#17: Oren Ambarchi - 'Hubris'
Hear "Hubris Part 3" After a whole bunch of heavy metal, we are finally finding another genre on my top 25 at #17! Wait, what? There are non-rock forms of music?? Well, yes, yes there are. And they are more meditative and neutral usually. Like an abstract painting, drones and experimentation do not yield obvious results. There is no mythology or heroic characters involved usually, just cool sounds a bit unhinged from reality. A futuristic sound beyond rocking out sometimes. While Oren Ambarchi uses the rock music cliched instrument of electric guitar, he makes it sound... different. The pitch bends are either more subtle or more extreme; the feedback and noises allowed to ring out even more; more and more affectations layered upon the sound. This is not virtuosic playing, it is more like unleashing the instrument and allowing it to be more itself. I have been following Ambarchi for a few years now. Prior, my favorite thing was his collaboration with Stephen O'Malley: 'Shade Themes from Kairos'. This is how I found out about Oren Ambarchi. His attention to tone and detail is hard to match. That and the wide variety of sounds and distortions he produces from his guitar and table full of effects and dials makes him a more expansive musician than most. While 'Shade Themes' was more focused on tones and drones, Ambarchi's newer work is very rhythmic, adding another dimension to what was more of an ambient music paradigm. Harmonics are allowed to be free and frolic. Even at its most distorted the guitars are impeccably clear. And the rhythms on top of all of this are top notch. Track one enters the stage as a 20 minute plus table setter. I am reminded of Phillip Glass in an obvious way, in that there is a study in repetition going on here. And also clarity. On this lengthy opener the listener becomes very acquainted with the most straightforward beat on the album and the track lulls the listener into a state of near-captivity (if it weren't just so long to let the mind wander I suppose). Then the 2nd movement arrives and is gone in a few blinks of the eyelashes. Its main purpose is to introduce something totally different rhythmically, and to sound more like a digestible song format... accept that it is not even as long as a pop song. This in effect resets the whole thing so that you can hear "Hubris Part 3" (linked to above). The ending track is somewhere in between the first two, mimicking the lengthy repetition of Part 1, but absorbing the more complex rhythmics of Part 2. The closing track is my favorite part of the album, and makes the whole thing, whole I guess. The other part beyond the interesting goings on with the musics, this thing is produced to sound fantastic. It is absolute ear candy and highly recommended.
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Although there are some albums on this list that rock very hard, or for some, could be called Heavy (or even Metal), there were so many quality albums that were released in 2013 that I am making two year end lists to kick off the blog version of Questionable Taste (what once was a facebook page for my internet radio station called Through The Cracks, which morphed into some other manifestation of posting some music through the magic of youtube). "Like" the Facebook version of this blog on your Facebook please, if you are into that, so you can get any updates..
The purpose of this inaugural post is to get a list out there as quickly as possible, since this page is not really done yet, and 2014 is now well under way. I cannot even explain how excited I am about music right now, both as a listener and as a musician... it is truly a wonder to be into and follow the routes music is taking currently. Production keeps getting better, the musicians more imaginative and more connected to information than ever, and the cross referencing of ideas is phenomenal. Music is everywhere, and it has never been so easy to get the word out about it. Which is another problem unto itself, to get noticed or even recognition; but I digress. What makes this year different from my tumblr blog about 2012's music is that I am going to just list my favorite albums of 2013, and not worry about a cutoff (the blog format was a top 40). Since I know that I loved more than 40 albums from 2013, I am moving on from that format. Also, I will not do a countdown to #1 album style of blog, as I felt that was too arbitrary a way of doing things, and made me look at music rating too linearly, or whatever... maybe hierarchically is a better way to describe what I was doing. And tier-ing is lame and played out, isn't it? So I suppose I will still rate the albums, as I go through and review them all (albeit more succinctly than last year) alphabetically this time, according to 6 categories. Just like everyone, my taste is difficult to attribute to anything or to sum up, predict, etc. Music is just super subjective like that (which is part of what makes it so great). The things that I have been liking more and more over time are jazz and experimental music, and pop less and less. And I will always love heavy music, innovative and/or adventurous rock and roll, as well as electronic music of the progressive variety (well, prog probably applies to all those other genres too, but sometimes I can find prog to be exceedingly boring or cheesy). So all I can offer here is my expert, completely subjective as ever and convoluted opinion; and hope to turn people on to some music they would not have heard otherwise. Ok, so, the list, is what this is all about... the non-metal list:
And now, for the Honorable Mentions...
Well, that's that, and that was there. 2013 was an incredibly great year for music, and I encourage you to get every one of those albums I just listed, even the Honorable's. Next up, will be my picks for best Heavy Metal albums of 2013! |
AuthorG.M. Bowles Archives
February 2017
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