This is a listening thread for UK avant-music publication THE WIRE's best-of lists published at the end of every year. We pick a year, listen through all the albums ranked, discuss any and all impres

Or, as the spine of my CD calls it: "Last Cncert"

Ok haha so skot otm; Consume Red is immense. It's kind of hard to describe or to talk about...I guess this could be what maybe FLOOD sounded like if Boris had been obsessed with idk, maybe Borbetomagus, or some of the RIO bands, instead of the Melvins. I didn't realize this at first (though I think a lot of you prob did) but this is classified as 'japanoise', a genre I've had a burgeoning interest in for the past few months. I've been approaching that stuff through the metal/psych side--through stuff like Mainliner and Fushitsusha, and related bands like Gravitar and the Goslings--and not so much the avant/abstract side. I never would've guessed this was 'japanoise' from the first few minutes of this, when it sounded like call-and-response saxophone (actually hojok) field hollers, but it totally is.

Try the live version! It's less refined; shorter and heavier (IIRC)

Adding to the Ground-Zero love here, seeing them play it live in London that year was religious. Also the Takemitsu compilation would be one of my desert island discs, were I to find myself in such a position.
I guess Wabi Sabi is something to do with the Pluramon guy, having just looked it up (with some difficulty). I have no memory of it ever existing.

9.John Wall - Fractuur

this one's v good iirc. the takemitsu too

Next up for me is Dots and Loops , since I'm prob one of only about a few hundred people on Earth who haven't listened to it yet ;-)

I used to read The Wire a bit in the late 90s/early 00s. I had stopped reading Melody Maker as it had gone shit. I came across a lot of good stuff from The Wire - japanese music like Cornelius, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Jim O'Rourke, Faust, the more weird indie stuff like Woodbine.

The Wire Tapper CD's could often be incredible too.

dots and loops and emperor tomato ketchup are the stereolab i listened to when i started listening to them, so they'll always be definitive of the band to me

I decided to begin from the bottom, and noted a mistake. The album at number 50 is Four Dhuns not Four Drums. It's Indian classical music with flute. Hariprasad Chaurasia played on George Harrison's The Inner Light, even. I'm one track in, and it's quite good.

Arcana at 49 is jazz-fusion with Tony Williams, Bill Laswell and Pharaoh Sanders amongst others. Not on spotify. 48 is Cuban masters. 47 a live album with Ornette Coleman, and then Patti Smith at 46. 45 is an old Georgian composer, so it's Maurizio at 44 who is the first artist who wasn't big in the 70's or earlier. That's kinda weird...

I only just discovered 90's Henry Threadgill recently and Where's Your Cup is one of his best.

This list got me to check out the two Arcana albums for the first time ever. The first one, The Last Wave, came out on the Japanese DIW label and was a power trio session (kinda) with Derek Bailey on guitar, Laswell on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. Arc of the Testimony is a more typically Laswellian project, with Williams back but no Bailey; instead, you get Nicky Skopelitis on guitar (and Buckethead on three tracks), Pharoah Sanders on sax throughout, Byard Lancaster on sax on three tracks, and Graham Haynes on cornet on two (overlapping with Lancaster). I think it might have been rawer and noisier had Williams not died with the record still unfinished, thus permitting Laswell to take the reins completely. Still, it's pretty nice in a drifty dubby ethno-jazz with metallic/skronky moments kind of way.

It's quite fun googling and trying to find the lesser known bands. 42 is Gushwachs, not Guschwachs (it's a mistake that's also on the wire webpage). It's swedish free-jazz trio Gush (which includes Mats Gustafson) meeting Phillip Wachsmann's electro-acoustic experiments. It was rereleased on bandcamp last year, if anybody wants to check it out.

The Sign of 4 sounds fun. 3 hours of noisy live improvisations with two drummers, apparently. 1,5 stars on all music. Would love to hear that one.

The Sign of 4 is better on paper than in your ears. Metheny's and Bailey's improvisational languages are totally incompatible. The two drummers do what they can, but ultimately it's one of those "you had to be there" sort of things - probably fun live, but a slog when listened to at home. Metheny talked about it on his website a while ago.

Wow, just heard Ground Zero - Consume Red, that's pretty brilliant. Also heard Paul Schutze - The Second Site, though only the second disc. Is it an opera of sorts? It's moody pseudo-world music with spoken word on top, quite good. Schutze has another disc on the list - he's one of four artists in the Driftworks box - and apparently also wrote for Wire.

Oh, yeah, the second disc of Second Site is on youtube. Check it out.

The one by Vinicius Cantuaria is a keeper as well. Brazilian singer, the album is done with help from Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, even Ryuchi Sakamoto on one song. Brazilian folk with gentle electronic touches, almost like the updated tropicalia album Gil and Veloso kinda failed to deliver with Tropicalia II.

It's also cheesy as fuck. Which is a good thing, I love the cheesy in Brazilian music, and think it's way underrated in Western reception - which is so often about how 'out there' and 'wild' it is. But even on Tropicalia - Panis et Circenses, the second song is an old schlager that they just put in there. It's the balance of cheese and invention that I love about it. Still, I love love love that this here song is on an album from the Wire list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAkRDBSW4sg

Beautiful. But poppy.

Cantuaria played on the Arto Lindsay album at #4 too iirc, he was in Arto's band for quite a while actually

Is Dots and Loops known as the Stereolab album where they deliberately turned away from motorik towards exotica?

"Dots and Loops" is their first fully formed exotica album, but there was definitely traces in earlier albums like "Mars Audiac Quintet".

dots and loops and emperor tomato ketchup sound pretty similar to me

i seem to recall dots and loops was remarked as their first time working in a dice and slice copy and paste DAT type environment, hence the name?

Thought Dots and Loops was their "dance" album? Cobra was the start of exotica iirc.

Meant to type DAW not DAT

Part of the interest with lists like this is to look at was isn't on the list. In this case, the obvious one is OK Computer, which of course every voter must have known, and most of them rejected. Another one that they've probably known but rejected is Homework by Daft Punk. But as I looked over the Acclaimed list from 1997 there was one album that seemed more like something Wire just a few years later would have kicked themselves for missing. Missy Elliott - Supa Dupa Fly. We're really just a few years away from this kind of pop-avantgardism being all the rage, and Supa Dupa Fly is so much an auteurist statement, with all songs written and produced by the same team, in a forward thinking experimental style. Instead we get Company Flow (makes sense) and the second Gravediggaz, which isn't that well thought of today, right?

have you ever read The Wire?

He, once or twice. Why? I've checked their end-of-year lists, and Missy Elliot are on later ones.

the obvious thing that people have sort of been talking round is that when something genuinely new comes around, it will catch most people by surprise, "vanguardist" publications like the wire as much, if not more, than the established pop media. the wire, as much as any other media, was dependent on labels and publicists (and now i suppose is dependent on the internet grapevine). if you look at the rym list, which yes has problems but has a benefit of hindsight the wire's year end lists don't, you'll see plenty of apparently obvious omissions (like, say, biosphere) that don't make the list because the wire weren't as aware of them as they were of robert wyatt and jim o'rourke.

xp just interested. It's very UK-centric by and large, and in 1997 the voters would probably have actively decided not to vote for stuff that the "mainstream" music press would rep for, incessantly, hence no Radiohead or Daft Punk, despite whatever claims they might have to being avant garde.

Oh, definitely, I mentioned Radiohead and Daft Punk exactly as two bands I understood why was not on there. Other albums of that ilk from 97: BlurBlur and Mogwai Young Team for instance. Verve Urban Hymns. I definitely get why they aren't on there. I also get why Supa Dupa Fly isn't on there, I'm just guessing it's one the magazine would like to redo more than they would Urban Hymns. Because a few years later it would be seen as progressive to have Miss E... So Addictive instead of Is This It on your list.

I don't think the list is that UK-centric, btw? Four japanese albums, German techno, Brazilian singer-songwriter, etc. Some of it definitely seem parochial (Robert Wyatt tops not only in 97 but again in 03 and 07) but the NME list from the same year had UK artists in all top 10 positions.

yeah that's fair enough actually, it does have its local heroes but by and large does a pretty good job of being international(ist)

The Wire got a huge amount of shit for putting Radiohead on the cover in 2001 or 2002, I forget when exactly, but a large contingent of "You're The Wire, you're supposed to be above such pop trash" letters poured in.

It's a market niche thing, brand loyalty, all that. Some people get very upset when The Wire covers bands that are covered in the NME; their conception of the "avant garde" is based as much around what it _isn't_ as what it is.

The Radiohead cover is 2001: http://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/209 Funnily enough, the headline is 'Dissent Into the Mainstream', appropriately enough.

enough enough

Pretty weird that Reprovisers didn't make it into that list somewhere.

Pretty cool list overall, I think it points to 1997 as a very exciting year for the potential future of electronic music that didn't quite pan out. People would've been mighty disappointed to find out that those Squarepusher/Mouse on Mars/Bjork albums were arguably their peaks, rather than a springboard to an interesting and evolving career.

There's probably something ironic about the Radiohead kerfuffle: in 2001, Radiohead was easily more avant garde than Dots and Loops , which for all its various non-rock impulses, is basically a lovely indie-pop album. But I can also grasp, even from my layperson view, how Laetitia Sadler and co. had built up their radicalist cache throughout the 90s...

maybe there's an element of the wire feeling a need to have its own singular perspective on things that are popular elsewhere, as it does with hip-hop through 'critical beats' nomenclature etc, or could with stereolab by making that radicalist cache front and centre. when the mainstream press are lauding radiohead for being influenced by uh a bunch of things you can read about in the wire, this could be a harder move to make

In 2011, King of Limbs was on their end-of-year list, probably as one of the few music magazines. I do like that album as well, though, better than anything since Amnesiac, so I'm not complaining.

Haha thats a great point xp

In 1996 or '97 the Wire praised Limp Bizkit's debut album and thought the Frogs were actually gay, so mainstream avoidance may have been only right and natural for them.

I remember when The Wire trashed Amy Winehouse for being mindless pap or some such (direct citation needed). Some of their writers were pretentious in their derision towards what they felt were lesser forms of music.

I definitely hear the dance elements in Dots and Loops btw. It feels like 97 was a year for trying to incorporate ?d'n'b? elements into indie. It works really well playing off the larger lounge-pop affectations. A lot of aesthetic sophistication here, which quite enhances the loveliness. And yet...my mind kept wanting to lump this in with The Sea and Cake's The Fawn (prob bcz how _unrock_ both are) but I tend to like that album a little more, the songwriting seems more memorable

Lo Fi Allstars "how to operate with a blown mind" came out in '98 which was kinda the Brit Indie versh of LCD Soundsystem

i don't think it's weird to lump Dots and Loops in with The Fawn; John McEntire plays on 8 songs on D&L, and all of those tracks were recorded in Chicago about 4 months after The Fawn. I also love The Fawn, and agree that it has more memorable songs than D&L

Ok so I had no idea about any of that (not even sure I knew McEntire was in Sea and Cake, except for some vague sense that they get mentioned often with Tortoise) so that's kind of crazy.

Anyways, I'm onto Porter Ricks now. Second track in: sounding alright. I don't really have a lot of context for electronica, but a genre tag like 'dub techno' is something I'm p much always game for

Okay, third track, "Exposed", is absolutely my kind of thing

https://youtu.be/jDr2FF5_Kgc

...aaand "Scuba Lounge" is even better. A fully realized dub nightmare, invoking the sort of 'wateriness' that that genre can affect and exploiting it fully for claustrophobic effect.

https://youtu.be/W4Tf879dSn4

...so I was searching around for reviews for the Porter Ricks self-titled album that I'd started listening to last Friday (#34), and it was kind of hard going. However, the album PR put out before that, in '96, Biokinetics , had gone re-released in 2012 and subsequently had been subjected to breathless reviews from at least a few of the crucial music websites (P4k, FACT). I searched around for that album in the '96 Wire list, hoping to link to those reviews on a tangential post, only to find out... Biokinetics is #10 on the '97 list, and likely the PR album brimstead had been referring to.

So now I'm listening to that one, too. My first response is that the dub stuff seems a little less overt. I kind of want to say this sounds like the dance counterpart to a lot of the amorphous, abstract psych that I love from this time (Super Roots 6, yes, but even R Montgomery, Fuxa, Hovercraft, Azusa Plane, Circle's Hissi), but I'm really unqualified to discussed electronica, and dimly suspect that a lot of music could qualify for that description. Is "Biokinetics 1" one of the tracks that play an important role in the evolution of what would end up being called 'dubstep'?

I will say this: I'm taking a real shine to the Porter Ricks self-titled. Feels like the greatest seapunk album ever recorded

Anyone up for doing a second year of this?

If you want to, that's fine. I def have plans to return to this thread in the next month or so to finish off 97

Hey Fred B, if you want to take over this thread, that's 100% fine by me. I'm sorry I headed your last attempt off. I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to start listening through the Wire lists again, but there's no point in letting this sit in mothballs if there's interest from other posters.

Oh, actually I was thinking of returning to 97 and checking out the ECM albums on it now that they're on spotify. Anyone else up for spending a week more or so on this list?

i'm interested

Cool! The ECM albums I'm going to delve into are these three:

6.Tomasz Stanko Septet - Litania: Music Of Krzysztof Komeda
29. Joe Maneri Quartet - In Full Cry
45. Giya Kancheli- Caris Mere

lovely

this stanko record is sounding really nice. komeda is really worth exploring. i particularly like his "astigmatic" from '66

https://img.discogs.com/x2lhdRJZIXHTSHEdf9zi6SpLOno=/fit-in/600x574/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2684297-1315083022.jpeg.jpg

...which, as the cover art now reminds me, tomasz stanko played on. duh

wow, i guess this komeda album is really well-known and very highly regarded! my friend, who lived in poland for about a decade, once showed it to me and he gave me the impression that he was letting me in on this secret obscure underground avant-jazz polish thing but the internet tells me otherwise.

anyway, back to "litania" and stanko. the record is so sparse and breathy and completely beautiful. there's this moment in "night time, daytime requiem" around 11m after a longish piano interlude and stanko starts playing, it sounds like he's wincing, it's this strange, fragile, hesitant, raspy sound. and then as the band comes together it has this feeling of a primordial moment, a kind of re-discovery, as if the musicians are all remembering that they play jazz, that jazz is this beautiful thing for which they are living, breathing conduits, and the realization makes them convulse in this spasm of noise around 14m40s and then the serene, post-natal textures at 15m giving way to further reflections alternating between tranquility and these slow, increasingly ecstatic crescendoes and then collapse and re-set. what a pleasure.

great post

and maybe this is hackneyed but i feel like the music definitely evokes post-war poland in a big way. i mean, this is what stanko's hometown looked like in the '60s:

http://www.podkarpackahistoria.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/08.jpg

http://www.podkarpackahistoria.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/13.jpg

the whole "we gotta start over" sentiment maybe

(thanks ross)

and yeah okay so this is stanko talking w/ npr in 2006:

HANSEN: The music critic Geoffrey Himes wrote that you pioneered a distinctly Polish brand of jazz. What does that mean? What's Polish jazz?

Mr. STANKO: This is question not for myself. I don't know exactly, because I play this music. I think it's kind of melancholic, what maybe it's coming from our climate, our light in our country, and this melancholy may be a little bit also in the Chopin music, this kind of romantic, melancholic atmosphere, mood.

HANSEN: So it does reflect sort of the culture. Politically, however, how difficult was it to play jazz? Because Poland has gone through so much in the last 50 years.

Mr. STANKO: Yeah. It was - in the '50s, it was quite difficult, even was illegal. But in my times, '60s, it was quite possible, even fashionable and every film director, actors, Polanski and this society, was really into the jazz music, and we were kind of kings in the arts society.

(Soundbite of laughter)

HANSEN: Do you think there's a difference between the way jazz is developing here in the United States and the direction it's going in Europe?

Mr. STANKO: Probably yes, because had war, you know, and jazz was much shorter period in Europe, because war destroyed completely everything. Like you remember, you said Django Reinhart was in France before the war, but after that, you know, everything start from the beginning.

Polish Jazz makes me think of Ida. Kinda holy, kinda modernistic chic.

lol of ALL the polish films!

or wait did you mean the band?

No, the film :)

Looking through his discography, Komeda apparantly made several scores for Danish director Henning Carlsen as well, including his international breakthrough Hunger. Never knew that. One of the tracks on Astigmatic is from a Carlsen film as well.

i like stanko's '70s stuff. particularly "purple sun" (with zbigniew seifert on violin) and "twet". they've got a sound to them i find amenable.

although the notion of "polish jazz" has me listening to this record called "winobranie" by zbigniew namyslowski that rym rates highly - any of y'all heard this one? good shit!

never heard it, just put it on. thanks for the rec!

somebody made a list on discogs of the whole "polish jazz" series, which was done by the state-run label i guess. the first one is "new orleans stompers" by the warsaw stompers lol

https://www.discogs.com/lists/Polish-Jazz-Series/17341

also this is a really nice overview of stanko's career https://jazztimes.com/features/tomasz-stanko-the-soul-of-freedom/

I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by the Giya Kancheli album. It's very intensely religious classical music, but both a little too kitchy and a little too proper. It doesn't have the austerity of an Arvo Pärt at his best, but on the other hand isn't as straightforwardly emotionally manipulative as something like Gorecki's third. I love the final vocal passage of the first track. But there are a couple of moments, as when there's a quote of Jewish music, or some of Jan Garbarek's saxophone passages, where it's a bit of a stylistic mishmash. Holy Polystylism? Holystylism?

hi Frederik. sorry i let this lapse. i listened to the kancheli album twice (last week) and didn't have much to say, except that i wasn't very into it. i was planning to listen a couple of more times, and perhaps be more specific in my criticism. but then i listened again and decided against trying to formulate my feelings into words.

so onto joe maneri, then. (tomorrow.)

Lol, that seems like a pretty legit response to Kancheli to me. Joe Maneri, and then, anyone who has a suggestion for another year?