while we have the 2011 new music thread going on, i realised that for me the main soundtrack of 2011 has been about music from previous years.
in the last 12 months i have fallen hard for :
the cramps.
moody blues.
iggy + the stooges.
neu! possibly my fave ‘find’ of the year
bobbie gentry
loads of fania reissues
some of the mad stuff on finders keepers
bill plumber and the cosmic brotherhood
so, what have you (re)discovered in 2011 ?
Colour Haze—this has been my big discovery, really enjoying plowing my way through their back catalog. Shout out to ilxor FastNBulbous for his primer on these guys.
David Axelrod—finally getting around to this guy. I’ve only heard Song of Innocence so far, but its fantastic stuff.
The Beach Boys—not really new to me, but this is the first time I’ve finally thrown myself into their post-Pet Sounds discography and I’m finding new songs to love almost daily. I have to thank the ILM Beach Boys poll for this.
Trans Am—had heard and enjoyed these guys previously, but I picked up basically their entire discography used for less than $25 over the couse of a few weeks this summer and really immersed myself in their back catalog. Lots of great stuff.
Blue Oyster Cult—stupidly dismissed them as minor also-rans for too long, but buying a cheapo set of three of their early albums showed the errors of my ways.
David Axelrod—finally getting around to this guy. I’ve only heard Song of Innocence so far, but its fantastic stuff.
oooh man.
i picked up on his stuff a few years back and even now i have to be careful.
once i start listening to the trilogy (Songs of Innocence/Experience, Earth Rot), i find it very hard to listen to anything else for days/weeks.
Al Stewart is the big one for me this year i think
hmm.
got an al stewart 2cd anthology in the archives.
never had the urge ..
Unrest
Bob Welch era Fleetwood Mac (thanks, ILM!)
Robert Ashley (probably the biggest find of 2011 for me) and other artists in the Lovely Music stable (notably David Behrman).
Classical music made quite an impact on me this year. I’m not listening to it all that much (besides the Lovely stuff I mentioned up there) but I attended a “New Music at the University of Missouri” concert series featuring world debut performances (by Alarm Will Sound!) of new works by composers in the University program. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. I’m also weeding an academic libraries lp collection as part of my MLS pursuit. So, yeah, more important than the WHAT is the WHY of music for me this year.
Not a great deal of old stuff. My love of reggae’s been reignited with some fantastic Studio One comps. I decided to finally check out the REM albums I’d been missing out on (most of the ’80s ones). Serge Gainsbourg, Leonard Cohen and Lee Hazlewood have all been excavated and toyed with. Have to say that this year is an anomaly for me in that I’ve been much more excited about new music than trying to obsessively uncover the back catalogue of a past master like I’ve done in the past with Talking Heads, the Beach Boys, Tom Waits. If it’s older music I’ve been listening to, it’s stuff from my own past—old mixtapes etc...
Oh yeah—Fleetwood Mac. I received a turntable for my birthday and I’ve been going round the chazzas and buying up lots of old vinyl, so it’s strange I haven’t got much to show for this thread.
huge amount of jazz due to the jazz poll: andrew hill, joe henderson, jackie mclean etc
like axelrod, i actually avoided jazz in 2011 as i find it becomes too much of an addiction, and i can lose months to a miles davis urge.
but i cant deny that thread nearly tipped me over the edge ..
oh, and the return of the £3 jazz section @ fopp hasn’t helped !
and i can lose months to a miles davis urge
Haha, this is so true for me too. I’m expecting that I’ll have the ’67 box shortly after the holidays and that’ll be much of my listening for Jan & Feb 2012 wrapped up.
Can’t remember who it was, but someone posted about the Willie Tee album produced by Axelrod on the Rolling Reissues thread and it’s amazing
the albums I’ve played the most this year are probably So7S—Alpinism and Tom Vek—We Have Sound
Not sure if there was talk before the main ILM went down, but new album Ghostory in Jan!
post-A Love Supreme Coltrane
Cluster, Harmonia, Moebius & Plank, etc.
Popol Vuh !
Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, and other acts discussed in Electric Eden
early Pink Floyd
Wayne Shorter
pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk
pre-Phaedra Tangerine Dream
Waylon Jennings
2011 was an excellent year, thx ILM
and other acts discussed in Electric Eden
Got this sitting on my Nook waiting for me, need to plow through the backlog of books first though. I’m thinking 2012 will also be a folk filled year for me.
big Denny year for me too, although i’ve had Electric Eden for a while and only gotten a few chapters into it
This year I had a major Harry Nilsson phase wherein I got into the later stuff. Also dug into the catalogues of Kate Bush and The Fall, “discovered” Moondog and Harry Partch. Wayne Shorter. Got into Psychic TV (!) and Current 93 for the first time. Also Skip James (!!!) and Joe Meek (!!!).
Mickey Newbury was the big “new to me” guy for this year.
Joe Gibbs—how, as a dub fan, I had not heard of him and his wonderful productions I just don’t know. Some of his stuff is just out of this world and he really needs to be commemorated in the same breath as King Tubby and Lee Perry.
Oh and I also got into calypso music after dancing to Wilmoth Houdini records at Boomtown Fair.
just started listening to scott walker, my gf says SCOTT4 sounds like christmas music but i love it!!
A breadth of country music from the ’30s through today. I dove fully into the country stacks at the local library with the intent of educating myself beyond “Taylor Swift, Neko Case, the Grateful Dead, and Johnny Cash”. That’s somewhat of an exaggeration, but honestly pretty close to the mark. Force-fed myself country of all stripes for hours on end every day for weeks until I was sick of it. Didn’t listen to an ounce of country for a few months and then in the beginning of October picked up listening to it naturally in my regular rotation.
I’ve tried this immersion method before with the other sitting ducks—classical, jazz, and hip-hop—but not to any degree of lasting success.
The other big things from earlier years I can remember getting into this year are
*the Silver Jews general discography
*the second A Perfect Circle record
*the Zero Boys, who I had heard on a compilation once, but never bought an album
*the second A Perfect Circle record
this is one of my favorite albums of all time
my gf says SCOTT4 sounds like christmas music but i love it!!
‘boy child’ totally does!
i love steely dan but ‘gaucho’ clicked with me huge this year, in a way it hadn’t before
Joe Gibbs—how, as a dub fan, I had not heard of him and his wonderful productions I just don’t know
technically you should credit Gibbs and Errol Thompson, one of the unsung geniuses of JA music. Good obit for him here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/dec/09/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1
was saying in the outloud.fm room last night that i just discovered that divine comedy had more than one song.
These first two fit together, to an extent:
V/A—Pakistan Folk and Pop Instrumentals 1966–76
Japanese surf guitarist Takeshi Terauchi, but especially Let’s Go Eleki Bushi, which has some of the most distinctively eastern sounding material. When huge forest fires in Arizona filled Albuquerque’s air with smoke sometimes so thick you could only see for a couple blocks, I drove around playing this all the time. It somehow made the perfect soundtrack for that temporarily apocalyptic-seeming environment.
I liked some of the flamenco rock songs on the Acid Rumba compilation, but particularly like Morena y Clara and their self-titled album.
A bunch of cumbia villera (which is mostly Argentine, and relatively recent, just not necessarily from this year) and some other cumbia found here and there, without paying much attention to the names of artists (or in some cases simply not knowing the names), including music from a couple great Colombian “best of the year” type compilations from the 70s (that I found on a blog).
I bought my first car ever at the beginning of the year, so that’s put a big spin on my listening this year. “Is it good driving music?” has become one of the questions I ask. Also, inevitably, I’ve heard new things in familiar music this way. Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon amaze me more than ever, along with Willie Rosario. Among others.
Can’t remember who it was, but someone posted about the Willie Tee album produced by Axelrod on the Rolling Reissues thread and it’s amazing
ahh .. glad someone else picked that album up, tis indeed wonderful !
Mainly jazz this year: Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco, Horace Silver Song for my Father, Lee Morgan Sidewinder, Max Roach Deeds Not Words, Donald Harrison w/Ron Carter & Billy Cobham Heroes.
I get into a lot of old music as bedtime albums. These were the albums that comforted me this year, either new to me or they belatedly revealed the full extent of their charms):
John Martyn, Solid Air (new to me)
Steely Dan, Gaucho (full extent of charms)
Richard Horowitz & Susan Deyhim, Majoun (full extent of charms)
Russell Mills/Undark, Strange Familiar (new to me)
Cocteau Twins, Victorialand (full extent of charms)
more I’m forgetting right now.
A lot of vocal jazz like Mark Murphy, Blossom Dearie, Karin Krog, and Jula de Palma, even rediscovered Frank Sinatra. The whole Nashville studio musicians and all of the different records they led me to. My big discovery this year was Jesus music, from xian folk to country and western gospel.
Oh and Michael Farneti’s Good Morning Kisses
Neu!
folk and old-timey music from the ’20s and ’30s.
La? Neu! for me. I guess I assumed Rother dropped off in the 90s? WRONG
Rother Dinger :P
Have you heard Martyn’s One World Tim? If not, you really should
^ would strongly second that
Popol Vuh !
has become my morning music of choice. ILM’s PV thread is a handy album guide
not so handy atm (but yes!)
Chris Stamey/Yo La Tengo’s “McCauley Street (Let’s Go Downtown),” which I found in a used bin last week.
Also: Herman Cain’s “Imagine There’s No Pizza.”
“I wonder if you can” ?
Yes we can.
Almost forgot—this was also the year I got into Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty by the Grateful Dead.
This is the year that Charalambides clicked in a big way for me, thanks in large part to their excellent new album EXILE (which is easily in the top five albums released this year for me).
xp: next year you should check out Jerry Garcia’s Garcia and Bob Weir’s Ace. They are of the same ilk.
Don’t sleep on Mickey Hart’s Rolling Thunder, also released in ’72. I just discovered that one this year and it is also pretty excellent. John Cipollina plays guitar on it. May as well rep for Europe 72. as well, a record that sounds better to me now than ever before.
Thanks for the recs. I will investigate.
Reassessed and moved from ambivalence to full-fledged love:
Scott Walker (via the “Five Easy Pieces” box)
Kevin Ayers (via the “Songs For Insane Times” box)
Pere Ubu (via the first two discs of the “Datapanik In The Year Zero” box)
Brian Eno’s ambient work (via the “Instrumental” box)
Nuggets I and II boxes (and 60s UK psych as well)
It’s been an awesome box set year!
Incidentally, I’m always amazed how one’s tastes can change over time. It makes me think that eventually I’ll dig everything.
^yeah, been feeling the same way lately. Eventually, everything sounds good.