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Greg Taylor's RTQE Top 10 list 2014

Gregory Taylor

December 1 at 10:47pm ·

The official RTQE "15 of the top 10 releases of 2014." Your mileage may um... vary, but this really is what rose to the top after fussing over the thing long and hard. Very odd year for music for me, I think....

John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (Cantaloupe)

Aphex Twin: Syro (Warp)

Brian Eno & Robert Fripp: Fripp & Eno – Live in Paris 28/5/75 (Opal/DGM)

The Gloaming: s/t (Real World)

The Humble Bee: Henrietta (or) She Possessed The Secret For Listening To The Stars (Other Ideas)

Dennis Johnson: November (Irritable Hedgehog)

King Crimson: Starless (DGM)

K. Leimer/M. Barreca: Premap (Palace of Lights)

Nickel Creek: A Dotted Line (Nonesuch)

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Dan Trueman: Laghdú (Distrokid.com)

Michael Pisaro: Continuum Unbound (Gravity Wave)

Bill Seaman/Daniel Howe: Minor Distance (Cotton Goods)

Leyland Kirby: The Death Of Rave [A partial flashback] (History Always Favours The Winners)

Various Artists: Die Welt ist Klang: A Tribute to Pete Namlook (Carpe Sonum)

Various Artists: Elements I-V (Home Normal)​

Julien Lambrechts "End Of The Year" list 2014

Minor Distance lately has become one of my favorite late night listening choices. This is sonically quiet music, but it certainly isn’t simple. Bill Seaman’s piano (“live” and sampled) and Daniel Howe’s guitar are dominant throughout, while occasional guests on acoustic wind, brass and string instruments add other textures to the soundspace. There are no melodies as such, but there are systems of chords and samples supplied by Seaman, around which Howe’s noise-meets-Ry-Cooder electric guitar fills gravitate like a swarm of metallic dragon flies. Each composition is a network of anticipations and resolutions, and the mood is cumulatively somewhere between ominous and soothing. This music is both cognitively challenging and emotionally complex, and that’s a very satisfying combination.

Steve Fore.

Titles are, alternately, announcements, locations on the periodic table, and one-time ciphers. What, then, to make of minor distance? rip the title on the crosscut saw and you've got two separate bits, one in each hand. Start with the adjective first, which leans toward its noun like each piece on the recording leans toward what follows it, and then leans to silence when all is finished. A judgement? A musical clue about tonal content and emotional terrain? A statement of modest intentions? The title starts with a set of instructions about what is

to follow....

Likewise, distance ("standing apart," as the Romans taught us) - things separated. The men who made this, scattered across the world. Work that grows in the space between those who collaborate, the product itself composed of layers of sound laid down like geological strata, deformed, cut through, and finally uplifted as part of the finished landscape.

Distance, too, from works like it - by the absense of the expected tropes of its microculture (what? No "tin can telephone" filtering? No vinyl surface noise?). Distance from more rigorous segregations of acoustic and electroacoustic sources (where the unadorned piano shares the ecosystem with tiny dustdevils of looped noise that skitter across the surface of the audio file). Intervallic distances, too - the piano and guitar whose occasional entrances would normally anchor more predictable "stepwise melodies picked out over two modal chords" are instead otherwise engaged, dropping little chordal depth charges into the darkness whose detonations illuminate something very different lurking below in the low light.

And, when joined as a title, I am left also with another kind of minor distance - the uncanny ability of this work to evoke snatches of work well removed from the genre into which this work fits: Miles floating a single trumpet note toward the ceiling of that deconsecrated Armenium church in "So What". The way that the piano appeared out of the rain in those divine Blue Nile recordings. The grave and resolute brass in Johan Johanssen's "Miner's Hymns. Moments of beauty that leap the gap like a spark across the air. Craig Tattersal cleverly turns the initial material on its head in his reworks, using the timbres of the original material the way a painter uses gesso to prepare the surface, adding washes of harmonium and other judicious interventions whose distance is a deceptive single layer of audio processing away.

And the final minor distance for me? I will keep these recordings near to hand for some time to come.

Gregory Taylor.

*Edition of 95 individually numbered copies, only 70 available for sale. Double CD edition housed in bespoke book packaging with fold-out print insert - each copy is completely unique, no two are alike. This Edition includes a second CD of remixes from Cotton Goods head honcho The Humble Bee as well as an instant download for both discs when purchased* This collaboration between Bill Seaman and Daniel Howe came about after the pair exchanged ideas and recordings while both where travelling separately - in effect making for an album recorded between North Carolina, Seoul, Bremen, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hong Kong, Thailand, Mainland China and New York - covering a bit more than the "Minor Distances" referred to in the title. The recordings began life with Howe's improvised guitar recordings and Seaman's simple Piano loops - before being dissected and manipulated into the kind of delicate electro-accoustic arrangements synonymous with the whole Cotton Goods aesthetic. The album also features Trumpet parts recorded by Robert Ellis-Geiger (who also mastered the album), and an additional disc of re-works by Craig Tattersall, aka The Humble Bee, who does a typically wonderful job of imbuing proceedings with delicate wonder. His version of "Improbability" in particular sounds like an extract from The Remote Viewer's gorgeous "Let Your Heart Draw A Line" - a thing rent with so much delicate beauty as to make this whole package required listening for any of you who have followed Tattersall, or indeed Cotton Goods in the past.

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