petak, 21. prosinca 2012.

Najbolja muzika 2012 - boomkat, Secret Thirteen, Tiny Mix Tapes




Za mene najrelevantniji godišnji izbor najbolje muzike redovito ima boomkat (također je najbolje dizajniran). Osim redakcijske top-liste, donose oni i osobne izbore relevantnih muzičara, od Richarda Skeltona do Vindicatrixa. Dovoljno prijedloga za slušanje dok čitate ovogodišnje prijevode Nadasa, Bernharda, Bolaña, Pereca, Iyera, Becketta, G. Stein... ili domaće - Nenada Ivića, Luku Bekavca i Dubravka Detonija.
Sličan boomkatu je litavski Secret Thirteen.
Nešto mekši ali i dalje izvrstan izbor rade na Tiny Mix Tapes (oni donose i izbor najboljih filmova).
Korisnu listu "svih" krajemgodišnjih top-lista (muzika - Pitchfork, The Quietus, PopMatters itd. - filmovi, knjige) možete naći na Year-end Lists.




Boomkat Top 100 Albums 2012 Chart
Boomkat Top 100 Reissues / Archival 2012 Chart

Boomkat Top 100 Singles / EP's 2012 Chart


Chris & Cosey 2012 Chart
Holly Herndon 2012 Chart

Juju & Jordash 2012 Chart
Brad Rose - Digitalis 2012 Chart


Erik K Skodvin - Miasmah 2012 Chart




Daniel Martin-McCormick / Ital 2012 Chart


Further Records 2012 Chart

Matthew Ingram / Woebot 2012 Chart


Raime 2012 Chart
Thaddeus Herrmann - DE:BUG 2012 Chart
Rachel Evans - Motion Sickness of Time Travel 2012 Chart

Pat Murano - Decimus 2012 Charts

Amanda Brown 2012 Chart
Baron Mordant - Mordant Music 2012 Chart
DJ Haus (UTTU) 2012 Chart


Barron - Hippos In Tanks 2012 Chart
Left Blank 2012 Chart
Andy Votel 2012 Chart

Gary Howell 2012 Chart
Dominick Fernow - Vatican Shadow 2012 Chart

Bok Bok 2012 Chart
Christ Menist 2012 Chart


Ralph LTF (Wifey) 2012 Chart
Kareem 2012 Chart
Luke Younger - Helm 2012 Chart


John Twells - Type 2012 Chart

Evian Christ 2012 Chart
Ancient Methods 2012 Chart

Peter Rehberg - Editions Mego 2012 Chart
Robin The Fog 2012 Chart
Kiran Sande / Blackest Ever Black 2012 Chart

Giuseppe Ielasi 2012 Chart
Lee Gamble 2012 Chart
Ian Hodgson - Moon Wiring Club 2012 Chart
Kevin Martin - The Bug 2012 Chart
Jan Jelinek 2012 Chart
FaltyDL 2012 Chart
Jackmaster 2012 Chart
Ross Tones - Throwing Snow 2012 Chart
Juan Mendez - Silent Servant 2012 Chart
Total Freedom 2012 Chart
Perc 2012 Chart
Karl O'Connor - Regis 2012 Chart


Monique Recknagel - Sonic Pieces 2012 Chart
Public Info 2012 Chart
James Ferraro 2012 Chart
Miles Whittaker - Demdike Stare 2012 Chart
Vindicatrix 2012 Chart
Wes Eisold - Cold Cave 2012 Chart
Jon K 2012 Chart
Pete Swanson 2012 Chart

Peverelist 2012 Chart

Mark Leckey 2012 Chart
Stephen Bishop - Opal Tapes 2012 Chart
Rollo Jackson 2012 Chart
Stephan Mathieu 2012 Chart
Slackk 2012 Chart
Sean Canty - Demdike Stare 2012 Chart
Steven Warwick - Heatsick 2012 Chart

Tom Lea - Local Action 2012 Chart


 Rory Gibb - The Quietus 2012 Chart


 William Bennett - Cut Hands 2012 Chart
 Sebastian Gainsborough - Vessel 2012 Chart
 Veronica Vasicka - Minimal Wave 2012 Chart
 Richard Chartier 2012 Chart
Powell 2012 Chart
Ron Morelli - L.I.E.S 2012 Chart
Ricardo Donoso 2012 Chart








Pye Corner Audio 2012 Chart

PINKCOURTESYPHONE 2012 Chart
Will Bankhead - The Trilogy Tapes 2012 Chart

2562 - A Made Up Sound 2012 Chart
Mark Fell - Mat Steel - SND 2012 Chart
Richard Skelton 2012 Chart
Forest Swords 2012 Chart
Conor Thomas 2012 Chart
Swing Ting 2012 Chart

Fulbaechop 2012 Chart
Alex Alexander 2012 Chart

Trevor Jackson 2012 Chart
 Liam Morley (Boomkat) 2012 Chart
 Thomas Morr / Morr Music 2012 Chart
Bill Kouligas - PAN 2012 Chart

 Secret Thirteen:


2012 been chaotic, intense and overloaded year. Every season it is getting harder and more complicated to follow all the progressively expanding intellectual music scene worldwide as the new genres and talents tend to emerge quite rapidly. Inbox is always full of new records which vary from industrial, experimental to ambient or noise. The spectrum of brilliant and promising music is enormous and this fact sometimes makes us dissociate a little bit from this peculiar madness. It is a gloomy feeling when many musicians and record labels starts competing with each other involuntarily. Anyway, there is not only the shadows that shroud the situation. We agree that this commotion is a reason high-quality production and innovative projects to be born, but sometimes it is hard to discover them all and even more harder to listen to them.
2012 was quite fruitful in terms of releases. There were even several unexpected comebacks, reunions. The amount of music is huge and it is sometimes very hard to immerse in every interesting album properly, contemplate it, appreciate it. Moreover, for some records, one year is simply not enough. However, here we put some of releases we managed to enjoy properly. If you are a real music lover you know that even in 2022 you can find amazing record that was released in 2012 and wonder ‘Where I’ve been in 2012? Why I haven’t found it earlier? Who was listening to this masterwork at that time?”. Take a look at these noticeable records and compare with your own music vision, discuss and share your thoughts about the situation in music in 2012 with us.


Justinas Mikulskis
Cut Hands – Black Mamba [Very Friendly]
Andrea Parker Et Daz Quayle – Private Dreams And Public Nightmares [Aperture]
Raime – Quarter Turns Over A Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]
F.C. Judd – Electronics Without Tears [Public Information]
Thought Broadcast – Emergency Stairway [Editions Mego]
Iibiis Rooge – Hespherides [Weird Forest Records]
Lee Gamble – Diversions 1994-1996 [Pan]
Emptyset – Collapsed [Raster-Noton]
Radvile Nakaite
Demdike Stare – Elemental [Modern Love]
1991 – 1991 [Astro:Dynamics]
Orcas – Orcas [Morr Music]
mmpsuf – Retina [Not On Label (mmpsuf Self-released)]
Kane Ikin – Sublunar [12k]
Various – Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira [Sublime Frequencies]
Loscil – Sketches From New Brighton [Kranky]
Simon Scott – Below Sea Level [12k]
Paulius Ilevicius
Andy Stott – Luxury Problems [Modern Love]
Konx-Om-Pax – Regional Surrealism [Planet Mu]
The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald) [History Always Favours The Winners]
Actress – R.I.P [Honest Jon's Records]
Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales [Ghost Box]
Laurel Halo – Quarantine [Hyperdub]
Windy & Carl – We Will Always Be [Kranky]
Trust – TRST [Arts & Crafts]

Music is endless and that is a fact (while there is no absolute vacuum in our daily routine). We wanted to distinguish some of the original records that were re-pressed in the 2012. Seems that some of the artists solid works disobey the time and sometimes re-born with a bigger energy than they were originally released. Now when music scene is full of kaleidoscopic influences from different times, cultures and authorities it is a really appropriate period for these records to shine and compete with fresh experiments. Our honor goes to these talents music who are still effective and invincible by time.


Monoton – Monotonprodukt 07 30Y++ [Desire Records]
Alvarius B. – Alvarius B. [Abduction]
John Cage – Shock [EM Records]
Porter Ricks – Biokinetics [Type]
Etat Brut – Mutations Et Prothèses [Sub Rosa]
Various – Traces One [Recollection RRM]

Our mix series and interviews uncovered secret and unexpected parts of artists, attracted people from all over the world. It was an invaluable, exciting and educational experience for us to meet these talented and friendly personalities, to find a way to work together, to create rich and significant content. We wish to believe that it also was an inspirational charge for our readers too. We invited almost every person by ourselves. We follow their meaningful work closely everyday and want to share the memorable records that were released in 2012 by the people and their projects who contributed for our journal.


Scanner – Colofon & Compendium 1991-1994 [Sub Rosa]
Nick Edwards ‎– Plekzationz [Editions Mego]
Lawrence English ‎– For/Not For John Cage [Line]
High Wolf – Know Thyself [Sun Ark Records]
Machinefabriek – Colour Tones [Fang Bomb]
Merzbow / Lasse Marhaug – Mer Mar [Editions Mego]


Kreng ‎– Works For Abattoir Fermé 2007 2011 [Miasmah]
36 – Lithea [3six Recordings]
Team Doyobi ‎– Digital Music Volume 1 [Skam]
Pillowdiver ‎– Cassette Recordings [Analogpath]
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa – Góða Nótt [Editions Mego]
HTRK / Tropic Of Cancer – Part Time Punks Radio Sessions [Ghostly International]


Trepaneringsritualen ‎– Deathward, To The Womb [Release The Bats Records]
Spacemen 3 / Sun Araw – That’s Just Fine / I’m Gonna Cross That River Of Jordan [The Great Pop Supplement]
Steve Roden ‎– Berlin Fields [3LEAVES]
Anduin ‎– Stolen Years [SMTG Limited]
Astor – Alcor [Kye]
ASC – Lost Sync Part 1 & Part 2 [Samurai Horo]

That was our team’s subjective view and sincere hints to 2012. Next year we will continue our journey through music and art universe trying to reveal new talents. We have set some goals for ourselves too as we will try to increase our team and create richer content. Also, we have already started to plan our mixes‘ schedule for the whole year 2013, we are going to expand out horizons by taking interviews from the more variable persons starting from people working in NASA laboratories and finishing with solid choreographers. Everything we do is just a strong love to what we call art and what we want to experience in this grimy world every day.
Our team wishes, that everyone will respect and support to each other in the music industry, share social connections, opinions, management knowledge and casual advices. We would like to thank especially to our dear readers and supporters (without you we would probably find it hard to exist), music friends, co-workers, colleagues and other friendly blogs, webzines, magazines. Also we want to thank Margarita, who has left our team, for all the great work she has done.
Let the 2013 bring us much more pleasing surprises and inspirations to aim passionately for our dreams.
All the best,
Secret Thirteen team

 Sculpture “Sound Wave” by Jean Shin
After publishing our own best-of lists, we proudly present an essential selection of albums picked by the featured artists. There were different levels of collaboration with them in 2012: some recorded and contributed their exclusive mixes, others gave interviews or both. 41 artists, listed in alphabetical order, here present their most memorable releases of the fruitful 2012. The whole list amounts to over 200 diverse entries ranging from world music to metal, from IDM to post punk. Due to music catalogs or music shops, every artist is referred to some styles, genres. But it’s obvious that they are listening and exploring much more in music. All the presented mixes show that artists usually break the limits of styles they are referred to. Moreover, it is nice to see many essential reissues here as well, what makes us to remember albums from the past influencing the sound of present artists and unfolding in new ways in a different context.
These top 6 records of the year 2012 were selected very differently. Some of them picked albums that they were listening during the last months, some of them mentioned releases they have recently bought, some of them picked by intuition, made it in a strict order or vice versa. It is obvious though, that for the majority of them it was extremely hard to squeeze all the best material into 6 entries. So we can assume, that for each of them thoughtful and careful choices are made and unfortunately many other great pieces of work were not included.
Even though you might have already heard some of the records, there is still plenty of space for new discoveries and obscure gems. Have a great time exploring this elaborate and extensive list.


36
Dam Mantle / Becoming Real ‎– Her Woes / Paramnesia [GETME!]
Funk Obese – ECL I-VI ‘Dark Matters’ [Solar Industry]
Burial – Kindred EP [Hyperdub]
1991 – High-Tech High-Life [Boomkat Editions]
Lee Gamble – Diversions 1994-1996 [Pan]
NRSB-11 ‎– NRSB-11 [WéMè Records]


Aaron Martin
OM – Advaitic Songs [Drag City]
Umberto – Night Has A Thousand Screams [Rock Action Records]
Sounding the Deep – Return to the Quiet [Sonic Meditations]
Zelienople – The World Is A House On Fire [Type]
Grand Salvo – Slay Me In My Sleep [Preservation]
Plante – Harvest [Fedora Corpse Recordings]


Aidan Baker
Codeine – When I See The Sun [Numero Group]
Mount Eerie – Clear Moon [P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
Hangedup & Tony Conrad – Transit of Venus [Constellation]
Mount Eerie – Ocean Roar [P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.]
OM – Advaitic Songs [Drag City]


Anders Ilar
Edward Ka-Spel – This Saturated Land [Not On Label (Self-Released)]
The Legendary Pink Dots – The Creature That Tasted Sound [Trademark Of Quantity]
Kettel & Secede – When Can [Sending Orbs]
Dictaphone – Poems From a Rooftop [Sonic Pieces]
Shrubbn!! – Echos [Shitkatapult]
Dead Can Dance – Anastasis [[PIAS] Recordings]


ASC
Raime – Quarter Turns Over a Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]
Voices From The Lake Feat. Donato Dozzy & Neel – From The Lake [Prologue]
Kiyoko – Sea Of Trees [Auxiliary]
Mindspan – The Second Cycle [Silent Season]
1991 – 1991 [Astro:Dynamics]
Ulrich Schnauss & ASC – 77 EP [Auxiliary]

Scott Walker - Bish Bosch Mark Fell - Sentielle Objectif Actualité Grouper - Violet Replacement Can - The Lost Tapes Anthony Pateras - Errors Of The Human Body Oren Ambarchi - Audience Of One
BJ Nilsen
Scott Walker – Bish Bosch [4AD]
Mark Fell – Sentielle Objectif Actualité [Editions Mego]
Grouper – Violet Replacement [Yellow Electric]
Can – The Lost Tapes [Mute]
Anthony Pateras – Errors Of The Human Body [Editions Mego]
Oren Ambarchi – Audience of One [Touch]


Cezary Gapik
Merzbow / Marhaug – Mer Mar [Editions Mego]
Luigi Archetti – Null II / Null III [Die Schachtel]
Daniel Menche – Guts [Editions Mego]
Napalm Death – Utilitarian [Century Media]
Ambarchi & Brinkmann – The Mortimer Trap [Black Truffle]
JK Flesh – Posthuman [3BY3]


Colin Andrew Sheffield
Jana Winderen – Débris [Touch]
Eleh – Homage To The Pointed Waveforms [Taiga Records]
Ingenting Kollektiva – Lost Beyond Telling [Invisible Birds]
Howlround – The Ghosts Of Bush [The Fog Signals]
Pye Corner Audio – Sleep Games [Ghost Box]
Slant Azymuth – Slant Azymuth [Pre-Cert Entertainment]


Dale Lloyd
Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe (reissue) [Unseen Worlds]
Panabrite – The Baroque Atrium [Preservation]
John Grzinich – Two Films [and/OAR]
Brian Eno – Lux [Warp Records]
Frédéric Nogray – Buiti Binafin (Déambulation À La Lisière Du Monde) [3LEAVES]
Thomas Köner – Novaya Zemlya [Touch]


Dalglish
David Sylvian – A Victim Of Stars 1982 – 2012 [Virgin]
Helm – Impossible Symmetry [Pan]
The Caretaker – Patience / Extra Patience (After Sebald) [History Always Favours The Winners]
Scald Rougish – Bardachd [Icasea]


Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words
Natural Assembly ‎– Arms Of Departure [Avant!]
Tollund Men — Door [Bleak Environment]
Death And Vanilla – Death And Vanilla [Hands In The Dark]
Sutekh Hexen – Larvæ [Handmade Birds]
Lower Synth Dept. – Plaster Mould [Genetic Music]
Various ‎– Kosmoloko 2 [Galakthorrö]


DJ Ilmajaam
Claro Intelecto – Reform Club [Delsin]
Terre Thaemlitz – Soulnessless [Comatonse Recordings]
Ghosting Season – The Very Last Of The Saints [Last Night On Earth]
Dariush Dolat-Shahi – Electronic Music, Tar And Sehtar (reissue) [Dead-Cert Home Entertainment]
Juju & Jordash – Techno Primitivism [Dekmantel]
Professor Genius – Hassan [L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems)]


Ekoplekz
Red Math – Obsolete Systems [Further Records]
IX Tab – Spindle & The Bregnut Tree [Not On Label (Self-Released)]
Thought Broadcast – Emergency Stairway [Editions Mego]
The Hers – Tough Cunt [Sex Lies Magnetic Tape]
Vindicatrix – Mengamuk [Mordant Music]
Helm – Impossible Symmetry [Pan]


Enrico Coniglio
Roland Etzin – TransMongolian [Gruenrekorder]
Thomas Köner – Novaya Zemlya [Touch]
Simon Scott – Below Sea Level [12k]
Deep Listening Band – Needle Drop Jungle [Taiga Records]
Asférico – Sonidos Del Subconsciente [Galaverna]
VVAA – Somewhere On The Edge [Gruenrekorder]


Ersha
Nils Frahm – Screws [Erased Tapes]
Anduin – Stolen Years [SMTG Limited]
Kettel & Secede – When Can [Sending Orbs]
Black Swan – Aeterna [Ethereal Symphony]
Oliwa – Rituals [Zeon Light]
Mind Over Mirrors – Check Your Swing [Hands In The Dark]


Golders Green
Aaron Dilloway – Modern Jester [Hanson Records]
Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples – More Circulations [Faitiche]
Peter Evans / Nate Wooley – Instrumentals Vol. 1 [Dead CEO]
Fennesz – Fa 2012 [Editions Mego]
Pinkcourtesyphone – Foley Folly Folio [Line]
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Visiting This World [En/Of]


Grant Evans
Sean McCann, Matthew Sullivan & Jeff Witscher – Barb [Salon]
Joshua Bonnetta – American Colour [Senufo Editions]
Villages – Theories Of Ageing [Bathetic Records]
Aaron Dilloway – Modern Jester [Hanson Records]
Everyday Loneliness – Recontextualizations [Arbor]
Rain Drinkers – Yesodic Helices [Brave Mysteries]


High Wolf
Bola – Volume 7 [Awesome Tapes From Africa]
NHK’Koyxeи – Dance Classics Vol. II [Pan]
Oren Ambarchi – Raga Ooty / The Nilgiri Plateau [Bo'Weavil Recordings]
Goat – World Music [Rocket Recordings]
Various – Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira [Sublime Frequencies]
Pulse Emitter / Date Palms / Expo 70 / Faceplant – 4 Way Split [Immune]


Jara Tarnovski
Beak> – Beak>> [Invada]
Jessica Bailiff – At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky [Kranky]
Federsel & Mäkelä – An Evening With Federsel & Mäkelä [Poli5]
Parallel 41 – Parallel 41 [Baskaru]
Gareth Dickson – Quite A Way Away [12k]
Evade – Destroy & Dream [Kitchen]


Kreng
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
Otto A Totland / Erik K Skodvin – Harmony From The Past [Sonic Pieces]
Matt Elliott – The Broken Man [Ici D'Ailleurs]
Jonny Greenwood – The Master [Nonesuch]
Steve Roden – … I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces – Music In Vernacular Photographs, 1880-1955 [Dust To Digital]
Gabriel Saloman – Adhere [Miasmah]


Lasse Marhaug
Scott Walker – Bish Bosch [4AD]
Okkultokrati – Snake Reigns [Fysisk Format]
Chris Corsano – Cut [Hot Cars Warp Records]
Nekromantheon – Rise, Vulcan Spectre [Indie Recordings]
Jason Crumer – Let There Be Crumer [Second Layer Records]
Entre Vifs – Heavy Duty (reissue) [Influencing Machine Records]


Lawrence English
Grouper – Violet Replacement [Yellow Electric]
Maggi Payne – Ahh-Ahh Music For Ed Tannenbaum’s Technological Feets 1984-1987 [Root Strata]
Scott Walker – Bish Bosch [4AD]
Black Rain – Now I’m Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95 [Blackest Ever Black]
Earth – Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II [Southern Lord]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]


Leonardo Rosado
Parallel 41 – Parallel 41 [Baskaru]
Birds of Passage and I’ve Lost – I Was All You Are [Heat Death Records]
Steve Peters + Steve Roden – Not A Leaf Remains As It Was [12k]
Cello + Laptop – Parallel Paths [Envelope Collective]
Richard Skelton – Verse Of Birds [Corbel Stone Press]
Greg Haines – Digressions [Preservation]


Listening Mirror
William Basinski – Disintegration Loops Box Set [Temporary Residence]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
William Cody Watson – Bill Murray [Bathetic]
Raime – Quarter Turns Over a Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]
Demdike Stare – Elemental [Modern Love]
X-TG – Desertshore / The Final Report [Industrial Records]


Machinefabriek
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Leyfdu ljosinu [Touch]
Greg Haines – Digressions [Preservation]
Anne-James Chaton with Alva Noto and Andy Moor – Décade [Raster-Noton]
Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It [Matador]
Will Guthrie – Sticks, Stones & Breaking Bones [Antboy Music]
Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe (reissue) [Unseen Worlds]


Marcus Fjellström
Gareth Davis & Frances-Marie Uitti – Gramercy [Miasmah]
Otto A Totland / Erik K Skodvin – Harmony From The Past [Sonic Pieces]
Scott Walker – Bish Bosch [4AD]
Kreng ‎– Works For Abattoir Fermé 2007 2011 [Miasmah]
Machinefabriek – Colour Tones [Fang Bomb]
Simon Scott – Below Sea Level [12k]


Mark Harwood
Matthew P. Hopkins – Small Entry [Horizon Pages]
Various – Wandelweiser Und So Weiter [Another Timbre]
Quentin Meillassoux – The Number And The Siren
Robert McDougall – Unfinished Studies [Angklung Editions]
Laurent Binet – HHhH
Karlheinz Stockhausen – Mittwoch aus Licht (Birmingham)


Mike Shiflet
Black To Comm – EARTH [De Stijl]
Sylvain Chauveau & Stephan Mathieu – Palimpsest [Schwebung]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
Locrian & Mamiffer – Bless Them That Curse You [Utech Records]
Mount Eerie – Clear Moon [P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.]
Mika Vainio – Fe₃O₄ – Magnetite [Touch]


Mnemonic45
Mirrorring ‎- Foreign Body [Kranky]
Brambles – Charcoal [Serein]
Various – Lost In The Humming Air (Music Inspired By Harold Budd) [Oktaf]
Dictaphone – Poems From A Rooftop [Sonic Pieces]
Bvdub – Serenity [Darla]
Pleq And Hakobune – Adrift [Nomadic Kids Republic]

Sendai - Geotope
Mokira
Silent Servant – Negative Fascination [Hospital Productions]
Tin Man – Neo Neo Acid [Acid Test]
Norman Nodge – Berghain 06 [Ostgut Ton]
Andy Stott – Luxury Problems [Modern Love]
Shed – The Killer [50Weapons]
Sendai – Geotope [Time To Express]


Obtane
Vatican Shadow – Kneel Before Religious Icons [Type]
Charlatan – Isolatarium [Type]
Outer Space – Outer Space II [Blast First Petite]
Black Rain – Now I’m Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95 [Blackest Ever Black]
Silent Servant – Negative Fascination [Hospital Productions]
Bee Mask – When We Were Eating Unripe Pears [Spectrum Spools]


Orphx
Raime – Quarter Turns Over a Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]
Silent Servant – Negative Fascination [Hospital Productions]
Mika Vainio – Fe₃O₄ – Magnetite [Touch]
Shackleton – Music For The Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ [Woe To The Septic Heart!]
Vatican Shadow – Ornamented Walls [Modern Love]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]


Pillowdiver
Nihill – Verdonkermaan [Hydra Head]
Ian Hawgood – The Shattered Light [Koen Music]
Sublamp – Orphan Horns [Self-released]
Sylvain Chauveau & Stephan Mathieu – Palimpsest [Schwebung]
Cleaners From Venus – Box Set, Vol. 1 [Captured Tracks]
Horrid Red – Nightly Wreaths [Terrible Records]


Pimmon
Blank Realm – Go Easy [Siltbreeze]
Digital Natives – Parted By The Say [Housecraft Records]
Euglossine – Floridian Abstract [Rotifer Cassettes]
Vikki Jackman, Andrew Chalk & Jean-Nöel Rebilly – A Paper Doll’s Whisper Of Spring [Self-released]
Sky Needle – Rave Cave [Negative Guest List Records]
Land Observations – Roman Roads IV – XI [Mute Artists Ltd.]


Scanner
Amon Tobin – Amon Tobin Box Set [Ninja Tune]
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
Clock DVA – Horology – DVAtion 78/79/80 (reissue) [Vinyl-on-Demand]
X-TG – Desertshore / The Final Report [Industrial Records]
Can – The Lost Tapes [Mute]
King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Box Set (reissue) [Burning Shed/DGM]


Steve Roden
Stephen Vitiello – Dowsing [Farpoint Recordings]
Robert Turman – Flux (reissue) [Spectrum Spools]
Vatican Shadow – Ornamented Walls [Modern Love]
Zoviet France – 7.10.12 [Altvinyl]
Ben Vida – Esstends-Esstends-Esstends [Pan]
Celer & Machinefabriek – Hei / Sou [Self-released]


Talvihorros
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – Timon Irnok Manta [Type]
Gabriel Saloman – Adhere [Miasmah]
Raime – Quarter Turns Over a Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]
Stian Westerhus – The Matriarch and the Wrong Kind Of Flowers [Rune Grammofon]
Kane Ikin – Sublunar [12k]
Paul Corley – Disquiet [Bedroom Community]


Team Doyobi (Alex Peverett)
Polysick – Digital Native [Planet Mu]
Le Révélateur – Horizon Fears [NNA Tapes]
Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe (reissue) [Unseen Worlds]
Tod Dockstader – Recorded Music For Film, Radio & Television: Electronic Vol.1 (reissue) [Mordant Music]
Poborsk – Waiting For Junior [Icasea]
Bernard Parmegiani – L’Œil Écoute / Dedans-Dehors (reissue) [Recollection GRM]
Team Doyobi (Chris Gladwin)
Swans – The Seer [Young God Records]
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats – Blood Lust [Rise Above Records]
Can – The Lost Tapes [Mute]
Bong – Mana-Yood-Sushai [Ritual Productions]
White Hills – Frying On This Rock [Thrill Jockey]
Pharaoh Overlord – Lunar Jetman [Ektro Records]


The KVB
Ela Orleans / U.S. Girls / Slim Twig / Dirty Beaches – The Statement [Clan Destine Records]
Tame Impala – Lonerism [Modular Recordings]
Tamaryn – Tender New Signs [Mexican Summer]
The Soft Moon – Zeros [Captured Tracks]
Led Er Est – The Diver [Sacred Bones Records]
Silent Servant – Negative Fascination [Hospital Productions]


Tropic Of Cancer
Lebanon Hanover – Why Not Just Be Solo [Fabrika Records]
Horrid Red – Nightly Wreaths [Terrible Records]
Tor Lundvall – The Shipyard [Dais Records]
Robin The Fog – The Ghosts Of Bush [The Fog Signals]
White Hex – Heat [Avant! Records]
Raime – Quarter Turns Over A Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]

One more time we would like to express big thanks to all of the artists, who contributed to those lists. You are the essential source of inspiration and drive for us. We hope to continue this mutual collaborations in the future. And of course we cannot forget our readers without whom we would not exist. All have a good Christmas and happy New Year. Hope the following year will be good, happy and productive.






Tiny Mix Tapes:



2012: Favorite 50 Albums of 2012

In 2012, we were inundated: new artists, new labels, new microgenres, new ideas. A lot of these artists and labels were dropping releases so quickly (some weekly, some monthly) we could barely comprehend what was happening, let alone listen to them all, while journalists were scrambling to find new names for what was going on (doomstep, vaporwave, djent, hipster house, drill, etc.). It reached a point where there was an almost instinctual tendency to bracket any one-click genre creation as a temporary historical perversion: wait it out long enough, and the movement will either die or lose its cultural currency. Add the bottomless wealth of SoundCloud streams, Bandcamp uploads, DatPiff mixtapes, and Mediafire links, as well as the slipstream methodology of our most prolific reptilian artists, and it began to appear like music, over time, has been and will become increasingly fragmented.
But to understand music as being fragmented is to assume that there is something to be fragmented in the first place. Music for the past century has been best understood on the levels of syncreticism, hybridization, and bottom-up subacculturation. Rather than fragmenting, the very conception of what music is, or what it can do, is simply expanding, reconstituting, and reinvigorating which notes can be played (Aaron Dilloway), which songs can be sampled (Daughn Gibson), which symbols can be recontextualized (情報デスクVIRTUAL), which genres can be reimagined (Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos), which rhythms can be danced to (DJ Rashad/Traxman), which bodily noises can be aestheticized (Scott Walker). It’s at once about adapting and preserving, revising and recycling, progressing and regressing, evolving and devolving. All of these artists on this list contribute not only to an expansion of music’s identity and reach, but also an expansion of taste, where the perceptual foregrounding by artists like Dean Blunt can exist alongside the modernist narratives of Swans, where the pitch-black beats of Raime can complement the ecstatic harmonies of Grimes, where taste is reinforced by Frank Ocean but problematized by INTERNET CLUB, where the conceptual cinema of Kendrick Lamar can offer respite from the heretofore unimagined disgust of Scott Walker, where the untreated voice can be heard as alien (Laurel Halo) and the treated one as embodied (Holly Herndon, Farrah Abraham).
To defragment, then, would be to revert to classicism, to essentialism, to tired notions of authenticity. It would also be impossible. Humanism ain’t what it used to be, such that the default position of the modern listener is decidedly posthuman, favoring disunity, telepresence, and multiple perspectives: We don’t pronounce artist names; we copy-paste into search boxes. We don’t recall the past; we retrieve information. We don’t listen to notes; we identify symbols. We don’t create genres; we recognize patterns. Sure, it can be scary to see consensus drifting away, to watch values you once held so close morph into something once again foreign, to witness how quickly technology can be rendered obsolete by the faster dominating the slower, to observe not only the degradation of the environment, but now also the degradation of our collective imagination and memory. But what opens up is the possibility of adopting emerging, fluid identities, of inserting yourself in varied contexts politically or aesthetically. It’s a process of potentially becoming and embodying both nothing in particular and everything altogether, with the quaint idea that the next breakthrough in consciousness/justice/whatever may very well just be deceptively dormant, eager to find expression at just the right moment.
50. Mykki Blanco
Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss

[UNO NYC]


00:00
Immersed in a sea of dolphins, octopuses, and underwater aesthetics, 2012 got pretty wavvy, while Mykki Blanco’s Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss mixtape employed the dank beats of post-corporeal producers like Nightfeelings and Matrixxman to submerge our ears deeper into the abyss with a distinctly gritty mutation. The Gobby-produced “Riot,” for example, flaunted a particularly subaquatic production quality with its filtered, low-end beat. Alternatively, on “YungRhymeAssassin,” Blanco affirmed her fluid lyricism over a distinctly buoyant production by trap darlings Flosstradamus, comprising the genre’s signature airy snares and handclaps. In spite of its title, Cosmic Angel was far from angelic; Blanco rhymed about sinful scenarios including promiscuous sexual behaviour with DJs (“Fucking the DJ”), and her fierce tone, notable on the Benmar-produced “Kingpinning (Ice Cold),” remained frozen solid, bearing the entirety of the album. Moreover, Blanco’s hard militant demeanor, exemplified by the gabber-infused track “Virginia Beach” and visible in the video for “Haze.Boogie.Life” (which featured Blanco brandishing a baseball bat), clashed with a softer exterior of girlish attire, subverting any princessly presuppositions.
Mykki BlancoUNO NYC
49. Raime
Quarter Turns Over a Living Line

[Blackest Ever Black]


00:00
No city knows how to commodify its past into neatly packaged scenes like London does. Or how to brood over something embedded in its cultural guts. But to make the connection between jungle and goth as Raime did is more curious than knowing. After plowing through Detroit techno, bass, and jungle, the pair of DJs who call themselves Raime found meaning at the bottom of the pile with 80s industrial and goth. Quarter Turns Over a Living Line was a rich, textured debut, made by men in their 30s willing to bang sheets of metal under bridges like oafish art students to get a first-pressed field recording basis to their sound. Their label Blackest Ever Black has pledged to resist the increasingly rarified and bland cycles of dance music by encouraging DJs like Raime to use real drums and cellos. But there is a reference less tribally pure than goth/industrial, which goes unacknowledged in Raime’s debut: the dark dinner party vibe of 90s Bristol trip-hop. Quarter Turns Over a Living Line was a smog-tinted record for their own city, to stand in good company with the urban synthesis of their gloomy DJ forebears. Although Raime favored a more gritty perspective over the aerial view of laptop composers, they still made a curiously urbane record: blacker in tone than in spirit.
RaimeBlackest Ever BlackTMT Review
48. Belbury Poly
The Belbury Tales

[Ghost Box]


00:00
It’s 1973. Halfway through the filming of The Wicker Man, a freak incident with a combine harvester leaves composer Paul Giovanni dead, forcing director Robin Hardy to look elsewhere for a soundtrack. Hardy searches high and low for a replacement. Delia Derbyshire, electronic music pioneer extraordinaire, has just left the BBC to score horror films, and a desperate Hardy engages her on a whim, when, out of nowhere, his quixotic begging-letter to Fairport Convention bears fruit in the form of an unlooked-for affirmative. What to do but allow them to work together and see what emerges from this fecund, pagan cauldron? This, obviously, is an alternate history, one that could have produced The Belbury Tales. But content aside, alternate history itself is very much what the Ghost Box label, and founder Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly project, is all about: a hauntological retro-futurism that draws on Astley-esque pastoral and BBC Keynesianism. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffin produced photographs of the fairies at the bottom of their garden in Cottingley; similarly, The Belbury Tales is the unreliable quarter-plate record of the time that Jupp saw something nasty in the woodshed.
Belbury PolyGhost BoxTMT Review
47. INTERNET CLUB
VANISHING VISION

[Self-Released]


00:00
This year, among the more enigmatic corners of the internet, a handful of artists took a late-2000s trend toward revitalizing the written-off sounds of nascent commercial digital instrumentation to its extreme. Visually identified by an esoteric take on early digital 3D animation and loosely grouped as vaporwave, these musicians often foregrounded the incidental, architectonic music of the boardroom, airport, or plaza, demanding a confrontation with the musical inheritance of global capitalism, about which the music had an eerily ambivalent relationship. INTERNET CLUB’s VANISHING VISION stood out among those who would make miracles from muzak. On a conceptual level, as James Parker put it in his review, VANISHING VISION was “a dramatic demonstration of the fact that the music/muzak distinction has always been unstable at a time when it’s less stable than ever before.” Its source material was, while never loose, vaguely human, from the wonky and inscrutable mallet percussion of “Zones” to the hyperactive R&B guitar in “Pacific” to the downright beautiful depth of “Ever be Real.” But music built on reframing, altering, and appropriating those pieces of the musical past — often to an acute degree — appears to be a project that bears only limited fruits. If so, VANISHING VISION helped point the way out before INTERNET CLUB, along with other key practitioners of the genre, vanished themselves.
INTERNET CLUBTMT Review
46. Converge
All We Love We Leave Behind

[Epitaph]


00:00
In his review of Converge’s eighth studio album, Birkut wrote, “All We Love We Leave Behind entices kinetic release in every possible way.” Truer words have never been written: the latest offering from the Salem punk innovators just may have been their most explosive. With the marked absence of the digital effects featured heavily in the band’s last several albums, the hooks hit with twice as much force and none of the filters. With Jacob Bannon’s feral shriek now doubly piercing, the already-intricate riffs revealed even more complexity. Best of all, the aggression neither relented nor slipped into the redundancy that’s an all-too-common problem among their peers. The frenzied, almost drunken grindcore of “Tender Abuse” seamlessly flowed into sludgier cuts like “Sadness Comes Home” and “A Glacial Pace,” and on the title track, they sounded groovy. Ultimately, All We Love We Leave Behind proved to be the kind of record to throw caution to the wind, flip the bird, and take immense risks in nearly every aspect of its construction. And that fearlessness paid off: we’d be hard pressed to name many 2012 records more exhilarating than this one.
ConvergeEpitaphTMT Review
45. Arca
Stretch 2

[UNO NYC]


00:00
Familiar elements of exercise, recreation, gambling, and incarceration float in a pea-soup-green void on the cover of Arca’s Stretch 2. These ordinary objects are obscured by a humorous yet unnerving gray elastic leg that’s twisted, tweaked, and stretched in unnatural and impossible directions. This is much like the music that played beyond this fascinating and uneasy exterior of Arca’s second release of 2012. The clean-cut, delectable textures and rhythms that Arca produced here were — by themselves — masterful achievements of beat-oriented electronic music, but it was the vocals that made Arca’s work infinitely intriguing. Sure, they recalled the familiar elements of gangsta rap and modern hip-hop that we all know and love, but they were so heavily manipulated that the resulting inflections and phrasings became something else altogether: not a voice, not a synthesizer, but a horrifying, untameable monster. In fact, by the last two tracks, the monster had retreated back to its dark, dank dwelling, and Arca’s brilliant instrumental work slowly dragged us back down to Earth, where things just didn’t sound as cool.
ArcaUNO NYCTMT Review
44. Fiona Apple
The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

[Epic]


Describing music as “emotional” is among the laziest and most short-sighted critical tools. Although you can typically suss out which emotions are being lauded, it suggests that certain emotions are more genuine, more real than others. So prepare to call me a hack when I admit I constantly reach for “emotional” when describing Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel. Apple’s fourth album was charged with something, but what? It was sad, but rarely depressing. It was angry, but rarely bitter. Even its moments of deep uncertainty sounded bathed in a soothing tranquility. “Every single night’s a fight with my brain,” she sang on the record’s opening, but she sounded full-throated and celebratory. Yet even then, the record never approached the time-honored, arguably cynical tradition of juxtaposing happy music with sad lyrics. Sure, The Idler Wheel was an exquisite piece of work, a show of masterfully economic songcraft that found Apple succeeding as she took her most uncomfortable leaps. More importantly, though, it was proof that she had reached a level where she can bypass typical modes of expression via song, obliterating artifice for something decidedly hers.
Fiona AppleEpicTMT Review
43. Killer Mike
R.A.P. Music

[Williams Street]


00:00
Looking back, I can’t help but think that any vote against the Killer Mike/El-P ticket in the 2012 election was a wasted one. We need these guys in charge, people. On the one hand, you had Mike on the mic, brain and brawn, a trained, tried-and-true veteran with an intimidating (read: confident and, yes, charming/disarming) Southern drawl that managed unparalleled agility despite its gravity. On the other, we have El-P ‘s production matching Mike’s unstoppable aggression with laser beams of synth and pulverizing blasts of bass, pushing Mike’s triumphs of tradition headfirst into the unforeseeable future of hip-hop, a sentiment no more apparent than on the album’s title track. On R.A.P. Music, it all came together into something more than just a great listen. Mike’s record was downright inspiring: a rapper unafraid to show his seams/weaknesses and capitalize on them to better himself, a guy who could both spin a gripping (or hilarious) yarn when he wanted and, of course, wax the freshest of politics (see: “Reagan”). This meant crumpling the whole damn system like a ball of trash into the palm of his hand. So then, America, the question becomes this: Do we get a redo, or what?
Killer MikeWilliams Street
42. Death Grips
No Love Deep Web

[Self-Released]


00:00
The Deep Web is a void, a cesspool. It is the vacuum in which truth and reality is consumed and held captive — the truth of the real, of humanity’s brutal essence. The Deep Web “others” us by casting an image that we don’t want to accept. When the first thing you see is a violently erect penis, you can only imagine what the music will sound like. And it was abrasive, hyperreal, and strangely intimate. MC Ride’s delivery was raw and hoarse, exhausted from the hard-fought battle. For Death Grips, hell is other people, and the Deep Web connected those people and then made them an entity. In comparison, Exmilitary and The Money Store were just small-scale battles, the first movement. No Love Deep Web introduced the war. The void was swallowing us up, and Death Grips were the keepers of the void.
Death GripsTMT Review
41. Heat Wave
Fukd In Tha Game

[Heat Rave]


00:00
In his quest to sample the entire internet, Alex Gray has tossed releases out like they’re wearisome sandbags weighing him down. Each mixtape was thrown haphazardly overboard and reached us as a chewy mulch of noise and relentlessly choppy rhythms. They all bore the sound of a man eager to get rid of his past before diving headfirst into a new project (DJ/PURPLE/IMAGE) — Gray is desperate, perhaps obsessed, with avoiding stasis. Yet rather than sounding like carelessness, Gray sculpted moments of arresting beauty from his dizzying array of samples. What was so entrancing about Fukd In Tha Game was its impenetrability — I doubt even Gray knew what was intentional and what was merely the result of random knob-twiddling/cursor-jerking at 3 AM. Thus, nothing sounded forced or contrived, yet Gray somehow staged a fascinating musical journey. We were casually led through bizarre experimentalism (“Smoke Rings”), chopped ‘n’ screwed R&B (“Party Time”), and poignant refrains (“Dem Boyz”) as if it were no biggie. Of course, there was no shortage of artists reappropriating the past, but Gray fucked with nostalgia in such a unique, bizarre, and precarious way that his creative stamp would be readily apparent on any musical debris he decided to grace with his presence.
DJ/PURPLE/IMAGEDeep Tapes
40. Lil B
White Flame

[Self-Released]


00:00
My favorite quote of 2012: “Underground music, nigga. I don’t want to make it.” The lyric completely outlined the composition of Lil B’s White Flame as a vessel of himself. Mariah Carey became a fine-tuned human-musical instrument, and Lil B has become the perfect 21st-century artist. Mixing satirical rap, self-deprecation, hyper-aesthetic marketing, trans-lyrical personification, and digital-deep emotion brought White Flame to that level of “I’m so self-conscious about my art work I’ll make it exactly about that. Oh, and hide it in the cheesiest pseudo-spoof mixtape, but keep it completely nostalgic on a Based level. And now I’m talking as Lil B the BasedGod as C Monster. It must be all that BasedEnlightenment I’ve been experiencing while listening to White Flame on random through three different media players.” Yet, it’s really hard to describe Lil B without quoting him — err, his work. So here’s the skinny: for TMT’s Chocolate Grinder section, I usually listen to a single track anywhere between five to [feels like a milli] times a day, but I can listen to White Flame on repeat forever. Thus, this stamp in the Lil B timeline, I feel, was his most important in 2012. “White Flame ain’t no joke.”
Lil B
39. ahnnu
pro habitat

[WTR CLR]


00:00
Conceptually and musically, ahnnu’s pro habitat created its own environment, one that depended heavily on preserving the habitats of his decaying sound sources (vinyl crackle, tape hiss) alongside orchestral crescendos, broken soul samples, and slurred jazz noises. While many beatmakers seek to isolate the parts of sound that they wish to use in order to repurpose it for their own music, ahnnu took a step back, analyzed the way the multiple layers of a song or sample existed together as a complete habitat, and boldly used all of it, suggesting an unbroken flow of similarities spreading between genres, locations, and time periods. The result was so smooth, so natural that it was impossible to imagine the size of the spectrum of varying musical habitats from which the source material was pulled. So, when “canopoli” rang in and a sampled voice suggested that “the music should be barely noticeable… and non-distracting,” it was like ahnnu was imagining a future of sample-based music portrayed by a smooth, painted landscape, rather than one assembled from puzzle pieces.
AhnnuWTR CLRTMT Review
38. Ian Martin
Mechanical Rain

[Further]


00:00
From the very first moment of “Moving Activity,” I felt a chasm open up within me, gut-wrenching, head-sinking, chest-thumping. In all honesty, this hadn’t happened to me in six or seven years, back when I first heard “Everyone Alive Wants Answers” from the album of the same name by Colleen. As did that album, Mechanical Rain started from perfectly configured initial conditions and spun inward, onward, unfolding, it seemed, according to nothing less than absolute necessity. It made me feel alone, but in a way less sentimental than plainly truthful. It wasn’t exactly easy to listen to the desolate intricacies of Ian Martin’s two synthesizers, but it was a lot harder to not listen. I found the album demanded my attention without forcing my attention. It lay me out supine and closed my eyes, yet it refused to let me fall asleep. Call it “meditative” as long as you understand meditation as a discipline of the attention, as the ability to follow the objects of your mind without encouraging any of them to mislead you. Mechanical Rain was un-ambient: it didn’t sink into the background but rather became the background so that the background could become foreground. I listened to this music not to look at rain as weather, but to see rain as (strange, mechanical) rain.
Ian MartinFurther
37. Tame Impala
Lonerism

[Modular]


00:00
Kevin Parker has fully dispelled any lingering pretenses to the low-pass production filter de rigueur by so many of today’s psych revivalists. Lonerism’s purchase on solitude, what with its superabundance of reverb and wealth of manicured synth banks, owed more to Rick Wakeman sonic excess than Erickson angularity. Still accessible but short of anthemic, Fridmann’s maximalist hand on the stern suited Parker’s preference for texture over linear progression. Lonerism presented a giddy mood of teenage exceptionalism, that die-cast sense of me-apart-from-the-world. And yes, it was one to be indulged in, whether it was shamelessly air drumming to the flanged fills à la Steven Drozd or giving a quarter crank to the volume knob as “Music to Walk Home By” recapitulated its forward momentum. Maybe Tame Impala’s abiding anachronism lied beyond their retinue of driving pentatonic riffs, boutique fuzz pedals, and Beatles-esque psych ramblings; Parker’s latest embrace of studio wonkery and overdub indulgence hinted at an ideal of bedroom isolation predating our impulsive connectivity. In those moments, when we were caught chewing on the crumminess of the world, there were worlds to be lost in — not networks or directories. Lonerism is one to pull from the stacks 15 years down the line after pulling your dad’s speakers out of the basement.
Tame ImpalaModularTMT Review
36. The Men
Open Your Heart

[Sacred Bones]


00:00
“Evolved,” “changed,” or even “softened” might be words you had heard/read regarding The Men’s Open Your Heart, but their MO is the band’s driving force, and that for all intents and purposes was what had truly improved. Beyond their sound, quotable approach, and penchant for direct riff-rippage (Stiff Little Fingers, The Buzzcocks, and Sonic Youth, most notably), Open Your Heart showed a band in a classic state of personal and professional growth, while also showing that rock ‘n’ roll’s traditionalism could be just as exciting and sincere as the bands and moods they had appropriated. From the addition of slide guitars and an acoustic ballad, The Men looked to rock’s past in order to find an outward reflection of themselves and their intentions. Open Your Heart was not about reinvention, revivalism, or bringing back punk to the masses. It was about how playing with repetition, the past, and the present shapes meaning. The Men aren’t saviors; punk rock can save itself. Or as they put it: “We’ve never been a band that was part of anything.” Indeed, Open Your Heart was about something bigger than rock ‘n’ roll’s life status.
The MenSacred BonesTMT Review
35. Burial
Kindred [EP]

[Hyperdub]


Burial likes to shroud himself in secrecy, the better to spin those threads that comprise his all-consuming worlds of sound, those little miracles that conjure up your most dangerous, most secret emotions. Such was the dark magic of February’s Kindred EP. Deeper and more textured than any Burial release before, Kindred not only captured the essential isolation and beauty of city life, but also made you want to wallow in it. Second track “Loner” immersed the listener in a soundscape where hope was twinned with despair, and once its seven and a half minutes were over, you were genuinely surprised to look out the window and see sunshine and palm trees rather than rain streaming down the windows of a junker car parked beneath a bridge near the docks. Critics drooled over the fact that tracks like “Ashtray Wasp” and opener “Kindred” came closer to dance-floor staples than any Burial release before, and why not? It’s only natural that, after Burial guided you into the heart of darkness and out again into the light, you’d wanna throw your hands up and celebrate the sensorial wonders of the human experience.
BurialHyperdubTMT Review
34. Thee Oh Sees
Putrifiers II

[In The Red]


00:00
Rather than putting his energy into coming up with a new genre or pushing some crazy personality to generate hype, John Dwyer unashamedly focuses his Thee Oh Sees project on 1960s garage psychedelia. Although perhaps not adding much to the critic repertoire of genre prefix and suffix shuffling, what he and his collaborators presented with Putrifiers II was a shining example of how to channel the raw garage power of The Monks, The Sonics, and the experimental composition of The Velvet Underground while maintaining that glint of newness, of a clear and present danger that made garage rock so compelling to youth and scary for adults the first time around. This album was not a mere anachronistic exercise. Bolstered by a renowned ability to perform live, Putrifiers II had a sense of immediacy to it that could not be faked with all the Pro Tools tweaks in the world. Awash in distorted guitar lines and heavily processed vocals, the pure jams of “Lupine Dominus” and the opening track “Wax Face” could make believers of anyone willing to listen. Sure, its forms may have been familiar — parallels could be drawn from “So Nice” to VU’s “Venus in Furs” or “Wicked Park” to Syd Barrett — but the energy that fuels Thee Oh Sees burned as hot upon their 2012 release as it ever could have.
Thee Oh SeesIn The RedTMT Review
33. Farrah Abraham
My Teenage Dream Ended

[Farrah Abraham/MTV Press]


Hoping to spark a critical debate on what exactly makes a piece of art good, former director of the Tate Modern Will Gompertz recently wrote an editorial making a plea for a major museum to stage an exhibition of works from its collection that it deems to be bad art. Just let them try to acquire Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended on behalf of The Museum of Bad Art; Abraham’s disorienting album fearlessly confounded every playlist and exhibition into which it was dropped, even as debate among critics continued and The Museum of Outsider Art came knocking. There was so much here: tortured echoes of tabloid sound-bytes, reality TV confessionals, and pop’s faked climaxes, but as Abraham said, “I can only put so much in a song.” For us, it wasn’t how much she had put in, but how deep she had buried it — all of it ratcheted by Auto-Tune and ribboned by churning bass riffs, both dramatizing and plowing under the album’s tortured backstory. The year’s most compelling narrative, sonically and otherwise.
Farrah AbrahamTMT Review
32. Motion Sickness of Time Travel
Motion Sickness of Time Travel

[Spectrum Spools]


00:00
By design, free-form drone music usually doesn’t come packaged as a big statement. It’s usually doled out little by little on CD-Rs, cassette tapes, and 7-inches. This kind of experimentalism seems meant to be absorbed in small bites, each one a beta test of a still-evolving sound. Although her sound is still developing, Rachel Evans achieved something of a watershed moment with this record. As she mentioned during an interview from May, the album’s gestation period saw it develop into a surprisingly self-sufficient statement. It is self-titled, it’s a double LP, and, as she told Jonathan Dean, ” I felt like the finished product was a good representation of where I’m at right now with [Motion Sickness of Time Travel]. In that way it is a definitive statement…” In terms of pure aesthetics, the album was a blanket of bliss. Evans had the courage and patience to allow moods and moments to develop at a glacial pace, clearly feeling the freedom to stretch out over nearly 90 minutes of recorded material. She also had the compositional ear to create beguiling layers of twinkling arpeggios and shimmering oscillations. These served as ripples within the vast waters of her sound, until the listener felt totally enveloped beneath the waves. What remained was a picture of an artist totally in love with her synthesizers, totally in love with the process of methodically building her tracks, and totally in love with drone.
Motion Sickness of Time TravelSpectrum SpoolsTMT Review
31. Jason Lescalleet
Songs About Nothing

[Erstwhile]


Cynically designed and morosely brimming over with sooty diamond-crusty apathy, Jason Lescalleet’s Songs About Nothing nonetheless thrilled and enticed as one of 2012’s most euphorically ear-opening experimental works. The mastery of a suspenseful atmosphere drove each of its 13 environ-peeping sections before it dropped you square in a glorping body-high bog of eternal squenche. In addition to it being the masterpiece of queasy abstract voyeurism that it is, there was a radiance-imbuing quality to this album. It was like a ratty old blanket you pull over yourself and dream roving desert dreams of a reckless peace and an ever-changing light at the bottom. You sense it’s there, but you are too terrified to look and take stock. Such was the way of it here. Songs About Nothing was the best horror film of the year, for years. It was a well-curated museum of breaking down, a murky stand of mottled black windsocks whipping about between two receivers. The sample circled arguing with the microscope. Time squeezed tight and flexed.
Jason LescalleetErstwhileTMT Review
30. Dolphins Into The Future
Canto Arquipélago

[Underwater Peoples]


00:00
Abandoning the turbulent nurturing of modern societies, Dolphins Into The Future’s Lieven Martens went to the Azores islands on a quest to find an arche, an ultimate substance and essence related to all things — and he probably found it in the primordial form of waves: mechanical (acoustic, oceanic), electromagnetic (light, radiation), mathematical (sinusoids, tones). Canto Arquipélago, like a wave, presented patterns of repetition and interference that absorbed the environment and reflected it back, in a way that the artificial (music) was not opposed to the natural (field recordings) but was embedded within it. Emerging from the gap between these categories, there were the oscillations of natural cycles confronted to traces of proto-languages (dolphin whistles, talking percussion, bird chirping, clusters of analog bubbling), and the bulk movement of wind and rain added to the arpeggiated and sweeping synths configuring primeval information networks, dismissing in the process any exoticist representation. Instead of a trance-like, out-of-body experience with new-spirituality pretensions, the whole trip was inundated with a pensive feeling of mundanity — the sublunary becoming all-too-earthly. Canto Arquipélago did not gaze at the heavens waiting for divine redemption, but melancholically stared at its terrene surroundings in humble contemplation.
Dolphins Into The FutureUnderwater PeoplesTMT Review
29. 情報デスクVIRTUAL
札幌コンテンポラリー

[Beer On The Rug]


00:00
Taking its samples and inspirations from music that can often be found in places such as news channel intros, infomercials, and hotel lobbies, 札幌コンテンポラリー by 情報デスクVIRTUAL (a.k.a. New Dreams Ltd., Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions, etc.) was one of 2012’s most challenging entries in the already perplexing genre of vaporwave. By foregrounding corporate sounds in an almost unadulterated format, the listener was confronted with the deconstruction of kitsch, a removal of the safe distance that ironic detachment once provided. During its 25 tracks (27 in a subsequent bonus release), 札幌コンテンポラリー demanded that you stop and listen to the unlistenable, music so ostracized that it became impossible to not thoroughly reflect on its very structure. Are we faced with a sonorous exposé of late capitalism, bringing its invisible sounds to the foreground, forcing us to pay attention to the never-ending muzak that make up the soundtrack of our consumerist lives? However you may choose to answer this question, 札幌コンテンポラリー was the perfect soundtrack to a certain Don Delillo quote: “He watched Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory — words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the Esperanto of jet lag.”
情報デスクVIRTUALBeer On The RugTMT Review
28. Tim Hecker / Daniel Lopatin
Instrumental Tourist

[Software]


00:00
You can’t entirely prepare for a collaborative improvisation. Sure, you can make patches or conceive of a tonal pool you might end up using during the session, and you can nail down some certainties by only bringing specific instruments. But the operative element of any good improvisation is what shined through on Instrumental Tourist: it unleashed Tim Hecker’s and Daniel Lopatin’s creativity from the restraints of their usually dense compositional process, leaving only the tethers of instinct and taste to decide where their work went. This freedom led to the intense, freewheeling bursts of energy found in Hecker’s massive collisions of musical data, as well as a calm wander through the nuances of texture heard in Lopatin’s deep pads and delay-laden samples. Instrumental Tourist epitomized the process of investigating the moment and imbuing it with sound according to the audition of the preceding moment, serving as a document of the free-play meeting of great musical minds. It was a game of Go, a conversation of musical impetus. For all the freedom and uncertainty on Instrumental Tourist, it achieved a remarkable coherence, rivaling even the most exhaustively composed works of 2012.
Tim HeckerDaniel LopatinMexican SummerTMT Review
27. White Suns
Sinews

[Load]


00:00
Dear White Suns, I’m desperate and I need your help. See, the [HARDCORE] I was leasing just to get to work every day just broke down. I just can’t afford to get it fixed. But I also really can’t afford to miss work right now, because the aging [PUNK ROCK] that I take care of is really sick and can’t get its medication. I am supposed to be a provider. The thought of it just makes me sick. Also, the [HEAVY METAL] I was planning on using for retirement was lost in the recent super-storm. It’s all gone! Just like that. Just a smoking pile of rubble and ashes! I don’t mean to complain or anything, but is this what faith and hope in [CLASSIC ROCK] are worth!? And that’s not even the worst of it. See, my first-born [DRONE] just got drafted in an unwinnable war that, in one way or another, I just know will end up claiming his life. Everything just seems broken. It’s all coming apart. I don’t hear music anymore, just a terrible, inevitable sound. What kind of [NOISE] is this, White Suns? So fucking ceaseless. So fucking mangled. So fucking loud.
White SunsLoadTMT Review
26. Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos
FRKWYS Vol. 9: Icon Give Thank

[RVNG Intl.]


00:00
A definite minority of humans personally identify with the Rastafari movement, but that didn’t prevent anyone from basking in the psychedelic and rhythmic synergy emanating from Icon Give Thank, the superb collaboration between the dub-inspired Sun Araw, producer M. Geddes Gengras, and legendary reggae outfit The Congos. Do you have a distinct idea of what constitutes the “court of the king”? Does the name Haile Selassie hold a special significance for you? It’s almost irrelevant, because similar philosophies (musical and otherwise) brought all of the individuals involved in this recording together for an album, crafted primarily in St. Catherine, Jamaica, which appealed across generations and regardless of whether or not your image of Zion comes mostly from The Matrix. Sun Araw’s modern take on dub music offered a fresh complement to The Congos’ delayed and nostalgia-inducing vocals, and this was particularly evident on “Happy Song,” where the driving bass line, a common quality of the former’s solo work, presented an amazing contrast with Cedric Myton’s memorable falsetto. A line in the song also works as an accurate commentary on the entire album: “Let us play the music. Let us sing the song. Let us dance and play. Music all night long.” I think we can all get behind that.
Sun ArawRVNG Intl.TMT Review
25. Mediafired
The Pathway Through Whatever

[Beer On The Rug]


00:00
In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a character dreams of addiction personified as Death with a big, yellow “Have a Nice Day” smiley face. That image stuck with me as vaporwave developed throughout 2012; the music was chintzy to the point of surrealism, but with an unsettling subliminal darkness. Sidestepping that, Mediafired’s gorgeous album felt optimistic in its hypnotic eccojams. “Pixies,” the centerpiece to The Pathway Through Whatever’s hyperreality, turned Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” into the most blissful broken record I’ve ever heard. Surrounding that, Mediafired passionately worked from the hazy, looping blueprint of Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person project, creating glitzy vignettes from warping The Who to the closing pair of fractured takes on The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” which first bloomed into the pulsing “Spring Is Here” and then stretched and melted like a lava lamp into a pitch-shifted choir on “Tender Age.” Lopatin first described the looped vocal fragments of eccojams as something spiritual and poetic to him, but he also hoped the practice could become more sophisticated. On that merit and more, The Pathway Through Whatever succeeded and became one of the most blissful mindfucks of the year.
MediafiredBeer On The RugTMT Review
24. Graham Lambkin
Amateur Doubles

[Kye]


00:00
Technically released last year but too late in the year to make our 2011 list, Amateur Doubles was a testament to the versatility of listener interpretation. As suggested by the album’s liner notes (“Recorded 2010-2011 in a Honda Civic”) and gatefold (a sun-kissed photo of Graham Lambkin sitting in said vehicle with his family, his veiled gaze directed towards an obscured car stereo, two CD cases lying on the dashboard), the album was ostensibly recorded on the road. But regardless of whether it was read as a meticulously deliberate fabrication or as an authentic artifact, the recording’s seemingly indeterminate happenings remained an alluring evocation of automotive experience. Driven by Lambkin’s erratic audition of two otherworldly Pôle Records albums, the Civic’s womblike acoustics were supplemented by ambience of both interior and exterior genesis. Scattered throughout the cut-up tape, we heard the car’s ignition, its doors opening and closing, muffled speech and soothing whir, Doppler-effected horns and objects whizzing by. To listen to Amateur Doubles was to listen to the listening of music: the record blurred the line between recorded and not-yet-recorded sound, between Lambkin’s status as esoteric DJ and as field recorder, but in the process it cemented his reputation as sound poet.
KyeTMT Review
23. Angel Olsen
Half Way Home

[Bathetic]


00:00
In a recent radio interview, Angel Olsen described the process of finding her voice as similar to how an actress, without ever seeing her own face, learns to control her expressions in order to convey what a given scene asks of her. Listening to Half Way Home, Olsen’s understatedly acrobatic voice nimbly elevated her collection of simple folks songs to a place that, when encountered, sent a shiver down your spine. Her delicate falsetto morphed into a caterwaul as easy as it receded into a whisper. Without a lot of modern vocal peers, it made sense to compare Olsen’s performance on the record to that of a great actress who both embodied a role and defined it as a part that only she could play. Even if you didn’t speak a word of English, Olsen’s voice would still convey the meaning behind her ambitiously sparse material, at once stoic and vulnerable, light and heavy.
Angel OlsenBatheticTMT Review
22. Demdike Stare
Elemental

[Modern Love]


00:00
No one explored the possibilities of disembodied sound this year better than Demdike Stare. Across Elemental’s nearly two hours of expertly stitched-together dub techno — for lack of a more apt genre tag — samples were taken out of context, rendered unidentifiable individually, but given a coherent, recognizable identity through collaboration. Like 2011’s superlative Tryptych, Elemental thrived on its powerful mood-induction. But while last year’s mammoth collection dealt in deeply claustrophobic atmospheres, Elemental’s sounds occupied less confining environments. Given greater space to breathe, those sounds gained the power to question the forces at work behind their nigh-cinematic evocations. These tracks were palpably nightmarish, provoking subconscious physical reactions and campily demanding at least a little bit of rudimentary psychoanalysis: Just why was this stuff so powerfully associative? And then the questions kept coming: Why did the drumming in “Erosion of Mediocrity” do “apocalyptic” better than anybody else, in a year where apocalyptic was simultaneously ubiquitous and easy? Why did the title of “We Have Already Died” give the track’s paradoxically organic-sounding techno groove such a funny and unsettling edge? But most importantly: When could we hear more?
Demdike StareModern LoveTMT Review
21. Aaron Dilloway
Modern Jester

[Hanson]

00:00
Former Wolf Eyes member Aaron Dilloway spent years on his magnum opus, Modern Jester, a painstaking project that produced some of the most intricate and musically aesthetic noise to ever be pressed onto vinyl. And not unlike his peers John Wiese and C. Spencer Yeh, Dilloway comfortably explored the sonic dynamic ranges of gritty drones and oscillating static swells set beyond the noise traditionalism of unwavering harshness. Modern Jester then played a significant role in returning a once experimental genre back toward its exploratory roots, defying our expectations of what it is that noise does, can do, and, of course, will destructively undo.
Aaron DillowayHansonTMT Review
20. Kendrick Lamar
good kid, m.A.A.d city

[Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope]


Despite exemplifying François Truffaut’s oft-cited claim that “it is impossible to make a true anti-war film, because the act of looking at violence is inherently exciting,” Kendrick Lamar’s “short film” succeeded at having it both ways, as a thrillingly visceral, yet explicitly critical depiction of a conflict that has claimed the lives of countless young men. Received as an instant classic, good kid, m.A.A.d city has revealed itself to be more flawed — and more rewarding — than even the rapturous critical response would have had you believe. Even if good kid, m.A.A.d city never fully transcended the Afro-American Gothicisms of its boilerplate gang-initiation storyline, Lamar experimented with form more daringly than any other rapper to date, a claim that even his detractors, few and far between, would have trouble disputing. There are few longform narratives in pop music and fewer still that are this thoughtful, cohesive, or self-consciously cinematic. Despite its fractured timelines and mythopoetic aspirations, it would be a stretch to describe good kid, m.A.A.d city as avant-garde; nevertheless, this was unmistakably the work of an artist leading the charge, at the forefront of a still-undefined new wave.
Kendrick LamarAftermathTMT Review
19. Traxman
Da Mind of Traxman

[Planet Mu]


00:00
“Footworkin on Air,” the opening track of this Planet Mu debut by Traxman, was one of footwork’s finest moments of the year. Instead of strapping a chopped vocal stutter into the pilot’s seat, Traxman commanded an echoey marimba melody to navigate the jagged snare snaps and jerky claps. It felt like, well, footworkin on air — like floating, lingering, wandering, drifting. The footwork sound ordinarily thrives on claustrophobic blasts and grinding repetition. But Traxman spread his wings and momentarily soared away from the battle floors that serve as the music’s natural habitat. This was a fascinating gesture considering that, due to Lit City Trax and Planet Mu’s numerous juke and footwork releases (Spinn, Rashad, Young Smoke, et al.), this once hyper-local Chicago dance music managed to smack many new ears this year — ears that belong to bodies with feet that were “on air,” not down on the dance floor. This same curious infinity-feeling snuck, ever so slightly, into head-nodders like “Chillllll” and “Lady Dro,” but Traxman mostly did what he does best: design dizzying mazes of ever-tangling sounds that maximized tension without offering breathing room, let alone the possibility of escape.
TraxmanPlanet MuTMT Review
18. The Caretaker
Patience (after Sebald)

[History Always Favors the Winners]


00:00
Last year, our fourth favorite album of the year was The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss, a work that was best understood through the suspect deployment of nostalgia in 2011 films like The Artist and Hugo. Here in 2012, The Caretaker wowed us again. But while the album soundtracked Grant Gee’s documentary of the same name, the music this time also had to be approached through literature. An astute reader will understand immediately: we find W.G. Sebald, one of the most incisive and tragic writers of recent times, directly in the album’s title. At the start of this millennium, Sebald promised literary vision and deliverance; before the end of 2001, he was dead. Likewise, The Caretaker’s tracks, regardless of promised melody, seemed inevitably to drift away, to be lost at sea. Sebald was famous for embedding pictures into his prose, often antique found photos, already faded, holey, beautiful, tortuous for lack of clarity — not unlike the music of Patience. No single medium was sufficient in these endeavors, as all bowed to the greater work of Human Memory. In 2012, The Caretaker mined moments from the past and exposed them to the development of the present, without breaking a resolute stare toward the future.
History Always Favours the WinnersTMT Review
17. Daughn Gibson
All Hell

[White Denim]


00:00
“Daughn Gibson” sounds like only a slightly down-pitched version of “Don Gibson,” the name of one of Nashville’s saddest poets. And yet, with such minor tweaks, Daughn Gibson (real name Josh Martin) seems to have resurrected all the great grim ghosts of country’s past. All Hell, his debut, didn’t merely set country music storytelling to wobbly synths and digital loops. Rather, it exploited the emotional possibilities of digital sound production to create a remarkably contemporary kind of pain. The redneck emptiness of “Bad Guys” existed not in spite of, but through its half-false processing of Gibson’s clichéd baritone; the outlaw desperation of “In the Beginning” came across not just in the song’s pleading lyrics, but in its crowded mix of scratchy samples, as they each incessantly returned to some long lost time before sin. Gibson had the good sense to keep his arrangements as light as the morning air, and yet it was precisely the incredible weightlessness of these songs that made each so crushingly tragic. In fact, All Hell simply did what all good country does: it turned the time of decay and space of ruination into pleasing sonic form. Sadness, grief, loss, betrayal — the circle is indeed broken, but the emotions it once contained here became sources of exquisite pleasure and established nothing less than a future for country.
Daughn GibsonWhite DenimTMT Review
16. Death Grips
The Money Store

[Epic]


00:00
Try to pigeonhole Death Grips. Just try. Experimental. Industrial. Hip-hop. Rap. Punk rap. Garage rap. Noise rap. Avant-noise. Post-noise. Electrical noise. Listen to “Double Helix.” MC Ride shouts about an “unidentified genre abductor,” and maybe that’s the best way to describe Death Grips. Furtive. Violent. The Money Store warped and wrecked sounds we knew or sounds we thought we knew. The Money Store crackled and rumbled from an unrecognizable future world, a wasteland where only shattered screens and burnt wires and exploded buildings remain. MC Ride, Zach Hill, and Andy Morin channeled an underworld from the end of the world to warn us, to shock us into remembering that no one is ever safe. “Lost Boys” trapped a disembodied voice in a burned-out power plant. “The Cage” distorted and broke down beats that sounded like alarms. “Hacker” invaded a crowd. The Money Store conjured a dark and deconstructed space where no one speaks and no one sleeps, a space mapped only by disregard and danger. And yet, we’ve returned again and again. We’ve returned for the thrill.
Death GripsEpicTMT Review
15. DJ Rashad
TEKLIFE Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi

[Lit City Trax]


00:00
It’s easy to label DJ Rashad’s TEKLIFE Vol. 1 as footwork’s crowning achievement. After several years of hype and more than a few exceptional releases, 2012 saw the genre expand with the epic, 83-minute TEKLIFE released by his own Lit City Trax (with DJ Spinn and J-Cush), entering the mainstream media’s consciousness and subsequently representing the whole Chicago-based dance movement for most curious listeners. Unsurprisingly, Rashad lined his record with the enduring footwork trademarks: highly syncopated, often disorienting rhythms and chopped samples falling somewhere between bizarre minimal rap and kush-fueled experimentation. But let’s get real: TEKLIFE was its own hybrid animal, an album that reflected Rashad’s rapidly evolving musical intuition and an international flavor influenced by his globetrotting. The record could be weird as hell, brimming with ideas, sprawlingly uneven, and all the better for it. You either connected with it or you didn’t, its bare-bones production being either amateurish or a welcomed catharsis from overcrowded house and calculated, entitled indie. Appropriate for footwork’s ambassador, the tracks on TEKLIFE were constantly in motion, containing an almost improvisational spirit and looseness amidst an unrelenting pulse. As far as I’m concerned, the mid-album span from “Fly Spray” to “Over Ya Head” was its own masterstroke within a masterstroke, a 40-some minute stretch of absurdist new-electronic minimalism that once again raised the bar. By the time “We Leanin” locked into its pitch-shifting, hilarious, mindblowing four-minute mantra of “I’m geeked up off them bars, nigga,” there was no turning back.
DJ RashadLit City TraxTMT Review
14. BEBETUNE$
inhale c-4 $$$$$

[Self-Released]


00:00
Another faux-trendy, post-ironic, undanceable dance release with lots of caps lock and hashtags? Nice, TMT. Real nice. No question we listened to plenty of “that” this year — not that our brains were too warped to interlock upon any consensus — but James Ferraro’s mixtape as BEBETUNE$ was an uncommonly singular entry, one that managed to encapsulate so many of 2012’s ever-morphing musical values without at any point allowing itself be mistaken for a thing cold, conceptual, anthropological, or rote. Sure, its social critiques (witness the mutant gurgle and PCE-evoking title of “Pepsi Baby”) were readily apparent. And the flotsam — the hypercompressed escalations building to nothing at all, the most indulgent Auto-Tune discharges this side of Farrah Abraham — might on first listen have sounded like baldfaced hit-or-miss references. But this was not a listening experience of strung-out addiction and malaise: some uncanny, aberrant harmony repeatedly beckoned us back. Ferraro’s became an accelerationism fearless and deceptively serene. Between the insanely cheesy synth that provided the lone ray of clarity in “#C I T Y LIGHT$$$” and what may be a literal storefront congregation in “P.O.W.E.R.,” Ferraro’s project was secretly about locating a kernel of belief at the core of all things cultural, messy, and anxious. Forget “distroid” — by far the most unnerving thing about inhale c-4 $$$$$ was the warm, beating heart at the center of each song.
James FerraroBEBETUNE$TMT Review
13. Holly Herndon
Movement

[RVNG Intl.]


00:00
Suspense was one of the central components that made Holly Herndon’s Movement such an irresistible listen. Patterns emerged through purported rhythms that stretched across a drastic range of formats, respiration being the most prominent. Ex/inhalation, contraction, expiry, and whisper become visualized as a consequence of observing compositional frameworks, where specific sounds were subconsciously imposed by association upon familiar, tangible motions — when Herndon breathed in, it was understandably expected that exhalation would follow. The element of tension was achieved through tampering with the setup of each anticipated response in creating something wholly unimaginable. Gingerly austere, delicately abraded, strung up, and wrapped in plastic, these patterns didn’t solely extend the breadth of the rhythmic experimental tracks exhibited here; they also encompassed those disco moments so lovingly hailed by critics as an open doorway to the “academic sound art tangled in Berlin nightclub appreciation” model that Herndon adopted. Regardless of the form these splendid compositions took — a 4/4 beat fumbling into pitch-shifted purr, a palpitating baritone loop bleeding into crumpled distortion, a stupefied retention that danced like analog static — suspense was always on the cusp, looming at the seams of the most gorgeously pranayamic album of 2012.
Holly HerndonRVNG Intl.TMT Review
12. Frank Ocean
channel ORANGE

[Def Jam]


The de facto chaperone of a brilliant though foul-mouthed collective of young L.A. rappers, Frank Ocean had a few pop songwriting credits and a mixtape to his name when Kanye made him the first voice you hear on his and Jay-Z’s occasionally exceptional index of hubris, Watch the Throne. Stack on that the difficulty of coming out just before releasing an eagerly anticipated album in a genre where homophobia still finds plenty of purchase. And yet all this pales: “Thinkin Bout You,” ORANGE’s astonishing opener and single, introduced Ocean as a voice both pained and limitless, falsetto employed with abandon, as haunted and oversexed as anything from Prince or D’Angelo. Across the album’s 62 minutes, Ocean veered from heartbroken to pathetic (“Pyramids”) to eminently chill (“Sweet Life”) to something like lucky (“Super Rich Kids”). As he channel-surfed and catalogued the varieties of Californian experience, Ocean revealed himself to be an artful collaborator, a talented and well-read musician, and an innovative songwriter. channel ORANGE, defying its hype, revealed a young man at his most confessional, confused, and aching, already primed for an altogether new type of throne.
Frank OceanDef JamTMT Review
11. Grimes
Visions

[4AD/Arbutus]


00:00
Let them be, they can’t shut up. Nor should they. You should calm down. No need to be angry. We can be far more than this… No, we have been. Even when we were excessive. Even when we sounded childish. People just try to bring us down because they need to. They need to forget that they, they themselves, are just as flawed and messed up. They just want us to fuck up so we feel better about themselves. Well, let them think that, whatever. We still have ourselves, right? And that certainly helps. You could be a better friend […] I could be a better man. You put a line, let it drag out, punched a beat that makes the whole damn thing danceable. You let your voice waver, quiver, but never get gimmicky. You kept yourself at a constant. You had help from others, but you were great by yourself. Being myself makes me feel like I know who you are. You kept yourself distant yet close, and that’s important. You’re always there, even when you don’t reveal yourself. And yet, you didn’t think of yourself as any better than anyone else: I know you’re faced with something/ That could consume you completely. It makes you very powerful. And you remember: It’s always different. They may not like you, but they can’t touch you.
Grimes4ADArbutusTMT Review
10. Dean Blunt
The Narcissist II

[World Music Group/Hippos in Tanks]


00:00
“I can’t talk to you,” snarled the deeply frustrated, highly repugnant male subject of Dean Blunt’s The Narcissist II, before smacking his lover and tumbling into a mental morass of wheezing drone, wireless interference, and YouTube-compressed storm clouds. Upon reemerging, he found a troubling means of expression: self-reflexive “come hither” song sketches glued together by R&B cliché, but too ragged and paranoid to settle into any genre in particular. Here, songcraft congealed from artful escape into pathological avoidance, recentering the drama by way of co-opted language and mood, a comforting cloud of smoke blown at the bathroom mirror. But as the outside world intrudes — with violent narrative interjections, ringtone keyboard lines, the scraping whirr of a crusty apartment — that projected image warped and stretched to let through slivers of actual alienation. Blunt’s uncomfortable vocal delivery upped the tension, slipping from playful to sinister to desperate, hilariously confused but disturbing in context. On the sublime title track, at the singer’s lowest moment, he hurled out a strange request to “fold” her, some despairing desire trapped between fucking and holding, a smeared impulse left unresolved as the song washed away in a wave of canned critical applause. One of many bent transmissions from Hype Williams HQ in 2012, The Narcissist II may have been their most unusual and affecting infiltration yet.
Dean BluntHippos in TanksTMT Review
09. YYU
TIMETIMETIME&TIME

[Beer On The Rug]


00:00
TIMETIMETIME&TIME was initially shocking for how painstakingly meticulous it was and how current and unabashedly hip its referents and sources were, embracing footwork’s skittering percussion, clipped vocal ghosts, and chopped-up twangs of acoustic guitar rather than the corporate pap of Beer On The Rug’s more well-known vaporwave releases this year. It was built on dance music’s core of repetition, yes, and wore its edits on its sleeve, but it joyfully avoided dance’s forward momentum — a gorgeous and purposeful surface at all times, but no cohesive trajectory, endlessly discursive and elusive. Its rhythmic underpinnings clattered in and out of formation as it followed inscrutable whims on odd tangents, memories of older loops appearing, transfiguring, disappearing, returning again in some mangled form. Certainly the least aggravating and most purely pleasurable of the label’s releases, YYU nevertheless seemed to invoke the same sort of intellectual fascination as vaporwave’s aggressively wretched material. It seemed to exist for some purpose or statement, but it even more so than the rest of the label’s work, figuring out what that might be proved close to impossible. After YYU, the loop and the edit were no longer firm and solid, but they proved just as transfixing.
YYUBeer On The RugTMT Review
08. Andy Stott
Luxury Problems

[Modern Love]


00:00
One of the most enduring kinds of music offers total immersion, an aesthetic world unto itself. An intangible place or headspace in which to while away some time, from which to return in some way enriched. Andy Stott’s Luxury Problems can lay full claim to this rare achievement: from the orbital vocal loops of “Numb” down to “Up the Box’s” mossy, terrestrial rhythms, the album was like an experimental techno circumbinary of Music For Airports, On Land, and all manner of interstellar debris in between. An evocatively textured and visually descriptive work, Luxury Problems was the most fully-formed microcosm presented by any one artist in 2012. Yet for all its atmospheric layers and tactile intricacies, it remained an unusually intimate listen. As if to center his most ambitious dub techno and “knackered house” abstractions to date, Stott’s widely noted use of his teenage piano teacher’s voice provided an emotional core half-hidden by both its title and its sonic palette. Allison Skidmore’s repurposed old a capellas served as warehouse operatics, textually ambiguous and obscured by echo, but nevertheless imbued with the deeply personal resonance of an artist returning to the woman with whom he began his musical studies, nearly 20 years later, to ask once more for guidance; to show her everything he’s learned.
Andy StottModern LoveTMT Review
07. Actress
R.I.P

[Honest Jon’s]


00:00
Much of the year’s best electronic music could be described as indeterminate, open-ended technoid soundscapes increasingly preoccupied with vertical elaboration over sequential composition. The possibilities opened up by Selected Ambient Works Vol. II and Burial have crystallized into an established lexicon for the post-bass underground, and no one pushed this aesthetic logic further than Actress. R.I.P dramatized the journey of the soul through the underworld with a series of baroque abstractions, piecing together a dark brocade of richly textured materials, an elaborate drapery profuse with a labyrinthine complex of shadowy folds. No other electronic artist this year was as fixated on the encounter between clarity and obfuscation, smoothness and erosion, the explicit and the implicit, and no other artist displayed as much talent and poise in bringing the drama of that encounter to life.
ActressHonest Jon’sTMT Review
06. Macintosh Plus
Floral Shoppe

[Beer On the Rug]


00:00
For many of us here at TMT, 2012 was all about vaporwave. And in many ways, New Dreams Ltd., the umbrella moniker for Macintosh Plus, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, Laserdisc Visions, and Sacred Tapestry, embodied the genre best. Not only did it provide some of vaporwave’s most essential releases, but it also cannily folded at just the right moment, thanking us all for visiting the Virtual Casino. 2012 wasn’t just the year vaporwave broke; it was also the year it exhausted itself: morphed, rebranded, its practitioners moved on. If any single release deserves to be remembered, though, it is surely Floral Shoppe. From the very beginning, it stood out not only for its artful marrying of the conceptual with the sensual, but also for its performance of the inseparability between the two. Working with a particularly wide range of readymades, from R&B classics through glossy muzak to smooth jazz grooves, Floral Shoppe slid seamlessly between pure pop pleasure and the ironic framing of that pleasure, the presence of the artist at turns barely noticeable and dramatically foregrounded. This is the sound of a kind of sensuous virtuality, the artist as simulacra, both the experience and problematization of the post-human, a new cyber-pop unconscious.
Macintosh PlusBeer On The RugTMT Review
05. Laurel Halo
Quarantine

[Hyperdub]


00:00
There’s an unlikely precedent for what Laurel Halo did on Quarantine: Neil Young’s Trans. The vocal abstractions Young created circa 1982 for one of his most critically maligned works was an attempt to connect with his young son who had cerebral palsy and was unable to speak. His use of vocoder allowed him a chance to make a human connection through electronic enhancement. Halo asserted in various interviews that, by removing the reverb from her vocal tracks, the objective was to add some humanity into her works of techno wonder. Instead, she managed to offend a lot of fans or would-be fans the same way that Young did. The amount of bile spewed forth via internet commentators over Quarantine’s vocals was staggering. The same amount of hatred is still piled onto Young’s album, but both works are bright, bold, and beautiful, sounding as if they were beamed in from a “post-human” future. Some people were not quite ready for Quarantine. A lot of us were.
Laurel HaloHyperdubTMT Review
04. Mount Eerie
Clear Moon / Ocean Roar

[P.W. Elverum & Sun]


00:00
Mount Eerie’s two releases this year were tethered tightly, but asymmetrically. Clear Moon’s emotionally-satisfying songs flowed into one another as naturally as lunar phases, weaving together a career’s worth of Phil Elverum’s previous strains of sound (Wind’s Poem’s black metal, Lost Wisdom’s spare folk, and even The Glow Pt. 2’s indefinably catchy layers) with some new ones (vocoders, drum machines, synths) to create his most precise and, well, clear statement yet. The nearly instrumental Ocean Roar took those same elements and seemed to make fragmentation instead of coherence, lopsidedness instead of balance, sound instead of a statement. Released first, Clear Moon’s structured gravity seemed to shape the unpredictable swells of Ocean’s tides. But eventually, I caught glimpses of Moon’s reflection in Ocean Roar’s uneven surface, too. It makes sense that Mount Eerie would happen to record its most and least coherent albums at the same time: “There is either no end/ Or constant simultaneous end and beginning,” Phil Elverum sings on Clear Moon’s “Through the Trees pt. 2.” It’s not that Elverum has so successfully reinvented himself twice this year; it’s that, again, he’s never had to.
Mount EerieTMT Review
03. Swans
The Seer

[Young God]


00:00
A bizarre paradox of the human condition: there is no experience of profound joy or pleasure that is not accompanied by pain. It’s unsurprising that Christian mystics frame religious ecstasy in violent terms, the flaming darts of St. John of the Cross or the golden spear of St. Teresa of Avila. It’s a joy that pierces, a joy that penetrates, a joy that overwhelms with its just-too-much-ness. Michael Gira has always aimed at capturing this rapturous state via the sheer sonic brutality of Swans, and in many ways, The Seer can be considered the culmination of those efforts. In its maddening dins and unnerving silences; in its thundering hammer blows and tender caresses; in its twisting, arduous passages that promised a fulfillment no frail human creature is sturdy enough to withstand, the record carved a rhythm that, for its near two-hour runtime, had the power to change one’s entire way of being. Like Gira’s parade of tortured mystics — lunatics, seers, warriors, apostates — we felt like we had brushed something vast and powerful, but not necessarily without cost. Swans used their profane tools to elevate us toward the sacred and showed us a path to ecstasy as severe as that of any monastic order.
SwansYoung GodTMT Review
02. Dean Blunt And Inga Copeland
Black Is Beautiful

[Hyperdub]


00:00
From the dark, slow burn of Andy Stott and Black Rain to the more elaborate gloomscapes of Raime and Demdike Stare, black was serious currency in the international dance underground of 2012. Typical, then, that perhaps the year’s most convincing celebration of the color came wrapped in a red sleeve, the cover text referencing African-American consumer culture rag Ebony (black, amirite?). But if that undermined blacker-than-thou pretensions elsewhere, the act of détournement itself sprung from another scene entirely: Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland started out performing thriftstore improv in small galleries, and although their Hyperdub deal surprised many, it didn’t stop them from diversifying their gallery portfolio as career outsiders peddling homebrew psychedelia. For some listeners, the joy of Black Is Beautiful was found in the diversity of its frame of reference — surely only one band can connect the dots between Bruce Haack, Mick Harris, Nami Shimada, and Billy Cobham while sounding like no one but themselves — yet of all the contradictions and paradoxes that keep Blunt and Copeland afloat, perhaps the likeliest is that, all posturing aside, they are not incompetents. They are just competent enough, flaunting a rare and bewildering equilibrium forged in the crucible of on-the-fly collaborative composition. Against all appearances, Black Is Beautiful was a matter of precision.
Dean Blunt and Inga CopelandHyperdubTMT Review
01. Scott Walker
Bish Bosch

[4AD]


Is it now safe to say that 2012 was a terrible year? Is it now safe to say that it was another terrible year in a string of terrible years? God, did you see what I saw? Running together, shuffled into one consumptive experience, the stories that we have left to tell are terrible things, indeed. Pink slime, drones, Trayvon Martin, Fifty Shades of Grey, Benghazi, Lana Del Rey, #Kony2012, Hurricane Sandy, Jerry Sandusky, McDonald’s’ Flavor Wars, James Holmes, bath salts, and cannibalism. Unity through “Gangnam Style.” Ecce Homo, mangled. The dark day behind us, the dark day ahead… Was there a better year for a new Scott Walker album?
I admit: a part of me sighed after Mr P assigned me Walker’s Bish Bosch. Had we even had time to digest it? (Yes, Ed did, obviously.) Most of us are still farting out words left and right, trying to grant some air of meaning to a work that is bigger, yes, bigger than we are at this moment in time. I’m not suggesting that Bish Bosch is incomprehensible. What I mean is that Walker is a world-builder, and you don’t so much listen to Bish Bosch as much as you wake up into its interpretation and wander around. While most of us haven’t had the time to get to know it well, the first steps have nonetheless been thrilling, enough to warrant its placement here, at the end, even as we are only beginning to understand its importance.
From what I can determine, Bish Bosch is important largely for what it isn’t: more sentimental garbage from another “old master.” Working from the absolute periphery of what can still be called the “folk process,” it’s totally at home in tradition, in passing-down, in relating then to now. Yet, unlike his cohorts, Walker does so without a waft of nostalgia; no, his stories are cyclones picking the past up into the sky, dropping bits and pieces as he goes along his way. What’s left is dumped into the present. Sorted, sort of. Walker is a storyteller at the end of storytelling, and he “spins his yarns” from a broken radio play, broadcast from history’s rubble: a remnant of the decaying oral tradition, howling like the anti-Garrison Keillor at the Cabaret Voltaire, letting disgusting sounds from bodies and instruments slither around words and utterances, letting them articulate their meaning when the words and speakers themselves are losing ground.
Bish Bosch is also important for what it actually is: a reclamation, and transformation, of the meaning of lived history. I remember reading that Joan Didion, after enduring a week in El Salvador in 1983 (eh, eunuch Ron?), had made her see Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a “social realist.” Spend some time in 2012 with Walker, and he too unfurls the surrealism of the real from the real. For Walker, history is a springboard for facts to launch off of, so that they might break apart in the atmosphere until the blunt truth of them remains. Whether or not they orbit or crash down is completely contingent upon the nature of the truth. So yeah, Walker’s factually wrong sometimes. Sure, his stories are fantastical, non-sequential, absurd. But can you listen to “SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” and tell me that you’ve never turned into a brown dwarf? I know that nearly every day this year I woke up on the verge.
More significant than temporary importance, though, is what vitality Bish Bosch has lying in wait. What will propel Walker’s work forward — what will keep us listening beyond 2012, or 13, or 14 — is its comedic critique of the ruthless comedy that its world, our world, coheres to. The pitifulness of the pitiless. The rot and stench of the body, broken and broken down. History culminating in the questionnaire. The final, quasi-threatening words of wisdom: GTFO! That music is made with anything, everything, especially things that will kill you. That you make it anyway. That the story is finished slap-dash, and that it will nonetheless stand in judgement of a time and place that no longer really believed in judgement at all, but apocalypse. Honestly, I wonder if we’ll ever live to see the day that we’re actually done with Walker’s work.
So, maybe we only had a few weeks with Bish Bosch here at TMT, but for most of us, it only took a short time to discover how it could be possible that even our worst years (centuries, millennia, whatever) could be exposed, drained, re-/dis-figured, and recast/told/sung/farted/assassinated into a towering work of art. Bish bash bosh. The end. #yolo
Scott Walker4ADTMT Review



Nema komentara:

Objavi komentar