Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

My Fun / Kimberly Ellen Hall / John Ira Ebersole: Camaraderie
The Land Of

Camaraderie would seem to be the ideal title for a collaborative project—The Land Of's first—that includes a forty-minute CD by My Fun (Justin Hardison) housed within a twenty-four-page booklet containing poems by John Ira Ebersole and designed by Kimberly Ellen Hall (available in a limited edition in a 200-copy run). On presentation grounds, the release is striking. The simple watercolour illustrations, cream-coloured paper stock, and sewn binding complement Ebersole's hand-written poems, of which XV provides a representative sample: “Wishing to wake (wake) / What wishes to rest (rest) / Will not give me (me) / The same easy rest (rest).” The musical side of the equation can be summed up as electro-acoustic, ambient-drone sound sculpting heavily processed and laced with field recordings taken from the natural outdoors and the urban jungle. At times musical sounds are at the forefront, such as when organ tones waver through clouds of hiss during “Murals,” while at other times field recordings dominate; “Churning Surf,” for example, contains few if any conventional musical sounds as the focus is wholly on field recordings taken from an apparent seaside locale replete with crashing waves and bird sounds. In other cases, a balance is struck between the two (e.g., the closing drone "Gasp").

In developmental terms, the project didn't merely involve conjoining the CD and poetry in a shared context; instead, the process evolved interdependently with the poems influencing Hardison's compositional process and the music in turn influencing the writing as it was shaped into its final form. Though such interconnections were part and parcel of the creative process, no compromise to the individual creators' respective styles is evident, a result attributable not only to the distinct areas of artistic endeavour involved but also to the sincere commitment to the project shared by all concerned.

December 2010