Exclaim!'s Top 10 Experimental & Modern Composition Albums of 2018

To record *All Melody*, Frahm designed his dream studio inside Berlin’s historic Funkhaus complex, rewiring the cables, installing a pipe organ, and building a custom mixing desk. Then, like a kid in a candy store, he created one of his most meticulous and adventurous albums yet. A delicate mix of ambient meditations (\"The Whole Universe Wants to be Touched”), wandering piano melodies (“My Friend the Forest”), and staccato, Latin-leaning grooves (“A Place,” “Kaleidoscope\"), it’s an absorbing study of atmosphere that\'s full of surprises.

For the past two years, Nils Frahm has been building a brand new studio in Berlin to make his 7th studio album titled All Melody, which will be released on January 26th, 2018 via Erased Tapes, before Nils embarks on his first world tour since 2015. Since the day Nils first encountered the impressive studio of a family friend, he had envisioned to create one of his own at such a large scale. Fast forward to the present day and Nils is now the proud host of Saal 3, part of the historical 1950s East German Funkhaus building beside the River Spree. It is here where he has spent most of his time deconstructing and reconstructing the entire space from the cabling and electricity to the woodwork, before moving on to the finer elements; building a pipe organ and creating a mixing desk all from scratch with the help of his friends. This is somewhere music can be nurtured and not neglected, and where he can somewhat fulfil his pursuit of presenting music to the world as close to his imagination as possible. His previous albums have often been accompanied with a story, such as Felt (2011) where he placed felt upon the hammers of the piano out of courtesy to his neighbours when recording late at night in his old bedroom studio, and the following album Screws (2012) when injuring his thumb forced him to play with only nine fingers. His new album is born out of the freedom that his new environment provided, allowing Nils to explore without any restrictions and to keep it All about the Melody. Despite being confined within the majestic four walls of the Funkhaus, buried deep in its reverb chambers, or in an old dry well in Mallorca, All Melody is, in fact, proof that music is limitless, timeless, and reflects that of Nils’ own capabilities. From a boy’s dream to resetting the parameters of music itself. Words from Nils, October 2017: “In the process of completion, any album not only reveals what it has become but, maybe more importantly, what it hasn't become. All Melody was imagined to be so many things over time and it has been a whole lot, but never exactly what I planned it to be. I wanted to hear beautiful drums, drums I've never seen or heard before, accompanied by human voices, girls, and boys. They would sing a song from this very world and it would sound like it was from a different space. I heard a synthesiser which sounds like a harmonium playing the All Melody, melting together with a line of a harmonium sounding like a synthesiser. My pipe organ would turn into a drum machine, while my drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes. I would turn my piano into my very voice, and any voice into a ringing string. The music I hear inside me will never end up on a record, as it seems I can only play it for myself. This record includes what I think sticks out and describes my recent musical discoveries in the best possible way I could imagine.” The cover art was taken by photographer Lia Darjes in Nils’ new studio and designed by Torsten Posselt at FELD. A series of these in-studio photos will be included in a booklet with a copy of All Melody.

Released (LP) September 2018 by Ba Da Bing Composed and mixed by Sarah Davachi Recorded April and July 2017 at Hotel2Tango in Montréal QC, engineered by Howard Bilerman Additional overdubs recorded at home in Los Angeles in November and December 2017 Performed by Sarah Davachi (flute, Mellotron, organs, piano, synthesizer, voice), Thierry Amar (contrabass), Terri Hron (recorder), Jessica Moss (violin), Lisa McGee (voice) Mastered by Sean McCann Photography by Dicky Bahto From Ba Da Bing: Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us. Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. “I’ve always been a pretty solitary person, but that summer I discovered quiet moments to be increasingly valuable,” says Davachi. “I became engaged in private practices of rest and rumination, almost to the point of ritual.” Though not religious, she sought ecclesiastic environments, sitting for hours in muted spaces and listened to how church instruments augmented them – their pipe organs, their bells, their choral voices – and resolved to “tap into that way of listening.” Davachi went deeper into studying early music over that summer, considering how Renaissance musicians experimented with new instruments, forms, and texture. Her reflections led her to the duality of stillness and rest, and upon entering Montréal’s hotel2tango with Howard Bilerman, she adapted her modern style to standard approaches of a recording studio’s function. She composed the majority of the record alone at the piano to find specific harmonic colors and movements, then brought in an ensemble of musicians to interact and extrapolate organically with those tones. Gave In Rest opens and ends at its most unornamented moments: the first track, “Auster”, being played entirely on a recorder and then, “slowed down and opened up so you can hear the innards of the sound,” and the final track, “Waking”, one long take of Davachi on a Hammond organ. The latter is a solitary departure of concrete simplicity and is allegorical in its inclusion at Gave In Rest’s end, with harmonic structures of a Baroque style materializing and wavering in long, textural passages of consonance and dissonance. The overdubbed, chant-like singing on “Evensong” was treated through an EMT 140 plate reverb, the very same unit Stevie Nicks used for “Rhiannon”. Completed after this period of suspension in her life, Davachi finished Gave In Rest while establishing herself in Los Angeles. Her new home is a radical departure from her previous Northern surroundings, with its vast reach, otherworldly terrain, and bizarre, isolating nature; “It is easy to remain anonymous in Los Angeles,” says Davachi. Gave In Rest was mixed over a period of two months while she adjusted to this new lifestyle. Davachi has mined a bottomless landscape where listeners can witness music’s participation in their solitudes. Gave In Rest lends a voice to her personal exploration with a firm, intuitive stance.

For a jazz drummer, Makaya McCraven has a rather unorthodox way of making albums. Back in 2014, he began hosting a live-improv series with other like-minded Chicago musicians. “We recorded everything, and I started to just mess with it as samples,” McCraven tells Apple Music. He would pluck out the best parts from those extended jams and, with digital editing software, build entirely new tracks. The result—2015’s aptly titled *In the Moment*—introduced a style of hip-hop-inspired production that owes as much to Madlib as it does Sun Ra. But it still comes down to that source material. “It’s always about playing with lots of people, in lots of situations, and exploring as many avenues as I can to push me to grow as an artist,” he says. Culled from what he calls “spontaneous compositions”—recorded live with different ensembles in four cities, then recomposed digitally—*Universal Beings*, McCraven\'s third official album, is both a testament to his creative ambitions and a pulse-taking of modern jazz. British tenor heavyweight Shabaka Hutchings, who appears on the Chicago sessions, plays with rhythmic ferocity, while fellow London saxophonist Nubya Garcia offers laidback counterpoint to Ashley Henry’s moody Rhodes piano. \"I think they’re coming from more of a groove sensibility,” McCraven says of his London collaborators, some of whom he met literally moments before they took the stage together for these recordings. “A lot of them are tapping into the diverse fabric of the city, with music from the West Indies, Afrobeat, British soul.” With abundant harp from Brandee Younger and cello from Tomeka Reid, the tracks from New York only hint at conventional jazz idioms, instead leaning more heavily on abstract elements of classical, rock, and R&B. And on the songs made from the LA session at guitarist Jeff Parker’s house, energetic free-jazz flourishes mix with gloriously off-kilter drums and the musicians themselves ruminating on consciousness, happiness, and human potential. When McCraven tells Apple Music, “The music exists in an alternate universe, an alternate reality,” it’s just as much a comment on the album’s sample-based structure as its overarching philosophy.

Paris-born, New England-raised, long-time Chicago-residing Makaya McCraven has been at the forefront of genre-redefining movements in jazz since 2015, when he introduced the world to his unique brand of ‘organic beat music’ on the breakout album In The Moment. Culled, cut, post-produced & re-composed by Makaya using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, through incubation & experimentation In The Moment established a procedural blueprint that he has since been sharpening & developing. Honing this process on narrower sets of source material, Makaya followed up In The Moment with 2 mixtape releases – 2017’s Highly Rare, a lo-fi free-jazz-meets-hip-hop suite he made from a live 4-track recording, and June 2018’s Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), which he produced using live recordings from London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre (captured at a showcase called CHICAGOxLONDON). Now, after 4+ years of refining his approach, Makaya McCraven puts forth an ambitious new work – Universal Beings – a culmination of concepts conceived by In The Moment, and his most elegant & articulated work yet. Spurred by a desire to connect with old friends & new collaborators in places where similar spirits & diasporic jazz innovations are thriving, Makaya worked with International Anthem across late 2017 & early 2018 to setup intimate live sessions in New York & Chicago, and pop-up “studio” sessions in London & Los Angeles. Though the contexts and logistics were D.I.Y. (as they almost always are with IARC), the friends & friends-of-friends that Makaya was able to enlist are top tier players across the board. Some might call them super groups of “new” jazz musicians from their respective cities, with Makaya as a common denominator. But more importantly, collectively they make an inspiring display of the organic global inter-connectedness of the Black American music tradition in 2018. Physically spanning national & international borders to create an album that musically spans deep spiritual jazz meditations, pulsing post-bop grooves & straight-ahead boom-bap, Makaya McCraven defies the simplifications of revisionism & regionalism while celebrating the sounds, settings & stories that define the provenance of his work. Universal Beings projects an all-encompassing message of unity, peace & power by embracing transcendence in all its expressions.

There’s a wistfulness to this album that emerges from its faded colors and the vintage feel of the muffled piano on many of its tracks. French-Canadian pianist/composer Alexandra Stréliski’s music is fragile and vulnerable, its surface optimism a mask for her deep introspection. But it’s also calming: The opening “Plus tôt” is a reassuring waltz, “The Quiet Voice” a lilting, innocent miniature. Stréliski returns to the full-throated sound of a grand piano for the beautiful “Burnout Fugue,” a mesmerizing toccata, before delivering a gentle, rippling ballad, “Revient le jour.”

One of the rare women in the neoclassical world, Alexandra Stréliski creates music that enthralls listeners, filling their minds with rich, cinematic images. An artist of Polish Jewish origin who grew up between Paris and Montreal, she made her debut with the 2010 album Pianoscope, but the general public discovered her via Jean-Marc Vallée’s films Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Demolition (2016) and, more recently, the trailer of the acclaimed HBO series Big Little Lies (2017). Building on this momentum, the composer and musician is now making her next artistic statement with the album INSCAPE, out now on Secret City Records. “To me,” says Stréliski, “Inscape was an existential crisis. A year where everything capsized and I had to go through various interior landscapes – hectic, beautiful and painful at the same time.” In her attempt to fill a certain emotional emptiness, she follows a creative urge that commits to taking the listener back to a form of lost sincerity. “A piano, on its own, is a very vulnerable thing, and I want to share this moment with the listener.” The aforementioned support of Jean-Marc Vallée, which allowed Stréliski’s music to be heard during the Oscars ceremony, brought her streaming numbers up to nearly 10 million streams. UK newspaper The Telegraph praised her debut album as “distinguishable by its simplicity, its sensitivity and softness” and “imbued with both melancholy and light.” ******* Rare femme évoluant dans le monde du néo-classique, Alexandra Stréliski crée une musique qui fait vibrer l’auditeur émotionnellement, emplissant l’esprit de riches images cinématographiques. Artiste d’origine juive polonaise ayant grandi entre Paris et Montréal, elle a fait ses débuts avec le disque Pianoscope (2010), mais a été révélée au grand public à travers les films Dallas Buyers Club (2013) et Demolition (2016) de Jean-Marc Vallée et, plus récemment, via la bande-annonce de l’acclamée série Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017). Portée par cet élan, la compositrice-interprète est fin prête pour un accueil en bonne et due forme avec l’album INSCAPE, paru sur Secret City Records. « Pour moi », confie Stréliski, « l’inscape [un concept réunissant “interior” et “landscape”, qu’on pourrait traduire en français par “paysage intérieur”] a été une crise existentielle. Une année où tout a chaviré et où j’ai eu à traverser divers paysages intérieurs, mouvementés, beaux et souffrants à la fois. » En cherchant à combler un certain vide émotionnel, elle a suivi une pulsion créatrice qui s’engage à ramener l’auditeur vers une sincérité égarée : « Un piano, seul, c’est très vulnérable et je cherche à partager ce moment avec un auditeur » Appuyée par le coup de cœur mentionné plus haut de Jean-Marc Vallée, qui permet à la musique de Stréliski de retentir en direct lors de la cérémonie des Oscars, la pianiste bénéficie d’une vitrine stellaire faisant bondir à près de quinze millions les écoutes en continu à travers les différentes plateformes numériques. Le journal britannique The Telegraph encense d’ailleurs la créatrice, parlant d’un premier album sensible, mélancolique et lumineux.