ILM's Top 77 ALBUMS of 2011

Never heard of Barwick. I like the way it sounds, but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

xp re ongoing true/false debate: it seems pretty obvious to me that genre hybridisation is orthogonal to "watering-down". Music that crosses genres A and B may be more accessible to a fan of B than something that is "true A" without losing any of its complexity and quality.

From that description of Barwick I'm imagining somewhere between Imogen Heap and AGF.

oh wow i am kind of feeling "prizewinning" a lot

i wonder how you guys would feel about fatima al qadiri/ayshay? she's who i thought of when i read "lex it's kinda like...ambient music made entirely from her voice looped and processed" -

on ayshay's warn-u ep she reinterpreted some traditional islamic chants/anthems in that manner

http://youtu.be/AJobaxZqy18
http://youtu.be/4AvDiYDMRz8

xp i think if you like the way it sounds you're listening to it correctly already. nothing academic about it really

Love love love the Barwick album, great to see it place so high. Is Tim Hecker going to be top ten?!

Barwick's collaboration with Ikue Mori on FRKWYS is also well worth checking out, really really good stuff.

Yeah, she's just jamming on loops basically, nothing amazingly clever, but such a fantastic sound. xxp

fatima al qadiri? seandalai you are a fan of hers, right?

I like the way it sounds, but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

see, this is how i felt about julia holter - i'm finding barwick quite immediate though, the ebbs and flows of the sound make "sense" to me

but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

Early morning on a weekend in a quiet house works for me.

the drums on prizewinning are kinda jarring to me though

Yeah I love the Fatima Al Qadiri EP, haven't got round to spending much time with the Ayshay material yet though.

on "prizewinning" it's like the two vocal lines are singing in rounds - one descending as the other ascends

oh man the percussion has just come in!!!! i am SOLD

i'm behind but i think this nicolas jaar record is the weirdest thing i've heard from the countdown? like i have no idea what this music is for.

it's for me

it's you, it's you, it's all for you

Contender/Sean: taking this cheese analogy a bit further, if someone were to scoff at me whenever I put some Lego cheese slices in my burger, I'd be like 'fuck offs cunto!'. On the other hand if I was in the super market and saw
Babybels all wrapped up in rustic
Packaging and then people started telling me how amazing these things were, I'd prob want a bit of clarity on that.
fancy packaging

Vow is another great track on the Magic Place:

http://youtu.be/6JkSVvMn5Sc

http://i.imgur.com/eLOVp.jpg

12. EMA — Past Life Martyred Saints (590 points, 18 votes, two first place votes)

P4K: 13
P&J: 15

Spotify

Not sure this is going anywhere, but I don't buy your implication that crossover or even hipster representatives of a genre are automatically Babybel. They may be that, but they might also be really cool variants that haven't been tried before.

lex, maybe try "Prizewinning": http://youtu.be/jW-nKlgrK7I

currently listening to this, as i'd never heard JB before. reminds me in different ways of things i like quite a bit (o paon/woelv, grouper and the knife, for instance) but i'm finding it more lovely than compelling, at least on the first pass. suppose i need to hear the whole album...

The Kurt Vile album reminds me a lot of latter-day Dylan's backing band with a little more electric guitar drone. There are so many clean, open chords as well as a lot of crunchy dissonances and great resolutions. "Puppet to the Man" is probably my favorite - the vocals are in that space between speaking and singing and sit in the middle of this sea of parallel-sounding lines that aren't actually moving in parallel. At the core it's still a droney vibe record, which can understandably turn people off, but I appreciated the songs and the subtle instrumental touches.

"more lovely than compelling" is a succinct summation of my feelings tbh xp

woelv, grouper

Ok, gotta hear this now

As someone who finds lovely stuff compelling I'm getting increasingly excitable.

it's really immense looped vocal pieces, that have this very spectral, early morning choral feel.

that is a great description. it's sort of like grand church music if churches were all outdoors

also, I just listened to the Nguzunguzu remix of that Ayshay EP and O_O

xp, the drums coming in on Prizewinning is the BEST

i like the frank ocean album as pop music, in the same way that i like ghost and lady gaga, without making any accompanying claims about "getting into R&B" or w/e. it sounds good when it goes in my ears.

Feeling this post.

nicholas jaar is for the children

(and seems way less 'weird' than a lot of music on this poll)

xp

The "more lovely than compelling" crew might prefer the FRKWYS release (e.g. http://youtu.be/43dvViC_IHA to pick a random track)...going back to one of my more overused adjectives of the past year, it's a lot "knottier" than The Magic Place.

I don't buy your implication that crossover or even hipster representatives of a genre are automatically Babybel. They may be that, but they might also be really cool variants that haven't been tried before.

― two lights crew (seandalai), Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:40 AM (15 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

exactly, and the loud insistence of troo heads that crossover/hipster shit = babybel is inevitable and usually meaningless

yeah to be serious, parts of the jaar album almost feel like an IDM record 10-15 years out of time. the vocals are weird and kind of obscure this but that's the vibe i get from it

Hm. I didn't expect to be so not-central. 6/25 have placed thus far, but only Nguzunguzu out of my top 10 and EMA out of my top 15.

(Not that I deserve having my votes place or anything, just that I tend to find myself in the bland centre of overlapping ILX tastes.)

Maybe only two others I'd expect to place now that we're up this far.

I'm p bummed about Blood Lust tbh

I hated that EMA record; the "California" song/video combo irritates me in such an acute and specific way. I've got no time for this hip poet shit anymore. Oooh, she opened the song with "fuck"! She made her fingers into guns! It's like the lamest parts certain strains of '90s alterna-garbage.

i like the frank ocean album as pop music, in the same way that i like ghost and lady gaga, without making any accompanying claims about "getting into R&B" or w/e. it sounds good when it goes in my ears.

the crux is that a lot of people seemed totally more willing to put frank ocean in their ears than a lot of r&b singers who didn't have the same DIY-tumblr-promotion-strategy or indieblog/indiecrit backing. that's all. i don't intend to get into this argument on this thread again though

Drugs B. Wrongey?

ok lol

not sure what to listen to off this nicholas jaar thing, so i just called up "colomb". gorgeous and spooky. love the organ tone, handclaps, ghostly vocal. wow. something almost grotesquely intimate about it. any other recommendations?

Wow, three in a row from my ballet.

xp "keep me there" is my favorite track i think

I'm not giving up. I will just fool myself into thinking WOW ITS #1 after #2 is posted

contenderizer:

jaar pox

wouh
a time for us
love you gotta lose again
marks
the bees - winter rose (nicolas jaar remix)
ellen allien - flashy flashy (nicolas jaar remix)
russian dolls
el bandido
space is only noise if you can see
no regular play - owe me (nicolas jaar remix)

― irina-camelia begu (lex pretend), Wednesday, January 11, 2012 11:48 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some dope albums placing this morning, would have voted for peaking lights, tropical 2 and rustie. lex's diagnosis re: the jaar album otm, way too sparse and not dancey enough. he still released a lot of my favourite music of the year

re: peaking lights i think contenderizer arguing their previous material is better is way off the money. 936 is really incredible and a huge step above their previous work. despite being still maybe somewhat lo-fi by some people's standards it's not murky at all and feels really well mastered. i still don't think people like call all destroyer would be into it, but it shouldn't be dismissed as lo-fi. despite their really minimal set-up the amount of space the music occupies and the dynamics existing within it is really magical. all the warbly, drifting beams of sound feel so lovingly crafted, and the uncrowded arrangement puts the focus on them. it's a really psychedelic bliss out kind of album. the mood is really sumptuous and romantic and joyful, but also cut with a little bit miserable and bleak

http://i.imgur.com/ep6mx.jpg

11. Tim Hecker — Ravedeath, 1972 (597 points, 21 votes, one first place vote)

P4K: 30
P&J: 36

Spotify

!!!

great record

Whoa... Barwick placing so high is fantastic!

xp Hecker hurray!

There's a lot of ambient/experimental music this year Innit? Like the fact most of it is more interesting than some cunt on a laptop.