The (last) Year Of
This happens to me all the time: I’m listening to a subdued, downtempo electric-organic album by an Austrian supergroup of sorts and I’m sort of lulled into submission when something just makes me sit up and pay attention. Doesn’t that happen to you to? No? Yeah, doesn’t happen to me much either.
promo shot; german(ic) or industrial designers?
There aren’t any labels where I’ll buy anything the label puts out blind, but Morr Music is perhaps one of the closest. The Berlin indie electronic label doesn’t put out 100% great records, but it puts out consistently good stuff by bands/ artists like ms john soda, Styrofoam, Benni Hemm Hemm, Lali Puna and others. There’s a decent chance I’ll like a release from the label. When I was at Monitor Records a couple weeks ago, they oddly had some records separated out by label, including Morr, so of course I took a closer look. I’d never heard of The Year Of, whose album, Slow Days came out last year, but I saw that some (real, or organic) instruments and programming were done by B. Fleischmann with more instrumentation and vocals done by other people. I’ve liked some of B. Fleischmann’s lappop stuff and the prospect of his sensibilities with more organic instrumentation was intriguing. I bought it unheard.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I’ve listened to, or mostly fallen asleep to the album in hotels in China and Hong Kong, planes, ferries and more ridiculous forms of transportation. It’s subdued, “downtempo” as those electronica kids may call it, and it does that, the subdued electro-organic thing, well–I don’t want to take that away from it–but one track is sort of different and it gave me a jolt hearing it again for the first time.
“Calling Sky” is a slow-building 14 minute song. It’s got some lappop, glitchpop or whatever you want to call it elements near the beginning with a oscillating drone, subtle bass, glitchy drums and fairly simple vocals. Then it starts building, first with the broken-record glitch beat, then faraway drums, bass, and vibes. The track really announces itself with the electric guitar part and if you don’t hear something by the time the almost-wild saxophone comes in and starts the second build, you’re probably aren’t going to. I’ve heard some great long electro-organic glitch pop tracks–the Wind Up Bird’s “All the Shiny Fishes are Floating; All the Dark Fishes are at the Bottom of the Sea” is one I’m thinking of–but they rarely seem to incorporate the dynamic shifts often seen in post-rock.
The Year Of - Calling Sky (mp3)
That said, I wonder how many people like both glitchy electro-organic music and post-rock that this cross-section will work for them? I have no idea; maybe I’m just posting this track for my friend Andy and my fellow DJ Chris. That’s fine with me too.
The album is available from insound.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[…] While I was looking into Morr Music the other day, I also found Seabear (myspace). There was a song playing under a slideshow and I had to go through all the Morr artists until I could figure out who it was. […]
October 19th, 2007 at 12:05 am
[…] Adrian (me): The Year Of - Calling Sky (mp3) (buy) It came down to this and a seabear track for this week. It’s not often that I get obsessed with a 14 minute song and I didn’t actually listen to it that many times given the length, but more than any other song, I kept pressing “back” to hear it again. It’s got a nice post-rock like build along with interesting electro-organic instrumentation. For more, read what I said about it before. […]