with the moon on their wings

In 2010 my year-end favorites list was quickly appended with four additional picks – such is the silliness we engage in when listing towards one or another of the glut of each year’s releases. With a self-limiting top ten we add a few more (the ancillary approach); with a top 25, or so, we become so expansive as to become, as Keith Rowe would have it, promiscuous. Or we adopt the strategy of compulsive list-makers such as The Wire, spreading our taxonomies into wafer-thin sub-genres (Outer Limits – really?).  

Last year I opted out; this year I include  a clutch that reveal a very significant dynamic range and an apparent list towards composition. I enjoy posting, as I seldom do when writing about music, the album art. Curious, I counted the number of musicians who appear on both my 2010 and 2012 lists (eight). There is no ranking intended within the three sections; however, the sections represent my favorite releases in descending order.

As has been my rule since launching crow, these lists extend the principle, as Shamrayev says in The Seagulls, de gustibus aut bene, aut nihi (let nothing be said of taste but what is good). Here is a necessairly partial list of the good of 2012:

Michael Pisaro/Toshiya Tsunoda Crosshatches

Antoine Beuger/Barry Chabala/Dominic Lash/Ben Owen s’approcher s’eloigner s’absenter

Keith Rowe September 

Various Artists Wandelweiser undt so weiter 

Davies/Lazaridou-Chatzigoga/Mukarji outwash 

Vanessa Rossetto Exotic Exit 

Jason Lescalleet Songs About Nothing 

Mike Shiflet The Choir, The Army / Sufferers / Merciless

  
Mites (Grisha Shaknes) Passing Resemblance

Nathan McLaughlin Echolocation #4 / Echolocation #6

And… 

Lucio Capece / Radu Malfatti explorational 

Will Guthrie Sticks, Stones & Breaking Bones

Cyril Bondy / Phonotopy (Yann Leguay)  Komatsu 

Andrew Lafkas Making Words 

Prayer (Joe Houpert) First Species / Second Species 
 

Jason Soliday Nonagon Knives 

Greg Kelley / Olivia Block Resolution

Skogen (with Angharad Davies and Toshimaru Nakamura) 1st gefallen in den Schnee

Fergus Kelly A Congregation of Vapours

Ferran Fages  For Pau Torres / Radi d’or versio per a ensemble / pluie fine (Cremaster with Angharad Davies)

Jakob Ulmann Fremde Zeit Addendum

Archives

Morton Feldman Crippled Symmetry (Eberhard Blum / Jan Williams / Nils Vigeland)

Eliane Radigue Feedback Works 1969-1970

wild geese that fly /with the moon on their wings / these are a few of my favorite things 
Rodgers & Hammerstein, 1959