Joe Hill’s epic retrospective of the decade continues with 2015-16.
2015
The Art of the Lullaby
Max Richter — Sleep
In the 1700s, the Russian Count Hermann von Keyserling suffered from terrible insomnia. According to legend (or possibly history), he employed a harpsichordist, Johann Goldberg, to play to him all night to ease his discomfort, and the set of Bach pieces he performed became known as The Goldberg Variations.
Of course, these days, you don’t have to be a member of the aristocracy to hear music on demand, or indeed all night. I don’t know anyone who has listened to Max Richter’s opus Sleep from start to finish, but it’s hard to know if anyone is supposed to. Firstly, it’s eight-and-a-half hours long, and secondly, the clue is in the title. When Richter and his musicians performed it live (all of it), the audience were given beds instead of chairs, as if to actively discourage consciousness.
This is more than a great piece of music - this is commitment to a philosophy. Inspired partly by The Goldberg Variations, Richter constructed a representation and an accompaniment to perhaps the most universal human experience. For both versions of the album, the cover shows an image of the moon — the same moon that you and I have seen, the same moon which hung above the library of Alexandria, above Auschwitz, and above Count Keyserling’s bedchamber. We live in a world of division. Anything that allows us to appreciate our common ground as human beings — however seemingly insignificant — is an intrinsically good thing, and it doesn’t get much better than this.
Try: Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life)
Return of the Golden Goose
Joanna Newsom — Divers
Hey, do you know who Joanna Newsom — the harp-playing singer-songwriter whose work will outlast all of us, and deserves to be kept in nuclear bunkers in case of artistic drought — is married to? Andy Samberg — the guy from The Lonely Island who brought us ‘Threw It On the Ground’ and ‘Jizz In My Pants’. To clarify, Andy Samberg is a very talented man, but it’s still like learning that Weird Al and Harper Lee were an item. I wouldn’t mention this normally, but Divers has an air of palpable contentment which Samberg might be partially responsible for.
If Newsom ever writes about herself, it’s often so buried in poetics and allegory it could easily be about anyone or anything else. Even at its most troubled, ‘Divers’ is utterly idyllic. Newsom’s elegant honk of a voice is a divisive instrument, but truly unique performers are never for everyone. In this case, she has never sounded so in control of her craft. Like Carl Stalling and Brian Wilson at their best, her gambolling melodies elicit a guttural reaction of joy. The fact that they have roots in so-called ‘high brow’ genres of classical, medieval, and harp-led folk music is irrelevant, and further proof that she is one of the few living composers who vaults over stylistic borders like a cricket through a barbed-wire fence.
It’s the kind of record that makes you yearn for a time when music wasn’t so easy to consume — a time when you had very few records to hand, which needed to be savoured accordingly. In that sense, Divers is the ultimate value for money record. It’s so dense, rich and lush that you could listen to it dozens and dozens of times and never be numbed to its surprises.
Try: Anecdotes
and On and On and On
Major Lazer, DJ Snake and MØ — ‘Lean On’
I used to work in an electronics store which sold everything from computers to ovens. One such gizmo was a digital bluetooth speaker the size of a small fridge. Every time a customer pressed the DEMO button on the front, ‘Lean On’ by Major Lazer would boom through the store like an air raid siren. I must have heard that song at least twice a day, every day, for a year. I never once resented hearing it, ever.
For a while this was the most streamed song of all time, and it’s a fine choice. It manages to sound just like all the other manufactured dance-pop bilge from the middle of the decade, and yet somehow about eight-hundred times better. Like a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters producing the complete works of Shakespeare, ‘Lean On’ is a miracle of the same old thing being suddenly perfect.
Garbage Sculptures
Oneohtrix Point Never — Garden of Delete
Everything on the internet is disturbingly temporary and disturbingly permanent. You can throw giant chunks of your personal life into the infosphere, but you just better hope it doesn’t crawl out of the recycle bin and bite you. In the gooey centre of the decade, Daniel Lopatin made an extraordinary depiction of the semi-human cyberscape we live in. It’s not his best record, it’s not even his most definitive, but it’s possible that nothing else captures this era of overstimulation quite like Garden of Delete.
There are voices here. Some of them definitely came from organic lifeforms, and others most certainly didn’t. Telling them apart is another question entirely. There are threads of alternative rock, nu-metal, early video game soundtracks, baroque and classical music, but by the time they’ve been munched by the circuit-boards, they’ve been ground into mutants. There’s real humour in here too. The joy and pain of nostalgia is burped out by synths and static, time signatures hiccup in and out of place, and it finally ends with a melting android singing a desolate break-up song. Garden of Delete evokes a past we can’t reclaim and a future we can’t control. It’s all the excitement and fear of the present day, laid out like a pixelated tapestry.
Try: Sticky Drama
Dust Through Cracked Windows
Áine O'Dwyer — Music for Church Cleaners
Hopefully, out of necessity, the codependent relationship we’ve built with the internet will slacken. The more connected we become to the virtual world, the more the real one falls away from our grasp. John Cage once said: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
It would be a great thing to propagate a slower-paced world, where patience is rewarded with peace and ecstasy — the ability to enjoy a time and space on its own merits, without anaesthesia or distraction. Part performance, part unrehearsed field recording, Music For Church Cleaners is both self-explanatory and deeply mysterious.
Áine O'Dwyer turned her recorder on at St Mark’s Church in Islington and improvised on the organ while the cleaners went about their tasks, visitors talked, and children giggled. At one point, she has to pause her playing to allow one of them to plug in the vacuum cleaner beside the keyboard. No sound on this record feels entirely accidental or deliberate. It’s a rich near-stillness, spread out over 90 minutes.
That being said, it wouldn’t be worth much if it weren’t for O’Dwyer herself, whose playing is both familiar and completely unique. Pitched curiously between grand gothics and warm pastorals, it’s the kind of sound that exists outside of era. Somehow (and this is the only occasion I will ever say this) the sound of Henry the Hoover wheezing in the background only makes it more magical. As unpolished and raw as music gets.
Try: The Feast of Fools
2016
A New Career In a New Town
David Bowie — Blackstar
The era in which we are now living began on January 10th 2016. Two days after releasing Blackstar, David Bowie vacated this planet, opening a rift in the spacetime continuum, and leaking the diarrhoea of fate all over our lovely ignorance. It turned out to be a strangely symbolic death. Bowie was perhaps the greatest weirdo. He was an outsider in terms of what he liked, what he made, his queerness, his curiosity and his refusal to apologise for any of the above. What’s more, we actually had a piece of art to mark this era, and it was far better than we could have hoped for or expected.
Blackstar is an elegant mess of contradictions. It’s resonant despite its cryptic turn of phrase, approaching its subjects with humour and humility. Stylistically, it’s off the wall. Bad-dream jazz, claustrophobic beats, haunted carnival soundtracks and, underneath it all, a deep and honest source of compassion. For the most part, it owes nothing to nostalgia. David Bowie was once again using his prestigious name to sell very leftfield ideas, taking notes from Death Grips and late-period Scott Walker, neither of whom had any hope of being million sellers in this decade.
It’s his last great reinvention, this time as a figure more abstract and yet more human than ever. There is more than one nod to his past career. The closer ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ builds upon an instrumental from 1977, and serves as a bridge between the past and present. If David Bowie were still alive, Blackstar would still be a superb record. Having said that, we can’t deny that its context means something.
It’s the sound of a man facing his own mortality, and using his remaining time to understand and reaffirm his love of life. David Bowie didn’t change himself to make people like him. People loved him because he flaunted his differences. We still love him, because we aspire to be like him: to take pride in what makes us weird, and use that weirdness to make the world a bit less shit. “I can’t answer why – just go with me.”
Try: Lazarus
Oh, the Humanity
Tim Hecker — Love Streams
Few artists encapsulate a merging of the gentle and the violent better than Tim Hecker. What you hear might be guitars or synths, but they could also be warped field recordings of extreme weather, or miraculously harmonised radio static. Even if he drew you diagrams and took you through his entire process of making music, nothing could dim its mystery. Though Love Streams makes extensive use of that most familiar instrument, the human voice, it might be Hecker’s strangest work yet.
Working with an Icelandic choir — arranged by the supremely talented and much-missed Jóhann Jóhannsson — Hecker has created a sensual piece of uneasy listening. It’s unattached to specific cultures or styles. It shapeshifts when you think you’ve got a handle on it, establishing hypnotic motifs and dissolving them when you’re ready to let your guard down. As alien, confrontational and unintelligible as it all is, there’s something resoundingly soulful about it too.
The filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky once wrote: “In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.” We’re not talking about movies here, but by this definition Love Streams is most definitely poetry.
Try: Music of the Air
Also His Voice is Bad Lukas Graham - 7 Years (2016)
Also His Voice is Bad
Lukas Graham — 7 Years
When in America, Oscar Wilde was asked why he thought Americans were such a violent people. He said “Because your wallpaper is so horrible”. As quippy as that might seem, Wilde was actually being serious. His theory was that if you surround yourself with ugly things, you’ll feel angry, and that anger has to go somewhere. 2016 will go down in history as one of the most punishing years of the new millennium. As well as Brexit, Trump and the deaths of dozens of our heroes, targeted violence and hate crimes rose significantly.
Now, you may think me crass for linking a bad pop song with real life bloodshed. I’m not saying these events were Lukas Graham’s fault (per se), I’m just saying that every time I heard it, I wanted something else to feel my pain. Fuck it, let’s chase this connection to the end. Emotional manipulation might be the strongest tool of the cruel capitalist nightmare we’re living in, and there was no hit song this decade more manipulative than this one.
Lukas Graham is an egomaniac. Writing about this song isn’t a case of “I don’t know where to start” — in this case, I don’t know when to stop. This is a ‘We Are The World’-style charity single without the charity or the star power. I could write a book about this song, if only I could stop throwing my headphones across the room. In the meantime, I’ll just sum up with this line: ‘Something about that glory just always seemed to bore me’. A line like that in a 4-minute humble-brag is infuriating enough, but it’s also pretty representative. Narcissism disguised as authenticity — what could be more 2016 than that?
Moths and Streetlamps
Julianna Barwick — Will
The defining moment of this record is its first second. Up to now, Julianna Barwick’s music has evoked decidedly natural landscapes. Her songs are dominated by layered and looped recordings of her own wordless singing, gradually elevating into a one-woman superchoir. It’s very human music, but it comes from a place unspoiled by the presence of people. Or at least it used to.
The first sound you hear on Will is a passing car. From that first second, it’s evident that this is Barwick constructing a different scene from the same materials, and the ensuing 10 songs are proof that she is more versatile than we could have given her credit for. It’s hard to know if it sounds more like a wedding or a funeral. More so than ever before, however, she’s making music that sounds private — insular but just as expressive in grief and joy alike. The palate is more artificial. It evokes a city at midnight as much as a forest at dawn. Even the closing track ‘See, Know’, with it’s drums (gasp!) and harsh circling keyboard riff earns its place. It’s a final elongated explosion before it coils into nothing. Secular hymns for an overpopulated planet.
Try: Nebula
Appearing / Disappearing Frank Ocean - Blonde (2016)
Appearing / Disappearing
Frank Ocean — Blonde
R&B stands for rhythm and blues, but that’s not really what it means any more. The term has become vague and, to some of its own artists, frustrating. For instance, Frank Ocean claimed he wouldn’t be pigeonholed into R&B if he were a white man. There’s no way of knowing this for sure — but if Blonde proves anything, it’s that its creator doesn’t like labels.
For a start, his hair on the cover is acid-green. That’s a contradiction before you even press play, as is the fact that the word ‘blond’ is spelt differently on the cover than all the websites and press releases. Ocean has been open about falling in love with at least one man, but has resisted calling himself gay, bisexual or whatever else.
Ocean’s music became more expressive and vivid as he himself started fading from the public eye. The richness of his life is confined to his art, not Twitter or Instagram. There’s an entire track on Blonde dedicated to a man explaining the gulf between his personal life and his social media presence. The stylistic diversity on display might invite the word ‘experimental’ if Ocean didn’t sound so in control of his craft. Better words might be ‘honest’ or ‘intuitive’. By exhuming and illustrating his own psyche without flinching, Frank Ocean has made a record that actually does justice to the complexity of the human experience.
Try: Nights
Part I (2010-12)
Part II (2013-14)
Part IV (2017-19)
Words by Joe Anthony Hill