Watch the teaser below for a brief introduction to Rabbit Rabbit Radio and its first installment, "Hush, Hush," which is available today.

For us, 2011 was another year of taking in as much as we could and sharing the best with you. Next year, however, will be a homecoming of sorts, a return to rock-'n'-roll roots. We'll soon be able to share the projects that we have in store — across multiple mediums — but for now, dig into this rock-focused list of must-own albums.

And for more, revisit (or simply visit) our lists from 2010 and 2009:

100 Unheralded Albums from 2010
50 Unheralded Albums from 2009

Steven Drozd: The Heart Is A Drum Machine (The Score) (Twinkle Cash Co., 1/18/11)

Steven Drozd: "Born"

A multi-instrumentalist and the third-most-tenured member of The Flaming Lips, Steven Drozd marked his first official solo release early this year with the nearly instrumental accompaniment to the documentary The Heart is a Drum Machine.

The music shares a lot of characteristics with the Flaming Lips of the past dozen years – synthesized grooves, big rock beats, fuzz bass, airy keyboards, and different instrumental flourishes weaving in and out. But listeners are unlikely to confuse the two, and the score succeeds as a standalone album as well as a film accompaniment.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Tao of the Dead (Richter Scale Records / Superball Music, 2/8/11)

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: "Weight of the Sun"

There has been no shortage of grand themes and allegories in the canon of Austin post-punk quintet …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. The band’s newest album, however, better matches its ambitious themes with its music, presenting an epic pair of pieces for Tao of the Dead.

The album recalls progressive albums of yore, from the likes of Rush and King Crimson, but channels them into easily digested movements. Stretches of heavy distortion and drum thrashing will appeal to the more metal-minded Trail of Dead fans, but there’s also plenty of hook-laden, radio-ready alternative rock.

Wires Under Tension: Light Science (Western Vinyl, 2/8/11)

Wires Under Tension: "Electricity Turns Them On"

Light Science is the exciting debut from Wires Under Tension, a duo comprised of violinist/multi-instrumentalist Christopher Tignor and drummer Theo Metz. With help from a few friends, including Jared Bell of Lymbyc Systym, the two combine live performance with electronic manipulation, sounding something like a progressive Dirty Three with horns, hip-hop beats, and post-rock guitar swells.

This seven-track release is a dense, fluid collection that retains consistency thanks to Metz’s steady rhythms. Electro-mechanical piano, clavinet, and synthesizers mesh with loops and samples to round out an impressive first release.

Pitom: Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes (Tzadik, 2/22/11)

Pitom: "Head in the Ground"

Combining heavy, fuzzy rock jams with Jewish melodies, Pitom is one of many projects from guitarist, bassist, and composer Yoshie Fruchter. Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes, the quartet's second release on Tzadik, follows the same path as its predecessor, but it does so with a bit more cohesion and restraint.

Built from the ground up with distorted bass and violin, the band's music carries similarities to that of Skeletonbreath and Miasma & The Carousel of Headless Horses. Whether driving a song with an infectious melody, commingling with the violin in the high end, or simply taking over a track with raw ability, Fruchter knows when to go full throttle (the punk power of "An Epic Encounter") or pull back (the dark slow jam of "A Resentful Repentance").

The Psychic Paramount: II (No Quarter, 2/22/11)

The Psychic Paramount: "RW"

Though relatively silent for the past six years, New York noise-rock trio The Psychic Paramount returned in February to release its first full-length since 2005. Effected guitar loops, devastating low-end grooves, and bashing rhythms again form the core of the band's sound, but II is a direct yet dynamic rock explosion.

Between the guitar, the cymbals, and the effects, the mid-range gets a constant workout. Those who are turned off by this kind of music may find it to be an exercise in patience, but the lengthier durations are a testament to the trio's skills at climax and denouement.

DeVotchKa: 100 Lovers (Anti-, 3/1/11)

DeVotchKa: "100 Other Lovers"

Following the fame from its Oscar-winning soundtrack for Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, Denver multi-instrumental quartet DeVotchKa has playfully tinkered with its sweeping, emotive sound. Though it already tossed together elements of folk, rock, Mexican, and Gypsy music, it remained united by the sullen croons and songwriting of frontman Nick Urata.

That unifying factor remains, but its newest album, 100 Lovers – its second post-Sunshine full-length – continues to expand the band’s scope. The material adds new and often subtle flavors to DeVotchKa’s repertoire. Uninitiated listeners might hear more of the same, but 100 Lovers is perfect for content fans – moving in new directions without a radical departure.

Stateless: Matilda (Ninja Tune, 3/1/11)

Stateless: "Ariel"

Matilda, Stateless' second full-length, showcases the British electro-rock group's continued maturity. Lead singer Chris James hits an impressive range of notes, from reverb-cloaked backing croons to soulful leads, atop an amalgamated mix of styles, sounds, and beats.

With contributions from The Balanescu Quartet, DJ Shadow, and Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), Matilda is stylistically inventive, with familiar worldly touchstones reworked into new contexts.

Grails: Deep Politics (Temporary Residence, 3/8/11)

Grails: "I Led Three Lives"

With cinematic soundscapes, Westernized Indian melodies, film-noir mystique, 1960s psychedelia, and crushing heaviness, Grails is an instrumental rarity. The Portland band's newest offering, Deep Politics, is an engaging and epic mix of acoustic intonations, indigenous sounds and melodies, spaghetti-western motifs, somber piano balladry, and more doom-filled, Eastern-infused stylistic transcendence.

And thanks in part to arrangements by Timba Harris, the mighty violinist from unparalleled genre annihilators Estradasphere and Secret Chiefs 3, Deep Politics vies to be Grails’ best album yet.

Parts & Labor: Constant Future (Jagjaguwar, 3/8/11)

Parts & Labor: "Constant Future"

After establishing itself early last decade as an interesting new name in noise rock, Parts & Labor delivered a flurry of releases over the span of just a few years. Since then, the band has scaled back to a trio built around the fuzzed guitar, bass, keyboard hooks, and tight rock rhythms.

Featuring some of the band's sturdiest songs yet, Constant Future is direct, potent, and catchy. Behind Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw's echoing, harmonized vocals are dirty, thick grooves that power the overlaid electronic freak-outs.

Adebisi Shank: This is the Second Album from a Band Called Adebisi Shank (Sargent House, 3/15/11)

Adebisi Shank: "Micro Machines"

Released to European acclaim in 2010, the aptly titled second album from Irish electro/math rockers Adebisi Shank achieved North American release this year thanks to the peerless Sargent House.

The management company / record label describes the trio as a blend of Fang Island’s shredding riffs with Battles’ electronic quirkiness and rhythmic playfulness. That description isn’t off the mark, but readers won’t get a sense of the band’s real abilities until they hear its hyper-melodic, polyrhythmic, and — most importantly — jubilant songs in full.

Second Album delivers a maelstrom of zany electronics, unusual distortions, and triumphant, rapidly ascending scales mixed with vintage synths, marimba, horns, and other accoutrements. This is all packaged between and around gloriously catchy and powerful rock riffs, resulting in a manic and buoyant sophomore effort.

The Book of Knots: Garden of Fainting Stars (Ipecac)

The Book of Knots: "Microgravity"

Garden of Fainting Stars is the third installment in the "By Sea, By Land, By Air" trilogy of The Book of Knots, a collaborative studio project that's built around the quartet of producer/musician Joel Hamilton, bassist Tony Maimone, drummer Matthias Bossi, and violinist Carla Kihlstedt.

As on the previous two albums, the band delivers a dissonant yet melodic mix of pitch-bending, alien effects, and textured, metallic tones, and an all-star stable of guests again helps narrate the album's tales, this time relating to aeronautics.  Garden of Fainting Stars, however, feels the most cohesive of the three albums, as the core group comes closer to perfecting its brand of disconsolate rock experimentation.

But as expected, there's plenty of variety from track to track.  After the crunchy guitars and ascendant vocals of album opener "Microgravity," a brooding backdrop is set for "Drosophla Melanogaster," which includes narration by Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubauten.

The rest of the album's guests, consisting of extended musical family, include Mike Patton, Trey Spruance of Secret Chiefs 3, Mike Watt, Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables.  Patton's soft croons introduce "Planemo" before sonorous synthesizers darken the horizon, and shortly thereafter, potentially post-apocalyptic radio ramblings close the album on "Obituary for the Future."  It ends the trilogy in pessimism and mystery — fitting for an album that is self-described as a "wormless, rusty hook into the lifeless seas of the music industry, expecting to reap only sorrow."

Bosco Delrey: Everybody Wah (Mad Decent / Downtown)

Bosco Delrey: "Baby's Got a Blue Flame"

Bosco Delrey is one curious cat, one whose debut album is a Jon Spencer-esque roots-rock revival that incorporates strong elements of electronica and psychedelia.  Following a pair of seven-inch releases earlier this year, Everybody Wah is that debut, marking the arrival of a dynamic 21st Century songwriter.

In addition to the traditional rock elements, the album uses a plethora of modern sounds, from fuzz bass to drum machines to synthesizers.  "Archebold Ivy" is one of more genre-blended songs on the album, combining a classically flavored harpsichord melody with dance-fueled synth lines and Delrey's throwback vocals.  That's immediately followed by "Afterlife," a soulful yet futuristic faux-string-tinged amalgamation.  "Cool Out" borrows some Venetian Snares-style drum and bass over a simple sweeping backdrop, and "Insta Love" follows with a romantic rock-and-roll ballad.

If you haven't heard Bosco Delrey's name yet, introduce yourself.  And if you have, prepare to hear more of it.

Arkona: Stenka na Stenku (Napalm)

Arkona: "Stenka na Stenku"

Based in Moscow, Arkona is a raucous Russian folk- and pagan-metal band led by the alternately harmonious and growling vocals of Maria "Scream" Arhipova.  The Stenka na Stenku EP, which follows five full-length studio releases, is a fun, brief blast of tunes that mix power metal with wind instruments such as bagpipes, flute, and ocarina.

The result, though jarring for the uninitiated, is a mix that doesn't grow tiresome over the six tracks.  "Valenki" has an upbeat yet blazing delivery, pairing speed picking with rapid bass kicks, wily accordion riffs, and guttural folk chants.  But Stenka na Stenku also reels it back, offering an acoustic rendition of "Goi, Rode, Goi!" — the title track from Arkona's 2009 album — for something haunting and wailing, anchored by cello strikes, throat singing, and layers of old-world vocals.

Erik Friedlander: Bonebridge (SkipStone)

Erik Friedlander: "Beaufain Street"

Cellist/composer Erik Friedlander long has been associated with John Zorn and the downtown New York City scene, but his considerable abilities have made him known as a bandleader as well as prolific sideman, counting collaborations with musicians as diverse as Kaki King, Ikue Mori, John Vanderslice, Vinicius Cantuaria, and Kelly Clarkson.

Bonebridge is Friedlander's latest as a leader, weaving a melodic blend of Americana and jazz with guitarist Doug Wamble, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Mike Sarin.  This time around, Friedlander emphasizes pizzicato playing on his cello as he balances melody and feel with technical prowess.

This plus Wamble's Southern slide guitar are the defining characteristics of the album — yet the rhythm section is never lacking.  Dunn's upright-bass grooves root the album for leads from Friedlander and Wamble, although he is free to roam from time to time.  On occasion, Wamble's twangy tones nearly resemble a sitar; when less the focus, his guitar drifts in and out with soft murmurs.

Bonebridge actually began as material for Friedlander's Broken Arm Trio, which includes Dunn and Sarin.  But it quickly became more in Friedlander's mind, and Wamble was invited to expand the timbral possibilities.  The sonic destination is ground that Friedlander had yet to tread, which gets increasingly harder as his catalog grows ever larger.

Marissa Nadler: s/t (Box of Cedar)

Marissa Nadler: "Baby, I Will Leave You in the Morning"

After garnering a greater following with a pair of releases on Kemado Records,"dream folk" singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler has had to self-release her latest, self-titled album, made possible by a successful Kickstarter campaign.

The album being self-titled seems to signify a new starting point, which is reflected by her Box of Cedar label name and the fact that the album only features two players, Nadler and Carter Tanton.

As in the past, however, the music features healthy accompaniment to Nadler's airy, multi-tracked vocals and cavernous reverberations.  This time they come in the form of bells and glockenspiel, pedal-steel guitar, synthesizer, marimba, light drumming, and more.  Nadler calls the collection her "most honest and natural," and that's hard to dispute.  Each track offers a new direction without forcing it, and the entire album is unified by Nadler's idiosyncrasies and songwriting skills.

The Dear Hunter: The Color Spectrum condensed CD & 9-EP collection (Triple Crown)

The Dear Hunter: "Deny It All"

The Dear Hunter, begun as simply a side project, has since blossomed into a theatrical prog-pop band that now has multiple multi-album concept cycles. The group’s newest completion is a nine-EP project called The Color Spectrum, inspired by the colors of the rainbow (plus black and white).

Released as individual 10-inch records and as a single CD with limited selections, the music is as assorted as its inspirations. Black is sonorous, martial, deep, and reverberating; White is ethereal and hymn-like in places, but also doggedly cheerful. Blue is playful, youthful, and driven, churning and giddy; Green is ebullient, relaxed, and expansive; Red is sexy and insinuating as well as aggressive.

- Text by Summer Block. Read the full story in Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color and Music.

Honorable Mentions

Aaron Goldberg & Guillermo Klein: Bienestan (Sunnyside)

Diskjokke: Sagara (Smalltown Supersound)

Elysian Fields: Last Night on Earth (Ojet)

Isis: Live II 03.19.03

John Shannon & Wings of Sound: Songs of the Desert River (Creek Valley)

The Mattson 2: Feeling Hands (Galaxia)

This Morn' Omina: L'Unification des Forces Opposantes (Ant-Zen)

Terakaft: Aratan N Azawad (World Village)

Vetiver: The Errant Charm (Sub Pop)

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: "Subsequently"

Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Carla Kihlstedt has had a hand in upwards of 50 albums in less than 15 years. As a member of groups such as Tin Hat, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and The Book of Knots, Kihlstedt sings and plays violin, organ, percussion, and just about everything else.

Currently, she's set to premiere Necessary Monsters, a song cycle based on Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings, in San Francisco on July 29 and 30 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Read more about the project and the corresponding Kickstarter campaign on the Imaginary Beings Project website. We gave Kihlstedt the opportunity to write about her personal relationship with these monsters and how they unlocked a world of objectivity and imagination.

How Monsters Changed My Life
by Carla Kihlstedt

At first, they're all so cute. Even the one with only one arm, one leg, one wing, and half a tongue; the one who goes around with hatred in his heart stealing speech from animals; the one who weeps in the forest, and if she’s caught dissolves herself into a heap of bubbles and salt; the little one made of string, dust, and a broken spool of who-knows-what; the one with one eye and a maniacally monotonous, monocled perspective.

But then you let them in for long enough, and as the spectacle wears off, they start just looking like friends with foibles. OK…large foibles, exaggerated features, caricatures for sure…nonetheless familiar, and almost friendly. And that's when you're in trouble, but believe me, it's a necessary kind of trouble, a trouble that teaches you more about yourself than perhaps you were prepared for.

I'm referring, of course, to imaginary beings. My encounter with them begins with an innocuous moment when I was in college, home for vacation, looking at my parents' bookshelf for something to read. The Book of Imaginary Beings jumped out at me, both because of its title (scholarly yet full of fantasy) and because I had heard this fellow, Jorge Luis Borges, referred to with an equally compelling combination of reverence, amusement, and excitement.

There were those who had read Borges and those who had not. I had not. Having read Borges was a kind of a badge of intellectual hipness. He would laugh to hear such a thing, he who said, "I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes. And one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write."

Now, I normally whinny, rear up, and gallop in the other direction when faced with a peer-pressure-inspired badge of anything! But in this case, my curiosity led the way, and since then, I have grown to love him as if he were my own grandfather. (Listen to his set of three lectures from Harvard's "Norton Lecture Series" here, here and here, and perhaps he’ll become your surrogate grandpa too!)

He is (I use the present tense because he seems so very present to me through his words) an incredibly intelligent and well-read (not to mention well-written) man with a generous heart and an unstoppably inquisitive mind. He writes what could arguably be called adult fairy tales — unmistakably adult, but full of whimsy and a very mercurial logic.

The Book of Imaginary Beings is a collection of Borges’ favorite fictional creatures from across the world and throughout history from a wide array of mythological, literary, and religious traditions. He didn’t so much write it as curate it. And still, it is both a portrait of Borges and of humans, as told to us by our own collective imagination.

This book lived in my bathroom in college and beyond. Most writers would take offense at such base placement of the evidence of their life’s work, but I think Borges would understand, and perhaps would even approve. He tells us in the preface that this book is meant to be read in bits and pieces, not in any particular order — a page here, a page there — so it is the perfect potty book. And so it was for me for several years.

Now, I’ll fast forward so that we can get to the fun part about revelation and transformation. More than a decade later, I was invited by the wonderful and brave folks at Alverno Presents and at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art to come up with a concept for a new project, and to apply for a development grant with them from the National Performance Network, and they would give me the opportunity to perform this new piece in their respective theaters. The Book of Imaginary Beings fairly jumped off of the shelf of my mind and wouldn’t let me look away. This was the beginning of my five-year (and counting) journey.

I asked my friend and favorite poet, Rafael Osés, if he’d join me in creating a set of songs after Borges’ book, and off we went. We picked nine of the beings, making a kind of an arc through which we could trace a human life (beginning with an animal dreamed by CS Lewis, who is the embodiment of expression): from a great and strange song-dog who lives in the woods and yelps and howls her joyous song for no one, to Odradek, a collection of odds and ends from our human activities, who will outlast us all. Odradek lives under our stairs and in our entrance halls and subtly reminds us every day of our own mortality.

The piece we created is called Necessary Monsters, again, a tribute to Borges. He states in the foreword to The Book of Imaginary Beings:

“We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster, not some ephemeral and casual creature…”

It is scored for seven musicians and an actress, who tries in vain to corral these creatures into an orderly field guide as they parade out of her mind over the course of one sleepless night.

I have now lived with An Animal Dreamed by CS Lewis, Hochigan, the Squonk, the Nisna, the Double, the Ink Monkey, the Lamed Wufniks, the One-eyed Being, and our little, gently menacing friend, Odradek, for quite some time. They are my housemates. They take up no room at all, and yet they more than fill up every corner of my mind.

Here’s what they have taught me: They are all me. And some of them (I) are (am) not so cute. I’m sure the implication is not lost on you here: they are all you too. In fact, there is not a single one of us whom these little critters don’t inhabit. They live side by side within us, sometimes fighting, bickering, and clawing at each other, and other times oblivious to each other’s existence and utterly ambivalent towards the person we like to think we are.

Every creature that humans can possibly imagine is a just magnified reflection of one tiny aspect of our own thoughts and experiences. We have each simply chosen to let different beings take over at different times. For some of us, the menagerie is constantly rotating, taking turns with who gets to sit in the pole position, and for others, one particular being has hosied the steering wheel and won’t let go… for years, or even for a lifetime.

What this means, like it or not, is that we are all more the same than we are different. Yes, you and I, you and your obnoxious neighbor, you and your greedy boss, you and your credit-card collections agent, you and your favorite Hollywood heartthrob, you and your least favorite FOX News jockey…I could go on, because that’s actually really fun, but you get the point.

In case you haven’t gotten the point, here it is further explained: I’m sure that at the core of all of your favorite books or movies is a transformation of some sort. An average Joe becomes a superhero, the girl next door becomes a werewolf, a grumpy chef opens her heart and lets love in, a myopic divorcée goes on a solo voyage to Cuba and learns the meaning of family, love, and life… again, I could go on, because that’s also fun, but I won’t.

Even if you only watch documentaries and read science textbooks, it’s still always about transformation: a community learns to accept each other through fighting for a common good, a boy grows up and becomes a serial killer, a cell decides whether to be a brain cell or a heart cell. Even the nonlinear films of Stan Brakhage and the writings of Gertrude Stein are essentially about the transformation of our language and our perception. I went on. Sorry.

The point is that we are hard-wired for transformation because we are utterly teeming with these imaginary beings, these glimmers of potential. The ones that come to the forefront are the ones that we have nurtured. The rest may be silent or invisible, but they are still there, hiding, lurking, waiting for the right moment to spring. We harbor them in the deeper recesses of ourselves. This is not good versus evil, for they are all more complicated than that, and then even more so in cacophonous concert with one another. It’s like taking your life’s direction from a table of advisers all drawn by Dr. Seuss.

The gift of the imagination is the gift of objectivity. It’s much easier to look at these aspects of ourselves and our fragile, complicated humanness when they don’t look like us, or when they don’t even look human. They fool us into believing that we’re looking at something other, something foreign, and, dare I say, something exotic. But exotic only exists from afar. Exotic evaporates when you get up close to it. Exotic entices us to look, to gape, to gawk and point, and buy the postcard. But then, if you have the courage to get up close, you’ll find, rather sheepishly, that you are simply pointing at your own being…or one of them.

John Vanderslice with The Magik*Magik Orchestra: "Sea Salt"

In San Francisco’s Mission District, the small but bustling Tiny Telephone is booked four months in advance. John Vanderslice is there everyday. Things are smooth. When he first opened the studio almost 15 years ago, this wasn’t the case. There were problems. Floods. Power outages. He would get calls while on tour. “At the beginning, it wasn’t a celebration,” he says. “It was just a grind.” But about three years ago, between albums, Vanderslice returned from the road and decided to take a break from touring. He was recently married, and he had the itch to explore not the world but the life that he had in San Francisco.

“When I came back, I was happier,” he says. “I was with my wife everyday. She’s a teacher, so I would [go to the studio] every day and just help bands. I would figure out stuff. And I started to make the studio a lot better. I got in this feedback loop where everything I was doing was helping the studio.” He admits that life could’ve taken him somewhere else — the studio might’ve not been a success. Even now, success is relative. Not long ago, Vanderslice got an E-mail from his bank. “Available balance: $0.22.” It was Christmas Eve. So though he’s not getting rich, measured other ways, things are better than ever. As he says of rough times in the past, “Everything kept pointing to all music, all studio, all the time.” They still are.

Vanderslice’s latest offering, White Wilderness, is a collaboration with Minna Choi’s Magik*Magik Orchestra (M*MO). Despite its size — nine tracks that fill only 31 minutes — the record has the power to engulf: like a controversy, the more one digs, the more complex it seems to get. What at first sounds like a thin, quirky rock album becomes instead a contained magnum opus. Portentously, White Wilderness was released exactly a week before a monstrous snow storm blanketed two-thirds of the United States, transforming the Midwest into a white wilderness of its own and bringing Chicago to a standstill; 20 inches whipped into eight-foot drifts proved too much, even for the city of broad shoulders.

Initial inklings for the project came two years ago, when Vanderslice played a show with M*MO at the Great American Music Hall. “Within the first 10 minutes of being in the center of 20 string players, I was like, ‘This has to be the next record.’” He and Choi had just begun a new partnership. Her collection of classical musicians would serve as a modular, in-house orchestra for Tiny Telephone, a solution to a problem that Choi had noticed for a while: it was always difficult to find classically trained musicians to record her arrangements, so why not create a group with that as its primary aim?

It was the perfect opportunity for a studio owner who owns every Gustav Mahler and W.A. Mozart symphony on vinyl. “The color — the use of oboe, French horn, and clarinet on Mahler symphonies — I just wanted to taste that,” he says of his passion for classical music. “I wanted, like, 0.1 percent of what I heard there to show up in my music.” Fueled also by artists like Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, who’ve skillfully woven orchestral music into other genres, Vanderslice wanted to get away from the typical, rock-music-with-string-overdubs sound: “I wanted to…just flip it around, where the orchestra is driving everything.” This meant that Vanderslice had to take himself out of the equation. After penning the original demos, he passed the material to Choi and didn’t hear the music again until three days before recording.

“It was as far as I could get from my usual process,” says Vanderslice, who normally does everything himself in his basement before even heading to the studio. “I told Minna, ‘Listen, I have a very high tolerance for dissonance, and I would love to include as many woodwinds as possible.’ End of sentence. I didn’t say another word to Minna about music. Ever. I never changed a note. I never made a suggestion about orchestration — after a 30-second conversation.”

In her bedroom, surrounded by piles of paper, Choi had a significant amount of work ahead of her, but with Vanderslice encouraging dissonance, one of her main hurdles had been leapt. “As an arranger, dissonance is the thing that I have to worry about most,” she says. “I compare it to a caterer being hired to cater a wedding — that’s kind of what I’m doing. I have to get inside their head and create something that’s to their taste. Dissonance is like spiciness; everybody has a different idea of what’s spicy, just like everyone has a different idea of what’s dissonant. It’s totally subjective, it’s totally personal, and there’s no right or wrong.”

“When I think of wilderness, I think of something unknown — there’s a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of unsettledness to me. But then the whole idea of a white wilderness is different. It’s very peaceful and very beautiful.”

For Choi, “White Wilderness” set the tone for the record. It was the first song that Vanderslice played for her, and as they listened, he said that he loved the dissonance in a recurring chord — “some version of an augmented fourth,” Choi recalls. So she paired that sound with the visceral imagery of the title. “When I think of wilderness, I think of something unknown — there’s a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of unsettledness to me,” she says. “But then the whole idea of a white wilderness is different. It’s very peaceful and very beautiful.” The tension there — itself a sort of thematic dissonance — became the fulcrum on which the rest of the album balanced.

* * *

Vanderslice and Choi click. On the album, much like in real life, they respect each other enough to not talk over the other, or step on toes, or do those things that could poison promising collaborations. And so, at times, the orchestra will disappear completely; other times it’s Vanderslice’s voice that vanishes. These absences enhance the record’s topography and keep it from becoming pallid. “After It Ends,” for example, might not withstand critique on its own. It’s not a single. If untethered, it would fade into the background and be lost. But within the record, it serves as respite between two of the record’s more overgrown tracks.

Without M*MO, the same might have happened to White Wilderness. Distilled down to micro-vignettes and a few instruments, the album might’ve faded into the background, barely registering, the equivalent of a nine-page book of poems sandwiched between John Ashberry and Charles Bukowski on the shelf of a crowded bookstore. This allusion is not unfitting. Actual Air, a collection of poems by David Berman (of Silver Jews fame) is such a book, agonizingly difficult to find, often buried among more formidable names. But there’s a hint of it in the way that Vanderslice constructs his vignettes, and when his songs are compared to Berman’s poetry, it becomes clear as to why. “Aw man, that guy’s my hero,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of his. David Berman has actually given me a lot of titles for a lot of my songs. He sends me lists of titles for me to use. I mean, that’s fucking incredible, right? It makes me feel like a really lucky person.”

Such informal, casual collaborations are not anomalies in Vanderslice’s world. Even the title, White Wilderness — the lyrical, musical, and conceptual anchor of the entire project — was suggested by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. And by the time that Vanderslice came to Choi with the name, he was already under its spell. “I’m making an album called White Wilderness,” he told her, “and it’s going to be all magic.” Whether he meant “all magic” or “all Magik” is unknown. Both would be accurate.

Darnielle also influenced Vanderslice’s lyrics, which are more personal here than in the past. “He’d really been encouraging me to write about my family, my father, and my childhood,” Vanderslice says. “I’d told him stories about my life and growing up, and he’s like, ‘Man, you have to write about some of this stuff.’ So I just started writing. ‘Convict Lake’ is as true as I can tell it. It’s basically an experience I had taking acid and getting altitude poisoning. And it was in some ways beyond surreal; and in other ways, it was the most horrific experience of my life.”

This gives the following “White Wilderness” — already a sort of dream sequence — an even heightened ethereality. As tough as autobiographical writing can be, Vanderslice is an adept storyteller, deft with the details of childhood. In “The Piano Lesson,” an anonymous teacher is in charge (“Place your thumb on the middle C”), and so M*MO’s musical roughhousing, led by a great bari-sax riff, becomes the rebelliousness of a kid stuck at a piano. “There are rules when you strike the drum,” the young Vanderslice is told. He doesn’t like that notion.

The songs are made stronger by Vanderslice’s plain, unadorned vocals, sometimes almost spoken, and by bits of well-fitting fantastical language, the vernacular of a young boy’s imagination. “20K” is the exaggerated deep-sea adventure of a Florida tour boat, the name a reference to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “English Vines,” a gentle folk song replete with pedal steel, becomes a Poe-like tale: “By night, our neighbors’ invading vines / rooted into my dreams from underground / twined their nooses ’round our lives / branching out maniacally / they choked our sycamore / and grew thicker and thicker / and when I finally scaled their fence / to kill the source of this malevolence / were my neighbors watching me / from their house?”

Choi’s style here is modern, relying heavily on strings, brass, and simple, warm percussion to give muscle to the skeletal compositions of piano or acoustic guitar. Her orchestral arrangements feed off Vanderslice’s imagery as well as his brevity, respecting his selectivity even as they flesh out his stories. Some of the album’s most triumphant moments are in her graceful but compelling interludes: the pregnant phrasing between sung lines of “20K”; the seemingly endless rising and falling action at the end of “White Wilderness”; the end of “Sea Salt,” where a gorgeously layered orchestral volley becomes the air currents on which Vanderslice escapes, singing, “For the first time I could take to air / I was free now / I could go anywhere.”

In a way, this record is that same escape. No longer slave to savage condemnations of far-off political affairs, Vanderslice offers an honest, eager reflection of his past. So though it opens with a foreboding reference to the Gaza Strip, the album veers away from the political track and into new territory. “Sun shines on the Gaza Strip / smiles on the back alleys of Madrid / comes off the stone like a burning whip.”

* * *

As Choi arranged White Wilderness, Vanderslice planned his next project: a new studio, right next to Tiny Telephone. Vanderslice sits in his car, commenting on the progress. “They’re putting up mirrors and windows and doors today,” he says. “It’s incredible. It’s the most exhilarating feeling I’ve had in years. We’re sick of turning down work. We had Islands call us, we had Philadelphia Grand Jury — we always have these really great records that we can’t do.”

Bands love Tiny Telephone. Thao, Spoon, Ra Ra Riot, Mark Kozelek (Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters), Death Cab for Cutie, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum — all these and more have spent time at Tiny Telephone, partly because of Vanderslice’s belief in the sanctity of a more traditional recording process, which favors analog tape, live takes, and a host of other once-again-popular techniques. (He was recently interviewed by Wired magazine for a story on the growing use of ribbon mics.) “We always encourage bands to be confident in what they’re doing,” he says. “We’re here documenting and recording what a band does, and there’s a lot of power in what four people do in a room together.”

Or consider the power of 19 people — 20 if you count Choi, whose siren-like vocals appear on “Overcoat.” Produced by seasoned engineer John Congleton (who’s worked with St. Vincent and the Walkmen, among others), White Wilderness’ strings, horns, winds, piano, and drums were all recorded live. M*MO came in, set up, and for two days straight, it made music. “We said three days in the press release because we honestly didn’t think anyone would really believe us,” Vanderslice notes.

Vanderslice is adamant that recording together, on analog tape and in full takes, is exactly what gives an album energy and life. Comparing the world of infinite overdubs to a mirror that magnifies things 100 times, he says that it’s ridiculous to obsess over such a distorted image. “That’s not what life is, and that’s not how people listen to music,” he says. “People listen to music in the totality and for the commitment to the performance. So yeah, we’ve done everything we can to fight this micro-management of performance.” One way is by giving bands free tape, which means that they’re on a linear format. “It encourages performances, it encourages whole takes, and it encourages not cut-and-pasting and correcting minor imperfections,” he says. “It endorses the music as it is. And it’s a strong endorsement because it sounds really good — it sounds better than digital.”

Another strong endorsement is the one that Vanderslice gives M*MO. He gives it all the credit for White Wilderness, and he encourages every band that comes through Tiny Telephone’s door to work with it. This isn’t surprising. After all, his approach to music isn’t really about the profession. It’s about life. The musical community that he’s a part of and has helped create is how he interacts with the world — professionally, yes, but also socially, civically, and politically. And the same goes for Choi, in a very tangible way. In March, Choi will finally abandon her bedroom office for a real office space between Tiny Telephone and the new studio, which opens its doors June 1. Vanderslice is no doubt happy to weave her more tightly into his daily collaborations, but it might be Choi who’s most thrilled with the move. Because of its solitary nature, arranging can be a lonely task, and Choi will be happy to inhabit a space where she’s not alone in her creative efforts.

“I’m really excited about how I’ll change, socially,” she says. “Because I spend so much time arranging, that meant before [that] I was spending a lot of time alone. Like on a Friday night, writing a string arrangement isn’t the most social activity, but now, I can come here and write here, and I’ll hear bands on both sides of me also doing something creative. We can, like, take breaks together, and go out for coffee, and it’s so much more fun-sounding.”

John Darnielle. David Berman. And now Minna Choi. Vanderslice seems to collect talented people. With a brilliant new partner in crime and an already solid community of collaborators, increasingly, Vanderslice has more reasons to stay put than to go on tour. “I love touring; I love that,” he says. “But man, this can compete toe-to-toe with being on tour any day. It’s that exciting and that fun.” 

Download the podcast for This Week’s Best Albums: February 1, 2011 and subscribe to This Week’s Best Albums for free with iTunes.

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This Week\'s Best Albums: February 1, 2011

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: Still You Lay Dreaming – Tales for the Stage, II

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: "The Gyre"

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: "Wandering Secret"

Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi are two adventurous members of avant-metal band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum; each is involved in a plethora of projects, including Tin Hat (Trio), The Book of Knots, 2 Foot Yard, and Skeleton Key.  With Sleepytime bandmate Dan Rathbun, the two released an album a few years ago called Ravish, consisting of scores for dance and theater companies, and now the couple has self-released a sequel of sorts, called Still You Lay Dreaming — a download-only collection of tracks that were written for the Deborah Slater Dance Theater’s production of Men Think They Are Better Than Grass.

The music, though not as massively far-reaching as each musician’s career, is an eclectic assortment of unorthodox instruments, unusual melodies, and dynamic vocals.  Kihlstedt’s usual vocal power leads the way on half of the tracks, but her superlative violin skills take a back seat to duo’s “closet arsenal” of bass harmonica, pump organ, bathtub percussion, flour sifter, and other oddities.

A general compositional diversity – in addition to distorted, pitch-shifted, and reverberated instruments and vocals – makes the collection a wonderful listen from start to finish.  Fans of the duo’s previous work won’t want to miss it either, as there’s little that resembles what has come before.

V/A: Generation Bass Presents Transnational Dubstep (Six Degrees)

Fleck & Fish Finger: “Rude Profile” (Pan Agnostix flamenco-step version)

Featuring 15 world-infused dubstep tunes, Generation Bass Presents Transnational Dubstep is a journey around the globe as filtered through the pulsing beats and whirring, mechanical sounds of a dance subgenre that continues to flourish.  Compiled by the co-founders and editors of the dance-music blog Generation Bass, in conjunction with Six Degrees Records, it’s a continent-hopping collection of thumping grooves alongside sounds from India, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, South America, and more.

The majority of the tracks, at some point, adhere to the key dubstep directive – blown-out bass lines in triplets – but they often begin or build in very un-dubstep ways.  This is best experienced on tracks such as “Kaliyuga,” which takes a sweeping string melody – possibly from a sarangi – and coalesces it around, sitar, veena, tabla, and a dirty synth line before a wobbling bass line and hip-hop beats break it down.  It’s one of the comp’s best tracks and a great fusion between East and West.

Jono El Grande: Phantom Stimulance (Rune Grammofon)

Jono El Grande: "Borrelia Boogie"

Known musically as Jono El Grande, Norwegian guitarist/composer Jon Andreas Håtun uses his nom de plume to combine theatrical, progressive, classical, jazz, and absurdist styles for performance-art and dada-inspired live shows.  Though you’ll find this on his Wikipedia entry, his music might be best described as a mix between his confessed influences: Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, King Crimson, and Igor Stravinsky.

Following his outstanding and eclectic release Neo Dada in 2009, Jono has now released a collection of re-recorded stage songs and unreleased material.  It picks up where Neo Dada left oft, with fanciful, melodic meanderings that can sound like an acid-soaked version of countrymen Jaga Jazzist – only with strange, often nonsensical vocals in the mix.  Named Phantom Stimulance, the collection is a synchronized mélange of guitar, xylophone, harpsichord, organ, synthesizer, horns, singing saw, and more.

Buck 65: 20 Odd Years (Warner Music Canada)

Buck 65: "Who By Fire"

Last year, Canadian hip-hop artist Buck 65 released a series of digital mini-albums to commemorate 20 years of creating music.  Despite his recent connection to Warner Music, he’s always had an unusual and avant-garde style of rapping and lyricism, collaborating with a host of great artists with independent roots that include Sage Francis, Feist, Tanya Tagaq, Boom Bip, John Herndon of Tortoise, and more.

20 Odd Years is made in that daring, collaborative spirit, with a number of vocal and instrumental guests who take the music in copious directions.  Over the course of 13 tracks – four unreleased and the rest from the mini-albums – it moves through acoustic folk hop, piano-laced trip hop, synth rock, western cinematics, French pop, Eastern-tinged string melodies, and vocal balladry.  It’s often both dramatic and delicate – usually thanks the dynamic guest vocalists – but it also has a little fun, notably with a song about zombies. Ultimately, 20 Odd Years might be the best and most adventurous collection that Buck 65 has created.

Honorable Mentions

Abysmal Dawn: Leveling the Plane of Existence (Relapse)

Arthur's Landing: s/t (Strut)

Tommy Guerrero: Lifeboats and Follies (Galaxia)

Kotchy: Two (Done Right)

Fela Kuti: Vinyl Box Set 1, Compiled by ?uestlove of The Roots (Knitting Factory)

Noisear: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm (Relapse)

Rot in Hell: As Pearls Before Swine (Deathwish)

Seefeel: s/t (Warp)

Faun Fables: Light of a Vaster Dark (Drag City, 11/16/10)

Faun Fables: "Light of a Vaster Dark"

Morrow: Borne of principal songwriter Dawn McCarthy, Faun Fables is a powerful, somber, and multifaceted brand of neofolk songs and theatrical performance.  The group's works also are developed by co-conspirator Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and their breadth of instrumentation comes courtesy of assorted guests.

Light of a Vaster Dark is Faun Fables' first album in four-and-a-half years, and it again is led by the dynamic vocal interplay of McCarthy, Frykdahl, and others — blending elements of the 1950s/'60s American folk revival, medieval and Celtic music, and the catchall "psychedelic folk."

Though McCarthy's clear intonation and wavering vibratos are the real star, Frykdahl's backing vocals add a necessary baritone presence, and the album's range of sounds is just as vital.  Guitars, violin, flute, bass clarinet, autoharp, Theremin, and homemade instruments all offer different sonic flavors behind a vocal presence that can sound a little homogenous from time to time.

Hajduch: The whole flute/autoharp accompaniment and the melodrama of the vocals is maybe a little much, but the melodies are strong and the vocals are recorded extremely well.  The melodies remind me more than a little of Ulver's classic Kveldssanger — both use rock tonalities and circular, chanting structures in a similar approach to folk.  Faun Fables also uses these elements towards a proggier, more melodramatic end — "Housekeeper" returns to a chorus a few times, but over its six minutes, it diverts its attention to other ideas as it sees fit.

The album is at its most interesting when it gets furthest from the "freak folk" mantle.  The harmonica of "Parade" and the clanging drone of "Bells for Ura" make for a nice break from some of the longer-form folk-prog pieces.  The album is also broken up with several instrumental interludes, which help to pace an album that would otherwise feel relentless.  If you like long-form, intricately orchestrated, progressive, unfolding folk tunes that may lay it on a little thick at times, then this is arguably too much of a good thing.

Morrow: Indeed.  It's not for everyone, but if you already love forceful, harmonized folk vocals a la Charming Hostess and Jewlia Eisenberg, you'll love Faun Fables.  The Sleepytime fan in me would love to hear more of Frykdahl's vocals, but his support role works well as it is, and he's already credited as the second of the band's two composers.  I feel like this was a little overlooked (at least by me) as it was released in advance of the holiday season, so be sure to check it out if you missed it too.

Many children dream of running off and joining the circus, but only a few brave souls pursue fire eating and tightrope walking as adults. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum has done something even wilder: it has invented its own freak show, something more bizarre and beautiful than any clown-filled big-top.

The fearless five-piece performs one musical stunt after another, bleeding into performance-art territory as it carves genres such as metal, prog, and avant rock into strange new shapes. But this is no novelty act: the group has some substantial — even shocking — things to say about the nature of human life and 21st Century culture.

Most recently, Sleepytime has explored the theme of human extinction, which it began to dissect on its 2004 LP, Of Natural History. Described as a debate between Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, the album seems to boil down to a central question, phrased as a song title: "What shall we do without us?" This question leads to another too: "What might those last days be like?"
 

"I realized pretty quickly that one of the most direct ways to have a unique, original sound is to play instruments no one else is playing."

The group's Fall 2005 tour provided a few answers via Shinichi Iova-Koga, a movement artist who specializes in Butoh, an avant-garde dance form that grew out of student riots and cultural taboos in 1950s Japan. After hanging beneath a sheet, upside down, for the first half of each Sleepytime show, he would emerge as "The Last Human Being," painted head to toe in white, writhing like a demon-possessed corpse as his shadows danced upon the wall.

These days, the band — clad in tattered tutus, bad-ass boots, and braids — provides a soundtrack for these eerie encounters whether or not Iova-Koga is part of the act. But to take a closer look at this theme of extinction, Sleepytime will soon release a short film called The Last Human Being that explores Iova-Koga’s character while presenting a few new songs.

"During the [2005 tour], we would talk about the human being and what had happened to them, how they used to be all over the place," says Nils Frykdahl, Sleepytime's guitar- and flute-playing vocalist. "The film takes that idea even further. It looks like that 1970s TV show In Search of… where Leonard Nimoy was the host and would 'investigate' something. We have actors playing a panel of scientists on a talk show. The human is the mysterious creature being 'investigated.' It's fairly comic at its roots."

Frykdahl says that the film and its music were also inspired, in part, by the story of Ishi, the last of California's indigenous Yana people. After crossing paths with a group of cattle butchers in 1911, Ishi was quickly put on display at the University of California-Berkeley's Museum of Anthropology. Though Ishi helped scholars learn about his tribe's rapidly dying customs and language, he also functioned much like a circus attraction, entertaining guests by making crafts and arrowheads.

"He's this touching, tragic character," Frykdahl says. "His life went from a tribal world that was decimated, where he'd seen only a few dozen humans in his entire life and survived, in isolation, in very rough terrain, to suddenly being exposed to Ocean Beach, with thousands of people. He probably stood there with his mouth open, shocked that there were so many human beings in the world."

Sleepytime taps into this sense of wonder mixed with horror in many of its songs, especially newer offerings like "Salamander." A mix of apocalyptic sonics — machine-gun drumming, theatrical vocals, commanding rhythms, and loads of distortion — illustrates the struggle to survive in a hostile environment while the band’s absurdist humor seems to mirror the cosmos, laughing at each tiny creature's fragile existence.

A few tracks from past albums may find their way onto the film's soundtrack as well. One possibility is "Phthisis," a song from Of Natural History that imbues Sleepytime's live act with the essence of an ancient death rite. Beginning with a dose of wailing vocals and metaphorical lyrics from violinist Carla Kihlstedt, the song descends into a primordial ooze of passionate melodies and precise, pounding rhythms. And it's one of the group's more straightforward compositions.

Another contender is "The Greenless Wreath," from the band’s 2007 release, In Glorious Times. Frykdahl's voice scrapes and scratches like Tom Waits' as custom-made instruments create a jungle of futuristic sounds. Built by bassist Dan Rathbun, these instruments create a new lexicon of sounds with which the band can communicate its vision. (Examples include the Pedal-Action Wiggler, a pedal-powered version of the Brazilian berimbau, and the Electric Pancreas, a set of thin metal slices that make a crunching sound when whacked with a stick.)

Then there's a metal spring, inspired by the one that Einstürzende Neubauten plays in "Selbstportrait mit Kater." Sleepytime uses it as a percussive instrument and a zany stage prop, along with a bicycle wheel, a kitchen sink, and other found objects.

"Bands like Einstürzende Neubauten — just the number of different things they would make into instruments is inspiring," Rathbun says. "I realized pretty quickly that one of the most direct ways to have a unique, original sound is to play instruments no one else is playing."

Frykdahl admits that it's hard for the band to stick to simple musical concepts — or traditional instrumentation — in its recordings because it has mastered so many daring feats onstage. "Our natural tendency as composers is to fill the space with notes and harmony and melody, which means not leaving room for listening to the noise," he says. "What we often wish we could do is make beautiful, simple music with a focus on the sound itself, but we like playing notes too much to do that. It seems like the people who do that best are non-musicians who don't really practice their instruments."

In other words, Sleepytime isn't just another prog band with death-metal growls and guitars; it’s an ensemble of classical musicians making high art from unconventional sources. Frykdahl is more likely to gush about modern classical greats Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti than experimental contemporaries Meshuggah and Melt-Banana — when he's not wrapped up in fairy tales, that is.

Frykdahl, his baby daughter, and Dawn McCarthy—his wife and bandmate in psych-folk project Faun Fables — recently traveled to Idyllwild, California to take in the scenery and make a "fairy-tale rock musical" with a bunch of high-school musicians. Like The Last Human Being, it's a tale of being left behind. It's also the perfect story for a tiny hamlet that’s mile high in mountains.

"We arrived with the idea of doing something with the Pied Piper story, where there's a town that's infested with rats and the piper leads the rats away," Frykdahl says. "When the town doesn't pay the piper, he leads all the children away too, except for this one kid who has a bad foot. That kid doesn't reach the mountains with the other kids, so he spends his life haunted by what he missed. So, of course, we decided to focus on him."

The updated fable begins 30 years later than the original, with the bum-footed kid as town mayor. One day, his childhood playmates begin to reappear, as young as the day that they left. Pretty soon the village is filled with orphans, and he must decide what to do with them. According to Frykdahl, using lots of orphan characters makes for lots of acting roles, which allows all of the kids to play themselves—or wilder, more mythical versions of themselves—as they write original songs for the project.

"Right now, we're madly finishing up parts they can sight-read on French horn and cello, and we may need to do a polyrhythms workshop," he says, swept up in a flurry of creativity. "But hey, we get to indulge our obsession with fairy tales and mythology, which is really where it all started for us as performers—with cool stories."

The first time that Ben Goldberg heard a clarinet being played, he was struck by an unfathomable quality that he still hears to this day, even after spending decades playing the instrument. “I don’t know if other people hear it this way,” he says, “but to me, a clarinet has no end. It’s like it just disappears into…”

Goldberg trails off as he attempts to find words to describe the sensation that the sound of a clarinet gives him.

“It’s very deep,” he continues. “It has no bottom to it. And it always strikes me this way, no matter who’s playing it: that there’s something down in there that you just can’t reach. When you find something like that, you just start wandering towards it.”

"I realized that I had come up in a world where there was an axe to grind. That was an essential part of New Klezmer Trio: ‘God damn it, we can do this in an avant-garde way; watch this!’"

One of the principal forerunners of a musical movement that John Zorn dubbed “radical Jewish culture,” Goldberg blazed a new trail in the late ’80s by blending traditional Jewish folk music with avant-garde jazz, and he also has found new shades of expression for the clarinet in a jazz and experimental context. When he founded the New Klezmer Trio in Berkeley, California in 1987, Goldberg experienced what he refers to as the “musical big bang” of his career.

Ben Goldberg Quartet / John Zorn: Baal

At that time, Goldberg had already studied klezmer music for years in college and was heavily steeped in its tradition thanks to a rigorous itinerary of bar mitzvahs, weddings, and various social events. “I honed my style,” he laughs, “playing a thousand bar mitzvahs.”

Those types of gigs, Goldberg soon discovered, came with a hefty reward of instant social approval. “My choice to study it definitely had something to do with identity,” he explains. “Plus, you get a lot of praise. If you’re Jewish and you start playing klezmer at weddings, it’s like you’re an automatically esteemed member of the Jewish cognoscenti or something! They really treat you that way, like, ‘You’re doing such a good thing for the Jewish people.’ And that pleased me.”

But, despite the cultural affinity, Goldberg started to feel an acute sense of disconnection — a kind of generation gap, if you will — between klezmer’s old-world underpinnings and his own life experience. “Sounding authentic was beginning to feel pretty inauthentic to me,” he writes in his essay "New Klezmer Trio and the Origins of 'Radical Jewish Culture.' "

A lifelong jazz aficionado, Goldberg wondered why klezmer hadn’t evolved and branched out into a variety of modern permutations along the same lines as jazz had — and he wondered how it still could. Simultaneously, Goldberg wanted to use the clarinet as a vehicle for jazz. (If it’s a mystery as to why klezmer, itself a vibrant polyglot fusion of music from several different parts of the world, hadn’t continued to develop once it was transplanted into an American setting, it is perhaps an even more compelling mystery that the clarinet still hasn’t achieved the same visibility in jazz as, say, the saxophone or trumpet.)

So, after reaching a high degree of fluency brought on by year after year of intensive practice and analysis, he set about looking for ways to reinterpret Jewish folk music so that it might sound truer to himself and speak to contemporary sensibilities. One of his solutions was to apply the improvisation of jazz to klezmer’s heavily codified rules and parameters. Another was to, in a sense, crack the music open by attempting to dig deeper into the rich bedrock of Eastern European rhythms and uncover an essence that could be used as a living musical style.

Tin Hat: Foreign Legion

Revisiting how he felt back then, Goldberg wonders aloud: “Why is it that very few musical traditions are consciously involved with the idea of evolution?” It’s a rhetorical question, but Goldberg is less concerned with finding the answer these days, and he no longer feels as pressed to invent new languages as he once did. In a poetic twist to a career that spans work with individualist visionaries like John Zorn, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, and Trevor Dunn as well as several of his own groups, Goldberg became a full-fledged member of Tin Hat in 2005.

The brainchild of violinist Carla Kihlstedt (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, 2 Foot Yard) and guitarist Mark Orton, Tin Hat (originally named Tin Hat Trio before the group reconfigured with the inclusion of Goldberg) weaves together chamber music, jazz, Gypsy folk, experimentalism, and pop into a sound that gives Goldberg room to feel at ease, at least in terms of the ethical considerations of his creative decisions. In a sense, Tin Hat, which released its live album, Foreign Legion, this spring on Goldberg’s own label (BAG Production), represents the fruit of all the time that Goldberg spent questioning the integrity of his innovations.

“In some ways,” Goldberg muses, “Tin Hat fits like an old glove. But when I first started playing with them as a guest in 1997, there’s something that really impressed me about them and, at first, even confused me a little bit: they didn’t have an axe to grind. I’m a little bit older than those guys, and when I first started playing with them, they really showed me something. I realized that I had come up in a world where there was an axe to grind. That was an essential part of New Klezmer Trio: ‘God damn it, we can do this in an avant-garde way; watch this!’ There was a sense of ‘look out, everybody, we’re really going to fuck with this song.’

"Mark and Carla were another generation. They just found the beauty in all this different music — whether it was avant garde, traditional, this style or that style. If you listen to ‘Waltz of the Skyscraper’ on the live record, it starts off as a waltz. And then all kinds of strange things start happening and it turns into — I don’t know what you’d describe it as — new music or free improvisation or a free-for-all, but it sounds like all those things are what belong there. It doesn’t at all sound polemical. In a way, it’s taking the next step. It’s saying, ‘Look, these musical ingredients that seemed antithetical to each other can live together happily!’ But it’s no less a concerted and well-considered and brave musical statement to make that step. Different generations have to take different steps.”

Ben Goldberg: Go Home

Goldberg stresses, however, that Tin Hat’s uncanny ability to craft accessible music out of what are often presented as highbrow forms belies the group’s musical sophistication and depth.

“It totally kicked my ass joining that band,” he says. “They have a very high standard of composition. In their world, it’s not just the idea of writing a tune. Partly because of the instrumentation — there’s no drummer or bass player — the emphasis is on compositional thoroughness. And I feel like my own ability to write had to be stepped up a notch or two. That had a huge effect on me — the way that I think about what a song is, and also orchestration, form, what’s required, and what a piece of music can be.”

In addition to the new Tin Hat live album (which consists of performances from 2005 and 2008), Goldberg also recently released an album as a leader, Go Home, again on his BAG Production imprint. Go Home features guitarist Charlie Hunter and showcases Goldberg in a decidedly more groove-oriented setting. Despite the fact that it has the word “home” in the title, the album represents anything but a final destination or resting place for Goldberg’s art.

Go Home follows 2009 release Speech Communication, a new album on Zorn’s Tzadik label from a reactivated New Klezmer Trio. Yet having let go of the “mission” that New Klezmer Trio once represented for him, Goldberg feels free to venture well outside the very paradigm that he helped create. And as he continues to cover more disparate territory, Goldberg is proving himself to be a rare musician — one who hits a comfort zone while simultaneously stoking his inspiration.