1. Doctor L, Exploring the Inside World (Barclay/Polygram)
Every important development in pop music over the last two years has come out of France. Daft Punk took funk’s thirty-year-old tradition of the endless groove and branded it with microchip-size beats sequenced in a new house style. Air proved that the industrial production of atmosphere can be doubly negated – the pastoral becoming pastoral again. Now there’s Doctor L: above all, trip soul in a generous, modernized, psychedelic Norman Whitfield tradition. Everything but the vocals is sampled, yet the musical codes from three decades of club and street music aren’t so much cited as laid down like ciphers for states of mind. Doctor L’s unconscious is structured less like a language than like a block party turned nasty.
2. Snake Eyes (dir. Brian De Palma)
A flop in the States – because folks didn’t like the story! Have Americans not yet learned what the director’s films are all about? Snake Eyes is signature De Palma: the most interesting cinematic treatment of architectural space in the business, something Fredric Jameson and Mark Wigley might have come up with over the phone; a vision of psychic extremes that makes Alfred Hitchcock look like a cool clinician; what seems to be the longest shot in film history. And at last Nicolas Cage looks like himself again. Up there with the director’s other masterworks: The Fury, Body Double, Carlito’s Way, and Raising Cain.
3. “Junge Szene 1998” (Wiener Secession, Vienna)
While Europe is subjected to endless rounds of club-scene and ambient art, and gruesome group shows like the Berlin Biennale force us to choke down more pop cuteness for the sake of cuteness, curator Kathrin Rhomberg succeeded with many of the same artists – like John Bock and his obsessive cages and treehouses-cum-architectural-critique. In this veritable Kinderdocumenta (installed in a relatively small space), the various positions remain distinct and discernible and get a chance to speak in ways that have resonance.
4. King Britt Presents Sylk 130, When The Funk Hits The Fan (Columbia/Sony)
If you can’t live without the voice of poet Ursula Rucker, you’re better served by King Britt’s release than by the slightly disappointing 4 Hero double CD (even if we can be thankful for the Alice Coltrane revival it unleashed!). In addition to her “womanist” poetry, King Britt’s radio-play staging of a black adolescence in the ’70s offers much more: a winged passage through utterly heterogeneous social spaces (the streets, clubs, political organizations, concerts, kitchens, kids’ rooms), the music of which is not only fabulously reconstructed but invented anew for the most accurate account of an education sentimental on record since A Tribe Called Quest and Van Dyke Parks’s version of Randy Newman’s “Vine Street”.
5. Isa Genzken (Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne)
When all the Cologne galleries hold their openings on the same evening and we inhabitants have the joy of escorting out-of-town guests through the city so that they can take in nine or ten in two hours, I always make the Simpsons wager: Will a single exhibition manage to challenge, in artistic terms, the episode of said show broadcast on the same evening? Homer usually wins. But this time Isa Genzken made a loser out of me.
6. Tony Oxley’s Birthday Party
By its own legend, what’s called “improvised music” in Europe – somewhere between “new music” and “free jazz” – was founded in the early ’60s in London by the group Joseph Holbrooke. Unfortunately its members – composer Gavin Bryars, guitarist and improv-philosopher Derek Bailey, and percussionist Tony Oxley, who was later involved in such diverse pursuits as John McLaughlin’s first solo album, innumerable collective improvisation projects, and running an independent label (INCUS) – never recorded an album together. Their reunion on Oxley’s sixtieth birthday in the Stadtgarten in Cologne seduced old comrades and caught youngsters off guard with one of the sweetest glowing weaves the acoustic permits.
7. Rainald Goetz (www.rainaldgoetz.de)
It’s an unfulfilled modernist dream: The writer publishes, in real time, everything that happens as it happens. With this daily diary, Rainald Goetz comes wonderfully close to the ideal, exploiting the self-surveillance capabilities of new technology. Torn between the shame of violating another’s intimacy and the titillation of reading a serialized novel, even those who had no previous interest in Goetz ask what time today he’s going to open the diary. The author once noted he’d sent me a letter. That evening, before I had received it, a friend asked me: “Did you get Rainald’s letter yet?”
8. Jörg Schlick / Sabine Achleitner, Bonjour Madame
For the last twenty years this pair has been responsible for some serious art partying in Graz with institutions like “Forumstadtpark” and “steirischer herbst”. Schlick, who is also an outstanding artist, makes electronic and other kinds of music under the name JB Slik. The latest release: Bonjour Madame, with Ultra Violet (yes, that Ultra Violet!)
9. “Baustop.randstadt” (NGBK Berlin)
As the Berlin show buildings are reaching completion, the new express trains are up and running, and the move to the new capital is underway, there are still a few who believe it makes sense to criticize the irreversible process of building a vulgar, spectacular capital and enlisting the arts in the effort. The exhibition “Baustop.randstadt” exposed the clandestine, disastrous side of the new metropolis and the attempt yet again to cut short political and cultural debate.
10. Nothing Ever Was, Anyway: Music Of Annette Peacock (ECM)
The oceanic music of Annette Peacock – the synthesizer artist, singer, and composer of soft and melancholic balladesque pieces that seem at once in love with and bored by the world – always appears on the verge of oblivion. We’re fighting it. This double CD features Paul Motian and Gary Peacock accompanying pianist Marilyn Crispell – a congenial interpretation to Peacock’s unforced, circular, at times disengaged music. My most listened to record for the year 1998.