2023

The best thing I’ve done this year is take on leadership of my archery club to save it from closure after the previous chairman stepped down when the club was facing increasing costs and dwindling membership. It’s been a steep learning curve and a lot of work, but with the help of other members we’ve improved the course and kept the club going, so it’s been worth it. That’s one reason why I’ve posted so little on this blog of late (another reason is the diabolical block editor in WordPress). This is one of the few successfully completed posts – a round-up of some of the things I enjoyed in 2023.

7FO – ‘ヒ​ー​リ​ン​グ​剣 (Healing Sword)’ (EM Records)

One of my favourite tracks this year, a tip from Derek Walmsley, editor of The Wire magazine. 7FO is pronounced ‘nana-F-O’ (‘nana’ = 7 in Japanese). I didn’t realise until later that it’s pretty much a cover of the Prince Jammy track ‘Synchro Start’ from the album Computerised Dub (1986).

a0n0 – Underground Sea (Tokinogake) / City Lights (Superpang)

a0n0 is the man. Not only a master of noisy computer music, he’s the driving force behind the Tokinogake collective.

Umeko Ando (2017) Iuta Upopo (Pingipung)

I love this gently trotting rhythm of plucked strings and minimal percussion that support the sweet, slow and wavering vibrato of Umeko Ando’s voice.

Autechre – AE_LIVE_2022 (Warp)

On Mastodon, Sean described how the recent live sets, which usually last around an hour, can be seen as parts of a bigger composition that exists more virtually than actually, since it hasn’t been either composed or played as a whole in one go, but can be pieced together by listening out for the common elements spread across different performances.

Derek Bailey and Paul Motian – Duo in Concert (Frozen Reeds)

A magical performance by masters of improvisation. The drums provide a more metric rhythm than comparable Bailey collaborations, such as those with Tony Oxley (RIP), and in response the guitar is more melodic. Like the Roland Kayn box set from Frozen Reeds, this album is mastered by Jim O’Rourke with album art and design by Robert Beatty, and represents another jewel in the crown of the label’s infrequent but always special output.

BECKTON ALPS2 – Fuck Your Nazi Welkin III: Conformity

Angry anti-fascist industrial music.

Emily M Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, & Shmargaret Shmitchell (2021) On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

Article that coined the term ‘stochastic parrot’ for machine learning where a large language model generates seemingly sensible language but without understanding its meaning. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3442188.3445922 There’s a good follow-up commentary by Iris van Rooij – Stop feeding the hype and start resisting.

Theo Burt – Automatics Group Remixes – archive 2012 to 2016 (BUS)

Belated release of remixes of The Automatics Group’s processed versions of big club tracks. Their album Summer Mix (Entr’acte, 2011), based on a process of removing the phase information from the audio, leaving behind just ghostly remnants of rhythm, is one of my all-time favourites. In these remixes, Theo Burt uses processes where the tracks are “divided into quarter-beats and reordered so that each piece is followed by the piece most similar to it from those remaining”, with the result that the familiar tunes are mangled into exquisite corpses.

Kieran Daly

Seriously weird and seriously funny, Keiran Daly’s YouTube channel is worth following. https://www.youtube.com/@powerbob38

Dead Hand – Radio Hour

Streaming on Tuesdays 22:00–23:00 UTC, this show plays music alongside live sounds from a VLF radio antenna which picks up electrical storms and other atmospheric conditions.

Droid – interview with Autechre

Maybe the best ever interview with Autechre. https://nialler9.com/autechre-conversation-about-music-art-funk-and-emotion-interview/

Everyday Samething

I’m on the mailing list for this label that releases albums in such limited and inaccessible ways that it’s difficult to know whether the whole enterprise is actually an elaborate piece of performance art. Some are released on cassette, others are download only, or promo only. The latest album, Birdbath I by Birdbath, is released as a video on YouTube and a limited edition of 4 business cards priced at £100 each which have a QR code that links to the same video. A friend spotted some tapes for sale at a merch stall at the Cafe OTO summer fair, but there’s no Bandcamp presence. They do have an Instagram account and a Substack though.

Ed Hawkins – Climate Indicators

https://ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visuals/indicators.html

Catherine Christer Hennix – Solo for Tamburium (Blank Forms Editions)

Music to get lost in. A glittering slowly-evolving composition for a custom-built instrument that plays precision-tuned recordings of a tambura. RIP.

Nathan Ho – Haywire Frontier (Tokinogake)

Punchy debut album by Nathan Ho, who also writes an insightful and informative blog on music technology and technique, including computer music synthesis, algorithmic composition and audio effects. His in-depth exploration of wavelet synthesis is a good example of his stated aim of “bridging the worlds of music tech journalism with in-depth academic papers to create resources for technically proficient musicians”. https://nathan.ho.name/

Daniel M Karlsson – Ephemeral Broadcast

Some of the best sounds I’ve heard this year have come from Daniel M Karlsson’s ephemeral broadcasts – spontaneously scheduled live-coding streams that (as the name implies) are deleted shortly after. The video above shows a similar process, but simpler and shorter. https://www.youtube.com/@danielmkarlsson6823

Mary Jane Leach – Woodwind Multiples (Modern Love)

Four compositions for multiples of the same woodwind instruments – flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon – combining taped recordings played back simultaneously with live performances. https://boomkat.com/products/woodwind-multiples

Ursula K. Le Guin

Shamefully, until this year I hadn’t read any novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, just some interviews and essays (e.g. The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction). I read The Word for World is Forest (1972) and The Dispossessed (1974) and loved them both. Le Guin’s writing is a joy to read – clear and economical, precise yet poetic, neither hurried nor drawn-out, and says as much between each line as within them.

LOLTRAX

New and interesting label that’s put out just one compilation album so far, including 100PA (Parsa and Ramtin Niazi), Kindohm and Pantea, among other artists new to me.

Tom Mudd – Guitar Cultures (fancyyyyy)

Absolutely love this latest work by Tom based on extensions of his research into physical modelling synthesis. Whereas Brass Cultures (2019) pushed the sounds to physically impossible parameters, these compositions based on plucked strings are less obviously synthetic, exploring more subtle possibilities of expressive performance afforded by an algorithmic approach, as heard in the improvisational practices of human players like Derek Bailey, Hans Reichel and Fred Frith.

Ahl Nana – L’Orchestre National Mauritanien (Radio Martiko)

Joyous recording from the Boussiphone studios in Casablanca in 1971 of a band that paved the way towards the Saharan ‘desert rock’ popularised by Ali Farka Touré and Tuareg musicians such as Tinariwen, Bombino and Group Doueh. This release from the label Radio Martiko has perhaps mixed up the band name with the album title, where ‘Ahl Nana’ translates to ‘[The] Nana Family’, because the original albums from which these tracks are taken have it the other way round: Ahl Nana by Mohamed Ould Nana avec L’Orchestre National Mauritanien.

Paradox – Breakbeater / Detronic (Sneaker Society)

This single and last year’s Streetbeat / Drum Throne have had a lot of plays in this house.

Ben Peers – Doubled (Tokinogake)

Classy computer music from a relatively new kid on the block, part of Tokinogake’s extended family.

Pentangle – Live on Belgian TV, 1972

My dad took me to a Pentangle gig at Mansfield in the 80s, which was probably just after Terry Cox, Danny Thompson and John Renbourn had left the band. In this video the full line-up are present and are on top form. I particularly like this version of ‘Willy O’Winsbury’ with Bert Jansch on Appalachian dulcimer and without the recorder that’s on the album version.

Éliane Radigue – 11 Dec 1980 (imprec)

We are lucky that Éliane Radigue is still as active as ever, making works like Occam Ocean that are as good as any other piece from the previous 70 years of her musical practice. This album isn’t a new composition, but presents performances of Chry-ptus and Triptych broadcast live in 1980, now remastered.

Lucy Railton – Corner Dancer (Modern Love)

Not just cello but a wide range of sound sources, creating a much more abstract and darker tone than 2018’s Paradise 94’ on the same label. https://boomkat.com/products/corner-dancer

Pomu Rainpuff

After buying Metal Gear Solid V in a Playstation sale last winter, I watched some playthrough videos, including one by Limmy, which is great of course, and then came across one by the vtuber Pomu Rainpuff who had been playing through all the Metal Gear games in story order (see the full playlist here). Pomu is part of the English language speaking group of virtual YouTubers from the Japanese NIJISANJI agency which specialises in 2D animated avatars that track facial expressions. The video above is not from the Metal Gear series, but it demonstrates part of what makes Pomu special (for context: it describes Pomu’s visit to a maid cafe in Japan with two other vtubers, Enna and IPN).

Dan McQuillan – We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. (danmcquillan.org)

A critique of AI by the author of the 2022 book Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Another more recent article is equally good and succinct: AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism.

Ripple et al. (2023) The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory.

My 2017 end-of-year list started with an image similar to the one above, by the same author. That was from the second World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency, signed by 15,000 scientists. This is the 5th. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad080/731957

SDEM – Vortices (Skam Records)

SDEM has already had some involvement with Skam through their occasional AMKS.LIVE streams, but this is his first album on the label. Massive range of textures and tones, with twists and turns from noise to ambient through all kinds of unstable broken beats, and a deep groove underlying it all. It feels like SDEM should be supporting an Autechre gig next. https://bleep.com/release/389088-sdem-vortices

Jah Shaka

RIP

Terrine – Standing Abs (bruit direct disques)

I heard about this album through the interview with Claire Gapenne a.k.a. Terrine by Sasha Frere-Jones. It’s an album of musique concrète that starts with a shout and the kickstart of a two-stroke engine that’s repeated and mutated to form a rhythmic base for subsequent layers of machinic scraping noises recorded in an abandoned yoghurt factory.

Tokinogake

The Tokinogake label has put out loads of good albums this year. Some are already mentioned above. Others include the smooth techno of SILO by tameike, the double album of computer music contortions by Özcan Saraç – 0​:​1 and Inevitable Equalization, the gritty and tense drones of I by Hugo Lioret, and the psychedelic mathematical patterns of Binary Controlled Sequencer by mashiroa. But my favourite, because they represent the diversity and individuality of the members as well as its shared community of interests, are the compilations Time Series Processing 1 and 2. Much of Tokinogake’s activity has stemmed from the collective of musicians and associated labels that it has brought together on a Discord server. Being involved in this group has been one of the most rewarding things for me personally, both creatively and socially. Tokinogake established this online community from the remnants of the $pwgen Slack group that had originally formed around users of Marcin Pietruszewski’s Nu Pulsar Generator software and which subsequently involved farmersmanual, General Magic and Tina Frank in the production of the compilation album Get This: 32 Tracks For Free – A Tribute to Peter Rehberg. The Tokinogake collective extends these relationships and includes links with fellow labels Superpang, falsch, Xkatedral, sm-ll, 3OP, Hard Return, Memory Glands, and Traced Objects. In addition to releasing albums, it commissions and publishes mixes, produces films (example below), and conducts online interviews with some of the label’s musicians where anyone can ask questions in an open process that unfolds over days or weeks, building a rich insight into different but related creative practices. The server has custom emojis for EVOL, Mark Fell (wearing flat cap with rolled-up umbrella over shoulder), Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman with googly eyes, and Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm driving the apple car.

Catherynne M. Valente – Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

An essay written at the end of 2022 that articulates some of the frustrations and grief of experiencing the deterioration of social media and other internet services that sustained community and creativity. It describes the degradation of platform services that happens as companies switch their priorities from users to advertisers, a phenomenon for which Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification‘. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett (2022) Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?

This article hypothesizes that the complexification of civilization risks reaching a point of ‘asymptotic burnout’ where the limits to growth are exceeded. It builds on a previous study by Bettencourt et al. (2007), ‘Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities‘, that analyses various properties of cities – such as housing, wealth, energy consumption and infrastructure – and shows that they vary in how they scale with population:

• energy use and housing capacity scale linearly in proportion with the population;
• the total length of roads and electrical cables scales sub-linearly, meaning that economies of scale are achieved as cities grow and populations increase;
• in contrast, income, GDP, the number of new patents, disease and crime rates all increase super-linearly.

This explains why larger cities have greater rates of productivity and why the pace of life is faster. But if the conditions remain unchanged it also implies unchecked growth, which is unsustainable. To avoid a crisis and subsequent collapse, “major qualitative changes must occur which effectively reset the initial conditions”. Bettencourt et al. show that to sustain growth requires increasingly frequent resets, and that this theory corresponds with observed technological changes in growing populations. Building on that idea, Wong & Bartlett argue that an ultimate crisis – ‘asymptotic burnout’ – can occur where the time between resets becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation able to achieve a reset. The article concludes that all civilizations eventually achieve either burnout or homeostasis, which is why we haven’t yet found evidence of extraterrestrial life when the Fermi paradox suggests we should, and quotes Karl Schroeder’s re-formulation of Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law: “Any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from Nature”. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0029

Wooli Bodin – YAPTC Decode Mix

A great mix by Chris Douglas (Amhain / Scald Rougish / Dalglish / etc.) made for an Icasea podcast 10 years ago. Unearthed and shared by Tom Knapp (SDEM), uploaded to the Internet Archive by Peter Seligman (Trash Panda QC). https://archive.org/details/yaptc-decode