a limited-edition run of 50 CDs, each of which will feature an individual "slice" of the 50-hour whole. That, too, is an enchanting prospect: when my CD arrives, I'll have a unique, exclusive piece by Land. I'm eager to hear how it might differ from the version of Lilliput that drew me in so quickly in the first place.

Playlist.

A weekly tally of memorable things Steve Smith has stuck in his ears.

Frank Zappa - The Yellow Shark - Ensemble Modern/Peter Rundel (1993/2012; Barking Pumpkin/Zappa Family Trust)

Roman Grygoriv & Illia Razumeiko - IYOV - Maryana Golovko, Anna Marych, Oleksandra Mailliet, Andrey Koshman, Ruslan Kirsh, Anton Lytvynov, Elizaveta Kurbanmagometova, Janna Marchynskaya, Andrey Nadolskiy, Roman Grygoriv, Illia Razumeiko (YouTube; 2015)

Mike Shiflet - Tetracosa, Volume One (self-released; 2018)

Johann Sebastian Bach - Sonata and Partitas for unaccompanied violin - Johnny Gandelsman (In a Circle; 2018)

Celer - Above Polynesia (self-released; 2017. Bandcamp subscriber exclusive)

Pinkcourtesyphone - Ossification Palisades (self-released; 2017)

Marcus Fischer - Loss (12k; 2017)

llama/lama - euler ≈ ayler (Belts & Whistles; 2017)

SUNN O))) - Solstitium Fulminate (Southern Lord; 2013)

Michael Pisaro - hinwandeln (zwischen himmel und erd) - Rhodri Davies, Michael Duch, John Tilbury (Never Come Ashore; 2017)

Gareth Hardwick - Experiment.3 (Low Point; 2017)

Henryk Gorecki - Symphony No. 3 - Dawn Upshaw, London Sinfonietta/David Zinman (Nonesuch; 1992)

Arash Akbari - The Rest Is Silence (Unknown Tone; 2017)

Simon Cummings - Simulated Music (Interrobang; 2011)

Kevin Drumm - Another Set of Days Now Over (self-released; 2017)

Celer - Merita (self-released; 2017. Bandcamp private release)

Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa (ECM New Series; 1984)
> Fratres - Gidon Kremer, Keith Jarrett; Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten - Staatsorchester Stuttgart/Dennis Russell Davies; Fratres - The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic; Tabula Rasa - Gidon Kremer, Tatiana Grindenko, Alfred Schnittke, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra/Saulius Sendeckis

John Tavener - The Protecting Veil - Steven Isserlis (Virgin; 1992)
> John Tavener - The Protecting Veil - London Symphony Orchestra/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky; Benjamin Britten - Third Suite for Cello; John Tavener - Thrinos

Playlist.

A weekly tally of memorable things Steve Smith has stuck in his ears.

Chaya Czernowin - Hidden (Wergo; 2018) > Adiantum Capillus-Veneris - Inbal Hever; Hidden - JACK Quartet

The Bad Plus - These Are the Vistas (Columbia; 2003)

Orrin Evans - The Evolution of Oneself (Smoke Sessions; 2015)

Sarah Davachi - All My Circles Run bonus EP (Students of Decay/Boomkat; 2017)
> For Harpsichord; For Organ and String Trio

Harrison Birtwistle - Pulse Shadows - Claron McFadden, Arditti Quartet, Nash Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec; 2000)

Milica Djordjević - rocks-stars-metals-light (Col Legno; 2017)
> Rdja - ensemble recherche; Sky limited - Münchener Kammerorchester/Clemens Schuldt; The Firefly in a Jar - Münchener Kammerorchester/Clemens Schuldt; The Death of the Star-Knower - Armida Quartet; Quicksilver - Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Peter Rundel

Béla Bartók - The Six String Quartets - Juilliard String Quartet (Columbia Masterworks/Sony; 1965/2010)

Michael Tippett - The Rose Lake, Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage (Chandos; 2005)

Merzbow - Cloud Cock OO Grand (ZSF Produkt; 1992)

Natasha Barrett - Puzzle Wood (Aurora; 2017)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The Last Four String Quartets - Juilliard String Quartet (Columbia Masterworks/Sony; 1976/2010)

Onuté Narbataité - La barca; kein gestern, kein morgen; krantas upė simfonija - Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra/Christopher Lyndon-Gee (Naxos; 2017)

Albert Ayler - Nuits de La Fondation Maeght (Shandar/Water; 1970/2002)

Jamie Saft - Solo a Genova (Rare Noise; 2018)

Playlist for the closing weeks of 2017.

A weekly tally of memorable things Steve Smith has stuck in his ears.

Regular playlists will resume next Monday, Jan. 8, on National Sawdust Log. Meanwhile, this is everything memorable that I spun or streamed between Dec. 18 and Dec. 31, 2017. Rest in peace, Kevin Mahogany and Roswell Rudd.

Dec. 18-24, 2017

Percy Grainger - Grainger Edition, Volume One: Orchestral Works - BBC Philharmonic/Richard Hickox (Chandos; 1996)
> The Duke of Marlborough Fanfare; Colonial Song (Sentimental No. 1); English Dance; Shepherd's Hey; There Were Three Friends; Fisher's Boarding House; We Were Dreamers; Harvest Hymn; Blithe Bells; Walking Tune (Symphonic Wind Band Version); In a Nutshell; Green Bushes

High Aura'd - No River Long Enough Doesn't Contain a Bend (Debacle; 2017)

Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage (Blue Note; 1965/1999)

Kevin Mahogany - Double Rainbow (Enja; 1993)

Alvear Courtis Jones - A távlat, ha hátulról (Glistening Examples; 2017)

Divination - Sacrifice (Meta/self-released; 1998/2016)

Spontaneous Music Ensemble - Karyobin (Island/Emanem; 1968/2017)

Kyle Landstra - ways and means (Boudoir; 2017)

Nat Evans - Coyoteways (Mon Amie; 2017)

Beatriz Ferreyra - GRM Works (Recollection GRM; 1967-2011/2015)

Jlin - Black Origami (Planet Mu; 2017)

Anouar Brahem - Blue Maqams (ECM; 2017)

Hafdís Bjarnadóttir - Já (self-released; 2017)

Nadia Sirota - Tessellatum (Bedroom Community; 2017)

Sarah Angliss - Ealing Feeder (self-released; 2017)

Cecil Taylor & Buell Neidlinger - New York City R&B (Candid; 1961/1972)

Gil Evans (Cecil Taylor) - Into the Hot (Impulse!; 1962/1998)

Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd Quartet - School Days (hatOLOGY; 1963/2002)

XTC - Black Sea (Virgin/Ape House; 1980/2017)

Dec. 25-31, 2017

The Beatles - 1962-1966 (Apple/EMI; 1973/2015)

The Beatles - 1967-1970 (Apple/EMI; 1973/2015)

Van Halen - Best of Both Worlds (Warner Bros.; 2004)

Bent Knee - Land Animal (Inside Out/Epic; 2017)

HMS - Tetrad (Astral Spirits; 2017)

Tyshawn Sorey - Verisimilitude (Pi Recordings; 2017)

Michael Pisaro - July Mountain (three versions) - Greg Stuart (Gravity Wave; 2010)

Michael Pisaro - Close Constellations and a Drum on the Ground - Greg Stuart, Barry Chabala (Gravity Wave; 2011)

Michael Pisaro - Hearing Metal 2 - Michael Pisaro, Greg Stuart (Gravity Wave; 2011)

Michael Pisaro - Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds - Greg Stuart (Gravity Wave; 2013)

Robert Curgenven + Richard Chartier - Built Through (Line; 2012)

Kevin Drumm - The Next World Is Better (Chondritic Sound; 2017)

Celer - Euromaidan (self-released; 2017)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Piano Concerto in D (Hob.XVIII:11) - Marguerite Roesgen-Champion, L'Orchestre de Paris/Marius-François Gaillard (YouTube; 1937)

Lei Liang – Garden Eight - Ricardo Descalzo (Vimeo; 2016)

Anthony Braxton ZIM Sextet - Live at Moers Festival 2017 (YouTube; 2017)

The Caretaker - Take care, it's a desert out there (History Always Favours the Winners)

Ensemble MusikFabrik - Stille (Wergo; 2017)
> Georg Friedrich Haas - Ich suchte, aber ich Fand ihn nicht; Evan Johnson - Die Bewegung der Augen; Jani Christou - Anaparastasis III: The Pianist; Georg Friedrich Haas - Wie stille Brannte das licht

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gumboot Soup (Flightless; 2017)

Noteworthy.

The first recording I was moved to listen to in 2018 is Hidden, a new Wergo album featuring two dynamic, disparate compositions by Chaya Czernowin. Adiantum Capillus-Veneris (2015-16) is a three-part composition designated "for voice and breath" – the first and second parts involving amplification, the last adding electronics – performed with intimacy and vitality here by mezzo-soprano Inbal Hever. Its disc mate, Hidden (2013-14), a long, elaborate, feverishly inventive piece for string quartet and electronics, is presented in a brilliant account by the JACK Quartet (original personnel), to whom it was dedicated, in collaboration with computer-music designer Carlo Laurenzi and sound engineer Jérémie Henrot of IRCAM, which commissioned the piece. (In April 2016 I reviewed for the Boston Globe a live performance of Hidden involving JACK and Henrot, at the Institute of Contemporary Art.)

It's a remarkable record, one to which I expect to return throughout the year. Being that it was released on SACD in Europe and in digital form globally on November 24, Hidden even made at least one Best of 2017 tally that I'm aware of, and quite possibly more. Here in the U.S., though, the CD will be issued on January 12. So I'm treating Hidden as a 2018 release that I happened to hear in advance, as is often the case… and one that I'm sure I'll be remembering at the end of this year.

I did make a few Best of 2017 tallies of my own, published late last week on National Sawdust Log. The first highlights a select handful of shows at National Sawdust and recordings on VIA Records, the house label, that I found especially satisfying – obviously I don't claim complete objectivity. The second lists the 10 most memorable events I attended in 2017; I also mention two incredible events I disqualified because of personal involvement. The third is my tally of the year's most noteworthy records… 20 new recordings, 10 archival releases, and 50 more records that moved me strongly enough to merit mention. (Time ran out before I could annotate that last list, but I still intend to get around to it.)

[ANNOUNCER: He didn't get to it.]

Hello again.

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm resolved to keep things humming here again… watch this space.