I really enjoy compiling and sharing these year-end lists, but it also reminds me that I’m really ignorant about music and don’t have a great vocabulary to discuss music when we get right down to it. If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” I’m dancing with two left feet. Or something.
I’ll emphasize music that was released this year, but moreso than with the pop music, this post is about music I first listened to this year, even if it’s older.
There was some great rock/pop/folk/country on my first list, but I think this music below is deeper and more compelling—I think I’ll be returning to many of these albums over and over again for years. There’s just so damn much music out there easily available to us on mainstream and niche platforms, we are rich beyond our wildest dreams. The difficulty is finding the stuff that really resonates with us and then finding the time to listen to it all.
Jazzy
I don’t know that any of these albums are Jazz but they share some roots with more traditional jazz music.
I think it was Derrick who tipped me off to Pino Palladino’s Notes With Attachments, and it’s one of my favorite albums of the year. All the artists who perform on this record have very distinctive voices, and it really got me interested in saxophonist Sam Gendel. For some reason it’s not on Bandcamp, so here’s a Spotify link:
I first learned of Nala Sinephro’s Space 1.8 from a Pitchfork review, and I guess Pitchfork and Bandcamp Daily are my main sources for learning about new music. Some of this album sounds like straightforward jazz to me, but long stretches are more ambient and subtle. I guess that’s what you get when the band leader is playing the harp? Really a great record.
High on a lot of best-of lists this year is Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra. The arrangement puts Pharoah Sanders’ warm and human saxophone in a cool, shimmering somewhat otherworldly setting (there are strong hints of Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet in Floating Points’ electronics, to my ear). This record is an instant classic, one I expect to listen to for the rest of my life.
Moses Boyd is a drummer from London and while there’s a lot of jazz on his album Dark Matter, his beats often push the pieces toward funk and dance grooves and his supporting musicians are happy to follow with exuberant performances and solos. This is one that whenever I put it on I think, “I need to listen to this more often!”
Steve Lawson got in touch with me many years ago with a message saying “It seems we are joined at the Googles!” Steve Lawson (UK), as I think of him, is a bass player who usually plays bass as a solo or lead instrument. His music is various and experimental, and the more I listen to instrumental music, the more I return to his work. His website bills his music as “the soundtrack to the day you wish you’d had,” and that seems right except he’s been working in a more dystopian vein in the last few years so…
Of this piece, No Through Route, Steve says “It's the first 'jazz' sounding thing I've done in a long time, though as is so often the way, it's not really jazz in any sense that anyone else might think to use it.” So I’ll put it in my “sorta jazz” category.
Ambient
I listened to a lot of ambient music by Japanese composers this year, and these two compilations were my main starting point. Yoshi Ojima, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Satoshi Ashikawa are probably my favorites but there are a lot of excellent artists on both these records, and both of the labels, Light in the Attic Records in Seattle and Music For Dreams in Copenhagen, put out great stuff. Those two labels plus Geneva’s WRWTFWW Records are some big discoveries for me this year.
From Nairobi, Kenya, KMRU’s Peel feels massive and insistent, ambient music that tugs at your brain to come to the forefront. I need to spend more time with this one.
Olive Ardizoni, recording as Green-House, makes very calm, charming, sunny, plant-themed ambient music.
I have bought a handful of EPs and singles from noda yûki on Bandcamp and they are all catchy feel-good tracks. He also writes the best liner notes and sends cute emails to people who following him on Bandcamp. Here’s what he has to say about his record, soda sickness.
In 2020, my life style changed and increased staying at home.
That is why the reduction of stress brought about mental health and led to an increase in feelings.
However, staying at home for a long period of time encouraged an increase in eating sweets and carbonated juices, and staying up late with TV and internet, which not only made my body bloated, but also made my silly fantasies and illusions bloated.
Metal, Funeral Doom, and Dungeon Synth
There was a week or two there in 2021 when I just wanted to listen to black metal. But the problem with black metal, and most metal, is the vocals. I wanted something dark and sludgy and ominous and punishing without some dude growling or screaming over the top of it. And with metal subgenres, you also have to worry about what they are screaming or growling about: I’m fine with “hail Satan,” not at all OK with “heil Hitler.”
Trhä kind of solves this for me by mixing the vocals so low in their bizarre sludgy mix—and singing in an unknown-to-me language; the band’s official country of origin is “unknown”—that it all fades into one glorious noise. The best summation of this album, endlhëtonëg, comes from a user on sputnikmusic.com: “if you want some distant and cold black metal that sounds like you’re hearing it from outside the gates of hell, this is for you.” Not something to listen to every week, but when I need it, it’s good to have it.
I found Disemballerina via a tweet from Kim Kelly, aka Grim Kim, a labor journalist and metal fan.
The band calls their style “queer outsider chamber music” and it has the omnious gloom of black metal without the noise. The EP Fawn is beautiful and I went ahead and just bought their full discography on Bandcamp for a reasonable price.
”Dungeon Synth” is a microgenre that I came across on Bandcamp while looking for brooding atmospheric instrumental music. From what I can tell it’s a type of music mostly made by dudes alone in their rooms with keyboards and software, designed as soundtracks to imagined films, novels, and D&D campaigns. It’s pretty excellent music for playing at the D&D gaming table, but it may not reward closer listening. Anyway, I like it and here are some examples.
Future?
As I said in the intro, there’s just an overwhelming amount of great music out there, so it’s hard to predict what I’ll be listening to in 2022. I’m ending the year with chamber music, including these two by Spektral Quartet. I’m excited to see what else I find this year.