As another year folds out, it is time once again to look back and take stock or the highs and lows, before a fresh year rolls in. 2011 has had its moments and has overall been a rather good year, and trying to extract a list of twenty albums from the hundreds, thousands possibly, that I have listened to, loved, hated, reviewed or not, tried to make sense of or misunderstood seems a pretty restrictive effort at best. Still, it is always good to look back and realise that some records have made more of a mark than others, some almost imperceptibly. So, here is, in twenty records, what 2011 was made of…

1.

JENNY HVAL
Viscera
Rune Grammofon

Review:
There is such urgency throughout this record that it is quite astonishing how Hval manages to retain any lightness in her music, but she does, and [Helge] Sten picks up on just enough to bring it all to life in sprightly bright colours and tones. Continue Reading »

JOHN CHANTLER
The Luminous Ground
RMV442
Room40 2011
06 Tracks. 39mins50secs

Can music be ‘created by machines’? This is often the starting point of one of the main arguments hailed by detractors of electronic music, who see electronic synthesis and computers as the cold and inhuman antithesis to music played on ‘proper instruments’, by human beings. Yet, machines can’t work on their own. They cannot power themselves, have no natural creative will and depend on human interactions to even exist. Machines have to be programmed in some way, and, like musical instruments, are only as good as their users.

This is what John Chantler investigates with his latest album, published on Room40. For the last three years, he has amassed a handful of electronic devices into a modular set up which now regularly serves as a platform for live experimentation, and is here put to extensive use to create a rather intriguing soundtrack where human interaction and accidental machine input both play equally important roles. Continue Reading »

TUJIKO NORIKO, LAWRENCE ENGLISH & JOHN CHANTLER
U
RM435
Room40 2008
08 Tracks. 38mins57secs

Room 40 captain Lawrence English, musician John Chantler, and chanteuse Tujiko Noriko tumble together and tug apart over the course of U, inexhaustibly stitching the strong physicality of melodic lines to acoustic nuance, whilst crisp, agile, insistent digital tattoos envelop them and insinuate into every interstice.

Far from the jerky, skewed cut-ups of some of Noriko’s earlier work, U develops a judicious restraint to create a space for listening.  The album, though hardly esoteric, and sometimes lacking the edge of discovery honed by a confidently individualized voice, is thus easy to get lost in. Continue Reading »