"Shall I Project A World?"

Since, I am a human being writing this blog, I would like to begin with a reader-response post. In order to communicate my musical background and exposure to a musical "world," I will supply a list of five albums from the post-rock, ambient, minimalist, and post-minimalist genres that have personally "affected" my life and well of experiences. With this post, I don't intend to inculcate an objective standard on what is "good music" nor do I think that these are my all-time favorite albums, but instead I aim to provide insight into the musical worlds I have come to inhabit, the stories attached to them, and some suggestions for further listening. Hopefully these albums can give a springboard to introduce post-rock, ambient, post-minimalist, and minimalist works and anchor the genres of music I hope to discuss in subsequent postings.

In no particular order:

1.) 

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven"

A liberating, gravitational sonic journey broken into four, approximately twenty-minute long tracks. Godspeed's "Lift Yr. Skinny Fists" travels from sweeping horn crescendos thundering onward to lone, lamenting violins beside sampled voice inserts of a department store, a religious speaker, an old man remembering Coney Island, and children at play. Soundscapes pulse as if embodying the listener's psychology, surfing on the edges of epitome and confusion. Cellos warm the tone. The percussion marches, drops out, and emerges in a hip-hop-esque beat. Guitars cry with a resemblance to human screams. Songs collapse into gears of machinery chopping up and relocating their myriad parts, and out of the darkness, a pattern emerges, a voice, a quiet plea, the recognition that we are here for a limited time and that we should pay attention to our lives and contribute to making us all "a little more free."                       
2.)         

   Ben Frost "By The Throat" bandcamp

Ben Frost - "By The Throat"

A haunting, cinematic work of aural shadows. "By The Throat's" icy caverns are inhabited by wolves, one-by-one hunting the viscera of musical predispositions. The listener embarks on a thematic narrative that interrogates the relationship between civilization and wilderness. Ben Frost's cold ambient textures envelope straining strings, throbbing guitars, dissolving digital pulsations, strident horns, and drums that pass through channels of static before reaching your ear. To categorize this album is a difficult task. "By The Throat" seamlessly balances its classical minimalist, punk rock, ambient, and metal flavors to establish an environment that situates the listener within its own diegetic world. "The Carpathians" leads the listener into a frigid tundra filled with wolves and deconstructs the growl of a wolf within the song's "musical space." "Hibakusja" exemplifies Frost's eloquent synthesis of a song from its various genre ingredients. Furthermore, the album's motif of arctic wolves continues through the last three songs titles that work with a narrative function. "Through The Glass Of The Roof,""Through The Roof Of Your Mouth," and "Through The Mouth Of Your Eye" establish a process of events correlated with the music's progress through time.
 3.)

The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band - "He Has Left Us Alone, But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace The Corners of Our Rooms"

Written in the wake of Godspeed-guitarist Efrim Menuck's dog Wanda's death, "He Has Left Us Alone" soundtracks the mourning and grieving process. I turned to this album more than any other musical work in my life to help me "understand" death, suicide, and illness. A Silver Mt. Zion cohesively extends the instrumental thrust of Godspeed You! Black Emperor while maintaining a straightforward, direct structural approach that includes a few songs with lead vocals such as "Movie (Never Made)." The album's waveform pattern is the topography of sorrow. A "bleak, uncertain, beautiful" piano draws the listener into a mirage of sampled voices, tacit percussion, and rich, dark violins that transform tragedy into irrevocably moving art. "13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed" is a heavenly portrayal of the human capacity to communicate pain, suffering, and a desire to relieve the world of it. This is the kernel of hope left in Pandora's box.
4.)

 

 Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - "Insen"

Japanese classical pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto teams with German minimal artist Alva Noto to produce a stunning exposition of frontier music structures. Sakamoto plays ethereal piano and Alva Noto dresses the song's skeleton with micro electronic pulses, digital glitches, and melodic blankets. The album is light in color and often resembles the heartbeat of raindrops. With this collaboration, Sakamoto and Alva Noto have intertwined formal classical and electronic boundaries, creating a synesthesia of genres that explores uncharted ambient spaces and cloud-like, nebulous post-minimalism realms where individual musical notes softly burst into percussive patterns. With headphones, "Insen's" layers peel open through minute bass thumps, almost imperceptible bird chirps, and panned speaker output rattling one's bodily reactions to the left and right. Each song re-engineers what is typically understood as "musical space," embellishing a single note's infinite potential to create meaning. It is all at once phrasally repetitive and uncompromisingly fascinating. 

 

On this collaboration's later 2011 release "Summvs," there contains an extraordinary cover of Brian Eno's "By This River" posted above. 

5.)

  

Explosions In The Sky - "The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place"

Guitar-oriented, accessible post-rock that quivers with emotional evocation through minimalist compositions teetering toward the ten-minute mark. "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" crescendos with needling guitars bent beside syncopated drum rolls that sink to "Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean" and elevate to the harmonic peaks of "Your Hand In Mine." Replete with melodic guitar arpeggios and shimmering cymbal splashes, this album is devoid of the vast "canyons of static" one may find in a Godspeed release. Instead, Explosions In The Sky's four-piece instrumentation delivers clean-toned musical consonance within song structures that could more readily be consumed as singles than the songs of their post-rock contemporaries. Meanwhile, "The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place" could be played on repeat without a hint of boredom. The absence of vocals enhances the music's scalar sequences and enables fluidity. Simultaneously, the track and album titling couldn't be more suitable to the resolute and triumphant diegetic atmosphere manifested within the songs. Explosions In The Sky challenge the listener's palette to rethink the capabilities of a four-piece.