Here’s the final installment of my picks for top reissued albums of 2009.  Enjoy & have a great 2010!

3) Eliane Radigue “Vice Versa”/”Triptych”

I love drone.  I love the complexity masquerading as simplicity.  I love the physicality of a live drone performance, the ethereal purr of sine wave massaging my entire body.  I love how the monotony becomes hypnotic and meditative, to the point that I can forget where I am or that I’m even listening to a piece of music.  I love where the drone takes me.

Eliane Radigue, born in Paris in 1932, was a drone pioneer.  A wife and mother of three, Radigue studied piano and composing at an early age, and became enraptured with minimalist music after hearing a radio broadcast of musique concrete by Pierre Schaeffer in the early 1950s, who later became her mentor.  Despite her studies and studio work in the 1960s, she did not start her own career until the 1970’s, with minimalist explorations utilizing tape loops and Arp synthesizers.

Radigue’s work has influenced artists as diverse as Greg Davis and Stephen O’Malley of doom metal band Sunn O))), yet prior to the late 90s, she only had a handful of physical releases, most of which were in very limited runs.  Her popularity amongst fans of experimental music grew quickly when the wonderful Table of the Elements record label released her Adnos trilogy, consisting of three long-form, perfect drone pieces, and soon her new fans were clamoring more.

It takes a special label to take on a major and important drone release.  While fans of drone have increased exponentially over the past decade (possibly because post-rock and doom drone bands have made minimalism hip again), there is still not a large audience for such a release.  At the same time, work like Radigue’s rivals some of the best of minimalist art, so it would be a shame to see one of her masterpieces released on CD-R with a poorly designed cover, while even the worst of Frank Stella’s paintings still hang on international gallery walls and command millions at auction.

The special label that took up the job was, quite fittingly, Important Records, a label known for quality control in all senses of the word.  Important released two of Radigue’s masterworks this year, “Vice Versa, etc.” and “Triptych”, and presented the pieces with the utmost respect, including extensive liner notes and elegant, minimalist cover art befitting the music itself.

“Vice Versa, etc.”, the earlier of the two works, was originally recorded in 1970 and was composed only of tape loop feedback.  While the album was distributed upon its initial recording, only ten hand-numbered and signed magnetic tape copies were created, along with instructions to the listener on how to listen to the pieces.  The options included one at a time, both at the same time, forwards or backwards and at various speeds.  While the CD medium of the reissue makes such experimental listening difficult, Important did include two discs in this release: the first of the three tracks played forward, and the second with them in reverse.   You can always rip the CDs to a digital format and experiment with speed variations as well.  It is quite the interactive listening experience.

“Triptych” was recorded in 1978, when Radigue’s instrument of choice changed from the tape loop to the Arp 2500 analog synthesizer. A return to music after a brief immersion in Tibetan Buddhism and meditation, “Triptych” is truly a sonic meditation in itself, with an enhanced focus on subtlety and masterful patience.  If you’re new to Radigue (or drone in general), I highly recommend “Triptych” as a jumping-off point.

2) Oneohtrix Point Never, “Betrayed in the Octagon”

I’m a firm believer in the connections between dualities.  Not because I’m a New Age mystic/Eastern philosophies type (far from it actually), but because it’s just an incredibly obvious part of everyday life.  Love and hate are connected simply by being a dichotomy of strong emotion– just ask the hands of Radio Raheem.  How many times have you met somebody that just irritates you so much that you just can’t stop talking about them? And then soon the anger turns to intrigue, and then understanding, and soon they’re your best friend.

The same thing happened to me when I first heard Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Betrayed in the Octagon”.  While I was immediately drawn to the darker ambient tracks on the album, I was immediately repelled by tracks like “Behind the Bank”.  See, I was born in the 1980s, and all of the bad music and art that came out of that period.  To me, “Behind the Bank” sounded like the generic keyboard kitsch that was used as background music on the Preview Guide channel.  I had spent most of the 90s trying to surround myself with high art: Bergman films, Rothko paintings, and John Cage compositions.  While I loved and respected pop artists like Warhol and, to a lesser degree, later post-modern artists, I never was able to believe that they actually liked the works that they were using in their pastiche.  It was all ironic, tongue-in-cheek; there’s no way that this work could be paying homage, only putting up a mirror to reflect the ugliness of modern consumerist society.

What bothered me most about “Behind the Bank” was that the tongue was nowhere near the cheek.  This seemed like a true love letter to the sounds of early 80s elevator muzak, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese of music.  How could anyone want to pay tribute to such garbage and waste obvious talent by playing and recording it?  Why would anyone want to listen to it?

Stewing in my distaste, I couldn’t get the song out of my head, with its clichéd synth tones and pitch bends.  Sure there was a elegance to the composition, and an emotional pull.  But that wasn’t what kept it coming back into my mind like déjà vu, a long forgotten collective memory.  It was the fact that it was a collective memory, at least for those of us who grew up in the 80s.  It was a reclaiming of the things that defined us as children, all of the things that we were taught were low and base and garbage and deserved only to be forgotten in a forced amnesia.  John Carpenter movie soundtracks and public access TV shows on VHS and Atari 2600 and hot pink and synth pop.  These were all supposed to be embarrassments, a blip in the timeline of technology and culture than needed to be forgotten and moved past.

“Behind the Bank” was quite simply a rebellion against such mindsets, and a reclamation of our shared cultural history.  It was ok to admit that we had a soft spot for these sounds, because these were the sounds that raised us.  They were a part of us, and saying that we hated them amounted in a way to saying that we hated ourselves.  Once I accepted this fact, “Behind the Bank” became a revelation to me, an opportunity to look back on a time in my life that I thought I had lost and, for the first time, be proud of it.

1) The Beatles discography (stereo and mono)

Ok, I’ll admit it–I bought into the hype.  I bought into it hard actually, listening to nearly nothing besides the Beatles reissues for the first month after they came out.  Is it because I was a huge Beatles fan?  No.  Was it because I never heard the Beatles and this music was all fresh and new to me? No.  Was it because I’m a sucker for a gimmick?  Partly.

What really sold me on these reissues more than anything was simple opportunity.  It was an opportunity to revisit albums that I hadn’t put on in years because they were simply too ubiquitous and familiar to even need to be played.  The Beatles have long been one of those bands that I didn’t feel a need to actively listen to anymore, and I think that is true for a lot of people. Not only can you listen to them on the radio anytime you want to (try scanning the AM and FM dials for five minutes and NOT finding at least one Beatles tune), their lyrics are forever imprinted on our minds, their melodies encoded into the double-helix of our DNA.  Why listen to the Beatles when we are eating, breathing, walking, talking and living the Beatles and the culture they created?

There’s a definite downside to this outlook though, and it’s that while we “know” the Beatles, not actively revisiting the albums in full from time to time causes their music to become a jumbled, ambiguous specter. You recall the best lyrics or the most catchy riff, but you pass by the forgotten gems or the rare throwaway track that served as a transition to a great song.  Listening to the full albums are simply the best way to appreciate what the Beatles were all about.

In retrospect, maybe they weren’t.  The original CD masters really were pretty poor and mono versions of many albums (arguably the way the Beatles were truly meant to be heard early in their career) were unavailable.  This year’s stereo and mono reissues, with their top-notch remastering, were like a face-to-face reuniting with an old friend that we had only spoken to over the phone for the past decade.  There was dimension, clarity and humanity again, and you’ve found a whole new respect and attraction to them.