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

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'?

Here's some opinions that are surely worth reading. Ph1l1p Sh3rburn3's review for Pitchrok (8.5 rating):

If you bought Porter Ricks' Biokinetics on CD in the 1990s and the disc is still intact, consider yourself lucky: The original edition is currently trading for $65 and up on Discogs. The price has something to do with the album's place in history: Biokinetics, a touchstone of experimental techno, was the first album released on Berlin's widely worshipped Chain Reaction label. But scarcity is a bigger factor: Biokinetics, like all of Chain Reaction's CDs from that era, came packaged in an aluminum tin that tended to crack the CD it was supposed to be protecting. (As a comment on Discogs notes, "Another Chain Reaction release, another metal box that eats up CDs.")

Fortunately, 16 years later, John Twells' Massachusetts-based Type label has stepped up with a reissue of the landmark album, not just on CD (this time in a standard jewel case) but also, for the first time, on 2xLP and digital download. It's a welcome reissue, and long overdue. It comes as certain ideas from techno's fertile, experimental, mid-1990s period are being picked up by a range of underground musicians. Many of these ideas have permeated so deeply into the culture that it's hard to remember a time without them, but we wouldn't have Burial, to name just one of the duo's distant descendants, without Porter Ricks' seafloor crackle and mottled-granite color scale.

Porter Ricks were the duo of Thomas Köner, a sound artist and ambient composer, and Andy Mellwig, a techno producer who also recorded as Continuous Mode and, with former Monolake member and future Ableton founder Gerhard Behles, as Async Sense. Released in 1996, Biokinetics was Porter Ricks' debut album, gathering tracks from three vinyl EPs released that year along with three songs exclusive to the album. It had been years since I last listened to it, and the Type reissue surprised me first by reminding me how diverse the album is. "Chain Reaction" has long since become shorthand for a certain fusion of buoyant dub, hazy ambience, and coiled techno, but on Biokinetics, none of these has quite settled into place; it's a dynamic, unpredictable mixture of pulse and hiss.

The opening "Port Gentil", a precursor to the template Wolfgang Voigt would adopt under his Gas alias, pairs soft, monochromatic tones with a muted 4/4 pulse. On the surface, it couldn't be simpler, but as it pulls you in, you become aware of shifting contours and unusual dimensions, the interplay of light and shadow; it sounds like a string section tuning up atop a freight train trundling through a deep canyon.

"Nautical Dub" hews closer to textbook techno, with muscular bass pushing relentlessly forward, but it's hardly conventional. There are no sharp edges, for one thing: Percussive accents have been buffed to a dull gleam, and the upper register of the track, normally reserved for crisp, cutting hi-hats, is diffused into a fine-gauge spray that sweeps back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. Only "Port of Call" assumes dancefloor techno's chiseled boom-tick profile, but this time it's the low end that's fizzed to near nothingness. A few years later, Pole would famously construct an entire aesthetic around the vagaries of a broken Waldorf filter, but Biokinetics was first: Everything sounds broken here, all frayed cables and dusty contacts, and every gesture toward techno clarity feels like a trade-off made at the expense of another element that's left to crumble.

Dub techno has since become one of electronic music's most mannered styles, but here, Porter Ricks' tracks feel not so much like compositions, much less stylistic exercises, than answers to very specific, fairly arcane questions-- what happens when we route this LFO through that filter? How many divisions can we parse between the downbeats? How can chaos be turned into rhythm, and how far can a repetition be stretched before it's rendered senseless? Where is the boundary between tone and white noise?

On "Biokinetics 1", a heaving, wheezing synthesizer struggles to stick to a regular pulse as it's fed through disorienting delay and looped back upon itself, stumbling and confused. As an experiment in stretching a groove to the breaking point, it's as exhilarating as anything in the history of techno. "Port of Nuba" and "Nautical Nuba" submit drum machines to a similar warping process, resulting in rhythms that gallop like teams of horses. Here, you can hear the origin of Thomas Brinkmann's tumbling cadences of a year or two later, as he used a double-armed turntable to draw elliptical rhythms out of the grooves of records by Wolfgang Voigt and Richie Hawtin. And while we're talking about precedents, the leaden dirge of "Biokinetics 2" lays the groundwork for the bleak, trudging techno of Andy Stott and his Modern Love labelmates.

That Biokinetics is an album about currents is reflected in its seafaring titles, such as "Nautical Dub", "Nautical Zone", "Port of Call", etc., and also in the way that the record's energies feed back into itself. What Porter Ricks learned from dub was less about particular rhythms or stylistic tropes than about the path that a sound travels as it wends its way through the mixing desk, and how it comes out transformed on the other side. Dub's hall-of-mirrors approach to versioning, meanwhile, informs the way that many tracks here are variations upon one another: "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" bookend the album with nearly identical chords, while "Nautical Nuba" and "Port of Nuba" recycle the same drum patterns, using filters and delays to achieve very different results. Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

Like Detroit's Drexciya, Porter Ricks (who took their name from a character from Flipper, the 1960s film and television series) used aquatic metaphors to get at larger ideas, both musical and otherwise. Ocean currents, electrical currents, sound waves, feedback; dub, techno, minimalism, noise; exchange as a fluid back-and-forth but also, as Drexciya pointed out, as a loaded dynamic, fraught, unequal-- they all swirl together, rippling in time and veering out of sync, as though pulled by complicated gravitational forces. Biokinetics is above all a music of tides, suggesting rhythm as both celestial stroke and as a vibration deep in the body, bubbling at the molecular level.

FACT magazine:

Between 1990 and 1993 Thomas Köner composed a trio of astonishing albums that represented the peak of ambient exploration alongside fellow travellers and collaborators like Paul Schütze and David Toop. Sonically traveling though arctic landscapes that were inaccessible to most life, the music that was birthed on Nunatak Gongamur, Teimo and Permafrost was created through a radical reinvention. Mic’ing up the not-so-humble gong and then treating to it a range of experiments like scraping, brushing, recording underwater and then heavily treating with effects, Köner developed a completely unique sonic language that could only be appreciated through focussed deep-listening. These epic wraith-like hallucination-inducing drones may have laid the benchmark for dark ambient but that is something of a misnomer, with Köner developing an emotional state of wide-eyed astonishment upon glancing upon terrain that was as beautiful as it was forbidding. This was by no means music of doom though. The triptych was later gathered together by Deleuzian-inspired German label Mille Plateau only to drift straight out of print before last year receiving a full and proper reissue treatment by Type, the same label who now bring us this essential tablet from the skies. Or should that be seas?

1996 saw Köner unexpectedly shift this singular aesthetic towards the dancefloor in partnership with Andy Mellwig as Porter Ricks (named after the dad from 60’s dolphin soap-opera Flipper). Mellwig has released occasional work but is primarily associated with – and still very much present at – the legendary Dubplates Mastering studios in Berlin. Biokinetics was released in 1996 and compiles Porter Ricks first three 12″s for Chain Reaction with three new tunes, housed in that label’s signature metal tin, and has since become the stuff of legend. Deservedly so: Biokinetics may have been assessed on dub-techno terms, which is perfectly reasonable given its relationship to Basic Channel, and in a sense this was the template with which the duo chose to work, but the Porter Ricks project is a lot more versatile than this one genre and really represents the peak of a period of experimentation in underground music where such classifications had become extremely fluid and the boundaries between producer, musician and engineer were at a non-existent high.

Bookends ‘Port Gentil’ and ‘Nautical Zone’ both push the 12 minute mark and perhaps fit closest to the Basic Channel template whilst simultaneously pushing that mode to its most illogical and gorgeous end. Both tracks are monolithically huge, ocean-expansive meditations on sound, surreally submerged and completely relentless 4/4 buried under the subtlest of melodic flourishes with entirely vague whispers of noise and texture enveloping you in some kind of underwater, universal womb. There is something strangely loving about this music, with tension tempered by a very occasional chord at the slowest of repetitions, a benevolent hand leading you through this weird wilderness. In the thawing of ice to water (possibly aided by the drugs du jour), Köner and Mellwig seem to have located the urge to move from godforsaken to guide. ‘Biokinetics 2’ pushes this to the absolute limit, a complete reduction of texture to nothing but a sinister whisper of breath, an unrealised threat of melody and a distant cavernous machinic heartbeat. ‘Nautical Dub’ is slightly more forbidding and faster, with clapping chugging rhythms and gloopy gamelan rapidly encroaching from a distance. Over its six minute course, a menacing bassline that locks you properly in to a zombie groove slowly synthesises to become a truly evil hook. I once heard this lost in some warehouse at 3am many years ago and all semblance of normal existence seemed to vanish in a micro-minimal second. It still has that effect today.

Things get truly weird at points. ‘Biokinetics 1’ is, quite frankly, fucking nuts, taking what sounds like a vociferous sequenced sealion and watching it shimmy out of time to a muted gong. ‘Port of Nuba’ and ‘Nautical Nuba’ take this chattering out-of control abstraction and incorporate the beat around it, making for some of the most paradoxically strange dance music you are ever likely to hear – the accelerated pulse rate playing havoc with your internal rhythm as blocks of noise get pushed round the edges of your senses.

Biokinetics was the start of a truly fertile period of experimentation for the duo and maybe the last truly great experimental period for techno; perhaps even a watershed moment for whatever post-rock actually was. The combination of Köner’s avant-garde background and Mellwig’s studio and techno-savvy ended up mirroring an approach to sound comparable to My Bloody Valentine on Loveless (which dropped between Köner’s first two albums); the long-term impact of ecstasy having an inverse effect on music production and removing all its physical edges. Köner and Mellwig actually went on to complete a truly stunning collaboration with Sonic Boom’s E.A.R. project, which at the time included MBV’s Kevin Shields as well as luminaries like Kevin ‘The Bug” Martin and legendary improv percussionist Eddie Prévost, as well as an equally brilliant and bizarre follow-up Porter Ricks album for Mille Plateau and a full-blown collaboration with the aforementioned Martin and Justin Broadrick (in Techno Animal mode) on Symbiotics.

16 years down the line and the passing of time has done absolutely nothing to diminish the radical and immersive power of this record or any of Porter Ricks’ later forays. Combined with Köner’s solo work, Biokinetics is a pivotal moment in electronic music and a decisive moment in one of the most important and brilliant oeuvres in contemporary music.

Yeah, I heard Biokenetics a bit as well, and it's really really good. I'm not sure it sounds that out there, though, isn't it a template for dubtechno that was followed quite a lot afterwards?

I've also heard Shleep. That's... ok?

is is amazing IMO but I'm not gonna work to convince you if you aren't a Wyatt fan

is = it

I like Rock Bottom, but no, I'm not a particularly big fan.

I feel like I'm getting the hang of this list now. So many of the albums are hard to find, but I've heard quite a lot. I've begun checking out the lists from this decade, am discovering a lot of good music I've known about but never checked out.

Frederik B, do you have the Internet subscription to The Wire? I think I need to get it

No, but their lists are freely online.

I'm still doing this, I just hit a slow patch. I am kind of struggling to find stuff to say about Porter Ricks or Maurizio, but I legit like both

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.

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?