For the second year running, I took a month-long hiatus from my weekly radio show on Calgary’s CJSW 90.9FM, which has already come to an end so much faster than I thought possible. One nice thing about the time off, though, was allowing myself to actually sit with some of the stand-out albums from the first half of 2021 instead of just mining them for singles and moving on to the search for more material for the show.
Given that, it seems a little wrong to present them as just another list to be grazed. I’ve been thinking lately about Elina Gorfinkel’s essay in the Another Gaze film journal, Against Lists, which is more about the futility of list-making as a tool for challenging canons, but is also a good reminder that the internet’s obsession with lists is also a way of avoiding dealing with any particular work in any depth. I’ve been trying to find tricks to force myself to actually engage with the media I consume; this Substack is ideally part of that, along with putting more effort into the Monday Shorts posts for Quickdraw, and scrapping star ratings on Letterboxd this year, so that if I want to say something about a film, I have to actually say it.
But, I also am addicted to sharing any art that weasels its way into my heart, and a round-up is by far the easiest way to do that. So here is an arbitrary rundown of 34 albums released in the first half of 2021 that I think anyone with an interest in accessibly unconventional sounds would be well served to add to their collection.
Why 34 albums? Because that’s how many came to mind. And because arbitrary limits are useful in putting together things like this, each write-up is exactly 34 worlds long—not quite long enough to truly say much, but hopefully enough to twig your interest. Bandcamp Friday is also coming up in a couple of these days, which is a great excuse to pick up a few of these and have all the proceeds go directly to the artist.
If Bandcamp isn’t your jam, I’ve also added a song from each to a Spotify playlist. Just hit shuffle and see what strikes your fancy.
A fresh start for the Montreal instrumental sextet, Bell Orchestre’s first new album in a decade is a single, mostly-improvised piece in 10 parts. An intuitive, propulsive celebration of the act of spontaneous creation.
Sideways pop and R&B from a group that refuses to approach hooks head-on. Spacious arrangements leave room to savour Robin Dann’s vocals, the music and lyrics both embodying a spirit of questioning and self-reflection.
The Besnard Lakes - Are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings
Atmospheric rock, in the sense that it reaches dizzying heights and encompasses vast layers of varying density. The mix conjures up roiling storms, gentle currents, dazzling aurora, and fleeting glimpses of the great unknown.
Colleen - The Tunnel and the Clearing
Colleen creates worlds, not albums, each one exploring a narrow but evocative range of sounds. In The Tunnel..., she navigates elongated expanses via echolocation, synths reverberating into eternity, sunlit vistas lurking just beyond sight.
This Bay Area psych-pop quartet brilliantly channels the same cosmic forces that gave the Byrds their notorious jangle, elevated Roky Erikson to the 13th floor, and forged the finest garage nuggets of the '60s.
Florence Cleopatra Shaw plays against her backing trio's taut post-punk, dryly delivering her poetic monologues in defiance of the band's energy. The tension works, the calm and the storm standing strong in symbiotic coexistence.
El Michels Affair - Yeti Season
Piya Malik's vocals add Bollywood cool to the Affair's already expansive musical arsenal. The result is Michels' most satisfying album yet, as omnivorous in its influences as it is consistent in its head-bobbing grooviness.
Andre Ethier - Further Up Island
Ethier’s ongoing collaboration with Sandro Perri continues bring out the best from both artists. The arrangements are spare but not somber; these are songs suited to Sunday morning tea or walking in the woods.
Fiver - Fiver with Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition
Country music stripped to its barest essence, draped in the improvisational instincts of some of Atlantic Canada's most imaginative players, and sent swirling into the cosmos with the tender strength of Schmidt's singular voice.
Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Best thought of as one continuous piece, this unexpected collaboration drifts as delicate and refreshing as morning fog. Gentle chords meander and roam, Sanders' sax piercing through like sunbeams through clouds, warm and healing.
Masayoshi Fujita - Bird Ambience
Building multilayered compositions around his marimba gives Fujita's works a percussive foundation, even at their most ambient. Inspired by natural settings, Fujita complicates that influence with electronic manipulations, finding beauty in the synthetic, too.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee AT STATES END!
No one controls the build and release of emotion like Godspeed, and 27 years hasn’t dulled their impact. Cavernous and apocalyptic as ever, this is music for watching nation-states crumble—or demanding it.
Green-House - Music for Living Spaces
Essentially Mort Garson's Plantasia for a new generation; music for nurturing and growth. Simple melodies, gentle sounds, and a core of uncoying cuteness, encouraging you to stretch your leaves and bask in the light.
Ìxtahuele - Eden Ahbez’s Dharmaland
A lost work of mid-century American mood music resurrected by a Swedish collective dedicated to the sounds of exotica. Beautifully captures the sweeping sincerity and woozy mysticism that makes these faux-foreign soundtracks so captivating.
Canada's long-reigning master of ambient experimentation finds a whole sonic universe in a single song, transforming a three-minute recording from a 22-piece orchestra in Budapest into a drifting cosmos of sonic form and void.
Lost Girls - Menneskekollektivet
A pop record, a late-night spoken-word experiment, an assemblage of half-formed ideas, soaring beats and uniquely transcendent moments. Menneskekollektivet is many things, none especially easy to define or digest, but richer for its idiosyncrasy.
Four Tet acts as Madlib's sonic super-ego, stitching the beatmaker's flurry of subconscious samples, beats and loops into a coherent communication, a stream of musical consciousness that might just be Madlib's most satisfying yet.
Breezy Latin pop that embraces the freewheeling spirit of Tropicalia, embroidering its melodies with Mariachi horns, pristine harpsichord, Melotron, samba rhythms, and other eclectic flourishes. Never flashy, but always surprising. A perfect summer album.
The Nigerian guitar hero continues his high-wire act, bridging Tuareg guitar with modern rock, producing some of the most electrifying sounds ever coaxed from an amplifier. Brimming with vitality, even in its gentlest moments.
Mogwai - As the Love Continues
26 years into their career, there's no reason Mogwai should still feel this vital, or debut at #1 on the UK charts, but sometimes things just work out right, and we should celebrate that.
Lael Neale - Acquanted with Night
Neale's Sub Pop debut is deliberately lo-fi; otherworldly Omnichord surfaces like lost echoes of a submerged pipe organ, vocals buzz at the limits of the mic, needle-sharp lyrics providing all the clarity you need.
The farther Netrvnnrer strays from the core tenets of synthwave, the stronger his songs have become. A utopian strain has crept in, or at least a hopeful one, with more humanity, warmth, and imagination.
Known for her work in Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre, violinist and composer Neufeld strays from both bands with this collection of atmospheric, evocative, compositions centering her hypnotic melodies and innate sense of drama.
Rooted in No Wave and post-punk aesthetics, Nightshift keeps the sense of tension and release inherent to both those influences, while stretching beyond them, opening up to unexpected bouts of melodicism and even sweetness.
No Joy - Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven
In reworking selections from last year's Motherhood, No Joy brings her compositions into entirely new aesthetic territory, re-imagining arrangements to include operatic background vocals, french horn flourishes, and other endlessly intricate dream pop details.
Brimming with international collaborators, Vertigo Days' hypnotic kraut-pop is global and insular, triumphant and melancholy, unfamiliar and comfortable. In other words, it's a perfect parallel to the vertiginous landscape of the last 18 months.
Resurrecting the KPM library release Electrosonic through creative sampling, Fir Wave finds Peele in collaboration with the late Delia Derbyshire. It's an aural teleporter tuned to realms unknown, reworking sci-fi sounds into cosmic odysseys.
Their third masterpiece in two years, Nine's stripped-down soul could be a post-millennial update of There's A Riot Goin' On, lyrically unforgiving and musically tense but laced through with hope, anger and bittersweet beauty.
Ulrich Schnauss & Jonas Munk - Eight Fragments of an Illusion
Two masters of ambient pop pursuing Neu horizons and tangerine dreams on an interstellar superhighway. Less a collaboration than a complete fusing of aesthetics, reaching for bliss through insistent melodies and richly realized settings.
Chad VanGaalen - World's Most Stressed Out Gardener
It's steeped in anxiety, but Gardener feels like Van Gaalen having the most fun he's had in years: spinning stories about samurai swords, indulging a fondness for flutes, giving every impulsive idea its due.
Ryley Walker And Kikagaku Moyo - Deep Fried Grandeur
This isn't a story to be told in concise terms; nobody on this two-song, 40-minute psych-rock odyssey worried about keeping things tight. But "grandeur" shouldn't be small, it should be overwhelming, immersive, and awe-inspiring.
Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood
Astoundingly intricate finger-picked guitar that's alive with wonder and joy. Inspired by natural phenomena, Williams' compositions echo nature's intricacy, radiating out in complex waves, never taking the obvious path, always finding the right one.
Unabashed easy listening jazz and rare groove that isn't afraid of schmaltz and sentimentality so long as it serves the melody. Suited to long drives in bucolic countrysides, or semi-hip soirees in '70s B-movies.
Inspired by a 2019 journey through China, and diverse enough to do its inspiration justice. Opening with sheer joy in "Xiu," it depicts pastoral ambiance, industrial clamour and urban energy on its wide-ranging voyage.
Misc. Recommendations
Watch
I watched Pig over the weekend, my first time in a theatre since before the start of the pandemic. The trailer makes it look like a revenge flick, but it’s really more a meditation on food's ability to connect to our bodies, memories, and environment, and a critique of high-brow culture that intentionally divorces us from those connections. Not at all what I expected from a movie about a stolen truffle pig.
I also finally saw WarGames, the ‘80s flick where Ferris Beuller accidentally starts a countdown to global thermonuclear war. It’s aged better than I expected, and even though I already knew the ending, there was more to it than just teaching a computer about no-win situations. There’s an interesting parallel between the computer needing to learn when to quit, and its creator needing to learn when to try instead of resigning himself to fate. Neat stuff.
Anyone who hasn’t been availing themselves of the Criterion Channel’s newly added Arthouse Animation, do yourself a favour and dig in. Between Hertzfeldt’s sad but wonderful It’s Such A Beautiful Day, the jaw-dropping art of Son of the White Mare, the singular vision of Chris Sullivan’s Consuming Spirits, Jan Svankmajer’s twisted take on Alice in Wonderland, and two dozen other selections, it’s one of the best surveys of the possibilities of animation you’re likely to have access to any time soon.
Read
Symbiosphere advocated two years ago for the use of “entropocene” over “anthropocene” to describe our current era, “an easy switch for an era in which the biosphere and the Earth’s crust, but also our social, political and cultural heritage are divided, extracted, ploughed, burned, and finally converted in atmospheric warmth. Entropy, they call it.”
A little less compelling in the wake of the ongoing crises of 2016 onwards, but J.F. Martel’s 2014 essay Beauty Will Save Us is still a wonderfully written argument for art’s ability to overcome artifice.
A couple of longer reads: Vox has the fascinating (and heartbreaking) story of Isabel Fall, a sci-fi writer whose first story landed her in the middle of a Twitter war over trans identity and representation. It’s an empathetic story about using art to understand your own identity, and the ease with which motives can be misunderstood and weaponized online.
I’d heard about the “Satanic Panics” of the ‘80s and ‘90s before, but I didn’t realize they had their (modern) origins in Victoria, BC. Jen Gerson gives a thorough retelling of a story whose ripples lead directly to some of the most pervasive current conspiracy theories.
A quick one to end with: The Guardian’s look at modern loneliness is eye-opening, especially the stats about modern friendships, like how “a recent study, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, suggests that the proportion of people who can name six close friends has dropped from 55% to 27% since the 1990s, while people who have no close friends at all had risen from 3% to 12%.”
The A.M.
Yesterday was the first day back on air after a month away from The AM. For the most part, it’s just going through a selection of the albums above, but it’s at least a condensed version of the list that might be a bit easier to get through.
I also forgot to upload my last two pre-hiatus episodes to Soundcloud, so here are all three for your listening pleasure.
Aug. 2, 2021:
June 28, 2021:
June 21, 2021:
Monday Shorts
Monday Shorts is a blog series I write and curate for the Quickdraw Animation Society, sharing independent animated shorts that deserve a wider audience. There are 150+ entries over on the QAS site, but here are a few of the more recent shorts we’ve shared (which, in retrospect, are at least somewhat relevant to this entry’s theme), plus links to my write-up on each.
“A feminine, feminist reframing of the act of creation, Ross’ film revels openly in its sexuality. Adam depicts the process as tender and tactile, not cold and clinical. It’s a creation fueled by desire, one just as linked to the needs of the body as any of the acts that would follow from it.”
(CW: This film is an exploration of PTSD using intense visual metaphors including depictions of graphic violence to convey feelings of shame and disembodiment.)