HCMJmagic

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2019 End Of Year Mix

Other Favorites:

David Bruce - The North Wind Was a Woman

galen tipton - fake meat

upusen - Highland Ave.

BLACKPINK - Kill This Love

Starkey - Earth EP

Lamp - ‘A Distant Shore’ Asia Tour 2018

AWITW - Ｓｈｅ Ｗａｌｋ Ａｌｏｎｅ う者姻

Seaketa - Gion ぎおん

SNJO - Diamond

BONNEVILLE - AFFORDABLE LUXURY

20) Gareth Davis & Scanner - Footfalls

I first found the experimental composition/clarinet music of Gareth Davis in the early 2010′s during my initial dive into the Miasmah catalog. Teamed up here with another electronic musician/clarinetist, Footfalls uses long, poetic waves of deep woodwinds and synth improv to describe hauntingly desolate environments. It only seems fitting to start the list with one of many bookends on a decade in the grim, cold grey of Philadelphia.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

19) Barker - Utility

Arp and delay-driven rhythmic expression that recalls late-era Kraftwerk, building a pristine sci-fi future with ear-pleasing, rich, and laser-sharp production. Like disembodied trance or house music searching for a strong beat that never comes, Utility is absolute, skillfully-stated synth pleasure.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

18) Sean McCann/Seth Graham w/Kymatic Ensemble  - Split Series Vol. IV

Seth Graham’s Gasp was a big favorite in 2018, here condensed and re-imagined for chamber ensemble. Sean McCann’s “Vilon” finds a blissful middle-ground between electronic ambient music and traditional western instrumentation, like a poignant hymn sung somewhere far away, while the new “Gasp” arrangements are full of expressiveness and surprises.

BANDCAMP

17) 猫 シ Corp. & t e l e p a t h - Building a Better World

Deep bass pulses and distant rain welcome us to a familiar comfortable place, but as the unmistakable sound and melodic freedom of telepath’s original synth work bends its way over rolling toms in the reverb-soaked hifi opener, it becomes clear that this album is something new and special. Full-on new age drenched in an endless downpour, it’s a huge and beautiful world that’s blissful to be lost in.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

16) Various Artists - Oneironaut

Another rare case of a compilation that is actually worth listening to, Japanese indie powerhouse Local Visions assembles the best talent from the sax-loving, jazz-infused, post-vaporwave electronic underworld of Japan and beyond in the indomitable Oneironaut comp. Notable contributions from Utsuro Spark, upusen, Tsudio Studio, tamao ninomiya, and countless others deliver a hazy daydream.

BANDCAMP

15) wai wai music resort - WWMR 1

Also from Local Visions comes this special collection of tracks caught somewhere between “lost LP found in a record crate” and “bedroom 4-track” - two distinct lofi flavors that mysteriously meld seamlessly on WWMR 1. It sounds new and old, youthful and mature, and full of affection for love and the music it references.

BANDCAMP | SPOTIFY

14) EXID - Me & You

There’s something about this mini-album, a Christmas time snowy nostalgia as the sun sets on another chapter of life (and era of kpop) in tracks like “나의밤” and “WE ARE..,” the Jamiroquai funk of “내일해 (Urban Mix),” or club igniting title track - EXID may never exist in this form or at this level again, and like so many of my favorites this year it reflects the recent history of its genre brilliantly.

APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

13) Fire-Toolz - Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

Field Whispers is the stunning next step in the evolution of Fire-Toolz that feels completely at home on the finely-curated Orange Milk. Extended sax-soaked dreams collide with splinters of music jumbled and broken, elegant and disjointed, all bouncing off each other while still leaving room for moments of soaring guitar and dreamy synth pads.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

12) Hakobune - The Last of Our Time Together

With over 50 releases (4 just this year!), Hakobune’s discography can seem like an impenetrable wall of ambience, but like classics Seamless and Here and Love Knows Where, The Last of Our Time Together stands out - monumental and multi-dimensional - a slow dance skidding along the frozen surface of an endlessly deep, rich sea of emotion.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

11) FM Skyline - Advanced Memory Suite

As nostalgic electronic music continues to evolve and find itself elevated in the hands of increasingly-focused musicians, FM Skyline delivers a joyful retrospective on a decade that gave new life to so many old sounds. Exploring the inner recesses of our memory and delusion, Advanced Memory Suite turns the page on a decade of chillwave/synthwave/vaporwave/whateverwave. It’s a hypnotic monument to the modern renaissance.  

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

10) emamouse - Black place on the edge

It was a huge year from the prolific Tokyo-based visual artist and musician emamouse, whose non-stop creative output continues to challenge the very nature of reality. Black place on the edge was a standout favorite this year, layered and mysterious - incidental music for the surreal dreamworld described in mou’s most unnerving illustrations. Like waking up and finding yourself trapped inside Quest 64.

BANDCAMP

09) Koeosaeme - Obanikeshi

My favorite Orange Milk release of the year, Koeosaeme delivers another absolute hurricane of hyper-detailed, sensory-extreme, buckshot-to-the-face arrangements. The sheer amount of data on this album is staggering, with more musical information packed into a few minutes of its blissful chaos than most full length albums combined.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

08) Jaeho Hwang - Non-self 비자아

I was super fortunate to play a show with Jaeho Hwang in Tokyo during this year’s Neo Gaia Phantasy tour - his immense set started so intensely it’s as if the entire room was cast under a shamanistic spell, hypnotized by percussive expressionism, drawn to the light of digitally melting faces and occult rituals playing out on the screen behind him. Non-self 비자아 is without mercy and full of powerful and primal energy.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

07) Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising

Natalie Mering’s subtly expressive, velvety voice on its own is enough to make anything she touches turn to gold, but her songwriting is so masterfully dialed in on Titanic Rising it’s as if Harry Nilsson came back from the dead to write a new volume of pop rock ballads to get us through the next 50 years. It’s an album dripping with love for all the best parts of the 1970′s (Stardust-era Willie Nelson, early ELO, “Lost Weekend” Lennon and friends, etc), but also showcases the compositional chops to match and sometimes surpass its musical lineage (e.g. “Picture Me Better”).

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

06) Monari Wakita - RIGHT HERE

Off the heals of last year’s jaw-dropping Ahead!, ex-Especia Monari Wakita continues to defy modern conventions while asserting herself as one of the most powerful female voices in jpop. “エスパドリーユでつかまえて” sounds like Hitomitoi when she was a rising star, FRIEND IN NEED continues the new jack swing flirting, “やさしい嘘” sounds like it’s begging to be sampled by a future funk artist, and the lead-off single “Just a Crush for Today” is somewhere in a stop-and-go freefall between Billy Joel and Sonic R.

VIDEO 1 | VIDEO 2

05) Yeule - Serotonin II

Beneath the subtle power and diffusion of a voice like an extra-dimensional Julee Cruise, Serotonin II’s beautifully bleak paintings of the world it carefully constructs are reflective of Yeule’s transcendence into the artist’s next form. Crumbling brutalism under a blinding white sky, aliens in a graveyard - the romance of eternal torment in the spiral - all in dark room illuminated by a computer monitor sometime in the 00′s.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

04) The Caretaker - Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 6

The final release for this multi-year project, capturing a mind being lost to dementia, also marks the end of Leyland Kirby’s multi-decade spanning Caretaker project - a project that has had an immense impact on my perception of the limitlessness of music. Now completed, Everywhere at the End of Time towers as a 50 track, 6.5 hour journey from dreamy lucidity to terrifying confusion and darkness.

BANDCAMP

03) Tsudio Studio - Soda Resort Journey

Tsudio Studio brings a contemporary frame to leisure fantasy. Instant classics “Kiss in KIX,” “Asian Coke Light,” and “Like a Ruin” expand on the electro-bossa pop of Port Island, while surprises like “Beijing Cat” expand and explore new worlds of sound. One perfect chord after another, from start to finish, Soda Resort Journey is bubbly and delicious to listen to. Play it looped, close your eyes, be where you’d rather be.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

02) Minuano - Butterfly Dream

Lamp vocalist Kaori Sakakibara’s side project Minuano is like some mutant variant of Lamp - equally complex while slightly less disorienting arrangements (although there are a few re-worked Lamp classics on here), tighter pop sound, stunningly immaculate vocal production - all while maintaining the unique orchestral jazz pop that makes both bands such a euphoric joy to listen to. “Memory of Soda Pop” was my favorite track released by anyone this year.

BANDCAMP

01) EQUIP - CURSEBREAKER X

This was the year of EQUIP. No better story for this year, no better sound than CURSEBREAKER X - the songs from this album will always bring back a thousand memories of smoke-filled clubs, dark forests, and snow-capped mountains from across Japan - the building promise of absolute freedom and a happier tomorrow as we all lived the Neo Gaia Phantasy.. But even without my personal connection to the music, the hardware-driven “perfect sound” VGM and EQUIP’s signature cassette tape destruction has never been better balanced than it is here - it’s loud, and filled with unforgettable melodies and unknown lands. It’s monumental and iconic and will stand the test of time and it was my favorite album of 2019!

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2018 End Of Year Mix

Honorable Mentions: 

LLLL - Chains Phase 4: Resemblance

Various - 慕情 in da tracks

Endurance - Shade Terrarium

Farragol x dropp - 楽感 / optimo

pool$ide - aquarius

FUJII - EUPHORIA

Andrew W.K. - You’re Not Alone

Stardazer - Vacation Dreams

Alex Crispin - Open Submission

Foodman - Aru Otoko No Densetsu

20) TUPPERWΛVE - To you baby, with love

As the years go by, sometimes I still crave that classic-style (or as Tech Honors once described SEAWRLDハートブレーク, “trash-ass”) vaporwave sound. It’s the usual fare of slowed down antiquated R&B with filter sweeps and side-chained kicks, but TUPPERWΛVE’s sample choices and looped snippets stay inspired throughout, building emotionally impactful arrangements and proving the artist has what 90% of contemporary vaporwave is missing: a sense of taste and purpose. NUWRLD vibes.

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19) The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 4 & 5

Leyland Kirby released stages 4 and 5 of his six part, multi-year epic simulating a mind falling into dementia. It’s said the last memories someone suffering from dementia retains are the melodies heard in their youth, and on this year’s installments we find melodies from the first stages lost in a haze of static and noise. While not as easy to listen to as the first three stages, these 8 tracks lose the poetic titles of the previous installments and present an absolutely horrifying interpretation of the confusion that comes with a mind breaking down.

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18) Kate NV - для FOR

I won’t lie, I went into the new Kate NV hoping for at least a few heart-melting rib-cage exploding pop masterpieces like what she showed us on Binasu (my favorite album of 2016). However, the absence of conventional songwriting on для FOR ends up being its defining characteristic. The album delivers a set of impressionistic synth sculptures that slowly develop an album that blossoms into blissful organic structures with brushstrokes of vocals before skipping off into a brightly lit horizon.

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17) 忘れた頃に手紙をよこさないで - Tamao Ninomiya

There is an air of surreality drifting through the new crop of Tokyo underground post-pop. Tamao Ninomiya’s “lo-fi bedroom pop” is always performed in PJs and has a playful gloominess with a thousand-yard-stare kind of shyness that exudes a special kind of emotional resonance. Everything is gentle, subtly “off” - it’s an inventive and delicate pop sketchbook. 

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16) Kero Kero Bonito - Time 'n' Place

The same way Pokémon Yellow was a video game based on an anime that was based on a video game, Kero Kero Bonito is a British group that has arrived at a sound closer to early 2000′s jrock than the British rock that crop of Japanese musicians were imitating. While the final 1/3rd of the album drags, there’s no denying the pop perfection of “Time Today,” the Blue-Album-Weezer thunder of “Only Acting,” the Parklife-era Blur artschool bounce of “If I’d Known,” the whimsical bubblegum of “Make Believe,” or the saccharin yet heartfelt “Dear Future Self,” a pop meditation complete with "Mr. Blue Sky” charm and melodramatic chamber orchestra arrangements.

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15) we could die here - we could die here

While “brooding ambient” is a genre I have drifted away from these past years, ‘we could die here’ reminded me of why I was once drawn to it. It’s all about creating atmospheres, and while so much of genre these days seems to be producing the same, boring, smoke-filled neon/black room, ‘we could die here’s lush sound succeeds in building a sprawling, haunting world with enough depth that it’s worth returning to.

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14) poemme - Moments in Golden Light

Similar in scope to ‘we could die here,’ Moments in Golden Light is as advertised - warm and soft. Blissful pillows of ambience constructed in the old style, poemme pulses and drones with the silkiness of Hakobune and the breadth of Steve Roach, featuring a track that even unabashedly layers in bird samples.

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13) Machine Girl - The Ugly Art

The Ugly Art is special, as it’s the first Machine Girl album that begins to capture the raw energy and power of their live shows by showcasing live drums. The insane breaks are intact and the blistering Dreamcast punk is more hardcore. It’s dense, unrelenting in its shredding, and culminates in the epic “A Decent Man,” a 10 minute violent rave masterpiece with more content than all 3 Matrix movies combined.

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12) Oneohtrix Point Never - Age Of

Age Of is a complex concept album more convoluted than a Roger Waters solo project. The music itself makes the trip one worth taking, through 13 immaculately produced tracks painting a post-apocalyptic machine world. It has an ability to turn pop tricks on tracks like “Black Snow” and “Same,” while the sound remains distant from any of comfortable paradigm. Bits of static, broken samples, and walls of noise develop into larger-than-life ballads that seem eerily familiar despite being so alien. The arrangements are complex and the production is deep, it’s a cyber-western soundtrack that always commands full attention. 

SPOTIFY / APPLE MUSIC

11) Seth Graham - Gasp

Gasp has a charm and complexity that sets it apart from a lot of experimental composition. The tape cut samples of “Whisper - Slap” sound impossibly worked on, while the ASMR freakouts of “Binary Tapioca” and the restrained playfulness of “Flower Cheese” make the process sound like an artist working effortlessly. Deeply emotive and loudly expressive, Gasp has a sound that digs in its hooks and burrows deep.

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10) Equip - Synthetic Core 88

The long awaited followup to the seminal faux-ost I Dreamed Of A Palace In The Sky, Synthetic Core 88 delivers on the promise of Equip’s earlier work and brings it to a new realm of legitimacy. This is a 32-bit RPG I wish I could play - with all the themes of interwoven technology and magic revealing themselves in the clever score. The conflict between the cold steel and floral lushness emerges in the sound somewhere between Uematsu and a “Tales of” game. This album could only be made by someone who truly understands how music supports the worldbuilding an RPG needs to be a successful narrative platform.

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9) Utsuro Spark - Static Electricity

Utsuro Spark is a miracle. One of the highlights from the impressive output of the Japanese label, Local Visions, this mini-album is a collection of beautifully crafted metropolitan electro pop. Sharp instrumentals including studio-perfect guitar and on-point synth work lay a foundation for blissfully creamy vocals - pop music that is full of desperate longing and unpretentious charm. The katakana titles recall the old Japanese pop it draws inspiration from, but in many ways the soul of this music at the very least meets the bar set by the old masters. 

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8) Tsudio Studio - Port Island

I was lucky to play a show in Kobe with Tsudio Studio, whose brilliant songwriting and iconic vocal delivery completely won over my heart and soul. The jazzy coolness and gorgeous chord structure for tracks like “Azur” and “Snowfall Seaside” are absolutely intoxicating, while the hooky R&B in “Mikage” and the Phantasy Star Online space-shredding of the opener “Tor” make Port Island a mini-album where every single track is a stand out.

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7) Dinosaur On Fire - Populous Romantique

After a 6 year gap, dds cohort Tech Honors unleashed the second Dinosaur On Fire album in a maelstrom of prog rock and laser beams. It’s an ultra hi-fi production that bounces from stoner prog to krautrock to synthwave to operatic video game symphonies to Ray Lynch arp fountains and back again effortlessly. Populous Romantique showcases the expansive reach of Tech’s abilities both as a visionary artist and producer.

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6) Monari Wakita - Ahead!

While so much jpop has become aggressively intense and fast-tempo, Ahead! provides a soulful contrast. Monari Wakita is an ex-idol and alumni of Especia, a group known for capitalizing on 80′s/90′s nostalgia. Ahead! mostly pulls from the 90′s, with new jack swing aping and hyper-produced city pop so technically perfect that the instrumentals would sound at home on the soundtrack of a 90′s Sonic Team video game. It’s that FM bass, synthetic swing, and plastic instrumentation against Monari’s powerful and soulful voice that gives Ahead! its irresistible charm and made it one of the most addictive albums of the year.

VIDEO 1 / VIDEO 2

5) Ventla - Plugged-Matic/Sublingual Odyssey

After years of silence, Ventla returned in 2018 with 10 (!) new albums on his quest to release 100. Ventla’s music continues to be eclectic vignettes of scratchy pop music, utilizing a seemingly endless variety of instruments and synths. Of the 10, the “classic Ventla” sound of Plugged-Matic and the playful exoticism explored on Sublingual Odyssey were my favorites - but with an artist whose entire catalog of 477 songs is easily played on loop for days on end, picking only 2 albums is almost an act of futility.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD: Plugged-Matic/Sublingual Odyssey

4) emamouse - Pigeon’s Point

emamouse’s genius visual art and surreal identity are accented by her equally forward thinking music. The iconic opener “01_PP2″ is a brilliant statement of purpose; a homicidal vocaloid squeaking words you can’t quite understand but frighten you nonetheless over a synth organ jamming out hypnotic post-pop you can’t help but dance to. This is music written by a true artist with a powerful vision of reality and instrumental chops informed by video game music deep cuts. “08_Pigeon’s Swipe” is another great showcase of emamouse’s ability to skew Dragon Quest baroque synths and contort them into the brilliant, unsettling world of her boundless imagination.

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3) TWICE - What Is Love?

Kpop can be a divisive genre, but its meteoric rise in the US is no fluke. The Korean pop machine has mastered the art of the pop song, and nowhere is it more evident than in TWICE’s “What Is Love?” Perfect structure, heart-tugging hook, surprising turns, and a chorus that sounds like 1000 girls yelling the lyrics from the bottom of the grand canyon, “What Is Love?” is technically perfect and sweetly endearing. It’s truly the most perfect pop song I’ve ever heard.

VIDEO

2) Mid-Air Thief - Crumbling

Crumbling is an album so in tune with my personal taste it’s hard to believe it exists. With a foundation of Lamp-esque dreamy pop labyrinths, Mid-Air Thief weaves complex arrangements peppered with ELO synths, chiptune fireworks, lo-fi indie folk revery, underwater voices and Elliott Smith whispers, even some Merriweather Post Pavilion electro-hippy clouds. It’s all the right flavors and textures coming together in a perfectly balanced, romantic masterpiece.

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1) Lamp - Her Watch / 彼女の時計

I discovered Lamp through a vaporwave album back in 2014 that sampled them heavily, and while those short samples of cooing vocals and breezy guitar looped with their heads underwater certainly worked in a satisfying way on that album, discovering the source material was a revelation. Lamp is the result of an algorithm to determine music that would be most appealing to me, and they hit new ridiculous heights of personal appeal on Her Watch. Their signature labyrinthine hurricane of Beatle-esque chord changes under soft voices and bossa nova rhythms is re-fitted into a nostalgic frame, sometimes approaching an almost city pop revivalist sound. The tenderness of “Slow-Motion,” the romance of “A Train Window,” the pop genius of “1998,” the borage of melancholic brightness that rolls from the opening chords of “At The Night Party,” all of it falls into place on the most sublime 36 minutes I have heard in a long time. It was the soundtrack to my life this year and my favorite album of 2018!

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2017 End Of Year Mix

Honorable Mentions:

Carla dal Forno - The Garden

GFOTY - GFOTYBUCKS

ミスト M Y S T - 緑の目

Nmesh - Pharma

Black Marble - It’s Immaterial

Leyland Kirby - We, so tired of all the darkness in our lives

世界は80年代に終了しました - People Lead Such Busy Lives

Virtual Vice - Sanctuary Runner

Golden Living Room - Autoscopy

DESIRE - STAQQ OVERFLO

20) World War - Soundsystem

Distorted Redrum rhythms dripping with gabbery, housey, bounceable goodness. Every moment is more relentless than the last, with strange electronic and sometimes nightmarish sound elements effortlessly woven into the complicated crescendos that comprise each track. 

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19) Curved Light - Quartzsite

It’s rare to find a synth album that isn’t endlessly droning or cheekily nostalgic. Quartzsite utilizes slow-attack expansive pads alongside stabby knob turners without falling into the tropes that have been turned over time and time again over the last decade. Subtle but fast tempo percussive elements ticking beneath pure white pads and icy synthfalls of pure crystal.

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18) Geo Metro - Ravage2099

Fellow Philadelphia artist Geo Metro dropped this dense debut on Tiger Blood Tapes earlier this year. His shows are always foggy headthumpers with mind melting realtime sampling, deep drones, dancing rhythmic enigmas and astral melodies. None of this was lost in translation to magnetic tape, the bubbling pulse of beyond - a spiritual guide.

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17) Disasteradio - Sweatshop

Another incredible performance I was fortunate to witness this year was Eyeliner AKA Disasteradio. His on stage MIDI splicing with its gravity-increasing, vocoded, show-stopping finale was exhilarating and inspiring. All of that energy, bombast, and humor can be found on Sweatshop. There’s also a high level of musicianship - touching upon 90′s FM video game music, new wave DEVO synthpop, and moments like “Unleash The Free TV Revolt” which echo Daft Punk vocoder jams. Playful and reflective of what childhood in the early 90′s actually felt like.

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16) x.y.r. - Labyrinth

x.y.r. could keep putting albums out like this every year until I die and I would still count them among my favorites. No one does lo-fi synth music the way he does - his unique musical character pulses and wanders in this fuzzy maze.

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15) Computer Graphics - Lo-Fi

This collection of hazy house jams was a lens back through time. Flashbacks of downloading strange electronic artists off LimeWire in the early 00′s, sinking endless frustrated hours into PixelJunk Eden, and now dancing around my house with Computer Graphics bumping. It’s just as dreamy and hypnotic as you’d hope.

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14) Nico Niquo - In A Silent Way

Taking a step away from the “darkwebwave” of 2015′s Epitaph, Nico Niquo explores more expansive snow plains on In A Silent Way. Gone are the stabbing vocal samples an occasional swirling rhythmic patterning - in their place is Eno-esque slow burners with that rise and fall like the breaths of a sleeping frost giant against moments of purity and silence. 

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13) Arca - Arca

Arca’s 3rd full length is thick and operatic. Like haunted ballroom music with a broken falsetto whispering in your ear, being engulfed in underwater explosions, or watching the credits roll on your own life. It’s sometimes oppressively stark, sometimes intimately vulnerable, and always entrancing. I was initially pulled in by the video premiere for the masterpiece “Desafio.”

VIDEO STREAM

12) Nyoi Plunger - Poiret Status

Playful and full of detail, twisted and bent as it’s pulled into a black hole and spit out again. Poiret Status is always teetering on the edge of a nightmare. Strange voices laugh and coo, like being trapped in a realm ruled by the manifestation of fear, or a dance hall where your very physicality is distorted, warped, and twisted as time becomes unhinged and there’s nothing left to hold onto.

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11) The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time - Stages 2 & 3

Discovering Leyland Kirby’s work was a turning point in my life. Over the last decade release after release of both haunted ballroom music as The Caretaker and reflective synth/piano music as himself have becomes markers for the years of my life. This year we received the next two stages of the dementia simulation of Everywhere at the end of time. The flowers have wilted, and the darkening mind is displayed with a poignant beauty.  

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10) TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL - orz

More than half a decade after the wave rose and fell, torch bearers continue to twist the pop of the past to express new ideas and add their emotional mark to the blockchain of internet music. In the case of the prolific TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL, orz uses vaporwave techniques and traditions as a framework for an emotionally radiant, deeply personal love story. Bursting with raw emotion and feelings of NUWRLD.

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09) Various - Even Further

It feels weird putting a remix compilation on one of these lists, but the Zoom Lens label tribute to Infinity Shred is one of those rare moments when a compilation isn’t just a total mishmash of whatever happened to be thrown into the pot. A fitting showcase of the LA label’s diverse palette of sound, from Berserk ost aping to widescreen chiptune bliss - heavy beats and the brightest black leather darkness that is worthy of Infinity Shred’s cinematic scope.

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08) FIRE-TOOLZ - INTERBEING

Metal-screeches in empty halls drip over post-eccojam synth operas, spastic crystalline outbursts, and high-tempo-high-energy half pipe spaceship rides with broken bits of sound and a cyberpunk sheen. Songs completely split open with massive bombardments of noise and an endless layering of digital artifacts. A labyrinth of glitched out modernity.

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07) Koeosaeme - Sonorant

Fast and full of neck-breaking spins, Sonorant alongside Nyoi Plunger’s Poiret Status were two of the most forward-looking albums I heard this year. With the endless tiny pattering of a billion bits of music playing up against unnatural arrangements of bizarre rhythmic breaks and supernatural harmony. Part sound sculpture part audio apocalypse.

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06) Piper Spray - r.i.p.

When pieces of you die and slowly fall away, they leave a trail of memories in their wake. Piper Spray, one of my favorite artists of the last decade, has been prolific and mysterious - even elusive. His entire body of work has since been deleted from his bandcamp and only this retrospective release that looks back at the last 7 years of his output and life in 6 tracks remains. Full of noise, pain, frustration - with a touch of sorrow and sweetness we are given once last glimpse into the nostalgia for a place we’ve never known. His music has been my constant companion on my own personal journey these last 7 years. RIP Piper Spray.

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05) Euglossine - Sharp Time

It wasn’t until I was lucky enough to play a show with Stany Bebe AKA Euglossine that I discovered to my amazement that the majority of the sounds on this album were performed on MIDI guitar. The sound blips and pan flutes expressed with metronomic precision on a real guitar having its note data interpreted by a MIDI conversion box. Mind blowing musicianship and sprawling melodic composition.

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04) Giant Claw - Soft Channel

I couldn’t stop listening to Soft Channel this year! The culmination of everything that has come before and a wide leap into the future. Orchestral fragmentation in a thick rainbow of sound that breathes and pulses - the sound design is mind blowing, frantic and brilliantly produced. It’s a crisp and meticulously designed new height. 

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03) Marcus Fjellström - Skelektikon

It’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years since Marcus Fjellström’s Schattenspieler was listed as my favorite album of 2010 (on the inaugural annotated list!). Now, all these years later, we were finally treated with a proper followup - and tragically lost Fjellström himself. Skelektikon is a remarkable swansong, picking up where Schattenspieler left off - diving deeper into the anxiety ridden halls of darkness. Larger orchestral arrangements pop up, tape flutter constantly threatening to snap the dread to a sudden end. There’s is a sometimes darkly romantic turn to its harmonic movements however - a humanizing touch that makes the ghosts that much more terrifying.

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02) Sour Gout - I S O L A T E

It doesn’t matter how you get there, only how good the ideas are. I S O L A T E may be built out of a collection of new age and incidental music samples, but its collages give a sense of a deep personal expression. Saccharin guitar, C418-esque piano phrases, and blankets of emotional vulnerability eventually fall into the uneasy loneliness of the 15 minute title track. The empty soul that was once full, bordering on brooding but very soft to lay in. I found myself keeping this one on loop for hours at a time.

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01) Machine Girl - ...BECAUSE I’M YOUNG ARROGANT AND HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR

Machine Girl puts on a really incredible/brutal show - and the recorded version of that experience loses none of the warped maelstrom of sound that makes them so viscerally intense. Heavy industrial punk with face smashing breakdowns peppering every track - like moments of floating in violence as you’re torn apart by passing gravity wells. Disillusioned anger with the musical chops and temperament of someone who grew up listening to Phantasy Star Online music - it was my favorite album of 2017!

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2016 Year End Mix

Honorable Mentions: 

EXID - Street

Daniel Lanois / Rocco Deluca - Goodbye To Language 

Vektroid - RE•SET

Blank Banshee - MEGA

Foodman - Ez Minzoku

Hakobune - In Arboreal Whispering

Morris County Meteorological Team - WMCC Weather Channel

Svarte Greiner - Moss Garden

Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

David Bowie - Black Star

20) Fulldeck Subhuman - Myst

Big, sparse, weird - softsynths with early-decade style synthwave builds, tiny smatterings of sample work. Strange melodies and a haphazard attitude throughout, Myst holds down wide synth drones while maintaining an endearing level of playfulness. Great cover art too.

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19) Rose - Exile

Notes of Akira Yamaoka, ambient drones broken up with tinkery lofi to hifi beats. A unique set of hypnotic tracks, the sci-fi hi-fi piano of “Hydration Cherub” and the Silent Hill loop and trips of the title track stand out.

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18) ALIS - Corporeal

Deep space synths, post-rave Fifth Element sci-fi vibes. “Replicas” resonates with the DARKPYRAMID brand of neo-cyberpunk, with a little space and light peering through the cracks between the breakdowns. Sabina Plamenova drones and pings - with her deep, breathy vocal work feeding the feeling of electronic space opera.

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17) Infinity Frequencies - Closer than ever

The Caretaker of vaporwave returns for another enigmatic collection of haunted loops. Between bits of pop and commercial phrases there are moments of true tape synth bliss, with tracks like “Unexplored regions” recalling early Dolphins Into The Future.

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16) DJ ALINA - MANIAX

Absolutely brutal collection of tracks. The synth work is tight, the beats slamming. Tracks like “STRIKE SPIN” and “AFTERGLOW” show her unique ability to weave interesting rhythmic ideas out of the ruins of ancient electronic dance genres, re-contextualized and given a new relevance.

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15) Piper Spray - Drugstore Phones

The Russian Federation’s most talented tape splicer returned with a double-vinyl release this year. After his bandcamp page vanished, I feared that the creator of my beloved Omnicrom Girls had hung up the moniker for good. Drugstore is a welcomed and cherished return to form, as labyrinthine and sprawling as ever - a dream to get lost in. 

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14) Tominaga - Echoes of Megaliths

Elegant experimental dance music from Japan. Opens with 7 minutes of amen breaking before exploring all sorts of electronic avenues. Avant garde piano chopping, vaportrail beatwaves, trappy hits over harp and guitar, chiptune aping over funk guitar. Sheer eclectic joy permeates the experience.

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13) t e l e p a t h - A

Vaporgod and alien life force t e l e p a t h stepped out of his dreamlike world of phased samples and Japanese TV girls to create this stunning synth album. Short circuiting Steve Roach-style ambient music with pulsating Phantasy Star Online vibes, with a surprising tech beat side B. An extremely promising “coming out” synth album for the sample-master.

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12) Arizona Dream - Glade

Another favorite Russian artist, Arizona Dream explores the wilds just outside the city limits of his home in Bryansk with lush, warm synths and field recordings. There’s a gentle touch to this album, tumbling melodies lost in the hiss of tape - a tranquil collection of landscape sketches.

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11) PowerPC ME - Kmart 1989-1992

When the tape dump of K-Mart’s in-store audio from the late 80′s and early 90′s hit, it was clearly a boon for the vaporwave sample hunters. Luckily PowerPC ME took on the task of sifting through the hours of material to compile what is essentially a haunted ballroom album. The low hum of tracks like “I've never been more happy in my entire life, I can't feel my legs anymore” would be right at home on an early Caretaker release.

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10) Dang Olsen Dream Tape - Zonk

Lo-fi psychlord Dang Olsen Dream Tape returned to Constellation Tatsu to follow up last year’s surprise hit, Just Roll. Zonk follows the same basic formula that made Just Roll so memorable - low key drum machines, tiny squeezebox synths and cheap-n-deep pads, the warm hiss of tape and the promise of something blissful in the distance. At home alongside the likes of x.y.r., Zonk goes deeper into the jungle and never looks back.

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09) Equip - I Dreamed Of A Palace In The Sky

While it’s not the first time someone has attempted the “ost for a non existent game,” Equip has taken the concept to the next level with this love-letter to mid-to-late 90′s JRPGs. Menu sounds, sound effects, gameplay interruptions - much more than an ‘ost,’ I Dreamed emulates the whole of the Cheeto-palmed late night RPG grinding experience, warmed by the glow of a CRT TV.

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08) The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

Stage 1 - September 2016 Here we experience the first signs of memory loss. This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.

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07) 2814 - Rain Temple

After last year’s Birth of a New Day blew up the scene and propelled HKE and telepath to new levels of notoriety, the hype and buildup to Rain Temple was palpable. The payoff was deeply gratifying, as Rain Temple is the established 2814 aesthetic taken to a new extreme. It still manages to find new avenues of expression as it plays out in unique moments like “Transference,” exemplifying the careful planning and deliberate execution of the album.

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06) x.y.r. - waves t*pes vol.2

Russian Formanta-mini master Vladimir Karpov can do no wrong. A short extension to his ‘waves t*pes’ series, the enigmatic artist who has turned so many times to maritime themes now employs them as an allegory for existential exploration. Hoping to "inspire the listener to drift effortlessly through the coastal waters of the subconscious mind,” x.y.r. sends us on yet another placid journey.

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05) Perfume Advert - Foreverware

1080p regulars Aaron Turner and Tom Brown are known for their multi-layered, subtly enticing releases with foundations in electro house. Foreverware takes classic house tropes to new and exciting noir locals, bringing cyberpunk neon night drives with pulsating brilliance.

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04) DARKPYRAMID - Prelude To Destruction

I might just be a sucker for middle chapters, but between the two DARKPYRAMID releases this year Prelude To Destruction delivered the classic cyberpunk aura that made me initially fall in love with this producer (who took my album of the year in 2014). Less sci-fi noir than its predecessor, yet less dense than its sister album, New Humans, Prelude hits all the marks - from the Vangelis styling of “She Still Dreams” to the blissful underwater light of “Awake.”

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03) Dante Mars Ajeto! - Celebrating Digital Artifacts

#NUWRLD of a high order. Painfully emotive sample work in that post-whatever style that is very dear to me. Emotional displays of vulnerability and sensuality stretch out across this behemoth of an album, splintering and cracking, revealing the eponymous digital artifacts in a lite-brite rainbow of color. “A4 november.mp3″ still stops me in my tracks.

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02) Julien - FACE OF GOD

FACE OF GOD is a seamless, exhilarating experience. It’s fast, intricately detailed, smart and adventurous - constructed as if the whole thing was a recorded run-through of some amazing electronic set. “Memory Interface” quickly became one of my favorite tracks this year.

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01) NV - Binasu

And it was my favorite album of 2016!

DERELICT MEGATOWER (DM4) is a 4 hour long NUWRLD mixtape of mostly video game music. The idea was to tell a grand narrative via the methods I had used to make my previous mixes as death’s dynamic shroud.wmv (esp. #NUWRLDの気持ち). The majority of the mixtape is comprised of small sections from these video game tracks looped, recorded onto analog tape, and then sent back into the computer for various processing. I used a tape deck and an old TASCAM cassette 4-track, the combination of which allows for what I refer to as “tape ghosts” - or strange pitched/reversed pieces of other recordings that I mixed into the tape dumps in real time. Some tracks are entirely made from these ghosts, almost all the tracks feature them in some way.

The idea was to treat video game music similarly to the treatment of old LPs in Haunted Ballroom releases, with an emphasis on the ‘mixtape aesthetic’ (abrupt start/stops, disjointed bits between tracks, etc). Pieces of chord progressions and melodies that were particularly moving to me were re-contextualized to tell its post-dystopian story.

Recently I posted the entire list of sample sources in a nested YouTube comment, thinking it might be fun to have it out there for people to discover. The person I responded to has since deleted my comment and started posting on different videos. It was never my intention to give one vaporkid the keys to the kingdom, so here it is!

Most of the music was recorded onto tape in large passes, so there are almost no files for the tracks and some of the sources have been lost to me. I’ve done the best I can to reconstruct the list here.

http://deathsdynamicshroud.bandcamp.com/album/derelict-3

DM4 Sample Source List

Final Fantasy XI Piano Collection

DUNE/ Gumby Theme

Sonic 3D Blast (Saturn Version)

Earthbound

Bomberman 64

Reverse Tape Ghost (Blackbox)

Sonic CD (US)

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Le Mans (1971 Film)

All The Love In The World (The Korgis)

Conquering The World (Genesis Days)

Bomberman 64

Mario is Missing (SNES Days)

**Original Synth Track**

Super Mario 64

Riptide (Robert Palmer)

Ocarina of Time Rearrange Album

Ocarina of Time Rearrange Album

Killing Moon (Echo And The Bunnymen)

Shadowgate 64

Nights: Journey of Dreams (Wii)

Monster Manor (3DS Street Pass Game)

Final Fantasy XI

Phantasy Star Universe

**Original Synth Track**

Sonic & Knuckles

MST3K Skit (Boggy Creek II) / Animal Crossing New Leaf

Q*BERT (SNES Days)

Final Fantasy XIV 1.0

Hindu Times (Oasis)

Silent Hill 2

SimTower (Gameplay Sounds)

Daytona USA

Animal Crossing Wild World - K.K.’s Choice Mix!

Phantasy Star Online Episode 4

??? VGM

Batman (Genesis Days)

Reverse Tape Ghost (Riptide)

She’s So High (Blur)

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Amor The Invincible (1984 Film)

Beta64 YouTube Video

Sonic Adventure

??? VGM

PlayOnline (Final Fantasy XI Developer’s Corner)

Final Fantasy XI

Mystical Ninja (N64)

**Original Synth Track**

Everybody Everybody (Blackbox)

??? VGM

Star Onions (Final Fantasy XI Rearrange)

Quest 64

Gremlins 2 (NES Days)

MST3K Skit (Time Chasers)

**Original Synth Track**

Phantasy Star Online

Mystical Ninja??

Majora’s Mask

Phantasy Star Universe

??? N64? VGM

Nights: Journey of Dreams (Wii)

Animal Crossing (GCN)

Sega CD Bios

Goemon's Great Adventure

**Original Synth Track**

Super Mario Sunshine

Sonic CD (Japanese)

??? VGM

??? VGM

Final Fantasy XIV 1.0

Mystical Ninja (N64)

Mr. Crowley (Ozzy)

Virtua Cop

Reverse Tape Ghost (Major’s Mask)

??? VGM

Sonic Adventure

Animal Crossing

**Original Synth Track**

MST3K Skit (Boggy Creek II) / Banjo Kazooie (N64)

Sonic 3 (Genesis Days)

Animal Crossing New Leaf

Mystical Ninja 64

Phantasy Star Universe

Listen to a mix featuring these albums and a mix of honorable mentions here:

HCMJ’s 2015 Year End Mix

HCMJ’s 2015 Other Favorites

20) Skylar Spence - Prom King

Counter to the plunderphonics of the vapor/future funk scenes he left in his wake, FKA Saint Pepsi flashed his songwriting chops and created a neo-nostalgic pop album from scratch. Prom King has all the bounce and exhilaration of Daft Punk disco while maintaining a contemporarily informed production style in a rainbow burst of pop.

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19) 仮想夢プラザ - 仮想夢プラザ

Extraterrestrial life-force ‘t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者’ set a new bar for ridiculous album length with this 16.5 hour collection of serially released dreams. Each of its 31 tracks clocks in at 31 minutes and change, exploring and developing haunted loops and themes. Just when it lulls through 15 minutes of repetition, a whole new element will introduce itself and apply gravity to the trance.

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18) Holly Herndon - Platform

Broken rhythms and spinning bursts of vocals, Platform explores human darkness with futuristic reflection. Projecting and warping her voice over waterfalls of mercilessly chopped samples, the album weaves a hyper-human experience. Biological and exposed, intricately produced.

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17) x.y.r. - Mental Journey To B.C.

The albums of x.y.r. are inescapable. Purposely ignoring the turns and trends of the contemporary mutations of ambient music, Mental Journey To B.C. has Russian Formanta-Mini master Vladimir Karpov penning a new tale of exotic worlds. With an expanded arsenal of synths and machines it’s his most diverse album.

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16) Lamitina - ATLAS//RADAR

Asleep in the vastness of Dream Catalogue was this experimental diamond. An alien beat tape built from grooves and guitar samples slowly deteriorates over 21 tracks - like a digital disintegration loop it whirls into globs of sound until only static remains.

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15) Hakobune - Love Knows Where

Japanese ambient god Hakobune has a rare silk touch. Love Knows Where moves as it expands, sound spreading like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water. The production is as deep as it is crystalline, touching upon a Steve Roach level of spectral fullness.

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14) DARKPYRAMID - Cytherea Somniare

The mysterious DARKPYRAMID continues their conquest of the cyberpunk future with another expansive android fem noir. Overbearingly dark, as if blade runner Dekard were projecting Silent Hill’s Otherworld, Cytherea draws us into the pyramid in the form of a sci-fi masterpiece.

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13) +you - World Tour

World Tour is a delicate exhibition. With moments of haunted ballroom, plaza fountain, Shenmue casino - it’s an album of many parts all centered around an ectoplasmic emptiness. A period of dreamy near silence explodes into a twisted and broken weather report with a chorus line of ghosts providing the evening’s entertainment.

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12) Giant Claw - Deep Thoughts

Deep Thoughts is a meeting place between electronic expressionism and experimental composition. Giant Claw’s unending stream of musical consciousness is channeled into a generic MIDI soundscape, as much pop as it is modern classical. Soulless MIDI is transformed into something evocative.

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11) Darksleep - Obviate

Out of chaos something moves - Obviate is a beautiful mess of digital synths and nauseating sample clusters. Hundreds of puzzle pieces, out of order and scrambled, pushing out against the boundaries of electronic music. It’s a specter of time psychologically lingering as the end comes.

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10) Golden Ratio Syrup - Golden Ratio Syrup

It wasn’t until long after GRS’s release that UK producer Rudi Zygadlo was revealed as being behind it’s trailing emptiness and warped planetary menagerie. In a year marked by a broken sound aesthetic GRS stood on its own with silky choirs, alien synths, and electroacoustic/modern classical experimentation.

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9) Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete

Garden of Delete is OPN’s most labyrinthine release to date, a complex album with excruciating detail. An almost-industrial metallic darkness permeates through a kaleidoscope of forms, including gorily-eschewed vocaloid pop - like a blood spitting Hatsune Miku gasping her final words through clenched teeth as thrashing guitar and dirty NIN chiptunes dance over beds of synth pads.

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8) Piper Spray - Krolorog

Piper Spray shuffles a deck of tapes, glued together with mud, painted by fantasy and flashes of inspiration. The album sputters and trips with warmth and exuberance, occasionally breaking into longing melodies over a tense anxiety. It’s an extra-dimensional shock into the moment that still takes the time to get swept into reverie.

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7) Golden Living Room - Post-Internet

NUWRLD practitioner GLR returns to Phantasy Star Online’s technopunk themes while also expanding into the music of Final Fantasy XI bathed in the light of the VR dawn. The forward glances of the early millennium are expressed as statements of the now as the division between the real and the virtual draws ever closer.

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6) Dang Olsen Dream Tape - Just Roll

In a musical landscape marred by VST ambient albums and confused vaporpunks, it’s easy to give up on the possibility of New Age music existing in any relevant form in 2015. Then came Just Roll, a tape not pretending to be something it’s not, that in the wake of x.y.r. marks a new era of New Age sensibility. Colorful dreams lost in a fog of distant rhythmic pulses.

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5) 2814 - 新しい日の誕生

2814’s sophomore album was easily one of the most iconic and era-defining releases of the year. Pianos trickle and fall like rain on a windowpane, deep pulses and phased out ambience coalesce is this brilliant post-vapor dreamwork. Five years out this album will be remembered as a turning point for the dream scene.

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4) MCFERRDOG - “Lawd Forgive Me”

The 1080p label was absolutely unstoppable this year, and MCFERRDOG led the charge. 90’s techno tropes are turned on their head in this post-nostalgic endless rave. Classic and contemporary, repetition and trance meet modern beat making in this danceable work of hypnotic art.

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3) SOPHIE - Product

There’s no denying the raw talent coming out of PC Music’s stable of producers. SOPHIE more than anyone completely massacred pop music with his Product this year, an album that captures the pure visceral exhilaration of pop hooks and crystal production. “Vyzee” was track of the year for me - shake-shake-shake it up and make it fiiiizzzz!!!

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2) Nico Niquo - Epitaph

Perhaps the lineage will be remembered as R+7 → DARK WEB → Epitaph, as each of those albums seem to complete the former’s last thought. The breathy choir patches, clicky high-hats, the chordal composition, the eclectic sound, and the modern fixation with great gaps of negative space are all expertly applied to this tapestry of sound. This one was very close to being my favorite album released this year…

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1) mus.hiba - White Girl

…but in the end I simply could not deny how much mus.hiba had become a part of my life. Easily the album I enjoyed and listened to the most this year, White Girl is a refreshing take on Japanese minimal electronic music. Ice cold synths and deep beats, all crowned by the breathy, synthesized voice of UTAUloid virtual idol Yufu Sekka. Reflective and deceptively simple, so high in its craft/art that it doesn’t need all of those post-OPN tropes to ascend to relevance. It’s an ice covered garden, expressive and concise - it’s a snowglobe I can never wait to swim inside of and it was my favorite album of 2015!