#endof2015

Neon Indian — Vega Intl Night School (Mom + Pop)

Alan Palomo had a lot to answer for before Vega Intl Night School, like launching the shiny-but-gutless genre known as chillwave and making the world safe for bedroom tapers who wanted to channel, oh, I dunno, Milli Vanilla instead of Pavement and Pollard. But with this third and inexplicably lauded release he explored new levels of messy, meaningless juxtaposition and empty references. Pitchfork heard Vega Intl and envisioned “utopian all-night clubs where synth-pop, disco, funk, R&B, and early hip-hop were feeding off one another.” I put it on and saw Palomo gorging on uncooked Prince and Chic, getting violently ill and blowing his funk in chunks all over a tawdry shag rug. This was the record that got Dusted going on an “albums we hate” feature. Congratulations for extraordinary awfulness. — Jennifer Kelly

Father John Misty — I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop)

Father John Misty was revealed to us with a Letterman performance of "Bored in the USA" where bourgeois pleas for a craftsman home are met with a laugh track. I liked the deadpan culture-jamming, and assumed the song was a vehicle for discomfort, rather than a vehicle for a singer-songer career. Odd to see what I took for a Zach Galifianakis-styled gag mutate into a launch for a celebrated album. He's coked up and cocksure as peak Lindsay Buckingham, with a similarly strong and colorless voice and Pet Sounds obsession. He examines and inhabits the asshole-esque persona, going deep into an imaginary Laurel Canyon. We're supposed to gawk like an actor that lost or gained 30 lbs. for a role. The movie as a whole is flat and vast, Oscar-bait that's forgotten a few seasons later. Being aware of your shortcomings doesn't necessarily make the shortcomings into virtues. — Ben Donnelly

Protomartyr — The Agent Intellect (Hardly Art)

Ever get the sense that you listened to a new record for the last time, like there's nothing about it you'd ever consider revisiting? That's how I felt about the last Protomartyr record, not a bad album by any stretch, but also one where there is no nuance, nothing to uncover on repeat listens — not even the indecipherable vocals of a song like "Tarpeian Rock." It sounds like the work of a band that's digested its criticism and found influence in it, which is unfortunate because they were on the right track with Under Color of Official Right and went the dramatic route instead. I've said this before, but in my time writing Still Single there has been nothing that has slowed me down more than average records. They're fine, some people will love them, their friends will support them, but they give nothing back. Listening to them is a chore.

Particularly where The Agent Intellect hits its back half, in harrowing songs about death and loss, they play to a sort of horror soundtrack crescendo that I don't ever care to hear again. It's an easy choice from a band that didn't seem like it would take any aspect of its career or sound easily. It's hard to even write this, as Protomartyr has grown and developed as a band significantly since their first single, and I really appreciate the narrative depth of Joe Casey's lyrics, but this thing just flatlined for me. And any critics who were crowing about how "they are the most important band since U2" are automatically stricken from the record, as there is nothing important about U2 that's not in their own heads. I'm a fan of the first Protomartyr 7" and second LP, so maybe they're an every other record sort of band. Here's hoping. — Doug Mosurock

New Order — Music Complete (Mute)

Believe me, I was both excited and ready to give the benefit of the doubt when people started talking about this album as a return to form (and I say that as someone who genuinely loves the awkward but tuneful Get Ready). Unfortunately, Music Complete is pretty much what the cynics would expect from a band of New Order’s vintage— flabby, uneven, sometimes wince-inducing, and far longer than it should be. The highlights here are especially frustrating, because they suggest a completely different album— the opening “Reckless” shows that the band is still good for at least one single. It and the later “Nothing But a Fool” grapple with the uncertainty and regrets of age in a compelling way. If the focus was more on that, or even just the worst offenders were excised (the stretch of “Tutti Frutti”/“People on the High Line”/“Stray Dog,” with the latter’s aimless Iggy Pop monologue being the worst offender, just steals the life from the record) you’d have something that makes an argument for New Order being a vital if reduced force in 2015. As it is, this is serious fans-only stuff, and even we can be offended they thought all 65 minutes here deserved to make the cut. — Ian Mathers

Run the Jewels — Meow the Jewels (Mass Appeal)

We’ve already been through this once, I know, and it can’t be understated that they did eventually clarify the breakdown and where that charity money went, which is refreshingly transparent. But let’s leave aside how it sounds: Even in thanking backers who trusted El-P and Killer Mike to do the right thing with that cash, its intentions are derailed. “We feel like it falls in line with the spirit of who Run the Jewels and the Jewel Runners are, as well as the whole idea behind Meow the Jewels.”

Really? The whole idea behind Meow the Jewels was to support organizations like the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee? I don’t think so. El and Mike are conflating Run the Jewels with Meow the Jewels here, which is dangerous: The former started as a relatively lighthearted vehicle for serious rapping but has morphed into a socially conscious political platform — the latter is a deranged, frivolous product of smug Internet self-absorption. Run the Jewels is voting in local elections and joining organizations like the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee; Meow the Jewels is overeducated keyboard cowboys reposting Vox articles about militiamen in Oregon or football takedowns or sexist thermostats. Does that bother you? Are you offended? Do you know who your Water Reclamation Finance Chair is? The point is that these guys want you to take positive action if you’re sick of the system and tired of complaining.

Meow the Jewels is not that. Meow the Jewels is whining about your gas bill without ever knowing which commerce commissioner the governor you didn’t vote for appointed to jack it up. Meow the Jewels is laughing at racists without considering the role a lack of education in how they came to be. Meow the Jewels is a pat on the back for pledging $10 to get some stickers for your car window. Meow the Jewels isn’t just a bad joke, it’s bad art. But it had to exist, I guess, because everything does. Even philanthropy and cat noise. — Patrick Masterson

Julia Holter — Have You in Your Wilderness (Domino)

I can't make it through Julia Holter's "Feel You" song past the second line, where she enunciates "rainy days in Mexico City" like it's the "Banana Boat Song." I get why the accolades flow towards Holter. Her arrangements are experimental yet wise to pop. Like Owen Pallet and Joanna Newsom, it's as reasonable to consider her a composer as much as a songwriter. But these tracks are full of interesting instincts gone awry. I can get caught up in the Kurt Weill gray skies of "How Long," but elsewhere the atmospherics dissolve to mush. Careful textural shifts aren't that much different than DX-7 presets. But the big problem is how she tries to enliven the ethereal with those awkward ESL enunciations, veering towards Tune-Yards/Dirty Projectors pastry-filled-with-turds preciousness. — Ben Donnelly

Mac DeMarco — Another One (Captured Tracks)

Honestly, I was expecting to like this one, and even thought that if I could just keep going, its plain vanilla sameness would reveal itself as classicism. But nothing doing, this album is dull, dull, dull, in the cleanest, most careful way. I’d say it’s like a warm bath, but I enjoy warm baths — this is a warm bath full of piss, which would be cozy and relaxing if it didn’t smell like piss. —Jennifer Kelly

Viet Cong — Viet Cong (Flemish Eye/Jagjaguwar)

This can’t be ignored, so let’s just get it out of the way: These jackasses picked a name that’s upsetting to people, for no real reason other than they thought it sounded cool. They were informed that, for example, there are people in Canada who have lived through things that make hearing the words “Viet Cong” bring on panic attacks. What's really reprehensible with the band is that their response has been a lot of mealy-mouthed bullshit (and yes, their defenders at the Polaris Prize were among the worst for this too). I guess it helps that both the band and the majority of their indie-rock audience aren’t personally effected by anything about the name, so clearly it isn’t a real problem, right? Look, anyone can and will and does screw up— the real mark of assholes is the way they react when they get called on it. Eventually, under pressure, claiming you’ll change your name (we’re still waiting) but playing out every option in the rationalization playbook is pretty much the worst one short of a Black Pussy-style doubling down.

This seemed like anomalous year for music, where hype collected around records that would have been happy to remain cult items: Kamasi Washington and Courtney Barnett don’t seem like they’re going to lead new waves of spiritual jazz and neurotic power pop. They made some seriously unfussy records, though, and got solid response. I dug ‘em. Big, aggregated year end lists tend to celebrate records that also seem designed reach the broadest possible audience. The kind of records that flatter the listener, providing in-the-know references and eclectic journeys. These records don’t flatter. They just reach.

Guitar, Solo!

Sir Richard Bishop - Tangier Sessions (Drag City)

Shana Cleveland & the Sandcastles - Oh Man Cover the Ground (Suicide Squeeze)

Stara Rzeka - Zamknely sie oczy ziemi (Instant Classic)

Ulaan Khol - Salt (Soft Abuse)

Coming into this decade, it didn’t feel like guitar, as stand-alone instrument, could be a source for innovation. To me, all the avenues seemed to have been mapped. But the last few years, that’s changed.

These four records were undoubtably my favorites, though it’s hard to pick a favorite among them. They’re all basically solo guitar performances, Ulaan Khol being the only who’s not primarily acoustic. To elevate one of these players is to discount the investigations of the others. Between them, six strings get dressed with varying amounts of spare accompaniment and teeter towards avant, folk and rock forms, without ever crossing into a specific genre. There’s some lyrics on Stara Rzeka and Shana Cleveland, adding up to about four great hooks, still in service to the guitar work. Consequently, none of these albums hit on their first pass. But boy do they burnish on repeated listens. One could image Bishop, Cleveland, Smith and Ziolek’s names on the cover a bizarro-world guitar tablature magazine, where calisthenics and nerdy acrobatics aren’t the point, and the guitar is recognized as a tool to the otherworldly.

Oh Man Cover the Ground is a set of acoustic songs that feel as sturdy as an old house, creaking like old floorboards and heavy doors, foundation tilting, but tested by storms. Shana Cleveland’s main gig, La Luz, follows nearly opposite instincts, with it’s hyper and ornate surf rock. She’s just as powerful a guitarist in that mode (and La Luz’s Weirdo Shrine is another 2015 favorite). But these songs are line drawings, modest and filled with perfect marks. Cleveland covers the same ground Nina Nastasia, presenting melody pared down to an essential image, though Cleveland’s melodies follow from playing more than voice. Chamber instruments contribute drafty cello or oboe, but mostly she feels like she’s playing in a dusty parlor.

Speaking of parlors, Sir Richard fell in love with a small antique guitar, and Tangier Sessions feels like the first days of a passionate fling, like they can’t get enough of each other. As with Dave Rawlings 1935 Epiphone, I get the sense that this isn’t the easiest instrument to play, but destiny sent it to the right hands. The peculiarities focus his far-flung talents towards flamenco and Moorish scales that suit the sonorities of the instrument. On “Safe House” he runs though a maze, testing corridors that might hold dead ends, never hitting the walls, but coming close. “International Zone” chatters out Berber vocabulary, forming longer and longer sentences, each ending with a note that hangs like blues. The final track traces out a delicate arpeggio with hesitating pauses. Only when he nudges an idea over the next rise do we get clues that this is an improvised work. Those slight hesitations hint at how he short-circuits the conscious thought process.

Kuba Ziolek’s first Stara Rzeka topped my list two years ago, in part because he made a puzzle I couldn’t unravel. He unraveled it this year with an epic album that made it clear that krautrock, metal and electronics were an aside to guitar composition. Some of these tracks are fingerpicking journeys that could stand alone, but are made more interesting when he buries the trail in white noise. Somehow, the electronics make the acoustic work seem more ancient, like a digitally rescued sepia portrait.

I spent the year catching up with the back catalog of Steven R. Smith and how nice of him to provide a particularly strong addition to his catalog at the end of the year. Best as I can tell, everything Smith does is at least spectacularly interesting, so it wasn’t really a coincidence. Ulaan Khol’s Salt is a rock album, in that it draws most of it power from riffs and atmosphere. Those riffs are hefty, but not exactly heavy. The backing is too sparse to add weight, and the whole endeavor feels absent of both ego and id. So it’s raw, but hardly primal. Like a dilapidated factory town theatre where the Who and Crazy Horse played in the seventies, the grandeur feels like a echo.

Blood on the Tracks

Joanna Newsom - Divers (Drag City)

Dan Melchior’s Broke Review - Lords of the Manor (In the Red)

Jazime Sullivan - Reality Show (RCA)

I was about 16 years old when I first heard Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” It instantly struck me as one of the greatest things ever, because it also struck me as perfect portrait of what it feels like to be in your thirties, plumbing emotions I’d never heard in a rock song.

It painted a world where you’d be less bold than in your youthful plans, but finally comfortable with your identity. As the particulars pile up in the song, the narrator stands, mouth agape, as to what has transpired. None of his friends lives are epically dramatic, but verse after verse captures the narrator’s spinning head. And who makes rock songs about just accepting fate for what it is? It was a song that felt like it might be helpful for real life. Now having lived a good way past my thirties, I can report that, yes, “Tangled Up in Blue” is an excellent emotional weather report for a certain stage. And hey, I just noticed that the tracks in blood on the tracks is a pun.

The songs on Divers, Reality Show and Lords of the Manor drew me in for the same reasons. Each captures it’s creator coming to terms with a new stage in their life. All three are established enough as artists that solid material flows naturally. The surface of each of these records is expert, even if they don’t share anything with each other. Newsom needs her ever-shifting embroidery as much as Melchior needs nine minutes of a two-note bass to accomplish what they want to accomplish. The point of these records is to get through self doubt.

Reality Show opens chanting the word “Dumb”, and the romantic exhaustion grows from there. Sullivan can hold big, stagy notes, but she frequently steps back into a growl. There’s no bluesy sorrow in the growl, just as there’s no diva triumph in the belting. She thought she’d be further along in love at the end of her twenties. But nope, the necessary cooperation isn’t happening. Some of the songs come off cynical at first, then deepen. “Stupid Girl”, struts like the mod-soul of Amy Winehouse or Aloe Black. It feels like a warning on the surface, but grows ambiguous. She misses surrendering to blind attraction. The house anthem “If You Dare” talks about partying crazy and going for the top of the world, but her delivery is reserved. She’s calibrating expectations. That’s different than giving up, but when you’re struggling in the middle of the calibration, it doesn’t always feel that way.

Lords of the Manor seems to have been created rapidly, without a lot of forethought, by a guy who’s always juggling a lot of projects. Strangely, vulnerability leaks out of Melchior’s punk invective. The music is simple, lunkheaded even, and the lyrics are based around simple conceits - tears as rain, zoos are sad, Glen Beck fans are spooky. But no matter how sludgy and sarcastic the record gets, it’s determined to slog through and carry you along with it.

Divers even more oblique, of course– Newsom has amassed a following of analytic fans as dedicated as Joyceans walking Dublin on Bloomsday. Her releases never lack for coverage, and as Divers made its way through the hype cycle, helpful footnotes emerged. The album, we’re told, is about dealing with the realities of aging, death and loss. Her art is always multi-layered, but this one seems literally so. From the buried indian villages under Manhattan to the space soldiers of the “Lightborne Brigade”, Newsom seems to be trying to figure out how her span fits into the timeline of history. It’s disarming that she makes such pretense modest, lovely and fun. It’s disarming that once again she’s figured out a new way to be disarming.

Stretching

Christian Scott - Stretch Music (Ropeadope)

Fuzz - II (In The Red)

Pridjevi - Pridjevi (Trouble in Mind)

A lot of this past years fusion and experimentation tends to be the work of individuals at workstations (along those lines, I liked Four Tet, Matchess and FKA Twigs.) Contrary to the time, these albums breath group rapport.

Christian Scott’s Stretch Music is nominally not jazz, says Scott, and on tracks like “Tantric” and “Perspectives”, with whirring chirps for a rhythm, his team can sound a lot like jazz-inflected techno, think Theo Parrish or Faulty DL. The assembled crew drips with charisma, and Scott’s trumpet cuts a swaggering-yet-thoughtful profile. Elena Pinderhughes’ flute give a early 70s feel throughout, surprisingly suited to the breakbeat-like trap work. And while the motor runs cool and smoothly over this album, the bits of Latin and rock textures that fall into the gears spark and put the machine off balance. Like a gyroscope, they always sway back to center.

Fuzz is a band with a plan, determined to keep their riffs within the boundaries of proto-metal. They end up finding a variety of sounds that let them stick to their manifesto without lapsing into pastiche. “Rat Race” has the blown-mind friendliness of Meat Puppets. “Sleestak” imagines Jaki Leibziet sitting in with Iommi. The strings enter, and it works. The jam goes on past ten minutes and it works. It all works.

Pridjevi’s debut is wonderfully loose and efficient psych, getting to the outer reaches within minutes. Second by second, they can remind me of Os Mutantes or Rowland S. Howard. They aren’t sunny, but it’s still uplifting. Or levitating. The woozy upstrokes and paired vocals drift like smoke filling a room, out the windows, billowing into the night.

Ten More

GG King - Unending Darkness (Scavenger of Death)

Miss Red - “Murder” (self-released mixtape)

Cold Beat - Into the Air (Crime on the Moon)

Ufomammut - Ecate (Neurot)

Matchess - Somnaphoria (Trouble in Mind)

La Luz - Weirdo Shrine (Hardly Art)

Follakzoid - III (Sacred Bones)

Napalm Death - Apex Predator/Easy Meat (Century Media)

Desperate Journalist - S/T and Good Luck EP (Fierce Panda)

I heard fewer new albums in 2015 compared to 2014, and missed many things that I am sure I would have liked, but I wrote a lot more about what I did hear and I went to a lot more shows too, a lot of excellent shows, in Boston (Sarah Hennies, Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes, and Fraufraulein, via the always excellent Non-Event), Portsmouth (Jason Lescalleet, Olivia Block, Kevin Drumm at the 3S Artspace), and Los Angeles (courtesy of Steve Flato, Richard Kamerman, Joe Panzner, Greg Stuart, Michael Pisaro,and everyone at the wulf). I found myself returning to more records more frequently and I became more familiar with their ideas, more involved in the worlds they created. Some of those records and shows got me back on the creative boat and now I’m writing and recording sounds of my own again (or someone’s sounds anyways, they don’t belong to me). It was a good year for focusing.

Once I allowed myself to slow down and move at my own pace, the creative, renewing force of sound and art re-asserted itself. I bought more records and tried more new things because I wasn’t always inundated at the end of the day or worn out by the flux of whatever someone else was saying was worth my time. Which isn’t to say I didn’t check out records other people wrote about. That United Bible Studies LP is one of my favorites this year and I have to get my hands on that new Áine O'Dwyer record before it goes out of print. I don't mean to pontificate about buying less music or something stupid like that, even if that was part of what helped me. The point is that I’m happy I haven’t gone deaf yet and that music still excites me the way it did when I was 15 and finding Coil and Merzbow for the first time. Something missing came back.

Below is an unordered accounting of the six albums I most enjoyed in 2015, plus a longer list with some briefer comments here and there. One album, however, stood out as particularly significant. It was the first thing that came to mind and the one thing that stayed there as I went through all the records that left the greatest impression on me, so it comes first and is my choice for album of the year. Here’s to an even happier (and a more hopeful) 2016:

Joseph Clayton Mills, Sifr (Suppedaneum)

In my review, I played with the idea that Sifr isn’t a piece of music so much as it is a multimedia thing, a collection of poetry, photography, and visual art with an album to boot. Ascribing the project to Mills alone is misleading, even though the CD with the music on it bears his name. Ryoko Akama, Sylvain Chauveau, Jonathan Chen, Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes, Michael Pisaro, and Adam Sonderberg were all involved in the release, their scores acting as performances of the music instead of the other way around. The idea alone is excellent and had things turned out less sharply, Sifr would still be a remarkable release. But everything about Sifr is sharp, from the gorgeous music to the surprising ways in which each of the participants interpreted it. There’s also a kind of musical reverse perspective at work in that the sounds and the ideas presented all converge on the listener. It’s almost impossible not to respond to the process of interpretation on display. If music is often a kind of representation, in Sifr’s case it’s an open space where the audience can participate in its creation in exactly the same way as the artists involved. Maybe that’s why Joseph chose to package the release in an envelope, because he wanted people to write back.

Devin DiSanto/Nick Hoffman, Three Exercises (ErstAEU)

I told myself I would only pick one Erstwhile record to write about at the end of the year, but that’s an impossible task. There’s nothing that Jon Abbey released in 2015 that doesn’t deserve a mention on this list. And if you think that’s an exaggeration or just the product of a fanboy’s enthusiasm, take note of how many different Erstwhile albums ended up on people’s best-of lists. If it isn’t the Graham Lambkin/Michael Pisaro collaboration, then it’s the Kevin Parks/Vanessa Rossetto disc or the new Kevin Drumm/Jason Lescalleet album or the puzzling work of Eric La Casa and Taku Unami. Erstwhile dropped seven solid albums in less than 12 months and not one of them is skippable, but with space a consideration and exclusion the rule, Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises comes to the fore. The excitement of that recording and the playfulness it captures are two big reasons it stands out. It's unpredictable and theatrical, a Möbius strip that twists through elements of documentary music-making, voyeurism, and architecture. There’s a temptation to try and decode the thing like it's a puzzle, to map out every event DiSanto and Hoffman enacted, but at least some of the fun comes in relaxing that critical muscle and surrendering to the idea that it’s not always possible to know what the hell is going on.

Greg Stuart & Ryoko Akama, Kotoba Koukan (Lengua de Lava)

Greg Stuart’s performance on “fade in and out procedure” is one of my favorites of the year. It’s subtle, slow, and in theory relatively simple, involving the fading in and out, as the title implies, of five sounds over a period of 25 minutes. I imagine in practice it’s not nearly so easy. If you have had the chance to see Greg Stuart perform, you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, know that his focus, intensity, and talent refute the idea that open scores such as this one, or any of the others on Kotoba Koukan, are simple or easy to play. As for Akama, her compositions are fascinating combinations of poetry, visual art, and seemingly contradictory instructions. The more I think about them, the more they seem like prisms. Thought enters them at one wavelength and leaves them dispersed, fanned out in surprising directions. What at first seems impossible or unlikely, such as producing "soundless sounds," becomes an occasion for seeking out some new aspect of music-making. In Stuart, Akama found a perfect partner for that task.

Coppice, Cores/Eruct (Category of Manifestation)

Of the two full-lengths released by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in 2015, Cores/Eruct is the more rhythmic, somehow more mysterious one. Since first hearing it back in February, I’ve tried to figure out what exactly Coppice are up to on it but have come up short. Materially, the album sounds like it is made up of old failing machines and instruments, or of parts of instruments: the bellows, nuts, bolts, and motors of accordions, organs, cassette players, and so on. Its structure is more elusive, a hall of mirrors that falls into itself until it condenses and becomes a mood. Even though “Son Form” and “Bluing” have identifiable components and are maybe even regular enough to be notated, their effects are more unpredictable and unexplainable. I’m also sometimes reminded of Twin Peaks and Angelo Badalamenti when I listen to this, but I have no idea why because superficially there is very little resemblance. Maybe it’s in the ghostly qualities of the instrumentation, or maybe it’s a result of the eerie spaciousness in all of the performances. Whatever it is, it makes for great music.

Michael Pisaro, A Mist Is a Collection of Points (New World Records)

Sample from New World Records here

Seeing A Mist performed live in Los Angeles did a lot for my understanding of it. Maybe because mists make me think of distances and spaces before anything else, hearing and seeing the work performed in a sizable theater was what I needed to get at its essence, or at least a part of it. In person, the points of the title were the places where pianist Phillip Bush and percussionist Greg Stuart played their instruments, the mist the interaction and dissolution of those instruments in the air, along with the sine waves produced by Joe Panzner, who was not on the stage at all. On album, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that multiple instruments are actually being played. The nature of the piece is that they get lost, fade away, and re-emerge in unexpected places. Melodies travel in circles, crotales are subsumed in high frequency tones and vice versa, and hammered chords turn into warped resonances. So when I saw Greg start to play his crotales and I couldn’t tell whether he or Joe Panzner was responsible for the ensuing dissonances, something clicked. If a mist is a collection of points, then music might be like a mist too, organized and definable, but always slipping through our fingers anyway.

Jeph Jerman/Tim Barnes, Matterings (Erstwhile)

In a year filled with fantastic live shows, Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes put on one of the very best concerts I’ve ever seen, at the Goethe-Institut in Boston on May 22nd. Some of their material that night was familiar to me as it came from Matterings, which I had been listening to almost non-stop since it’s release in February. At some point, though, Jeph started to spin two or three small silver bearings around in a shallow, dimpled bowl that looked like it could have served as an ashtray. Held up to a microphone and combined with a surprisingly melodic blend of synthesized noise and contact-mic percussion (using a wooden board and what I think was a screw; check out minute 14 in the video above), those two little beads turned into two massive boulders spinning inside a metal drum. The ensuing drone felt like it could swallow the room whole. The special edition of Matterings, which comes in a sizeable wooden box, includes a second CD with some of that live material on it, but if you can’t get a copy, the standard edition offers more than enough to chew on, including “In Situ,” one of my favorite songs of the year.

Ilyas Ahmed, I Am All Your Own (Immune)

John Chantler, Still Light, Outside (1703 Skivbolaget)

Sounds so good with the volume turned up. A powerful, physically imposing album recorded on St. John at Hackney’s three manual Mander organ and in Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS.

Loren Chasse, The Sodden Floor (Notice Recordings)

Morton Feldman, Clarinet and String Quartet (Saltern)

Fraufraulein, Extinguishment (Another Timbre)

Jürg Frey, 24 Wörter (Edition Wandelweiser)

Jürg Frey released a whole lot of gorgeous music last year. I could have picked Another Timbre’s Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014 to fill this spot, but went with 24 Wörter because it’s a self-contained cycle comprising 27 self-contained wholes. Even pieces like “Tänzer” feel complete and significant, despite their sub-minute duration. The music is sparse and fragile in places, but some of my favorite Frey melodies are here too, many of them strong and brightly asserted. Some people might need time to adjust to Regula Konrad’s voice, especially if they like their music instrumental, but it’s an easy adjustment to make, especially after hearing a song like “Sehnsuchtslandschaft.”

Heather Leigh, I Abused Animal (Ideologic Organ)

Try not to stomp a hole in the floor listening “The Return.” I came to this one pretty late in the year, but that song had me on the first playthrough. The rest of it snapped into place a listen or two later. Like the Nzʉmbe and Radu Malfatti records (below), I Abused Animal generates an atmosphere of its own: it's stripped down (maybe even more than the Malfatti record in a way) woozy, and heavy, even when "All That Heaven Allows” isn’t on repeat.

Jason Lescalleet, This Is What I Do (Glistening Examples)

By my count, Jason Lescalleet was responsible for 15 new releases in 2015, 12 of which were part of the This Is What I Do series. Finding one and singling it out as a favorite would be an exercise in futility. In all honesty, I only ever made it part way through the series anyway, stopping somewhere in August just so I could reflect on what I'd heard. You might think these are collections of improvisations or sketches because of the rate of Jason's output, but I'm not convinced of that at all. Each volume feels too tight, too carefully edited and considered to be just an exercise or just the product of some fooling around in the studio. Maybe I'm wrong. That's OK. I'll keep checking in when I can as it doesn't look like Jason is going to stop anytime soon (Volume 16 hit the Internet on December 31st, beating the New Year buzzer). Even if this series were to end, he has his Glistening Examples label to run. On top of the releases with his name attached, he released six albums by other artists last year, including the much-loved new LP from Marc Baron. The question is, will he keep doing what he does, or will there be a non-series, non-collaborative LP from him in 2016? Where does the process end and the product begin?

Radu Malfatti, One Man and a Fly (Cathnor)

A misleading title if only because there’s so much more here than Radu and a fly buzzing out. Literally. There’s an airplane, a car, a lawnmower I think, maybe a cow in there somewhere, the sound of wind, and a trombone of course. If that sounds flippant, it isn’t meant to be. One Man and a Fly is one of the most calming and strangely atmospheric records I own. Strange because at times it almost disappears into the background. Some small noise will then alert you to the fact that in the perceived silence something very slight and very interesting has been going on the whole time, and it wasn’t coming from your window or the next apartment over. The environment may contribute of course, but Cathnor did a wonderful job producing this and creating a still, somehow full environment on CD.

Meridian, Tuyeres (caduc.)

Nzʉmbe, Titubeo (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

Pop music of a sort, dredged from the subconscious and shaped into surreal arrangements for synthesizer, guitar, alto sax, trumpet, and accordion. One of the stranger records I heard and one the more pleasant surprises.

Claudio Parodi, Primo del terzo (Unfathomless)

Keith Rowe/John Tilbury, enough still not to know (SOFA)

James Saunders, assigned #15 (Another Timbre)

Dark, glassy, glacial music performed by Apartment House, based on one of James Saunders’s #[unassigned] pieces. Chamber organ, dictaphone, and shortwave radio mix with cello, flute, viola, and piano, creating something that sounds both seismological and machine-like.

United Bible Studies, The Ale’s What Cures Ye (MIE)

It’s worth noting, however, that two of my joint-top albums are by African-American women, at the end of a year that, as well as the ongoing calamity in the Middle East and Donald Trump’s daily expressions of arseholery, has been dominated by awful stories of police brutality of black people and the long overdue Black Lives Matter campaign. Gary, Indiana, resident Jlin seemed to crystallise this crackling tension in the crisp, taut lines of her grimy footwork on Dark Energy, seemingly creating a musical reflection of a city where urban deprivation overwhelmingly afflicts African-American citizens and where institutional indifference allowed a serial killer to dump his female victims’ bodies in several of Gary’s countless abandoned and run-down houses. Matana Roberts, meanwhile, released her most powerful statement yet in the form of the third instalment of her Coin Coin series, River Run Thee, a solo workout that bridged folktronica with free jazz to explore the collective ghosts of America’s history of slavery and racism. I was privileged to witness a full performance of the album during the European leg of her tour, and was moved to tears by Roberts’ intensity, emotion and anger. 

The phantoms of the past seemed to traverse Heather Leigh’s I Abused Animal as well, albeit in a more abstract way, with its combination of noisy, feedback-laden pedal steel and arcane folk drawn from the Appalachian traditions she was born into and the windswept rural lore of Scotland, where she resides. More traditionally, Jessika Kenney continued her odyssey into Middle and Far Eastern musics of centuries past, Laura Cannell released a sophomore album of medieval-inspired devotional music for fiddle and recorder (albeit with a subsequent remix album that drew the dots between traditional folk and the modern electronic scene in the UK), Richard Skelton continued his solemn explorations of drone and folk as The Inward Circles, and United Bible Studies harked back to the golden era of sixties and seventies British folk-rock with their excellent The Ale’s What Cures Ye. 

Noise rock received a welcome shot in the arm in 2015, after many years of aimless drifting. Whilst Helm’s Luke Younger completely transcended his noise roots to create his most expansive and experimental album yet, via nods to Balearic disco and industrial rock, the likes of Sightings, Liberez and Ramleh all pulled off masterstrokes of rock-and-song-based noise, albeit in wildly different styles, proving there’s life in what had seemed a very old dog of a genre not so long ago. Harsh noise fans will have also revelled in Exploring Jezebel’s On a Business Trip to London (Dominick “Prurient” Fernow’s better album of the year) and John Wiese’s Deviate From Balance. Perhaps most striking of the noise albums to grace 2015 was Consumer Electronics’ brutal Dollhouse Songs, which expanded on 2014’s Estuary English with a rampaging diatribe against inequality, prejudice and injustice with the band’s usual mixture of “colourful” language and unrelenting power electronics viciousness. In an echo of some of the above, lead singer Philip Best handed the microphone to his American wife Sarah on two songs, broadening Consumer Electronics’ vision to lead an assault on what has been a turbulent year for the Stars and Stripes. 

Jlin’s triumphant debut followed on from a 2014 dominated by exceptional electronic albums, and this year was no different. Aside from Dark Energy, techno, dance and house fans were treated to an array of mind-expanding beat-based records, from Mark Fell and Gábor Lázár’s minimalist The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making, Ekoplekz’s warm tribute to early-nineties UK house of the Warp Records variety, Kode9’s solo debut Nothing (perhaps the most emotional album of the year), another footwork salvo from genre Godfather RP Boo, and the stripped-down instrumental grime of PAN newcomer Visionist. On the flipside, there were interesting weird electronic releases in the form of Elaenia by Floating Points, a weird amalgamation of jazz, funk and kosmische, IX Tab’s woozy hauntology, the all-consuming deep drone of Retribution Body’s Aokigahara and Nochexxx’s beyond fucked-up beauty Plot Defender. 

2015 also saw a number of great jazz, improv and experimental releases. Another Timbre is quietly establishing itself as a key record label, furthering the cause of quiet, minimalistic music such as Common Objects’ Whitewashed by Lines, which featured stellar performances by Rhodri Davies, his sister Angharad and saxophonist John Butcher (whose solo live album Nigemizu was another gem); and a vast album by Wandelweiser alumnus Jürg Frey. More traditional was the cosmic jazz of The Greg Foat Group, who recorded the transcendent The Dancers at the Edge of Time in an old church, with spectacular results, whilst sturdy veteran Henry Threadgill continued his singular vision with his Zooid project.

And then there was Blue Neighbourhood by Troye Sivan, which is not on the below list, but probably deserves to be, despite my intrinsic snobbishness. It’s the most mainstream album I’ve fallen in love with since The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, which was actually an underground album made by an act that happened to have found itself popular almost by accident. In contrast, Sivan has made no qualms about wanting to appeal to the public at large, and that is no bad thing. It’s certainly worked well for Bieber, Spears, Beyoncé et al. The difference is that Troye Sivan is openly gay, and isn’t afraid to express his homosexuality in his lyrics. So far, so very Years and Years, except that the music on Blue Neighbourhood, which lyrically abounds with so many pat phrases, takes in underground tropes with supreme confidence, from dubstep to hypnagogic pop, all done, yes, with an aim to appeal to teenage fans over studious critics, but perhaps, just perhaps, pointing towards new avenues for mainstream pop music. As the Internet breaks down the barriers of genre and renders obsolete those of us who feel we can decide what is or isn’t “good music”, the new generation is rising with avengeance, encapsulated by this beautiful 20-year-old Australian homosexual with a velvet voice and an ear for what works. 

To be honest, the above paragraphs only scratch the surface of what was weird, wonderful and wild in 2015, a year where underground music showed its breadth and depth, from the politically engaged and hard-hitting to the abstract or experimental, and artists travelled through time and space to make meaning of worlds both inner and outer through sound, even as their mainstream counterpoints breathed fresh energy into established conventions. The early weeks of 2016 are going to see vinyl reissues of This Heat’s catalogue, a good omen if ever there was (and a reminder that I haven’t even gone into reissues in this article, but there were some masterpieces getting a fresh hearing). See you in the New Year! 

Album chart:

1 = Jlin - Dark Energy (Planet Mu)

1 = Heather Leigh - I Abused Animal (Ideologic Organ)

1 = Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee (Constellation)

4 Helm - Olympic Mess (PAN)

5 Laura Cannell - Beneath Swooping Talons (Front & Follow)

6 Mark Fell & Gábor Lázár - The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making (The Death of Rave)

7 Jessika Kenney - Atria (Sige)

8 Retribution Body - Aokigahara (Type)

9 Common Objects - Whitewashed with Lines (Another Timbre)

10 John Wiese - Deviate From Balance (Helicopter)

11 Senyawa - Menjadi (Morphine)

12 Consumer Electronics - Dollhouse Songs (Harbinger Sound)

13 Kode 9 - Nothing (Hyperdub)

14 The Inward Circles - Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984 (Corbel Stone Press)

15 Graham Lambkin & Michael Pisaro - Schwarze Reisenfalter (Erstwhile)

16 Nochexxx - Plot Defender (Type)

17 Visionist - Safe (PAN)

18 RP Boo - Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints (Planet Mu)

19 Liberez - All Tense Now Lax (Night School)

20 Luxury Apartments (David Tyack) - Luxury Apartments (Dead Cert Recordings)

21 Malcolm Goldstein - Full Circle Sounding (Kye)

22 William Basinski - The Deluge (Temporary Residence)

23 United Bible Studies - The Ale’s What Cures Ye (MIE Music)

24 Philip Jeck - Cardinal (Touch Music)

25 Jac Berrocal, David Fenech & Vincent Epplay - Antigravity (Blackest Ever Black)

26 IX Tab - R.O.C. (Twiggwytch Recordings)

27 Greg Foat Group - The Dancers at the Edge of Time (Jazzman)

28 Ramleh - Circular Time (Crucial Blast)

29 John Butcher - Nigemizu (Uchimizu Records)

30 Floating Points - Elaenia (Pluto)

31 Sightings - Amusers and Puzzlers (Dais Records)

32 Anthony Child - Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle Vol.1 (Editions Mego)

33 Henry Threadgill’s Zooid - In For a Penny, In For a Pound (Pi Recordings)

34 Exploring Jezebel - On a Business Trip to London (Blackest Ever Black)

35 Eric Chenaux - Skullsplitter (Constellation)

36 Ekoplekz - Reflekzionz (Planet Mu)

37 Jürg Frey - Grizzana and other pieces (Another Timbre)

38 King Midas Sound & Fennesz - Edition 1 (Ninja Tune)

39 Nick Höppner - Folk (Ostgut Ton)

40 Roseau - Salt (Big Dada Recordings)

 Reissues: 

1 Ellen Fullman - The Long String Instrument (Superior Viaduct)

2 Sam McLoughlin & David A Jaycock - Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. III: Inland Water (Folklore Tapes)

3 Harmonia - Complete Works (Grönland)

4 Masahiko Sato - Belladona of Sadness (Finders Keepers)

5 Ata Kak - Obaa Sima (Awesome Tapes from Africa)

6 Richard Youngs - No Fans Compendium (VHF)

7 Pere Ubu - Elitism for the People 1975-1978 (Fire Records)

8 Aíne O’Dwyer - Music for Church Cleaners Vol.I and II (MIE Music)

9 Joe McPhee & John Snyder - To Be Continued… (Kye)