The Null Device

Posts matching tags '2014'

2015/1/17

Arika Okrent, author of In The Land Of Invented Languages, has a survey of neologisms of the year from various countries:

In the Netherlands, the Van Dale dictionary group chose dagobertducktaks, “Scrooge McDuck tax,” a tax on the super rich. The “youth language” category choice was aanmodderfakker (someone with no ambition in life, from a blend of aanmodderen, “muddle,” and motherf***er).
Médicalmant, a word for a medicine taken to in order to calm down (a blend of médicament, “drug,” and calmant, “soothing”) was selected word of the year at the annual XYZ Festival of New Words in Le Havre
The Fundéu BBVA, a Madrid organization tasked with the protection of the purity of the Spanish language, made selfi, without the English e, the word of the year. Previous suggestions such as autofoto and autorretrato (self-portrait) had failed to catch on, so the spelling change to selfi seemed the next best option. Other candidates were amigovio (blend of amigo, “friend,” and novio, “boyfriend/girlfriend,” for “friends with benefits”) and impago (successfully replacing “default” in discussion of the economy).
Elsewhere in the list, a few themes recur: the younger generation's attachment to their mobile phones gives rise to the German neologism Generation Kopf unten (“generation head down”); members of this generation may be at risk of what the Norwegians call mobilnakke, mobile neck. Meanwhile, the Swedish Language Council's list of words included fotobomba (to intrude into someone else's selfi) and klickfiske (“click-fishing”, i.e., what viral content sites engage in). On the other side of the Öresund Bridge, political issues such as hverdagssexisme (“everyday sexism”) and madspild (“food waste”) were the order of the day, while Portugal tackled the social implications of technology, from gamificação (gamification), to cibervadiagem (“cyberslacking”). And apparently in Finland, the word of 2014 was Putin-juusto (“Putin-cheese”), referring to Finnish cheese intended for the Russian market, knocked back because of import bans and sold at a steep discount all over Finland, with Cyrillic lettering still on the packaging.

English, meanwhile, had fairly mundane ones; the OED chose “vape” (relating to electronic nicotine inhalers), while Merriam-Webster's choice of “culture”, seemingly mundane, reflected the mainstreaming of anthropological thinking about collective human behaviour (in the sense of “company culture” or “rape culture”). And Australia had “shirtfront”, a testament to the virility of its elected leader.

(via MeFi) 2014 language neologism 0

2014/12/31

Once again, the year is almost over, so it's time to look back on the music of the past year; and so, here are the records of 2014 (in alphabetical order):

  • Ben Frost, A U R O R A

    Frost's most recent album sees him put aside the processed electroacoustic sounds he has used on previous records and instead start experimenting with electronic/dance-music instrumentation (as alluded to in one of the track titles, Diphenyl Oxalate, after the chemical used in glow sticks); though, by the time they've been put through his production process (whose details are a closely-held secret), the sounds are almost unrecognisable, Frost also collaborates with two drummers, who play in tandem. The result is layers of vaguely distressed textures; slow build-ups, often of corroded timbres, and intricate soundscapes, punctuated by bursts of searing, cathartic noise; contrasts between vast spaces and overwhelming intensity. Highlights include Venter and the closing triptych of No Sorrowing/Sola Fide/A Single Point Of Blinding Light. Sublime, in the Burkean sense of the word.

  • East India Youth, Total Strife Forever

    William Doyle, aka East India Youth, juggles the hats of songwriter, minimalist composer and producer of bangin' choons; as such, Total Strife Forever could be summed up, somewhat reductionistically, as two parts Hot Chip to one part Philip Glass. The opening track, Glitter Recession, seems to have begun its life as a piano piece in the Glassian vein, before being given a doing-over in Ableton Live; the result is an atmospheric buildup, easing into a more typically dance-music second track, albeit with an unusual 5-bar loop. Track three, Dripping Down takes it into more mainstream club-ballad territory, combining beats and basslines, a chorus of “soulful” gospel-via-Radiohead backing vocals, and lyrics with asomewhat introspective and soul-searching theme (as befits the inner-space exploration that so often happens when electronica meets songcraft). This segues into Hinterland (a rather good bleepy techno banger that transports you to a sweatily euphoric basement rave in Hackney), possibly the highlight of the album, before Heaven, How Long, (a techno-ballad of chemical alienation morphing, in its chorus, into a club floor filler), and Looking For Someone (which sounds like a spiritual for millennials). Doyle's more avant-garde tendencies reëmerge in tracks like Midnight Koto and Song For A Granular Piano, as well as the four-part title track interleaved throughout the record.

  • Fatima Al Qadiri, Asiatisch

    A relentlessly postmodern, multilayered cross-cultural mashup like something out of a William Gibson novel; a Kuwaiti-raised, Brooklyn-based producer's concept album about the futuristic Far East, titled in German for some reason, and executed in a dubstep/grime idiom. Asiatisch starts off with the appositely-titled Shanzhai, a knockoff of Sinead O'Connor's cover of Nothing Compares To U, performed on synthesized choir pads, with the vocals replaced with nonsensical lyrics in Mandarin. The interlude Loading Beijing ramps the cyberpunk up to 11, as affectless machinelike voiceovers seemingly announce the initialisation of the virtual reality that is Al-Qadiri's gritty, high-tech new Orient. Other tracks, with titles like Forbidden City, Dragon Tattoo (its very title a semiotic layer-cake, juxtaposing Orientalism and cyberpunk via a recent Swedish crime thriller; the song itself sounds like M.I.A. reinventing Warm Leatherette) and Shanghai Freeway, combine oriental (and occasionally Middle Eastern) scales, synthesized shakuhachis and subbass drones to create an impressionistic sound-painting of something sprawling, neon-lit and aggressively futuristic.

  • I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro

    The Stockholm electropop duo's second album is a decidedly darker affair than its predecessor, seemingly having picked up DNA along the way from witch-house, coldwave and/or the recent wave of neo-goth synthpop like Former Ghosts and Cold Cave, and having an brooding, elegiac majesty to show for it. The opener “You Burn”, with its heartbeat rhythm, slow minor-key piano chords and measured vocals, sets an ominous mood; this is followed up eight tracks, alternating icy detachment and urgency over layers of coruscating synth arpeggios, bass drones, pulsing sequencers, gothic/industrial drum machine patterns and cathedraline reverb, with titles like “Faith”, “Denial” and “Disclosure”; the album is bookended with “Heart To Know”, knowingly weary vocals over a stripped-back piece of dusty, distorted ambience somewhat redolent of Polygon Window (i.e., Aphex Twin)'s Quino-Phec.

  • Makthaverskan, Makthaverskan II

    Technically a 2013 release, but it was released outside of Sweden this year, so it scrapes in, and if anything qualifies, this does. Among some of the better C86-almost-meets-shoegaze indiepop of recent times, sounding in places somewhere between The Sundays and The Cure's poppier mid-80s moments, with tight bass lines, choppy processed guitars and punchy, reverb-drenched female vocals; a highlight is No Mercy, which burns with righteous energy.

  • Oh Peas!, Shades Of Intolerance (BandCamp)

    Welsh multi-instrumentalist Rosie Smith, who is also one half of post-punk duo Totem Terrors, makes an impressive solo début with a collection of varyingly askew yet technically meticulous bedroom-pop songs, a few spoken-word pieces and the odd instrumental, layered from a variety of instruments (guitars, keyboards, melodicas and such) and lyrics alternating between pop idioms, quotidian observations, and the odd touch of wry surrealism and clever wordplay (example: “take a book of poetry to your best friend's birthday party, read them every poem about love, hate, war or death”, “you're so much sexier since I found out that you had dyslexia”). Highlights include the opening track Thick Like Snow, the Casio VL1-and-skronk punk-pop of Peanuts And Pickled Onions (which almost reinvents the key concepts of Ninetynine's Wöekenender from first principles), and the closing track Warm World, which is sweetly romantic and yet not cloying, not unlike early Mirah. This record manages to be at once uncontrivedly sincere and technically accomplished. Look for Oh Peas! to go places.

  • Penny Orchids, Worse Things

    London's Penny Orchids theatrically straddle the spaces between the scabrous end of rock'n'roll and older, though not necessarily more salubrious, traditions such as sea shanties and outlaw balladry; one could compare them to the likes of Tom Waits and Nick Cave, though the artists they remind me of the most are two antipodean bands, The Paradise Motel and Mikelangelo And The Black Sea Gentlemen. It starts off in fine form with One More Drink, a nautical murder ballad of sorts, and then goes on from there. About half of the album is themed, being the story of an Irish immigrant named Maloney who falls in with old New York's Jewish mafia; it's set sometime between the late 19th century and the Prohibition era, and adopts a klezmer idiom, which the band manage to pull off respectably (indeed, if one were to coin a genre name for this album, it would be “klezmerbilly”). The album closes with Shell Beach, a wistful piano ballad sung by the Penny Orchids keyboardist Kate Dornan, whose voice sounds a little bit like Sarah Blackwood of Dubstar. Dornan has been doing more singing in new, yet-to-be-recorded songs, which can only be a good thing.

  • The Royal Landscaping Society, s/t (BandCamp)

    Another new band from Spain's increasingly vibrant indiepop scene, The Royal Landscaping Society wear their Sarah Records influences on their sleeves, and combine that with more electronics. This year, they played at Indietracks and released their eponymous début EP, on French online label Beko. The opening track, Goodbye, starts off a little like The Field Mice's Five Moments; the Sarah comparisons continue in the third track, La La La, which doesn't sound too far from The Orchids or similar bands; other tracks (such as Frost) lean more on the synthesizers and drum machines, though often adding a guitar, not unlike bands like Kuryakin. The EP proper ends on a mellow note with Early Sunrays, all guitar arpeggios and synth strings, but this is followed by three remixes, from other Spanish indie artists. As this sort of classic indiepop goes, there are few better examples from 2014.

  • Todd Terje, It's Album Time with Todd Terje

    They like to have fun with their house/disco/electro/whatever up in Norway, and Terje Olsen, aka Todd Terje (his pseudonym itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to Chicago house DJ Todd Terry), is no exception. The album comes with playfully colourful, retro-styled cover artwork, and starts with a short theme tune, followed up by two tracks (Leisure Suit Preben and Preben Goes To Acapulco), which sound like TV-show themes and surf the fine line between cool and cheesy. The pace steps up into an unselfconscious 80s-flavoured retro-disco with Strandbar (which means “beachable”, I think) and Delorean Dynamite, before suddenly dropping the pace with a cover of Robert Palmer's anthem of middle-aged coupled ennui, Johnny and Mary; it's glazed over in soft, glossy layers of mid-to-late-80s overproduction (listen to those delayed drum-machine handclaps!), and sung by a weary-sounding Bryan Ferry, who could be the sharp-suited, melancholy drunk riveted to his barstool at the end of the night, his tie loosened and a cigarette burning to a stub in his fingers. The highlight, in my opinion, is the bipartite Swing Star (whose first part, all ambient synth arpeggios and drones, manages to sounds uncannily redolent of the Reload (The 147 Take) remix of Slowdive's In Mind, and whose second part reprises this with beats); finally, the album ends on a high with the bouncy disco anthem Inspector Norse.

  • Jane Weaver, The Silver Globe

    Jane Weaver was hitherto known mostly as a “folk” singer in a Wicker Man-esque vein; her new album is a surprise in its maximalist intensity; a densely cosmic, psychedelic affair, stacked with propulsive grooves, analogue synthesizers and lush textures, and not too far from Broadcast or Stereolab. The opening (and title) track is 47 seconds of ambience, all analogue synths and tape delays, easing into the metronomic kosmische grüv of Argent; a Krautrock juggernaut which motors along on a wave of pulsing bass, filter sweeps and choppy guitars. Weaver's ethereal soprano floats over this, weaving a tale of technological enchantment, and setting the mood and the theme for the rest of the album. Next up is The Electric Mountain, a prog-rock ballad built up over a Hawkwind sample and analogue synth riff, its story-telling vocals sounding somewhat like a more sci-fi-influenced Wendy Rule. Arrows (apparently based on a meditation on the cycle between the feathers from killed birds and the arrows used to hunt them) is a lovely, languidly ethereal piece, Weaver's vocals, singing a repetitive mantra, melting into a clunking bass guitar, wash of reverb over string machine and home-organ drums, before segueing into the Casiotone-driven disco stomp of Don't Take My Soul, with its circus-style melody and country-style falsetto, which would probably be the obvious radio hit. Cells has a dreamy languor about it, sounding not unlike Saint Etienne as heard from another room whilst still waking up; the tempo goes back up with the cosmic disco of Misson Desire, which one could imagine as the theme song from an obscure, infinitely cooler Barbarella-analogue filmed in, say, Yugoslavia or somewhere during the early 1970s. (There are undoubtedly layers of reference and allusion throughout this work; Weaver's husband and partner in music is the arch-obscurantist curator Andy Votel, after all.) The album eases to closure, with a few more mellow, though no less intricate, tracks, before bidding adieu with Your Time In This Life Is Just Temporary, its reverbed barroom piano courtesy of BC Camplight. In any case, this is a record which reveals more with each repeated listening.

Honourable mentions include: Aphex Twin - Syro (his long-awaited return from the wilderness, with a collection of twelve tracks—apparently the more approachable material he has been working on, with several discs of other things waiting in the wings—makes this 2014's m b v; the tracks, with their layers of analogue synthesizers, sequencers, beats and the odd processed sample bridge the gap to James' earlier works; they tend towards the busier end of his oeuvre, rather than the more ambient), The Drink - Company (BandCamp) (Dan and David from promising post-rock combo Fighting Kites hook up with vocalist Dearbhla Minogue (apparently from the Irish branch of the family). The result is a combination of angular post-punk guitar/bass, between Life Without Buildings and Future Of The Left with touches of Congolese groove here and there); the thing that stands out is the vocals, which eschew the untutored, melodically constrained shoutiness that has been a marque of authenticity since punk rock, in favour of a melodious soprano more reminiscent of traditional folk balladry; perhaps this is a hitherto unexplored side of the collapse of the equation of lo-fi with authenticity? In any case, the effect works), FourPlay String Quartet - This Machine (BandCamp) (their first album entirely of original compositions, without the covers they started their career doing; their compositions have always been good, and here they grow even more sophisticated, whilst still keeping their sense of humour; higlights include the Romany knees-up of Moon Over The Moldau, the vaguely Middle Eastern Anti-Occident (remember, this is a band whose first album was titled Catgut Ya Tongue?) and the driving Space Party Awesomeness), Future Islands - Singles (new-wave angularity with “soulful” vocals vaguely reminiscent of Gnarls Barkley's cracked bluesman persona), Goat - Commune (freaky cosmic psychedelia, vaguely reminiscent of a more polished Amon Düül II), Hookworms - The Hum (psych-rock meets krautrock, done well; not too far from Wolf And Cub or The Assassinations), Momusmcclymont - Momusmcclymont II (Momus and David McClymont's second collaboration, combining funky grooves and sardonic wit, not to mention their anthem to the birth of the independent Nordic-socialist Scotland that was not to be, Yes), Mr. Twin Sister, s/t (having prepended the "Mr." to their name, the band formerly known as Twin Sister ramp the smooth maximalism up, going between deep house and late-1980s R&B; highlights include opener Sensitive, which goes from dreamlike arpeggios to a slow-jam like something Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis could have produced around 1989, and the Underworld-esque propulsive techno of Twelve Angels), My Favorite - Second Empire/Dance With A Stranger (only a 2-track single, and not strictly the original My Favorite—Andrea's still nowhere to be heard, which may be a dealbreaker for some fans—but a promising comeback; very much in a synthpop vein, with Michael Grace Jr. wearing his world-weariness with panache), My Sad Captains - Best Of Times (the Captains' latest record sees them perfecting their mix of pastoral laconicism and motorik repetition, and even getting funky at one point), Geoffrey O'Connor - Fan Fiction (the themes of glamour and desire are similar to Vanity Is Forever, but the yacht-rock trappings are replaced with Pet Shop Boys-esque synthpop stylings, and O'Connor comes across as less of a seducer and more of an observer who, were he not so discreet, would have explosive stories to tell), Samaris - Silkidrangar (the Icelandic trio's second album, combining sparse, chilled electronics with lyrics from Icelandic poetry, and building on their self-titled début last year), Spearmint- News From Nowhere (the veteran indie band's return sees their songwriting take on more mature themes, with wistful reflections on what could have romantically been replaced by pieces on vegetarianism, environmental degradation and the failures of past idealisms), Takako Minekawa and Dustin Wong - Savage Imagination (1990s Shibuya-kei star Minekawa is best known for kawaii pop songs like indiekid mixtape favourite Fantastic Cat; her return, made in collaboration with Dustin Wong (formerly of Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine) is a glorious katamari of joyous melody, with track titles like Pale Tone Wifi and Dioramasaurus), Woman's Hour - Conversations (possibly the smoothest indie record released this year; late-80s digital synths and a Berlin-meets-Sadé vibe). And, as far as rereleases go, the standout title would be St. Christopher's omnibus retrospective, Forevermore Starts Here.

The album of the year is, of course, Taylor Swift's 1989, but were it not, it'd be Jane Weaver's The Silver Globe.

As far as the gigs of the year go, the highlight would be a tie between the Slowdive gigs I saw; they were all great, but I'd say either the very first one at Hoxton Bar (for the “I'm watching Slowdive play live!!” factor), the one at Primavera, for its epic scale and energy, or the very last one at the Forum (by when they had had half a year of live gigs under their belt and some appropriately psychedelic visual projections to boot); they were all magnificent. I'll just say that watching them play what their cover of Syd Barrett's Golden Hair has grown into—a sonic cathedral of coruscating majesty—is the musical equivalent of watching the most breathtaking sunset one has ever seen, until its very last rays disappear below the horizon into the velvet night.

This, of course, is a very hard act to follow, but the very strong runner-up was seeing Loney Dear play with the 22-piece Norrbotten chamber orchestra in the north of Sweden (I caught the first two dates of their tour, in Luleå and Haparanda). They played a raft of new songs and a few familiar ones (though Loney Dear's songs tend to evolve as he plays with them; Harsh Words, for example, has since grown an intro of analogue white-noise percussion). The orchestral arrangements worked really well as well; they were good, without being too pretty. Honourable mentions would probably be the Icelandic post-rock band For A Minor Reflection, seen at ATP Iceland, the FourPlay String Quartet soundtracking Neil Gaiman's The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountain at the Barbican, and Ben Frost, seen at St. John's Church in Hackney.

For your listening pleasure and/or curiosity, there is a streamable mix taken from the records mentioned above here.

2014 cds lists music 0

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