Last year I struggled to build up the enthusiasm to write a year end round-up blog. Thankfully this year has been crammed with so much adventurous, exciting, terrifying, cosmic, humourous and life-affirming music. So let's get right to the year end playlist - my longest yet!
With so much great music I don't have the strength to try and make yet another "albums of the year" countdown. No one wants to read another bloody list anyway. However, I would like to single out one release in particular that I thought was just phenomenal.
Let's Eat Grandma are a pair of teenagers from Norwich. They ostensibly make pop music but its draped in a thick layer of DIY sound-making and naive invention. The album seems to be all about playing in that blurry pre-teen phase of life and the instrumentation itself is strongly linked to conventional images of childhood (xylophones, recorders, the album even opens with a clapping game). Fairy-tale themes are prevalent throughout but they are tinged with dark, slighty Gothic edges think Roald Dahl rather than Disney. It's just so unabashedly unselfconscious.
I mean just watch this...
Love it.
If a pop record became my favourite of the year, albeit an off-the-wall one, then I shouldn't be surprised that 2016 broke another of my genre barriers. Hip hop has always felt rather alien to me but this year I finally got an in with the experimental soft rules from True Neutral Crew. I never thought hip hop could be so weird and inventive. This led to me exploring more of the acts on the Deathbomb Arc label and getting into new releases from clipping. and JPEGMAFIA.
While I'm on the subject of JPEGMAFIA that leads (rather uncomfortably) to the elephant in the room which would of course be the trials and tribulations of Western democracy in 2016. The 2nd Amendment tackled some of the, let's say, autocratic tendencies of 2016 politics. Moor Mother's Fetish Bones also feels like something that could only have been forged in this most turbulent of years. In one sense it's a harrowing listen and it's horrible that the hateful climate that fostered its creation is even allowed to exist. But on the other hand it's a real blistering gem that I feel privileged to have heard. Never before have I heard punk, noise and jazz combined in a way which is so bloodcurdlingly visceral. The noisy sphere was also served well by Puce Mary and the first new Pita release in far too long.
So what else was good... Well a bunch of What Was Music?'s old friends continued to produce the goods. Take a bow Matmos, Rashad Becker, Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi. Katie Gately had the best songs and Roly Porter seemed to do no less than simulate the birth of an entire universe in pure sound. The weirder end of electronic music (my bread and butter) was well served by the incomprehensible biomophic squelch of FIS; the uncanny synthetic voices of Matt Carlson and the Yorkshire sampling NYZ. At the acoustic end of the spectrum Eli Keszler hits things like no one else can hit things and Sarah Nicolls' vertical swinging piano was a joy to behold. I even managed to find time for a bit of reggae and some dub infused with a bit of J-Pop.
As tedious as the year end lists can be they are an incredible discovery tool. If I didn't pour through the year end lists from The Quietus, Wire, FACT, Late Junction, A Closer Listen and Boomkat. I wouldn't have discovered some truly outstanding sounds from Inventing Masks, Andrew Pekler, Billy Bao and Stian Westerhus.
Not making the playlist (mainly for time reasons) was Maja Ratke's epic Crepuscular Hour. It's well worth a listen (or ten). And I also can't miss out Andy Stott and Demdike Stare who released killer albums this year but their insistence on limiting themselves to releasing on physical media means they are sadly overlooked in the traditional Spotify playlist. It's worth remembering that Spotify is not the be all and end all...
On that note, this has been a great year for independent musicians/publishers with the Bandcamp platform going from strength to strength*. I'm afraid though I can't even link you to my favourite Bandcamp release of the year as it was a timed audio gag from Leyland Kirby's V/VM persona. A music hall inspired piano re-rendering of the deserving (if slightly po-faced) album of the year contender Love Streams by Tim Hecker. It put a huge smile on my face anyway as did the bonus "Christmess" album given out to fans. This kind of artist/fan connection is fantastic, let's hope this is the shape of things to come.
I also can't forget my own musical forays this year. As discussed in my few blogs from this year I've been inspired by the TidalCycles music software. Hopefully expect more sounds from me next year. I couldn't be more excited about the prospects of live-coded music making. The scene is open and friendly and despite the initial technical leap I think it could become a fantastic tool for amateur musicians. The pinnacle of the Tidal scene this year was this maximalist charmer from Tidal veteran Kindohm.
This E.P. from another live coder, Renick Bell, is also well worth anyone's time.
Right well 2017 is almost here so I'd better wrap this up. It's been such a brilliant year for music I almost don't want anything new in 2017 so I can pour over 2016's treasures a few more times.
Happy New Year!
* A negative footnote unfortunately, prompted by a somewhat unsavoury incident with Bandcamp and the publishers of the Dominic Fernow project Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. The album Green Graves was uploaded by someone other than the rights holders. Bandcamp seemed fairly slow to respond and so this unscrupulous person managed to profit for a short time from someone else's hard work. Hopefully, this isn't a common occurrence but just be mindful of who you're buying from.
