When making this sort of list, there's the temptation to go flashy or hyper-obscure, to use the occasion to advertise one's esoteric taste. So these are simply the new albums I played the most this year, the ones I kept revisiting because they challenged, delighted, and reassured. These records shifted my horizons, and more importantly, I enjoyed them.

Gyeongsu & June - All to None

Dear Dogs | Bandcamp

A shimmer on the horizon. Extremely patient and a little gaudy, but never forgetting that music is a direct line to catharsis. These four songs are pop music from a much better future.

DJ Niraha - KorgMusic2024DemoEL-HELL-EΛ

Heat Crimes | Bandcamp | Boomkat

"Derived from the fiery Roma wedding music of Kavala, in northern Greece, eastern Macedonia," this album has been a steady companion for my ugly morning runs around the pond, and it delivered my favorite musical moment of 2024: Lale Pashmiri's accidental laughter in the middle of a hypnotic vocoded verse at the 1:43 mark of "Lali Lale". It's the sound of reckless abandon, ecstacy in its strict sense of escaping the body to join something greater, even if my running style is anything but.

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Realistik | Bandcamp

This nostalgia-soaked opus will fill your living room with shag carpet, sploshed drinks, and overflowing ashtrays made of amber-tinted glass. At some point, it will soundtrack your grocery shopping, and you'll realize it's not an album, it's a haunting, the sound of a forgotten beehived girl group circa 1963, maybe the Rubies or the Sapphires, fooling around with the occult. As much as I've listened to this album, it shape-shifts and evaporates like an expertly blown smoke ring, and the only thing I can do is play it again.

Midwife - No Depression in Heaven

The Flenser | Bandcamp

Madeline Johnston's voice sounds like it's fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.

Eat-Girls - Area Silenzio

Bureau B | Bandcamp

These ten tracks have nicely filled the DVA Damas-shaped hole in my soul. Spiky vocals cut through the coldest of waves, and it's a durable album for running through the frost.

Chantssss - Shyness

Theory Therapy | Bandcamp

The color blue in all its permutations, aquatic and airborne, and it inspired me to get with the spirit of the twentieth-first century and create my very first personal automation. Fifteen minutes before sunrise, this album plays throughout our flat. Sometimes I wake up to the sub bass. Most of the time it seeps into my dreams.

Dregs - Dregs

Purely Physical Teeny Tapes | Bandcamp

Seedy and a little tacky like remembering a night in 1994 when people earnestly said things like "trip hop" and "acid jazz" and "dub techno" and thought new hybrids of music would lead us to utopia rather than the inevitable flattening of everything into an endless sheet of liquid crystal gloss. But the production here is so plush and friendly that alright, sure, I'll sink into this corduroy couch with cigarette burns in the cushions while Strange Days plays on mute and you tell me all about the Information Superhighway.

Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 5

Noton | Boomkat

Dignified music for the right side of dawn. Stately orchestration woven with long threads of burning synthetics that conjure something beautiful entering an elegant room like Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending a Staircase in all her streaked glory.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

2023 got away from me, but I’m not surprised. Time itself has gone wobbly. We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin. Music-wise, I’ve always enjoyed cobbling together a yearly list of my favorite new albums to mark the passage of time and cement some memories. Perhaps it’s a side effect of age, but each new release these days reminds me of something I’ve heard before. Whether this is a curse or blessing, I’m not sure, but I’d like to listen to a song that immediately gives me a splitting headache or, better yet, leaves me covering my ears while screaming that’s not music.

I tortured my parents with Plastikman and Boogie Down Productions. They assaulted their folks with Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, and my grandparents probably did the same with The Glen Miller Orchestra and The Andrews Sisters. Youth should frighten middle age. This is the sign of a healthy culture.

My sense of losing touch is compounded by today’s condition of all-at-once, in which images and sounds hit our devices stripped of context and location and time, leading to a strange dual sensation of liberation and stasis. So this year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music I played most often or rediscovered or that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.

Scatterwound – 0.0 / MN / CB

Midira Records, 2017/2019/2021 | 00 | MN | CB

Ambient drone of the highest order. Each track ranges between fifteen and forty minutes, giving it plenty of room to slowly unfurl from the faint whir of an appliance into a monumental pulse that feels absolutely life-giving.

Date Palms – The Dusted Sessions

Thrill Jockey, 2013 | Bandcamp

Sun-soaked desert drone like the hum of a distant powerline.

Kevin Richard Martin – Above the Clouds

Intercranial Recordings, 2023 | Bandcamp

Music for a rain-soaked thriller in a fallen city: steam rises through the grates while trunk-rattling drums echo across windows with the shades drawn.

Reinhard Voigt - Robson Ponte

Kompakt, 1999 | Bandcamp

While dusting off my Speicher and Kresiel records, I rediscovered this unhinged ode to a footballer. Twenty-five years later, it’s still the best thing for running as fast as I can manage, and it still gets stuck in my head for weeks: Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Te. Te. Te.

Orville Peck - “Kansas (Remembers Me Now)”

Pony (Sub Pop, 2019) | Bandcamp

Woozy Americana that sounds like a half-remembered, rose-tinted fantasy, even if the song is about the murder of the Clutter family. “Come, Las Vegas sunset…”

Sandra Plays Electronics – Want Need / Sessions

Minimal Wave | Bandcamp

Late 1980s and early 1990s sessions from the muscle behind the indispensable Sandwell District and Downwards imprints. A concoction of new wave and no wave, punk and post-punk, industrial and pre-industrial, and every other genre that produces visions edging toward the sacred.

DVA Damas – Nightshade / Wet Vision / Clear Cuts

Downwards, 2014/2015/2016 | Boomkat

Voice, twang, and drums stripped down to raw spikes. Minimalism as a provocation, perhaps an act of seduction. Or aggression.

Plastikman – Consumed

Downwards, 2014/2015/2016 | Boomkat

A masterpiece and a monument, a cold hard tower of sound yet malleable like a Rorschach test depending on my mood. Twenty-five years later, this still sounds like the future.

Earth - “Coda Maestoso In F(Flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)”

Legacy of Dissolution (Southern Lord, 2005) | Boomkat

High-grade low-end head-nodding sludge. An essential tool for challenging times.

Philus - “Acidophilus”

Kolmio (Sähkö, 1998) | More

Mika Vainio's dirtiest teeth-grinding moment, and he delivered so many full-bodied moments.

Heart - "Crazy on You"

Dreamboat Annie (Mushroom, 1975) | More

A magnificent piece of songcraft, this is the plush sound of AM gold alchemized with some guitar shred. I played this song nearly every day in 2023, each time stunned by the sound of a band doing everything they know how to do all at once. It's like mainlining the 1970s in five minutes flat.

Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook – Sleeps With the Fishes

4AD, 1987 | More

Midnight music by turns haunted and reassuring, here is the 1980s ancestor that not only birthed Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s turn of the century gloom but the emotional bombast of early M83. And “Searching” is a stone brooding classic.

Robert Görl - Mit Dir

Mute, 1983 | More

Everything you need from a pop song: streetlights washing across the hood, a cigarette nodding on the lip, a memory of being cooler than you ever were, and a hook that will worm its way into your dreams because even though you don’t speak the language, you get the drift.

See also:

• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

I’ve given up my hunt for the bleeding edge. Perhaps we’re living in an exhausted age that offers only iterative variations on deep-grooved patterns. More likely, I’m too old to catch the mind-blown thrills I felt twenty or thirty years when I first heard Boogie Down Productions, Drexciya, Autechre, and Thomas Brinkmann.

Several of my favorite albums this year came from artists who delivered my favorite albums from other years: Romance, Ralph Kinsella, Pye Corner Audio, and Kali Malone. Bohren & Der Club of Gore did not release a new album this year, but Kevin Richard Martin delivered a pair of records that filled my annual need for a soundtrack for rainy streets. I want to think my aesthetic has become more refined over the years—that by now, I know what I like. But another word for this might be stagnation.

Thankfully, the artists listed here had other plans. They’ve pulled off the neat trick of delivering the sounds I love while pushing them into unexpected nooks and alleys and, occasionally, wheeling around and smashing my assumptions to bits. My favorite records this year sounded messier than in years past: scuffed and bruised yet defiant—which sounds like the future.

Nils Frahm – Music for Animals

Leiter | Bandcamp

Nils Frahm nixes the piano and now I like Nils Frahm. This was my most-played album of 2022: three hours of shadowy pulse and thrum that sounds like it’s keeping something darker at bay. A perfect soundtrack for reading and writing.

Romance & Dean Hurley – In Every Dream Home A Heartache

Ecstatic | Bandcamp

A symphony for today’s malaise that looks backward, cribbing its title from my favorite Roxy Music song, the one where Brian Ferry reaches peak modernism and enjoys open-plan living while he romances an inflatable doll. Wrong-headed infatuations and Ballardian ennui also fill this record as soap operas swirl in a half-remembered fog of ringing telephones.

Kevin Richard Martin – Nightcrawler / Downtown

Intercranial | Bandcamp

A slightly less despondent cousin visits the house of Bohren & Der Club of Gore, where time no longer works and the only illumination is rain-streaked neon. Trapped in the hour of the wolf, Martin soaks his jazz in static and grain until it potent barrel-aged doom.

Ralph Kinsella – In The Lives That Surround You

8D Industries | Bandcamp

The guitar gets destroyed but its ghost remains. Kinsella recorded one of my favorite albums a couple of years ago, and now he’s returned to conjure visions that blister and flare like the afterimage of something that cannot be named. When I close my eyes and listen to tracks like ‘Holding On To Memory Devices’ and ‘An Ocean In The Pines,’ I see the beauty and drama of a burning cathedral.

Erasers – Distance

Moon Glyph | Bandcamp

Drowsy Casio calypso beats and dead-eyed vocals edge toward a liturgical reenactment of Murakami’s superflat theory: pure stasis, the carcass of a cold-wave song circa 1982 buried beneath a thousand layers of acrylic.

Kali Malone – Living Torch

Portraits GRM | Bandcamp

A pair of endless liturgical drones with bursts of science fiction at the edges. Thanks to composers like Malone, Tim Hecker, and Yosuke Fujita, the pipe organ feels essential in the 21st century. (If you worship in the church of Chain Reaction, Maxime Denuc’s Nachthorn smudges the line between novelty exercise and classic timepiece, esp. “Dusseldorf”.) With Living Torch, Malone trades the organ for trombone, bass clarinet, and sine wave generators, but her harmonics remain pure stained glass.

Civilistjävel! – Järnnätter

Felt | Bandcamp

Electronic music as topography: plenty of breathing room with miles of alpine air over pristine clicks and deep valleys of bass. This project remained clandestine for a while, harkening back to the golden age of faceless machine music distinguished by clinical names like Model 500 and Basic Channel. Now we know Civilistjävel! is the alias of a quiet Swede, but there’s still plenty of mystery in the music.

San Mateo – Exspiravit Luminaria

8D Industries | Bandcamp

100% uncut Blade Runner aesthetic: plaintive chords and endless twilight, the image of some new lifeform crossbreeding Stars of the Lid with Vangelis at the edge of the sprawl.

M. Geddes Gengras – Expressed, I Noticed Silence

Hausu Mountain | Bandcamp

If you prefer a more incense-soaked Vangelian future, M. Geddes Gengras pairs psychedelic twang with his cyborg bells. This was the first album I played when I set up my office in Vegas, where I finally have a desk large enough to enjoy a stereo field, and it’s a deep artificial dream forever looping the moment psychedelic music reached for the sitar, affirming that tomorrow’s music can also steep itself in magic.

Pye Corner Audio – Let’s Emerge

Sonic Cathedral | Bandcamp

Midnight gets dragged into the sunlight, where it’s peeled and stretched into steam-gathering drones and dreamgaze guitars. A welcome update on the blissed-out and spiritualized sound, this album plays like a movie I would very much like to see.

The Black Dog – Brutal One to Five Mix v2

Dust Science | Bandcamp

The Black Dog has held the fort since ’89, and with this one-hour mix, they melt down their recent fixation on architecture into glorious ambient exhaust.

Honour – Beg 4 Mercy

PAN | Bandcamp

Originating from points unknown, this gunky tape lurches from battered breakbeats to hypersaturated spaghetti westerns to bottomless hum. Each time I play this, I remember the teenage nights when I would drive around Detroit to watch the steam rising from the winter streets.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

The end of another year, and exhaustion hangs heavy like a fog. We move through virus variants and frightening weather. We reckon with attention hijacking and institutional decay. This doesn’t feel like the future we were promised thirty years ago when Warp released the first installment of its Artificial Intelligence series, back when electronic music eagerly awaited the arrival of a new millennium. Drawing upon the futurism of Kraftwerk, Cybotron, and Derrick May, the promise of better living through technology seeped through the discography of the 1990s: Surfing on Sine Waves. Bytes. Electro-Soma. Dimension Intrusion. And now, looking at my favorite records this year, it strikes me that many of these artists are dismantling and rewiring these templates to better suit our times. Instead of celebrating technology, they’re leaning upon the language of faith.

Black Swan – Repetition Hymns

Past Inside the Present | Bandcamp

Lamentations for a decaying future. Layers of grit and grain gradually congeal before blooming into tones that approach something that sounds like grace.

Topdown Dialectic – Vol. 3

Peak Oil | Bandcamp

Electronic contrails and drum machine residue. These blurred transmissions from an unknown station conjure the lowlight hiss and mystery of a half-remembered Chain Reaction record from twenty-five years ago. This third installment is the most spectral of the series on Peak Oil. Be sure to check out their more structured releases for the Aught label.

Christina Chatfield – Sutro

Mysteries of the Deep | Bandcamp

Sleek midnight ambiance fused with a Drexciyan edge. Tracks like “Concatenate II” begin with fragile drift before gathering the ballast of low frequencies and arpeggiated synths that reconfigure and refine the sensibilities of optimistic mid-1990s electronics into a darker and savvier score for the 21st century.

Akira Rabelais – À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Argeïphontes | Bandcamp

A four-hour epic that melds reverb, opera, and detached strings into the sound of a distant century bleeding through the walls. The album begins with a minute of silence save for the faint sound of a ticking clock before the music of La Belle Époque unfurls through a scrim of crackle, echo, and time.

Not Waving & Romance – Eyes of Fate / Restoration of Bliss

Boomkat Editions | Bandcamp

Melodramatic loops and choral sludge of the highest order. Sometimes these tracks drift and fade midway, only to return in more menacing form. See also Romance’s A Kiss Is Just a Kiss and You Must Remember This for more smudged slow-motion elegance.

Microcorps – Xmit

Alter | Bandcamp

Alien hymns varnished with a jet black gloss. These eight tracks resurrect the cyberpunk spirit of mid-1980s Transmat and Cybotron for a new century, collapsing time and space until I’m in the passenger seat of Model 500’s night drive through Babylon back in ’83: The lights of passing vehicles reflected in her mirrored sunglasses. She looks at her watch, and I can see the liquid crystal display reflected dancing where her eyes should be.

Stephen Baker – After the End

Bandcamp

Perhaps I’m biased, but Baker’s original score for After the End has become one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. After spending three months listening to this sci-fi lamentation reverberate across the stone walls of a chapel, it continues to reveal new textures and connections between the liturgical and the Blade Running.

Suss – Night Suite

Northern Spy Records | Bandcamp

Sometimes synchronicity strikes hard. This record was released on October 22, a day I’ll remember because it was C’s birthday and we were driving through the Mojave after passing through Kingman and Needles. And this record captures the gestalt of the desert as I’d like to imagine it: wide open and dazzling but edged with mystery and an eerie twang.

Muqata’a – Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص

Hundebiss | Bandcamp

Broadcasting from Palestine, Muqata’a fuses classic Arabic songs with nearly every facet of electronic music, dicing up the sensibilities of DJ Shadow, techno, and even the occasional jungle break. But here, these styles are artifacts, grist for the mill of a much larger project that sounds like the stress and shred of thinking these days. This is my soundtrack for running and imagining what the future might sound like.

Wasted Cathedral – I’m Gonna Love You ‘Til the End of Time

Cardinal Fuzz | Bandcamp

A durable collection of hazy and occasionally frost-bitten loops from Saskatchewan that range from chugging drones to tranquilized dub to blissed-out reverb.

Minced Oath – Superstrate

Countersunk | Bandcamp

Elite-level shimmer and hum. This record operates in a state of suspension, echoing the sensation of an endless afternoon with dust hanging in shafts of sunlight. But these sounds never settle; they morph and unfurl new patterns. This is music for speculation, a future balm.

Pye Corner Audio – Entangled Routes

Ghost Box | Boomkat

A masterful synthesizer workout that swings between the baroque and the zen, this is propulsive late-night highway music for speed racing and imagining better horizons.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

Each year I debate whether I should make an inventory of my favorite albums because it’s such an arbitrary exercise. Then I revisit my lists from the past, and I appreciate how this process generates a unique portrait, a sense memory of a lost season. But Christ, who wants to remember this year, let alone provide the soundtrack? And yet music felt more necessary than ever, carrying me through long nights of uncertainty and heavy bouts of cabin fever, and I’m grateful for these new sounds that provided some much-needed perspective and restored my faith in the human enterprise.

Alessandro Cortini – Ritmo / Memorie

Bandcamp

Introspective late-night synthetics so polished they seem to gleam in the dark. These songs start off murky, all bass and shadow, but they slowly gather steam, conjuring the optimistic tones of early 1990s electronics, back when there was still a little faith left in better living through technology. Driving down the highway late at night with these tracks on my dashboard, sometimes the synthesizers squiggle or veer a certain way, and I can’t help but let out a little cheer.

Autechre – Sign

Warp | Bandcamp

In this era of algorithmic playlists designed to satisfy our immediate moods, Signs is an increasingly rare phenomenon: music that teaches us to meet it on its terms. I’m not sure if I like this album, yet I find myself returning to it, almost compulsively. After a decade of increasingly brittle and cloistered records, Autechre has rebooted their software and returned to more poignant terrain. And like many things this year, the emotions here are alien and new. The result is stately and occasionally melancholy, with the residue of melodies flickering within patterns that never stabilize, and it sounds very much like a ghost in a machine.

Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Patchouli Blue

Play It Again Sam | Boomkat

A soundtrack for these long isolated nights. This is distilled rainy noir with faint neon on the horizon, a companion for a lone car drifting down the street. Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s slow-motion gloom is the music I play most often, usually around midnight. Their Midnight Radio album from 1995 is a masterpiece, and this new installment proved to be a logical score for these elastic nights.

Cindy Lee – What’s Tonight to Eternity

W.25TH / Superior Viaduct | Bandcamp

A demented version of the Ronettes in the best possible way, like an otherworldly transmission of those mid-century bands named after jewels, their voices reverberated and haunted.

Jonnine – Blue Hills

Boomkat Editions | Boomkat

These songs capture a sensation that lives a few clicks beyond words, something listless and unsettled. Maybe it’s the sense of suspension that defines this season of distancing and isolating, or a childhood memory of killing time in a room while a voice bleeds through the walls. Drowsy guitars and drums blend with the rustling weather of someone pacing and waiting, perhaps sighing for time lost.

KMRU – Peel

Editions Mego | Bandcamp

Elegant longform ambience that patiently begins at the periphery. Atmospheric hiss and cavernous tones hover at the edge of attention before they slowly, almost imperceptibly bloom into hypnotic loops. This is music that sounds like a shift in the light.

Olan Monk – Love/Dead

C.A.N.V.A.S. | Bandcamp

Midnight vapor and pop songs for dead cyborgs. Lurching across a bottomless low end, Love/Dead delivers a nervy Joy Division or Suicide aesthetic that’s been ground into matte black sludge. It’s an almost poignant flavor of future dread.

Oliver Blank – Fin

Bandcamp

Orchestral drift that finds the territory between sorrow and hope. The centerpiece of this record is a magnificently restrained twenty-three-minute meditation that gives every element space to breathe, including the listener.

Ralph Kinsella – Lessening

8D Industries | Bandcamp

This album entered my life as reliable background music while I puttered around the room. Then it quietly moved to the foreground and became one of my favorite records this year. Gathering the soft-focus residue of an old shoegaze song, these ever-evolving compositions are equally comfortable with moments of abrupt silence as with gestures that soar.

Tomas Jirku – Touching the Sublime

Silent Season | Bandcamp

A deeply strange and panoramic record that merges the frigid elements of dub techno with moments of unexpected warmth: the half-heat of voices at the margins, a hushed guitar, a sudden flash of brass. These songs roll in like a fog, and the word “sublime” is well-earned in the way this album transfixes you, holding you in its gaze. A perfect soundtrack for reading about failed arctic expeditions and contemplating the allure of such forbidding terrain.

William Basinski – Lamentations

Temporary Residence | Bandcamp

Dignified heartache that bleeds through the grain of decaying tape loops. “Our world is in a bad feedback loop right now,” Basinski said a few years ago. “We’re at a point right now where we need to get rid of some bad feedback loops and it’s happening. It’s not gonna be pretty, but eventually things will resolve.” Listening to this album, it’s almost possible to imagine a moment when the loop finally and truly breaks.

Vatican Shadow – Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era

20 Buck Spin | Bandcamp

Vatican Shadow appears on my list of favorite albums every year. So be it. These are dark and conspiratorial times fueled by suspicious energies, and this project has nailed the gestalt.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

This very strange decade has finally ended, and it’s harder to keep track of things these days. Pictures, songs, and paragraphs wash across my screen one minute and disappear the next. I find myself increasingly relying upon lists. Traces of nostalgia are beginning to appear in my thinking, a desire for finite collections and limited entertainments. This is a natural side-effect of getting older, but perhaps it’s not all in my head. Maybe we are living through uniquely disorienting times. This year I heard a more spiritual bent in my favorite records, something nervy and apocalyptic that craves refuge. But whether this reflects the general mood or my own needs, I cannot say.

Earth – Full Upon Her Burning Lips

Sargent House | Bandcamp

Vintage slow-motion grind that lopes through America’s midnight parking lots, pool halls, and dead-end bars while finding occasional moments of beautiful light.

Chihei Hatakeyama – Forgotten Hill

Room 40 | Bandcamp

Perfect ambience that shimmers without being saccharine.

Dissemblance – Over the Sand

Mannequin | Bandcamp

Jet black synthetics and blurred vocals like the echo of a 1980s new wave hit from that was once upbeat and fun but after three decades of psychosocial distortion, now only the skeleton remains.

Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code

Ideal Recordings | Bandcamp

The album I’ve returned to the most this winter. At first it sounds like a childhood memory of an old woman tuning the church organ before the service begins. Then it slowly reveals itself as an austere and dignified sanctuary for noisy and decadent times.

MMMD – Egoismo

Antifrost | Bandcamp

Hymnal chanting, cello, and drone from Greece that feels like an existential shiver in church.

Monokultur – LP

2019 | Bandcamp

A sprawling record that stitches together detuned weirdness, pastoral ambience, and icy Swedish vocals that conjure images of dead rock-and-rollers with cigarettes bouncing on their lips while guitars screech and purr at the margins.

Rafael Anton Irisarri – Solastalgia

Room 40 | Bandcamp

Symphonic ambience that sounds like an elegy for snow fields and decaying glaciers—and it introduced me to the defining word for the next decade: solastalgia, the mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

Topdown Dialectic – Vol. 2

Peak Oil | Bandcamp

A welcome return to the anonymous mythos of techno when mysterious transmissions appeared on white labels without context, origin, or reference point. These eight unnamed tracks from an unknown source rework the best elements of the genre for stranger days.

Vatican Shadow – American Flesh for Violence

Hospital Productions | Bandcamp

An exercise in grainy drums and haunted tones with bombastic titles that increasingly sound less like paranoid conspiracy and more like reality. Throughout the year, Dominick Fernow has been steadily reissuing cassettes from his Vatican Shadow project, and with titles like Media in the Service of Terror, Oklahoma Military Academy, and Rubbish of the Floodwaters, this feels like the logical soundtrack for the final seasons of America.

Sunn O))) – Life Metal / Pyroclasts

Southern Lord | Bandcamp

A spartan workhorse built from slow-motion guitars that feel like they’re holding the world together even when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

Alessandro Cortini – Volume Massimo

Mute | Boomkat | Spotify

Sleek synthesizers that swerve, glide, and snarl before opening up into something utterly cinematic that left me thinking about making a cognitive leap into the future.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

Everything continues to dissolve into static. Ideas are crammed into weird little boxes begging for attention. Scenes from our lives are cropped, filtered, stripped of context, and pinned to a scoreboard. Perhaps the album has suffered the most, stripped for parts and strewn across algorithmic playlists as our listening habits revert to the era of the digestible single. The endless churn of the digital jukebox brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase from 1944: “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”

Does the album still matter in 2018? Getting my head around an entire record takes more effort than I remember. Perhaps this is a result of age; more likely because my attention span has been blown to bits. But putting a record on loop is still the best way I can nail my memories of each season to some kind of texture and timeline. Here are a few of the albums that challenged and reassured me and, above all, harmonized with the strange vibrations of another disorienting year:

Abul Mogard – Above All Dreams

Elegant drift and drone for a rainy afternoon. And maybe the story is true, that Mogard is a Serbian metal worker who began building synthesizers during his retirement, hoping to recreate the acoustics of the factory floor. Either way, this is the soundtrack of myth.

Ben Chatwin – Staccato Signals

Haunted chrome and machine grit like a Ballard novel. A string quartet conjures a slow-motion chase across a snow-covered plain, followed by sensations of free fall as synthesizers stretch across the sky, covering the light. A line from Jeff VanerMeer’s Annihilation: “…when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”

Certain Creatures – Nasadiya Sukta

Spacey electronics that hum with nostalgia for the pre-millenial days of analogue bubblebaths, those halcyon years when artificial intelligence was still a fantasy and a networked future seemed like it would be so much more elegant than it turned out to be.

CUTS – A Gradual Decline

Cascading drums and plaintive synthesizers wrapped around field recordings of collapsing glaciers. I remember the sound of white thunder, that bone-shuddering crack as another piece of ice fell into the sea. Most of all, I remember the sound of our voices cheering and our cameras clicking as if we were applauding our terrible way of life. This is the sound of the world collapsing, and it is sublime in the strict sense: beauty twinned with fear.

Divide and Dissolve – Abomination

Plunging miles beneath standard-issue doom and drone, this is vantablack snarl and groan with unexpected shifts that flash like bared knives.

Ectomorph – Stalker

Neuromancing future sleaze. Rarely have synthesizers sounded so tactile, conjuring black leather and blinding chrome. Bass lines crawl out of your speakers towards some shadowy corner of the room, leaving traces of godknowswhat across the floor.

The Eye of Time – Myth II: A Need to Survive

Ambitious and roomy, these songs aim towards a futuristic opera with layer upon layer of blurred vocals, crashing drums, and shivering columns of bass. The title of the first song perfectly captures the mood of these strange days: “There Is So Much Pain in This World That We Have Created Robots to Share It”

The Field – Infinite Moment

Another episode of The Field’s reassuring heartbeat chug, although it’s nervier this time around, veering into skittering drums, acidic synthwork, and grey morning weather with voices wailing at the edges like the echo of some half-remembered party.

GAS – Rausch

Another gothic monument from Wolfgang Voigt’s series. Dense pines beat against a stained glass window in the middle of the night. This is the closest techno has come to church.

Jerusalem in My Heart – Daqa’iq Tudaiq

Static spills into the margins of a reverberated ode to an Egyptian classic originally titled “Oh Neighbor of the Valley,” now renamed “The Language Of Speech Has Broken Down.” A fitting coda for 2018. Here is the sound of history collapsing, which is thrilling and a little scary. Don DeLillo’s Zero K comes to mind: “How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?”

Midwife – Prayer Hands

Vapor trails of dream pop and beautiful fuzz. “Angel” was my favorite song of the year, taking the best elements of classic Slowdive and Sugar Plant and streamlining them into something dark and new.

Witxes – Orients

An overwhelming blast of light. An uneasy blend of the melancholy and triumphant, this is perfect music for looking out of the window at 35,000 feet, breath fogging the window pane.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation