Suffice to say itâs been a time. Between the pandemic and its attendant toll of illness, death, isolation and unemployment; ongoing state violence against black and brown citizens, immigrants and refugees; the legitimization of white extremism; the utter cruelty and incompetence of the powers that wannabe and the fool on the hill dynamiting whatâs left of the adjacent beacon before skulking off, music has been a vital salve during the dog days of this benighted, multi-plagued year. Whether it spoke directly to the issues of the day or not, it seems everything was filtered through the quarantine, the daily shenanigans in DC and the Black Lives Matter movement. Without live gigs, clubs and physical records listening was an even more solitary and disconnected experience than usual and yet felt more important as a connection to the world. Working alone onsite throughout this year meant IPod and headphones on the subway and streets, then blasting through speakers at work. In early March I started listening to the 15,000 some tracks on the pod in alphabetical order; as I write this weâve reached âTowers Of Strengthâ by Died Pretty. Maybe thereâs a message in that but then again. At home we had music going constantly. Old favorites frequently revisited, new music absorbed for enjoyment and review despite those periods of lethargy and distraction where concentration goes out the window and hours drift by without registering.Â
Below are the records of 2020 that have stayed with me, been on high rotation and spoken with redemptive force, escapist joy or consoling intimacy. They are loosely grouped in a way that makes sense to me and I hope to others.
Irreversible Entanglements â Who Sent You? (International Anthem)
Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes â Heritage Of The Invisible II (International Anthem)
Moor Mother â Forever Industries (Sub Pop)Â
Irreversible Entanglements as a collective of musicians have produced several records that have been on high rotation. Who Sent You? Â is for me the most essential, electrifying and inspiring record of 2020. As I said in my review, it is an extraordinary statement both lyrically and musically which encompasses history, politics, religion, violence and most importantly how structures of power entrap everybody, warping both the oppressed and the oppressors, tainting us all with lies, complicity, delusion and self-censorship.Â
The bandâs trumpeter and drummer Navarro and Holmesâ release Heritage Of The Invisible II explores community and identity through a collaboration of deep empathy and music intelligence. Vocalist/lyricist Camae Ayewa AKA Moor Mother remains a vital voice fired by fierce intelligence and clear-eyed dissections of structural inequality. Her EP Forever Industries combines visceral poetry and experimental electronica in two short tracks. A mention also to bassist Luke Stewartâs Exposure Quintet for their eponymous album on Astral Spirits and Ayewa again twice for Circuit City and with Mental Jewelry as Moor Jewelry the rather excellent, punishing punk of True Opera both on Don Giovanni.
 Speaker Music â Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (Planet Mu)
Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry by Speaker Music
Moodymann â Taken Away (KDJ)
SAULT â Untitled (Black Is) (Forever Living Originals)
Shabaka & The Ancestors â We Are Sent Here By History (Impulse!)Â
Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry speaks directly to the Black Lives Matter with a coruscating collage of poetry, found sound jazz, and fractured techno; it is a summation of the darkness at the heart of the American experiment. Speaker Music seeks not to preach, not to salve but to show and by showing force us to listen and to see and to act. Â
Moodymann, SAULT and Shabaka and The Ancestors dug deep into techno, funk, soul, gospel and jazz to produce outstanding albums that spoke to the Black experience here and in Britain.Taken Away is riven with betrayal and anger even as the music lifts with transcendent beats, voices and strings. Untitled (Black Is) is both direct and elliptical in its range of styles and voices but never less than compelling and We Are Sent Here By History is fire music for the 21st Century steeped in the lessons of Shepp, Coltrane and Fela Kuti.
Wire â Mind Hive (Pinkflag)
The Cool Greenhouse â The Cool Greenhouse (Melodic)
Fontaines DC â A Heroâs Death (Partisan)
Ganser â Just Look At That Sky (felte)
Kvalia - Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)
Protomartyr â Ultimate Success Today (Domino)
Tvii Son â Tvii Son (MIC)
Itâs been a good year for Post Punk and adjacent bands. Mind Hive arrived early and stuck through the year. As I said in February â35 minutes of Wire is enough to fuel a multitude of pretenders.â Not that the rest of this section are that. The Cool Greenhouseâs shambolic, rollicking, sarcastic songs will hit a chord with fans of Half Man Half Biscuit, Sleaford Mods and The Fall. Fontaines DCâs second album was an unexpected pleasure after Dogrel failed to excite. Ganserâs combination of exhilaration and enervation, Kvaliaâs intense, industrial thump and Tvii Sonâs bracing detachment hit different nerves but with inescapable precision. Protomartyr expanded their palette to create, as Tim Clarke said on these pages âa thrilling and brutally effectiveâ album. Shopping, Las Kellies, Hypoluxo, Sweeping Promises, Peel Dream Magazine and Lunchbox also released records that held the ears.
Quicksails â Blue Rise (Hausu Mountain)
Blue Rise by Quicksails
Autechre â Sign (Warp)
William Basinski â Lamentations (Temporary Residence)
Hausu Mountain continues to release high quality, challenging experimental albums that are both immensely entertaining and thought provoking. Blue Rise is an amniotic oasis. World War and Rainbow Bridge are always on hand to jolt one out of the doldrums and focus the mind. On days when the temptation to drift with the passing time or succumb to darkness presses, the homeopathy of Basinskiâs swoon, Brattenâs obsidian depth and Dinorwicâs environmental calm provided accompaniment, guide and consolation. Coates conjures bleak beauty from his enhanced and manipulated cello while Autechre untangle some of their knottier inclinations without letting the listener completely relax on a relatively straightforward return to the album format.Â
 Archival releases and reissues:
Melt Yourself Down â The Complete Leaf Recordings 2013-2016 (Leaf)
Pole â 1,2,3 Box Set (Mute)
Pylon â Box (New West)
Rowland S Howard â Teenage Snuff Film (Fat Cat)
Stalker â Empire2020 (Ruf Kutz)
Thelonious Monk â Palo Alto (Impulse!)
Various Artists â Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 (Captured Tracks)Â Â
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Quicksails is Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist producer Ben Billington. The Bright follows 2016's Mortal LP on Hausu Mountain and a catalog of vinyl and tape releases on labels like Spectrum Spools and NNA. In a host of other projects including the shapeshifting improv group ADT, the long-running experimental industrial collective ONO, and the firebrand free-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, Billington's freewheeling drum performances swerve between loose-limbed, cascading flourishes and steady rock-informed grooves. Alone behind his rig of synths and samplers, Quicksails transmutes his mentality behind the drum kit to the realm of electronic production. His compositions unfold with pulsing electronic leads and swathes of polyphonic drone that wash his mixes in a new age sheen to contrast the stark industrial percussion patterns beneath. He stacks interacting rhythmic elements into multi-tiered mosaics that bear the unpredictable structural detours of electro-acoustic improv and a focus on texture and atmosphere in line with the school of 70s kosmische and the 21st century ambient underground. Quicksails's tracks juxtapose lush piano and harp-like synth voices with amorphous loops of staccato rhythm. Billington tempers his fascination with sampled acoustic sound sources with explorations of the molding and disfiguring of electronics into alien formants somewhere between drum voices and dollops of tonality.
The tape's B-side invites a crew of friends and Hausu Mountain artists to reinterpret The Bright. Ohio-based producer Khaki Blazer (Pat Modugno of Moth Cock) mangles fragments of the tape's title track into a stew of garbled carnival-core samples and percolating, footwork-inspired beats. Chicago-based composer/synthesist Brett Naucke stretches and processes the layered electronic missives of "My Moon" into a web of panning melodic patches and bursts of mechanical grit. Austin's Shit and Shine churn up "Purge" into a quivering pile of rhythmic magma and bump through the noise with bruised drum patterns. Angel Marcloid's (HausMo artist Fire-Toolz) omnivorous vapor/synth project Mindspring Memories melts "Flinch" into a half-remembered 80s slow jam carried through a series of dramatic crescendos.
To be released on cassette and digitally on 5/25/18. Blue tape with black imprints. 2-sided 3-panel J-Card with artwork from HausMo Max. Chrome Plus stock.
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
QUICKSAILS - Mortal LP (Hausu Mountain)
When I last heard from Ben Baker Billingtonâs Quicksails project it was via the excellent Fleurs De La Lune LP, a very diverse and tough to pin down work that still sticks deep in my brain. Mortal is pretty much the perfect follow-up, in that itâs just as diverse and non-pinnable, but it also feels bigger, wider, more open, and more encompassing. Thereâs diversity thatâs about carefully-chosen control and thereâs diversity thatâs about unrestricted adventure...and somehow Billington has mastered both of those qualities on Mortal.
For me, that makes the most exciting parts of the album the ones that are most about pure, free bliss. My favorite tunes, like the cycling bubble bath âAmbassadorâ and the sun-baked cloud âDance of Eyes,â are perfectly happy to let their bright hooks run on and on, eschewing unnatural changes or pasted-on textures. Thereâs also a lot of density and complexity on Mortal, and no track is anywhere near predictable. But even the most abstract material feels loose and confident and just stresslessly content with existence. Maybe thatâs what the album titleâs about - this is music that gleefully accepts its fate, and isnât really worried about the fact that itâs going to end.
â Marc Masters
BEN BAKER BILLINGTON on Mortal
There's a recurring dream/story that I've re-told in my head since I was a young teenager that paints a picture of what inspired a great deal of Mortal. The dream starts in the shadows of a banana tree with an overly ambitious but mature weasel named Fee. The weasel was a buddhist that hoped his religion would set him free, which he had seen happen with his friend Floyd the chimp. At some point Fee meets a beautiful gospel singer named Milly at a bar in Peru and quickly fell in love. Unfortunately his old friend Floyd had already hoped to have Milly as his companion and became quite jealous. Later on Floyd unexpectedly ran into Milly and Fee on a boat towards Canada, which led him to attack Fee with a broken bottle. Although a tiny being, Milly fought back and hit Floyd in the face with a nectarine. Floyd was stunned and fell over the side of the boat, then hanging on by only one finger. Milly was incredibly angry, so she took a piece of paper from her pocket and sliced Floyd on the chest so he'd lose his grip. He fell into the ocean and was swiftly torn apart by sharks. Despite the brutal occurrence, Fee and Milly were able to live happily ever after in love. Thanks to TA for the story and life inspiration at age 12; I owe you more than you know.Â
Mortal is out now on Hausu Mountain. Buy it here.
Ben Baker Billington returns with another installment of exploratory synthesizer tracks as Quicksails. Billington concentrates on texture and produces a knotty often discordant soundscape that probes beneath placid veneers. Wresting form from apparently random collections of sound, Billington uses rhythm as his organizational tool. A mixture of synthetic and live drums flit and flirt with Quicksailsâ synth fills, vocal samples and, on three tracks, guest Patrick Shiroishiâs saxophone. From aqueous splodges and robotic squiggles, Billington patiently orientates the ear to his internal logic and as you adjust, tracks bloom and spread like kaleidoscopic algae insinuating their way into your consciousness and nesting there.
Even at his most straightforward, Billington makes choices that take his music in unexpected directions. Bursts of celestial choir, free jazz drumming, stretches of meditative synth, muttering voices deep in the mix, arpeggiated house rhythms bubble out of the mix. A series of koans that revel in paradox, Surface is far more than an academic riddle or playful piss-take. What lies beneath are lines of connection across genre, juxtapositions that grind smooth contradiction and difference to create interstitial spaces where music exists as intrinsic. The chaos of âChat Laughâ pairs bleeps and burps with a house shuffle that circles like a cantankerous, distracted AI generator confounded by human noise programs. It segues into âAll of Alexâ on which Shiroishiâs plangent tenor provides a deeply human presence amid the digital detritus. On âPiss + Moanâ Billington rolls around the drum kit in free jazz mode as sheets of synth rise like dusk fog. âHope Slideâ is all twinkling synths, subtle percussion and Shiroishi stretching notes in the distance with a monk-like intensity. As the album progresses Billington brings his machines to leash, using them as structural elements supporting the emotional expression in his music. The title track, which closes the album, is a meditation on the struggle to overcome restive distractions that characterize many of the preceding pieces. The beats are sparse, conjuring the dripping water of a Zen garden fountain, the synth beds strive for the celestial amid pops and squeaks which one has to listen through in order to focus on the transcendent.
As Quicksails, Billington has tended to the ambient end of electronica without ever completely foregoing his interest in more extreme music. On Surface the balance seems more contingent than usual and this feels deliberate. In Shiroishi he finds a collaborator of great sensitivity and the three tracks they make together leave you hoping they have plans for future music. In the meantime, this is a record that bewitches if you let it.
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Chicago musician Ben Baker Billington is best known as the drummer for avant-garde collective Ono and free jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, among others. Under his electronic moniker Quicksails, Billington charts a calmer course through an archipelago of lambent synth based ambience. Built from layers of drones, loops and melodic snippets over intricate electronic and acoustic percussion, Billington creates eight miniature atmospheres from pieces recorded between 2016 and 2019. Though made before COVID, these are ideal vehicles for transcending the difficult times in which we find ourselves. By turns meditative and transportive, Blue Rise drifts by like a soft breeze with enough pollen to keep the listener both relaxed and alert. Filigrees of vocal samples, shakers, gongs, clicks, brushes and twinkling synths decorate Billingtonâs worlds.
âCypressâ begins with the kind of glitchy beats heard on numerous Mille Plateaux releases in the early 2000s over a vocal sample that may be an answering machine message or overheard phone soliloquy; chimes and squelchy synth lines fidget and jostle like impatient nightclubbers checking their gear before receiving the bouncersâ benediction. âBelieve The Cloudsâ evokes a similar feeling of itchy anticipation before it resolves into long humid chords and a choir of wordless notes.Â
Billington demonstrates his skill at subverting classic New Age tropes with judicious use of his rhythmic sense and ear for details. The pieces are restless rather than busy like so many of us in this age of confinement and they speak directly to distracted busyness and the lassitude of having things to do, avoidance activity and that combination of guilt and devil-may-care that overtakes us sometimes. Voices heard through walls, staring out the window, distant echoes of life out there and the louche joy of drifting through what ever day or hour it is as music embeds itself into your subconscious and sticks.Â
Blue Rise is a collection of self-contained, three-dimensional jewels that reflect and refract. Pinpoints of light that illuminate without blinding, a tonic of delicacy and harmony in a crude world.Â