A highly recommended solo piano album. From boomkat.com (with audio samples):

There’s a very literal reason for the title of Nils Frahm’s new album, Felt. He wanted to play the piano during the dead of night, without disturbing his neighbours, so he layed thick felt in front of its strings to muffle the sound. Rather than being frustrated, he unexpectedly found himself enchanted by this dampened sound, and it opened up new compositional as well as playing possibilities for his inquisitive mind. The resulting work is varied in style but it all has a close, confessional, nocturnal quality that’s beautifully wrought and expertly recorded: from the Reich-a-like layered arpeggios of ‘Keep’ and ‘More’, to the wistful, jazz-tinted Glassisms of ‘Familiar’, there are plenty of grand harmonic gestures, but these are nicely interspersed with, and balanced by, eerie ambiences like ‘Pause’ and ‘Less’. Really lovely music for the arriving Autumn days, and recommended for fans of Machinefabriek, Isan and other masters of subtly romantic electro-acoustic sonorities.

Recommended album for those looking for something a bit challenging – this album is just a bizarre collision of destroyed Techno and noise.

Another fine addition to the 12k catalog. The Boats’ latest album is a very nice quiet weekend album – highly recommended.

I’ve been listening to lots of great new music that I’ll feature once I update this site, however I wanted to highlight this 2004 album in the meantime.

I recently found a used copy of the limited edition vinyl release of this album on Southern Lord in 2006. Well worth checking out if you missed it the first time around.

Another solid year of new music. The following is a summary of some of my favorites from 2011:

Best Track of the Year:

Mountains : Blue Lanterns on East Oxford off their excellent Air Museum album:

Compressed audio does this track little justice (seriously, the above video sounds horrible – I shouldn’t even post it – hearing the extreme frequencies on this track really matter – it’s like drinking a famous vintage of your favorite wine out of a plastic cup). If you ever have a chance to see Mountains live, do not miss out. They are one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen – they put to shame most electronic/’laptop’ artists.

Favorite Album:

Stephan Mathieu : Remain [Line]

Much like Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, this album excels through its remarkably simple structure – exemplifying a perfect execution of the minimalist esthetic. I thought I’d missed out on owning this album due to its limited pressing, but it’s fitting that I randomly found a copy on a weekend trip to Baltimore.

From Stephan’s website:

My sound is largely based on early instruments, environmental sound and obsolete media which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution, and has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the work of Colorfield artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.

A Static Place, also released this year on 12k, is excellent as well:

The rest in no particular order:

Julianna Barwick : The Magic Place [Asthmatic Kitty]

Very unlike most of the music I listen to, it’s hard to find a single fault in Julianna’s album.

Beirut : The Rip Tide [Pompeii Records]

Zach Condon returned with his strongest release since his impeccable The Flying Club Cup. I challenge you to dislike the track Payne’s Bay.

The Caretaker : An Empty Bliss Beyond This World [History Always Favours the Winners]

James Kirby released lots of material in 2011, but this album stands out the most to me. The dominate adjective that comes to mind for this album is ‘haunting’. From a pitchfork review:

Bliss was inspired by a 2010 study suggesting that Alzheimer’s patients have an easier time remembering information when it’s placed in the context of music. What makes it unique isn’t that Kirby resuscitates old but vaguely familiar source material; it’s how he edits it. Several of the tracks here take pretty, anodyne phrases and loop them mindlessly; several stop in what feels like mid-thought; several reach back and then jump forward. They never feel filled-in from start to finish, and they tend to linger on moments that feel especially comforting or conclusive: the last flourishes of a song, maybe, the pat on the shoulder, the part when we’re assured everything is drawing to a close. Kirby isn’t just making nostalgic music, he’s making music that mimics the fragmented and inconclusive ways our memories work.

DOM : Family Of Love EP

DOM will become very popular in near future. Their latest EP is probably the most fun album I’ve listened to this year, and a solid follow-up to their amazing Sun Bronzed Greek Gods EP. Their single, Happy Birthday Party, is pop perfection:

Christian Fennesz : Seven Stars EP [Touch]

A solid evolution to Fennesz’s sound. Anything he does makes it onto my end of year lists by default:

Tim Hecker : Ravedeath, 1972 + Dropped Pianos [Kranky]

Like Fennesz, Tim Hecker can do no wrong. These albums are no exception:

Mark McGuire : A Young Person’s Guide To Mark McGuire + Get Lost [Editions Mego]

The first track to A Young Person’s…, the 17+ minute Dream Team from his 2008 micro release will have anyone hooked:

Andy Stott : We Stay Together [Modern Love]

Just an awesome album which will be on everyone’s end of year list. Anyone who craves the old Chain Reaction material will love this album. I prefer it slightly to his Passed Me By album. I believe the below is a borrowed National Geographic photograph for the album’s cover art:

Christopher Willits : Gold [self-released]

Another excellent long-form ambient track from Willits:

Best Re-Release:

William Basinski : A Red Score In Tile

Probably my most prized possession on vinyl gets the CD re-release for mass audience. Basinski had a big year with his masterpiece, The Disintegration Loops, being performed live at the Met by the Wordless Music Orchestra on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11.

From Touch:

El Tren Fantasma, (The Ghost Train), is Chris Watson’s 4th solo album for Touch, and his first since Weather Report in 2003, which was named as one of the albums you should hear before you die in The Guardian. A Radio programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 30 Oct, 2010, produced by Sarah Blunt, and described as “a thrilling acoustic journey across the heart of Mexico from Pacific to Atlantic coast using archive recordings to recreate a rail passenger service which no longer exists. It’s now more than a decade since FNM operated its last continuous passenger service across country. Chris Watson spent a month on board the train with some of the last passengers to travel this route. As sound recordist he was part of the film crew working on a programme in the BBC TV series Great Railways Journeys. Now, in this album, the journey of the ‘ghost train’ is recreated, evoking memories of a recent past, capturing the atmosphere, rhythms and sounds of human life, wildlife and the journey itself along the tracks of one of Mexico’s greatest engineering projects.

THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE:
‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music

By Kim Cascone.

The medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message. The technique of exposing the minutiae of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has helped further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music, but it has also forced us to also to examine our preconceptions of failure and detritus more carefully.

From boomkat.com:

These tracks are arrestingly clear-headed and sombre, with the requisite amount of emotional un-ease and a beguilling sense of ambiguity thanks to those perception-altering layers of fuzz and filtered detritus on the lens keeping things firmly hyperreal. How you decipher the meanings of these moods and atmospheres is where the beauty and longevity of these tracks lie, as patience and repeated listens will reveal new views of the landscape as the seasons change. Imagine if Roedelius had grown up in Stockport in the midst of a rave-o-lution, couple that with a sardonic yet discerning post-everything attitude 10 years before everyone else, and then wonder what that experience may result in – and you just might be quite close to imagining the treats this album holds in store for you…

Dom’s second EP, after their masterful debut, Sun Bronzed Greek Gods.

From philipglass.com:

Metamorphosis was written in 1988 and takes its name from a play based on Kafka’s short story. Numbers three and four are from Glass’s incidental music to the play, which he wrote to fulfill separate but nearly simultaneous requests from two different theater companies. Numbers one and two use themes from Glass’s soundtrack to the acclaimed Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line, which depicts the true story of a man’s wrongful conviction for the murder of a Dallas police officer. The touching melody of number two and the diatonic harmonies throughout provide an ironic counterpoint to the film’s numerous reenactments of the shooting. The thrice repeated two-note theme (a descending minor third) in numbers one and five recalls the movie’s pathetic litany of interviews and testimonies. Number five, which also draws on themes from The Thin Blue Line, was composed as a finale to the set.

Mad Rush was written for the occasion of the Dalai Lama’s first public address in New York City, in the fall of 1981. Originally an open-structured or open-ended piece, it was first performed by Glass on organ during the Dalai Lama’s entrance into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was later performed on Radio Bremen and finally used by choreographer Lucinda Childs as accompaniment to a dance Mad Rush. It is cast in seven similar sections that create an extended ternary form.

Wichita Vortex Sutra is the result of a chance meeting between two long-time friends, Glass and poet Allen Ginsberg, in St. Mark’s Books, a popular bookstore in the East Village. “We decided on the spot to do something together, reached for one of Allen’s books, and chose the poem ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra,'” Glass recalls. “I composed the music to match the rhythm of Allen’s reading.” The piece was first performed in 1988 at a benefit for a theater group of Vietnam veterans, with Ginsberg reading excerpts from his poem and Glass playing piano. Continuing their collaboration, the poet and composer are now at work on a new song cycle, Hydrogen Jukebox, which will include Wichita Vortex Sutra with Ginsberg’s own narration.