Second Inversion’s Top 10 Albums of 2018

Cheers to another year of new and experimental music on Second Inversion! Our hosts celebrate with a list of our Top 10 Favorite Albums of the Year. From a quiet ocean of percussion to the shimmering orchestras of Iceland and the bold harmonies of Beijing, our list celebrates musical innovation within and far beyond the classical genre.

Michael Gordon: The Unchanging Sea
Released Aug. 2018 on Cantaloupe Music

It’s easy to get lost in the haunting majesty of Michael Gordon’s The Unchanging Sea, the sheer force of its rolling waves echoing across the piano in the hands of Tomoko Mukaiyama with the Seattle Symphony. Gordon’s ocean of sound swells to overwhelming proportions, each wave cresting higher and higher, surging and submerging you in its growling depths. Though originally conceived with an accompanying film by Bill Morrison—a gritty collage assembled from deteriorating film reels and historic footage of Puget Sound—the piece’s sonic imagery is equally vivid on its own.

It’s paired on this album with Gordon’s shimmering Beijing Harmony, a work inspired by Echo Wall at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, where sounds reverberate from one side of the structure to the other. In performance, the wind and brass players are spread out across the stage—and when you listen with headphones, the music echoes from left to right and back again, all around and through you. – Maggie Molloy

Ken Thomson: Sextet
Released Sept. 2018 on New Focus

Clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer Ken Thomson is known primarily for his work with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. But as it turns out, he’s been living a sort of musical double life as a jazz musician for, basically, ever, much like Ron Swanson as Duke Silver. Unlike Swanson, Thomson has decided to let his alter ego run free. I hear strains of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue in Thomson’s Phantom Vibration Syndrome, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out in the time signatures, maybe even a little Charlie Parker when the improvisation builds to a frenzy. Thomson brings the complex compositional structures—the details of which I will not pretend to understand—of new music and improvisation together on this album in a way that can only be described as fun. – Dacia Clay

Nils Frahm: All Melody
Released Jan. 2018 on Erased Tapes

Nils Frahms’ latest solo album is striking in its simplicity—the compositions distilled down to their most potent melodies. The album features the composer himself on his usual keyboard collection of pianos, synthesizers, and pipe organs—but here expanded to feature an ethereal choir of vocalists along with subtle strings and percussion. The resulting tracks are an ambient mix of minimalism, mid-tempo dance grooves, and broad, synth-laden washes of sound. Though each song is expertly crafted in iridescent detail, the individual pieces also fit together into a larger whole, the album unified in its wistful harmonies and muted colors. Understated but immersive, it reminds us of the simple pleasure and the intimate perfection of a good melody. – Maggie Molloy

The Hands Free: Self-Titled Debut
Released May 2018 on New Amsterdam

Over the course of the past decade, the four composer-performers who make up the Hands Free have performed together in a variety of contexts. They found that what they loved doing the most was holding informal late-night jam sessions—which is what led to the quartet’s inception. Comprised of violin, accordion, bass, and guitar (plus the occasional banjo), the ensemble likes to perform unamplified, sit in a circle, and integrate a mix of genres ranging from folk music to jazz and improvisation. Their resulting debut album features a beautifully eclectic mix of sounds that depict an immense variety of places and emotions—all while maintaining the warmth and spontaneity of an impromptu jam session.  Gabriela Tedeschi

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: AEQUA
Released Nov. 2018 on Sono Luminus

Anna Thorvaldsdottir finds inspiration in nature—her music is its own ecosystem, the nuanced textures shared, traded, and transformed among individual instruments over the course of her works. The delicate balance of nature is at the heart of AEQUA, a collection of chamber works (plus one solo piano piece) performed by musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Like the stunning natural landscapes of her native Iceland, Thorvaldsdottir’s compositions echo with the full subtleties of timbre, the music expanding and contracting, breathing and humming and vibrating like the earth. – Maggie Molloy

Éliane Radigue: Œuvres Électroniques
Released Dec. 2018 on INA GRM

This beautifully-produced 14-CD set documents Radigue’s career as the mother of dark ambient music. Laboring humbly and hermetically with an ARP 2500 synthesizer and some tape recorders, Radigue spent the 70s, 80s, and 90s perfecting her brand of dense, slow-changing drone music. The works from that time are often inspired by descriptions of states of consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism, bearing such titles as Death Trilogy or Elimination of Desires. They’re best confronted in darkness, without distractions, allowing the mind and ear to absorb their long timeframe (from 17 minutes to well over an hour) and complex sonorities. – Michael Schell

Third Coast Percussion: Paddle to the Sea
Released Feb. 2018 on Cedille Records

Paddle to the Sea was a book that was made into a movie that was made into a live show and album by Third Coast Percussion. In Holling C. Holling’s original 1941 children’s book, a First Nation boy in Ontario carves a wooden canoe and on its side, he writes “Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea.” He puts the boat into the Great Lakes where it begins its adventure, and the book follows it on its journey. (Spoiler alert: years later, the boat winds up in a newspaper story that ends up in the hands of the boat’s original creator, who is by then a grown man.) The film, which was released in 1969, added a focus on water pollution to the original story.

Third Coast Percussion composed a new score to perform live alongside the film, including existing works by Philip Glass and Jacob Druckman, plus traditional music from Zimbabwe. Third Coast broadens the focus of the story a little more, asking us to think about our relationship to water and waterways on a grander scale. Their addition to the story doesn’t moralize; it instead draws listeners’ attention to the fact that the water is us—we are Paddle to the Sea. – Dacia Clay

Nordic Affect: He(a)r
Released Oct. 2018 on Sono Luminus

“Hér” is the Icelandic word for here. That idea of being present—of listening, of connecting here and now through music is at the heart of Nordic Affect’s newest album. He(a)r is a collection of seven world premiere recordings penned by women composers and performed by women musicians. Wide-ranging sound worlds from Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Mirjam Tally, and Hildur Guðnadóttir comprise the album, each offering a distinct perspective on the ways in which we hear and create sound—our individual voices and the ways in which they interact. – Maggie Molloy

Invisible Anatomy: Dissections
Released March 2018 on New Amsterdam

Drawing inspiration from the experiments of Leonardo da Vinci, facial polygraphs, and more, Invisible Anatomy’s Dissections uses medical metaphors to explore the risks and joys of opening yourself up to others. The avant-rock ensemble combines the theatricality of performance art with the drama of jazz and classical music, creating haunting songs of danger, intimacy, and dissection.

Fay Wang’s vocals layer and weave into intricate composite melodies and eerie disonances, asking powerful questions about the ways humans interact. With its thought-provoking text and complex, dramatic texture, Dissections is an impressive, hauntingly beautiful debut. Gabriela Tedeschi

My Brightest Diamond: A Million and One
Released Nov. 2018 on Rhyme & Reason Records

Few artists inhabit both pop and classical worlds so freely and convincingly as Shara Nova, the operatically-trained singer and composer behind the art rock band My Brightest Diamond. A Million and One tilts further into electronic and pop worlds than her previous albums, her lustrous voice dancing above synth-laden backdrops and pulsing drumbeats. While the drama and dynamic range of the songs hint at her operatic background, the vulnerability of the lyrics and the sheer danceability of the tracks bring a pop music immediacy to her work. The resulting album is visceral, unconventional, and free—emblematic of the modern day dissolution of genre. – Maggie Molloy

ALBUM REVIEW: Invisible Anatomy’s ‘Dissections’

by Gabriela Tedeschi

Invisible Anatomy’s new album Dissections explores the dangers and joys of being vulnerable with other people. The title suggests both emotional and medical implicationswhich is why the album dissects our interpersonal relationships through the musical imagery of an operating room.

Invisible Anatomy is comprised of vocalist Fay Wang, cellist Ian Gottlieb, guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers, percussionist Benjamin Wallace, and keyboardists Paul Kerekes and Daniel Schlosberg. They draw from a variety of genresclassical, rock, jazzand incorporate elements of performance art and theatre to create dramatic, multi-dimensional music. While the ensemble works collaboratively to write the texts and workshop pieces, members start the composing process individually, so each piece approaches the album’s theme of human intimacy in a unique way.

Wang’s “Facial Polygraph XVIA” is a dissection of facial expressions, analyzing what can be learned about someone from their tics and tells. Combining sustained, dissonant chords in the strings with quick, seemingly random melodic lines, the intricate piece highlights the complexity of our emotions and how difficult it can be to decipher the meaning behind each gesture. Fittingly, Wang’s haunting, whispery vocals weave in and out of the foreground, at times blending into the instrumental riffs to emphasize the mystery of expressions.

“Pressing Issues,” Kerekes’s piece, creates composite melodies by allowing each instrument, including Wang’s voice, to contribute a few sounds at a time. This creates a kaleidoscopic listening experience, artfully representing the internal chaos we experience when we’re juggling too many thoughts and conflicting emotions.

Gottlieb’s two-part composition “Threading Light” is a surgical metaphor, with the piano representing a human body and the cello, guitar, and vibraphone representing the knife. In part one, a heartbeat monitor beeps mechanically over suspenseful dissonance in the strings, with short bursts of percussion alluding to the fear and uncertainty of surgery. Part two features a creepy, atonal melody created by weaving instrumental lines togetherthe resulting dissonance hinting at the painful aftermath for the patient, perhaps even death.

Also split into two parts is “A Demonstration,” Schlosburg’s musical representation of Leonardo da Vinci’s fascination with examining human cadavers. In “the cause,” with intense, percussive accompaniment, Wang uses extended techniques to emulate a shortness of breath. She repeats over and over again the words “the cause of,” each time including a new human function: breathing, sneezing, vomiting. Gentle, but eerie, “where the soul is” references da Vinci’s search for physical evidence of the soul in the human body. Pure, otherworldly vocals purposefully clash with the clanging, incoherent instrumentals. The piece becomes both a tribute to the amazing progress we’ve made and a reminder that an obsessive desire to understand can be dangerous.

Randall-Myers’s “Permission” and “Othering” address the discomfort we often feel when we open up to others. With rock and jazz influences, “Permission” asks what is and isn’t okay between two people as they become close. At times the intense, moving lines in the strings and piano yield to a delicate but disturbing vibraphone pattern as Wang sings, “You let me in. You must have wanted this,” allowing the dark implications of this closeness to dominate the piece.

“Othering,” which tells the story of an encounter with someone who exists on the margins of society, is more hopeful. The honest, heart-wrenching lyrics explain how much easier it is for us to see someone in this position as merely “the other,” but that when we get closer, this becomes impossible. A beautifully warm string motif punctuates the darker vocal lines, suggesting that there is hope for compassion and understanding.

With a fusion of styles and compelling texts, Dissections tackles the questions it poses about emotional intimacy in diverse, impactful ways. It’s a hauntingly beautiful, thought-provoking examination of the ways we interact, and the ways in which we harm and help those we care about most.