15. The Choo Choo Trains – tape 

(self-released)

14. Mi Ami – Decade (100% Silk)

I’m really at a loss for something to say about this one, but I’ve certainly listened to it a hell of a lot this year, so there must be something going on here.

Last I heard, Mi Ami were some sort of conceptual art rock duo who released a record with Bob Marley’s face on the front. Now, apparently, they make straight up techno / deep house sorta stuff, and, utterly absurd though it may seem for me to fall back on a couple of ex-indie dingbats for my repetitive beats when there’s a whole churning, ever-changing universe of actual dance music out there, I can’t deny that the results please me greatly.

Opener ‘Horns’ contrasts the gleaming urban sprawl of its glacial synths and echoed hi-hat pulse with an utterly unhinged vocal line buried just below the surface, a somewhat terrifying sounding individual of unguessable gender trying to clamber aboard the hover-car of the music from below, chanting and screaming, “I feel so fucked up, get me out”. The overall effect is akin to pulling into a giant, utopian silver railway station in a hyper-modern bullet train, and looking out of the window to see a disfigured, acid-damaged hobo gesticulating wildly at you. Unnerving, but revealing. Human spirit crushed beneath the machinery and all that.

Second track ‘Time of Love’ lacks such jarring tactics, but I like it even better – a blissful eleven minutes of celestial disco perfection, glass towers of quivering bass rising from the metronomic pulse as dubbed out voices and echoes speed through the side streets in slowed down Doppler effect style.

Years ago I’d probably have despised this record, raging against shitty, inoffensive, backgroundy electronica designed to make graphic designers and fashion students feel better about themselves. These day, 20+ plays on itunes tells you all you need to know, I suppose. S’good, I like it. Look, it’s got a VHS-warped ‘90s straight-to-video sci-fi jacking video, so it must be good:

13. Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Friends – 

The saxophone is one of those instruments that, like the violin or the accordion, allows no room for amateurs. Either you know how to get a good sound out of it, or you should probably shut up. Getatchew Mekuria knows how to get such a good sound out of it, he seems to throw most accomplished first world players back into the amateur category. His tone is so deep and rich and sonorous that its effect goes beyond the immediate feelings of warmth and welcome and actually becomes slightly queasy and overpowering – an overwhelmingly generous sound, like a Blue Whale stepping out of the ocean to say hello and shake hands.

As is extensively chronicled in the sleeve-notes to this album, the initial meeting
between Mekuria and The Ex seemingly proved a life-changing turn of events for both parties, giving the “grand negus of Ethiopian sax” a new lease of life, allowing him to present his music to audiences around the world after years present playing standards to VIP guests in an Addis hotel lounge, and helping the Dutch punks to undertake perhaps the most rewarding tangent of their long career, reconfiguring the gigantic, cyclical melodies and gargantuan swing of Ethiopian big band jazz for electric rock and avant improv formats, with the earth-shaking results presented on 2006’s incredible ‘Moa Anbessa’ album.

Apparently it was Mekuria himself who expressed a wish to get together with them to make another album – one that the sleeve notes repeatedly refer to as being perhaps his last, the implication being that his health is no longer really up to the demands of performance, and that retirement beckons (proceeds from this album go straight toward his retirement fund). As such, ‘Y’anbessaw Tezeta’ is Mekuria’s record through and through, with his European collaborators often remaining distant in the mix, slightly hesitant to disrupt their leader’s flow, with only the steady, rolling pulse of Katherina Bornefeld’s drumming remaining a constant, as the horn section of regular Ex collaborators interject only for brief, carefully controlled bursts as a counter-point to the central voice of the sax.

Certainly, listeners anticipating something as pulverising as ‘Moa Anbessa’s ‘Ethiopia Hagere’ will be disappointed, as the mood here remains more restrained and contemplative, more in keeping with the original laidback sound of vintage Ethiopian jazz recordings, with the warlike roar of The Ex’s lurching punk rock only occasionally making its presence felt, as the guitarists often fall back on providing more gentle textures of scraping and feedback.

Just hearing Mekuria do his thing is more than enough to satisfy though. His playing here remains as powerful as ever, representing the legacy of a man who has given his whole life over to perfecting and existing within this sound. Stormy discontent brews through the seven slow-burning minutes ‘Ambassel’, a beautiful, expansive track full of mournful trumpet and double-picked guitars, that requires me to use all my self-control to avoid going on about desert winds and shadowy, masked armies. Traditional melody ‘Bati’ presents an even more restrained performance, with The Ex creeping on tip-toes through the undergrowth as Mekuria’s sax turns bewitching, arabesque shapes. ‘Yegna Mushera’ is another definite highlight, remaining similarly low key but somehow overpoweringly bright and reassuring, like the feeling of a joyous family reunion captured in sound.

As my fruity lingo perhaps indicates, this is supremely evocative music, in which the oft-intimidating technique of the players and the strict yet organic lines of the compositions swiftly give way to a heady, transportative effect. Far be it from me to try to define *where* it sends you, but it certainly does send you, and that is very much the point. If this does turn out to be Mekuria’s final recording, it’s a fittingly intense conclusion to an extraordinary career.

12. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – self titled 
(Spectrum Spools)

From July:

“Before digging into these LPs, it’s helpful to read up on the methodology Evans used in constructing them. Basically, sides A, B and D were assembled from the kind of shorter pieces that have featured on her previous records, threaded together into twenty minute ‘suites’ in time-honoured ‘70s fashion. Side C – ‘Summer of the Cat’s Eye’ – meanwhile is a one-take live improvisation, and maybe that goes some way toward explaining why it’s my favourite track here. Not that the other sides aren’t great too of course, but ‘..Cat’s Eye’ is really something, by-passing the kind of snidey “sounds like..” comparisons used earlier in this review for a really engrossing trip into the unknown, steady tremoloed signals crashing headfirst into waves of chattering chaos and unknowable space-voices, like original series Star Trek unexpectedly drifting into a Tarkovsky-esque realm of terrifying alien beauty. So that’s pretty good.

As to the other tracks, the whole ‘suite’ concept seems the like kind of thing tailor made to annoy the hell out of me, given my general distaste for stop/start dynamics and liking for distinct, self-contained pieces of music, but in actual fact it works pretty well, to the extent that you probably wouldn’t notice the methodology if not informed in advance. The run-off from each ‘bit’ is nicely calibrated with the rise of the next, further building the established mood rather than upsetting it.
[…]
There is a kind of hermetic purity to Evans work that I think really sets her apart from the potential tedium of the ‘mystic synth explorer’ aesthetic. I may have thrown around plenty o’ names in the paragraphs above, but the truth is that there is absolutely NO “he he, yeah, Tangerine Dream dude” type intent going on here. It sounds instead as if she’s simply sitting down in front of her gear, taking a deep breath and firing it up to make some wide-screen, expressive music, the way it naturally comes out, filtered through the technology, not defined by it – and the celestial depths scraped by the results speak for themselves.”

11. Six Organs of Admittance – Ascent 
(Drag City)

Who’d have thought it? A Six Organs record riding high on the list in 2012. After the best part of a decade spent pursuing pleasant but rather inconsequential psych-folky directions on a series of Drag City albums, Ben Chasny’s project would likely have remained very much in the corners of my radar, were it not for the announcement that ‘Ascent’ represents what is to all intents and purposes a reformation of Comets On Fire, a band whose singularly chaotic psychedelic tumult has been increasingly missed round these parts since they faded away sometime in the mid ‘00s.

As you might expect, erstwhile Comets leader Ethan Miller – still mired in the aftermath of Howlin’ Rain’s disastrous mess of a Rick Rubin produced un-breakthrough album – is strictly on second guitar here, following Chasny’s lead as we get a hefty glimpse of what CoF might have sounded like with the positions of the two guitar-slingers reversed. And what it might have sounded like is, you’ll be glad to hear, bloody stunning, as ‘WasWasa’ kicks in with the headiest brew of unashamed heavy-psych fret-mangling I’ve heard this year, afterburners roaring through a text-book perfect emergency descent into a hostile alien world, nerve-shredding solos blearing out like torpedoes across a fearsome High Tide/Pink Fairies groove. Fucking awesome, in other words.

‘A Thousand Birds’, an extended electric reworking of an ancient Six Organs acoustic number, follows suit, with the rhythm section of Ben Flashman and Utrillo Kushner locking down a fine Rallizes style eterno-groove over which Chasny can sprawl and sway as he pleases, intoning verses between cascades of chiming, electrified string texture to fine psychedelic effect – full bore star-dazed rock awesomeness that continues across the hulking landscapes of ‘Close To The Sky’ and ‘Even If You Knew’. Unlike Comets, the sound here is sharp and clear, with more of a progressive edge rounding off the fuzz (kinda matches the outer space concept art), but the playing and the instrument tones are mighty enough so roll with such precision, and the chaos and noise of earlier outings is rarely missed. Quite what all-purpose electronics/effects guy Noel Harmonson adds to proceedings I’m uncertain, but I’m assured that he’s in there somewhere.

A blinding album then, for the most part, but the problem (for me at least), comes when Chasny switches back to his regular solo mode for ‘Solar Ascent’ and the rather anaemic closer ‘Visions (From IO)’. He’s a cool guy and a phenomenal player, and there’s little wrong with these tunes as such, but personally I’ve never been fully sold on this side of his work, and his folkier musings have a slippery, silvery quality to them that I can’t help but find slightly contrived - too overtly studied, veering more toward ‘candle shop mood music’ than the private press cosmic revelations he’s no doubt aiming for.

Still though – for a good 70% of the run time, ‘Ascent’ hits the spot like a battering ram. More please! Official Comets reunion..? C’mon! I’d certainly buy the ticket.