Date: 1988
Release: EMI/Parlophone4
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Spirit of Eden’s potently eerie but beautiful aural textures is worlds apart from the bubbly synth-pop hits—”It’s My Life” and “Talk Talk”—that typified Talk Talk’s early-’80s new wave sound. After scoring a bestseller in 1986′s The Colour of Spring, EMI gave the band (Hollis, Friese-Greene, Webb, and Harris) a hefty recording budget for their next effort. Moving into an abandoned church, Talk Talk embarked on a lengthy 14-month recording session. When the group finally delivered Spirit of Eden, EMI execs—who had been refused advance access to the recordings—were shocked: The album’s classical and freeform jazz influences and art-rock leanings broke from traditional pop expectations, resulting in something utterly uncategorizable!

This record label nightmare elicited nary a commercial whimper, but quickly garnered huge critical accolades, nevertheless. Even more than a decade after the album’s release, the organic, often stark, arrangements decorated by singer Mark Hollis’ nasal and hauntingly plaintive vocals still command immediate attention.

Listed as individual tracks, “The Rainbow,” “Eden,” “Desire” are really three parts to a single brooding 23-minute piece reminiscent of the more melancholy sections on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. As “The Rainbow” and “Eden” unfold as contemplative lilts with moments of soft atonality, “Desire” percolates to an aggressive and percussive climax.

Fans of late-’90s electronic music also take note: Spirit of Eden’s transcendent ambience practically paved the way for later innovators such as Massive Attack, making this a truly forward-thinking album.

Date: 2001
Release: FatCat #A1-2
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Life is a journey. Sigur Ros’ second album, Agaetis Byrjun (“Good Start”), provides the mystical soundtrack for that journey. Having heard about the album but at the time unreleased in the United States, I found Agaetis Byrjun in Edinburgh at the Scottish independent music store, Fopp. The search for the album was well worth the effort. The experience the album provides is complete, whether observed in an ancient cathedral, coaxed as a lullaby, or played on a train ride across the Scottish plains. The sound defies simple classification. Neither rock nor pop, Agaetis Byrjun creates sensation and longing without the usual tools of universal lyrics and chords. The music flows over and around the body, as if simultaneously lifting and pressing its vibrations against the skin. With its Icelandic lyrics (and no current translations) and invented words, Agaetis Byrjun directs the mind into the mind’s own interpretation and emotions, not dictating, but gently guiding with powerful vocals and sounds. The music envelopes. The eerie, unintelligible words may lack in concrete definitions, yet they surge with meaning.

The Icelandic quintet, comprised of vocalist and guitarist Jon Thor Birgisson, bassist Georg Holm, keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, and drummer Orris Pall Dyrason, add flutes, stringed instruments, horns and the accordion into their music. The sound is eclectic and unique. The varied instruments become delicately layered, supporting one another as if musical sections in a symphony. At times, the instruments drastically increase or decrease in tempo, speeding or slowing the songs. The change in tempo influences the feeling and emotions produced by the track.

And like a symphony, the songs often undergo multiple highs and lows within the individual track, with “sections” of the instruments emerging and disappearing to create these changes. To effectively incorporate these highs and lows, the tracks are often twice as long as typical pop songs. “Ny Batteri,” at a length of over seven minutes, serves as an example. Opening slowly with guitar, vocals, and distant horns, the track has three major crescendos, where the drums enter and the horns and guitars increase in loudness. The first crescendo only begins at approximately four minutes into the song. Sigur Ros often toy with the instruments’ sounds, adding an even more unique element to their music. The guitars play like violins and the drums like cymbals. Birgisson forgoes plucking his strings by using a bow, distorting and elongating the notes.

Birgisson’s voice eludes gender. His vocals morph from mermaid to whale to bird to child. In “Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa,” Birgission sounds as if he is singing through the rain, muffled by his own predicament. His voice emerges as an instrument, moving the songs in new directions. Sigur Ros also use background choir-like vocals to support the song’s climaxes.

Sigur Ros create, through the music on Agaetis Byrjun, an innovative and distinct sound by combining once distant elements. While the album may not be mass marketable or radio friendly, the album’s power will likely influence the direction of rock music. Just as a symphony permits the audience members to emerge from the experience with their own personal experience, Agaetis Byrjun encourages the listener to make the music his/her own personal soundtrack.

Date: 1987
Release: VIRGIN 90677-2
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In modern recorded music there has always been a section of sheer pop marketed to the masses. Every year we are shown beautiful faces that are soon lost in next years’ tide of the new. While some of the music might be catchy, it’s sadly just a part of a wider culture based on surface sheen. Only a handful of individuals born of this world have been able to break away and redefine themselves as true artists, listening only to their muse instead of the bottom line or the fashion of the times.

In 1982, British tabloids ran headlines featuring David Sylvian as “the most beautiful man in all of Britain.” A scant 5 years later, he would alienate the fans he had gained as the lead singer of the glam/early electronic band Japan. He was to do so by creating a work that was only about music, only about lyrics with such depth, complexity, and texture, that it remains a complete ‘must hear.’

Secrets of the Beehive is an album unlike any before or since. The album features string arrangements and piano by Ryuichi Sakamoto, guitar work by David Torn, and flugelhorn and trumpet played by Mark Isham. Sylvian assembled his band in the same tradition of Miles Davis, allowing his collaborators to color and shape his work without allowing his own voice to be overwhelmed.

The lyrics are nothing less than breathtaking—a combination of dark, brooding, and redemptive, all sung in a whisper, deep and resonant in a quality unlike anything in Western music. The stand out single from the album, Orpheus, may be the most powerful thing to come from the British Isles since Nick Drake’s Northern Sky. With packaging by 4AD hallmark Vaughn Oliver and photography by Nigel Grierson, the whole thing is quite an object d’art as well. It’s the perfect album for an overcast day inside.

Date: February 1998
Release: Sony #67909
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Bill Laswell, a controversial maverick in the “remix scene”, stirs into his musical caldron the work of Miles Davis, concocting a new and fresh brew: Panthalassa. Laswell’s remix project judiciously employs state of the art studio technology to expand the radical break from the traditional jazz cannon that Miles spearheaded during his electric years between 1969 and 1974. Laswell interprets music from In A Silent Way, On The Corner, and Get Up With It to shape a dreamlike mosaic of Davis’ trumpet sweeping through Laswell’s ambiant soundscapes.

On this miraculous trip to Planet Miles, all ears are mesmerized by the opening fusion of “In A Silent Way,” “Shhh/Peacefu,” and “It’s About That Time.” Here, Laswell creates an ethereal setting for Davis’ gorgeous trumpet work, which blankets the sensous harmonic changes eminating from John McLaughlin’s guitar and the multi-keyboard accompaniment of Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, and Chick Corea. “Black Satin” kicks off with a funky Indian tabla groove, punctuated by rapid-fire trumpet blasts, vodoo guitar stylings, and bass lines which barrel over an ever evolving funk and R&B core.

On“He Loved Him Madly,” a dirge-like tune dedicated to Duke Ellington (off of Get Up With It), the music unfolds like a haunting meditatition, overflowing with emotive flute and trumpet melodies and throbbing bass tones. What Laswell artfully accomplishes in Panthalassa is a compelling sonic fusion of Miles gems with vibrant contemporary undercurrents. The presence and personality of these two musical innovators makes Panthalassa a needed addition to any respectable Miles collection.

Date: 1978
Release: Point #536847
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It’s August 18, 1969, and Jimi Hendrix takes the stage playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. In doing so, he puts the entire tenor of his times through his guitar. You can hear it: Vietnam. Civil rights. Riots. People dying in the streets. People dying in a far off land. Now compare this to a performance of the Boston Pops done that same year for the Fourth of July. It’s the same song, right? So why do we remember the Woodstock performance and not the Boston Pops? It is because music moved on. It moved beyond the sheer recitation of notes on a page into intangible qualities of texture. Through distortion, chorus, flanging, and a myriad of other guitar tricks, you had for the first time in music, synthetic sounds that directly approximated natural ones.

As legend has it, in 1975 two things hit Brian Eno. First, he was actually struck by a car, spending most of the year immobilized. Second, while laying in bed to recuperate from his injuries, he asked a female visitor to put on a record of 17th century harp music. The only thing was she didn’t turn up the volume before she left. So he lay there trapped in bed, a captive listener, able to hear only the loudest notes above the rain outside his window. He began to slowly surrender to the sounds, yielding the second catharsis of that year, an experience from which he would give birth to modern ambient music.

Up until the advent of the full-length LP, music was experienced live or through technologically limited recordings. Recorded songs tended to be excessively short, only around 2-3 minutes in length. With the birth of the record, Eno and his contemporaries were able to record longer and wider ranging pieces of music. His work had already taken great inspiration from the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and the Amundsen of modern composing, John Cage.

It was Cage’s “4’33″ that made listeners for the first time truly hear the world around a performance. In the song, a lone piano player sat silently in front of a piano, proceeding only to close the cover and sit motionless for a full four minutes and 33 seconds. This revolutionary act of music led people to finally become aware of the world of sound around them. The breathing of the person next to them. The blood rushing through their bodies or the pounding in their head. The hum of the air conditioning or the electric lights. A siren fading in the distance.

Drawing upon all of these experiences, Brian Eno recorded Music for Airports in 1978.

A word about the title. Eno wrote the piece to play on a cultural and physical place. Airports are the modern point of departure and they are places where reunions occur and separations begin as people move back and forth. Airports are also places of duty-free commerce, blaring announcements, boredom and tension. So he took all of this into considerations: a work that would reassure people who might possibly be flying to their fiery death, that would give a spirit of hope and trepidation and calm all mixed together.

Originally written for the LP record, it is broken up into pieces titled 1/1, 2/1, 1/2, and 2/2. The second number reflecting what side of the original LP that it was on. Like Cage before him, Eno played with the listener’s awareness of their surroundings by not only increasing the space within each of the pieces, but also extending the length between the sections to an exaggerated level. Unsure of when pieces stopped or started it allowed the listener to go further into this immersive sound world.

For Eno, ambient music (as he was to call it) was simultaneously able to engage the listener at louder volumes with depth and complexity but as well could be brought down to the level of color, tint, or texture to an environment. A painting in a room is always there. You walk by it everyday. It colors the room. Sometimes though you notice that color here in the corner. You notice this part of the picture. You notice that hue and then you go on with your day. Ambient music could be like this. For what it was, was the next step in the development of contemporary music it was music whose sole basis was texture. If melody, rhythm, harmony, or lyric got in the way of this then it wasn’t necessary.

In the first section 1:1, Robert Wyatt’s piano plays a simple line against itself repetitively this is counter-balanced by other instruments playing their own points untethered to the lead melody.

In 2’1, Eno begin to play with repetition allowing a series of independent short vocal phrases to mix together at different points. No second of the piece is like any other and you are left with a memory of what the piece is like, not what it is. Lines combine together and fall apart like ice crystals moving on water.

1’2 is a more pastoral piece building on the components of both 1’1 and 2’1. The vocal lines are here again independent glancing off of each other as well as the motile lines of the piano similar to the work in 1’1. Excellent to listen to while reading about the South Pole.

The last piece 2’2, is entirely comprised of synthesized tones. A mix of melancholy and hopeful tones reminiscent of the best aspects of acoustic instruments, the vibrato of strings, the bussing clarity of a horn are all hear at the same time. The sounds of driving back from visiting a long lost parent.

It’s tough to write about this album. It’s an album about listening. It’s an album about hearing. And to that end you are going to have to pick up the album that has influenced everything that has come after it.

Listen to it the night your child goes off to college, filled with that same sense and trepidation. Listen to it in the waiting room of a hospital for news of a loved one. And yes listen to it in the terminals of LAX, Heathrow, or Keflavik….

Date: March 23, 1999
Release: Motel Records #3
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Bombay the Hard Way plays like the soundtrack to some imaginary 1970s B-films with names like Shaft’s Bad-Ass Pilgrimage To India or Ganges Ghetto Payback. Featuring the music of Indian composers (and brothers) Anandji and Kalyanji Shah, who wrote and produced soundtracks for the so-called “Brownsploitation” films made in India’s “Bollywood” during the 60s and 70s, this saffron-funk project is the brain-child of Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, Bay Area producer / remixer of Dr. Octagon fame, with additional beats provided by the immensely talented DJ Shadow. The end product is a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation.

While this East meets West mixture is incredibly funky, there are few innovations or surprises within. Beyond the sweeping and intense orchestrations of the opening track, “Bombay 405 Miles,” the album tends to value mood and groove over tunes.

That said, there are still some particularly strong standouts. “The Good, The Bad, And The Chutney” and “Inspector Jay From Dehli” are mysterious Spy-thriller grooves, loaded with sitars, spacey synths, orchestral breaks, and DJ Shadow‘s laid back beats. Like much of the album, these two songs are heavily spiced Indian approximations of the cinematic funk found on Blaxploitation soundtracks by Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Willie Hutch.

“Professor Pyarelal” is a deliciously slow Barry White-styled groove that blends funky flute, bass, and drums with atmospheric synthesizer and jazz piano. The album’s only song with lyrics, “Ganges A Go-Go,” features a sound straight out of the Indian quarter of London’s “swinging 60s” scene. Over a driving Go-Go beat and Eastern-flavored horn arrangements, a handful of male and female singers (with cute Indian accents) belt out the lines,

“I got no time to think / Cuz’ I need somebody to love / Yeah! / Baby, I love you so / But you can’t love me more / Why don’t you hold me closer / And I’ll give you more / Yeah!”

With lyrics like that, this song is destined to wind up on one of my more kitchy MustHear.com mixes. Throughout the album, there are fun snatches of dialogue lifted straight out of vintage “brownsploitation” films. These digressions add to the overall enjoyment, helping to make Bombay the Hard Way a classic party record for the new millennium.

Date: 1975
Release: A&M/Horizon #0809
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“In France, and maybe the rest of the world, I am not considered like a real hip-hop DJ–and I don’t want to be considered a real hip-hop DJ, because I love so many different styles of music. My way of working came from the hip-hop, but I try to expand it.”

– DJ Cam

The number of people who ought to concern themselves with the musical innovations of DJ Cam runs into the millions. A former Parisian graffiti artist, Laurent Daumail (aka DJ Cam) has released several undeniably hip-hop records that radically rewrite the rules of the genre. Neglected in his native France, audiences in the US, UK, and Japan have embraced his envelope pushing style of downbeat hip-hop, helping to amplify the global impact of such kindred artists as DJ Shadow and DJ Krush.

An avowed enemy of the synthesizer, DJ Cam crafts his complex music with the barest of tools: a couple turntables, a sampler, and a mixer. Far removed from any hip-hop on the charts, his laid-back sound seamlessly blends obscure and familiar basement samples with thick bass lines, tricked-up scratching, and imaginative breaks.

While steeped in the classic hip-hop sounds of the mid-80s (think Public Enemy), DJ Cam‘s sprawling style encompasses a range of musical influences that goes far beyond his core hip-hop roots. His greatest talent lies in his ability to fuse hip-hop with such diverse genres as jazz, jungle, dub, funk, and orchestral scores–and to do so often within a single song.

Although always mixing many influences into his musical palette, it is heavy strains of old-school jazz that define the instrumentals found on DJ Cam‘s 1996 release, Substances. Previously unreleased in America, this fantastically mellow record plunders the jazz vaults for stirring samples from such artists as John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry and others. An engrossing and often beautiful set of songs, Substances is, as Cam explains, “an ambient album, something for the home.”

The album opens with a brief but punchy hip-hop intro–a pledge of allegiance of sorts–explicitly framing the musical explorations that follow in a hip-hop context. Turntable scratching opens the next track, “Friends And Enemies,” before gently giving way to Coltrane riffs, pitched down beats, eerie strings, and spoken words by Malcolm X. After a brief jazz-sampled interlude entitled “Essences,” the mood heads East on “Meera,” a hypnotic song where arabic rhythms and atmospheric drone instruments are bent and twisted around the spiritual voicings of Kakoli Sengupta. The obscure avant funk groove of Don Cherry’s Brown Rice finds a new home as the core sample in “Sound System Children,” an up front track with plenty of drive, while the opening theme to the film “Interview With the Vampire” is extracted to form the basis of the album’s most epic downtempo track, “Twilight Zone.” “Outro” closes out the record with a book-end slice of abstract hip-hop.

A lush journey into an alternate universe of hip-hop, Substances is a groundbreaking record that reveals the infinite possibilities in music. Like all musical innovators, DJ Cam‘s strikingly individual brand of music fails to fit inside any rigid definitions, and he just might have to wait for the unknowing millions to catch on.