VERSUS

You know how all the haters are always saying Arthur only has love for so-called New Weird American Freak Folk or whatever, despite the fact that Delia & Gavin, Spiritualized, Sunn O))) and MIA (and Sparks, Diamanda Galas and Wino while we’re on the topic – ed.)have graced our covers and we also write tons of stuff about everything from Flying Lotus to classic country to contemporary African blues nomads?

Well as a matter of weird fact your humble contributing editor was once the editor of a rap magazine, and so respected a critic of electronic music as to be quoted by the Wikipedia on the subject of minimal techno’s links to classical minimalism*. If you have even a passing fancy for minimal techno, ambient electronic music or classical minimalist composition (or if you’re curious about some of those German names that keep popping up in the liner notes of Animal Collective albums), we would like to direct your attention to two timely items of interest.

The first: Resident Advisor’s Top 30 tracks of 2008. Ignore the cheesy club flyers and interchangeable baldhead Anglo DJ headshots you’ll find a quite useful resource for contemporary electronic music, much of which is still quite hard to follow for the neophyte given that it still happens on vinyl 12-inches traded mostly between close-cropped/baldhead designers slash DJs living in either Berlin or Brooklyn. (Not unlike the aforementioned folk music, just with more tracksuits and less fringed-vests).

If you follow closely, you’ll find all sorts of hairy kosmiche shit and lysergic drum meltdowns. (Always check for anything Ricardo Villalobos is putting out, for example). Anyway, this techno blog from Greece or somewhere compiled all 30 of Resident Advisor’s year-end best techno tracks, which means this is probably the only electronic dance music download most of you will want to make for the foreseeable future.

And as for the minimalist stuff: Glowing Raw made this amazing compilation of links to their favorite minimalist recordings back in November. It’s got loads of heavy and wonderful dronings from Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, et al. Do not sleep on Charlemagne Palestine’s Four Manifestations on Six Elements, btw. EPIC DRONE ECSTASY from jump.

* Your editor is also accused in this Wikipedia thingy of attributing the roots of minimal techno to classical minimalist composers at the cost of providing a musical history lesson tracing back to its Indian/African roots. It should be noted that said editor is well aware of such connections, but was not concerned about providing the full audio genealogical chart — including the requisite Detroit techno hagiography sidebar — given that the piece in question was a quite lite 500 word event preview written overnight for a cheesy Miami newspaper, and thus doesn’t really hold up well as source material for a wiki-academic encyclopedia entry. And that said editor was also using the assignment to finagle himself a promotional copy of Terry Riley’s remastered In C, which is awesome. Anyway. Meh. Point taken. The Periya Mêlam ritual music ensemble buries all comers, true.