The
Numbers
Because of some quirks of how I entered in this data, some of
this might not be 100% accurate. But it should be close
enough. Let's start with the main ones.
Total Listens: 2317
Releases Listened This Year: 919
Artists Listened This Year: 663
Estimated Average Release Length: 50:14
Estimated Total Listening Time: 1939:40:21
That looks like a lot. But really, if I slept 6 hours a day every day, that would mean that I would've slept 2196 hours in 2016. And I totally slept more than 6 hours a day on average, so I still slept more than I listened to music. Also, I'm able to listen to music when I am at work, so I had a lot of time available for listening. This is actually a completely reasonable amount of music listening to be doing and is not crazy. And yeah I know there's people who listened to even more music than this, and people who listened to much less music than this, and I see no reason why both of those peoples couldn't have had a very fulfilling time engaging with music. I don't think I have a high score or anything, or that that's something that you need to go after (though if you got it, congratulations). I think it's fair to say that this is a lot of listening though. Possibly the most I ever packed into a year? Regardless, I'm really happy with the amount, I feel like I was able to do a lot while still giving myself the necessary moments of silent reflection on what I had heard to make sure the listening experiences gained the appropriate amount of significance and weren't just in one ear and out the other. I was still all over the map on a day-to-day basis though, as you can see from the following graph.
Things were actually a little stable there at times in the first half of the year. But then from May to July I had some stressful stuff happening with moving, dental work, and a laptop death that wiped out a large chunk of my digital music library. So there's a bit of a crash around there. But then around the end of July I got settled in, and got into a much more volatile listening schedule with higher highs and lower lows. When I saw this graph I actually thought I did more listening in the back half of the year, but that is mostly not the case when you break it down month to month.
So while things do pick back up in August and then really blow up in September, after that I'd settled somewhere in the middle. But I guess really there's not so much of an extreme deviation, it actually is kind of stable overall looking at it like this. Actually you know what it is, one weird quirk I did with the log (that I'm not doing this time around) is only consider a day as ended once I went to sleep. So if I stayed up on Friday until 2:00AM listening to music, those albums in the A.M. got Friday's date. So I think that led to some days getting really stacked in ways that aren't actually possible with only 24 hours in a day. But yeah, so this chart also includes the counts of albums I hadn't listened to before. Lets look a bit closer at that.
I think that's a really good balance. I try to get things to where I'm still holding on to and continuing my relationship with many things I've valued in the past, while also continuing to try to add new things into the mix. So this all sounds fine, but now let's get into some more controversial graphs. These listens weren't all evenly distributed between each album. In fact, a little more than half only got one listen, as you can see by this chart of how many listens each album got:
So yeah, that's about one half things I listened to once, one quarter things I listened to twice, and then one quarter things I listened to more than three times. And I'm sure there's some hardcore music nerd out there saying "what the hell this is so wrong, you have to listen to something at least three times to be able to have an opinion on it!", which I don't know if I'd really argue with, but there's a lot of stuff I hear where I don't really care about having an opinion about right away, or ever. Also, a lot of those single listens were just check-ins with things I already have a history with. So it's not a big deal.
See that's mostly things I've listened to before. And then the 203 things I only got one listen on, some of those are really heady experimental things that I need to come back to with some time away, others are things I just found at the end of the year and will be returning to soon. Some of them are things that were popular that I was just curious about. But then yeah, there's some things where I gave it a chance and decided I didn't need to go any further with it. Maybe that's not entirely fair but I think I'll be OK. These graphs still don't give the full picture, though. So there were certain releases that had my attention much more than other, but what about release decades? When exactly is my attention most focused at?
As you can see by the giant blue pac man that looks like it is eating all of the other decades, my attention has been heavily focused on the current decade. It's actually disporportionate to the number of albums I listen to from each decade.
That doesn't even look like a pac man there, though it is still more than all the others combined. So not only am I mostly listening to contemporary albums, I'm giving those more attention than the older stuff I'm hearing. I know a lot of people complain about the quality of music these days (a tradition that's only slightly younger than music itself). I will have plenty to say about the music I've found worthy of so much attention later though, but there's still more that we can clarify here first. To really get an idea of how much of my attention was focused on the contemporary, it seems best to separate my 2016 first listens from everything else.
There's still a pac man here too but not an extreme pac man. I gave a lot of attention to new releases but still also got a good amount of exploring in through other decades. In fact when you take 2016 first listens out of the equation you get this:
Sure, even with 2016 excluded, the 2010's are the biggest still. But I still did close to the same amount of digging in the 2000's and 70's. Though I will say, one of the things that appealed to me about doing all this graphing was that I'd be able to identify practices that I want to change, and I think this is one that I want to change. There's a lot of music in the past that I still need to explore, that I'll get a lot out of. So for 2017 I will be trying to give the past more of my time, even if that means sacrificing some that I'd give to keeping up with the present. Still though, this year was marked by a few older records that really left an impression on me, let's start the actual music talk with some focus on those:
There's a few other things from before 2016 that really made a mark on me, but I'll get into those later. Lets get back to these numbers, get into this 2016 stuff. So obviously my attention was heavily focused on 2016. What did I listen to the most? Here is my album forest.
This is a every album plotted out based on number of listens. Each triangle is an album, and how high it gets is determined by how many times I listened to it. So you can see it's very crowded at the bottom, the first row representing 1 listen is actually so crowded that some of the triangles get shrunk down to be very tiny. But then as you get up it thins out. This mode of counting is of course biased towards the shorter albums. The album at the very top there, considerably higher than any other album, is Animal Collective - Painting With. But that's only a 41 minute album. Autechre - Elseq 1-5, on the other hand, is 4 hours and 7 minutes long. And so even though I only listened to that 11 times, the amount of time I spent listening to it is actually close to twice the amount of time I spent listening to Painting With. And my 8 listens to Michael Pisaro/Reiner van Houdt - The Earth and the Sky adds up to more time spent listening to that than Painting With, though by a smaller margin. And if Keith Rowe - The Room Extended had come out earlier than November, that would be in this range as well if it included my January 1st 2017 listen. But I still think this is a good visualization, since the majority of the albums I listened to aren't obscenely long.
I love how this graph takes my relationship with music, and sort of turns it into this physical space, like if you use your imagination that's totally a forest. I can scroll over it with my mouse and the albums that appear more significant from the isolation of listening to them more than other albums, those stick out for a good reason, they were a huge part of my year. But then even in the further back areas that are more crowded, I can still remember some good times that I had with each album. But then in the back row, there'll be some "oh shit, I listened to that?" moments, but there are just as many personally canonized classics I've been keeping up with for many years now. All of this is important, because it is the understanding of music that I build for myself by experiencing it. This is the system that gives each individual entity it's value to me. A lot of online music discussion that I see positions a piece of music as something that gains value from its relationship to a monocultue built from recognized historical significance and cultural impact. But really we all just build our own music forests and values get established differently from all the different layots and everyone argues about what number each tree should be. While there is some good in the historical preservation instinct of this canon construction, it can also be used to diminish the personal values for things that people build themselves, and that's a load of bullshit. If you like your music forest then it's a cool music forest, no matter what anyone says. So I'm a fan of this graph showing off all that. But it still isn't enough to really get the picture though, we need to visualize the intensity over time of my relationship with each album.
The way this graph works is that (for every album I listened to more than 3 times, plus a few with less), it measures the number of days since the album was last listened to. So the initial listens for this year have no value (so there's missing information about albums I've been listening to for a while). Once an album gets a 2nd listen, it blips in on the graph here. If the 2nd listen happened 0 days after the 1st listen (on the same day), it appears as a very small dot at the top of the graph. If the 2nd listen was 80 days after the 1st listen, it appears much lower, as a larger dot. And so the animation runs from the beginning of the year to the end, with albums appearing on their 2nd listen and disappearing after their final listen of the year. The dots move up and down over time depending on how often they're being listened to.
Here is the same information, just displayed differently. These lines are the courses that the dots take over time in the animation. This is a lot of information, maybe it'd be best to start getting into this with a closer look at some of the albums I talked about earlier.
Going left to right, we start with Izipho Zam. I already had my focused period with it in the 1-10 range last year, and this year was just sort of about living with it, bouncing around in the 16-100 range. Next is Marzette & Company, which had a short period of time in the 1-10 range for about a week and a half, and then it settled into the 40-100 range. Then there's Obnóxious, which had a little bit of a slow start appearing at 6, so this wasn't like I'm immediately hooked, I waited almost a week to listen again. But then it spends a long time bouncing around the 1-10 range for over a month before getting into the less dense area. And then finally there's Dymaxion, who had an even slower time getting in but then had some really intense focus time, with the first three listens spanning over a month but then the last four all in one week.
I believe that my understanding of what music is is something I have to construct and maintain, and that it is built out of the sustained relationships with pieces of music, and developed with the introduction of new ones. So then, what am I actually doing, and what do I want to be doing? These graphs show that I am all over the map on ways I am taking in albums, but there is still something consistent going on. For the albums that leave a significant impression on me, whether it's immediate or takes some time, I tend to have a heavy consumption period at some point in the run, where the album is a very significant part of what music is to me at that moment, popping up frequently over the course of a week or two, though in rarer cases it can go over a month. And then the album drifts down a few levels, and the relationship with the album takes its own distinct shape. Sometimes the balance will shift and I won't have any activity in the 0-10 level, and I'll be focused on trying to hold on to things that I believe I still value. And then other times there will be multiple albums getting this level of focus, my view taken over entirely by something new. I'm really satsified with how I've been doing things here with the variety, and building these varied relationships with music where I'm not trying desperately to hold on to everything all of the time, allowing things to recede far enough into the background to let in something new, but still keeping them close enough to become a part of my space.
Total Listens: 2317
Releases Listened This Year: 919
Artists Listened This Year: 663
Estimated Average Release Length: 50:14
Estimated Total Listening Time: 1939:40:21
That looks like a lot. But really, if I slept 6 hours a day every day, that would mean that I would've slept 2196 hours in 2016. And I totally slept more than 6 hours a day on average, so I still slept more than I listened to music. Also, I'm able to listen to music when I am at work, so I had a lot of time available for listening. This is actually a completely reasonable amount of music listening to be doing and is not crazy. And yeah I know there's people who listened to even more music than this, and people who listened to much less music than this, and I see no reason why both of those peoples couldn't have had a very fulfilling time engaging with music. I don't think I have a high score or anything, or that that's something that you need to go after (though if you got it, congratulations). I think it's fair to say that this is a lot of listening though. Possibly the most I ever packed into a year? Regardless, I'm really happy with the amount, I feel like I was able to do a lot while still giving myself the necessary moments of silent reflection on what I had heard to make sure the listening experiences gained the appropriate amount of significance and weren't just in one ear and out the other. I was still all over the map on a day-to-day basis though, as you can see from the following graph.
Things were actually a little stable there at times in the first half of the year. But then from May to July I had some stressful stuff happening with moving, dental work, and a laptop death that wiped out a large chunk of my digital music library. So there's a bit of a crash around there. But then around the end of July I got settled in, and got into a much more volatile listening schedule with higher highs and lower lows. When I saw this graph I actually thought I did more listening in the back half of the year, but that is mostly not the case when you break it down month to month.
So while things do pick back up in August and then really blow up in September, after that I'd settled somewhere in the middle. But I guess really there's not so much of an extreme deviation, it actually is kind of stable overall looking at it like this. Actually you know what it is, one weird quirk I did with the log (that I'm not doing this time around) is only consider a day as ended once I went to sleep. So if I stayed up on Friday until 2:00AM listening to music, those albums in the A.M. got Friday's date. So I think that led to some days getting really stacked in ways that aren't actually possible with only 24 hours in a day. But yeah, so this chart also includes the counts of albums I hadn't listened to before. Lets look a bit closer at that.
I think that's a really good balance. I try to get things to where I'm still holding on to and continuing my relationship with many things I've valued in the past, while also continuing to try to add new things into the mix. So this all sounds fine, but now let's get into some more controversial graphs. These listens weren't all evenly distributed between each album. In fact, a little more than half only got one listen, as you can see by this chart of how many listens each album got:
So yeah, that's about one half things I listened to once, one quarter things I listened to twice, and then one quarter things I listened to more than three times. And I'm sure there's some hardcore music nerd out there saying "what the hell this is so wrong, you have to listen to something at least three times to be able to have an opinion on it!", which I don't know if I'd really argue with, but there's a lot of stuff I hear where I don't really care about having an opinion about right away, or ever. Also, a lot of those single listens were just check-ins with things I already have a history with. So it's not a big deal.
See that's mostly things I've listened to before. And then the 203 things I only got one listen on, some of those are really heady experimental things that I need to come back to with some time away, others are things I just found at the end of the year and will be returning to soon. Some of them are things that were popular that I was just curious about. But then yeah, there's some things where I gave it a chance and decided I didn't need to go any further with it. Maybe that's not entirely fair but I think I'll be OK. These graphs still don't give the full picture, though. So there were certain releases that had my attention much more than other, but what about release decades? When exactly is my attention most focused at?
As you can see by the giant blue pac man that looks like it is eating all of the other decades, my attention has been heavily focused on the current decade. It's actually disporportionate to the number of albums I listen to from each decade.
That doesn't even look like a pac man there, though it is still more than all the others combined. So not only am I mostly listening to contemporary albums, I'm giving those more attention than the older stuff I'm hearing. I know a lot of people complain about the quality of music these days (a tradition that's only slightly younger than music itself). I will have plenty to say about the music I've found worthy of so much attention later though, but there's still more that we can clarify here first. To really get an idea of how much of my attention was focused on the contemporary, it seems best to separate my 2016 first listens from everything else.
There's still a pac man here too but not an extreme pac man. I gave a lot of attention to new releases but still also got a good amount of exploring in through other decades. In fact when you take 2016 first listens out of the equation you get this:
Sure, even with 2016 excluded, the 2010's are the biggest still. But I still did close to the same amount of digging in the 2000's and 70's. Though I will say, one of the things that appealed to me about doing all this graphing was that I'd be able to identify practices that I want to change, and I think this is one that I want to change. There's a lot of music in the past that I still need to explore, that I'll get a lot out of. So for 2017 I will be trying to give the past more of my time, even if that means sacrificing some that I'd give to keeping up with the present. Still though, this year was marked by a few older records that really left an impression on me, let's start the actual music talk with some focus on those:
Older
Discoveries
I got really into using Bandcamp this year, it is a very nice platform for independent artists and labels to sell music online. On each album page, they have icons for every user who purchased an album. I can't remember what I was looking at, but I saw in the icon list that someone had an avatar of Crazy Frog, the CGI character associated with the Axel F ringtone who could be seen late at night in television ads in the mid 2000's, allegedly with visible genitalia . And so I was like "who the fuck is using Crazy Frog as their avatar that's hilarious", I mouse over it to see their name. It's Dan Snaith! AKA Caribou! So I click on the Crazy Frog, and it takes me to his user page, where I can see all the stuff he has been purchasing, and where I also have the ability to follow him, so that I can get updated when he buys stuff in the future. I have come to really appreciate this feature, and have been collecting the accounts of other musicians, critics, and other users in general who seem to have similar taste to me. It is a wonderful feature that I can't recommend enough, you get these e-mails full of things to check out, it is great. But anyway, on Dan Snaith's page I see this album :
Jose Mauro - Obnóxius (1970) (link)
9 Listens, Listened On:
10/11/2016, 10/17/2016, 10/18/2016, 10/28/2016, 11/2/2016, 11/9/2016, 11/11/2016, 11/21/2016, 12/31/2016
This album is the work of a Brazillian man who has a sad biography, he appears to have disappeared sometime after recording this album and there's uncertainty over what happened and whether he still might be alive. This album sort of lingered in obscurity for some time, it was on a few people's radar for sure but I had no idea it existed. Fortunately, this new reissue has led to some increased visibility. I'm not especially well versed in the music of Brazil, so when I hear 70's Brazillian music that draws from lots of influences, I want to start throwing out Tropicalia comparisons, but this feels different. That stuff tended to lean more towards the happy side of things, but this album has a weird emotional rollercoaster sort of feel, there's a mixture of joy and melancholy and tracks can sometimes feel like they're presenting both simultaneously. I like a lot of "difficult music" but this album is pretty straightforwardly gorgeous, and I'd feel comfortable just generally recommending it to whoever. There's singing, instruments that sound like instruments, all sounding good without sounding too safe, patches of lively percussion popping in and dropping out, leaving the space around Mauro's voice and acoustic guitar to be filled in with some trumpet, piano, violin, flute and the like. Of everything I heard in 2016, it is my number 1 recommendation for a thing that other people should be listening to. All you have to do is click the link up there and then click play and you can do that.
I've also been continuing to very slowly explore more free jazz. I need to buckle down and get more educated to really get appreciating more traditional forms of it, but the whole chaotic raucousness of free jazz tends to cut through my ignorance and hit something more immediate. Honestly, if this year has taught me anything, it's that what I really like is when the guitar goes all crazy.
Pharoah Sanders - Izipho Zam (1973) (youtube playlist link)
9 Listens, Listened On:
1/10/2016, 1/31/2016, 3/8/2016, 3/24/2016, 4/11/2016, 5/1/2016, 8/2/2016, 9/20/2016, 10/21/2016
Joe McPhee Po Music - Oleo (1983) (youtube autogenerated playlist link, only works in some countries)
7 Listens, Listened On:
2/11/2016, 2/16/2016, 3/7/2016, 10/22/2016, 10/27/2016. 11/1/2016, 12/22/2016
Marzette Watts - Marzette & Company (1968) (link)
6 Listens, Listened On:
7/26/2016, 7/27/2016, 7/31/2016, 8/9/2016, 9/18/2016, 12/14/2016
I've been into the work of Sonny Sharrock for a while, and have liked what I heard of Pharoah Sanders, so I investigated Pharoah Sanders - Izipho Zam in late 2015 when I found out it had Sharrock too, and turned to that quite a few times over this year. The first track has some yodel vocals from Leon Thomas which I've seen some people complain about, but I don't mind them. It's a nice little song, but doesn't really show how wild things get here. The other two tracks go wild. They'll go crazy cacophonous, like it goes right up to the edge of pushing into full on noise at times, but still pull back and let the form assert itself again. This one isn't just a "the guitar goes all crazy" sort of thing, this is a "the everything goes all crazy" sort of thing, with seemingly every player (including up to 7 people who are credited on some form of percussion) just going wild. The extended portion of the title track that just focuses on percussion is really incredible. But of course, I should point out that I also liked the guitar.
I'd also seen this guy Joe McPhee popping up in collaborations with contemporary artists I like, like Graham Lambkin and Eli Keszler, and so I checked out Joe McPhee Po Music - Oleo, because I'd read that the Po stood for Pauline Oliveros and that McPhee was really inspired by the whole deep listening thing. So there was like an orgy of evidence that I should check this out. I'd actually listened to a bit of his other stuff too, and I do like his playing a lot, but what really struck me about Oleo was the insane outer space guitar of Raymond Boni. Especially on the first track, Oleo (Take 1). I may have only listened to the album 7 times but I probably listened to that track twice as much on its own. It's a performance of the Sonny Rollins composition that I guess was already quite a few decades old when this was recorded, and it's got that bouncy sax riff and walking bass, but they seem to be delivered with a little more of a sense of instability in time, which works great with Boni's guitar just coming in with very long, incredibly warped sounds which sort of obliterate any sense of time before popping off some shorter sounds to let the other elements bring things back into something where the meter is more dominant. The album is great too but it doesn't really go back to the heights of this one track for me, but I really do need to spend more time with the album as a whole.
Then later in the summer, I had a moment where it's like "ok I need to expand things, let's find a free jazz thing that doesn't have any of these people on it", so I take a quick look at the ESP-Disk' discography and the cover to Marzette & Company jumps out at me, so I decide to check it out. Turns out, it's one of the early appearances of Sonny Sharrock on a record. I wasn't trying to hit that though, I swear! But god, he is great on this. Though again, him standing out from the other talented folks on here says more about my preferences (for when the guitar goes all crazy) than anything else. This one is probably the most difficult listen of the three, it's a bit brittle sounding, and can get sort of to the verge of anarchy at times. But those three listens at the end of July in particular were very good for me and probably helped me get out of my funk around my amount of listening. I still liked it on my winter listen but I think I may have turned this into a summer album, it just doesn't feel right to listen to it while it is cold outside.
Another thing I've been doing to find music is following musicians and critics I like on twitter. Some people are throwing out some fantastic recommendations on there. One that I found out about through Robert Beatty really struck a chord with me/
Dymaxion - DYMAXION×4+3=39:21 (2000) (song link, full album unavailable to stream)
7 Listens, Listened On:
11/1/2016, 11/22/2016, 11/30/2016, 12/2/2016, 12/4/2016, 12/7/2016, 12/9/2016
Dymaxion is some sort of bizarre plunderphonics rock band who combine lots of odd 60's soundtrack sounding things with their own playing (seemingly? This live clip shows them playing instruments, though some of that is them covering samples I think) or other oddities, like I know I heard some Silver Apples in one of the tracks. But yeah, the whole thing has a real chopped up, loopy sample sort of feel, and they cobble together a sort of aesthetic that draws from a lot of different influences and turns it into something distinct, getting at a specific sort of sound better than any of the individual components could. It took me a bit after my first listen to really click with it, but eventually it ended up leaving a significant mark on my end of the year. This release is actually a compilation of most of their singles, they never really put out an album. But this totally works as one. You'll have to do a bit of work to actually hear the whole thing but it is worth it.
Sometime in the summer when I was getting back into the swing of things with listening, I was looking at these graphs in progress, thinking "shit I'm maybe too focused on 2016". And so to try to combat that, I started up a project with some folks where we'd randomize the Nurse With Wound list, and go through an album from two artists each week. The NWW list is a list of artists that was included in the liner notes of the first album of the titular band in 1979 (later expanded in 1981 with their 2nd album). The members of this band were all serious record collectors/record store employees, and so had an absurd amount of knowledge (especially before the internet) of musicians who were operating on the fringes, doing wild stuff. There are close to 300 artists on this list, the project will end up going into 2018 I think (possibly later now, since I put it on hiatus at the end of October to give a bit of breathing room for what we'd already listened to). Over my years of exploring weird stuff, I've come across plenty of artists I love that were listed here, so I figured it would be a great resource for expanding my knowledge of figures operating in the 60's and 70's. So far, it has mostly been the 70's, and there's been plenty I didn't really care for. But one album in particular really stood out to me.
Günter Schickert - Samtvogel (1975) (link)
7 Listens, Listened On:
9/13/2016, 9/14/2016, 9/15/2016, 9/19/2016, 10/12/2016, 10/27/2016, 12/6/2016
I haven't been putting album art in, but you should click that link so you can see it for this one. I love that psychedelic chicken so much. When I saw that cover I thought "this is going to be good" and my expectations were exceeded. This is a krautrock/kosmiche album (depending on how insensitive you find the term krautrock (in addition to how it's limiting, since there are bands like Moolah who were based in the USA and should probably get the classification)) with no drums, but lots of delay-aided guitar to start getting into the driving rhythm that you need to meet the genre criteria or to get any sort of buzz going when playing the kosmiche review drinking game (don't drink and driving rhythms). The first track is more of a quiet bit of spaciness with some low, half sung vocals and wobbly guitar tones. That's just setting the stage for things to get going, as the rest of the album is just two long pieces that do the whole evolving consistency sort of thing, which, as you'll find out later, is something I am really into. I was shocked to hear this and discover that it is relatively obscure for the genre, not heralded nearly enough as one of the greats. But it is totally one of the greats, and if you're into this genre you should really make a point of listening to it if you haven't already.
I got really into using Bandcamp this year, it is a very nice platform for independent artists and labels to sell music online. On each album page, they have icons for every user who purchased an album. I can't remember what I was looking at, but I saw in the icon list that someone had an avatar of Crazy Frog, the CGI character associated with the Axel F ringtone who could be seen late at night in television ads in the mid 2000's, allegedly with visible genitalia . And so I was like "who the fuck is using Crazy Frog as their avatar that's hilarious", I mouse over it to see their name. It's Dan Snaith! AKA Caribou! So I click on the Crazy Frog, and it takes me to his user page, where I can see all the stuff he has been purchasing, and where I also have the ability to follow him, so that I can get updated when he buys stuff in the future. I have come to really appreciate this feature, and have been collecting the accounts of other musicians, critics, and other users in general who seem to have similar taste to me. It is a wonderful feature that I can't recommend enough, you get these e-mails full of things to check out, it is great. But anyway, on Dan Snaith's page I see this album :
Jose Mauro - Obnóxius (1970) (link)
9 Listens, Listened On:
10/11/2016, 10/17/2016, 10/18/2016, 10/28/2016, 11/2/2016, 11/9/2016, 11/11/2016, 11/21/2016, 12/31/2016
This album is the work of a Brazillian man who has a sad biography, he appears to have disappeared sometime after recording this album and there's uncertainty over what happened and whether he still might be alive. This album sort of lingered in obscurity for some time, it was on a few people's radar for sure but I had no idea it existed. Fortunately, this new reissue has led to some increased visibility. I'm not especially well versed in the music of Brazil, so when I hear 70's Brazillian music that draws from lots of influences, I want to start throwing out Tropicalia comparisons, but this feels different. That stuff tended to lean more towards the happy side of things, but this album has a weird emotional rollercoaster sort of feel, there's a mixture of joy and melancholy and tracks can sometimes feel like they're presenting both simultaneously. I like a lot of "difficult music" but this album is pretty straightforwardly gorgeous, and I'd feel comfortable just generally recommending it to whoever. There's singing, instruments that sound like instruments, all sounding good without sounding too safe, patches of lively percussion popping in and dropping out, leaving the space around Mauro's voice and acoustic guitar to be filled in with some trumpet, piano, violin, flute and the like. Of everything I heard in 2016, it is my number 1 recommendation for a thing that other people should be listening to. All you have to do is click the link up there and then click play and you can do that.
I've also been continuing to very slowly explore more free jazz. I need to buckle down and get more educated to really get appreciating more traditional forms of it, but the whole chaotic raucousness of free jazz tends to cut through my ignorance and hit something more immediate. Honestly, if this year has taught me anything, it's that what I really like is when the guitar goes all crazy.
Pharoah Sanders - Izipho Zam (1973) (youtube playlist link)
9 Listens, Listened On:
1/10/2016, 1/31/2016, 3/8/2016, 3/24/2016, 4/11/2016, 5/1/2016, 8/2/2016, 9/20/2016, 10/21/2016
Joe McPhee Po Music - Oleo (1983) (youtube autogenerated playlist link, only works in some countries)
7 Listens, Listened On:
2/11/2016, 2/16/2016, 3/7/2016, 10/22/2016, 10/27/2016. 11/1/2016, 12/22/2016
Marzette Watts - Marzette & Company (1968) (link)
6 Listens, Listened On:
7/26/2016, 7/27/2016, 7/31/2016, 8/9/2016, 9/18/2016, 12/14/2016
I've been into the work of Sonny Sharrock for a while, and have liked what I heard of Pharoah Sanders, so I investigated Pharoah Sanders - Izipho Zam in late 2015 when I found out it had Sharrock too, and turned to that quite a few times over this year. The first track has some yodel vocals from Leon Thomas which I've seen some people complain about, but I don't mind them. It's a nice little song, but doesn't really show how wild things get here. The other two tracks go wild. They'll go crazy cacophonous, like it goes right up to the edge of pushing into full on noise at times, but still pull back and let the form assert itself again. This one isn't just a "the guitar goes all crazy" sort of thing, this is a "the everything goes all crazy" sort of thing, with seemingly every player (including up to 7 people who are credited on some form of percussion) just going wild. The extended portion of the title track that just focuses on percussion is really incredible. But of course, I should point out that I also liked the guitar.
I'd also seen this guy Joe McPhee popping up in collaborations with contemporary artists I like, like Graham Lambkin and Eli Keszler, and so I checked out Joe McPhee Po Music - Oleo, because I'd read that the Po stood for Pauline Oliveros and that McPhee was really inspired by the whole deep listening thing. So there was like an orgy of evidence that I should check this out. I'd actually listened to a bit of his other stuff too, and I do like his playing a lot, but what really struck me about Oleo was the insane outer space guitar of Raymond Boni. Especially on the first track, Oleo (Take 1). I may have only listened to the album 7 times but I probably listened to that track twice as much on its own. It's a performance of the Sonny Rollins composition that I guess was already quite a few decades old when this was recorded, and it's got that bouncy sax riff and walking bass, but they seem to be delivered with a little more of a sense of instability in time, which works great with Boni's guitar just coming in with very long, incredibly warped sounds which sort of obliterate any sense of time before popping off some shorter sounds to let the other elements bring things back into something where the meter is more dominant. The album is great too but it doesn't really go back to the heights of this one track for me, but I really do need to spend more time with the album as a whole.
Then later in the summer, I had a moment where it's like "ok I need to expand things, let's find a free jazz thing that doesn't have any of these people on it", so I take a quick look at the ESP-Disk' discography and the cover to Marzette & Company jumps out at me, so I decide to check it out. Turns out, it's one of the early appearances of Sonny Sharrock on a record. I wasn't trying to hit that though, I swear! But god, he is great on this. Though again, him standing out from the other talented folks on here says more about my preferences (for when the guitar goes all crazy) than anything else. This one is probably the most difficult listen of the three, it's a bit brittle sounding, and can get sort of to the verge of anarchy at times. But those three listens at the end of July in particular were very good for me and probably helped me get out of my funk around my amount of listening. I still liked it on my winter listen but I think I may have turned this into a summer album, it just doesn't feel right to listen to it while it is cold outside.
Another thing I've been doing to find music is following musicians and critics I like on twitter. Some people are throwing out some fantastic recommendations on there. One that I found out about through Robert Beatty really struck a chord with me/
Dymaxion - DYMAXION×4+3=39:21 (2000) (song link, full album unavailable to stream)
7 Listens, Listened On:
11/1/2016, 11/22/2016, 11/30/2016, 12/2/2016, 12/4/2016, 12/7/2016, 12/9/2016
Dymaxion is some sort of bizarre plunderphonics rock band who combine lots of odd 60's soundtrack sounding things with their own playing (seemingly? This live clip shows them playing instruments, though some of that is them covering samples I think) or other oddities, like I know I heard some Silver Apples in one of the tracks. But yeah, the whole thing has a real chopped up, loopy sample sort of feel, and they cobble together a sort of aesthetic that draws from a lot of different influences and turns it into something distinct, getting at a specific sort of sound better than any of the individual components could. It took me a bit after my first listen to really click with it, but eventually it ended up leaving a significant mark on my end of the year. This release is actually a compilation of most of their singles, they never really put out an album. But this totally works as one. You'll have to do a bit of work to actually hear the whole thing but it is worth it.
Sometime in the summer when I was getting back into the swing of things with listening, I was looking at these graphs in progress, thinking "shit I'm maybe too focused on 2016". And so to try to combat that, I started up a project with some folks where we'd randomize the Nurse With Wound list, and go through an album from two artists each week. The NWW list is a list of artists that was included in the liner notes of the first album of the titular band in 1979 (later expanded in 1981 with their 2nd album). The members of this band were all serious record collectors/record store employees, and so had an absurd amount of knowledge (especially before the internet) of musicians who were operating on the fringes, doing wild stuff. There are close to 300 artists on this list, the project will end up going into 2018 I think (possibly later now, since I put it on hiatus at the end of October to give a bit of breathing room for what we'd already listened to). Over my years of exploring weird stuff, I've come across plenty of artists I love that were listed here, so I figured it would be a great resource for expanding my knowledge of figures operating in the 60's and 70's. So far, it has mostly been the 70's, and there's been plenty I didn't really care for. But one album in particular really stood out to me.
Günter Schickert - Samtvogel (1975) (link)
7 Listens, Listened On:
9/13/2016, 9/14/2016, 9/15/2016, 9/19/2016, 10/12/2016, 10/27/2016, 12/6/2016
I haven't been putting album art in, but you should click that link so you can see it for this one. I love that psychedelic chicken so much. When I saw that cover I thought "this is going to be good" and my expectations were exceeded. This is a krautrock/kosmiche album (depending on how insensitive you find the term krautrock (in addition to how it's limiting, since there are bands like Moolah who were based in the USA and should probably get the classification)) with no drums, but lots of delay-aided guitar to start getting into the driving rhythm that you need to meet the genre criteria or to get any sort of buzz going when playing the kosmiche review drinking game (don't drink and driving rhythms). The first track is more of a quiet bit of spaciness with some low, half sung vocals and wobbly guitar tones. That's just setting the stage for things to get going, as the rest of the album is just two long pieces that do the whole evolving consistency sort of thing, which, as you'll find out later, is something I am really into. I was shocked to hear this and discover that it is relatively obscure for the genre, not heralded nearly enough as one of the greats. But it is totally one of the greats, and if you're into this genre you should really make a point of listening to it if you haven't already.
There's a few other things from before 2016 that really made a mark on me, but I'll get into those later. Lets get back to these numbers, get into this 2016 stuff. So obviously my attention was heavily focused on 2016. What did I listen to the most? Here is my album forest.
This is a every album plotted out based on number of listens. Each triangle is an album, and how high it gets is determined by how many times I listened to it. So you can see it's very crowded at the bottom, the first row representing 1 listen is actually so crowded that some of the triangles get shrunk down to be very tiny. But then as you get up it thins out. This mode of counting is of course biased towards the shorter albums. The album at the very top there, considerably higher than any other album, is Animal Collective - Painting With. But that's only a 41 minute album. Autechre - Elseq 1-5, on the other hand, is 4 hours and 7 minutes long. And so even though I only listened to that 11 times, the amount of time I spent listening to it is actually close to twice the amount of time I spent listening to Painting With. And my 8 listens to Michael Pisaro/Reiner van Houdt - The Earth and the Sky adds up to more time spent listening to that than Painting With, though by a smaller margin. And if Keith Rowe - The Room Extended had come out earlier than November, that would be in this range as well if it included my January 1st 2017 listen. But I still think this is a good visualization, since the majority of the albums I listened to aren't obscenely long.
I love how this graph takes my relationship with music, and sort of turns it into this physical space, like if you use your imagination that's totally a forest. I can scroll over it with my mouse and the albums that appear more significant from the isolation of listening to them more than other albums, those stick out for a good reason, they were a huge part of my year. But then even in the further back areas that are more crowded, I can still remember some good times that I had with each album. But then in the back row, there'll be some "oh shit, I listened to that?" moments, but there are just as many personally canonized classics I've been keeping up with for many years now. All of this is important, because it is the understanding of music that I build for myself by experiencing it. This is the system that gives each individual entity it's value to me. A lot of online music discussion that I see positions a piece of music as something that gains value from its relationship to a monocultue built from recognized historical significance and cultural impact. But really we all just build our own music forests and values get established differently from all the different layots and everyone argues about what number each tree should be. While there is some good in the historical preservation instinct of this canon construction, it can also be used to diminish the personal values for things that people build themselves, and that's a load of bullshit. If you like your music forest then it's a cool music forest, no matter what anyone says. So I'm a fan of this graph showing off all that. But it still isn't enough to really get the picture though, we need to visualize the intensity over time of my relationship with each album.
The way this graph works is that (for every album I listened to more than 3 times, plus a few with less), it measures the number of days since the album was last listened to. So the initial listens for this year have no value (so there's missing information about albums I've been listening to for a while). Once an album gets a 2nd listen, it blips in on the graph here. If the 2nd listen happened 0 days after the 1st listen (on the same day), it appears as a very small dot at the top of the graph. If the 2nd listen was 80 days after the 1st listen, it appears much lower, as a larger dot. And so the animation runs from the beginning of the year to the end, with albums appearing on their 2nd listen and disappearing after their final listen of the year. The dots move up and down over time depending on how often they're being listened to.
Here is the same information, just displayed differently. These lines are the courses that the dots take over time in the animation. This is a lot of information, maybe it'd be best to start getting into this with a closer look at some of the albums I talked about earlier.
Going left to right, we start with Izipho Zam. I already had my focused period with it in the 1-10 range last year, and this year was just sort of about living with it, bouncing around in the 16-100 range. Next is Marzette & Company, which had a short period of time in the 1-10 range for about a week and a half, and then it settled into the 40-100 range. Then there's Obnóxious, which had a little bit of a slow start appearing at 6, so this wasn't like I'm immediately hooked, I waited almost a week to listen again. But then it spends a long time bouncing around the 1-10 range for over a month before getting into the less dense area. And then finally there's Dymaxion, who had an even slower time getting in but then had some really intense focus time, with the first three listens spanning over a month but then the last four all in one week.
I believe that my understanding of what music is is something I have to construct and maintain, and that it is built out of the sustained relationships with pieces of music, and developed with the introduction of new ones. So then, what am I actually doing, and what do I want to be doing? These graphs show that I am all over the map on ways I am taking in albums, but there is still something consistent going on. For the albums that leave a significant impression on me, whether it's immediate or takes some time, I tend to have a heavy consumption period at some point in the run, where the album is a very significant part of what music is to me at that moment, popping up frequently over the course of a week or two, though in rarer cases it can go over a month. And then the album drifts down a few levels, and the relationship with the album takes its own distinct shape. Sometimes the balance will shift and I won't have any activity in the 0-10 level, and I'll be focused on trying to hold on to things that I believe I still value. And then other times there will be multiple albums getting this level of focus, my view taken over entirely by something new. I'm really satsified with how I've been doing things here with the variety, and building these varied relationships with music where I'm not trying desperately to hold on to everything all of the time, allowing things to recede far enough into the background to let in something new, but still keeping them close enough to become a part of my space.