Below is a list of my 20 favourite avant-garde albums of 2020, in alphabetical order, with links linking to where to listen to them. Listen to them!
Hear a mix of these albums by me here: https://aftersilencepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/as-10-avant-garde-2020
die ANGEL - Utopien 1 (Karlrecords)
die ANGEL (Ilpo Väisänen & Dirk Dresselhaus) have one of the most refined, demanding and powerful sounds in electroacoustic music. Through thick, synthesized drones and corroded guitar textures, chopped and layered and processed and dissected, building intricate, tense tracks that feel more cinematic than musical in their progressions. In climaxes especially the music is surprisingly heavy, not aesthetically dissimilar to something like Sunn O))) but with a frostier, more precise edge.
Éric La Casa - Intérieurs (Swarming)
In likely my favourite "field recordings" piece of the year, album opener Appartement examines the artist's own apartment - creating a vast, dynamic, subtle, intricate, wonderful soundscape from the small sounds that always surround him, typically just out of ear-shot. They're the sounds that play such a consistent role in our lives that we deem them unworthy of focus, but in the piece's context they're given life and clarity that transcends human patience and audibility. The following two tracks observe other interior spaces with an equally fascinating level of depth.
Werner Dafeldecker - Parallel Darks (Room40)
This rare solo album from the bassist-composer shows an exciting, specific side to him. The music comes across as muddy in the best of ways - atmospheric, strange, surreal, vast - leaving the listener curious towards sound source, but eager to bathe in it. The enchanting flow between movements is clever but ambiguous - contrasting vague timbral structures, accentuating the experienced, performative energy and ambitious, aesthetic curiosity within.
Morton Feldman - For John Cage (Diatribe Records)
The duo of Darragh Morgan and John Tilbury had recorded the classic Feldman piece years before in concert, which was released on Matchless Recordings - a recording I love, I've been calling it my favourite Feldman recording for years. Recorded 12 years later, this studio remake is perhaps even more impressive - lush and precise. The composition is not new, but it is one of the most gorgeous ever written.
Mark Fell & Will Guthrie - Infoldings / Diffractions (NAKID)
The recent collaboration of Mark Fell and Will Guthrie, with debut and sophomore albums released in quick succession, is some of the most idiosyncratic, genre-defiant and engaging music I've heard all year. The music's primary focus is rhythm, and it does frequently dabble into groove music, but the rhythmic structures are quickly abstracted and subverted both by Fell's digital and Guthrie's instrumental performances. These two make for such a fine, eclectic but specific aesthetic - I really hope this project continues.
Klaus Filip & Moé Kamura - p a s s a g e i n (Winds Measure Recordings)
Klaus Filip (laptop with sine tones) and Moé Kamura (voice) seem like performers on the opposite end of the emotive spectrum, but they pair together quite naturally due to a shared fragility - both sounds seem to teeter on the edge of non-existence, making the moments where they don't exist feel completely natural. Filip's unobtrusive drones come and go while Kamura's sparse voice seldom raises above a hum, not harmonizing but in clear cooperation regardless. I find every moment of it beautiful.
Jürg Frey - l'air l'instant - deux pianos (elsewhere)
Jürg Frey has already proven his aptitude as a piano composer several times (most notable, to me, is the 90-minute
Pianist, Alone), but these piano duets push his usual themes in an exciting, warm direction. Rather than using the pianists' four hands to enhance a cacophony, or even provide more sound at all, the idea lands closer to co-existence, mutual listening and patience. With similar patience the listener is invited to join in that listening, and they will find it to be beautiful.
Ash Fure - Something to Hunt (Sound American)
Perhaps the most eccentric and exciting classical album of the year is this debut release from American composer Ash Fure. Each track takes on varying forms of atonal expressionism, shifting between confusing beauty and allusive horror. The narrative nature of the compositions is likely their strongest trait, making each piece engaging and cohesive, guiding the listener through bumpy, exhilarating, intimately captured emotional terrain.
Sarah Hennies - Extra Time (Hasana Editions)
Composer Sarah Hennies has actually had a few albums this year that could have made this list, but the one I'd most like to recommend is this collection of pieces for solo percussionist - Sarah's own instrument. Each piece is highly singular, maintaining a soft, repetitive expression over x minutes, sometimes adding or removing a little or pausing to make a slight, but clear shift - crafting odd, blissful, provocative atmospheres that either transcend their instrumentation or prove its worth.
Clara Iannotta - Earthing (Wergo)
Clara Iannotta's much-anticipated sophomore album (by me, at least) brings her in a surprisingly specific direction - just string quartets. The grotesquely screaming strings recall Helmut Lachenmann, but Iannotta brings warmth and fragility to her music which is not found there. Instead, these scratchy, uncomfortable performances sound admirable and lively - full of human error, mind, logic, playfulness, creativity and heart.
Choi Joonyong & Jin Sangtae - Hole In My Head (Erstwhile Records)
If you only hear one improvised album this year, this should be the one.
Hole In My Head is immensely inspiring - it's like little else while sounding relatable, timely and wholly precedented. The music feels born from a post-modern junkyard - discarded gadgets, computers and CD players fumble while performers make their presence and location sonically and viscerally discoverable from different angles, hidden amongst rubble and industrial sound.
Ulrich Krieger - The Yggdrasil-Soli (Winds Measure Recordings)
Most of the year's softest, most fragile, most gorgeous music has come from the years-delayed
Yggradsil-Soli - an immaculate set of half-hour compositions united by a similarly meditative near-silent calm. The pieces are meant to be heard in any combination, as each piece's dazzling simplicity seems to exclusively work with the others in harmonious addition. Personally, I made a 90-minute mix that gradually fades through the 9 tracks, but I'm not convinced it's more beautiful than the 30-minute layering that Krieger's already provided.
Takuma Kuragaki - BOTTOMLESS / BLANK (Hitorri)
Click. Click. Click. A moment of blank space and then another click. This album invites the listener to periodically meditate within that space, to let the clicks guide them. The small sounds sound as if they might fit into a stranger collage or more performative approach, but Kuragaki's formal computer compositions (which they compare to composing with Microsoft Excel) force aesthetic consistency, allowing the minute differences within the 6 compositions to become apparent.
Alvin Lucier - String Noise (Black Truffle)
Buried by his legacy it seems easy to forget that Alvin Lucier is still alive and composing music, but his recent string of releases on Black Truffle have proven that the artist never left the cutting edge.
String Noise compiles three pieces for violin - all of which are slow to the point of non-moving, and focused heavily on the physical, sonic traits of the instruments and the rooms in which they are being played. The opening piece made just from tapping is attention-suspending like little else, and the rich, droning strings of the two latter tracks I find striking.
Jim O'Rourke - Shutting Down Here (Portraits GRM)
It's always been a debate among fans what the true Jim O'Rourke album sounds like. Over the past decade it's become increasingly clear, to the disappointment of many, that the answer is not indie rock. Perhaps the answer is this. The electroacoustic assembly is highly dynamic - complex & dense during its shimmering spikes but subtle and intimate during its various moments of sustained bliss. The composition floats through these various sections patiently, thoughtfully, leaving a trail of soft, nuanced beauty in its wake.
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Four Pieces for Recorded Percussion (Il faut attendre) (Self-Released)
Each of these pieces collages together performed percussion to create fictional, pseudo-natural environments - pristinely beautiful both in concept and execution. The most remarkable track is the longest, which has the performer dropping single water droplets on various objects, and then arranging those sounds to re-create the illusion of rain. That being said, I do think the album's moreso defined by its profound sense of suspended zen than its concepts.
claire rousay - Both (Second Editions)
claire rousay has been one of the most prolific and varied artists of the year, boasting 14 new releases stretching across improvisation and collage music. Both seems to be somewhat of a proper debut-album-statement for her - or her first LP, at the very least - but more importantly, I think it's the best of the bunch. Simultaneously full of sound and bravely simple, rousay creates some of the most nuanced compositions of the year from modest indoor recordings.
Philip Sulidae - Perplexor (LINE)
Quiet but full, strange compositions constructed from field recordings. Each bares the name of a fictional(?) address, letting the track feel like an investigative study of a building, a home perhaps - but this is a cold, dark, Lynchian space with electricity in the air and the threat of bad vibes looming around each corner. The manipulated sounds are dynamic and captivating, keeping the listener glued to each tracks narrative flow and slick aestheticism.
suzueri - Fata Morgana (Hitorri)
Piano&stuff improviser suzueri's studio debut was something I really anticipated, and it did not disappoint. suzueri's general style of performance is to trigger the piano's strings with various mechanical devices, looping sounds, clicks and clacks, building them into vast, cacophonous drones of mushed textures. What Fata Morgana boasts above previous live performances is a really dynamic and versatile recording by Makoto Oshiro that makes the machine sounds clear in tandem with the booming piano.
Eric Wong - Cognitive Dissonance (Edition Wandelweiser Records)
Composed entirely in Ableton Live, Cognitive Dissonance is one of the simplest, purest and most powerful drone records of the year. Precise digital tones twirl around the listener's ears in stereo, minimally layering into small harmonies, pulses and rhythms. The refined textures grow and mutate slow enough to avoid detection, but clearly enough to leave the listener wondering what they may have missed amidst their meditation.
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