It’s that annual round-up post…
I listened to quite a lot of dance music in 2022, and that seems to have continued last year. I’m not sure whether that’s down to my mood moving towards the bosh, or the trends in bosh moving towards my preferences. Anyway, I very much enjoyed records by Terr, NIGELTHREETIMES, Santaka (which is just about dance, I guess?), and Rrose. (If the whole of Rrose’s Please Touch had been as good as the techno tracks, it would have been a shoo-in for my final list, and maybe the problem is that those tracks were so awesome that the ambient numbers seemed a bit disappointing by contrast… Tell you what, let’s give Spore a bonus track-of-the-year award.)
Obviously I listened to a bunch of ambient and drone, too, ‘cos I’m nothing if not predictable. And, predictably, I loved the latest Claire M Singer and Richard Skelton records. Smashing new finds for me were Kate Carr and Catherine Christer Hennix. And the knights-move-away-from-dream-pop of the Julia Sabra & Fadi Tabbal albums was great, too.
My final selection for 2023 is (drum-roll):
- The delightfully dubby jungle of Double O’s Firm Meditation.
- The marvellously melodic techno of Erika’s Anevite Void.
- The enchantingly epic drone of Kali Malone feat. Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy?.
- The huggably haunting experimentalism of Rupert Clervaux & Dania’s Acción y Destino.
- And the first compilation album to have made one of these lists, the wonderfully strange Ballads Of Seduction, Fertility And Ritual Slaughter curated by Was Ist Das.
dogrando writes about some records 