Stereogum's 10 Best Experimental Albums of 2022

Recorded January 2022 at Quixotic Jib Jab Chicago Il. For the forseeable future I'm out of work due to a hip injury. It's cringey to mention, but any purchases at this time are greatly appreciated.

(DB plays with radio for a while - horrible noise drowns out our voices on the tape) "The station's not there now - usually they've started by 5.30... They've no announcements - when they go off it just stops, when they come on it just blasts in... It's enormously loud - I get it accidentally sometimes when I'm just fucking about. So I've been listening to it, and I really like the way they do it on the radio - I have to say that in recent times it seems to have got softer, a lot less abrasive in some ways. There are more vocal samples, for example... But what I like about the radio is the live quality - although the stuff is records, they don't leave them alone - they'll talk over them, advertise gigs, order a pizza - the music's constant but with interruptions. It's very live - and with that sustained pace, which of course is inhuman... And it's nice to play along with, particularly as opposed to free jazz situations where the pace is often very slow. I've found it fantastic to practice with. So for a long time I've been doing that... I've always liked the parts where the music stops and drifts along - you get some ridiculous string orchestra, then it just slips a bit, the pitch goes or they slow it down or something. Then the drums come back - it's completely meaningless! I like that... What is a pain and can sometimes dilute it is the repetitive - looped or sampled - vocals... The funny thing is, I've never heard a jungle record, all I've heard has been off the radio..." Derek Bailey [talking to Stefan Jaworzyn] full interview here preparedguitar.blogspot.com/2014/01/derek-bailey-interview-by-stefan.html also hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/pirate-radio-in-hackney-early-1990s/

Éliane Radigue Frédéric Blondy Occam XXV organ reframed OR1 In 2018 experimental festival Organ Reframed commissioned Éliane Radigue to write her first work for organ, 'Occam Ocean XXV'. Radigue worked closely with organist Frédéric Blondy at the Église Saint Merry in Paris before transferring the piece to Union Chapel for its premiere at Organ Reframed on 13 October 2018. The recording on this compact disc was made at a private session at Union Chapel on 8 January 2020. 'Occam XXV' inaugurates the very special record series of works exclusively commissioned by Organ Reframed, the organ-only, one of a kind experimental music festival, carefully curated by Scottish composer/performer and London's Union Chapel organ music director Claire M Singer. Paris-born Éliane Radigue is one of the most innovative and influential living composers of all time. After working under Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the late 1950's/early 60's she mainly worked with tape before developing a deep relationship with modular synthesis in the early 1970's. Over the next three decades she pushed her own conceptions of musicality forward developing a deep relationship with her ARP 2500. Through endless exploration and drawing on her personal journey as a practicing Buddhist she created an entirely new landscape of experimental sound. In the early 2000's she made an extraordinary shift into writing predominantly for acoustic instruments. 'Occam XXV' is the latest chapter of Radigue's broader series of works Occam Ocean which she has been composing in the last decade. Carefully selected by Radigue she has closely collaborated with various extremely experienced yet sensitive instrumentalists. For Occam XXV Radigue collaborated with pianist, organist, composer, improviser, artistic director of the Orchestra of New Musical Creation, Experimentation and Improvisation (ONCEIM) Frédéric Blondy, which is their second collaboration in the Occam Ocean series. 'Occam XXV' premiered in 2018, and was later recorded privately in 2020 at London's Organ Reframed headquarters Union Chapel. "We live in a universe filled with waves. Not only between the Earth and the Sun but all the way down to the tiniest microwaves and inside it is the minuscule band that lies between the 60 Hz and the 12,000 to 15,000 Hz that our ears turn into sound. There are many wavelengths in the ocean too and we also come into contact with it physically, mentally and spiritually. That explains the title of this body of work which is called Occam Ocean.The main aim of this work is to focus on how the partials are dealt with. Whether they come in the form of micro beats, pulsations, harmonics, subharmonics – which are extremely rare but have a transcendent beauty – bass pulsations – the highly intangible aspect of sound. That's what makes it so rich. When Luciano Pavarotti gave free rein to the full force of his voice the conductor stopped beating time and you could hear the richness in its entirety. Music in written form, or however it is relayed, ultimately remains abstract. It's the performer, the person playing it who brings it to life. So the person playing the instrument must come first. I've always thought of performers and their instruments as one. They form a dual personality. No two performers, playing the same instrument, have the same relationship with that instrument – the same intimate relationship. This is where the process of making the work personal begins. The purely personal task of deciding on the theme or image that we're going to work from. Obviously, because this is Occam Ocean, the theme is always related to water. It could be a little stream, a fountain, the distant ocean, rivers. Out of the fifty or so musicians I've worked with no two themes have been the same. Each musician's theme is completely unique and completely personal. The music does the talking. This is one of those art forms that manages to express the many things that words aren't able to. Even at an early stage, all those ideas need to have been brought together." - Éliane Radigue Since its conception in 2016, Organ Reframed has commissioned artists including Low, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Philip Jeck, Phill Niblock, Mark Fell, Mira Calix, Darkstar, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Sarah Davachi, hailing from London's Union Chapel, ending up also in Amsterdam and Moscow. Organ Reframed will be back this year on September 16--18 with Abul Mogard, Ipek Gorgun, Anna von Hausswolff, Claire M Singer and Cabaret Voltaire's Chris Watson. "The idea of Organ Reframed dates back to 2006 when I was commissioned to write my first organ piece. At the time I was mostly composing in the studio and was struck by the vast breadth of the instrument and how capable it was of creating timbres that were similar to what I was working with electronically. The lush acoustic quality of the sound resonating in the space was incredible and the sonic possibilities seemed endless. I felt so fortunate to have had the time to experiment and explore the instrument and realised perhaps the reason there wasn’t a huge amount of experimental works being written for organ was because they are mainly housed in churches and concert halls so you really need to know someone with a key. From that point on I started composing almost exclusively for organ and since launching Organ Reframed in 2016 I am now able to give fellow artists the opportunity to explore what an incredible instrument it is." - Claire M Singer. Union Chapel's 1877 organ built by master organ builder Father Henry Willis is known to be on of the finest in the world. It is one of very few organs left in UK with a fully working hydraulics (water powered) which can be used an alternative to the electric blowing system. The organ is completely hidden from the listeners allowing to focus solely on the music.

field anatomies is a collection of blisteringly physical works for flutes. From the imagined geographies of massive spatialized arrays and speculative architectures of resonance, to the precarity of atmospheres devoid of oxygen and physicalities in tender flux, these works create constellations of the flute-body. Each of these recordings is the result of a long-term collaborative relationship with the composers—both on the recorded work, and in several other performance contexts, from theater works to installations, and from improvisations to creating digital video collages—the relationships here are as cared for as each presented piece. The works of Bird and Younge were commissioned by and written for me. These works have all dramatically shaped my relationship with my flute-vocabulary, both in individual technical glossaries and in the analytical realms that each work invites.

Over the course of her career, Tanya Tagaq has committed herself to the cathartic and, at times, deeply uncomfortable process of transforming horror into healing. On past records and in her harrowing live performances, the artist from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Nunavut, has deployed the Inuk tradition of throat-singing to viscerally personify the trauma she’s experienced—sexual abuse, Canada’s genocidal residential school system, the environmental degradation of her homeland—and used her guttural growls to summon a sound not unlike free jazz or metal. But where 2016’s *Retribution* occasionally framed its impressionistic improvisations with spoken-word commentary, *Tongues*, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, fully embraces the narrative form, as she unleashes her signature screams more strategically in service of poems recited from her 2018 novel/magical-realist memoir *Split Tooth*. And while her longtime bandmates Jesse Zubot (violin) and Jean Martin (percussion) make return appearances, Tagaq’s musical DNA has been radically altered by producer Saul Williams and mixer Gonjasufi, who re-situate her graphic, bloodlusty treatises on colonialism, survival, and motherhood in a claustrophobic collage of icy electronics and queasy bass frequencies. “With improvisation, there isn\'t such a cerebral idea or solid concept in the interpretation,” Tagaq tells Apple Music, “but with \[spoken\] word, it\'s very concise and it guides you down a river as opposed to floating in an ocean. I didn\'t know \[my book and my music\] could live together, but when I was recording the audiobook for *Split Tooth*, I was thinking, \'Wow, this is nice and everything…but there\'s no music!\' So I thought, \'How about instead of just reading it, I express it.’” Here, Tagaq provides a track-by-track guide to speaking in *Tongues*. **“In Me”** “I wanted to start by showing my peacock feathers! I wrote this poem out of frustration with vegan activists trolling Indigenous people—there\'s this idea that because we hunt and live off the land, we\'re somehow cruel, or at a lower level of living, when in actuality, it’s a very higher power to be living in harmony with your habitat without polluting your land. The land is still the boss where I\'m from—we have to obey it. So we have a close kinship with animals, and the vegan activists don\'t understand how much we love and cherish other life forms. \'In Me\' became this narrative about skinning an animal—particularly a seal—and how, when you consume a fresh animal, you are eating the energy from the sun. It\'s this idea that you are eating more than your meat. If you eat very sick animals that were raised very unhappily in these giant slaughterhouses full of chemicals and antibiotics, you\'re eating that animal\'s pain and fear and suffering. But when you\'re a really good hunter, and you kill an animal with one shot, and they never knew you were there, their meat is calm, so when you eat them, you\'re eating that, too. ‘In Me’ is about the intimacy in processing an animal and what you glean from it. It\'s about liberating people from this idea that we are somehow doing wrong.” **“Tongues”** “This is a pretty simple, straightforward song: You had all these kids sent to residential schools who then had their language beaten out of them. I, myself, lost my language, and I\'m reclaiming it: I\'m taking Inuktitut lessons now and I\'ve been working on brushing up on my Inuktitut. And I just want to eradicate the shame around that. Canada\'s pushing for Inuktitut to become an official language. I think it\'s time that Canada starts recognizing more than just the colonial languages as official languages.” **“Colonizer”** “I used to do live concerts set to the \[1922\] film *Nanook of the North* by Robert Flaherty, and there are points in the movie where the camera and the actors set it up to show a naivete \[in the Inuit\] where there might not have been. So I loved to sing \'colonizer!\' over that part. But the reason I really wanted to put this out as a song is because Canadians have really got it in their heads that these atrocities \[against Indigenous people\] happened in the past and there\'s nothing to be done about it now. And really, it\'s happening right now, right this second—it never stopped. Every single person needs to wake up and realize their part in that. Often, complacency is what makes room for more violence. There\'s this really false narrative of Canada being this nice place with maple syrup. Yeah, that\'s great and everything, but really, whose land is your house on? So \'Colonizer\' is saying: \'No, you\'re guilty—yes, you! Do something about it!\'” **“Teeth Agape”** “In Canada, the foster \'care\' system—quote-unquote—is the modern version of the residential school program. So I just wanted to say: Enough with taking our children. This isn\'t allowed anymore.” **“Birth”** “I tend to start with a wide-scale general idea, and then a smaller idea, and then a very specific idea. So, \'Birth\' can refer to a birth of a new idea. It can be about the stopping of abuse, because then you are birthing non-abuse. It can be about the end of something, or the beginning of something. But if you want to talk just about childbirth, I really liked the dilation part; the pushing and ripping was not so great. I was very loud in both of my births. And I just remember my mom looking at me, judging me, like, ‘You made noise?\' Because that\'s how tough a lot of Inuit are—there are stories of Inuit women giving birth and being back up and running an hour later. But it\'s dangerous when you\'re giving birth—you are walking the line between life and death, and I really wanted to acknowledge it.” **“I Forgive Me”** “When you\'re abused as a child, you really carry a lot of shame, and anger and fear, and it\'s something that permeates your whole life. So being able to forgive yourself and move past that shame is really crucial. And I find a lot of people are just suffering in silence with these things. I\'m so tired of us not reaching out to each other and supporting each other and understanding that so many of us have gone through these types of things. So I just wanted to say it\'s important to work on forgiving yourself. And it\'s important to open up and talk about it. It\'s part of the healing process. It\'s part of prevention. It was hard for me to make the song and put it out, but I thought about all those other people out there feeling like I do, and how maybe it could help somebody to connect with themselves or forgive themselves—and also simultaneously shame people that are doing this shit. I actually now see the song as quite light, because it\'s shining light where it needs to be shone.” **“Nuclear”** “I was really missing the electricity of the concerts, so there are a few pieces on the album that I wanted to reflect that breakneck urgency that happens in the shows. It gets very, very intense and it grows and grows into a dome and then bursts. And I thought that it was important to have that experience without lyrics on some of the songs, just to make sure the record represents the full breadth of what we do.” **“Do Not Fear Love”** “There\'s an arc to the album, and \'Do Not Fear Love\' is about recognizing the struggle to remain vulnerable after you\'ve been hurt, and learning to trust people, and not going so far into your pain that you begin to close doors that can offer you love. You need to learn to remain open and continue to accept it, even though you\'re hurt. If you open up, it\'s there for you. It\'s an active process. I read somewhere that when you get scurvy, all your scars open up for lack of vitamin C. A scar is actually an active process—it\'s being made. So I think it\'s an active process to clear the path to allow love in, and that\'s something you have to keep an eagle eye on.” **“Earth Monster”** “I wrote this for my \[daughter\] Naia. She\'s 18 now; I think I wrote this on her sixth birthday. Within the intimacy of motherhood, you\'re so close with your children that you can\'t help but have them see your flaws. And as much as we love them, and as much as we want to be perfect for them, they will see our mistakes. This is life and I\'ll celebrate you and do my best to take care of you, but I\'m a seed in the wind when it comes to having control and making things perfect for my child. You cannot do that. The thing about parenthood I find interesting is that when you shield your child from too much, and they eventually go to face the world, the world is so harsh. So you don\'t want to shield your child from life itself—there has to be some sort of acceptance or a better balance between how we communicate with our children. I think it\'s very important that children are able to be children and not live under the oppression of gross adults—yes, they should remain innocent. But should a mother and father never quarrel in front of their child? I think that\'s strange—so your child will not know how to fight? Your child will not know how to say the things they need? Sometimes, I think that bad can be good.”

This work was written and recorded by Elías Merino and Daniel del Río in 2016 during a residency at The Game of Life Foundation’s Wave Field Synthesis System in The Hague (The Netherlands). All the material is based on algorithmic synthetic sound and it was recorded in binaural format. According to the description in Game of Life Foundation’s website, Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is a sound production technology designed specifically for spatial audio rendering. The WFS system consists of 192 speakers, which are arranged in a square formation of 10 by 10 metres. Unlike conventional audio procedures (e.g stereo / surround) the perception of these wave fields is not dependent on psychoacoustic “phantom” sound perception, therefore the WFS sound field is actually reconstructed physically. Although WFS is assembled in a 192x8 loudspeakers array, this work approaches the setting through the idea of a unitary – but divisible – object. Due to the technical and spatial characteristics of the system and its powerful possibilities, the music was built as a collection of different discrete synthetic sound bodies with unique peculiarities by exploring the location-unlocation concept and perspective variations. The work is accompanied by a limited edition booklet that includes a series of computer-generated 3D drawings, a process notes and an essay written by AA Cavia. The images of the booklet were created after the music, as a synaesthetic interpretation/portrait of the plasticity of sound, including as well an interpretation of the articulations and variations of the musical form. This visual imagery also portrays our idea of the WFS system as an unenclosed and malleable surface. Composed, mixed and recorded by Elías Merino and Daniel del Río Mastered by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros Booklet Design by Joe Gilmore Published by Superpang 2021