JASON DILL IS DEAD

\\Notes From Downriver//
\\Ambient/Experimental/Drone/Reformed Emo//  By James Harbard

JDIDS 50 favourite records of 2018.

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50. Facecahin - Accensor  

It’s easy to get trapped in the formulaic niceties of dub techno. Facechain’s vaporwave past helps him untie Accensor into an otherworldly excursion, worlds away from his nature sampling friends on terra firma.

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49.  The Men - Hated: 2008 -2011

The Men learnt to make music as a band a little differently to most, starting with structure and texture before they ever even thought about melody. In more recent times they have been in an arm wrestle with Parquet Courts to be the most ambitious proper capital R independent Rock band of the moment, so it’s easy to forget that once a upon of time they were more literally, physically trying to “open your heart”. These previously near impossible to source early recordings that preceded 2011’s still incredible Leave Home are about the first thing released since then that actually come close to matching the jarring intensity of that record.

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48. Poemme - Moments In Golden Light

If there is any proof of the existence of a god it is in sunsets, a nuclear explosion that evaporates the previous day and shrouds anything bad that happened in a vast all saturating golden light. Celebration of their existence seems like logical worship to me and a lot of other ambient enthusiasts however Constellation Tatsu are a mark of quality, Moments in Golden Light is a reminder of how often this type of thing is done and how rarely it is done this well.


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47.  Borusiade - A Body  

The ex Romanian Choir girl’s record is an unforgivingly dark introverted record that turns a modest setup into a deep mine for showcasing her incredible talents as a producer. From some of the most gut wrenching ambient to vocal tracks that layer ambivalent, deep vocals, to deep pulsating European techno.

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46. Pinegrove - Skylight

It’s no secret there was controversy around this record which makes it very hard to write about, but once that controversy was laid bare it really didn’t make a lot of sense. I’ve had bands ruined for me by this type of thing - Swans for one. Skylight was written before it all but exudes a scary self awareness. I listened to this record a lot when I took a week off work and found its levels of introspection incredibly useful. Aside from Pinegroves present and predictably wondrous technical acrobatics, Skylight offers a glimpse into a mind that acknowledges it is confused.  

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45. Answer Code Request - Gens  

Berghain techno is a now a universally celebrated sound and Answer Code Request is one of the clubs lauded success stories. Gens shrouds his once crystal clear mathematics with a mist, dulling the edges a little. The dynamics edge closer to label mates Barker and Baumecker’s booming sonics without sacrificing his insane level of detail.

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44. Merzbow & Hexa - Achromatic 

Every record that Merzbow features on is a Merzbow record. He’s released around 2-300 depending on who you ask and not even his greatest fan would try and claim they’ve heard them all. Of the 15 or so I have heard, this is the most transcendent. Here he is mellowed, (relatively) and it allows the door to crack open a little wider to achieve the masochistic enlightenment a merzbow bowel cleanse can achieve. If there is beauty in self torture it lies somewhere within these walls of screeching noise.  

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43. Nadia Kahn - In Gleam

Nadia Kahn is highly out of step, In Gleam is full of sun faded deep house and ambient, almost a contemporary version of the memory house nostalgia of the late 2000’s. But the record is guarded in a way those records never were and rewards patience. Snips of these tracks may conjure a record of small insular moments but an afternoon of listening reveals a golden, spacious terrain.

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42. Masayoshi Fujita - Book of Life

The vibraphonist called this his most “human” release but there’s only some truth to this. It’s his first record you could imagine being played by a couple of people in a room but on the record’s best moments like the sparse, quiet title track he has an uncanny ability to make you feel like the instrument is simply conjuring these sounds itself. Thanks to sublime recordings you can hear every little detail, scratch and vibration the instrument is making. It’s a true demonstration of the complexities of sound and challenges conventions of what can summon images of beauty in music.   

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41. Taylor Deupree - Fallen

One of ambient’s most reliable contributors both through his own record and his label 12K, it seems a little odd that Deupree hadn’t made a record centering around the piano until now. Fallen joins a long list of smoky, conceptually tight Deupree records that could be his best.  

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40. Melquíades - Blue Caves

Alex Albrecht’s Scissor and Thread debut is a delight in subtle mutations. It’s an appropriately cavernous record, a meeting of traditional piano-scapes and and deep electronics that flows seemlesly from expressive exercises on melodic ambience to more traditional deep house. Less about invention and more about melding disparate ingredients in a new way, the record hangs around the air like a thick summers evening.   

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39. Yo La Tengo - There’s a Riot Going On

Yo La Tengo deal in absolutes of quiet and loud, their live shows often divided by the two. Dismantling the eclectic tendencies of their more recent records, the vets have crafted a cohesive, calm album that sits content with the former, gorgeous ambient passages swell into quiet signature songs -the type only they can write - whilst never raising their voice from a whisper. 

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38. SUSS - Ghost Box

Strange things would happen in Suss’s world, unsolved murders, unexplained out of town visitors would show up, stunning sunsets would welcome another night of unease. Ghost Box is spaghetti western ambient, steel pedal guitars and cavernous reverb abound, painting a revolutionary landscape. Post rock fore fathers Tortoise and Godspeed have both made music like this in the past but I’ve never heard anyone dive so far down the rabbit hole as these guys.

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37.  American Pleasure Club - A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This  

Oh Sam Ray, what are you serving us up now?  Field recordings of construction sites at night? Drake sampling house? A homage to a seminal Jim O’Rourke album?  More emo love songs dedicated to the shit belt of America? Another record under yet another name that does just about all of it? I’m not sure if he means it when he goes on those long rants about how talented he is, or if his bashing of Car Seat Headrest is internet trolling or unabashed sincerity, but as long as he’s pumping out records like these it’s hard to care.

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36. Mary Lattimore - Hundreds of Days

The harpist’s latest pushes her vision as an innovator of the instrument- medieval kitsch this is not. Her harp wanders around guitars, synths and her own voice her mastery in a way that are easier to compare to natural phenomena than music, it crackles like fire and swarms like evening insects. She uses a 47 string behemoth to slow the world down.   

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35. Objekt - Cocoon Crush

According to their forums, despite being scored higher than any other album this year on RA, it seems disappointment was a common reaction among their readers to Objekt’s latest. Until Skee Mask showed up Objekt was the greatest hope for IDM in the 2010’s and follow up to 2014’s highly important Flatland with similar intentions was something worth waiting four years for. This wasn’t it, instead TJ Hertz decided to stay with the more relevant sound design movement gravitating towards the hyper queer scenes of Arca, Lotic and Amnesia Scanner. But this music didn’t want to shock, nor did it just exist to serve TJ’s obsession with chrome plated sonics. I kept coming back to this record, despite its gravity there’s something really nice about it. I’m not entirely sure what it is but I’m looking forward to spending the next four years figuring it out.  

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34. Laurel Halo - Raw Silk Uncut Wood  

The shapeshifting wonder turns her sights towards ambient and like her immersive techno and chameleon like experimental pop, she makes it her own. The brevity of Raw Silk makes it feel like it may have been an experiment for her, but it’s unique nature just expands the legacy of her genius for us.

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33.  Sandro Perri - In Another Life

Sandro Perri works slowly. This record took seven years and effectively only contains two songs, but they are songs you could plausibly say took seven years to write. Fantastically out of step with the current world, the title track swarms for 24 minutes and just when you’re settling in Dan Bejar shows up and makes dinner for you. It’s familiarity at its finest.

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32. Cavern of Anti Matter - Hormone Lemonade

On their best, and at times gorgeous third krautrock album, Tim Gane continues to carve out the smaller details of Stereolab songs (and their memorable outros) as full widescreen instrumentals. Perfectly monotonous but never taxing, Hormone Lemonade forgoes Stereolab’s hard to ignore melodic qualities for offers beautifully human blankets of rhythmic, trance like sound still hooked to the kooky genre that birthed it. Its details are so luxurious and its synths so warm and big you want to curl up inside them.

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31. Rafael Anton Irisarri - Midnight Colours

The collective earth has perhaps never looked at its mortality closer than it did in 2018. There’s discussions on how to “stop” climate change that happen within pockets of intellectual thought but the science, stupidity and capitalist drive outcome is indisputable, it’s done. Rafael has long been ambient royalty and he is perhaps one of the most capable to turn this final exhale into a record. Big music for a big feelings.

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30. Pariah - Here from Where We Are

2018 was a year of hard turns for many artists featured on this list but Pariah’s was potentially the most surprising, like Laurel Halo he turned his way to ambient but for an artist riding the James Blake bass wave of 2010 and then falling into an eight year writer’s block it feels quite odd he ended up here. His brand of ambient is more perplexing still, an odd mix of complicated arpeggio layering that gently shifts your focus to various elements of the music with graceful fluidity.

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29. Joyce Manor - Million Dollars to Kill Me

It’s 2018 and Joyce Manor are still fucking awesome.

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28. Negative Gemini - Bad Baby  

Low-fi pop has long been a genre more ambient than ambient itself, a trick used to hide flaws, ironically flattening whatever good may lie inside. Negative Gemini turns that idea on its head, rather than hide behind it, she seeks to add spaces to her immensely complex music using hiss and gaseous drift. To-die-for melodies float in and out of focus like a slightly off kilter dream you can’t quite figure out, one that that makes you uneasy and blissful at the same time.

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27. Tangents - New Bodies

The Australian improvisors continue to run a course similar to their American forefathers Tortoise. If 2016’s Stateless was their TNT, New Bodies is their Standards, a fleshed out ambitious front to back rendering of improv jazz, post rock and insane electronics. It’s a complete spectacle.

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26. Aphex Twin - Collapse

For someone who’s spent his life creating genres, setting trends and defying expectations it’s more than a little odd to hear actual outside influence from a high profile act in Jlin’s instant classic Black Origami on Richard D James’ latest. However fraught or obvious the relationships between the two might be, James warps it into an IDM aphex acid frenzy full of his own signatures and lots of cheeky winks. It doubles as his most accessible release of this decade.     

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25. Steve Hauschildt - Dissolvi  

Hauschildt’s output of aggregated landscapes has been both predictable and blissful since his band Emerald’s disbanded. Dissolvi sees him maneuver it the way of minimal techno and although it’s his first big surprise, he makes it into something beautifully out of alignment with  everything around him. Julianna Barwick joins him for a meeting of ambient titans that lives up to the bill.

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24. Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto - Glass  

Delicately recorded live in Philip Johnson’s glass house, Glass is the very rare meeting between music and architecture that moves beyond the tokenistic. The pair use the surroundings to create a piece of music that at once could not have been made anywhere else and is warmly emotive. The single piece is 37 minutes long but expertly dissolves time, destined to be deemed an overlooked ambient classic.

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23.  Tiny Moving Parts - Swell

To understand the magic of Tiny Moving Parts you really have to see them live. Dylan Mattheisen physically explodes, throws himself everywhere and looks like he is the happiest man on earth. He does this whilst playing some of the most ludicrously complicated math rock you could imagine in unworldly time signatures whilst screaming his head off. Swell cleans up the rougher edges of 2016’s Celebrate and amps up the ludicrosity, an impassioned and technically dazzling record.    

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22. Lone - Ambivert Tools Vol 1- 4

DJ’s hate Lone. His time signatures and BPM’s are a nightmare and his synths are often bizarrely tuned leaving very little avenues for him to slide readily into sets. The Ambivert Tools series, released over the last two years was designed to be a break from this, a more straightforward club ready, 4/4 offering form one of current electronic music’s great visionaries. It started out that way, but by the essential, mesmerizing fourth volume he seemed to have jettisoned that idea in favour of crafting the most ambitious music of his esteemed career. Anyone can make basic club music, except Lone.  

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21. GAS - Rausch

After last years unexpected return that jettisoned the project into new spaces of neo classicism  after a 17 year coma, Rausch returns to GAS’s origins. It’s a darker, more familiar GAS sound, reminiscent of a refueled version of 1997’s Zauberberg and although the era shifting experimentalism of last year is notably absent, the seamless cohesion of Rausch will be welcomed by a certain type of GAS fan. 

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20. Biosphere - The Hilvarenbeek Recordings

Based around field recordings form a dutch farm, this typically odd piece of ambience may actually be the Jenssen’s finest work this decade, recalling the surreal and instantly identifiable, creepy soundscapes of Substrata. It’s a Biosphere sound that has been missed.

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19. Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma  - Limpid as the Solitudes

Ambient Music has long had an obsession with the idea that it exists within the contamination of the world’s outside sounds. Eno went on and on about the relatively new nature of recorded music and how pre the record, music would always be subject to its environment. Even headphones are susceptible to the sounds of the outside leaking in. Ambient, instead of fighting that idea has celebrated it. Limpid as the Solitudes, a meeting between two big names in ambient is a fantastic example. Felicia’s gracious, collaging style dominates and dulls traces of Jefre’s more recent shoegaze exploits, the result is a non democratic meeting of the minds that is lucid and dreamlike.

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18. Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End The Day

Davachi is a fanatical fan of Frédéric Chopin, the romantic tone poet of the 1800’s. It shows. Her music deals in what first appear to be solid blocks of sound yet of further examination are like following long winding undulating tunnels. Let Night Come Over is her finest yet, it beautifully captures the duality of the clam hussle and bussle of sleepy rural European cities at dusk. If you find yourself inclined to enter a meditative trance and follow her boldest moment like highlight “Hours in the evening”  Bells doubles as a cheap psychedelic trip. Pieces that at first seem like a single note sustained for 10+ minutes start to wobble, and melodies appear sunken within them. Like Chopin,  Davichi can teach you to hear new things.

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17. The Field - Infinite Moment

The Field is this decades colossus of ambient techno. On the third album of his “Black Period”  he makes his music seem big and small all at once. This is the headphones record of the year, one where the best moments lie coiled up in gargantuan slow moving waves of fog. It’s no secret that GAS birthed The Field’s sonic framework, but never has Axel taken his music closer to Voigt’s.

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16. Jim O’Rourke - Sleep Like It’s Winter

For someone who hates ambient music Jim O’Rourke sure makes a lot of it. His Steamroom series is music that he says “he just has to make” and it’s a relatable position for many ambient artists who use the genre as both a meditative process an act of self examination and an exercise in restraint. His first labored over effort in formless music elevated to “album” status acts as a counterpoint to his 2015 stunner Simple Songs (A record I wrote about a lot) and a critique on ambient music and himself alike. If you ignore all this however it is simply one of the most peaceful, soul cleansing records you will hear all year.

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15. M. Geddes Gengras - The Hawaiki Tapes

Recorded in the evenings whilst on holiday with nothing more than a space efficient Vulca FM and a reverb pedal these recordings work sublimely into an ambient history of artists honing in on the possibilities of one instrument. I own a Vulca FM and nothing achieved on this record is other worldly or technically difficult, but nobody has unpacked the emotional scope achievable within this accessible synthesizer in quite the same way. You can imagine him coming home from days on the beach and making these tracks, they’re long, indulgent and they don’t expect an audience. It’s a beautiful, perfectly executed small scale idea in a world of big poorly executed ideas. 

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14. Citizen Maze - Serenity In The Woods

For someone who is apparently a fruity loops wizard, Citizen Maze’s Analogue Attic debut felt remarkably untied from the world of the computer. He fits the label like a glove, an Australian wunderkind who melts field recordings into his own dubby electronic wilderness with a surprising jazz influenced undercurrent. He’s got his own unique magic, unlike the location specific music of label bosses Albrecht La'Brooy, Serenity sounds to me like a fictional landscape painted by the mind of its creator.

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13. Grouper - Grid Of Points

Liz Harris’s music seems to be getting smaller to the point of collapsing in on itself. After the eclectic Ruins, the uniformity of Grid of Points creates a striking desolation despite the absence of traditionally ambient pieces. The record is made entirely of simple, quick songs and the best one of all, the bizarre opener called “The Races” is done in under a minute. Grid of Points is stark, airy and like everything else she’s done, mesmerizing. You can feel every crack, creek and gust of air that occupies the space that made this music.

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12. Adrianne Lenker - Abysskiss

Already proven as a songwriter whose biggest moments have the effect of a sledgehammer, Big Theif’s Adrianne Lenker’s solo outing evokes the surreal nature of peak Thom Yorke. Using simple, familiar tools she’s built an ominous, devastating presence far larger than herself and you get the feeling shes just getting started. 

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11. Dedekind Cut - Tahoe

Music media is increasingly bending genres into twisted shapes to alleviate the pressures of tradition. Ambient is a genre that has proved hard to bend, and a few records have shone through showing how barriers like genre need not be eroded to defeat political ones just as we should all remember that democracy is not married to capitalism. These records are incredibly important. Tahoe is one of them.

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10. Albrecht La'Brooy - Tidal River

In an Australia where nationalism is a torrid word, Albrecht La’Brooy have show the beauty of embracing a universal regionalism that everyone can enjoy. Their music is distinctly Australian in a way that is hard to describe without using hazy descriptors. This record actually does sound like the progression of a warm summer’s day in the Australian wilderness and conjures that kind of blissful exhaustion of a long day under our sun. Their debut for R&S ambient offshoot Apollo was bound to reach a bigger audience and the pair took that on - Tidal River is the culmination of years of carefully defining a new brand of Australian music and carries a kind of celebratory finality with it.    

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9. Shinichi Atobe - Heat

Mysterious, but more likely just modest, the Japanese producer produces yet another brilliant looping work of minimalist nostalgic tech house with that lovely Japanese sensibility that money just can not buy (or maybe it’s just keeping the hi’s loud in the mix who knows). Heat is his most optimistic record yet, one that floats on the borders of euphoria and hints at the fairytale life of its creator.

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8. Skee Mask - Compro

Unmasked not as a greying master but a stoned German teen, Skee Mask continues to confound by intensifying and expanding the musical universe he has built. Although it alludes to a decade past and Aphex’s obvious legacy, Compro feels completely of its own, a new level of immersion and sound design riding an emotive and unashamedly melodic wave. Breakbeats are vital and godlike and nowhere near cheesy nostalgia. A once in a decade event, Compro could be the best IDM album since Music Has The Right to Children.  

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7. Tim Hecker - Konoyo

Hecker’s career has operated in strange territories. Each of his records is more of the same, a recipe he perfected nearly two decades ago, yet each drills aggressively into a completely different conceptual mine. Konoyo asks a question rarely asked by musicians - what happens when western tuning interacts with non western ones. Richard D James has long been ranting, raving and producing incredible records based on an aggressive anti 440hz stance, but he was all but alone until now. Hecker who is a master of blending two alien entities into one takes 440 and 430hz instruments and melts them into something that has never existed in modern music. Although he’s always been a provocateur and a supporter of anti-music, (you need look no further than Ravedeath for that) the results of Konoyo are a new revelation.

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6. Julia Holter - Aviary

If Julia’s 2015 baroque pop masterpiece Have you in my Wilderness was a like watching her world through a crack in a door, Aviary blows the ceiling off and watches the pieces fall from the sky. A difficult, sprawling, formless epic of an album that frequently, thrillingly borders on collapse, it conjures the same magic anco did in the mid 2000’s when you first heard them, completely alien but entirely enthralling.

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5. Amen Dunes - Freedom

Freedom is a brilliant evolution of an artist’s sound that was already wholey distinctive to begin with. He shares a lot on paper with retroactive rockers like Kurt Vile and the War on Drugs, yet his music now completely untethered to any decade or style in particular. When he sings about his desire to drift along the Mekong if he could on “Skipping School” or reflects on the black and white world of 1963 on the years best song by a mile “Miki Dora” he constructs a musical fever dream of places he’s only read about. His distinctive voice gives the record a placeless,alien quality, his twentieth century narratives capturing a Dylan level of intrigue. There are few who can take this type of music and make it their own, there are fewer who can completely reinvent it. This guy reads.

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4. Joseph Shabason - Anne

Joseph Shabason has already played a major role on one of the 2010’s most influential records. The seminal saxophone on Destroyer’s 2011 monolith Kaputt was played entirely from his lungs. That record was this blog’s album of the year that year, but has since gone on to make a massive impact, a complete outlier compared to what the rest of the decade was to offer. His appearance wouldn’t ordinarily be such a big deal but that instrument formed the emotional core of Kaputt, it was all class and kept Dan Bejar from shifting into 80’s kitsch. Instead Kaputt was the most important and emotional record Bejar has ever made. There had been brilliant Destroyer records, but Kapput is readily acknowledged as his masterpiece.  

Anne is the same but different. It’s a highly charged, solo ambient record. Just as Dan was the star on Kaputt, Shabason makes it his mother by peppering the record with conversations between them removing himself from the centre. The saxophone, just as it did on Kaputt forms the emotional core. The restraint is incredible, a man of his talents could have easily gone wild with the instrument but Shabason’s understanding of his craft sees him implement it as the record’s secret weapon. Simple synths do the grunt work and often unexpectedly such as on “Deep Dark Divide” the saxophone swells into the mix as a powerful blanket or drone and offers pieces their most devastating melodic flashes. It’s a masterful and unique approach by a true old school master of an instrument.  

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3. Autechre - NTS Sessions

Don’t worry about the unimportant format of a radio show made super important with an issue of 8 hours of music on LP to confuse you, the human rhythms that drive most western music have long since left Autechre, so their logic systems of releasing music are the least of your concerns. These NTS sessions could actually prove to be their best, a record so confounding and challenging  that when you connect with it the results offer a very different kind of euphoria. Considering the algorithms that went into making this thing are beyond the grasp of human minds alone (it seems a lot of it was Max/MSP based) it’s amazing how easy it is to find satisfaction time and time again when visiting its colossal innards.

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2.  No Age - Snares Like A Haircut

No Age are a punk band with ambient sensibility at a zoomed out level but at a micro scale they operate as noise band with pop residue. They compose atmospheres, not songs and their latest makes a point of this sounding as delicate as steam burning off a lake. It’s as if something different is happening within their distortion. After their 2013 excursion to the world of art rock, It’s a welcome return to what they do best, only begging for more of the incredible ambient interludes that peppered their previous work of which we are only granted two (admittedly perfect ones). This is a minor gripe to say the least, Snares glistens in a way that even their magnum opus Everything in Between only hinted at.

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1. DJ Healer - Nothing 2 Loose

More than any other year there was never really any competition.

It might sounds strange but to really understand the effect of Nothing 2 Loose you have to understand Oprah Winfrey. Her show is a cultural melting point where suddenly the superfluous issues of celebrities become deep and meaningful tools reflected back at you for your own self examination. It’s easy to dismiss but it is also easy to be on the other side and to embrace the fact that although we hold ourselves as superior to all living things we are just a big fleshy emotional mess. She acts as a large part of the emotional machine of Healer’s universe

The reclusive artist once most famously known as Traumprinz among other names, retired after a decade amassing a lauded discography. Flash forward to Easter 2018 (not so Incidentally April fools day) and a strange website promising two new records from someone who ~might~ be him appears. Legions around the world, including myself, part with cash very quickly. Faith pays off  in capitalism quicker than religion it seems, whilst Prime Minister of Doom’s Mugshadow Propaganda is a DJ delight of 4/4 basics on N2L the prince takes his meta hat, looks inwards at himself and reality and mortality and of course religion. It’s at once theatrical, uncomfortable, comforting and jaw droppingly beautiful. In the current world peppered with insincerity and irony this is no joke, On “God’s Creation” he floated over the world from above and asked me to consider the grandeur of all around me. This is not giving me time to reconcile that some anonymous German calling himself DJ Healer who gets most of his samples from Oprah interviews has made what may as well be the only record of 2018.

But he wasn’t going to stop there, soon after three hours of additional, original, music appears on soundcloud and although it starts with some straightforward house, the collection appropriately called Planet Lonely soon swells into some of the most vital, impactful and brilliant music of the decade. It’s lovelorn and wistful and profoundly simple. On “Interior Renovations” our subject is in the midst of reflecting on a quest for personal reinvention within some pooling ambient clouds, “it seems, almost impossible to get through that without some damage”, laments a friend before the shriek of a power drill cuts through the ambience. The devastating highlight “A lot of Freedom” is a simple arpeggiated synth line with a forlorn female spoken word vocal sample repeated for four minutes. She sounds alone in a world gifted to her and she sounds desperately unhappy about it. “A Lot of Freedom” appropriately calls into question our own liberties and introduces the final, and best half an hour of Healer’s universe, trying to describe it would do it no justice but you get the feeling this is the kind of euphoria Moby wished he could have achieved in the late 90’s.

I will never forget the first time I heard Boards of Canada’s In a Beautiful Place and how that record changed the way I experienced the world, almost as if it had cast a sun ray over the afternoon that only I could see. It’s probably my favourite piece of music ever and until I heard that last half an hour of Planet Lonely nothing had ever quite made me feel the same things. Maybe the religious overtones in both those records are telling me that although I’m not religious, the feeling of religion is a broader church than you might think. Cast aside the mythology, the wars, the politics, that it scratches an itch, and thoughts that large can conjure magic and at the end of the day we just want to feel something. 

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James Harbard - Aerospatiale (Forever Self - 2018)

I recorded this between October 2017 and January 2018. During this period I was flying almost weekly for work and life obligations. I was never a nervous flyer until I started doing it regularly and got to know the drones of a 737- 800 intensely even through headphones. For one reason or another airports and flight have long been the subject of ambient music but traditionally the mundane, sterile nature or even the logical outcome of observing our fragility from above become the subject matter. This became more about growing unease of how unnatural the whole thing felt and replicating feelings of different flights from memory.
I was listening to a lot of Hecker, Keith Fullerton Whitman, GAS, Biosphere and Jan Jelinek. Recorded at home in Carlton, Pt Willunga and Fish Creek with the Korgs and the laptop.  

(Last track is around an old iphone recording of a quick go on my boss’s piano when he wasn’t around) 

JDID’s Favourite records 2017

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50. Brian Eno - Reflection  

Although not the definitive version of Eno’s generative music, the permanent and impermanent formats of the most labored over conceptual kick of his career are both vital listens.This was the first record I heard in 2017 and was almost relieved how untenable it was, Eno’s been defending this position for years. Reflection is not the result, nor last chapter, just a tiny fragment.  


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49. Godflesh - Post Self
Post self is a flattened charred industrial record as all Godflesh records are but built on an idea that they had transcended what they had become. It succeeds - Post Self relies on a guitar sprawl so unique the way the ear navigates these tracks is indescribably different. It becomes a suffocating evil cousin of their ambient project Jesu.

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48.  Aaron Dilloway - The Gag File 
In 2017 Dilloway graced me with a track called “Karaoke with Cal” - anyone that knows or works with me know s the significance of that. If you don’t then all you need to know is that this record is the only one that legitimately creeped me out last year.

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47. Tinariwen - Elwan

Elwan is little more than a beautiful extension of the middle eastern band’s meditative rounds they perfected on 2014’s Emmaar but in current times it feels potent. Despite the band actually not being able to return to mali after being directly targeted by militants  Elwan is not as urgent, political or anything a band from the region with a strong western following could be. It makes a far more confronting point, this magic that is under threat from the current dangerous political and cultural climate closer to our increasingly nationalist western homes.

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46. Talaboman - The Night Land 
Perhaps deliberately designed not to overshadow the solo work work of either John Talabot or Axel Bowman, this collaborative album feels relaxed and Jam-session-like at face value which as a concept sounds appealing anyway. The pair have made an album that is so overtly welcoming to the point where spending copious amounts of time within it to discover each of the artist’s sneaky signatures is really easy. When Talabot has been making us wait for years for a Fin follow-up there are plenty of moments here that tease what that could sound-like.

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45. The Necks - Unfold  
I first listened to the Australian improvisers expansive 19th (!) record whilst stuck in the Grampians preparing for a music festival whilst exhausted and sleeping in a tent. It seems to stretch on forever, Tony Bucks’ percussion refusing to stay still. It was one of those perfect place and time moments to experience a record. 

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44. Tom Rogerson with Brian Eno - Finding Shore 
High drama plays out the second you read that Eno has a second billing, yet alone when he starts to play with the composers piano shapes with lasers.


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43. Chuck Johnson - Balsams 
The pedal steel guitar has been a point of many emotive musical moments for me. It’s an instrument that seems to deal only in longing beauty. Chuck transformed that often fleeting feeling into an entire album of indulgent ambience.

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42. Jenny Lin - Philip Glass: Complete Etudes for Piano 
Glass wrote these classical vignettes to challenge him to learn, he later admitted the structure of some of them, especially the 11-20 movements, were beyond his grasp. Lin’s technical experience has injected new life into them via their most competent delivery yet.

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41. Matthew Hayes - Indigo     
Indigo is at first very disarming, a series of patient, calming exhales. Soon interwoven moments of intricacy, a voice here, a trickle of water there shape it into something that culminates explosively and joyously in relative terms by the final track. It’s a journey record that resets you and perfectly balances between melancholy and the quest for a more patient world. I listened to it a lot on my repeated plane rides from Melbourne to Adelaide. During the most capitalist points of my existence in 2017 it politely re-positioned my perspective on things.

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40. Bicep - Bicep 
The Field re purposed trance in a way that felt inexplicably sophisticated, in the same way these Bicep must be in on a joke, because they take the muscularity out of prog house and make it ephemeral.

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39. Yves Tumor - Experiencing The Deposit of Faith
The first track I heard in 2017 moments after midnight on new year’s eve was Yves’ “Limerence” one that wasn’t on his acclaimed Serpent Music, my introduction to him a few months earlier. It blew me away. “Limerence” went on to be the centrepiece of PAN’s Mono No Aware and one of 2017’s most vital pieces of music. Yves has made the most of it. Experiencing the Deposit of Faith rides the feeling of that seminal track in varying directions.

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38.  Khotin - New Tab
A few years ago everyone either realised Macs were overpriced paper weights and acknowledged that functionalism is the future or became nostalgic for Window’s 95. Although I hope it’s the former I suspect it’s the later fascinatingly, 22 years later windows operates not that differently but still looks like the future. You could say the same about the best mid 90’s IDM I love so dearly and Khotin.

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37. Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage
The critical darling of experimental music in 2017, possibly with thanks to the hard work of their lauded mixes that landed a few years ago. I’m not sure it it actually re purposes Hiroshi Yoshimura’s music but it’s nod to it is convincing enough to be be received as sincere and at times beautiful homage to it.

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36. Golden Retriever- Rotations 
There’s an alluring bass clarinet (I think?!) that populates Rotations -an unusual instrument to use prolifically especially in a Neoclassical leaning piece of experimentalism but it codes rotations with its own unique sound. It’s a new language that is rooted in emotion, although very different it wants to be felt by as many people as possible. 

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35. Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement - Ambient Black Magic

At the very least  Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement as a project wins best bullshit back story, a bunch of cassettes found in Port Moresby believed to be from missing christian missionaries, reissued in all their terror. I was a fan from the get go but possibly due to Fernow’s prolific 2017 workflow this is the best shape the project has been in since its inception. 

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34. Actress - AZD

Due to his bizarrely complex modes of operation every time I listen to a new Actress album I wonder if it actually is him or an imitator, it takes a few spins for things to line up again.  This didn’t happen with AZD, a capital B Black afro futurist techno record that is the true spiritual successor to 2012’s rightly lauded  R.I.P. - a record he threatened never to make.

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33. Shabazz Palaces - Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines/Born On a Gangster Star

This epic double album streamlines Ishmael’s sound into a distilled, aggressive but typically cosmic assault on America. Although this might be the easiest Shabazz Palaces album to digest, the music still forms a wonderfully alien ELM laced world where emotionless voices become percussive ghosts dancing around swamps of alien synths. 

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32. Lee Gamble - Mnestic Pressure
Apparently political, Mnestic Pressure’s finest point is the maze like way you need to train yourself to listen to it and extract full reward. It’s more psychological than political to me but maybe the point is they’re not so far apart.

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31. Four Tet - New Energy  
The insane popularity Kieran Hebden experienced at the turn of last decade seemed to throw him. New Energy finally scratched an itch for his magic I hadn’t had satisfied since Rounds. 

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30. Moon Diagrams - Lifetime of Love 
Lifetime of Love is a particularly weird, aching piece of ambient electronica.  Torn between a hypnotic ambiguous drawl of his Geographic North peers and his band’s early ambient psych pop monuments, Deerhunter’s Moses John Archuleta has made something here that is a rhythmic buffer from the catharsis of his day job. 

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29. Forest Swords - Compassion 
Barnes’s latest offering as Forest Swords creates a vibrant maximalist voyage by narrowing the occasional kitsch musings of his previous album and blasting the important and unique aspects of his project into full scale widescreen stuff.

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28. Cologne Tape - Welt
Magazine’s finest assemble for a homage to German music that although oddly eclectic is full of purpose and resolve. Magazine once again proves a safe haven for artists like Jens-Uwe Beyer and The Field to experiment outside their comfort zones, making me very happy.

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27. Rafael Anton Irisarri - The Shameless Years 
Although not his finest, Irisarri’s latest is a real grower by one of the ambient masters that rewards repeated listens and like his best can still suspend a Sunday afternoon in pure weightlessness.

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26. Japanese Breakfast - Soft Sounds From Another Planet 
Michelle Zauner’s smoldering sophomore record was originally intended as a science fiction concept album. It never quite became that but a strange dystopian shade is cast over it. It’s as if she made it 50 years in the future in mid western America, past its prime remembering its past. 

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25. Strategy - The Infinity File  

Jefre Cantu Ledesma’s excellent 2016 release on Geographic North meant more people than usual pointed their heads at the direction of the label. They didn’t waste the opportunity to capitalise on the attention, TIF is a genre hugging tape loop record running in the lineage of Basinski that beatlessly flirts with idea that this is music that can make you move. 
 

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24. Shannhet - So Numb

Bordering on classical in its grandeur, So Numb is the ambient metal titans at full wingspan. An austere and almost comically epic record, they understand like few others the grace and beauty required to pull something like this off.

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23. Avey Tare - Eucalyptus 
Anco’s Meeting of the Waters was the return of a sound I felt had long cease to exist, an early 2000’s ambient record with folk-pop song gems hidden inside. Eucalyptus is  the realization of those songs in broad daylight. Its stunning lucid dream state at its best it sounds like a sister album to Deakin’s Sleep Cycle, or even Spirit

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22. Juju and Jordash - Sis - Boom- Bah 
The idea of improvisation in techno normally lends to a sloppiness but these two have worked together so closely over the last decade that this record scans as each predicting the other’s next move. Impulsive yet perfectly refined.

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21.  Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - The French Press
Quite possibly the most unfathomably fully formed guitar band since The Walkmen and about the only indie rock record I cared about this year.

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20. Jefre Cantu Ledesma - On The Echoing Green 
For the third year running the noise maniac has outdone himself. This ventures closer to shoegaze and song structure than anything he’s released before and wonderfully for noise heads and MBV fans alike, pulls it off.  

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19. Richard Dawson - Peasant 
Peasant is sort of halfway between the absurdity of modern day Scott Walker and the somber beauty of prime time Nick Drake. It’s the most confounding record I heard all year. He plays the guitar like a 7 year old snapping at a nylon string but does it so intricately that it feels like there’s no other way to play the instrument. It also simply must be noted that for me there was also no better song than “Beggar” in 2017. 

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18. Call Super -  Arpo
I heavily underappreciated the depths that Joe could mine, he’s always been able to flick his music around just enough that it becomes genreless but the LP format give it time to crystallize in a way that is a lot less messy and much more rewarding. 

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17. Just Neighbors - Being where I Thought I’d Be 

Being where I thought I’d be could be the best math album since Mutiny on the bounty’s IMAX epic, Digital Tropics. Just Neighbors is the counterpoint to the record that out battlesd battles, a patient neighborhood band that know their limitations millimeter perfectly and simply coast through a near perfect suburban album like a  lost cousin of American Football. 

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16. Kettenkarussell - Insecurity Guard 
Giegling may be the first label to become a glorified electronic music meme. Insecurity Guard is virtually impossible to get a hold of digitally and if you want a physical copy you have to pay, big. The problem that seems to encourage this ostentatious behaviour is the music is somehow gorgeous enough to justify at least some of it. That last track is on some serious BOC shit. 

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15. Forest Walker - UV Sea 
Constilation Tatsu have always had an astoundingly consistent output of soundcloud ambience  but this tape from Oakland’s Forest Walker is the next step above. UV Sea is an enveloping wave of humming machines and perfectly measured, piano that melt together. Ambient bliss of the finest order.

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14. Ahnnu- Special Forces 
I’ve been a massive Ahnnu fan since Battered Sphinx but always seem to overlook the LA surrealist when writing these dumb lists, his music is timelessly expressive and fascinating, Special Forces is yet another record to ad to his ludicrously high standards of experimentation. 

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13. Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives
Mount Kimbie were once ambassadors for a sound I really loved that only seemed to really exist in 2010-11 before it was consumed by pop culture and somehow became something different. James Blake is a pub singer playing stadiums now. Love What Survives rescues some of that sound but also offers a nerdist offering of their fascination with the MS-20 - one of my favourite synths.

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12. William Basinski - A Shadow In Time
Many debate the legitimacy of the connection between Basinski’s Disintegration Loops to 9/11. On his first work that has actively engaged with the same technique since that career defining legacy, he crafts music that shifts over essentially large scales with new techniques to further unravel his difficult relationship with tragedy. It further homes in (and perhaps justifies) the most lauded conceptual framework of the his career. The two pieces introduce violent acts around the 6 minute mark, like a real marked event, by the distant end of the track’s twentieth minute it’s hard to remember what the pieces were like before fate reared its head.

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11. Varg - Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City  
Varg takes contemporary popular music culture, purist independent ambient techno and our self perception in the digital age, irony and steely purpose and compresses it to a dense singular point. Then he boasts on instagram about how easy it was to make on his ipad. This is your reality, are you flying business class?

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10. Albrecht La'Brooy - Escape Velocity 
As with much of the Melbourne duo’s work Escape Velocity is yet another place making exercise but this time one that is interpretive and cosmic bound. Their previous records relied on personal experiences and recordings to supplement their sometimes astoundingly intricate soundscapes, this proved that they can project that same romance to places they could only dream of going without diminishing any of their music’s power. 

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9. PAN - Mono No Aware
Mono No Aware strikes a balance that few label comps could ever dream of, and feels as important as Artificial Intelligence must have. The record is an incredible distilled snapshot of the way ambient music operates within the music of today, eclectic enough to keep you on your toes and yet captures a beautiful static and very specific mood. The thought that has gone into this is immeasurable, it doesn’t read as a collection as much as a modern ambient classic.

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8. Baths - Romaplasm 

Born from the 2010’s era where poptimism and independent music were still distinctly separated, Bath’s masterful third full length gave me hope that there is still a pop utopia hiding in the queer underground.

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7. Bing and Ruth - No Home Of The Mind
Composer David Moore’s neoclassical drone opus is waves upon waves of arpeggiated chords and shuddering, gut wrenching bass tones executed with mathematical, classical and emotional precision. Very few can do this type of thing.

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6. Bjork - Utopia
Utopia has been unfairly labelled Bjork’s “Happy Album,” unsurprisingly it’s far more complex than that. Bjork has become the perfect catalyst to bring out the best in Arca, strangely she grounds him but also manages to paint these surreal collages that are both “happy” and also somehow skin crawlingly weird. Their second meeting has resulted in my favourite Bjork album since Vespertine.

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5. Shinichi Atobe - From the Heart, It’s A Start, A Work Of Art
The mysterious chain reaction expat has been pulled out of hiding revealing a plethora of stunning technoscapes, Atobe crafts three dimensional loops that weave in and out of each other with no beginning nor end. His distinctly Japanese sensibility puts him squarely in a lineage of greats like Rei Harakami Susumu Yokota and the beyond legendary Hiroshi Yoshimura who plucked the impossible out of the most simple of electronic constructions. There is something desperately elemental about it, as though he’s trying to expose what it means to be human.

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4. King Krule - The Ooz
One hailed as the new voice of our generation, I never saw Archy as more than a modest fad, an english kid with a guitar and a deep voice. I’m very happy to be wrong, The Ooz is an incredible jazz fused odyssey and nothing sounds quite like it. Marshall plays with perception of the English language, bone shattering bass and quirky and brash areas of a lengthy album that open up into gorgeous interludes. His voice is one thing - and still notable - but his abilities as a producer and a lyricist are where things have become incredibly interesting. He’s getting a lot of attention right now and he deserves every bit of it and you don’t need me to tell you. 

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3. Bibio - Phantom Brickworks 
Phantom Brickworks borrows from just about every corner of modern ambient you could imagine. Basinski’s disintegration techniques, Glass’s repetition, GAS’s hiss, Eno’s placemaking melodies, this list goes on. What’s so absolutely remarkable about this is how an established artist who has never operated in this field has made such a convincing and beautiful masterpiece out of recycled ideas.

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2. Skee Mask - Skee Series - ISS001 - 2012 / ISS002
After last year’s already canonical Shred, The peerless German returns with a series gorgeously realised, ungodly pieces of ambiguous IDM. Both EP’s were razor sharp, bold statements from a producer with absolutely nothing to prove at this point. He has an LP on the way in 2018, repent sins, the messiah might be here.  

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1. GAS - Narkopop
Full disclaimer: I regularly regard GAS’s 2000 record Pop as my favourite of all time to the point where I once wrote an entire book about it. Wolfgang Voigt has done a lot since then including building one of the most important techno labels ever in Kompakt and continued to explore ambient avenues, but never returned under the GAS name. Myself and others started to loudly wonder if he ever would, or more importantly if he still could make this music. Pop perfected the formula he had been testing in the mid nineties, it sounded like the universe breathing, it gave new meaning to existing. The conclusion was always simple: Why would he?

Eyes fixed on the future, when Wolfgang brought back GAS for a fleeting remix of The Field a few years ago it felt unimportant but also opened up the possibility that he may not be done with the name. He had ever so slightly tarnished Pop’s perfect full stop. 17 years after Pop he’s exhaled another opus over the decades that does the GAS name justice and reinstates his god given right to walk away from it.

One thing to readily note here is this record is certainly not Pop 2.0 as the title may suggest. Narkopop’s new unstable nature brings fascinating, readily consumable answers to the question of where he planned to take us as well as obligatory nods to Konigsfrost and Zauberberg in overwhelming ecstatic waves of classical music. Narkopop is anything but nostalgia, it presents itself as a stunning individual entry into this once seemingly sealed vault. Gone are the naturalistic running streams of Pop’s opening three tracks, replaced by human voices on 3, horrifying militaristic drums on 5 and most strikingly, blindingly gorgeous piano fills, clear as day on 6. Its meaning was quickly clear.  

Narkopop
feels heavier than Pop ever did. It’s a velvety record, luxurious even but where Pop felt like it could have been accidentally made by the forest, Narkopop is undeniably the result of fingers on buttons and keys. Pop would never have let a human made piano fill enter the frame yet alone a voice. 17 years later perhaps Voigt can no longer achieve such feats, what’s more likely is he is trying to tell us that the world has gotten to the point where it won’t let him. Once a vision into the surreal side of nature, Narkopop seems to point the project somewhere it has never faced, nor needed to - the human condition required to program it. Not so strangely 2017 felt like the right year for him to do it and for me it was the best record of the strange year by a mile. 

 

JDID’s 50 Favourite records 2016

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50. Grouper - Paradise Valley

This is the only time in the seven years of writing this list I’ve ever included a 7 inch and likely only time I ever will. With 8 minutes of airtime in 2016 one of this blogs favourite daughters Liz Harris did more than most artists do with a lifetime. Paradise Valley is a golden masterstroke, perfect ambient pop and obvious chord structures lifted to heaven. It’s the perfect melting pot of the guitar based haze of a Man Who Died in His Boat and the haunting Ruins. If she keeps going like this and crafts a full length out of it (likely) Bradford may have to do something else to reaffirm his throne.

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49. Mr Fingers - Outer Acid

Larry Heard is a house god, someone I have spent many evenings with in smoke machines. He’s old, and one of the first canonized members of the dance music community. Outer Acid is just further fuel to the fire.  

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48. The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End of Time

A now highly regarded composer Kirby has challenged his breakthrough with another contribution to memory loss and ballroom nostalgia, apparently the first in a series of decay. Although the concept of giving his alias dementia sounds more blissful than it would be in its horrid reality, Everywhere At the End Of Time packs some of his most beautiful parlor music assemblages yet.

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47. Conor Orberst - Ruminations

Every Conor Oberst Record is about Conor Oberst. When yourself as a subject was once more fascinating than any political message you may have hid behind once upon a time can you blame him? I wonder if the older girl I was obsessed with in high school who was obsessed with Conor and started my love affair with his early music has heard his best record in years. Probably not, things have changed. I wonder if she still cares about him? Probably not. He sounds lonely, a little deranged and after all the drama surrounding him over the last few years almost completely alone. Ruminations has no miracle backing bands, no political epiphanies, buckets of elitist, pseudo intellectual melodramatic references and Oberstisms  and a few “did he actually just say that moments” but if anyone’s going to make a brilliant record out of these ingredients it’s going to be Conor. Just ask him.

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46. Julianna Barwick - Will

Seeing Julianna live is an experience that is hard to believe even when you’ve lived it. Up until Will her records have become increasingly inhuman, her last, produced in Iceland was almost godlike. Even though her shows prove it, she’s so talented it’s hard to believe all that noise came from one person to the point where listening to it on headphones you can so easily disconnect from it. Will finds a humanness and amateur streak in her songs and it works to her favour. Clunky piano, simple synths and the noise of a utilitarian highway in the background of the opener remind you that she’s just a normal person somewhere in the world making music that is anything form ordinary. It resets the awe you felt when you first heard her all those years ago.

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45. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer

Following last years headier and more romantic effort, It’s no coincidence In summers title conjures memories back to Fennesz’s 2001 classic. Like that record the midsection of this beast is an abrasive noise piece that manages to be beautiful and organic, an opera ripped apart by the nuclear power of a million suns. Oh beautiful Merzbow, to chaotic endings on the beach.

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44. Biosphere - Departed Glories

I’m still desperately waiting for Biosphere to make another Substrata (call me a dreamer) but now he’s in his 50’s the ambient wizard seems more content to pursue the stories of others and let Hecker do the magic. He’s grown increasingly erratic form the  sounds of space, to the terror of nuclear power but here he pulls himself back a little bit to tell an ambient haunted tale of a medievil queen. Although it’s still no substrata (what is?) It’s haunting and masterful as the editions to his catalogue that have dared come close.

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43. Russian Circles - Guidance

Guidance is Russian Circles at both their most professional and unguarded. They push their strengths to extremities creating a varied exploration of post rock and instrumental metal that is both diverse and adventurous, a new and exciting professionalism.

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42. Tim Hecker - Love Streams

Hecker’s now some sort of ambient god, a funny term to come to grips with but so hard to argue when you put on his records. Concept is so crucial to the success of ambient music and record to record Hecker’s are always so unique, purposeful, clearly defined and hauntingly executed. Love Streams is no exception, a fragmented take on the chorus and the choir, the human voice hacked at to the very edges of what we describe as human.

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41. Pinkshineyultrablast - Grandfeathered

Shoegaze has had a brilliant sub-populist resurgence in the last few years, once a genre that seemed doomed to parody a certain record released in the early 90’s forever on repeat, the same band that gave us that record delivered the next testament 22 years on and reopened the flood gates of youthful imagination the genre originally inspired. Pinkshineyultrablast are a Russian band and their sophomore album captures the innocence and grander of prime era MBV whilst bringing something distinctly alien.

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40. Porches - Pool

I wrestled with this one for a while, an oddity of a pop record by someone who really should be no more than Frankie Cosmos’s Boyfriend, Pool is somehow perfectly simple, a rare buzz record that doesn’t overstep its mark. Greta’s back up vocals provide whimsical observation of the twenty something’s relationship and the whole thing actually feels made in an apartment. “Be Apart” is one of the years most arresting songs, dance music lite made huge by a vocal performance few thought Maine had in him.

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39. Tortoise -The Catastrophist 

Almost as if they were trying to be self destructive, post rock greats tortoise managed to put the most reincarnation of David Essex’s god awful “Rock On” in the middle of this record. Try as they might they somehow managed not to kill The Catastrophist, an otherwise pragmatic Tortoise record with tones of space in tracks that rival their best stuff like the gorgeous “Clearing Fills” and one hell of a jam in “Hot Coffee”.  As if to say “just kidding!” at the end they welcome Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley to “Yonder Blue” to deliver you that stunning Tortoise-with-vocals moment you wanted…. That you deserved.

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38. Convextion - 2845

It’s not everyday you get someone like Gerard Hanson, this is only his second full length record as Convextion and the last dates back to 2006, the evolution made by 2845 is much less steep than indicated by the cover. 2845 is a record of meticulous patience and construction, unusually gentle techno, instantly likable but constructed with the ability to withstand the next ten years of musical trends. A flash in the pan this is not. 

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37. Brian Eno - The Ship

The Ship remarkably introduces a new mode of operation into Eno’s extensive catalogue of innovation. It’s an ambient record centred around the human voice and Eno’s soothing baritone has  never been deployed in the way it is here. The Ship is essentially one big disorienting ambient build to his out-of-nowhere cover of the Velvet Undergrounds “I’m set Free”. The cover is beautiful on its own but taken as a whole The Ship masterfully transforms its emergence form a sea of 40 minutes worth of cryptic ambient fog into an otherworldly science fiction leaning experience.

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36. Camp Cope - Camp Cope 

 I’d never heard of Camp Cope The day I saw Melbourne girl Georgia Maq absolutely destroy the support slot for Modern Baseball earlier this year. As I prepare to see them again in a few weeks both bands are suddenly big enough to pack out Billboards, shit moves fast in 2016. There’s admittedly nothing superficially special about these songs yet there’s something indescribable about them that means you’ll still know all the words to them in five years.

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35. Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of Denial

 Although he could never be expected to live up to his god-like 2015 singles collection Teens of Style Will has managed to craft a clever (albeit not too clever) no frills indie rock record packed with his now signature expansive moments of early twenty something catharsis, which should be enough to tip him over to stardom. He really is the heir to the Stroke’s throne, good luck kid.

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34. Jeff Parker - Slight Freedom

Is 2016 the unlikely year of Tortoise? From their freaky new record to Tangents “ode to tortoise” in my world at least the band enjoyed a wonderful resurgence. Before the year was out their guitarist dropped this, a loose as possible free jazz guitar record that’s as raw as they come. There is some genius at work here, the start of a few TNT’s, a bizarre instrumental Frank Ocean cover and a whole lot of ambient background noise like the odd police siren or reversing truck. The best whisky sipping late night record of 2016.

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33. Steve Hauschildt - Strands

A Hauschildt record with glaringly few arpeggio’s was almost impossible to imagine but the result is surprisingly rewarding. On his second brilliant album in as many years, he takes space and bleeds into an infinite expanse in a patient and more conceptually clear direction than his arpeggio obsessed former self may have dared. Strands is glaringly and comfortingly beautiful, an introspective and patient record from one of modern ambient’s rising great masters.

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32. Skee Mask - Shred 

Skee Mask’s  passion for breakbeats and traditional dance floor drive are certainly comfortable entry points to Shred but despite his notability as a percussionist, Skee Mask’s greatest talent is sculpting synths into amorphous clouds that feel both impossible and emotionally loaded. Sometimes the juxtaposition between these two obvious strengths can come across as too much candy to chew on, but when they work together like on the astounding penultimate track “Panorama” it can feel utterly transcendent and very rare.  

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31. Roly Porter - Third Law

Ambient freak Roly Porter is a designer. Third Law is loaded with unexplained twisted sound, unashamedly aiming to be the mood setter for a sic fi epic. You may wish this music was adding drama to a piece of cosmic cinema but soon the sudden shifts, the surprise moments of panic and the often overwhelming moments of sheer beauty culminate to a realisation that all the stories, visuals and drama are all already here.

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30. Touche Amore - Stage Four

Although a hardcore band with a hyper confessional front man who actually wants to make a whole record about cancer seemed to be a really bad idea, Touche have been doing this for over a decade and they certainly didn’t take on the task lightly. The most Glimmering production and razor sharp instrumentation of their career make this fitting tribute hardcore’s answer to Hospice or Carrie and Lowell, records nobody knew they needed but couldn’t let go of when they received them.

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29. American Football - LP2

How many of you were really waiting 17 years for this? Not many. These guys with the exception of Kinsella (who as Owen is a true indie rock lifer) have gone on to be bankers, academics, whatever. Their return is classic American Football guitar dynamics combined with Kinsella’s evolved Leckman-like croon. It’s a distant cousin of that record that redefined emo music and sensibly more mature and happy.  Ultimately it is a deserved and immaculately crafted victory lap for a band were never truly given the credit they deserved. It’s a warm thing to experience, I’ve seen them live in front of a sold out crowd, never seen anyone happier to be playing music for me.

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28. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Pretty Years

After 2014’s game changing Lose, it seemed predictable that CEG would reinvent themselves because its what they’ve always done. It teeters on disaster in places, Diostingo’s signature strained voice, the occasionally cheesy hooks, that fucking saxaphone!?  But that’s how they operate. Like always they miraculously come out the other side sounding vital, explosive and exciting as ever.

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27. William Tyler - Modern Country

Tyler’s most accomplished release to date is both an ode to the magical story telling prowess of the guitarist’s knowledge of his instrument and a sincere question about how you interact and redefine the Trumpian label of “country music”. To rid it of low brow and yellow belly undertones and embed it with the spirit of exploration and expansive beauty It deserves.

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26. Explosions In the Sky - The Wilderness

They may not have invented post rock but Explosions in the Sky have become the genre’s stadium poster children and they’ve done it comfortably. On their first full length since 2011’s admittedly excellent, yet dangerously safe take care take care take care they’ve replaced their signature big sweeping gestures with a more patient and delicate and sometimes tactile focus. For a band normally deals in seismic emotional shifts this tempered and beautifully executed approach feels like a revelation.

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25. John Roberts - Plum

Robert’s exotic sketches are further pushed into the depths of a drug induced surrealist evening on Plum, a bubbling fast and furious record that builds of the success of 2013’s equally hypnotic Fences. Robert’s always seems to invent new ways of making synths work for him and in the past it’s been transfixing, here he melts spidery guitar lines into the mix and goes somewhere completely sublime.

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24. Jenny Heval - Blood Bitch

Blood Bitch is period drama in the truest sense, a feminist record set in the future where the world has finally stabilized. In that case it’s somewhat utopian but the ease in which she executes this in a way that is approachable and never employs shock tactics is really something. On Blood Bitch the subject matter drops from it’s long history as a arts cringe topic to something that’s….normal. Progress might be slow but it exists.

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23. Krallice - Hyperion

During the middle of the harrowing Hyperion, Krallice open up a new universe, blast beats make way for militaristic fills, the guitars skyrocket at a seemingly unattainable ambient frequency. Krallice live for this innovative style of sonic acrobatics, waves of noise punctuated with bullet holes of ruthlessly calculated decisions. They’ve never sounded less like a black metal band or more above everyone else trying to be.

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22.  Tiny Moving Parts - Celebrate

To be sensitive about taboo genres in a world where “post emo” is actually a thing is a  real big waste of time, but mentioning emo with caution still seems appropriate when talking about the stunning Celebrate. To my untrained ear it actually still seems more aligned with the movement of the mid 2000’s that spawned side fringes and a whole lot of memes than anything else in the world of fourth wave emo, but under its exterior is a insanely accomplished math rock record.

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21. Barker and Baumecker - Turns

These two trialed each of Turns’ tracks at their resident Berghain, the club they have defined and reinvented. The feeling is not unlike walking up those stairs not really knowing what’s going to happen, a sordid night is easily swept under a rug every now and then but gazing into the depths of the forever encapsulated sonic MDMA that is Turns can be confronting. It’s rare even among the most seasoned producers to really embrace the idea of the club front and centre on record, here it’s presented stark naked.

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20. Joyce Manor - Cody

 They broke down indie rock’s Berlin wall with their indie/emo genre bender in 2014, two years later Joyce manor returned with a “I told you so” smirk. I got a text when this came out that said “Joyce Manor are starting to sound like a real band and it scares me”. It’s two years later, indie rock and emo are friends again and bands are finding just how many possibilities guitar rock offers beyond copying Pavement. Joyce manor are still a bunch of kids having way too much fun, Cody only sounds “real” because the rest of the world wanted in. This is real. It is actually possible to have this much fun.

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19. Lambchop - Flotus

Flotus is the result of a aging group coming to terms with the current shifts in independent music and contributing to it with an immaculate and tasteful record that outdoes potential influence (yes, Bon Iver). It’s Nashville folk gone  haywire, a uniformly electronic album drenched in vocoder not as an aesthetically ugly add on by as a structural fragmentation of sound the songs latch on to, necessary to bolster the blissful melt in your mouth melodies. The 18 minute closer is a perfect ending that I wouldn’t dare ruin by trying to describe.

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18. Lower Plenty - Sister Sister

Dole wave is the legacy that has been inherited by this generation of Australian indie rockers but it’s unfortunately misleading. Lower Plenty’s latest doesn’t consciously try and push against it but it sounds neither in a haze nor lazy, at its most creative, fractured and urgent it recalls the unrepeated energy of Essendon Airport and other forgotten late 70’s and 80’s movements in Australian Rock that should have more people copying them. Many of the current wave of dw bands produce records that are politically prickly but otherwise musically safe, Sister Sister is a really important Australian record that does the opposite.

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17. Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke - It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry

All star ambient team ups are normally a chance for masters to out weird each other (Hecker and Loaptin I’m looking in your direction) but It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry is a gorgeous, relaxed and surprisingly emotive work from two of the best that ever did it. I turn to O'Rourke for high fidelity orchestral acrobatics and I turn to Fennesz for fuzzy waves of nostalgic melody. You get both here, often at once.

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16. The Field - The Follower

Peerless and revered by the techno community and beyond, the second album into the Field’s “Black Period” is Axel at his most aggressive, assertive and eager to embrace rhythmic complexity. The 4/4 is still there but the loops and other elements overlap and dance around each other more acrobatically than on past outings. It takes a while to hear these tricks making this The Field’s densest and most intellectual album but one that ultimately achieves his familiar goal of building a legacy of bliss.

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15. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam - I Had a Dream That You Were Mine 

The best way to explain the success of this unlikely collaboration comes from one of the records weakest moments, “The Bride’s Dad”. A song that sounds like a Bob Dylan song but upon closer examination could actually be a Bob Dylan song, history will remind us that over the last two decades that the Walkmen’s former frontman  is one of the few that can make you look twice. Not taking anything away from Vampire weekend, but this record belongs to Hamilton Leithauser who’s days as a father have yielded his best music both with The Walkmen and on his own. Somewhere in all the 50’s undertones and American collage rich kid signatures of Rostam Batmanglij I had a Dream that You Were Mine would be almost laughably nostalgic if it wasn’t so fantastically addictive.

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14. Youandewan - There is No Right Time

Celebrated to the point of exhaustion before he’d even really even released anything, the hard to classify producer manages to avoid the problems with not aligning with a particular genre. He shrouds everything in the same cloud of heartache and patience, a well mannered record that asks for your respect rather than demanding it. The highlights like the to die for, perfectly titled “10450 (Alice)” insinuate you’re about to feel something forbidden that you were never ever meant to. These are not towering anthems but beautiful curiosities of places and people I will never know but wish I could.

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13. David Bowie - Blackstar

On the walk to my first day back at work in 2016 I listened to Bowie’s rather incredible Blackstar. A reinvention, another unfathomable and unexpected new version of the man who touched many. We didn’t know he was so sick but he did, we were still exchanging texts wowing over the shock of getting one of his best records this late in the game. By the end of the day he was dead. When I found out via a text message I was listening to “Girl Loves Me” its a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I thought it was incredible it “worked out” like this, it wasn’t until a few days later that I and the rest of the world realised he planned the whole fucking thing.

Blackstar is chock full of prophetic clues to Bowie’s imminent demise, but so was damn near every other Bowie album, he was obsessed with death because it gave him a chance to start again. Bowie loved that rebirth because every time he was reborn, whether a success or failure the world held its breath. Blackstar is his boldest and most successful expansion of the idea of David Bowie in decades. Sadly but fittingly it has now become a final dizzying and aggressive work from someone who seemed like they would never leave the earth. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in his final thoughts he was trying to reinvent himself again.

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12. Tangents - Stateless

I constantly found myself recommending this to people. Stateless is indebted to classic Tortoise during that era where they proudly adorned their records with the American flag - before September 11 - in a free jazz revival, a movement of hope now faded. Tangents are Australian but that couldn’t matter less, their free flowing improv soundscapes are so seductive and anti - nationalist they feel refreshingly out of step with current 2016. Stateless is a holiday.

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11. Jay Som - Turn Into

If Mitski’s rightly celebrated Puberty 2 is the history of female indie rock looking back at itself, and “Your Best American Girl” hands down 2016’s best song, Baltimore’s Janna Hunter and Victoria Legrand’s husk and mystery, Nadler’s history epics, Angel Olsen, White Lung’s potent feminism, Belinda Butchers sonic bending acrobatics, then Jay Som’s turn into sits in a strange juxtaposition to it all. She is 2016’s version of 2007’s version of Bradford Cox, a loner of exceptionally detailed bedroom pop who has gone so heavily introverted it’s turned inside out. Current Bradford is so out his shell now he’s running this decade, he is peerless. There is room for another.

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10. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Skeleton Key

Nick Cave released this record with an accompanying film that he self funded to explain the record without talking to the media about his son’s death. This seems like a perfectly good reason for the film to exist and for also a perfectly good reason for me not to watch it. Skeleton Key is a mesmerizing leap from an artist that shows a grace when dealing with big issues that can only come from years of wisdom. He never explicitly talks about his son, but the 8 vignettes that make up this album carry with them an accompanying guilt that only a man who has endured such hardship could produce such a devastating piece of art. It’s Cave’s best record.

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9. Aphex Twin - Cheetah EP

Richard D James doesn’t make it easy for you to truly appreciate his latest masterstroke. You have to understand how to listen to it and what to listen for which of course raises questions about its success. Unluckily for you I’m on his side of the fence and there’s a few of us here. If you do understand what you’re listening to, (an EP made by an unfathomably difficult to use synth from decades ago that can bend notes in ways no other can), the straight forward acid music here reveals its incredible detail and microscopic, impossible to replicate pitch shifts that once you hear, you can’t unhear. Yet again he’s unlocked another dimension and if you work with him he’ll let you come too.

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8. Modern Baseball - Holy Ghost

Unlike other bands with multiple lead singers Modern Baseball are a democracy.  Emo’s fourth wave has given birth to some awe inspiring records but Holy Ghost’s spilt personality is one of the greatest so far and it took the band to show cracks of creative unity to achieve it. The stubbornness of the bands two leaders to nakedly reveal their true selves brings highlights in equal doses, maybe a result of good old fashioned friendly competition. Both in concept and celebratory final result Holy Ghost is an album of how important it is to confidently be yourself, and how difficult and rare it is for people to do that.

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7. Porter Ricks - Shadow Boat

17 years after redefining modern techno and disappearing, upon hearing Porter Ricks return on a rainy evening in November it would be actually be reasonable to assume they actually spent the last 17 years crafting it. Shadow Boat is a suffocating, razor sharp  journey that exceeds anything they produced in the years where they basically invented dub techno. It removes all constraints. Firstly musicality is dissolved, textures become things to latch onto and dream about instead of melody. The cult like fascination surrounding these two is rendered plausible, each sound is a gift burrowed forcibly into your skull. This EP a perfect dissolution of what were once futuristic experiments. Then the world around starts to dissolve, the streets become disorienting, your footsteps become irregular. You forget about the two prodigal sons of sound design making this music. Then you wake up.

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6. Teen Suicide - It’s The Big Joyous Celebration, Lets Stir The Honeypot

The only thing consistent about Sam Ray’s output is its unwavering quality. The many masks he’s applied to himself over the years, from romantic lo-fi American indie rock to Drake sampling house have always been isolated to singular projects. On the fiercely ambitious bands aptly named  It’s The Big Joyous Celebration, Lets Stir The Honeypot, Ray bends all of his talents in to a grab bag of all his past accomplishments and them some. If nothing less it’s proof that everything the man touches truly does turn to gold.

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5. Deakin - Sleep Cycle  

Save the Avalanches, I like to believe Sleep Cycle is 2016’s less weighty equivalent to the My Bloody Valentine Loveless follow up saga and even listening to it now, 7 years after I first thought I was going to, it feels appropriately like a dream, an altered state of reality where anco did not diverge. This is surreal music from a distant lifetime, a loose more personal and guarded cousin of Feels and Strawberry Jam. Importantly Sleep Cycle is a quiet, personal record but never predictable. It’s punctuated with a bizarrely named explosive centrepiece  called “Footy” that sounds more urgent and inspired than anything from any anco member since that aforementioned period.

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4. Huerco S. - For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)

Within days of it’s release both Francis Harris and Skee Mask, two of the most forward thinking producers of today,  both who rarely use social media, had taken to facebook to pay the highest compliments to this record. Although never one to judge on the basis of words, stuck in another country with no way to hear it the sources of the compliments were enough to confirm there was something very special happening here. Unsurprisingly the praise was warranted.

On his call to ambient arms Huerco S takes the beatless and timeless techno he perfected on 2013’s Colonial Patterns and further dissolves it, the result is paradoxically both even more experimental yet also more melodic and easy to penetrate. Like his last record, despite its dependence on technology For Those could have been made at anytime in the twentieth century. Nothing here really loops even when things do “repeat” they reveal individual micro moments that emphasize the sheer dynamism of a synth, something that is regularly forgotten by producers of the current day. In terms of the nuts an bolts creation of electronic music in the twentieth century this is a game changer, although Colonial Patterns certainly championed Huerco S as a very strong conceptual thinker the physical creation and unbelievable detail of any mere thirty second slice of For Those should have even the most accomplished producers shaking their heads in astonishment. If Skee Mask and Harris’s comments were anything to go by, it did.

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3. Pinegrove - Cardinal

Pinegrove are Wilco meets pop punk, middle America’s War on Drugs and Phosphoresant meeting teen feelings rather than boring middle aged frustration and in the latter’s case, a strange and unusual attitude towards prostitutes. They are not a country band, the guitars are too loaded, too purposefully intricate, they’re not an emo band either, we just don’t know how to stomach sincerity anymore. On Cardinal’s closer and highlight, “New Friends” They prove they have a sense of humour, a infectious piece first ideated to the traditional county songwriter lament and regret which then bursts unexpectedly into a poppy teen anthem about being in love. All of a sudden they find themselves making fun of themselves after a record of intoxicating and occasionally exhausting highs and lows. It’s moments of respite like this that despite easy peer comparisons make Cardinal sound like nothing else but your dad and your 14 year old self making a record and it being simply, incredible. Just watch these guys play live, it sweetens the deal.

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2. Angel Olsen - My Woman

My Woman is possibly the only record from this last decade that I consider essentially perfect. After it gently purrs to life with sunset guitar chords and that voice around halfway through the records majestic centrepiece “Sister” an upbeat Fleetwood circa Rumors esq bass line whirls in before a guitar solo that sounded like Cat Power (when she sounded like she was taking heroin) adds a blistering intensity to the songs closing minutes. It’s one of the few points where the record reaches a place I like to think of as critical mass for classic rock in the twentieth century, tell me it can be done better? My Woman, is an album that could have been recorded in any of the last five decades, yet in every case would have experienced the same glowing reception. It’s an incredibly rare record for everyone that knocks you back down to earth and says you’re going to take 50 minutes of your life and bask in the presence of something truly beyond you. 

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1.The Hotelier - Goodness

Goodness starts with a fucking poem, an unguarded and supreme lame poem that most millennials in big cities will severely struggle with. When the line of what is ok to like becomes blurred (and it is increasingly shrouded in haze) we hide behind irony to the point the once prized literary tool  is now dead. Yep, our generation killed Faulty Towers. I’m not pretending I’m immune to this or that listening to this record makes me so, when asked for music recommendations this year I’d revert to the safe oddity and obscurity of Tangents, or the safe classic rock on steroids for everyone that Angel Olsen produced. This is the record I’d listen to when nobody was around.

Political correctness has failed. It is wonderful the world is moving forward on paper but there has never been greater proof than the US election of 2016 that it causes us to have meltdowns when we’re by our self and retreat backwards when confronted with an option to, alone. We are anarchists only in the voting booth, the last place in our society free of a security camera. Emotionally matured and weathered, in my eyes The Hotelier have transformed  from being an emo band of interest to one of the most important alt rock bands of the last decade. Their last record took emo signatures and reevaluated them for me. A bunch of people in their mid twenties put out a record with the passion of teenagers  laced with hindsight maturity and technical brilliance that only comes with time and age. It was a cathartic purging of the past that cleared the table for Goodness, a record grounded in positivity and the now. It is a triumph, a step up form a band already operating at a very high level. Beyond all that it is painfully honest and earnest in a way that demands you to interact with it on similar terms. There’s no halfway point when listening to this record and nowhere to hide.

The Hotelier are not explicitly a political band and as I write this they are tucked safely away in one of the last blue states most likely writing another amazing album not oblivious to the situation but independent of it. They are not explicitly political but their struggle is one of honesty and integrity and Americanism. Despite not wanting to be, they couldn’t really be more relevant right now.

The poem I mentioned earlier will do away with anyone not willing to give them the time of day, the benefit of the doubt. It’s clunky and awkward but it seems that it is so deliberately, I can say this because for me the following three quarters of an hour was untouched lyrically this year. Christian Holden said he’d been working on his writing whilst encouraging others of the same ilk to to the same, and that appears to be an understatement, he writes each line so it will sit as well on paper as it will in the fuzzy blanket of guitars that are so unique to this band he uses to curl his less than ideal voice up in.

I saw the Hotelier play twice when they were in town earlier this year and was taken back by how unguarded the crowd was. It was emotion on the sleeve stuff, that’s taken for granted, but it captured what I loved about emo when I was a kid, a place to be completely absorbed by music. At the time I loved everything about the genre but the music, thankfully we now have bands like this. Those shows proved how much this really is indie rock right now in the truest sense. This year people were huddling around a cassette player in an alleyway listening to the new million + copy selling pop album disguised in the word that is now just a misused fabrication re-invented by the urban outfitters revolution. It’s nice to know when everything is actually that hilariously complex, you don’t know what people are really thinking, what they truly believe or who they are really going to vote for, there’s a record like this to go to where everything is what it says it is. I’m not for a second suggesting that everyone will find good old fashioned personal honesty, revelation and confrontation in this album like I did, I’m purely advertising that its wonderful when you do.


Thankyou, Chocolate - Sunnybrook Ballroom (Self Released - 2016)

A series of field recordings, digital and live room instruments I created.

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Barely mixed, no master. Sunnybrook Ballroom is five short musical stories fabricated from my personal Google street view tourism of sites of American History. I have never been to America. I almost don’t want to, it would likely water down the myths, the feeling that in some way I grew up there. I’m familiar with specific nuances of both a New York and LA street, I know the cities languages just from viewing screens for years and years on end. I think I am am anyway, I wouldn’t want to find out otherwise. 

The possibilities of Google street view are endless yet we normally look only at possible immediate physical destinations. I found the subject for my architectural thesis but dropping randomly in North West Australian towns searching for an built language to latch onto. Luckily Street view doesn’t kill the romance, it is a personal and immersive experience but I believe the pieces of music I made from arriving at destinations that I may never go to in real life are somehow the same as if the idea of the place had been implanted in my head from folklore and are romantic than if I had visited in person. It’s hard to be let down when although your control of this new reality is total, it feels so clunky. When you leave you don’t remember the difficult interface. 

Current American culture is so indebted to Kanye even Hecker, one of my greatest musical heroes, has said that Yeezus had informed his new record. I waited until he broke that influence, he’s gone back to releasing pop now. In a way his brief stranglehold on experimental music which perpetuated though Lotic, Arca, OPN and even Hecker is marked as over by TLOP. this is wonderful news, there is a new chapter, America ambient has been released to the wolves again. I wanted to use that freedom, that dauntlessness and directionlessness to dwell in the past and in distant geographies. Places and times I will never visit. 

As always, forever indebted to Leyland Kirby, Hecker, Wolfgang Voigt and William Basinski.

Thomas Brinkmann - What You Hear (Is What You Hear) (Editions Mego - 2015)
I have a singular memory of being young associated with nothing but sound. The windscreen wipers on my mothers car made a very specific noise and as they did their job at...

Thomas Brinkmann - What You Hear (Is What You Hear) (Editions Mego - 2015)

I have a singular memory of being young associated with nothing but sound. The windscreen wipers on my mothers car made a very specific noise and as they did their job at perfectly regular intervals, without exception accompanied by the sound of rain on the metallic roof of the car, they would create a gorgeous symphony of what it felt like when it was raining. I couldn’t imagine the sound in any other context, without the smell of wet road, without the rainbow oil slicks. They were undoubtedly musical and they served as a protagonist for a life long fascination with sound. Finding ceiling fans that make the right noises and as essential to my idea of architecture as the size of a room.

At the the loss of any real descriptor for what music actually is and when noise becomes music, my definition is that when I react or relate to sound in any way that I normally would a piece of music, say a non arguable piece of music like Beethovens’s fifth, then it becomes music just as those windscreen wipers did. By this definition German composer Thomas Brinkmann’s What you Hear (Is What you Hear) is definitely music. The once techno aficionado’s 2015 contribution is although by far the densest and most challenging record I have listened to this year but far from the least rewarding nor least musical. What You Hear is comprised of experiments in single tonality and disregards melody entirely, many noise artists do this as well, but the catch here is that Brinkmann’s project is not really classifiable as noise music in the traditional sense either, I’ll explain in a second but first what actually is it?!.

The 11 tracks each take a single tone and push the capacity of the tone to display certain moods. The tracks range from anxious (“Agent Orange”) to excruciatingly painful to moments of subdued beauty of a humming computer monitor (“Antimongelb”) that all sound nothing alike but the very real cohesiveness here is in the conceptual strategy in which these tones are approached and dissected rather than any sort of emotional or melodic similarity. Opener “Ziegelrot” is essentially uncontrolled distortion pushed and pulled into more stable oscillating patterns. It’s sonic porn for those who are just interested in the visceral nature of sound.  And this theme repeats itself. You could almost describe “Indigoblau” as melodic but you will find you can’t follow it the way you would a traditional melodic piece but what it does offer is a thought on what potentially could be a fragment of human voice, sliced through a machine a clue as to where their musicality lies. None of these tracks have an isolated percussive element within them, yet their bodes all pulsate into rhythmic structures that at times seem musical, which brings me to “Bleiweiss” a personally devastating piece of music that sounded to me like those windscreen wipers, eerily presented without the accompaniment of rain on the roof of a car.

It’s an interesting record because the two sub genres that would normally be used to describe it are not really applicable. Ambient is certainly the wrong word here and Wolfgang Voigt’s latest is an interesting point for comparison. Voigt, for the uninitiated is responsible for the Gas project and commonly regarded (by myself) as the greatest ambient musician of all time. His latest is a single hour long piece called “National park” and unlike the Gas project it is devoid of rhythm for the entirety of it’s one hour and two minute runtime. It is a gorgeous orchestral piece meant to be played on hidden speakers in a national park and appropriately It does not seek to engage as much as it does seek to accompany a static emotion or experience which is how I define ambience. But I’d encourage you to listen to it in accompaniment to Brinkmann’s record as it certainly amplifies what Brinkmann is doing differently. Brinkmann’s music too actively encourages involvement to be decried as ambient and the way the tracks differ sonically so much gives the album a feel of a series of similar test of different objects. Brinkmann is not sitting back in his arm chair or improvising via feeling as Voigt so elegantly does, he’s anxiously trying to break into the sounds that your subconscious can find beautiful. The starting tone of each of these tracks feels like an intense product of design in itself even before he does anything with it, compare this to say a single unremarkable note on a guitar which when expanded form’s a building block of Led Zepplin’s Physical Graffiti and you’ll start to tap into the idea of this work. It’s not always an easy thing to experience but when those pathways to experiences in your life start to form, it’s far more rewarding that pop music could ever be, Voigt did this already with his masterpiece Pop in challenging the way we regard music that seeks to actively involve you, in his case with deep alien pulses, but here the pulses come from the singular lives of these carefully built elements themselves, and there must be millions out there we just haven’t listened to yet.

Jim O'Rourke - Simple Songs (Drag City - 2015)
Simple Songs is a celebration of Jim O'Rourke’s inability to be anyone else but himself and it’s beautifully comforting. The predispositions that precede any release by the Sonic Youth member and long...



Jim O'Rourke - Simple Songs
(Drag City - 2015) 

Simple Songs is a celebration of Jim O'Rourke’s inability to be anyone else but himself and it’s beautifully comforting. The predispositions that precede any release by the Sonic Youth member and long time wild ambient experimenter are numerous but I certainly didn’t expect him to try and be simple even after seeing the title of his first solo record in six years. What’s initially so fascinating is you can’t help but hear him challenge himself to strip everything back and instead of another dark, over detailed, experimental, vocal-less genre leveler wanting to create a 1970’s style traditional singer songwriter record your dad might like. Instead, by issuing himself this task he’s made another dark, over detailed, experimental vocal packed genre leveler which is like nothing else at all.

Your creative guidance system will be tampered with throughout your life but Simple Songs reveals how heavily the sum of your experiences impacts even the simplest of quests and how hard it is to break from the mould of what is normal for you. Luckily normal for Jim O'Rourke is a gloomy, funny, sarcastic man with an incredible mind for musical composition. If you tell yourself to be happy you inevitably worry to the point of unhappiness, when you tell yourself to be simple- to just let your guard down-you become increasingly complicated, introverted and difficult. Here O'Rourke has told himself to be simple and write verse chorus structures. Instead and perhaps inevitably he’s written a restless, introverted suite of eight songs that feel like their squirming in their skins and eight songs that more-often-than-not break out of their thin veils of simplicity all together. There’s nothing as challenging here as 2001’s kinda fascinating but ultimately tough to chew I’m Happy and I’m singing and a 1,2,3,4 but that’s not to say this is an easy listen. Take second track “That Weekend”, It’s a weird, dark synopsis of O'Rourke’s odd observations of someone’s life and it fleets between Zappa like sleaziness into devastatingly beautiful moments of piano release which then dive into slithers of flamenco esq guitar work into cinema style violins into Sonic Youth Guitar drawl in matters of seconds, all without derailing the thing. At first it’s an overwhelming blast of way-too-much but on multiple listens it reveals itself as one of 2015’s most affecting and brilliant pieces of music.

This theme of discomfort in the comfortable lasts the entirety of Simple Songs, The dense unstable nature of these pieces makes them initially too much to fully appreciate, paradoxically poppy yet unwelcoming but O'Rourke’s vocal performance (which is the best of his career) makes you feel as if you’re in on the joke in as little as five spins. Walking down the street listening to this soon becomes like wearing X-ray glasses, O'Rourke sings about people in a way that he knows everything about them he needs to feel comfortable, akin to imagining a group of people naked in a room. On the opener and possibly simplest piece here, “Friends With Benefits” he starts with the line “Nice to see you once again / its been a long time my friend / since you crossed my mind at all,” it’s a defense mechanism we’ve all used with a smirk. You never left his mind. But back to the effect of “That Weekend” the music that accompanies all this self aware joking is somewhere between the kitsch country queasiness of “Sweet Home Alabama” and Daniel Rossen’s beyond classy chamber pop and yep, Jim gets away with it. The sonic details are the gods that allow this miracle to happen, the signature pulls on the guitars strings that also appear on the epic “Last Year” the never overdone orchestration and perfect treatment of every element are overpoweringly evident. This is a man who can make any sound he wants better than just about anyone else out there, he’s proved this producing other peoples records but never shown it so wonderfully on his own.

This might sound like a clinical analysis of a technically competent musician unable to stop showing off but Simple Songs is anything but. It’s painfully self aware lyrically, but the music itself seems to come from far within O'Rourke and the results are often deeply moving. The show stopping “End of the Road” is a goodbye song that emotionally exposes Jim in a way that recent Sufjan Stevens would be proud of before semi unexpectedly blasting into the type of classic 70’s power ballad that Tobias Jesso Jr wishes he could write. Simple Songs inevitably becomes anything because like anyone worth a damn O'Rourke is a feverishly complex person and the wonder and perfect moments this complexity brings (like that unexpected Piano moment of “That Weekend”) is testament to the reason it’s worth enduring the often difficult task of befriending a difficult and brilliant mind. The hard times can be uncomfortable but the great times are not found anywhere else.

JASON DILL IS DEAD’S FAVOURITE RECORDS 2014.
*Panda Bear technically comes out next year*
Sorry about errors.
Thankyou for taking any sort of time to look at this.
50. Orcas - Yearling
Orcas’ pre - 2014 highlight was its debut’s beautiful closer...

JASON DILL IS DEAD’S FAVOURITE RECORDS 2014.


*Panda Bear technically comes out next year*
Sorry about errors.
Thankyou for taking any sort of time to look at this.

50. Orcas - Yearling
Orcas’ pre - 2014 highlight was its debut’s beautiful closer “High Fences”, a vocal-less Gas influenced track that fizzled that record away to a better place. In complete contrast Yearling’s highlight is the incredible “Infinite Stillness”, a borderline perfect pop song that rolls Meluch’s voice over hills of ambient orchestral oscillations to make it sound like it’s falling asleep in your arms. It sets the tone for a record that delights in melody when it could so easily avoid it. It’s weird that this shift has occurred and that Orcas are a sort of ambient Radiohead now rather than a Gas impersonation project that occasionally implements vocals, but what’s better is they’re good in both guises and now there’s more to love.


49. Answer Code Request - Code
Maths and logic were once common place within the world of 4/4, it’s hard to get attention with maths though and logic is just as boring. Code is quiet as a mouse and only on it’s subtly euphoric and incredibly beautiful closer does it break from some sort of purist logic. That all being said it’s deep grounded focus is quickly easy to be in awe of. Like most forms of new musical logic it takes months to truly uncover and understand. 


48. Makthaverskan - II
Female fronted rock music was seemingly attached to the political with an unbreakable tether in 2014, not because the artists wanted it to be but because that’s just the way the music community treated it. II is about textures, the vocals are an element of a guitar record quickly forgotten. Subversive without trying to be, II is grounded in a different type of musical politics, it wants you to go into it with your mouth ready to pass judgement (that font) and leave with your mouth sealed shut for the better reasons.


47. Mille and Andrea - Drop The Vowels
2014 gave us an Andy Stott record that wasn’t instantly jaw dropping. It’s the first time that he hasn’t expanded his own universe since his incredible run that started with 2011’s Passed Me By and culminated with one of the most singular breathtaking musical moments in my life -the masterwork that is the still unfathomably beautiful Luxury Problems. In 2014, Stott is flirting with popular culture, with indie rock, with TNGHT’s stranglehold on their part of the musical landscape and…. trap beats. It’s a bizarre record to say the least, someone who became his own entity within popular culture has now fallen back on it, but even a slight Andy Stott record features some starling moments. Faith in Strangers title goes deeper than you think, this is Stott under the influence, being guided by forces outside his world, but Drop the Vowels was him under the influence of another person, popular culture and their own ideals clashing together. Sometimes this resulted in a sea sick ship, other times the sky fell.


46. Parkay Quarts - Content Nausea
What’s in a name? Is a name defending Parquet Courts excellent Sunbathing Animal as their ambitious front runner for 2014 that it should be considered? Funnily enough their alter ego excels in doing just what the media what Parquet Courts to be, the new band that will save rock and roll. Of course that is the responsibility afforded to The Strokes some 13 years ago now, but these guys are smarter. Content Nausea is a no bullshit rock record, not an incredibly smart punk record. They wear simplicity well.


45. White Suns - Totem
Noise is real visceral thing, a palpable thing that you feel like you should be able to hold. A thing that shakes stuff and physically moves things. Its cathartic and angry and big and swelling and LOUD. The White Suns are often talked about as your least favourite band, the band that makes you nauseous. This is worse, which of course means it’s better. I’m glad that they have the energy to make stuff like this because now I have something to give mum for Christmas.

44. Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks - Enter the Slasher House
Animal Collective are one of the very few, acts that get away with being talked about readily in popular culture without sparking comparisons to any of their peers. Ever. Seriously go read every review of an anco record and try and find a comparison beyond the much worn “Noah sounds like the Beach Boys, but like, crazier!” line. So it sure was a shock when “Little Fang” the first single from Avey Tare’s new side project actually sounded like someone else. Ariel fucking Pink to be exact…. an amazing Ariel Pink song to be more exact. This is a double loaded bomb shell  because Ariel Pink is probably the best classic songwriter out right now. To be honest the rest of the record is only really compatible to recent centipede HZ Anco which you know yourself if you love or hate (I’m in the love camp here dudes), but that song alone was enough to make entry into this record feel like new untouched territory.

43. Lower - Seek Warmer Climes
It seems the Danish punk contingent, (has someone named them yet?) were intent on shaking things up this year, while Iceage’s shift is easier to explain, Seek Warmer Climes is just plain bizarre. It takes a LOT of getting used to, but I trusted this band to deliver me a good record and underneath the initial nauseating weirdness Seek Warmer Climes is a brilliant one. I’m still not sure what the title means but I don’t think they do either…

42. United Waters - Sunburner
Sunbruner initially sounds not dissimilar to a group of ten year olds trying to play a Joy Division record. Without mentioning the records obvious disregard for a creative title in the wake of 2013’s biggest record, Sunbruner not only doesn’t feel its way around the musical landscape or acknowledge the fact that it’s murky and often strangely tuned songs once were in realms of militaristic timing and blissful untainted melody. In that respect it’s quite possibly one of the years most experimental and risky records and instead of being a complete failure as it could so easily be, it’s a transfixing and addictive piece of art pop.

41. Downliners Sekt - Silent Ascent
Burial’s legacy crops up in all my lists in some way because regardless of his output that particular year his legacy is too big not to creep in somewhere. I could list all the ways he’s bled into electronica this year but that would be a waste of time, instead Silent Ascent picks up where a very particular Untrue Era Burial left off and while it ads nothing to the conversation it remains a great afterglow of a rocket that has now jettisoned itself far beyond this world.

40. Yumi Zuoma - Yumi Zuoma 
It was evident early that these guys are the only people from New Zealand equipt to cover Air France but this out-of-nowhere EP suggested there might not be anyone better in the world. Where they go from here will be interesting, indie pop is a treacherous ocean for fostering progression but like the innocent looking girl on the cover, seeing these guys absolutely blooming in their infant stages is a very beautiful thing that will probably never be repeated.

39. Raspberry Bulbs - Privacy
These guys seemed destined to fill the shoes of 2011 era The Men, although they are not quite there yet they’ve had a better stab than virtually anyone else. This is the most no bullshit punk rock record of 2012. Get it? “Finger Bones” and “Hopelessly Alive” do the opposite of the otherwise introverted records plea for Privacy. The shout and scream and kick and tantrum until the carer is exhausted. Raspbery Bulbs are brats, they are done with metal, they are done with New York and they’re done with you.

38. Sea Oleena - Shallow
In 2010 Sea Oleena released a song I became quickly obsessed with. “Island Cottage” was a one of kind piece of music the type of thing that would normally just get left in internet land if not given proper time, I was lucky, I was living in Italy and had a very shit internet connection, any music that I obtained I would listen to a lot because it was less readily accessible. Island Cottage soundtracked everything for a hot minute and everything she’s released since I’ve tried to give the same time. It deserves it.

37. The New Pornographers - Brill Bruisers
Indie rock has always been terrified of overachievers, The Arcade Fires stadium success has been met with distain, fuck it was pretty much as bad as when Modest Mouse made its channel 10 debut on the OC. How horrifying would it be if their was a band that somehow combined indie rocks most celebrated icons into some sort of ungodly supergroup of people who have managed to produce masterpieces without turning their careers into some sort of purist deodorant commercial and let them make a celebratory record of massive stadium sized ambitions that sounds as good as it should? What if nobody at your music festival cared about them? Destroyer is only part of this story, Twin Cinema was almost this good, but this is the first time that they have all really, truly sung as one.

36. Allo Darlin - We Come From the Same Place
The title of this record captures more about this band than they perhaps intended. Aussie expat and front woman Elizabeth Morris was around a lot when I was in my early twenties. She’s not anymore but her music hasn’t grown distant. Allo’ Darlin are obviously born and bred Slumberlanders, they live and breath the type of guitar driven indie rock they so readily championed on the commanding Europe, but We Come From The Same Place, kicks it out of tune in places, fiddles with it’s balances and still feels like it’s made next door. These guys are comfort wherever they may be in the world.

35. Fennesz - Bécs
This return from the ambient king of kings was meant to be a companion piece to his most lauded record Endless Summer. If it seemed like a bold move trying to reconnect a comeback record to your seminal masterpiece now filed away ten plus years in the past you don’t know how good Fennesz really is. Hecker had to learn from someone right? All your summer nights are here in a tidal wave of static memories left partly at the beach and partly on your Nokia 3315. 

34. Objekt - Flatland
Flatland could have ended up right down there if it was another year, but it takes time. Objekt’s trajectory is not dissimilar to Jam City’s Classical Curves motor in glass box techno and it can be downright jarring at times. But there is so much here, hidden melodies and storeys are hidden within the machinery, colour reflected back in the thousands of shiny night-black surfaces.

33. Total Control - Typical System
The off kilter sway of “Liberal Party” is fitting and self explanatory. This is a political statement and although it’s not a very intelligent one, you forget that most people don’t understand politics but still manage to become impassioned by it. The music that results is furious, unforgiving and at times uncharacteristically beautiful and sickening at the same time. Melbourne’s punk supergroup are hitting back and although they seemed confused about the difference between gay rights, gun control and what’s really best for our economy, whatever, it’s fun to play along.


32. Tinariwen - Emmaar
Remember When Darkside promised us a record that sounded like a middle eastern romance met with independent thinking? Instead Psychic sounded a bit like your dad who loves Pink Floyd a bit too much trying to make techno but Emmaar is the real deal, a fully immersive exotic guitar experience and unless you have some serious language skills one with a true element of the unknown.

31. Fucked Up - Glass Boys
They quit, they released a few zodiac singles then announced this.  I was like a kid trying to sleep before Christmas. From a band that’s done everything but try and make a simpleton record this finally does just that.  - It’s a return to Hidden World fucked Up. Glass Boys doesn’t touch their masterworks, but it is a a wonderful entry point to how fun and kooky this band can be and it features possibly the best single track the band has ever written. If it is truly a parting gift it’s a very welcome one from hardcore’s weirdest group of kids nobody wanted.

30. Alex G - DSU
There’s one every year. Jackson Scott last year, Mac Demarco a few years ago now, a guy that seemingly comes out of nowhere with an excellent ability to write weirdo songs with a tendency for weird tuning and voice warping. This year’s bandcamp hero was ALex G and the wonderful DSU is worth its break from the mud of the internet. Soon, he’ll be playing all the festivals and get sucked dry and become a caricature of himself like Mac did. It’s sad. See you in a few years Alex when I’ll love the other new guy on Bandcamp.  (Looking at you Quarterbacks)

29. Viet Cong - Viet Cong
Women were a much loved band and that will always be the first thing discussed when you hear about the rise of Viet Cong next year, but this despite sharing almost the exact same line - up, this is band that has grown up past the ideas presented by the brilliant Public Strain and into a new set of parts.

28. Shabazz Palaces - Lese Majesty
There’s no pusedo-wealth here, there’s no references to girls they’ve “collected”. HA~!!! Like these guys even get a label anymore. The opening four tracks could be the strongest run in 2014 before this thing gets lost in things that are probably beyond all of us apart form Ishmael Butler himself. Dudes, are you alienz?

27. Twerps - Underlay
Although this was apparently recorded in a weekend, its brief creation from Melbourne’s best, laziest , Centrelink sponsored band works to its advantage. This is a cute piece of indie Australiana that emits a subtle jump in their already excellent song writing. If their new record that they’ve apparently “Laboured over for a year” according to a drunken Marty at the bar the other night ever actually arrives it will be a treat. Till then this is the best time killer ever.

26. Lone - Reality Testing 
I’m a bit of a gear nerd so Lone records are worth sitting with your notepad at the ready based on nothing more than the fact that he sounds slicker than anyone else. Where there’s guys needing out about analog gear or whatever, this guy looks to the future. This record is a THX commercial, the highest fidelity crystal clear razor sharp piece of technology, it sticks to its mission statement, Restless City is reality pushed to the brink to a place where children flail MacBooks on the end of their arms as if they were connected to their body.

25. Ariel Pink - Pom Pom
Ariel Pink is so commercial that his records are starting to sound like a commercial, in a way Pom Pom cemented the idea that Ariel Pink is indeed one big joke, a songwriter so gifted he can write jingles that get intwined in your head like nothing else, or as his agent may lament, a songwriter so stupid that he accidentally writes jingles that get intwined in your head like nothing else. He’s brave too, his PR lead up to Pom Pom was virtually suicidal in 2014’s harsh climate of immediate judgement but Pink was never meant for 2014. These songs carry three times their body weight, they’re post pop, they’re bigger and more complicated than the 2014 musical landscape they inhabit, accidentally or otherwise. Fake it till ya make it.

24. Ricky Eat Acid - Three Love Songs 
There are twelve pieces of music on Three Love Songs and none of them are songs. Despite the one lone Drake sampling raging rave pic centrepiece outlier that was pretty much the years best track, these are lonely middle american ambient pieces that are actually strangely, clearly made by the same person that made last years brilliant Julia Brown record. Three Love Songs is a moment of respite, a moment to reflect on Sam’s unlikely and wonderful journey so far.

23.  St Vincent - St Vincent
By far my favourite feminist, Annie Clark is just one of those people who you can’t but help but be in awe of every time she opens her month at all but her appropriately self titled latest effort is jaw dropping. She probably could have been one of the greatest writers of our time if she wanted, but sonically she has a lot to say as well. These are ambitious, crystalline songs that are both alien and instantly loveable and when she turns that guitar to 11 like she does in “Huey Newton” it’s like you’re being jettisoned into space. I don’t know who handled the production here but it’s almost equally as impressive, she’s never sounded this good, never been this confident and never been this addictive.

22. Hands - The Soul is Quick
The Field’s side projects are always a little bit of a shock, his last - 2012’s Loops Of Your Heart - was a valuable history lesson of all things. They exchange the easy fix of The Fields blissed out trance techno for something more cerebral and this beat based noise project fits the “very alien and very smart” mould. These are uncomfortable pieces of music that make you think and feel, but somehow despite the lack of overly obvious melody, The Soul Is Quick actually feels like it’s got that Axel touch. It’s by far the best thing he’s made under another name and I’d be surprised if it was bettered. It gives a clue that makes you realise that the success of Lopping State of Mind is not just in its embrace of blissful melody alone.

21. Francis Harris - Minutes Of Sleep
There is a ghost somewhere in this record and you don’t have to look far to find it. Harris melds a dead jazz musican into haunted dance floor tracks played to the present from the past. The minutes of sleep he’s talking about here are the ones you don’t wake up from and unlike that other record this year that closely examined death with an ! this is no laughing matter.

20. Contrast - Less Than Zero
Jack Crook is probably my favourite skateboarder ever, He’s in Contrast and he also suffers from being a really nice guy, so that may mean that I’m listening to this through rose coloured filters, but who else did the whole MBV influenced, slumberland leaning no frills stuff thing this well in 2014?  Less than Zero has massive shoes to fill based on their obvious influences alone and the shoegaze mini epics that make up this EP are multi-coloured blasts of highly complex, innumerably layered perfection and they are incurably addictive and unashamedly melodic. It’s like an early Wild Nothing record mastered to fill that bit more of the room.

19.  Aphex Twin - Syro
Richard D James is a king that has lost control of the empire that he built. Instead of standing over it he’s chosen simply to ignore it and the results were predictably breathtaking. As a long time fan Syro was did all the things it needed to and then some, it lacks one thing a moment of perfect respite from its overwhelming innards and it’s closer fails to deliver like some of his devastating pieces of solo piano. But you can’t help but think this was part of the plan all along. Discount that and admire his lack of care for context and complete habitation of his own brain. It’s like nobody can get to him.

18. Marissa Nadler - July
July elevated Nadler to planes of operation so sophisticated it probably even had Julia Holter scratching her head. It’s a patient record, one that never bucks when it has the opportunity to and it has so, so many opportunities. Conceptually she’s come leaps and bounds as well, “1923” and “Dead City Emily” link stories over centuries in five minute suites of dizzying guitar and piano. Strangely although it’s distinctly a winter record and the title alludes to a North American summer July from a place that seems completely inaccessible, this was the record of last summer for me, I remember the city melting to it.

17. Lust For Youth - International
International ditches the Danish Punk and industrial techno of this (now) bands past almost entirely. It is a pop record. And these guys shouldn’t work as a pop band. This is hook filled song after hook filled song, and it’s not all entirely serious, International is a way of Europeans saying the world ends with Europe and this record makes it seem like the bounds of Europe are the edges of the earth. Lust for Youth as a project has always been about embracing sexuality and teen aggression but for the first time this is about things like the tenuous concept of home and having a lot of fun.

16. Steve Gunn - Way Out Weather
This is a future favourite. Way Out Weather initially was kinda uncomfortable for me. It’s got a countryness, an earthiness to it that leans it closer to Later era Eric Clapton than anything that could accurately be described as “indie rock” an earthiness that quickly turns into a specular, sprawling landscape of looping guitars over Steve’s lonely, stoned, yet strangely assertive voice. Track’s like “Milly’s Garden” roll from, calm sing a longs to bursts of maximalism and what makes these transitions so special is the looping interludes are just as addictive and easy to get lost in as their most overt moments. Gunn is a master of sounding comfortable and confident and he’s made a classic rock record that will make this summer a pleasure to do nothing in. 

15. Bill Callahan - Have Fun With God
There’s been a few successful dub re-do’s of classic records in recent times but none as surprising and instantly loveable as this. It’s almost as if Dream River was written to be transformed into Have Fun With God in the first place. On the opening “Thank Dub” the words “Beer” and “Thankyou” are melded into a hypnotic and ever pleasant warmth and the ritualistic task of getting a beer at the bar is suddenly transformed into a transcendent experience. The songs are more or less the same, but the elements are treated very differently. This record reminds me a lot of the end of last summer and being relaxed and hanging out with someone who now means everything to me. All of this is good.

14. Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again
Depending on where you sit on emo/inide crossover music you’ve either been hanging out ever spare second for Joyce Manor’s new record or you have no idea who they are. They pan to short attention spans and the 19 minute “Never Hungover Again” deals with issues you could probably cover in about say…1.30. This is oversized ambition in a shoebox. Arguably Joyce Manor had already made the jump and just improved on their formula with the Deafheaven producer associated Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired but it’s not until now that they’ve fully realised their potential as true populist propellors, jettisoning all thing that are considered to sweet for the world into a framework where they’re suddenly hard not to be impressed by. They’ve kept themselves exactly where they started growing, it’s a small place and a great place and it’s strangely refreshing to see a band with their potential end up here, in all these minute chunks of over melodic over sugared awesomeness.

13. Amen Dunes - Love
Love is the most contentious and common topic in songwriting history. Do we need your problems frozen forever in three and a half minute chunks? The fact is that this record titled just that, is the only way in which Damon McMahon is able to cope with the memories which overwhelm so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end you would would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life….that or just make some killer songs.

12. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else
In 2012 Dylan re-presented this project with unthinkably large ambitions. What had seemed like an ingenious, kooky play on pop punk done at a bedroom scale was suddenly presented by Nirvana’s most lauded producer and more importantly the frontman of one or two of the best industrial punk records ever(who himself released a great record that just missed this list). It was a massive leap and although the ambition was certainly there on Attack On Memory it was it stripped Cloud Nothings of a lot of stuff that made the project amazing in the first place. Here and Nowhere else is the inevitable middle ground and it’s a triumphant success, a blistering ambitious pop punk record that is still full of infallibly catchy hooks. This type of music is very easy to conceptualise and it’s why so many people have to break from it to do something “notable”, Attack on Memory is a great example but this steps back and builds on the simple building blocks used on 2011’s self titled debut and grows them into something more complex. It learns from every small short coming that has been presented with his always fantastic records and creates one that is free of them. This is a new type of ambition.

11. Frankie Cosmos - Zentropy
Zentropy feels like it was made by a friend, Frankie is stupidly adorable in pretty much every way. She writes cutesy songs that sound like bubble gum commercials. But there’s smoothing indescribable beneath the surface of Zentropy that makes Frankie more than just a cutesy new york indie rock singe songwriter who writes with “a lot of feeling”. She’s got a handle on her writing that is far beyond most, and she can pack more into a minute than most can squeeze into a record. When you start to get involved with these things you realise they are transforming from very very brief play doh tracks into things more sinister and complicated. “Birthday Song” is a minute about getting older, but it’s so much more that that, it’s about subversion, hate and being lonely and ugly. Her dad’s a fireman, who never came home. And lets not even begin talking about that cover. “Sad 2” is just about the most gut wrenching song on this list, nobody wants a dog to die but Frankie’s account of her’s passing is absolutely fucking unbelievable, not just in it’s honestly but in its way it can process so much in it’s typical brevity. So at the end of that day are these songs really so cute? Not really, but given time they could move the unmovable.

10. Segue - The Here and Now
Wasting virtually no time after last years masterpiece level Pacifica, Jordan returned with this instant classic, a hookier and more blissful take on the dub techno he did so well. It might lack the surprise factor that Pacifica had but strip that record of its incredible innocence and it could well be even better. He’s also branching out, The Here and Now floats above the genre tag “Dub Techno” that was so firmly latched to Pacifica into something undefinable. This is visionary ambience. 

9.  Kassem Mosse - Workshop 19
In a genre as stereotyped as techno breaking the rules of 4/4 is going to be the easiest way to give someone something to talk about. Here one of the greatest to ever do it sticks to the rules with a clenched fist and makes everyone look like fucking idiots in the process. Where some will initially see sterility I see a determined, disciplined, militaristic approach to dance music that was unmatched this year.  Because of this disco revivalist bullshit that’s going on in the club scene at the moment I don’t have an appetite for clubs anymore, the tech nerds have been replaced by the cool record searches, the people that seek long forgotten music that was forgotten because it wasn’t that good then. It’s hard when you hear a record like this and know its club play will be kept at a minimum for many years, until its lost enough that the guys searching for records can dig it up. The world needs passionate people involved in a creative discourse with the environment that they foster, when it is up to an imaginary third party to keep the party going - the party dies for those who care most. The drum signatures that populate Workshop 19 are feverishly complex and the mark of someone who’s enthusiasm for his craft would go on even if everyone else stopped caring. I don’t think i’ll ever stop caring.
8. Protomartyr - Under Color of Official Right
The Tarpeian Rock (/tɑrˈpiːən/; Latin: Rupes Tarpeia or Saxum Tarpeium) was a steep cliff of the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Roman Forum in Ancient Rome. It was used during the Roman Republic as an execution site. Murderers, traitors, perjurors, and larcenous slaves, if convicted by the quaestores parricidii, were flung from the cliff to their deaths. Those who had a mental or significant physical disability also suffered the same fate as they were thought to have been cursed by the gods. The cliff was about 25 meters tall. The Protomartyr song “Tarpeian Rock” finds Joe Casey listing a cast of those you should throw from here in plain spoken english as some fuzzed out backing vocals support his every claim with a riot shout of “THROW THEM FROM THE ROCK!” It’s a bleak anthem and points a lot of fingers. According to Casey “pretty much every band ever” should apparently get tossed.
Nick Cave’s influence is a tough one because not only does he not fully live up to his myth nor he doesn’t try to perpetuate it himself - others do it for him whilst he’s still very much an active and interesting contributor to the musical community. Take Iceage’s recent record which was a great play on Cave’s most egocentric qualities, but musically it lacked a certain focus that was found in the bands more original work. Protomartyr are pandering to the Cave myth too but  these guys have grown their admiration and their understanding of what that means into a thing of frightening power that is undeniably their’s alone. It takes this myth and translates it to songs like “Tarpeian Rock” and makes Casey sound like he’s a deadly serious man with a very valid set of admittedly ludicrous points and not merely an egotist.
7. The Antlers - Familiars
Familiars is about making the dense history of this band less commanding. Silberman says so on the penultimate track “Surrender” and he’s made a point that Familiars is not just The Antlers fourth record it is an at times statement from a band that now seems set for a form of longevity against all odds, and I mean all odds. For a band that achieved their power from the social isolation that comes with the deepest sorrows, pulling yourself back up doesn’t necessarily mean a change of mood but how you project it. If you’re not in the mood for feeling sorry for Silberman, you don’t have to. Familiars isn’t exactly a happy record (can you imagine!) but it’s grounded in an acceptance that’s lacked form their world until recently.

Familiars is notable not for any sort of emotional weight but for how fucking gorgeous it sounds, it is the poppier cousin to last years stretched out, excellent Undersea EP, which elongated their compressed waves of beauty they so utterly nailed on the one with the green cover. This is a musicians record, similar in a way to Shields in its desire to so take sound to it’s most velveteen extremes.

6. The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace Is There
I’ve known Ryan Robb for about 12 years or something. We don’t agree on a huge amount and that’t somehow formed the backbone of one of the best friendships I’ve ever had. I don’t see Ryan much but when I do it’s always the best time ever. He has an incredible ability to turn pretty much anything into a good time. He is one of the most exceptional people I have never come across and I more than anyone I know I’ll be friends with him for the rest of my life.

This record is indescribably turbulent and a testament to emo and indie rocks unbreakable tether despite the berlin wall between them. The Wrens, American Football, even the Postal Service have made the point before, but where that was in miserable romance this deals with a lot of really rotten stuff, suicide, things you don't  maturely and sanely  address at the time they are happening. This record embodies twelve years of things we DO agree on. It could be because it serves as a testament to the fact over the course of twelve years some stuff is going to happen to everyone that’s not going to be a good time and at some point you’re going to find you have more in common with the people you’re closest to than you think.

5.  Swans - To Be Kind
In the middle of the day, like daylight day, some guy decided we’d engage in some sort of testosterone fuelled nonsense, over whatever money I may or may not have had on me, (for the record it was about $20 and an iPhone 4. It felt weird as it was the first time I’d actively been in a fight in a very long time and it’s the first time I’d been that complacent with my personal safety in a long time. It wasn’t really some sort of fuse burning to an end or anything of the sort, it was just a time and place sort of thing. You can cancel credit cards at the push of button but it wasn’t about that. I’m still not really sure what it was about, but as much as all that stuff is frowned upon, and so it should be, violence just happens sometimes. I went home and listened to “Oxygen”.

This record is dangerous. It is a weapon. It is two hours long, it’s every bit as ambitious as The Seer on paper in reality it’s a far more all encompassing beast of looping guitars, bizarre stories and moments that make you feel like you can walk in front of a bus and not receive a scratch. Breaking down boundaries in songwriting is easier said that done, why does a song last three and half minutes? Take To Be Kind into your iTunes and skew your averages, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s why the averages are skewed that we should be reacting to, the fantasy created by a record that somehow entered the Billboard 200 is one of completely suffocation. It’s hard to rectify how this came from somebody’s head, nor how anyone could muster the incredible energy needed to extract this thing from an idea into an impossible reality a second time in just a matter of two years but I guess the dude is 60 years old and well practised in being out of his fucking mind. 

4. Kangding Ray - Solens Arc
In 2010 when Salem, Holy Other and Balam Acab were emerging the idea of “dark” electronic music seemed thrilling and it went beyond techno. All the post apocalyptic efforts since have felt distilled by the man who then proved that techno was in fact the perfect way of delivering this form of darkness in the wake of the aforementioned artists trun of the decade successes. Stott’s 2011-12 output distilled otherwise good subsequent efforts by Ben Frost, Arca, The Haxon Cloak which all tried to carve their own nieche in horror electronica to varying levels of success, but although you’d never call it purist. Stott’s relationship to a certain club linage somehow gave his music an edge that all the others operating with nothing to cling onto but seas of analogue machines now noticeably lacked.

He’s offered another two good records this year, one of which appeared on this list, both of which were overshadowed by this. Solens Arc is a painstakingly constructed full length horror soundtrack that rests on purist 4/4 techno. It has four distinct movements each progressively darker and more propulsive. There is almost no point in listening to this thing in cuts, it’s a series of deliberately and precisely measured waves of terror and respite with BPM’s fluctuating from wild to non existent. It’s so rare in a record so brashly ambitious and experimental in both concept and delivery never drops it’s astounding quality even for a second. As a front to back listen there may be nothing more mesmerising this year, Solens arc is a problem of horrific luxury. 

3. Hundred Waters - The Moon Rang Like A Bell 
The Moon Rang Like a Bell starts with a one minute acapella hymnal before blasting into forty eight minutes of bjork experimentalism, chamber pop, indie rock, slick RnB, lower dens esq electronic folk, ghostly bass music and pulsating dance floor ready beats and just about everything in between. The result is genreless and shockingly powerful, not to mention impossibly catchy and emotionally poignant.

Music media that I pay attention to is calling every band with a girl lead singer “feminist” but The Moon Rang like a Bell" is actually more empoeringly female than all they dared mention, a feat far more impressive than White Lung or Savages could ever imagine. Whilst the way they are bled with the production is borderline unparalleled. On “Out Alee” “Xtalk” and just about every other track, her coos bleed into synths and then are layered back on top of each other, it’s hard to rectify where she ends and the often pulsating electronica that accompanies her begins. On “Seven White Horses” possibly the records most outré reference appears. The track starts unremarkably compared to a lot of the records best, but suddenly turns into an almost spoken word piece that resembles a sonic smirk. Strangely this is not dissimilar to the most powerful Coco Rosie tracks. The media would never dare draw attention to it, but they forget that those guys that at their worst could be nauseating a the their best could be godlike.

Through the face of just about everything it remains about as subtle as a classy beautiful girl whispering in your ear and as polished as a brand new car, it never shouts, but becomes deafeningly loud, it’s never boring but it drifts into densely layered soundscapes that feel impossibly smooth. It’s a sea of paradoxical descriptors on paper, in reality it’s just wondrous. To say these guys have come a long way in a short time would be a massive understatement.

2. Real Estate - Atlas
Atlas is new found stability! Days will always be their masterwork, their urgent stepping stone of youthful enthusiasm but Atlas is where it all plateaus and with it comes this strange sense that the world has stabilised itself forever.

Of course there were tiny graduations of loss of my newfound stability and eventually it all caved into a heap. We drank in a park one evening shortly after this thing came into the world, I had been very bad at getting anything that resembled a good nights sleep due the relentless heat that week and I thought a couple of beers might help knock me out. There was a large amount of us by the end, maybe ten and as I left blurry eyed I caught sight of someone who wasn’t even meant to be in the city, but I made my peace and wondered barefoot in a syringe filled neighbourhood towards home, unable to see straight. As I got home I answered a phone call from a friend who was equally as intoxicated.

He was in hysterics, laughing loudly into the phone.
“Mate I’m looking forward to tomorrow night!” he said. I’m still unsure exactly what he meant.


I was in a strange happy/sad tango and Real Estate was the perfect soundtrack for all this. Atlas is a record that confronts adulthood head on and acknowledges without embarrassment that sadness and happiness are not mutually exclusive. I was completely alone at this time and it got me thinking where else do you go for this now? in 1998 you had Bedhead, Galaxie 500, Yo La Tengo…Real Estate are remarkable because they’re not simply the best band on the planet right now for interlocking guitar lines of excellence, with drowsy nothing lyrics over the top that can be both happy OR sad, that feeling of using the same set of tools to create a nothingness that becomes an every-thing-ness. Real Estate are not the best at this right now, they are the only fucking ones doing it. Is this for better or worse? I’d argue with a band as great a gift as this, it is certainly for the better.

Real Estate are as understated as you can be yet I can’t be helped but be blown away that a band as subtle as this is providing the very thing I crave so much. Tracks like “Horizon” and the far too brief highlight “Navigator” don’t perpetuate this acceptance/understanding as much as they carve it into stone.
Regardless of stability, company or anything else remotely of the sort - this band will be every drunken summer forever. 


1. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lose
One of the most horrific moments in my life was the first time I ever stepped foot in an Urban Outfitters. Apparently Alex Hueng felt exactly the same way, to loosely express the way we both felt, It made me so angry when I saw a group of people try to package and resell my youth back to me - the same people were giving me shit for it in high school. It’s was like someone pissed all over my teenage years, every first and discovery and then tried to sell it back to me. My deep seeded inner American Psycho is not a latent fear of high-fiving in sweat soaked business shirts, aneurysm imminent, smiling through gritted teeth, enamel ground down to the gums, it’s that scenes that once lived happily in isolation are now readily infiltrateable and accessible and ready to be marketed and fucked with to appeal to the very people they once repulsed. Indie rock has been a massive victim of that. In this fast paced world people look for things tho grab onto and in doing that don’t realise that people had spent decades building these things. A few years after I first walked into that store and indie rock proper is in remission. In 2014 Pitchfork loves misogynistic rap music and Beyonce and Urban Outfitters now sell more “vinyl” records than most record stores. We worship its Myspace grave.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the fist time I heard “Jackson” The massive opening mission statement of Cymbals Eat Guitars astonishing third record. It’s a devastating opener of an incredible album, an incredible song in its own right, and a dense fascinating story that drifts between dreams, folklore and reality on paper, When I finally set that all aside, which is hard, I heard a record that embodied something with more power than I’d heard from just about any record since I became a legal adult. It was finally a record that came from a linage of wonderful things - the things that I grew up with. It doesn’t stop at “Jackson”, These echos of innocent music formation and discovery seep though the Bright Eyes influence of that opener to thunderous Pavement esq 90’s chill of “Warning”, through the aggressive live harmonica punk of “XR” that dreams of seeing the Wrens in a back room in Philadelphia. The later half of the record holds a myriad of highly personal reflections including Lose’s most loaded song and highlight “Chambers” a blistering guitar pop epic that turns out to be (another) stupidly sad song about D’Agostinos dying dog. Lose was someone selling my youth back to me, but it was someone who experienced it as I did. Instead of being sold back with piss all over it it was sold back with an enlightened sense of self and an enlightened sense of maturity and repackaged for my twenty five year old self. It’s the record I didn’t ask for but always wanted. 

Lose needs Bright Eyes and the rest of the uncool things left behind by 2014 not the candy coated American High school victory laps of current day maximalist M83 or subversive electronica era Arcade Fire.  Lose will not send these guys to headline any festivals - the reflective nature of this stuff that won’t make sense to a lot of people also doesn’t make sense on a current day lineup - a hilariously thrilling prospect. Lose is by far the most basic Cymbals Eat Guitars record in terms of layout and construction, once they bled ever changing tracks into each other here they exists very much on their own but lyrically and sonically the individual tracks themselves are dense and complex as ever. Its ambitions are even higher than unique presentation, it’s an ambition not unlike the type of indescribable impossible trajectory of bands like Unwond or Codiene or Bedhead during the 1990’s. They were the bands that didn’t make sense at the time and with Lose Cymabls Eat Guitars don’t really make sense in an increasingly hostile indie rock environment that really should fostering it. Lose isn’t a record for 2014, it’s a record for D’Agostino when he was twenty five. Cymbals Eat Guitars are not a revivalist band by any stretch but Lose cements them as this generations answer to those bands in terms of their reach, scope and undeniable technical and emotional capacities. This will sound elitist and mate, that’s exactly the point. Where once I worshiped the myspace grave of indie rock, in 2014 by some sort of miracle you can worship Lose instead. 

Ultimate Painting  - “Ultimate Painting” (Trouble in Mind - 2014)

There’s a certain sound that’s unmistakably Australian in “Ultimate Painting” which is funny because they’re not Australian. Maybe Centrelink wave has crossed the seas? I wonder if these guys know how exhausting having a full time job really can be.

When they sound this content and are lazy enough to name the song the same thing as the band, I doubt it. Still great though.