John Diliberto’s Top 10 CDs 2013

This was one of the hardest lists ever to compile.  It’s different from 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2013, which is our picks of the best music played on Echoes.  And it’s also different from The Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll results.   These are my picks from all the music I heard in what turned out to be an epic year for new music.  And in an epic year, these are the albums that rose to the top of the top for me.

1- Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorn’s The Book of Angels, Vol. 20
Metheny takes fragmentary themes from composer John Zorn’s “Book of Angels” series and orchestrates them into expansive, electro-symphonic works.  The fact that it features some of Metheny’s most unbridled and psychedelic guitar playing in years is just a bonus.

2- Rhian Sheehan –  Stories from Elsewhere
On his 7^th album, Stories from Elsewhere,  Rhian Sheehan created one of the most sublime shadings of ambient chamber music since Harold Budd’s Pavillion of Dreams.  It’s a magical CD of soaring strings, surging rhythms, childlike music boxes and ambient expanses that sounds both familiar and timeless. It was a CD of the Month in May.

3 – Olivier Libaux – Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age
I don’t know if I could’ve gotten behind an album more than I did Olivier Libaux’s sublime covers of music by alt-metal band Queen’s of the Stone Age.  Part of the New Wave/Punk cover band Nouvelle Vague.  Libaux stepped out on his own to record the albums with singers including Emilianna Torinni and Inara George. He accomplished a melancholy re-imagining of this alt-metal band’s music. It was a CD of the Month in July.

4 – Ludovico Einaudi –  In a Time Lapse
In a Time Lapse is a defining album on which pianist/composer Ludovico Einaudi pulled out all the stops, synthesizing a 21^st century classicism that is all-embracing in its musical influences, and all-enveloping in its emotional sweep. It was Echoes CD of the Month in March,

5 – Moby   Innocents
Moby completes a trilogy of atmospheric, introspective songs that began with Wait for Me and Destroyed.  A CD of the Month in November,  Innocents is the most soothing melancholy.

6 – Ólafur Arnalds   For Now I Am Winter
Both sophisticated and edgy, Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds inhabits his own sonic universe, balancing emotions and mood on a laser’s edge of strings echoing out of frozen skies and electronics trawling the substrata.  For Now I Am Winter is his most mature work to date and a CD of the Month in April.

7 – Ulrich Schnauss A Long Way To Fall
A wonderfully melodic, groove driven album of synthesizer wonder as Ulrich Schnauss explores childhood memories with electronic dreams.  The title track will leave you breathless.  It was an Echoes CD of the Month in February.

8 – Mree   Winterwell
Serene dream pop from a 19 year old musician who comes from a singer-songwriter tradition but creates Enya like choirs with her voice on this lush and powerful album.

9 – Bleeding Rainbow   Yeah, Right
This Philadelphia based band created a garage-rock psychedelic ecstacy that often attained the epic mixing shoegaze guitars with motoric grooves and heroic girl-group choruses from singer Sarah Everton.  I’m still trying to figure out why Savages got so much hipster attention and this album slipped away.  Play it loud and you’ll wonder why as well.

10- Sigur Ros  Kveikur
Sigur Ros kick out the jams on this album of delirious, roiling textures and Jonsi’s falsetto melodies of prayer.  This is one of the Icelandic groups more aggressive outings which is saying a lot for a band that has no restraints in their electric storm.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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Pat Metheny Meets John Zorn in Heaven On Echoes

Hear Pat Metheny talk about Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Tonight on Echoes

You never know quite where guitarist Pat Metheny is going to land.  In just the last three years he’s recorded a album with his mechanical orchestra called The Orchestrion, released a solo guitar album of 60 pop cover tunes and now, like an elastic band stretched to one extreme, he’s snapped back to another.  In this case it’s a recording of music by iconoclastic avant-garde composer John Zorn, a denizen of New York’s downtown scene for more than three decades.  It’s called The Book of Angels.  John Zorn doesn’t do interviews, but Pat Metheny does and we talked to him about this surprisingly beautiful CD.

Here’s some of the highlights:

Pat Metheny on John Zorn: He’s also just a really good kind of you know, for lack of a better word, modern classical composer.  You know, he writes great notes.

Pat Metheny on Book of Angels: I mean it is I think a burst of inspiration that he wrote 300 pieces of music in a very short period of time.  And he’s gotten various musicians of different types to play those pieces.  And he calls it the book of angels.

Pat Metheny on the Orchestrion: I mean the Orchestrion for me is now a viable part of everything that I’ll do from now on.  And to me it’s a significant development in the set of possibilities that I think exist.  You can hear that there’s tons of Orchestion on the record. It was floor to ceiling of those kinds of instruments and deafening.

Hear more about Pat Metheny’s Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 tonight on Echoes.

For further reading, see a review of Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20

Further Listening: Pat Metheny’s Mechanical Orchestra
                                   Pat Metheny on What’s It All About

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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Pat Metheny Book of Angels Interview Podcast

Hear Pat Metheny talk about Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels in the Echoes Podcast.

You never know quite where guitarist Pat Metheny is going to land.  In just the last three years he’s recorded a album with his mechanical orchestra called The Orchestrion, released a solo guitar album of 60 pop cover tunes and now, like an elastic band stretched to one extreme, he’s snapped back to another.  In this case it’s a recording of music by iconoclastic avant-garde composer John Zorn, a denizen of New York’s downtown scene for more than three decades.  It’s called The Book of Angels.  John Zorn doesn’t do interviews, but Pat Metheny does and we talked to him about this surprisingly beautiful CD.

Here’s some of the highlights:

Pat Metheny on John Zorn: He’s also just a really good kind of you know, for lack of a better word, modern classical composer.  You know, he writes great notes.

Pat Metheny on Book of Angels: I mean it is I think a burst of inspiration that he wrote 300 pieces of music in a very short period of time.  And he’s gotten various musicians of different types to play those pieces.  And he calls it the book of angels.

Pat Metheny on the Orchestrion: I mean the Orchestrion for me is now a viable part of everything that I’ll do from now on.  And to me it’s a significant development in the set of possibilities that I think exist.  You can hear that there’s tons of Orchestion on the record. It was floor to ceiling of those kinds of instruments and deafening.

Hear more about Pat Metheny’s Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 in the Echoes Podcast.

For further reading, see a review of Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20

Further Listening: Pat Metheny’s Mechanical Orchestra
                                   Pat Metheny on What’s It All About

~John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/echoes-feature-pat-metheny/id77320816?i=96031973&mt=2

An Angel Taps Pat Metheny & John Zorn.

A Review of Pat Metheny’s Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20

Hear Pat Metheny talk about John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 on the Echoes Podcast

Pat Metheny and John Zorn were born within a year of each other and share many of the same musical influences.  But in their professional lives, they’ve traveled in different, barely over-lapping circles.  In fact, though they both live in New York, they’ve only recently met.

Guitarist Pat Metheny is still best known for his fusion records and his long running Pat Metheny Group, but you only have to listen to albums like Song X with Ornette Coleman, Zero Tolerance for Silence or The Orchestrion to get the full measure of his musical dimensions. He doesn’t get credit for being as completely far out as he really is.

Likewise, there is a consensus perception of avant-garde iconoclast John Zorn.  This view would assert that Zorn is completely far out as a downtown renegade bouncing from the Ornette-Coleman meets 50s rock sound of Naked City, the elliptical chaos of his game theory pieces and the Coltrane meets klezmer improvisations of Masada.  But those elements don’t take into account the sublimely beautiful melodies and deep sense of introspection that turn up on Zorn’s Filmworks series, The Masada String Trio or The Book of Angels.

Pat Metheny in old Echoes Living Room

The Book of Angels is a project that Zorn has been working on for about eight years now.  He wrote over 300 compositions, each one named for an angel. Artists like Uri Caine, Marc Ribot, Erik Friedlander, Medeski, Martin and Wood, and Joe Lovano, have already recorded some of these works. The latest to take on this task is Pat Metheny on Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20.

Released on both the Nonesuch label and Zorn’s Tzadik label, I think Metheny fans would spot him right away in this work, drawing influences from across his career.  Zorn fans, however, might have a harder time picking out the saxophonists impact, especially since he doesn’t play on the album.  But it’s there with the Hebraic modes and melodic flourishes that have dominated his music for the last two decades or so.

Pat Metheny & Orchestrion

The opening “Mastema” could almost be a Pat Metheny Group track with the electric sitar and insistent rhythm, but then you notice the rhythm is a little mechanized because it’s coming from Metheny’s Orchestrion, his mechanical orchestra, and the guitar is running through glitched out distortions

John Zorn

“Sariel” starts out like Klezmer ballad with Metheny overdubbed on several stringed instruments, like some exotic Middle Eastern oud orchestra.  Metheny solos over a percussion and oud-like groove that sounds like it could’ve wandered in off the kibbutz.  But no oud orchestra would ever whip out the snarling acid blues that Metheny brings in as the percussion drives him into solo of ecstatic arabesques of intertwined feedback.  It concludes in a sprawl of distortion, riff fragments and Antonio Sanchez’s free drumming, like a meeting of Hendrix’s “1983” and Coltrane’s Interstellar Space.

That leads into “Phanuel” the most Zorn like track, if you follow the conventional conception of Zorn, a free form work of acoustic guitar and industrial electronics with radio signals bleeding through like Stockhausen’s “Hymnen.” But as a Zorn track it morphs into something else, in this case a beautiful ballad for two acoustic guitars, bass and percussion.

“Albim” will sound familiar to Metheny fans opening with an acoustic guitar solo that could’ve been off his One Quiet Night album before segueing into a jazz suffused track that could be his recent trio, except all the backing is Orchestrion.

John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 Tzadik Cover

You can hear elements of Metheny’s Orchestrion Project, the expansive writing of The Way Up, the lyricism of One Quiet Night and the flow of the Pat Metheny Group.  There’s even some Zero Tolerance for Silence ear-bleeding guitar distortion, something you might expect from Zorn, but which you may have forgotten was part of Metheny’s sonic stash as well. Metheny brings it all to bear on compositions are sometimes just sketches, a head or a chord sequence.  But instead of just jamming on these themes, Metheny has orchestrated them into expansive, electro-symphonic works.  The fact that it features some of Metheny’s most unbridled and psychedelic guitar playing in years is just a bonus.

Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 is an exhilarating ride. After hearing it the only real surprise is why hadn’t this happened before?

~John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

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