[one of the murals on the exterior of the old youth drop-in centre on 101st/103rd(?)]The other night Bryna asked me what my favourite music of this past calendar year has been, & I must have named at least five albums instantly. Later that night my sleeplessness coaxed me into making a list:
Takk – Sigur Ros
To be wrapped up in this collection of warm, moving layers, riding the bus with tea in one’s hands & Sigur Ros in one’s ears will alleviate sadness & most types of mental shakiness. Little illuminated clouds on September Sunday mornings, trees in amber swirling, raining down leaves to catch in tiny curb-whirlwinds is the cure for most bad things.
Fragmenti – Paris to Kyiv
Open spaces to fill, bells to hide things in. Here are echoes & textures & repetitions & variations, birds with familiar feathers & voices to remind one not to forget things. It feels very old & wise. Alexis Kochan has a very beautiful voice, a little higher than my mother’s, the way I expect my grandma must have sounded when she was younger & still had a full range. This also conjures a place, wide reverberating spaces that I want to make films of – films of wind, of grass growing, of clouds moving, birds in flocks scattering into the sunlight.
(Come on Feel the) Illinoise – Sufjan Stevens
Lovely & choral with banjos & oboes, & the sort of comforting, truthful voice I want whispering in my ear. Rather wrenching & grand songs about place & identity & personal-historical memory all mingled together. (Landscape + Identity = Love!) It made me think about the physical places that my writing is rooted in; I know much is attached to the Kananaskis area, but it made me realize just how much of my images come to me closer to home. From my forest, especially...
What else? Usually I do not like things that twang but Sarah Harmer (I’m a Mountain) can make slightly-twangy things lovely & joyful, things that I like to listen to over & over again. Chris & I (& Bailey the bunny) listened to this album at least six times in a row one day while we cooked...
Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP was a collection of folk-ish stories about various spiritual women that was poetic & provocative & also instrumentally delicious. Iron & Wine also made In the Reins with Calexico & this is also pleasant (& mariachi-fied!) Sam Beam’s lyrics fascinate me. They seem fragmentary at times, but the images & rhythms are so brilliant: “Black horse fly, lemonade / jar on the red ant hill / garden worm, cigarette / ash on the window sill”...
Ani Di Franco made Knuckle Down, which was also very good listening as usual; the song ‘Recoil’ is very much the second part of the song 'Welcome to:' & has brought me much comfort.
Beck’s Guero is good to listen to on the bus, & he has these lines that stand out in all the pleasant evocative nonsense, like ‘Hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight’. I like to listen to him on the autobus & it is good & distracting. Gogol Bordello made Gypsy Punks, and somehow they mixed Romany & Romanian & Yiddish & Russian & Carpatho-Ukrainian music with reggae-ish punk music & made something like good borshch that is political & charismatic & delightful & absurd. This summer M.I.A. (with Arular) gave me something to drown out the obnoxious pop music of my international pupils & I was grateful for that. It also helped me get up in the morning when I really didn’t want to.
There were also a lot of other musics I enjoyed this year, but they did not come out in 2005. I will have to make another list... Regina Spektor! Angelite
& Huun-Huur-Tu! Jorane’s live CD from a few years ago... Hmm. There were also a few CDs that appeared which sort of disappointed me... I was all excited for Four Tet (Everything Ecstatic) but I couldn’t really get into it. I don’t know -- it was interesting, much more complex, but it seemed to have lost a little bit of melody & warmth & replaced it with something that reminded me of... math... there was nothing there like ‘Everything is Alright’ or ‘Parks’. I think this is because of the loss of some of the organic instrumentation, or because the organic chunks were chopped up very finely & added to a repetitive stew... & while I admire the sound capabilities of computers, synthetic tones can often lack certain timbres, & I think it is the timbre we respond to most emotionally... The Decemberists’ Picaresque had a few songs I enjoyed quite much, like ‘16 Military Wives’ (which also has a delightful video!) but the whole CD lost its lustre a little too quickly. & Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine was extraordinarily ordinary. Alas...
Currently I am eagerly awaiting the new Cat Power (The Greatest) on January 24th. I will run away from work on my break to go to Listen Records to fetch it! How delightful (& potentially detrimental to one’s paycheque) it is to be so close to so many music-shops...
ps: If anyone is reading this, I would like to hear your music-list for this past year...
Takk – Sigur Ros
To be wrapped up in this collection of warm, moving layers, riding the bus with tea in one’s hands & Sigur Ros in one’s ears will alleviate sadness & most types of mental shakiness. Little illuminated clouds on September Sunday mornings, trees in amber swirling, raining down leaves to catch in tiny curb-whirlwinds is the cure for most bad things.
Fragmenti – Paris to Kyiv
Open spaces to fill, bells to hide things in. Here are echoes & textures & repetitions & variations, birds with familiar feathers & voices to remind one not to forget things. It feels very old & wise. Alexis Kochan has a very beautiful voice, a little higher than my mother’s, the way I expect my grandma must have sounded when she was younger & still had a full range. This also conjures a place, wide reverberating spaces that I want to make films of – films of wind, of grass growing, of clouds moving, birds in flocks scattering into the sunlight.
(Come on Feel the) Illinoise – Sufjan Stevens
Lovely & choral with banjos & oboes, & the sort of comforting, truthful voice I want whispering in my ear. Rather wrenching & grand songs about place & identity & personal-historical memory all mingled together. (Landscape + Identity = Love!) It made me think about the physical places that my writing is rooted in; I know much is attached to the Kananaskis area, but it made me realize just how much of my images come to me closer to home. From my forest, especially...
What else? Usually I do not like things that twang but Sarah Harmer (I’m a Mountain) can make slightly-twangy things lovely & joyful, things that I like to listen to over & over again. Chris & I (& Bailey the bunny) listened to this album at least six times in a row one day while we cooked...
Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP was a collection of folk-ish stories about various spiritual women that was poetic & provocative & also instrumentally delicious. Iron & Wine also made In the Reins with Calexico & this is also pleasant (& mariachi-fied!) Sam Beam’s lyrics fascinate me. They seem fragmentary at times, but the images & rhythms are so brilliant: “Black horse fly, lemonade / jar on the red ant hill / garden worm, cigarette / ash on the window sill”...
Ani Di Franco made Knuckle Down, which was also very good listening as usual; the song ‘Recoil’ is very much the second part of the song 'Welcome to:' & has brought me much comfort.
Beck’s Guero is good to listen to on the bus, & he has these lines that stand out in all the pleasant evocative nonsense, like ‘Hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight’. I like to listen to him on the autobus & it is good & distracting. Gogol Bordello made Gypsy Punks, and somehow they mixed Romany & Romanian & Yiddish & Russian & Carpatho-Ukrainian music with reggae-ish punk music & made something like good borshch that is political & charismatic & delightful & absurd. This summer M.I.A. (with Arular) gave me something to drown out the obnoxious pop music of my international pupils & I was grateful for that. It also helped me get up in the morning when I really didn’t want to.
There were also a lot of other musics I enjoyed this year, but they did not come out in 2005. I will have to make another list... Regina Spektor! Angelite
& Huun-Huur-Tu! Jorane’s live CD from a few years ago... Hmm. There were also a few CDs that appeared which sort of disappointed me... I was all excited for Four Tet (Everything Ecstatic) but I couldn’t really get into it. I don’t know -- it was interesting, much more complex, but it seemed to have lost a little bit of melody & warmth & replaced it with something that reminded me of... math... there was nothing there like ‘Everything is Alright’ or ‘Parks’. I think this is because of the loss of some of the organic instrumentation, or because the organic chunks were chopped up very finely & added to a repetitive stew... & while I admire the sound capabilities of computers, synthetic tones can often lack certain timbres, & I think it is the timbre we respond to most emotionally... The Decemberists’ Picaresque had a few songs I enjoyed quite much, like ‘16 Military Wives’ (which also has a delightful video!) but the whole CD lost its lustre a little too quickly. & Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine was extraordinarily ordinary. Alas...
Currently I am eagerly awaiting the new Cat Power (The Greatest) on January 24th. I will run away from work on my break to go to Listen Records to fetch it! How delightful (& potentially detrimental to one’s paycheque) it is to be so close to so many music-shops...
ps: If anyone is reading this, I would like to hear your music-list for this past year...
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