So as some of you might remember, we had a masterclass with TSO English Hornist Cary Ebli a few weeks ago. Now, these masterclasses are *full* of useful information, but they are also hilarious. The results: 8 or 9 comics that you shall see over the next couple of weeks!

In other words: if you see a dude with an English horn in the comics, it is Cary Ebli.

 He is crazy.

I spent a disappointingly small amount of time actually investigating new indie music this year. My blog-reading has fallen off, I am *way* behind in episodes of the R3-30. However! There are 10 albums this year that I really, truly enjoyed and can totally blog about!

10. Oh, No, It’s Love - The Bicycles
Confession: I have not listened to this whole album! Uh oh. But the songs I have heard I *love*. I am a happy music junkie, and The Bicycles *always* make supremely happy music.

9. Oh My Darling – Basia Bulat
Basia Bulat…took me some time to get used to. Traditionally, I buy every album nominated for the Polaris Prize, and listen to them all, and decide who I want to win *reasonably*. So I bought this album, and at first I barely listened to it. Then one day my iPod was on ‘shuffle all’ and started playing “In the Night,” which I then listened to several times. Which led to my enjoyment of the rest of the album! Basia and her autoharp skim the edges of country and folk and somehow manage to come out on top.

8. Soft Airplane – Chad Van Gaalen
I haven’t listened to this whole album either, but once again, the songs I have heard are phenomenal. Chad manages to get the most incredible sounds with his inventive instruments and producing. “Willow Tree” is one of the songs I listened to the most this year and it is so beautiful!

7. Moody Motorcycle – Human Highway
All I can do here is to echo Craig Norris and say, “Please, please do not let this just be a one-off.” I have been sad because Jim Guthrie has not put out an album in a while! (And Now, More Than Ever was one of my very first favourite indie albums.) And then I heard “The Sound” on Radio 3 and got excited. Had Jim put out a new album? Yes! And with Nick Thorburn, who I…well, I don’t always like his music, but it appears that they have balanced out their sounds to create something awesome.

6. Victory Garden – Laura Barrett
I recommended Laura Barrett to my composition prof, and told him she was “The Joanna Newsom of the kalimba” which she is, but her new album is so much more! It not only includes kalimba, but *beautiful* arrangements of winds, brass and strings. There is oboe on “Consumption” and “The Sharper Side” and it is really great playing! So it’s like…the charm that Laura has always had with her young-sounding voice that plays with pitch and resolution mixed with gorgeous, professional sounding arrangements. The combination is sublime.

5. Parc Avenue – Plants and Animals
I never, ever thought that my top pick for this year’s Polaris would only land at number five on my top-of-2008 list! But it has. It is a great album, though, great songs and some of them have the same kind of scope as Anathallo’s Floating World, which is another of my favourite albums (but not from 2008). I listened to “A New Kind of Love” from this album for *ages* and it did not get old!

3. Tied for third is All Is Well, by Sam Amidon. This is a collection of old folk songs, revamped and performed by Sam Amidon. My first exposure to this album was when my friend Liam sent me a link to listen to the song “Saro,” which I still think is one of the most perfect songs ever recorded. Much to my surprise and delight, Owen Pallett posted a link to it on his message boards a couple of weeks later! (Then I was like, “HA, I totally knew about that.) Anyway, Sam’s voice is perfectly suited to this music, and the old songs speak in new ways with the help of arrangements by one of my favourite bloggers and composers, Nico Muhly. There is brass, there are strings, and I am pretty sure there is bassoon. Bassoon! Man. So great.

3. All Is Well has to jostle for position with Treasury Library Canada, Woodpigeon’s new album. I won a copy of this from i (heart) music, and did not stop listening to it for months. It was one of the things that inspired me to think more about the crossovers between the classical and pop traditions (mostly because of–again–gorgeous arrangements.) But it doesn’t just sound like “this is a song. Then we added some strings and horns.” It is very organic, the alternative instruments sound like they *belong*. There is a moment in the song “7th Fret Over Andres” which always sends tingles down my spine, where horns come in on this lovely chord on a resolution. Awesome.

2.Spectrum, 14th Century/Plays to Please – Final Fantasy
Owen! I feel I am being so terrible here, since your album is not my favourite of the year. Neither of them, I should say, although they are both phenomenal as usual! I like what you are doing, continually pushing the boundaries of what people want to accept in pop music. Has a Good Home was pretty chamber pop, He Poos Clouds got a little more complex with those awesome string quartets, and these two! Plays to Please is big band reworkings of a series of Alex Lukashevsky’s songs, big band as Hindemith would’ve written it, though, and if Hindemith had had a sense of humour. (It’s obvious he didn’t, yeesh.) Spectrum, 14th Century is several songs exploring Owen’s secondary world, Spectrum, where he is the deity, and the main character of the adventure is Lewis. This album doesn’t talk about Lewis, though, several of the songs are pleas from people of Spectrum to Owen, and some others look at different characters of the world. The songs are littered with birdsong and piano, “Blue Imelda” with steel drums and other percussion, “Oh Spectrum” with more Hindemith-sounding winds, “Cockatrice” grooves more than any song I’ve ever heard of Owen’s–probably because of the bassline and…well, it sounds like castanets to me, but I could be wrong.
Anyway! Great EPs. GREAT. I am a little sorry it is not my top album, but that position goes to…

1. Mothertongue – Nico Muhly
Oh, can you believe me? I am such a fangirl. And this album did not do so well on Pitchfork! Uh oh. But that is okay, because I know what I like better than Pitchfork does. And what I like is this album! Holy crap. As most of you know, I am a composer, and it shows it a lot of my favourite music–did you see how many of the above albums I was like “OMG ARRANGEMENTS” about? Yes. Point.
Nico Muhly is a “young” composer who is doing things with “new music” which I think are incredible. First of all, he doesn’t write extremely dissonant music for the sake of itself, the way Glenn Buhr claims most Canadian composers do (which I think is a lie, and Nico Muhly is American anyway), but really beautiful combinations and melodies, and rhythms and something inexplicable which makes me sit up and listen. I listened to “The Only Tune” (all three parts) so many times over the course of two weeks that I wrote an entire choral piece myself in that time, I was so inspired. Mothertongue is billed as “three large vocal works with twitching” and the twitching is so interesting! Man.
Another thing: I have a theory that the symphony, while by *no means* a dying ensemble, will continue to play less new music. In some ways, it is a way to preserve history, like a museum, like a painting, like a class in which you study Plato. One of the new mediums, then, that composers should perhaps look to using is the album. And when I discovered that not only had Nico Muhly pre-empted my idea by several years, but that he had done it *twice* I was…well, excited. Shall we say? I can’t recommend this album enough.