The new year begins as the old one ended: with way too much good music for us to cover at length. Here is just a small selection of those we missed, but didn’t want to let slip by unmentioned…

BABs – Diving Bells (Mini-Loop Records)

BABs is the improvising trio of Loop Collective members Olie Brice on bass, James Allsopp on bass clarinet, and Alex Bonney on electronics. Thanks to an unconventional approach to how they play their instruments, combined with the use of real-time electronic processing, BABs investigate textural spaces far beyond the remit of a regular jazz trio. Diving Bells sees them taking the sea as a cue, not through a use of simplistic sound effects, but really thinking about the sonic properties of water, and diving down to explore its depths. As well as being very clever, Diving Bells is a transportive and strangely beautiful record. You can imagine a vessel creaking and groaning as it descends, finding strange lifeforms amongst the icy blackness on the sea bed, before ascending back to a calm, rippling surface. Diving Bells is a (sunken) treasure. (SM)

Matt Elliott – The Broken Man (Ici d’ailleurs)

There is something of the high seriousness of European modernism to Matt Elliott’s catalogue of work – somehow this feels more akin to Thomas Bernhard or Milan Kundera than the eldritch strangness of the traditional British folk heritage. And I wonder how well we (and by ‘we’ I refer to some vague notion of a British establishment) actually deal with seriousness of this kind in our music? My feeling is that we turn away from it, see in the rigour and intensity of the vision a kind of betrayal – a betrayal of some implicit contract not to stare at things for this long without some recourse to whimsy or gentle humour.  Over six solo albums Elliott has certainly maintained an unwavering glare, a glare into the heart of things others of us might not have the courage to think on, save in the dead hours of the night. With the ‘songs’ quartet finished, Elliott has produced something more baroque, and fittingly, European sounding with The Broken Man. The ornate flourishes that decorate the deep throbbing melancholy contain elements of flamenco and  Balkan folk and there’s that lingering Gallic air about things. The album is built around three long tracks (‘Oh How We Fell’, ‘Dust Flesh and Bones’ and ‘If Anyone Tells Me “It’s Better to Have Loved and Lost Than to Never Have Loved at All” I Will Stab Them in the Face’) the last of which is a monstrously vast thing, a deep resonating chamber of sorrow, a 13-minute long sombre piano-led descent into a dark night of the soul.  It’s devastating stuff and a crowning achievement of what is a very fine album. (MP)

Marcus Fischer – Collected Dust (Tench)

Dust Breeding was the name of a creative challenge Marcus Fischer set himself to produce some sort of art (audio or visual) every day from January 2009 to January 2010. These small particles of experimentation built up over the course of the year, until there was so much of that he had to do something about it. Collected Dust sculpts some of this source material into new shapes. Where his previous release Monocoastal was inspired partly by the vastness of the ocean, Collected Dust by virtue of its very nature feels smaller, more domestic, created with whatever was to hand – for example, one track is called “Wires On Carpet”. From such prosaic materials, Fischer succeeds in crafting some exquisite miniatures, understated contraptions with flecks of delicate instrumentation glistening amongst slow, pulsing tones. Beauty is all around us, if we take the time to look for it. (SM)

F.C. Judd – Electronics Without Tears (Public Information)

“In electronic music, the sounds are derived from electronic sound generators. In music concrete, they are recorded via a microphone.” So begins the lesson from Fred Judd on this collection by the infant Public Information label, bringing together material that was released in limited numbers in the ’60s when Judd was establishing just what electronic music was and could be used to create. The album title itself, Electronics Without Tears, could almost by the title of a series of monthly publications, allowing you to craft electronic music in the comfort of your own home. All the music here, from the strictly scientific and technical ‘China Bowl’ (from which the opening monologue is taken) to the Stereolab precursor of ‘Speed Through Space’, this is the sound of a time when the future was tantalisingly close – an ability to hear the real science behind this new music and showing how these alien sounds were created from mundane artefacts through manipulation. Over the 20 tracks on this collection, you get to hear the full range of what Judd was trying to do – it’s almost like listening to a CV of music as he goes from recording singular objects and manipulating their singular sound, to blending a series of different sounds together, creating a sound collage and demonstrating just how powerful and, in the end, influential this method of music would become. Electronics Without Tears is an audio history book and essential listening to anyone interested in electronic music. (RH)

Daniel Menche – Guts (Editions Mego)

There is a physicality about Daniel Menche, both in terms of the way he works, and in terms of his subject matter. He has long sought inspiration from the body (the words “blood”, “skin”, “larynx”, “jugular”, and “tongue” all appear in album titles), but here he takes his visceral approach to its logical conclusion: the guts. On his latest release, he rolls up his sleeves and gets in up to his elbows inside a grand piano, slashing away at it until the sound flows in torrents. Across the four sides, strings are scraped, plucked, thumped, and otherwise interrogated, the resulting noises are then scooped up along with a roomful of resonance, processed and layered in different ways, but always ending up – as you’d expect from Menche – sounding HUGE. Guts is like being locked in the devil’s cutlery drawer, and having him rattle it til you bleed – skewered on Satan’s spoons, what a way to go. (SM)

Daniel Padden – Ship Chop (Dekorder)

There is something oddly slung together about Ship Chop, which may well, after all, be the point. On it, Daniel Padden pieces and places together samples from his record collection, fusing far eastern folk and devotional music, snatches of calls to prayer, what sounds like chopped and re-assembled recordings of Balkan folk assemblies. In a way it feels like a summation of a thread that’s always  been present in his work – indeed it’s tempting to think of that title from the Owl of Fives record, ‘Baltic Chunks of Antiquity’ as like a code-breaker to some extent. Yet there’s something subtly unsettling about the whole enterprise, something in the way the samples dryly abut one another, creating strange conversations and juxtapositions that otherwise would remain mute. Then you return to that ragged, slung together feel and the whole conversation begins again. There’s no denying the intrigue though, and the feel that you’re listening to something that has the skill and erudition of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts yet not, what, the same commercial ambition?  (MP)

Perispirit – Spiritual Church Music (Digitalis)

In his 1857 publication The Spirits Book, Allen Kardec used the term “perispirit” to describe a psychic vapour which envelopes the human spirit, from which he derived explanations for spiritual phenomena such as poltergeists. That the duo of Ricardo Donoso and Luke Moldof have named themselves after this suggests that they are trying to tap into some sort of higher plane with their excellent first release for Digitalis (having previously recorded for Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions amongst others). The collage entitled “14th Annual Séance” is structured like a scanning of the airwaves, in which they pick up transmissions both terrestial and extraterrestial – a crackly snatch of music will be interrupted by a ghostly groan, almost like a recording of Electronic Voice Phenomena. On the second side, traces of synth melody are ultimately obliterated in a violent maelstrom of unearthly noise, as if the whole edifice is being dashed to the floor in a fit of rage. There is something there, alright. (SM)

Josef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch – Concerning The Entrance Into Eternity (Important)

If there was an award for most unexpected musical pairing of the year, then this combination of lutist Josef van Wissem with filmmaker (and sometime guitarist, it seems – who knew?) Jim Jarmusch would walk away with it. It wouldn’t run away with it – there is nothing fast paced about their approach to their music. Van Wissem’s delicate phrases roll out like wisps of smoke, curling and forming circular patterns in the air, while Jarmusch floats charred cinders of guitar into the gaps. I may not have known that Jarmusch played guitar, but I could probably have guessed that if he did he’d sound like Neil Young, given their working history. The Dead Man soundtrack would be a useful reference point for“The Sun Of The Natural World Is Pure Fire”, as Jarmusch gives it the full Shakey, clouds of feedback settling upon a blackened landscape. Good to know Jarmusch has something to fall back on if that whole film-making thing doesn’t work out for him. (SM)

Refractor – Refractor (Under The Spire)

The latest LP from the excellent South Wales label Under The Spire features something incredibly simple in premise, but ultimately far reaching in sound. Refractor, aka Joseph Martinez, has produced an album that’s full of texture and depth by just passing all the sound through a single synthesizer. All the mixing, reverb and manipulation have been exectued using this instrument, the idea behind it to “embrace the limitations of one-take recordings with no additional editing”. If you were to listen to Refractor you’d think there was no limitations to single-take recordings at all. ‘Gimmick Policing’ is the sound of an overstocked cupboard falling upon you in a surprising tumble of noises and sounds whilst ‘Echo Chamber Music’ throbs like Satan’s own hangover, an undulating and gurgling rolling boil of bleeps and tones. The music is is all enveloping, a blanket of sound and noise that’s thrown over you. It’s so vivid you could almost reach out and touch it, and, when listening on headphones, the music pours itself into your ear canal. This is music at its awe-inspiring best. (RH)

Windy & Carl – We Will Always Be (Kranky)

If I have a problem with the current deluge of ambient and drone releases it’s the idea that nothing is at stake, that what we’re hearing is merely a function of the spread of affordable technology. If, loosely speaking, anyone can do it, where is the jeopardy, the crisis? Which is why the appearance of a new Windy & Carl record has something of a feeling, however diluted, of an event. It’s sobering to think that the duo have been doing this stuff for close on 20 years, and that it was once innovative and if not exactly new, certainly other enough to still have some revelatory impact. Then again, their sound has always been towards the lighter more shoegazey end of drone music, so maybe laying that kind of seriousness at their door is just unfair? With all that in mind, how does We Will Always Be feel in 2012? In view of their extensive catalogue it’s more evidence that they still have a lightness of touch and an appreciation of tone and form, and it all swells and builds with affecting warmth. And ‘Looking Glass’ in particular has a beautiful high metallic shimmer about it. Yet you sense they could have produced this stuff in their sleep, which may well be the point in that alongside the consoling clasp of Songs for the Broken Hearted this is the sound of contentment and ease. Which might just be enough, mightn’t it? (MP)

Peter Wyeth – Humming New Time (Olynka Records)

A five track EP and debut release on the new Olynka Records label set up by Tom Morris from Her Name Is Calla fame, sees Peter Wyeth produce music that was completely improvised and recorded on an iPhone and a handheld recorder using loop pedals in a series of gardens, fields and room of South Leicestershire. As with most of these projects, a wealth of material was edited down to form this release which is a blend of field recordings and beautifully simple but bright pieces of acoustic guitar. It’s quintessentially British, the sounds of a rolling summer, all shouting kids, buzzing insects and swaying branches. Wyeth’s guitar is your companion, holding your hand and leading you through this vista. The method of producing the record ensures it sounds different, there’s no darkness hidden away, and each piece can be taken at face value and enjoyed for its delicate and graceful music. (RH)

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