HCMJ’s Favorite Albums of 2017!
Listen to a mix featuring these albums here:
HCMJ’s 2017 End Of Year Mix
Carla dal Forno - The Garden
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
