My Top 9 Favorite Releases of 2011

9. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica


I remember when I began messing around with samples, and producers like Madlib and J Dilla really began to leave me jaw-dropped with the ways they pieced samples from all different genres and time periods together.

On Replica, Oneohtrix Point Never seems to take all of those short little leftover snippets from the beginning or end of the kind of samples most musicians are discovering now, and blends them so perfectly that, what sounds like a mistake at first, begins to sound like a beat or a melody or chorus.


8. Blouse - S/T


Blouse takes everything that was so new/now about the late 70's and the 80's, strips it of all the crap that didn't stand the test of time, and coats it in a handful of our late 2000's reverb, making the old sound new or the new sound old, or both.


7. Grouper - A | A


On Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill, Grouper seemed to float just beneath the surface of a large, lonely body of water, occasionally surfacing for just enough air to dive down for another swim.

A | A is more like laying on your back, staring at the stars, and forgetting that the ground is underneath you.


6. RAJA - The October Series Mixtape Trilogy


This immense trilogy spans 3 mixtapes, and nearly 80 songs. Each song crackles and vibrates through milk crate after milk crate of assorted old records, never straying too far from the soft, established emotion that each tape conjures.

Unlike some beat tapes, these songs feel like complete pieces rather than skeletons or ideas for someone else to pick up on and finish.

Free Download


5. City Center - Box of Sand


Fred Thomas, the man responsible for City Center, makes a lot of music. A helluva lot.

I still don't understand how musicians like this differentiate between what is going to be an "album" and what is simply going to be some side release or EP.

While the production of City Center's 2011 album Redeemer, certainly implies a greater degree of time and work was put into it, Box of Sand better shows Thomas' tendency of messing around with all kinds of new noises with each release.

Free Download


4. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up


I've already said a great deal about this one in an earlier post, and I think it is a good example of 2011's tendency of approaching established genres in new ways. Pushing things forward by looking back.

3. RUN DMT - Dreams


Stumbling its way through surf rock into on-the-floor-of-the-bedroom pop music, a description of Dreams might come a little too close to a comparison to every other one-man, sample-based operation with a copy of Person Pitch gathering dust somewhere in the middle of that milk crate full of records. But such comparisons are getting old enough that they’ve begun gathering dust themselves, and that is kind of the point of nostalgia, no matter how recent—accepting influences, and desiring to be a part of that which we look back on so fondly, and it tends to be a fortunate side effect of sampling.

What Dreams offers is a plunge into an ocean that hasn’t moved since surf-obsessed teenagers started writing songs about it in the early 60’s. The difference is that Run DMT’s Collins is more interested in what is going on below the surface where all the surfing is taking place. Tracks swirl around, ranging from 60’s style pop to drenched, slow-moving drone that reminds us how far we are sinking into this stagnant, beautiful underwater landscape that will be here long after we’ve left it.



2. DJ DJ Tanner - S/T


What I like so much about DJ DJ Tanner is how much it represents my belief that ideas, creativity, and experimentation make for better music than raw talent. Too often, I think the most talented musicians waste it on emulation, because it tends to be easier and more rewarding.

This album (and the various other clumps of music I have downloaded), is an album of ideas, showing the minimalist potential of loops, sampled or crafted, to expand outward as they repeat. That potential carries us through the highs and lows of each track as they drop in and sputter out, passing up the establishment of pacing -- the accepted technique most loop-based musicians rely on in absence of the dynamics of a whole band.

The focus on ideas over production is like DJ DJ Tanner's prolific call-to-arms. Too much attention to detail would only serve to wipe away the dust that establishes the environment of each sample, and leave less time for the kind of ideas that make this release so good.

Free Download

1. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saint


If someone had described EMA to me before I heard it, I don't think I ever would have listened to it, because it is kind of hard to provide a description that does it justice.

It has distorted guitars and drums and music swells, but it isn't really anything like rock music?

A lot of the lyrics are strangely humorous, but it isn't very comical?

As mentioned in the Shabazz Palaces blurb, 2011 was a year of turning previously established genres on their heads. Past Life Martyred Saints sounds so familiar in so many ways, but no one could call it rock, because that just wouldn't quite cover it.

All of the elements that make up this album seem so familiar, but are just strange enough to keep it from sounding entirely recognizable, like a painting hung slightly askew.

The Problem(s) With Music Blogs: Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Gauntlet Hair at Bunk Bar

Problem 1:

Damn you music blogs for introducing me to a bunch of great music by bands still too small to consider touring anytime soon. I’ve been waiting for a Gauntlet Hair tour since their single “I’ve Been Thinking...” was run through the cogs of the internet hype machine about a year and a half ago.


That anticipation mixed with a headlining Unknown Mortal Orchestra at Bunk Bar two nights in a row seemed too good to not be a misprint.

Problem 2:

The main way discovering new music on blogs is different than, say, the radio, is the translation of the music into text. More and more, my first experience with a band or a song is through reading descriptions and opinions of it. This acts as a music filter not at all based on just listening and deciding if I, ya know, like it.

I have probably spent more time reading about Thursday’s headliners, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, than I have actually listening to them. I’ve never liked funk music, and couldn’t get over the numerous associations made between this band the genre. In this case (and many others I have yet to discover), I was wrong to take the word for it.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra kicked out some very danceable tunes just buried enough in that haze of bedroom pop to prevent them from falling into that rut, appropriately described as “groovy.”


Their self-titled album has since become one of my favorite examples of a band capable of giving a nostalgic nod to the music of the 70’s and 80’s without actually turning around and chillin’ in it.

Problem 3:

By introducing music to fans via text, new reasons for liking a band or a song are introduced. I find myself deciding to listen to a song based on things like what effects the song is drenched in, where the band is from, or what label released the album. In short, I give myself reasons to like or dislike music before I actually have the chance to hear it.

So, when someone noticed all of my anticipation to see Gauntlet Hair channeled into, what I call, my dance moves, and asked me what I thought of the band, I found myself answering with a number of reasons—none of which were simply “They were great”.

No, I launched into a rant about Colorado bands and the DIY venue the Rhinoceropolis, and how much I like it when bands coat their music in so many delay effects that you really can’t single out any one instrument. This is, of course, way too much information to yell into someone’s ear at an already loud show and mostly just causes confusion rather than answering the initial question.

That being said, Gauntlet Hair was great and every bit as fun as I hoped they would be, and every song just kind of blurred into this large, echoey mess of weirdo dance music, which was a solid live representation of their recently released self-titled album on Dead Oceans.


The last thing I learned from this show, which has nothing to do with music blogs or either of the bands: Don’t be the one holding the pipe made out of a pomegranate when the bartender is angrily pushing his way through the crowd to confiscate it.

Never Knows Best Issue 4

Sixteen pages. All comics, including:

St. Arc
The Quarter Life Crisis
Portland, IA
Skinny Jeans
Mew and Mewtwo

And some random others.

Let me know if you want one, k?

Altered Zones John Maus Interview

Although, I haven't really grown to like his music quite yet (I'm sure I will), this John Maus guy is kind of becoming my hero. This interview, the way his gestures and manner of speaking is described is like the personification of that really famous Kerouac quote (ya know, the one written on all the On The Road posters). He is surely the least chill "chillwaver" in existence.

http://alteredzones.com/posts/1713/artist-profile-john-maus/

St. Arc #1

Here is a new comic I am working on that will mostly occur in order and tell some weird re-hashing of all of the myths surrounding Joan of Arc, as if she were somehow canonized while she were living and actually lived in some geographically blurry version of the Wild West and had something to do with the Ark of the Covenant.

I have a lot of ideas for this, so I will try to finish these somewhat regularly, although I am terrible at drawing horses and a bunch of other things, so it tends to take me a really long time to do something even as simple as this little 4-panel deal you see here.

Heaven and Hell and the Coast as the Line In Between

Multnomah Falls





Devil's Rest


The Pacific Ocean






Angel's Rest

Shabazz Palaces, Pet Sounds, and the Unfamiliarly Familiar

I, like many others, am currently floored by Shabazz Palace’s recently released album Black Up. Within the first minute or two of listening to it, I could already tell it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, that is, unlike any other hip-hop I have ever heard. I started to think about how strange it is that I can have that thought “This is totally unlike anything I have ever heard” in hearing a song, or a sound, or in this case, an album, yet still bring a specific genre to mind within which to establish the guidelines for what “anything” can mean in that statement. In this case, anything, only means every other hip-hop song and artist I have heard, rather than every song or album or artist or ambient sound I have ever heard anywhere in my entire life.


So, Shabazz Palace’s new album is like something I have heard before—hip-hop. The way Black Up plays out so uniquely using the same, familiar tools hip-hop has been developing since it began is, in many ways, more incredible than musicians using entirely new and unfamiliar techniques to make music actually completely unlike anything anyone has ever heard before, which is certainly something still worth admiring.

There are thousands and thousands of examples of this throughout the history of music, and we can thank these examples for progressing music to where it is now, and establishing new genres when some artist or movement managed to push things beyond those established lines we set up to define genres. The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds and subsequent Good Vibrations single, in lieu Smile, are classic examples of early game-changers.


I’ve read that “sonic” was the word primarily used to describe the new direction The Beach Boys’ sound was headed as of the release of Pet Sounds. The coining of this new term is proof enough that this album was anything else being made at the time, while still managing to be familiar enough to be called pop music (and, therefore, hold the attention of that delicate demographic of teenagers who practically determined the success or failure of albums released in the early to mid 60’s).

Pet Sounds is of course still mentioned frequently today, due to its own genre-pushing inventiveness and production techniques, often making top so-and-so lists, not to mention spawning its own “Bands Who Are Trying to Make Pet Sounds, Again” lists and claims. But the fact that this claim is often made of other bands then and still to this day, shows that it has become something that is like other things we have heard--all the music effected by it. In fact, it requires a bit of research and listening to understand how Pet Sounds, which has since become so clearly pop music, was new and bold and inventive at the time of its release.

J Dilla’s Donuts is another more recent (and probably more relevant) example of this within the same genre as Shabazz Palaces (and Bullion’s mixtape Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee is a wonderful combination of the marks left on music by The Beach Boys and J Dilla).


Donuts has been so influential that it spawned numerous Dilla-esque (a J Dilla-specific version of it “sonic”) claims in hip-hop to come, even spreading into other genres as well, including our modern day pop radio music and genres as small and specific as, say, chillwave.

Whether or not Shabazz Palace’s Black Up will have this effect on future music will be left to time to tell. I’m sure no one could justify their claims at the time of the release of Pet Sounds that it would change the way music would be made and heard afterward, although it isn’t a huge step to make when it follows the claim “this album is unlike anything I have ever heard before.”

The difference between the two claims is that one need not justify the latter with anything besides the wonder they experience upon hearing this new musical territory for the first time, and then second time… and third time… and fourth time…