Best Music of 2023
As Nietzsche said - "without music, life would be a
mistake". This, my annual project
(five decades of overweening lists) is to honor and select my favorites of the
year’s music. I used to claim I could order
music I find and like based, in part, on its furthering ”the cultural
revolution.” Disruptive music, making everything new. In old age I now scoff at such onanistic
dreams. Now I know the only true
revolution is of the cell… all the rest is a prison revolt. Now all revolutions are monetized and
dissipated by the digital claws of Big capital and the numbing of algorithmic
dominance. I used to have “rules” for
this constructed list: e.g. “hall of fame artists” excluded and the artists of missed
opportunities and excluded voices were elevated. Of course my own shy-but-bloated ego wanted
to show off my catholicity and deft discovery of obscure work. All of that
falls away from me now. Now it’s sunset
in the common room of assisted living, the day is over, and the revolution
never happened. Now we cling tightly to
sonic comfort as the Republic unravels in our hands, in our ears. So, even this darkness declares the glory of
light and I can claim here at the end that life was not even remotely a
mistake. This is the music that happened
in my cells in 2023.
1.
Atlas – Laurel Halo
Reticent to simply repeat other lists’ #1
(a foundational purpose of these 50 years of lists has been to showcase my
terminal uniqueness), Halo’s music delivers deep emotions, intellectual problem
solving, and cinematic imagery too beautiful to be denied. Ever the devotee of drones (incremental
stabilities) and minimalist impermanence (press refresh), originally I thought
Halo’s schtick was electronic whirrs and humming ambient music. The kind so useful in Reykjavik and movie
scoring. Then after a few listens I
heard the kind of fragments and disintegrating deconstructions I favor. Then even later I felt the thread of true
compositional voicing: many textures, shifting depths, tonal surprises are all
carefully, softly, laid out in contrast and in complementarity to each
other. Non-dualistic pop. This is music to hold up not only the world,
but dark energy, dark matter and the promise of infinite galaxies. In the 70s I
used to listen to a DJ late at night on public radio, “space music” was the
name given to the synthesized sounds that invoked deep space and spinning
stars. That sound attack went out of style – too cheesy, too pandering. But now, after decades of electronic ambient
music, Halo presents music to carry us, again, into deep space. In 2023 it seemed that may be the only place
left to live in.
2.
My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross –
Anohni and the Johnsons
“It must change” was the song of the year
for me… pop, soulful, sad, newsworthy, psychological and transformative. All with a beat and vibe that sounds like
cruising Whittier Blvd in 1971. In a
GTO. That R&Bish guitar teases you thoroughly
in each cut; you will be smitten. I’d
given up long ago on Anthony and the trans-performative falsetto. I was wrong. The black face on the cover is
the DNA of their music and their heartache. Because the voice drips with black
and blue truth, desperation, resignation, and struggle. And the songs and production, clear,
uncluttered, confidentyl support the rich complexity of that one-of-kind voice
that leaves a shining and sensual sadness.
Slow dance oblivions. Non-binary? The whole human story will simply not
fit into any character argument from any side of the breach. Yes, Anthony/Anohni will be the bridge for
anyone willing to go from here to a better future. Their pain is the price of such perfect
movement. Pain has always been the torch
to carry for singers like this (alt-rock, alt-soul Billie Holiday with a creepy
fashion sense). I was moved. I moved. “You’ll be free”…
3.
Picture of Bunny Rabbit – Arthur Russell
Recovered music from the dead underappreciated
gay AIDS victim, classical cellist and East Village loft denizen; made in a NYC
that lived in myth and is forever lost in the rents and sustainable coffee
beans of Williamsburg, Saudi high-needle condos and trusts of UES… fragments
and bittersweet vocals, mumbled and nodding out. Ambient analog outlines that might be outtake
mistakes by Glenn Branca or Sonic Youth. What’s not to like? Although recorded over 30 years ago, these
just-released fragments from our forgotten history – are sweet, gentle and still
completely groundbreaking, decades after Russell’s death. I am sucker for cellos, especially when
droning in analog atmospheric spaces.
His voice seemed so familiar to me, then I read that Norway’s Jose
Gonzales (Junip) was a devotee, and, yep, it’s that voice that is irresistible. Quiet, intense but not selfish, interior but
yearning to touch you, to be touched. Minimalist,
stark, and richly emotional. Resting in
peace.
4.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy – Kali Malone
Well, only some warped sense of self-preservation
prevents this from being #1. Three hours
of drones. Not a sequence of different
drone pieces, but variations on the same modulated drone composition. So think
of the joy (hidden or not): one droning tone with sympathetic frequencies
entering and leaving the soundspace (the editing and production is critical and
compositional, by the Rick Rubin of ambient electronic music, Stephan Mathieu). A fan of Malone, only this year did I realize
she is the wife of Sunn O)) guitarist Stephen O’Malley (who plays all three
hours here, a cellist the only other musician), which makes sense. Although Sunn O)) seems only to work well at
maximum volumes. Still, like that band’s
metal barrage of singular ideas, Malone’s organ playing in her past work seemed
to simplify the cosmos. And the sounds
of galaxies spinning into black holes do not make our universe an easy place to
exist in. But joy is in the ear of the
beholder - I think one review claimed a romantic melancholy in these hours, and
I can hear that. But I am addicted to
finding the One Last Drone that will finally explain everything, and these
hours of tectonically shifting tones are sweet and bitter: for me three hours
is not enough and it’s best to let it run on repeat: Trio for the End of Time.
5.
Javelin – Sufjan Stevens
He’s surprised some by “coming out” as he limns
a song cycle grieving his recently dead husband. I guess folks weren’t paying attention. I’ve
followed him from the upper peninsula through the clowns and cancer of Chicago
suburbs to Christian hippie incest in Oregon through cramped electronic
Brooklyn apartments and hiking in northern Italy. Through it all the bittersweet lightness of
his voice illuminated the deepest flaws and failures of his one human life, and
so all of our lives. Illuminated with
kindness and prayerful petitions for Grace. This is just more of thatness, and
the many layers of production may hide that these lyrics are the rawest, most
direct, and personal of all. It is
layered with synths, and choirs, and percussion – analog, tribal, and
electronic. His arpeggio-tricks of melody are so familiar – I swear every song
is just a repeat of what he recorded last year, last decade. Indeed every song on this seems like it has a
single melody. And probably could pass
for Gospel-lite in the praise choir of some grand chapel in Calabasas. So the mystery is how this breaks the heart so
utterly – grief has given him a cold eye and a tissue-thin narrative to hide
in. Like the confessional poets of the
50s and 60s, this may not age well, but for now these elegiac tunes meet the
moment, and hold us close in the glory of life ending and love remembered. Best not to waste time.
6.
This Stupid World - Yo La Tengo
It begins as though continuing a
conversation stopped in its midst years ago.
Isn’t that an expected trope describing oldest friends, heartwood
companions? Not many bands can do this, using
a musical language that once was innovative, zeitgeist-generated, and is still ghostly
on its own timeless terms and textures. Here
they produce new music with that familiar language that sounds disruptive
and comforting both, their brand. Indie strumming, ambient droning, sub-rosa sound
insurgencies for the tabula rasa music lover.
Subtle, pretty, no nonsense alternative rock, krautrock, soundtracks,
soundscapes, and the ever-generative tension between Georgia’s strictly sweet
beats and Ira’s narcissistic and virtuoso flights of fancy. So, as always, they are bittersweet. And as focused and coherent and novel as they
were forty years ago. Casual? Yep. Throwaway? Yep. Uncanny? That’s their middle
name… It’s their best work in many years.
7.
Sibyl of the Rhine – Lily Joel Plays the
Organ
There is no Lily Joel. There is, however, Hildegard of Bingen, the
medieval mystic who once was famous for being a woman composer who
lasted through the centuries, but now is famous for being a great
songwriter in any millennium – whose ethereal chants and invocations are best
heard echoing through the rafters of Gothic cathedrals. (Do cathedrals have
rafters?) So this Belgian musician reimagines H of B not in a cathedral (though
it sounds like that’s exactly where this was recorded), but in a psychedelic
quiet room in someone’s cerebral cortex, which organ is fluid beyond all
thought. (My cerebral cortex built
rafters for exactly this kind of hybrid devotional music). Ambient, droning, spacious, quiet, intense … ‘O
Quam Miribilis’ and ‘O Virtus
Sapientiae’ with really good single-source coffee. Glorious music that proffers peace running
from the cortex, down the vagus nerve, to the subtle body’s heart. God bless her in both centuries.
8.
Jarak Qaribak – Dudu Tassa & Johnny
Greenwood
An astonishing hybrid of artist/music that
sounds as pure as it could possibly be – middle eastern “greatest hits”
recorded in the manner of Radiohead – and yes I can hear Greenwood, his guitar
and his movie-mind being both smart and dramatic – but this is music of the
street, the souk, the history of lands taken, families destroyed, and loves won
and lost. Tassa’s voice is irresistible
and holds its authenticity in ethnomusicology recorded for western wannabes –
like me. On first listen it is one kind of pleasure, but upon repeated
listening there is an appreciation both for the variety of songs, but also for
how modern sensibilities have ripped some of these songs apart and sound not at
all precious, nostalgic and “ethnic”, but rather powerfully contemporary. Tassa is an ethnic jew singing in
Arabic. Greenwood is an English
guitarist playing quartertones. It's not
one marriage, it’s many, many marriages, all made in heaven.
9.
What Will You Grow Now? – Modern
Cosmology
I am going to call this the most recent
(and one of the better) Stereolab albums.
And why not, it has Laetitia Sadier up front and personal – her unique
sophisticated chanson-flavored voice is so recognizable, and her
ennui-melisma-flatlines are as modern as climate change. Her band, the rest of the Cosmology, are very
capable bosa nova musicians, and so this is fresh and modern and packed with
Brazilian rhythms energizing the rive gauche club workouts. And the rhythms are irresistible, syncopating
the flat-fifth bluesy torchsongs with sambas and wanderlust. Half the songs make one want to check out the
current tickets to Paris more than Rio. Stereolab
always made me want to walk through a Godard movie anyway. But here the extraordinary tasteful
instrumentation makes this not retro, but forward thinking. Um, actually modern music, right? And with reduced options to make it sound
“new”, Sadier has found one way, for sure. I wonder if this stays a band, or is
just an interesting side project for her.
Whatever the case the summer of 2023 will always sound like this in all
its futures. C’est la sunny vie, indeed.
10.
The Beggar – Swans
The inevitable “written during COVID
lockdown” album is lonelier, more spacious, kinder, and more tentative than
most of the Swans’ opus. It doesn’t
require the high-volume racket of cosmic destruction, doesn’t sound like the
gates of hell opening, doesn’t even always throw dark armies of electronics at
the usual resistant neurotransmitters.
Ringing, droning, throw-away voices, alarms in the distance, and an army
of drums on the other side of the sawtooth ridge. Per usual, a lot is going
on. But this sounds less frantic, less
cluttered than the last many Swan albums. Words and confessions? You betcha! Not sure if I’ve the time or hide
thick enough to listen carefully.
Michael Gira is not a well man; but he’s working on it and he wants you
to know. The thread of rhythm and the
one-chord modal relentless push sometimes invoke Spiritualized. Is it possible that this is the Swans
prettiest album? Yes, I think it
is. I always heard a kind of medieval
intensity in the music (the dark dungeons and demons trope, if not Dead Can
Dance), and it’s here too, falling into the Plague and then nothingness. But its doom really is easy to listen to if
not easy-listening now. It’s not at all bleak unless I’m making a mistake. Los
Angeles, City of Death is perhaps one of the lovelier songs about my
hometown…something about “…the root of
the syphilis fruit..” While I hope he
finds some peace, this, to my ears is nice music to wash dishes by. Oh wait, I don’t wash dishes anymore. Ok, this is nice music to make mistakes by.
11.
Everything is Alive – Slowdrive
I am annoyed by much of the breathless,
wispy vocals so prevalent in much of the music I like, yet here is the
progenitor of wispy: the Original from the days of quiet-is-the-new-loud,
slo-core Cowboy Yo La Galaxie Red House Low – and I’d suggest it was that
memory they evince more than the ubiquitous shoegaze which in
recent years is a marketing descriptor like macha, or CBD, or sustainable, or
plant-based…. Worn-out meaning. So the
chiming, airy guitars are a wash of 90s open skies and prettiness more than the
thick grungy veld of My Bloody Valentine (e.g. does cowgaze mean anything?) and
that oxygen is what they offered 2023.
Pretty, guitar-based, simplicity, without IDM, or noise, or hip hop, or Gen
Z humorlessness, or Millenial Hipster residue.. I mean, Gen X never got its
moment after Cobain died anyway, so why not a reprise of harrowing Beauty?? They do kind of sound like XX though, the stark,
potent, non-derivative version. Because
Slowdrive herein presented is not remotely derivative – they are Moses with the
Original Tablets. I don’t have a clue
what any of the lyrics are… they, too, get lost in space. But the guitars and rhythms and gloomy synths
seem very far from worn out. In fact,
they made time New for me this year. And
alive.
12.
I/O – Peter Gabiel
Dated or timeless? Yes. Some of my favorite artists are so
quintessential, and known that I buy, listen, love and don’t include
their latest music on these lists (e.g. Neil Young). Dylan alone has cracked that wall. But Gabriel’s wise music is as close to my
spiritual music DNA as possible and given my Boomer party membership I am proud
to put I/O (I and the Other, one/zero) at
#12 (though I’ll be listening to this long after those rated higher). The sonics are certainly known: the world music beats, the prog rock
chords and art rock essence. And I’ve simple
reverential gratitude that he still makes this music (20 years waiting). Unquestionably it’s a reminder of the explicit
spiritual experience of music. So (heh) how is this better than anything he’s
done since So? Two points: the lyrics/melodies are not kidding
around. They resonate with a daunting maturity,
both chronological and spiritual. This is
not the rock and roll of revolution; this is wisdom, born of long practice. A
report from a Teacher who wore his insides out. And, two, the Voice, the
quality, timbre, affect and power of a voice unlike any other, unfiltered,
timeless. I am glad I stayed alive long
enough to hear his report, here on the threshold of his old age and our next
Bardo. He’s ready for The Bridge, as should we all be. Sidenote: I had the good fortune of listening
to this on an absurdly upscale stereo – headphones, no matter their quality,
cannot replicate what Gabriel gives us in true space. The production, on a
lower level a little baroque or cluttered, heard on a good sound system is like
those photos from the new Webb Space Telescope.
Who knew reality was like this?
Gabriel knew, and knows.
13.
Rat Saw God – Wednesday
The avalanche of post-shoegaze shoegaze
guitars and primal therapy screaming (very Millennialed) at the beginning bely
a very pop-oriented open-faced countrified folk-rock contemplation on life in
the suburbs and the coming End. Benadryl overdoses and Sunday school, police
raids and naps. Rock ‘n roll was always,
will be always about adolescence and cleaning up messes before the Parents get
back. And these indie workouts that resuscitate rock and roll, as opposed to
the monetized anger of all the variables of hip-hop that is the real music of
the times (that I ignore), are sweetly young and off point. But still the tradition delivers results –
both Linderman’s ponderous power chords, her cheerful playground vocals, and too-clever
lyrics. Cut 7, with its rural speed lab
explosions and rusted trucks, is a mirror of Waterloo Sunset. Ah the bittersweet cancer in the thryoids;
waiting for AI and the planet’s demise in a melodic dancehall inherited from
the last century. So many of these kids
in these cul-de-sacs of American decline seem to be exvangelicals. Bruised by
the Prosperity Gospel of anti-wokeness. Torn jeans, perfect hair, and a
pocketful of Narcan. But it’s a real
foot-tapper. Thanks you Jesus, can I
meet you at the sex shop off the highway? Best not to take the wrong drugs.
14.
Afterpoem – Faten Kanaan
Brooklyn = means she is accessible to the au
courant non-classical musical ear and worth the effort. Avant garde = means she is to be listened to
for “new edges” not comfort. Minimalist
= means she is comforting no matter what.
Fragmentary = means she gets away with a lot. To me much of her
repetitive, incrementally developing music, really is just the offspring of
ambient music (Disintegration Loops - the grand progenitor of this
music). But she is a composer in that
the looping is often analog, in real time, with wildly different textures. It is minimalist serious music that is as
friendly as apply pie, elegant as designer clothes or drugs. It is also sneaky – you think you know her
tricks but something drops out of the soundcloud with each new listen (once I
heard a Souza march minimalist drone, then I realized it was a Neil Diamond
melody hidden in the storm clouds).
Yeah, like that. Good to let play
over and over throughout a rainy afternoon.
15.
Villagers - Califone
I remember at one point Wilco covered its
Americana in noise and dirt and became America’s best band for a hot Chicago
minute. Califone, another Chicago
corn-pone storyteller, cluttered its sound with similar noise for album after
album after album. It never achieved
great popularity, so it solipsisticly continued to develop this dirty American
throwaway folk rock. It progressed. While Wilco keeps trying to throw a
fastball down the middle of the plate, Califone is in the parking lot
smoking. Jazzy, clever, subtractive,
relentlessly analog and plinky – he has always been nasal and plaintive,
although you were never sure what he was actually saying. Here, twenty years later, he’s finally
learned to clear his throat and sing comprehensible stories. The ever-delicious folk-trippy
instrumentation is still here, but presented in a sunny and warm production. That distinctive voice, quirky and homely, is
mixed up front. And the noise now is the sound of someone dancing, or sitting
on the porch in the daytime, not someone hiding. “A Roxy Music cassette on the
dashboard dying in the sun…” His lyrics
are brilliant. Who knew?
16.
End – Explosions in the Sky
But is it? Or is it just a rumination on
change, impermanence and letting go? The first album in almost a decade by a
band who is both mysteriously ignored and admired as the founder of soundtrack
sonics in instrumental post-rock music.
Like Mogwai, the wash of big loud sounds playing hint at an ambient
electronic soundtrack experience, but clearly drums, bass, and guitars is the
language of the movie they want to play in your head. Always prettier than the equally loud/soft
Mogwai, more transcendent, they continue that soaring guitar picking into our
common cosmos if not consciousness, here with perhaps more drums-driven rhythm
than before. Simple chords, familiar tricks, and still breathtaking after all
these years. As befits the genre they
almost invented, or at least honed, the louder they get, the more peaceful they
sound. The “end” is quite lovely, if very
far from quiet. It’s never going to stop.
17.
Echoe Stane – Sarah-Jane Summers
If I say this music plays into the
interstices, the intersectionality of composition, I suppose that also is just
a way to stop naming something with its proper, new name. But this Scottish, classically-trained musician-composer
plays a variety of violins but here sticks to the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle (reedy
and rough, c.f. #33) to layer folk tunes, modernist noise, world-music flavors,
artful ambient soundwaves, melancholy melodies on devotional workouts. It was one of those albums that I let play
over and over and I heard new things in it emerge every time. So often “hybrid” music attract me, I listen
for the roots, the categories. But
having given Ms Summers a list of labels, all seductive in any form, this
music, the lone fiddle with warm mid-range sonics in a cool room with slight
echoes – moves beyond intersection. I
don’t know what this music is, but I know it is real. The last onramp before the coming cataclysms
– walking off with no wheels. With just
a fiddle and a bow. All pieces were
improvised on the spot. Like breathing.
Best to keep breathing.
18.
The Greater Wings – Julie Byrne
Many (most?) of the indie-adjacent bands that
seduce me in recent years have women vocalists/songwriters up front (Big Thief,
Soccer Mommy, et. al.). The religion of
rock and roll, like the religion of religion, and the religion of the-personal-is-political,
is “saved” by the feminist anima. But I
am getting poco andante with the coffee-house ASMR breathy earnest
voicings of these non-binary, very fluid-power artists … and so
I hear ersatz Joni Mitchell or replicated Bill Eilish and expunge them from the
list. Byrne, I suppose, is a folk-rock
version, but this elegy affected me deeply this year. Her serious purpose is to name her grief over
the death of her best friend/lover. The lyrics and melodies of loss are simpler
and less loaded than Sufjan Steven’s dunkel ist das leben work, which
places much higher on this list. The
songs linger in languor; give snapshots of profound existential loneliness,
perfectly conveyed by a voice singing folk-based melodies, or even redolent of
torch singers on open-mic night in a decade that hasn’t happened yet. But this voice, drenched in ethereal reverb,
singing what seems to be the same melody ten times over, isn’t just wispy…
there is a texture of something more battered, maybe just a drop of Sandy Deny
or Kate Bush. Life is loss, all is
impermanent. At one point I was sure
this was going to be the best album of the year, and then Javelin was
released.
19.
Jump on It – Bill Orcutt
An old guy (on the cover of this he looks
like a 70 year old homeless hobo, or perhaps a desert monk), he plays his
resonant acoustic guitar like old guys (think Bill Frissell, or further back:
John Fahey, Leo Kottke) which also means he’s asymmetrical and improvisational
and meditative, not looking for glory with his unfathomable chops. His last album was a long composition for
four guitars, and was loud and often dissonant.
This, solo, is gentle and curious, and so dreamy I almost expect Nick
Drake to start singing… but his strings and their picking are not completely opiate,
even in quiet meditation. Rather they are astringent, cutting softly. Hearing Chris play more acoustic this year
increased my appreciation for these fingerpicked inventions. Each year there is an album that should win
the Miss Congeniality Award… the one I’ll play on repeat and listen in the
background for hours and hours. This is
it for this year…
20.
Since Time is Gravity - Natural
Information Society
I suspect there are hundreds of “free jazz”
artists out there that are better than most of what’s on this list. My jazz radar is limited. But the range of what is “jazz” expands… jazz
is far from dead; instead it is widely distributed. This Chicago collective uses African folk
instruments, lots of percussion, odd combinations of instruments – a horn and
wind section that defies sounding like big band arrangements while playing over
harps and harmonium, and on this album the stunning Chicago saxophone of Ari
Brown. Long phrases of urban sax
goodness with a driving tribal world music thump underneath (there are two
drummers). The sound is new, fresh, and deeply
familiar.
21.
Amatssou – Tinariwen
Those wild and crazy desert insurgents
return with an album of rebel rock ‘n roll that sounds richer and more
mysterious than ever. I had listened to
it a couple times before I read that Daniel Lanois had done “post-production”
work on it, and that explained why this profoundly African music sounded more
than ever like classic rock, ala New Orleans and roots-revival ambient
music. It does seem you can listen into
this for the basics that were shipped to the US on the middle passage and
through blood and sacrifice became the blues. For, while it’s “world music” and as danceable
than anything on this list, there is a darkening sadness to it. I can’t understand the lyrics, of course, but
as the boys sing in unison, it sounds like they are sharing stories of
loss. Whatever the truth of my imposing
my old white ideas on their music, the guitar picking and call and responses
scour my cultural condescension. It’s the
real deal ready for Marseilles, Mali, or my sofa.
22.
Travel – The Necks
One of those bands, all instrumental,
“jazz” in most keyword searches, that begs the question when they put out a new
album, “well, the last three albums were pretty much the same idea, do I need
another one?” Yes, yes I do. The trio,
often analog with a vengeance (drums, bass, piano/keyboards), are able to
stretch your attention span out to new territories, variations, incrementally
developed compositions, excursions – sleepy, inchoate, transcendental. Yes, 20 minutes is just a start. This is armchair music as Satie and Eno might
say, but it’s not just something to doom-scroll by. I stimulates something deep in the vagus
nerve. I think because it’s not one mind
composing, rather it really is three musicians listening to each other and improvising.
That’s what they claim and I feel it – every “practice” session they just start
improvising something, and play until they stop. And, recorded, it is in our
hands. Looping
over and over, (in rock is that a jam band?) this very, very long single album
with single pieces which circle endlessly doesn’t tire. It sounds new every time played. As I was writing this I heard in one track a
kind of trip through a desert on another continent – maybe the Outback, maybe
the Kalahari, maybe Mars. And then it
connected, Oh yeah, travel, duh.
This takes you on trip, far off to foreign lands, they don’t know where
they are going, and such is their miracle.
23.
False Lankum – Lankum
I listened to this more times than most on
the list, and I am still not sure what this music is. I also assumed this would be a “top ten”
choice for me. But it’s mercury (if not
the Mercury Prize), I can’t fix where it should fit in my ears. It’s Irish folk rock, of course, but building
on a folk music that is not fiddles and dances in pubs with a pint. Its folk music is droning, mysterious, dark
and illusive. A hut in a remote forest
not a stage in a big city. It’s smoking
herbs, eating mushrooms, not swallowing Guiness. And so its sound is herbal, vegetative, earthy…
not air. In part it’s the production,
which behind and through the usual guitar, pipes, concertina, whistles, bodhrán,
and organ, it’s got alien arrival noises and industrial dirt woven in each cut.
Progressive Irish folk rock from a time that hasn’t arrived yet.
24.
Continuing – Tyshawn Sorey Trio
Sorey, a PhD and Macarthur Fellow, has
produced a lot of music in a lot of modes (opera, dance, big band) but here he
scales back to go deep and long. A trad
trio (bass, drums, piano) where his drums really do claim the space and lead
the way, as they take on some jazz classic standards. I suppose some would say they deconstruct the
jazz standards – and they do pull apart and problematize the chord progressions
and the melodies sometimes to a place where they are unrecognizable. But was deep jazz ever not this way? And the finished product is coherent,
serious, composed music. There is
so much jazz produced each year, and I find things by accident mostly. Music this spacious and questioning tells me
I should be more respectful, and spend more time with the singular American art
form.
25.
Borderland Melodies – Jurg Frey
There’s minimalist, and then there’s
minimalist. Some of these cuts sound
exactly like one or two musicians of a classical orchestra have come out early
and are slowly warming up, tuning up.
Not that they are listening to each other – these compositions (almost
all have violin, cello, clarinet, and percussion) sometimes seem like machines
left running in separate rooms – accidentally creating harmonies and
counterpoints and then vanishing into thin air.
It’s a glorious absence of too many ideas and sounds. One critic called Frey’s music “like a Mahler
adagio suspended in zero gravity…” I
love Mahler. I loved these long drawn
out bowings and soft hooting. Music that
is barely there.. a scent left in a room after someone walks through.
26.
A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life – Ki
Ono
A lot of beautiful things come out of Korea
these days, but to expand a useless ethnomusicologist self-pleasuring observation:
beauty out of Japan is cut and firm, no waste; beauty out of Korea has raveling
and blurs. This ambient, wide-spaced,
“pretty” and pretty smart music is at its best when is doesn’t wrap ideas up
too tightly, and when some musical phrases ravel when you expect them to
loop. The music uses incremental
micro-changes to propel it, which is to say it seems like one phrase over and
over for the length of the album. Sometimes things this pretty distract from
its cleverness: i.e. it seems oriented to the future not the past. And what sounds nostalgic is also an
invitation to lose preconceptions. So to expose such conceptualizing habit and mind-rot
stereotyping, Ki Ono isn’t from Seoul. He’s really some guy named Chuck who
grew up in Los Angeles. Go figure. So what was conceptual and habitual is really
asking the mind to be fluid. And then to
swim.
27.
The Cosmic Garden - Takashi Kokubo and Andrea
Espurti
This is music that is barely there,
assertive in its emptiness. A ritual of the quiet-is-the-new-loud creed. The Japanese ambient composer claims to have discovered
sonics that actually heal the body, from sounds found in the “natural”
environment. (It sounds like spaceships docking
in space to me). He teams up with
Espurti, an Italian jazz trombonist, fat and city-sounds over the electronic dark
vacuum…. So through much of this I feel like I am in the early 80s watching an
Alan Rudolph film with LA nightscapes and jazzy foreboding. That’s an acquired
taste. A little goes a long way. And the whole point is, I think, how little
is needed to change everything. In the end, this “futuristic” music sound
comfortably old-fashioned.
28.
(I’m just) Chillin’on Fire – Carlos Niño
& Friends
The collaborator-in-chief of a west coast
world music collective delivers his annual jazz-ambient-new age soundscape…
this is two CDs long (yes my kinesthetically-hungry hands still hold CDs, admire
the colors, and curse that my age means I can’t read the too-fine print on
them, but use “CD” as a metric of length). With participants as skilled and
versatile as Kamasi Washington and Andre 2000, the sheer length and varieties of
this probably keeps it lower on the list than it should be. So many textures and hybrid intersections of
all the genres I love, but perhaps too many too quickly shifting; it feels
absent of a central theme - is it brilliant or is it music to skate in circles
by? Background shopping music in Whole Foods? Tribal kalimbas and flutes and
jungle drums also make this sound like a soundtrack for an ayahuasca journey – and
the glitchy little hip hop nuances help the mechanical elves jump around like a
long-lost Robert Crumb animated cartoon, but chiller (get it?). Jazz is no longer one thing, not even this
many-faceted one thing. Maybe this is not even jazz, just pretending it is in
order to name something yet undiscovered in you. Maybe I should stop thinking all this free
flow jazz isn’t as good as Pharoah Sanders.
29.
Long Drove – Simon Scott
The drummer from Slowdrive (who’d a thunk
the drummer from Slowdrive would appear twice on my 2023 list) is also an
electronic musician and sound-artist. I
suppose there might be some irony that an album by a drummer would have
absolutely no drums, and very few “beats”, unless the fluctuations of the earth
and sky are counted as beats. In the
fens of East Anglia Scott captured environmental sounds, mixed them up in his
skull, and made droning electronic ambient music to carry them. The sound is certainly minimal, but it is
also flavored by that field-recording presence that real analog sound captured
in the outdoors always provides. I
listen to so many ambient drone artists and I always enjoy drinking water from
new sources. He claims that the
compositions record and report climate changes; I can’t hear what that’s about. I can hear a world with lengthening space…
the distance between the electronic and natural is further than Scott have meant,
or maybe it was exactly his attempt to capture… the fens.
30.
Les Égarés - Sissoko/Segal/Parisien/Peirani
I’ve been interested in recent decades
seeing Jazz, an African-sourced American art form , re-encounter Africanism in
the post-colonial spaces and studios of European capitals.. London and Paris
specifically, but also Berlin, Rome, Oslo, Warsaw etc. Great hybrid textures, melodies, harmonics,
and forms. This quartet of French
saxophone, Malian kora, cello and accordion is certainly that hybridized
confection, but it is surprising in its own ways. The different disparate threads don’t
mitigate their essences in order to be something new and different in combination,
but rather perform their “sounds and atmospheres” complimenting, not changing
each other. A Wayne Shorter solo, and
classical chamber music piece, an African folk dance, and a Romany busker on
the streets of Budapest thread together, at the same time, keeping their
unique timbre and effects. Sometimes
it’s confusing, but it’s always beautiful.
I suppose this kind of bounce-back cultural mélange can best be grown in
Paris, and so in that sense this is good, mid-21st century Parisian
music. Is it jazz? Sure, why not. But it is new, relentlessly surprising, and
seduces with every twist and turn.
31.
Cartwheel – Hotline TNT
The neo-shoegaze barrage of Big Sound
carrying Deep Emotions continues successfully.
This is a one-man band – although, unlike a lot of modern niche sound,
it seems grown in a garage, not on a laptop.
There are threads of Wall of Sound, grunge, Brit-pop, and Americana
stretched from My Morning Jacket to the Beach Boys. Sunny or gloomy? Toe tapping or head banging?
Thames Valley or Williamsburg? Two chords or three chords? Glitch rhythms or math rock? The answer
always seems to be, yes. Both/and. The
vocals are sea salt on the fresh and crunchy popcorn of the multi-tracked
guitars. And those guitars are the
glory, fer shure. The vocals are just slightly
too slight, and keep the album from being rated higher. Somewhere he was compared to Paul Westerberg;
but no, way too much satisfaction and good nature in the voice and lyrics.
Fortunately the vocals are buried just enough. Best to turn it up
32.
Garden Party – Rose City Band
In a year of close escapes and world war, many
artists were stirring up sound in the detritus of the old schools. Here is the
prime example of “Ámericana still works”… although there are elements that
don’t quite align with that rootsy nostalgia.
Or rather Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo’s Ripley Johnson’s penchant for
psychedelic stretching out and improvisation (it seems like this is no longer his
side project, but rather his main stage to perform on) has taken friendly
country-rock in a time-traveling trip, or even Trip. 60s trippy pop and 70s
Laurel Canyon smoke outs, and 80s North Carolina beaches, which is to say,
yeah, Portland. Many of the songs seem to break for improvisation and long
soloing – so, yes, psychedelic country-folk with improvised solos: it is
Grateful Dead adjacent. But those mismatched elements (an East LA farfisa organ
in almost every song) keep it quirky and lo-fi… “porch music” he calls it, and
it’s quite pleasant on his porch. Syncopated,
weedy, airy, danceteria (in the grabbing at butterflies mode, not clubbing in
Ibiza or hip hop in Houston). On the
porch it appears as though they may be microdosing for a better world.
33.
Glimmer – Nils Okland
Okland’s recordings in recent years of acoustic
analog rootsy Norwegian alt-folk rock are some of my favorite records of this
century. Gloriously morose tunes played
with “authentic” folk instruments including the vaunted Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. The ECM universe was made for him and his
side band Lumen Drones (which, not surprisingly, is a band of luminescent
droning). Tender and unique, his Norwegian
folk music has no-nonsense beauty. Here,
with different musicians (a keyboard, which doesn’t align with the hand-carried
wooden/strings gestalt) supporting Okland, his music is starkly beautiful
still, but where before real improvisation seemed like the musicians were sitting
around a fire, this music is arranged and seems made to be performed on a
stage.
34.
Living Circle - Shido Shahabi
The Iranian-Swedish composer prepares her
piano with tape loops and screws and joins it with an ensemble of cello, standup
bass, covers it all with waves, and waves of synthesized fog. Like so much of the music I like and buy and
play and put on these lists, it’s as much a movie soundtrack as it is an album
of ambient music. It’s quiet and
resonant, but suggests secrets and loss.
It’s ready for the recital hall as much as what used to be chill rooms
or silver screens. It’s got a love for
rich dissonance, and I can actually hear a Persian melancholy (or Swedish
suicide watch) in its trenchant melodies.
That’s the groundwater discharge for these “new classical” soundtracks –
the simple, wistful melodies stretched out like a patient etherized on a
table. “Modern classical” is what some
writers call this.
35.
Clear and Hazy Moons – Eden Longdale
Modern classical, huh? For many years the
appearance of “serious” music on my lists has been haphazard and
capricious. I don’t follow “serious”
music in the avid way I follow other genres – jazz, ambient for examples. I know there is a lot a great jazz that never
makes my lists, but I know it. I am sure
there is a lot of great serious music that doesn’t make my lists, but I don’t
know it. This is analog, in person,
chamber music, that is piano and strings and wind instruments – that sounds
like the turning of spheres or slowly collapsing black holes or fields of
background radiation proving the Origin story, dark and slow. It clunks and drones and pipes up when you
expect silence. This is serious music in
every sense, as slow and infinite as the cosmos. It is relentlessly, seriously, cosmic.
36.
After the Magic - Parannoul
He’s supposed to be “anonymous and
undercover”, but he has a name, and the lyrics, all in Korean, are, by
definition, unintelligible, not hidden.
It’s another work listed as “shoegaze” in 1) the retro-flavor of the day
and the 2) catnip to my own interests and taste. It surely has a big, weighty sound – wide
bands of guitar noise and dream-metal guitars that chime as much as
down-tune. Melodic and catchy songs
almost survive the flood of production tricks. It’s retro in many ways – sounds
like MGMT covering Gentle Giant songs… with a touch of 80s power ballads
sneaking in. It’s fun, and irresistible,
but didn’t hold up to my initial affections.
He’s anonymous… probably should stay so.
A confection, spun sugar, melts in the sun. Lugubrious and baroque both:
good at high volume though.
37.
Les Jardins Mystiques, Vol 1 – Miguel
Atwood-Ferguson
Most of the Gen Z neo-Jazz (from London to
Topanga) is either retro In A Silent Way ethno-spiritual or new agey soundtrack-ready.
This is the latter in the guise of trad
jazz (nothing too dissonant, ever). And Atwood-Ferguson is more Gen X than
Z. Soundtracks: I remember movies from
the sixties, black and white usually, British new wave or New York indie, where
the jazz piece played over a montage of the lead characters gamboling through
city streets and parks. Spacious moments in gritty neo-realism. So let me neo the neo and confirm that most
of these sounds, three CDs of snippets and partial ideas, would be perfect for
such film montages, pretty young things capering in pretty urban settings. Many, many instruments (many of which
Atwood-Ferguson plays) sometimes deliver Big Band fervor ala Kamasi Washington
(who plays on some tracks); the leads are sometimes sax, sometimes piano, and
sometimes the rare jazz viola. Three and
half hours (!!) of jazz textures and ideas from the wilds of Los Angeles (much
of this is recorded live). Composed as
serious jazz, but with lots of air. Lite
isn’t always light, but is here. Best to
put honey in your tea and be prepared for a long flight of fancy.
38.
Trio Tapestry – Joe Lovano, Marilyn
Crispell, Carmen Castaldi
Once upon a time Lovano was an enfant
terrible sax player keeping the jazz fires burning. Now he is over 70 and
his transformation to the wide-open spaces of ECM and submission to Manfred
Eicher is complete. This trio is minimal
and Lovano’s sax playing is airy and spiritual (at times sounding like Paul
Winter and his ashram phrasing). The
temperature is on the cool side, and that’s fine by me: I often think when writing
these lists how the attachment I have to “rock” and experimental music weakens as
my crows’ feet deepen and kidneys fail: if I were a real human of the moment
I’d be listening to more hip hop in all its permutations. And there is so much quality jazz I
miss. But a moment of Lovano’s plaintive
sax playing here absolves my dilettantish bourgeois myopia. Familiar sax
sexiness, yet full of ideas that don’t sell out for comfort only.
39.
Echolocation - Mendoza Hoff Revels
The permutations of jazz? Sure, like this. Dissonant and aggressive
music: I used to love “jazz fusion”, though now I listen to some of the nuggets
from the 70s and they sound bloated and noisy.
This is jazz rock that doesn’t have roots in that kind of music. But it is a guitar-bass attack that clears
out the cobwebs and is far from the other hybrid, incense-jazz, chill jazz I
usually find. Straight up, no chaser.
40.
Boygenius - Boygenius
Oh yes, I love the idea of the backstory
(sleazeball Ryan Adams thinks “only boys” can make real music, etc.), and
initially I loved the record. Saw them
on screens perform it live and it confirmed they are the real deal. Love the guitars and songs as songs. But one day I heard in their melodic
harmonies that they sound like Wilson-Phillips.
I can’t unhear it. So, I don’t
choose this to listen to much, but then I never listen to Wilson-Phillips, or Ryan
Adams, either.
41.
Workin’ on a World – Iris Dement
So many of the emerging “country/Americana”
female vocalists of the last decades can inspire the response, “well, she’s
trying to sound like Iris Dement.” So
why not go to the source and get the real deal?? I’ve gotten confused sometimes,
because sometimes her voice sounds like, and her respect would seem to date
from, the 60s or 70s – and I forget she’s actually not that old. Here she sings songs well intended (pleas for
peace and social justice), but perhaps just a little too slight for her rough,
ready, and regal voice. On this list I’ll
place her right next to Sza – two vocal pillars of what a better America could
be.
42.
SOS – Sza
Yeah, right, make out music with auto-tune
vocals, WTF is this doing on this careful and terminally white list? The production is subtle, simple, and simply delicious,
and I believe every wise phoneme she sings and processes through the auto-tune.
Under that layer of modern sound is her melisma
of real heartache and its root desire. Love hurts.
43.
Valley of Heart’s Delight – Margo Cilker
More womanly wisdom: Sometimes you need something
crunchy and salty; not a staple of your diet, but when you want it you want
it. Sometimes you need to immerse in
heartwood country music. Not Nashville
pop, not Outlaw, not even California weedy countrified rock, but the real thing,
not very available. Ms Cilker from
Eastern Washington delivers – tasty instrumentals, clever lyrics, modern and
timely – but that voice (a dash of Emmy Lou, a spoonful of Loretta, and even a whine
of Dolly) scratches what itches. While
southern story-telling is its main course, hippie westcoast vibe is the additional
sauce.
44.
Y Trois – Acid Arab
I’d place this higher, but I’ve already set
forth that I don’t/can’t keep up with hip hop/DJ, to my own impoverishment, so
I am hiding it down here. Here is hip
hop/trance of an off-shore but relentlessly potent force. Algerians on the mean streets of Paris –
charming, druggy, extreme, angry. Muezzin
through auto-tune: the new world isn’t as planned.
45.
Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart –
Lucinda Williams
One of my favorite singers of all time
returns from a stroke and… sounds pretty good for someone coming back from a
stroke. Hip hop has always demonstrated
the usefulness of albums/songs having “guests”… but here Williams’s guests
really seem to distract, and make this sound like a discount store remnant
special. Stuart Mathis, her superb
longtime guitarist, is the best thing about this. I am glad she is alive and look forward to
her next one without Bruce Spingsteen.
46.
Cantor Park - Stefano Pilia & Valerio
Tricoli
I used to follow (90s, 00s) “electronic”
music, not electonica, with ts glitches and hums and compositional
assertions. Now the streams of music
produced electronically have converged, diverged, and ultimately purged. What’s not electronic music now? Electronica
sort of became resurrected and called by the old school EDM, and resurges every
year. Now most IDM feels like a waste of
my time, and I’d rather dance to world music than RPM-Eurotrash mollified
melodies. Cantor Park (um, named for a
philosopher?) is surely European (Italy and Berlin) and is surely
electronic. But it’s also improvised
sessions by a real guitarist and then treated with electronic additions and degradations
– and is very interested in blips and drones and pops, coming first from an
electric guitar before it passes through synthetic space.
47.
Healing Rituals - Naïssam Jalal
The Syrian French jazz flautist constantly
surprises not just with her playing, but with the arrangements and combinations
of instrumentation she’s chosen. (Jazz
cello may be my favorite development of recent years.) Airy, hybrid, womanly (I’ll stand by that)
virtuoso playing.
48.
Seven Psalms – Paul Simon
Having no longer observed the “in the Hall
of Fame, and so out of competition for the hallowed List” rules, this has to
appear. A short song-cycle, artsongs
really, on death. “Achingly” is an
adjective too sloppily modifying “beautiful”, but here Simon’s ache at the
beauty of life is only intensified by its loss. The ache is melodic, affecting,
peaceful.
49.
I’ve Seen a Way – Mandy, Indiana
I think I am just starting to ossify and
not be capable of hearing true zeitgeist-demanded change (e.g my vaunting here
of my not having bandwidth or enough neuroplasticity to keep up with hip
hop). But this album got reviews that
interested me, and I clearly hear some kind of new international, relevant, and
interesting death knell. It’s a new kind
of music cultivated from familiar (industrial, dark metal, noise, dance)
sources. Apparently it was recorded in
caves and sounds to me as though it invites you to spend time there.
50.
Imagine this is a High Dimensional Space
of All Possibilities – James Holden
