The Fun Years Archives

Morrow vs. Hajduch: Jacaszek’s Glimmer

Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.

Jacaszek: Glimmer (Ghostly International, 12/6/11)

Jacaszek: “Dare-gale”

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Hajduch: I first heard Polish composer Michał Jacaszek when his music shuffled onto my headphones at an ungodly early hour while walking through a very crowded airport, and it was all at once calming and perfectly fitting. Jacaszek’s compositions make moody, atmospheric ambience using a classical palette, with bowed strings, operatic voices, and chimes to construct a brooding build.

His new album, Glimmer, is his first for Ghostly International, whose ambient compilation SMM: Context featured Jacaszek alongside like-minded modern/gloom/ambient merchant (and MvsH alumnus) The Fun Years, among others.

Morrow: Though this might be misclassified as an electronic album — partly due to its affiliation with Ghostly — it’s almost entirely an ambient classical release. There’s enough digital treatment and rearrangement to warrant a partial electronic tag, but it’s otherwise a very organic album. Jacaszek wrote and recorded the acoustic-guitar and mellotron passages, and then he enlisted a number of other Polish musicians to play the harpsichord and clarinet parts. It’s all a very stirring mix, with the harpsichord, bass clarinet, guitar, and vibraphone — not to mention the washes of fuzz — creating a richness of texture.

Morrow vs. Hajduch: The Fun Years’ God Was Like, No

Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.

The Fun Years: God Was Like, No (Barge, 11/16/10)

The Fun Years: “Breech on the Bowstring”

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Hajduch: The Fun Years is among a noticeable cadre of artists pushing icy, shoegaze-tinged ambient music these days, but the duo lacks the name recognition of Tim Hecker or even Ben Frost. Hopefully, its 2010 release, God Was Like, No, changes that.

The group is comprised of Ben Recht on baritone guitar and Isaac Sparks on turntable, but this album suggests that there are a lot of delay and fuzz pedals in that signal chain. Fittingly, the album opens with swirling guitar notes that gradually build into a sustained howl before suddenly exiting stage left, leaving a repeated crackle and simple guitar phrase in their wake.

Though it’s more than 40 minutes long and holds eight tracks, God Was Like, No ignores its purported divisions to form a cohesive suite, with each track blending into the next. All maintain a similar minor-key melody while shifting timbres in and out; bit-crunched, buzzy guitar, bowed cymbal, and repeated snippets of manipulated vocals all appear and disappear. The overall effect is of one long track; it’s very satisfying.

Record Review: Ghostly International’s SMM: Context

V/A: SMM: Context (Ghostly International, 3/1/11)

Christina Vantzou: “11 Generations of My Fathers”

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In most cases, if the typical, well-respected independent label were to take a risk in compiling an ambient-heavy compilation with artists who were mostly unknown outside their respective hyper-insulated circles, most fans of that label would probably skip the compilation without much thought.

But then there is Ghostly International, a Ann Arbor, Michigan-based label with an eclectic roster comprising Matthew Dear, Loscil, Shigeto, and Dabrye, among others. For its new compilation record, Ghostly chose to dust off SMM, an offshoot of the label created back in 1994, to present a refined aesthetic within a particular — to borrow from the compilation’s title — Context.