Horizons 2024

piece for late hours

there was a time we stretched the afternoon  
til all those lights from windows, cars, first fireplaces  
made us look for hints, traces of black skies  
to finally open its gates for the rain  
for songs about even harder rain hitting, bathing  
us, invincible children with a mission.

Putting together
a year’s end list is like
playing solitaire by the window.

Any of the stuff not-ranked:
on a special evening
the gateway number one
(soul food horizon)

(in anderen worten:
lass den samtvogel fliegen!)

My 20 Albums of the Year 

01. Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown ***
02. Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowlege Its Grace
03. Erik Honoré: Triage*
04. Fred Hersch: Silent. Listening 
05. Jessica Pratt: Here In The Pitch 
06. Anna Butterss: Mighty Vertebratae
07. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet: The Way Out Of Easy
08. Jakob Bro: Taking Turns (my radio review: HERE)
09. Ganavya: like the sky i‘ve been too quiet
10. Einstürzende Neubauten: Rampen
11. Nala Sinephro: Endlessness
12. Kalma / Chiu / Honer: The Closest Thing To Silence
13. Eric Chenaux: Delights Of My Life  
14. Laurie Anderson: Amelia
15. Danish String Quartet: Keel Road**
17. Laurence Pike: The Undreamt-of Centre
18 Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman: Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On
19. Pan American & Kramer: Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road
20. Tindersticks: Soft Tissue

* Erik Honoré’s ‘Triage’ can easily be categorised as abstract sound art, with itsdiscreet electronics, noisy passages, dark lyrics and the refusal of clear song structures. However, this shows the error of a reception that only skims the surface and subsumes everything under ‘avant-garde’ that doesn’t deliver a three-minute song and doesn’t immediately groove and thrill in mainstream‘s predictable ways. Just switch off the lights and give this album your undivided attention! Prepare yourself for music that will barely keep you in your seat, encouraging you to – often simultaneuosly – float, dance and sink into it. Erik Honoré’s ‘Triage’ is a journey in nine stages, grooving and swirling from power spot to power spot. 

** a trip through the folk worlds of the Northern Sea.. a disc of quiet revelations and arrangements that are as exquisitely crafted as they are captivating, performed with abundant spirit and conviction, and captured in warm, close sound.

*** this cover lives up to the masterpiece of my album of the year. But, bet you this will be my last list til December 6 of 2025 (except radio playlists). So much memory work, listening back, and fidding in the details: even the line-up of these covers is sequenced:)

Favourite surround albums (quad / 5:1 / atmos)

• The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
• Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark & For The Roses
• King Crimson: Red (50th anniversary edition)
• Frank Zappa: Waka / Jawaka*
• Neil Young: Before and After

*often seen as a preparation for The Big Wazoo, I love this fusion album even more. I am a bit worried, that the older I get, the more i like to listen to Zappa. The family enterprise Zappa Records delivers first class vinyl, cd and surrounds from the archives – for the first time in my life I‘ve listened to „Roxy and Elsewhere“, and I love the live vibes in there, the overflowing energy of the band in full action (Ian Underwood, George Duke…), Zappa’s storytelling, and his electric guitar work😉

Favourite live albums 

• Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert 1970
• Arild Andersen: Landloper (bass solo excellence)
• Sidsel Endresen: Punkt Live Remixes, Vol. 2 
• Wayne Shorter: Celebration
• Keith Jarrett: The Old Country
• Bill Callahan: Resuscitate!
• King Crimson: Sheltering Skies – Live in Fréjus, August, 27, 1982
• Oregon: Ludwigsburg 1990

Deeply moving anglo-american song cycles dealing with failure, fools, decay, love, awareness and all

• Julia Holter: Something In The Room She Moves
• Father John Misty: Mahashmashana
• Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More (späte Entdeckung)
• Hayden Thorpe: Ness (a fantastic melange of song & spoken word)
• Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: Woodland
• Iron and Wine: Light Verse

Albums I wish to materialize in 2025

Brian Eno: An album of songs following the magic „All I Remember“ from the doc „Eno“ / Scritti Politti: a man who only made fantastic cover versions of two Anne Briggs songs from her classic album in years and years should finally finish new songs to remember / Steve Tibbetts: a new (wild?) album by the guitarrero from Minneapolis (after the quiet brilliance of „Life Of“ on ECM)

Albums I wish to reappear remastered on vinyl after a very long time

• Mal Waldron, Eberhard Weber et al.: The Call *
• The Human Arts Ensemble: Under The Tree
• Anthony Braxton Quartet: New York, Fall 1974**
• Jan Garbarek: Sart

*one of the most underrated european fusion masterpieces of the 70‘s

**Braxton‘s albums on Arista Records between 74 and 76 were all brilliant. A shame they missed the 50th anniversary of one of his crownung achievements, that quartet with Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland, and Barry Altshul.

My fave albums for deep dancing with or without moving

• Nik Bärtsch‘s Ronin: Spin
• Underworld: Strawberry Hotel

Ancient song cycles, missed in their wild days, finally found

• Paul McCartney & Wings: Band On The Run
• Joni Mitchell: For The Roses

Easily trance inducing, „far out“-albums from the department of „Where am i-Music“ (a question you can ask yourself even while strolling through Clevelode‘s Epping Forest) – every album a grower, some „easy on the ear“, some challenging.

• The Necks: Bleed
• Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution
• Arushi Jain: Delight
• Sören Skov Orbit: Adrift
• Feliciá Atkinson: Space As An Instrument (spoken word thrills)*
• Rachel Musson: Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky
• Alva Noto: HYBR:ID III
• Kit Downes, Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille: Breaking The Shell
• Clevelode: Muntjac (HERE, my conversation with Paul Newland)
• Fennesz: Mosaic
  
  * „Since the late 2000s, this French musician and visual artist has been releasing collages of field recordings, midi instrumentation and her own hushed vocals, performing abstract poems and stories – in her native French and in English – over ambient clouds of sound. Her most recent album Space As An Instrument comes equipped with everything a great Félicia Atkinson record needs, while not deviating wildly from her proven recipe. This was my comforting go-to headphone soundtrack during fall and early winter.“ (Stephan Kuntze)

Finally, my eighteen favourite reissues & archival discoveries

01. Ank Anum: Song Of The Motherland  
02.The American Analog Set: New Drifters 
03. Taylor / Winstone / Wheeler: Azimuth 
04. Jan Garbarek: Afric Pepperbird 
05. Can: Live in Paris 1973 
06. Günter Schickert: Samtvogel (späte Entdeckung)
07. Annette Peacock: An Acrobat‘s Heart**
08. Julie Tippetts: Shadow Puppeteer 
09. Byard Lancaster: The Complete Palm Recordings 1973-74  
10. Anne Briggs: Anne Briggs *
11. Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz: The Invisible Road
12. Linval Thompson: Ride On Dreadlocks 1975-77
13. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Souvenirs
14. Steve Beresford & Anne Marie Beretta: Dancing The Line
15. Peter Thomas: The Master Tapes, Vol. 1)
17. Dennis Bovell: Sufferer Sounds
18. Toumani Diabate & Ballake Sissoko: New Ancient Strings

*(„A stone-cold British folk classic, rendered all the more precious by Briggs’ reluctance to add to her slender catalogue down the years. As a result, the four unreleased recordings included as a bonus 7” with this remastered vinyl reissue – including typically spare, devastating takes on “The Cruel Mother” and “Bruton Town” – were something of a holy grail.“)

** I met Amnette back then in Munich (in the summer of 2000), and she told me, at one point, about sensitive moments in the production. Once, in the morning, she felt her energy waning, couldn’t make the appointment, everything was up in the air. Manfred Eicher carefully knocked at her door. Helpful words, encouragement. It ended well. Fortunately. By the way, she never got together with Brian Eno (they would have made an interesting pair in the studio), but once, early in the seventies, he lent her a wonderful pair of old horn loudspeakers, she fell in love with their sound and never gave them back.

Five smart and deeply touching music documentaries from the last two years

• „Beatles 64“ (Disney plus)
• „Eno“ (by Gary Hustvit)
• „Music for Black Pigeons“ (on Jakob Bro and friends)
• „Zutaten für ein Desaster“ (on Nik Bärtschs, Prime, Apple+)
• „Zero Gravity“ (about the life and times of Wayne Shorter)
• “In The Court of the Crimson King“ (By Toby Amies)*

* I remember that Bill Bruford moment: „Change is part of what King Crimson is about. Change is essential. Otherwise you turn into the Moody Blues, for heaven’s sake.“ Change – and discipline, I should add, with all its good and not so good implications. Humour is an antidot of the doc that has its clear amount of bitter an bitter sad moments. Thinking back, my memory loves to return to a scene that seems like a moment of letting go: people in a park, it‘s raining, they are dancing, floating, kind of. Not easy to link that one with the film‘s dynamic structure, but Toby Amies has been looking, in between, for places of tranquility and surrender, a counterpoint to tough thinking and a means to overrule the intellect. Well done.

Postscriptum 1: Your first song from a great 2025 album, dear reader, comes from „Cold Blows The Rain“, the forthcoming album by Taylor Hayden and The Apparitions: „Lovely On The Water”, listen to it HERE, and immerse yourself into the moving pictures from an old time. In the words of Rob Young, „it’s a song originally collected by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1908, and it sets the tone for the rest of the album. It’s a lament for a pair of young lovers ripped apart. A last, tearful embrace before he must set sail for a distant war. The incomplete song’s last lines describe the collective mourning on Tower Hill of bereaved mothers, wives and lovers. The Apparitions take the song at a steady, funereal pace, adding dignity to devastation.“

Postscriptum 2: I want this „list“ to be a field to stroll around. Making discoveries, and meeting the thin line between memories and imagination, something that so often happens when listening to music you love. It is only a few days ago I heard from the death of my best childhood friend Matthias. We lost one another when being around 12 years young, there never was a wrong note between us. I was looking for him over the last months, and I had nearly found him. A few minutes, a few houses away. But, bad detective work. If I would be a singer, I would write a folk song about our adventures in Dortmund-Hombruch. In fact, my search for him began in springtime, and found its way into the poem „piece for late hours“ that was written while losing myself into the latest album of Pan American and Kramer, my ambient album of the year, and my number 16 in this field to stroll around – making discoveries, and meeting the thin line between memory and imagination that so often happens while living our life.