Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Bon Iver: 22, A Million

Bon Iver: 22, A Million

There's a line deep in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice wherein Doc, a small-time stoner-sleuth, considers the dissolution of the 1960s, wondering if the decade wasn't merely "a little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness." It's a funny way to think about time—that an entire era can be nudged back into the ether, erased. But on 22, A Million, the extraordinary third full-length from Bon Iver, Justin Vernon echoes Doc's somber pondering. These are fluttery, skeletal songs that struggle against known trajectories and then threaten to disappear entirely. 22, A Million might be musically distant from For Emma, Forever Ago, the collection of aching folk tunes Vernon debuted in 2007—mostly gone are the acoustic strums, replaced by lurching, electronic gasps born from the Messina, a doctored combination of the Prismizer software plug-in and some hardware that was invented by Vernon and his engineer, Chris Messina. But the albums share an ideology. All things go, taken back into darkness.

22, A Million is certainly Bon Iver's most difficult record; it's the work of a songwriter who seems to have lost interest in established, easily deciphered forms, a possibility Vernon has been hinting at for nearly all of his career. In 2006, Vernon, then living in North Carolina, was emotionally razed by a perfect storm of shitty turns: his band broke up, his relationship dissolved, he came down with an acute case of mononucleosis. He did what any reasonable person with an eye toward self-care would do: decamp to his family's hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin, drink a gang of beers, watch endless hours of "Northern Exposure," and write a batch of lonesome, yearning folk songs on his acoustic guitar. His high, brittle falsetto gave these pieces an otherworldly quality, as if they had blown in on a particularly cold wind. 

For Emma, Forever Ago was, in its own way, an experimental record—Vernon's vocals and phrasing are deeply unusual; its stories are impressionistic, fractured—but because it's so heavy with heartbreak and loss, it feels intimate, authentic, easy. 22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential. The album opens with a high, undulating voice (Vernon, singing into an OP-1, a combination synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer) announcing, "It might be over soon," and goes on to examine the idea of impermanence. Nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon's own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he's seen or known. Inasmuch as his lyrics are narrative—and they have always been more connotative than exegetic—he seems preoccupied with whether or not a life has meaning. "Oh then, how we gonna cry? Cause it once might not mean something?" he asks on "715 - CRΣΣKS."

Kanye West once called Vernon his "favorite living artist," and has long professed a deep and unexpected admiration for "Woods," the closing track from 2009's Blood Bank EP, and an obvious precursor to "715 - CRΣΣKS," itself a kind of warped a capella jam. "Woods" featured no instrumentation, but is merely five minutes of Vernon singing through Auto-Tune, in ghostly harmony with himself. In retrospect, "Woods" feels like a revelation: it was not only an unexpected affirmation of pop's future—artists aggressively distorting their vocals, feeding their voices into machines in order to build spectral, nagging songs that reflect alienation, arguably the reigning sensation of our time—but of Vernon's own trajectory.

Plenty of beloved contemporary artists, from Dylan to Neil Young on, have ditched the supposed purity of folk music to push the work harder, to make art that's less reliant on a tradition and invests, instead, in the strangeness of the present moment and collective uncertainty about the future. Trading on preexisting pathways—it's too easy. Vernon isn't alone in his hunger for true, tectonic innovation, for songs that seem tethered to and reflective of their actual time and place: Radiohead has been mirroring anxiety about the encroachment of electronics and virtual living since Kid A, a record that also required them to warp if not abandon their beginnings as a guitar-rock band.

Beyond its sonic striving, 22, A Million is also a personal record about how to move forward through disorienting times. Vernon occasionally employs religious language to express his anxiety, some explicit ("consecration," "confirmation"), some more plainly vernacular ("So as I'm standing at the station," "I could go forward in the light"). He samples two gospel tunes: Mahalia Jackson's live version of "How I Got Over," from 1962, and the Supreme Jubilees's "Standing in the Need of Prayer," from 1980. There is a song titled "666 ʇ," and another titled "33 'GOD.'" A bit of marginalia in the album's liner notes ("Why are you so FAR from saving me?") is attributed to Psalm 22, though in the King James Bible, that imploration is for help, not salvation ("Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?"). Either way, Psalm 22 opens in media res: its author is undergoing an urgent crisis of faith. So is Vernon?

Maybe. Musically, Vernon resists not just verse-chorus-verse, but all the ways in which Western cultures have come to conceptualize narrative. As kids, we're taught how stories work, and we use that rubric to organize and make sense of the events of our lives. But the imposition of structure can be violent; perhaps, Vernon suggests, the idea that we are organizing events at all is patently nuts. So when he ventures a line like "We've galvanized the squall of it all," from "8 (circle)," it feels like a mission statement. There is solace in resisting formal structures, in both acknowledging and embracing a certain amount of chaos.

It's the same story on "00000 Million," the album's haunting closing track, where Vernon samples a wobbly line borrowed from the Irish folksinger Fionn Regan: "The days have no numbers." Pitted against the record's obsessive numerology—each song has a number in its title—it lands like an admission of defeat. There's resignation in his voice, which gives way to desolation. The song's lyrics will be familiar to anyone wondering if they'll ever actually start to feel better, while still continuing to do something they know is hurting them: "If it's harmed, it harmed me, it'll harm me, I let it in."

For a while now, Vernon has been building songs in a modular way, and there are moments here (like the meandering last minute of "21 M♢♢N WATER") where it feels as if he could've jiggled the pieces together a little more—where his disavowal of connective tissue feels less deliberate than random. This is evident, in part, because he is exceptionally good at writing melancholic laments in the highly structured style of '80s soft-rock giants like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby (Vernon has covered Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me," and Vernon and Hornsby have collaborated on several occasions; "00000 Million" feels like it could have been recorded by either).

"8 (circle)" is the most immediately reminiscent of Vernon's last record, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, itself now recognizable as a clear midpoint between Emma and here; it's also the album's most conventionally composed track, with the smallest amount of vocal manipulation. Elsewhere, Vernon's vocals are filtered until they begin to actually dissolve, as if they have been dunked in a tub of lye. The song's stunning emotional peaks—I come to a full stop every time I hear Vernon sing, "I'm standing in the street now, and I carry his guitar," his voice steady and deep, as if he's announcing himself to someone he loves—are so plainly beautiful it's hard not to mourn, briefly, for the Bon Iver of yesteryear.

But 22, A Million sounds only like itself. There are precedents for all of Vernon's moves deep in the histories of rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues and electronic music—and, more immediately, on newer records by West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Chance the Rapper, Francis and the Lights, and Radiohead. But this particular amalgamation is so twitchy and idiosyncratic it feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless.

September 30, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Nicolas Jaar: Sirens

Nicolas Jaar: Sirens

There are only about 45 seconds left on Nicolas Jaar's new album Sirens when something astounding happens. Heralded by a selection of drums and birdcall synths, a gospel cry arrives, shrouded in distortion and punctuated by sharp arrhythmic drumming. The most useful words to describe this are the silliest and most hyperbolic: awesome, transcendent, timeless or more accurately, out-of-time. It begs for pretension, for the vocabulary of divinity and "high art," for references to religious philosophers and poets of the west that you barely remember from college, Milton and Kierkegaard, Eliot and Blake. And though there many similarly striking moments on Sirens, this one stands out for its brevity and particular beauty. It is a moment thoroughly earned by the album that precedes it, and in less than a minute, it's gone.

This moment—a supernova flash of prodigious skill—can be seen as something of a stand-in for Jaar's career to date. In 2011, when Jaar was just 21, he released his debut album, Space Is Only Noise, introducing a downtempo combination of psychedelia and dance music that vaulted him into the vanguard of the world's electronic artists. The record came alive in a room, its amorphous body emerging from the stereo, its limbs unfolding into every corner. His ability to conjure up what seemed like an extra dimension in his music made you aware of the tautology: space was noise, but he made noise seem like space.

The next year Jaar revealed the depth of his talent for collage with his Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1. These mixes are often superlative, but his felt more personal than most, even as it showcased his interest in referencing the texts of others. In one of many sophisticated in-jokes, Jaar, who is Chilean-American, introduced the operative sample from Jay Z's "My 1st Song," with Jay Z's own voice. That vocal prepared listeners to hear the Black Album closer before Jaar dropped the original version, "Tu y Tu Mirar, Yo y Mi Cancion," by the Chilean band, Los Ángeles Negros, in its place. The mix was filled with moments like these—jam-packed with allusions but still absorbing for those who didn't catch the references.

And then, Jaar shrank away from center stage. In 2013, he started his own label, Other People, partly to foster the careers of his musician friends. Jaar is a generous collaborator—artists like Dave Harrington, his partner in the duo Darkside, have been eager to credit his willingness to help them with their own work. But the instinct to work with others may not have been purely selfless. Jaar felt enormous pressure to replicate his early success. In an interview with Pitchfork in 2013, he confessed that he was scared of releasing music that wasn't up to those standards:

"For the first five years of making music, I did it because I had fun," he said. "When it started to get real, I was like, 'Now if I put out something else and it's not as good as what I did before, people will start thinking I suck.'"

So Jaar produced others' projects and made critically acclaimed records with Harrington under the Darkside moniker. But slowly, over the last two years, he's been creeping back toward the microphone, using his own name. First there were some extraordinary singles. Then, last summer's Pomegranates, a slippery alternate soundtrack to an old Russian film. Then Nymphs—an uncollected EP, maybe?—excellent, but difficult to evaluate holistically.

Sirens represents a full reemergence, as close as he may ever get to kicking over the mic stand. He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other. Add the strands of political expression that are gathered on Sirens, often cloaked in odd textures, in Spanish, or in cryptic lyrics, and you have a record as compelling as any of Jaar's other works.

It opens with the track "Killing Time," which feels like entering a labyrinth, or maybe a pyramid, something forbidding and funereal. The sound of a flag waves in the wind, keys like jagged wind chimes shatter on the floor. Nico is patient, but understands the need for progression, and though slower songs like this may linger in silence or briefly lavish attention on a particular effect, riff, or drum sound, they never stop moving.

"Killing Time," is silent, respectful, matching its lyrics ("We were just waiting…") And then "The Governor" which shares a post-punk edge with another song, "Three Sides of Nazareth," jolts the record into sudden motion. Those two tracks, with their driving rhythms and clear lyrics, are the easiest to glom on to on first listen. The words are more or less affixed to the music, in contrast with other tracks like "Killing Time" and parts of "No," where lyrics seem to dwell in the spacious labyrinth evoked by the sound. On those tracks, you're never sure exactly where you're going to stumble upon a sudden string of words, of thoughts.

"The Governor" is fast and loud and urgent. When I listened to it out of sequence, I wondered whether those qualities were imposed on "The Governor" because it's only fast and loud and urgent in comparison to "Killing Time," or whether it actually is those things. These are the kind of thoughts that psychedelia provokes at its best, and Jaar adores these puzzles. It's his obsession with setting up dichotomies and resolving them that places him firmly in a Western tradition. He's able to work a kind of alchemy upon the raw elements of his music, making one thing into its polar opposite: hard into soft, ugly into pretty, slow into fast. Like the word "sirens" itself, (the ancient temptress, the modern alarms), his music is able to evoke opposing ideas at the same time.

These contradictions give Sirens its strength, particularly during the album's centerpiece, the song "No." It's the only segment of music on the digital version of the album that includes a musical element not written, recorded, performed, mixed, and produced by Nico. (It's a Chilean harp piece, "Lagrimas," by Sergio Cuevas.) This section helps us to understand the mystery at the heart of Sirens, represented by the line of Spanish lyrics adorning its cover. The end of "Leaves," the entirety of "No," and the beginning of "Three Sides of Nazareth," orbit around two conversations. The first seems to be a recording of a young Nico speaking with his father, the artist Alfredo Jaar. They discuss a statue being attacked by lions.

The words of "No" are in Spanish, and they contain the second discussion, which serves as a parable that illuminates the first. An unhappy neighbor approaches Nico, and they discuss multiple contradictions—the far and the near, the inside and the outside. But the core of their conversation are the words from Sirens' cover: "Ya dijimos no pero el si esta en todo." This translates as: "We already said no but the yes is in everything," a reference to the Chilean national plebiscite, a 1988 referendum on democracy in the country. In the referendum, on whether Chile should continue to be ruled by General Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power about 15 years earlier, voting "no" was voting "yes" to democracy.

But if, as Jaar sings, "The yes is in everything," the idea is that we don't need to see the future to know that nothing ever really changes, that the cycle continues whether you vote for democracy or not. In turn, it suggests that the statue under discussion between little Nico and Alfredo, (whose own complicated politics are worth noting) could very well have been of Salvador Allende, who Pinochet ousted.

There are plenty of extraordinary references on Sirens that I'm sure I missed. But, as with the Essential Mix, as with any collage, being ignorant any of these things hardly lessens the weight of the music. What you pick up from the album is a real suspicion of power, from "The Governor" ("All the blood's hidden in the governor's trunk") to "Killing Time" ("Money, it seems, needs its working class.") And at the same time, Nico, through the music, exercises his own power, pulling on his listeners and compelling them to move, dance, think, and engage with one another, or sometimes to sit silently and take it all in.

Nico's aversion to authority reaches a climax with that last track, "History Lesson," which ends with those 45 transcendent seconds that I'm still failing to put into words. "History Lesson" takes its cues from old soul and doo-wop, like the Beach Boys at their most psychedelic. Think "Feel Flows" and those unfolding, enveloping missiles of soul.

The music on "History Lesson" is almost laughably gentle at first, and Jaar employs a trick favored by both John Lennon ("Run for Your Life") and Paul McCartney ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer"), juxtaposing inviting music with disturbing lyrics. Here's how his history lesson starts: "Chapter one: We fucked up/Chapter two: We did it again, and again, and again, and again/Chapter three: We didn't say sorry." And so on. The words are a harsh rebuke of any political system. But the music is tender. And the track is bleak and funny, and naïve and wise, and political and personal. It feels like everything all at once. It feels like Sirens.

September 29, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Hamilton Leithauser / Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine

Hamilton Leithauser / Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine

"I retired from my fight," Hamilton Leithauser crooned with a smirk on his first great solo tune. "I Retired"'s very existence confirms that the singer didn't actually give up, but Leithauser's point about getting older and figuring out how to keep creating felt like a painfully self-aware revelation upon arrival, six months after his longtime band the Walkmen announced an indefinite hiatus. "All the fire in your heart won't help/All the smoke up in your head," he continued, figuring that "as long as [he] can keep the train rolling, then all [his] friends will always know they'll never be alone." Consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy tucked inside a nugget of irony: A song called "I Retired" directly spawned Leithauser's next musical direction.

"I Retired" was one of two songs from Leithauser's 2014 solo debut, Black Hours, that he worked on with Rostam Batmanglij. Leithauser and the former Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist/producer apparently bonded over shooby doo wops, their deadpan version of which sounds like the Flamingos came down with a case of urban malaise. That vocal technique is all over "I Retired" and again on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, emblematic of what makes Leithauser and Batmanglij's first collaborative full-length the rare release that looks backwards without falling victim to retro pastiche.

With Batmanglij's piano and Leithauser's voice as their guiding forces, the duo answer a question that has eluded many a musician before: How do you incorporate the music of the past without losing yourself in what's already been done? Even those beloved harmonies represent just one tool in a deep kit, right alongside Spanish guitar, Disney strings, bawdy horns, tender banjo, airy vocal loops, and cinematic reverb. Together, Leithauser and Batmanglij work their way through nearly seven decades of musical history—from doo-wop and country-rock to Leonard Cohen-style torch songs and the George Martin-indebted baroque-pop Rostam often used to make VW twinkle—but they also don't forget who they are in the process: one of '00s indie rock's most charismatic singers, alongside one of its most creative songwriter-producers.

If there was any lingering doubt that Rostam was Vampire Weekend's special sauce (before his departure earlier this year), look to I Had a Dream That You Were Mine. The convincing ease with which the duo weaves disparate musical styles together seems distinctly Rostam—the work of someone who made Afropop, calypso, '80s synth-pop, samples from M.I.A. to Toots and the Maytals, and a half-dozen other global styles fit together within music that often was held up as the indie rock zeitgeist. Here on "You Ain't That Young Kid," a spirited Dylan-on-piano-and-harmonica act turns towards pleading slide guitar, then an echo chamber of angel voices, then a slow dance of '60s organ and steel drum, then a tidy harpsichord minuet—then, impossibly, all at once. The five-minute standout ends as a gilded acoustic singalong, the overwhelming sentimentality of which is amplified by an Instagram-filter of a synth line growing underneath. Rostam's production is highly visual, and listening to this record, you get a sense of all the colors he must see when he's behind the boards.

But RostHam is an equal partnership, and Leithauser reminds you why you were drawn to the Walkmen in the first place. He gives what has to be his strongest and most wide-ranging collection of vocal performances on record to date, spanning from talk-crooning to punkish howling to folk-balladeering to heavenly harmonizing to raspily brooding about as he first perfected on "The Rat."

Black Hours' primary flaw was that it alternated sharply between Leithauser going Bublé in his own way and simply channeling his old band. I Had a Dream That You Were Mine manages to incorporate these two modes in the larger context of its 20th-century-pop scrapbook—on songs about longing and looking back, no less. And it's the songs where Leithauser loses himself in what was and what could be that his voice sounds best. On "Rough Going (I Won't Let Up)," atop a creaking piano line and a spiraling sax solo, Leithauser screams like a man possessed that he won't let up, but he holds it together, and the song never lets its barroom singalong quality devolve into total shambles.

This is a slightly more mature Leithauser, but that life experience can also be a curse. Over the course of the album, the streets of downtown New York become littered with memories, and even the good ones hurt a little because they're faded now. The album is drenched in this wistful feeling, the crowning achievement of which is "When the Truth Is…" There are many moving parts that go into making this song work, from the echoing swirl of percussion and piano to the snippet of film dialogue at the end, but they're rendered so perfectly, all you hear by the end is straight swoon. The main thing Rostam and Hamilton get right about doo-wop is that it often makes romantic yearning shimmer like a slow-moving disco ball.

Towards the beginning of the album—on "Sick as a Dog," the song that sounds the most modern (and a little like Spoon)—Leithauser harmonizes with himself, "I use the same voice I always had." Indeed, it's not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It's rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but RostHam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past. It's the kind of album Leithauser can be proud of—you know, once he's old enough to actually retire.

September 23, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Julius Eastman: Femenine

Julius Eastman: Femenine

According to all eyewitness accounts, Julius Eastman was hard to ignore. He was lithe, he had a five-octave voice and an improviser's intelligence at the piano. When he was healthy, Eastman was sought out by famed conductor Pierre Boulez. He played jazz in a combo that frequented clubs in Buffalo, contributed synths and vocals to an experimental disco outfit organized by Arthur Russell, and sang in early groups led by Meredith Monk. As a queer African-American member of the avant-garde, he cut a unique figure in the 1970s by necessity. Composer and trombonist George Lewis remembers that, to him, Eastman represented "a singular figure of presence" in those years, since "black artists were far less in evidence in the Downtown New York music scene than queer ones."

While in the company of such elites, Eastman challenged the norms of etiquette with a potency that guaranteed scandal. His explicit, queer reframing of John Cage's Song Books famously enraged Cage himself. And Eastman's confrontational "nigger series" of compositions—including pieces like Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, and Evil Nigger—were sometimes truncated on concert bills, due to pressure from well-meaning protestors and risk-averse programmers. These were moves that obscured Eastman's stated desire to face up to "that thing which is fundamental" in American society. He contained so much art and vision as to be a scene unto himself. Then he faded from view.

After alienating lovers and collaborators alike, Eastman was evicted from his apartment in the mid-'80s. Most of his scores were bagged and carted away—eventually lost to history. Details from his homeless period are sketchy (or contested), but it's generally agreed that he lived in Tompkins Square Park and also suffered from some form of addiction. After he died, alone in a Buffalo hospital at age 49, it took eight months for an obituary to be published.

Eastman can be almost as fascinating to read about as he is to listen to. Yet for a long time, hardly anyone pursued either activity—largely because much of his music had been scattered to the winds prior to his death in 1990. Thankfully, the last decade has seen a renaissance in Eastman appreciation. Contemporaries like Kyle Gann and Mary Jane Leach have pooled rare recordings and fragments of scores, and found new material in archives. In 2005, a three-CD set on New World Records, Unjust Malaise, brought several of Eastman's most notorious compositions into wide circulation. Jace Clayton reinterpreted two of those works on a 2013 album. And along with Renée Levine Packer, Leach has edited an important book of essays covering every aspect of Eastman's career. Still, the primary stumbling block to any greater revelry has been a lack of recorded evidence of Eastman's own performances.

The release of Femenine, however, is an occasion for wide celebration. In terms of sonic fidelity, this is an occasionally scratchy live recording of a chamber orchestra performance from November 6, 1974, with Eastman at the piano. In creative terms, it's a crystal-clear, 72-minute shot that reaffirms what all the veteran scholars and performers have been talking about for decades. Though it doesn't offer an expansive look at his compositional growth like Unjust Malaise, it gives us a better sense of Eastman as a bandleader and performer of his own works. Better than any recording currently circulating, it's on Femenine that listeners can get a sense of how Eastman fused jazz-informed improvisation with the rigors of early, pulse-based minimalism.

And there is also a suggestion of Eastman's humor—an attribute sometimes overshadowed by the seriousness of his politics and the tragedy of his death. The first sound you hear on this recording is an audience casually settling down. And then there is laughter, as a performer switches on a mechanical device that shakes sleigh bells. In an era before drum programming, inhuman percussion had a jokey, improbable tinge. Artists in the Fluxus movement outfitted a violin with a rod-twirling motor that slapped away like the meekest torture device imaginable.

For Femenine, Eastman's machine automated the shaking of sleigh bells for the entirety of the performance. It can be read as both a Fluxus-style joke on the stark rhythmic processes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as an assumption of that sound into the overall Eastman palette. That Eastman could simultaneously be a prankster and a skilled style-scout was one aspect of his genius; whereas he'd copped R&B textures for a prior composition, Stay on It, with Femenine, Eastman was scouring his avant-garde contemporaries for inspiration. He gave as much as he took, too. As Leach told the musician and writer David Menestres, Femenine offers "the fluidity of jazz and a swing that is missing from, especially, Reich."

In the recording's opening minutes, Eastman plays a few chords and notes as the other members of the chamber ensemble tune up. Before too long, the piece begins in earnest with a catchy vibraphone line: one that starts with fast, one-note repetition, before ascending in see-saw fashion up a narrow interval. Along with the bells' rhythm, this vibraphone motif—both optimistic and energetic—is the backbone of the piece. Aside from that, it's up to Eastman and the other members of his orchestra to sustain the audience's interest over the next hour.

The length of the performance was a grid that Eastman used to guide his ensemble's improvisations. Each member had a digital clock, as well as brief passages of scored material that corresponded to a particular minute-mark in the performance. Choices left up to individual performers might have to do with octave placement, or with the selection of a given note from a particular chord. Another direction in the score is more explicit: "pianist will interrupt." Like other minimalists, Eastman knew how to get a lot of mileage out of means that look scant on the page.

Overall, the assembled string and wind players can hang with Eastman—an impressive feat, since this performance included some players who were much less familiar with the composer than others. There are brief fumbles in the ensemble, at some points, but nothing that can derail the performance, as it's Eastman who holds everything together at the piano. Over time, it's the intuitive authority of his largely improvised piano part that emerges as the major attraction of this set. He stays in the background during the initial playing, allowing that vibraphone part to really carve out a space in the listener's consciousness. Once that hypnotic effect is achieved, Eastman starts pulling from his personal dictionary of styles and influences, all while staying relatively close to the melodic material he gave to the other players.

Femenine was an early example of Eastman's "organic music" concept—a version of minimalism which allowed for all previously played material to be present in later stages of a performance. Years after this gig, Eastman would tell an audience that he was still trying to perfect this approach. But there are hints of his success with it here, thanks to a steady accretion of ideas that never throws Femenine off balance. Ten minutes in, there are strong hints of the blues coming from Eastman's piano. Soon after, he steadily adds new chords to a jazzy, rollicking piano line that syncopates with the vibraphone theme.  Gradually, the harmony is built out to a point of richness that recalls Romantic-era classical composers.

After nearly half an hour, the flute player of the S.E.M. Ensemble works in tandem with Eastman on an extended, ascending progression. A quarter of an hour later, when Eastman shifts down several octaves, he creates a massively booming, bass-heavy crunch. While he manages to put the recording a little in the red, the intensity and volume of this choice can't obliterate the essential joy of Femenine.

Remembrances of the show included in this album's liner notes inform us that Eastman appeared in a dress for the concert. The audience was also served soup. That convivial group spirit is alive on this recording, even at its loudest or roughest edges. The piece's semi-notated structure and expanded performance timeframe present a question of genre that is pointedly never resolved. But the force of Eastman's performance shows his own mastery of this ambiguity. His spirit of offering isn't merely strong enough to survive the openness of the form, it is enhanced by this radical flexibility.

Though never intended as an album as such, the first appearance of Femenine is nonetheless a major landmark in both Eastman's posthumous narrative and the story of the American avant-garde. In the recent scholarly volume edited by Packer and Leach, there is a tantalizing list of other Eastman-led performances, currently available only at the music library of the University of Buffalo. The artistic value of this archival release—imperfect sonics and all—begs for an arrangement that will make the rest of Eastman's genius widely accessible.

September 17, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith / Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith / Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy

"Ladies and gentleman, this woman standing next to me is an electronic wizard," declared a bemused and gleeful David Letterman on his show in 1980. He sounded like a wide-eyed child standing beside a chipper alien, one with braids in her hair, giving network-television watchers a portal into her new expanding universe. Letterman listed off her credentials: composing commercial soundtracks for the likes of Coca-Cola, reproducing electronic effects for "the disco version of Star Wars," and winning many awards. "This is Suzanne Ciani," Letterman goes, as she slathered the befuddled host's voice in quizzical delay. Laughter persisted. "Tell 'em what we got here," Letterman asked, and Ciani pointed out her Prophet-5 synthesizer, a vocoder, a frequency follower, an Eventide harmonizer—"That means nothing to anybody but you!" the host interjects. "Do the one where it sounds like the whole studio's gonna explode!" Ciani offered a pitched-shifted affirmation: "Don't be afraiiid..."

In 1980, the pioneering Ciani—who would go on to earn several Grammy nominations in the New Age category—was a decade into her experiments with the modular Buchla synthesizers, which she used to create dramatic seconds-long effects for the likes of the Xenon pinball game, PBS, and Atari. And Ciani had also just begun work on her own debut masterpiece, the elegantly spare Seven Waves, released in Japan in 1982 and the U.S. two years later. "In order to see something, you have to have a concept of it," Ciani, now 70, told The Quietus in 2012. "People had no concept of electronic music back then. So even if they were sitting in front of a machine and sound was coming out of it, they still didn't get it."

Even as electricity has become the preeminent building-block of our musical lexicon, the Buchla—with its wires spilling over a landscape of knobs, its tactile sense of exploration, of conversing subtly with the machine—is still extremely rare. But fate has its way of bringing outsiders together. That Ciani would encounter a fellow Buchla synthesist, the 30-year-old Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, while sitting on the floor at a dinner party in the isolated California coastal town of Bolinas, where they both happen to live, is fantastic serendipity.

Ciani herself had abandoned the Buchla for decades, making her name as a classical pianist. It wasn't until a 2012 reissue of her work, Lixiviation, by the Finders Keepers label, that she became "reincarnated as a Buchla person," and a reissue of her groundbreaking 1975 Buchla concerts followed. Before a European tour spurred on by Lixiviation, Ciani hired Smith as a studio assistant. New York's RVNG label ultimately asked them to collaborate for the 13th installment of its FRKWYS series, which brings together musicians of different generations in an improvisatory setting, always with the care of a gallery piece. In a film produced by RVNG during the making of the album—at Ciani's home near a cliff with exquisite views of the Pacific—the elder artist is seen with her Buchla 200 E, a wooden box propped open with wires all flowing about, a full display of the machine and its sound's infinity. Smith uses the slightly more contained Buchla Music Easel, which appears like a mysterious pad.

The resulting Sunergy is 54 minutes of generative music in three pieces, "A New Day," "Closed Circuit," and the bonus track "Retrograde" (absent from the vinyl pressing). Their energy exchange is potent. Sunergy is far from the lovely analog melodies and white noise that Ciani released on Seven Waves—it more so shares the thick, dewy feel of Smith's 2016 EARS—but as they cross-pollinate, those titular crests are all over. Sunergy is made of crashing waves and the glittering sun on water, meditations from the Terry Riley school of minimalism, as if Laurie Spiegel had composed for the tides rather than the cosmos. Ciani said she had a "long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise... [and] there was this synergy between us, and also the energy of the sun and the energy of the ocean... I think that's where Sunergy came from."

"A New Day" opens with an ominous, tectonic rumble that engulfs you like a circling Tibetan singing bowl. Sounds cut in from all angles, with static juxtaposing sparkling bleeps and textures that pop like candy. There are sounds of epic winds and rippling water, and its hypnosis seems to say something about journeying through time, about nature mixing with the artificial, about the promise and threat of the future. "Closed Circuit" comprises simpler synth figures, before swimming far out into a dark sea, a picture of the unknown. "Retrograde" takes on harsher, denser noise, but its menacing scrape is tempered with light.

All along, Sunergy makes for an inquisitive space to inhabit. The headier and grander it grows, the more its heavy drones swarm, the more undeniable the duo's alchemy proves to be. "I was in love with it," Ciani once said of her introduction to the Buchla, "It took my whole life… It was my boyfriend! I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was in love with a machine." But her devotion was prescient. It is moving to hear Ciani and Smith—in some sense, creative soulmates—commune so deeply. Because people like Ciani don't come down to Earth to join the world. They recruit comrades to enter their own.

September 15, 2016 at 12:00PM
via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/2cbU2Lh

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