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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Time for another annual round-up. In addition to picking my top albums, which has been giving my fun and headaches for four years now, I’ve added a top track selection, which is basically me cheating to get myself out of a tricky position. In alphabetical order, my Albums Of 2013 are: French avant-garde poetry and […]
While prepping my Albums Of 2012, I realized that I’d completely failed to do 2011. So let’s backfill. In alphabetical order: Balam Acab’s bizarre squeaky-voiced psychedelia Wander/Wonder. Byetone’s unashamedly catchy clicks’n’bass monster Symeta. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s gorgeous, nostalgic, and uplifting The Miners’ Hymns. John Tejada’s sublime shuffling techno classic Parabolas. Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer’s endlessly enthralling […]
