Happy New Ears Award 2015

An important note about the 2015 New Ears Awards:

The blog's poll is a simple tool, it doesn’t have a reliable way to limit the times a reader can vote, and we cannot control for errors or anomalies in a sophisticated manner, we can only monitor the voting and raise a flag of alarm when something seems abnormal. For this reason, we are calling the results from the polling data as of 12/29 rather than 12/31. Over the night of the 29th, we noticed an unusual spike of votes, nearly doubling the number of total votes in the poll to date.

We apologize for this change to the poll, the New Ears Award is a blog favorite and one that we feel highlights an innovative step in music and we hope to continue being able to run it as a public poll, but we will need to rethink our approach.

Anyway, the winner of the 2015 New Ears readers poll is...

Marcelo dos Reis & Angélica V. Salvi's Concentric Rinds on Cipsela

Dan Sorrells, in his review this past year wisely wrote ...

The tracks that begin Concentric Rinds are beautiful, unhurried, imbrued with the fullness of the resonant warehouse in which they were recorded. Dos Reis’s acoustic guitar and Salvi’s harp have similar timbres, intertwining into kaleidoscopic figures in the ambiguous middle ground between the instruments. The harmony and rhythm in “Spirals” has the organized, organic feel of music by composers like Terry Riley or Duane Pitre, with dos Reis preparing his guitar and playing it like a hammered dulcimer. While the duo often opts for a sound of peaceful concordance, there are bouts of more antagonistic interplay, as on “Convex” and “Concave.” Most striking is “Depth.”

A lovely album and a good way to cope with January 1st.

The results of the poll results, as of 12/29, are as follows:

• Marcelo dos Reis & Angélica V. Salvi - Concentric Rinds (20%)
• Luis Vicente, Marcelo dos Reis, Valentin Ceccaldi, Theo Ceccaldi - Chamber 4  (12%)
• Matana Roberts - COIN COIN Ch. 3: River Run Thee (11%)
• Pulverize The Sound - Pulverize The Sound (8%)
• Stephen Haynes - Pomegranate - (7%)
• Michael Zerang & The Blue Lights - Songs For The Big Book Of Love (7%)
• Eve Risser - Des Pas Dans La Neige (7%)
• Going II - Machinery (6%)
• Kris Davis Infrasound - Save Your Breath (4%)
• Pascal Niggenkemper – Look with Thine Ears (3%)
• Ingrid Laubrock Anti House - Roulette of the Cradle (3%)
• Kaja Draksler / Susana Santos Silva – This Love (2%)
• All Included - Satan In Plain Clothes (2%)
• Premature Burial - Conjuring (1%)
• Áine O'Dwyer - Music for Church Cleaners Vol. I & II  (1%)

We wish all of our readers and musical friends a very happy 2016!