2019: Music

Below are 25 of my favourite records of the year, and then after that, 10 artists of the decade. It feels like there is more amazing music being released than ever before, but it might just be that I’m a) increasingly more tuned into where nice things can be found, b) have ever more easy access to listening to all of it, and c) am now, more than ever before, not managing to stay on top of the volume of stuff surfacing meaning it seems like there is so much more. I think my favourite LP this year is the one by Julia Reidy. It’s an effortless sounding synthesis of all sorts of types of music I’ve been into over the last few years, and, for something so experimental, is also weirdly catchy. From the first listen, I was enthralled by it, and each time I return, it offers something new. I also really liked the two things put out by Kali Malone, and expect that, on spending more time being struck by them, will find that they will continue to be rewarding. Looking at this list, it looks a little unambitious, a little safe and familiar, but most of the best music I have heard will have been on the radio - songs that I have forgotten the names of or that I never knew, played on Whities, Sendspaace, Trilogy Tapes, or Emotional Landscapes, or by the old faithful, Benjamin UFO. The best live shows I went to were Sarah Davachi and Kara Lis-Coverdale, both at Cafe Oto. I have seen Sarah Davachi a few times now, and the amount of feeling she manages to extract from what seems like the smallest means and the simplest of sounds is always very impressive. Also, seeing South Korean folk musician Kim Doo Soo at the same venue was the best uninformed decision I made in the year, just after coming back from a visit to Seoul. He plays soft guitar, a wobbling harmonica, and sings with a warbling sound in his voice. I did not know what he was saying, but it was all very calming and pleasant.

 "I spend a lot of time wandering around London, I always have. Sometimes it’s because I’ve got somewhere to go, sometimes it’s because I haven't got anywhere to go. So I’d be wandering endlessly, getting in places. Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you. In London, there’s a kind of atmosphere that everyone knows about but if you talk about it, it just sort of disappears. London’s part of me, I'm proud of it but it can be dark, sometimes recently I don't even recognize it."

It is neat to me to look at the below list of what meant the most to me, musically, this decade, and think about how that compares to the one before, where artists like Brand New, American Football, or kidcrash would have been the ones that I deemed the most important; where music was made by bands and usually had words and where physical instruments were generally prominent. The artist that maybe connects that time to this one, that I was obsessed with then and remain so now, that I can’t imagine ever not listening to, that has defined sonically what it is to have lived in this time and in this place is Burial, my #2 artist of the decade. His music—both the albums he made in the 00s, and all the scattered tracks that are collected in the recent compilation—is genius to me. Re-reading the interview linked above, it is hard to not be moved by the understanding that this music was what he was meant to make. He describes it so well, and the stories of its making only make it sound better. The mood this music crystallises and the sensations it transmutes, the emotions it evokes, and the universe it conjures up are all so simple, clear and yet so strikingly precise. How many times I must have listened to “Rival Dealer”, and yet the spell it works remains so potent and so powerful.

I’ve also put Jam City at #3 because the music he’s produced, the mixes he’s made, and the projects he’s been involved with, and the way he has presented them have personally been very inspiring for me. Technically, it is is impressive to make two albums that are so radically different and involve such different skills, and that have both proved so inventive and influential, but beyond the music itself, I have found his way of operating kind of amazing, the way his politics have felt inseparable from his projects and their aesthetics. There has been a transparency in the way he has done things, a willingness to speak and think about political subjects without worrying about looking naive or simplistic, to think things out through work, friends and the world, to find a way of being in the world in real time. I have found the way that he has seemed to always retain hope that things can be better, in all sorts of ways, very brave, all the while displaying an earnestness that is rare and commendable. In a decade that has been defined by austerity and misery, by 10 years of Tory cruelty and suffering, I have found his way of working fairly bold. “They want us to be sad, they want us to be selfish, they want us to be unhappy. So we dream a garden, its weeds quietly gatecrash this world.”

However, I have devoted the top spot to Dean Blunt, because the (massive amount of) music he has released over the last ten years have summarised the decade more effectively than anything else. I really like ‘The Narcissist’ 1 and 2 particularly, and ‘Black Metal’ is a brilliant album, but It is hard to think of a project more befitting of the 2010s than the Babyfather one, specifically the ‘BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow’ record, with its dismantling of the notion of “British values”, its wry commentary on British society, music and culture, and everything else that is in it that lies beyond my comprehension. With all the simultaneous sincerity and irony, the humour and the anger, I didn’t know what to make of it when it came out, and I still don’t. But what more effective damning of the state of this pitiful nation has there been than this? What a way to open an album, and what a statement to make: sardonic but also not. I’ve also not been more bemused than seeing him play live alongside this project. Listening to old garage records being mixed badly between two bouncers wearing Union Jacks for a few hours, not knowing if the ‘real show’ would ever start, only for the venue to be filled with stupid levels of smoke, so much that you couldn’t see the person next to you, and then having ear-splitting noise blasted around the space for what I remember being quite a long time. When the actual performance started, it was good, but the sensation of having persevered all this time, possibly as the target of some extended joke or experiment, was exciting. Some kind of kinship of confusion, the sense that something was actually happening for once, something special maybe, or different at the very least. All the various things he has produced over these last ten years have been ahead of it all, or at least, adjacent of it all, uninterested in what is happening at the centre. Dean Blunt has even out there on his own, making things because he wants to, because he can.

“It’s the end of the world, really man. I mean the Olympics was the end of the world. Before the Olympics, we were leading up to Armageddon and after the Olympics the world ended. The riots happened – that was a battle. The Olympics happened – that was the big parade. The world is over now. And London, it’s like, it’s done. We’re living in Armageddon, we’ve all been in a zombie like existence since London 2012.”

Julia Reidy - In Real Life (2019)

TWENTY FIVE (NEW)

• 75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real

• Barker - Utility

• Caterina Barbieri - Ecstatic Computation

• Dis Fig - PURGE

• E-Saggila - My World My Way

• Felicia Atkinson - The Flower and the Vessel

• Jessica Pratt - Quiet Signs

• Jim O'Rourke - To Magnetize Money And Catch A Roving Eye

• Julia Reidy - In Real Life / brace, brace

• Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code / The Torrid Eye (with Acronym)

• Kyle Bobby Dunn - From Here To Eternity

• Leo Svirsky - River Without Banks

• Loraine James - For You & I

• Matana Roberts - COIN COIN Chapter 4: Memphis

• Moor Mother - Analogue Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

• MSYLMA - un Taht Shajarat Al-Zaqum

• Pan American - A Son

• Park Jiha - Philos

• Rainer Veil - Vanity

• Sarah Davachi - Pale Bloom

• Sarah Hennies - Reservoir 1

• Show Me The Body - Dog Whistle

• Special Request - VORTEX / Offworld / Bedroom Tapes / Zero Fucks

• Tribe of Colin - Age of Aquarius

• Yamaneko - Spirals Heaven Wide

Babyfather - “Meditation” (2016)

TEN (DECADE)

1. Dean Blunt - One Nation (with Inga Copeland, as Hype Williams, 2011) + The Narcissist I (2012) + The Narcissist II (2013) + The Redeemer (2013) + Black Metal (2014) + BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow (as Babyfather, 2016) + Wahalla (with Joanne Robertson, 2017)

2. Burial - Tunes 2011 - 2019 (2019) + Burial & Kode9 for Mary Ann Hobbs (mixes, 2010-2018)

3. Jam City - Classical Curves (2012) + Dream A Garden (2015) + Earthly (mixes, 2013-2018)

4. Grouper - A I A: Dream Loss / Alien Observer (2011) + The Man Who Died In His Own Boat (2013) + Ruins (2014) + Grid of Points (2018)

5. Autechre - EPs 1991–2002 (2011) + elseq 1–5 (2016) + NTS Sessions 1-4 (2018) + Warp Tapes 89-93 (2019)

6. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) + Runaway (film, 2010) + Yeezus (2013) + 'Only One' (music video, 2014)

7. Body War - Show Me The Body (2016) + Corpus I (2017) + Dog Whistle (2019)

8. Frank Ocean - Nostalgia, Ultra (2011) + Channel Orange (2012) + Blonde (2016) + Endless (stream, 2016)

9. Huerco S - Colonial Patterns (2013) + For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) (2016) + Make Me Know You Sweet (as Pendant, 2018)

10. Kelela - Cut 4 Me (2013) + Take Me Apart (2017) + AQUAPHORIA (mix, 2019)