I guess you could call me a conservative investor in that I have limited time. I think of listening to a recording as being an investment of time so I try to use my time wisely. I look at a recent post by Ted Gioia where he mentions listening to a thousand new recordings this year so he could pick out the top 100 and just the thought of it leaves me breathless. Mind you, I listen to a lot of clips on YouTube, but they are often of old recordings and I don't necessarily listen to all of the clip. I only purchased three CDs this year that I can recall: Igor Levit ON DSCH, Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age and Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and others, Amazone and the latter hasn't even arrived yet. Early in the New Year, I would expect. I did reviews of the first two soon after receiving them and they were as fine as I expected. I listened to excerpts before hand as I have done with the Lea Desandre recording. So, those are my candidates for best of the year. I just don't have time to listen to a thousand others and, just between you and me, the odds are that most of those would be, uh, mediocre. Somehow, though this is rather obviously necessarily the case, it seems boorish to mention it. In fact, apparently one has to gin up an enormous amount of enthusiasm for just about everything under the sun.
I do notice one thing: there seem to be two basic kinds of new music in the US these days that I will call "Brooklyn hammering" and "California Dreaming" for obvious reasons. I might do a post on that!
Here's Andy Akiho, excerpt from Seven Pillars
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