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Music

My albums of 2022

Oh, hi, it’s albums of the year time. It was a pretty good year for bosh, with bangers a’plenty from Roza Terenzi & D Tiffany, E-Saggila, and Nite Fleit. I enjoyed a couple of startlingly good noise collaborations from KMRU & Aho Ssan and from Merzbow & Lawrence English. And I spent many somewhat quieter […]

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Music

My albums of 2021

I seem to have been particularly indecisive about whittling down my albums of the year to my self-imposed limit of five. On the plus side, this means that I have had lots of excuses to revisit some great music repeatedly while I made up my mind… I really enjoyed records from Claire Rousay, DJ Black […]

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Music

My albums of 2020

I’m not going to try to tell you here what 2020 was about. I mean, you were there, and you had your own experience of it, and there’s not much I can add. One observation that is, however, blogworthy, is that I wound up listening to a lot of drone music. And some ambient and […]

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Music

I made a playlist: You Have Fallen Down A Well (But It Is Okay)

My partner has a thing where she posts selections of tunes on her Instagram Live, and she asked me to do a guest slot yesterday. The brief she gave me was “You Have Fallen Down A Well (But It Is Okay)”. I decided to restrict myself to the last decade or so, because more constraints […]

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Music

My albums of 2019

Time for my albums of the year. It’s just about possible that this list will give a hint about what I needed to get from music in 2019: mostly calm, with a little bit of escapism. As always, there are several records I’m gutted to have to exclude. This year, that includes releases by Croatian […]

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Music

My albums of 2018

Annual round-up time! Lots of lovely rekkids this year (I think I say that every year, but it’s true every year!). In the classical/drone/ambient space, I loved records from Clarice Jensen, Lubomyr Melnyk, and Sarah Davachi. In the nice gentle techno space, there were corkers from ASC and (stretching the genre-bucket a bit, here) Automatisme. […]

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Music

My albums of 2017

Alright, then, popkids, time for my annual round-up… I listened to lots of great records this year, thanks everyone! My longlist included records by Aiden Baker & Karen Willems, Colleen, Duran Duran Duran, Hior Chronik, Kelly Lee Owens, Marcus Fjellström, Still, and William Basinski, but none quite made the final cut. I spent a long time with a shortlist of […]

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Music

My albums of 2016

So, that 2016, huh? It would seem shallow to comment on the year musically without mentioning that, in a wider sense, it’s been a pretty momentous and frankly shitty twelve months. But I don’t want to get into politics here, so let’s leave it at that. The other popular theme of 2016 has been the […]

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Music

My albums and tracks of 2015

For some reason, I found picking my top 5 albums of the year particularly hard this time around. My long-list was 18 records long, and it was a struggle to get it down to 14, then 10, then 6. And in the end, I dropped the lovely Xerrox (Vol. 3) only because Alva Noto had made the […]

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Music

My albums and track of 2014 (an out of band post)

Right, then, time for my self-indulgent annual round-up. For the first few months, 2014 looked like being a lean year… but things picked up big-time, I got majorly obsessed with new discoveries several times over the winter, and it ended up being really tough to pick my top 5 albums. First noteworthy result is that, […]