2023 got away from me, but I’m not surprised. Time itself has gone wobbly. We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin. Music-wise, I’ve always enjoyed cobbling together a yearly list of my favorite new albums to mark the passage of time and cement some memories. Perhaps it’s a side effect of age, but each new release these days reminds me of something I’ve heard before. Whether this is a curse or blessing, I’m not sure, but I’d like to listen to a song that immediately gives me a splitting headache or, better yet, leaves me covering my ears while screaming that’s not music.
I tortured my parents with Plastikman and Boogie Down Productions. They assaulted their folks with Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, and my grandparents probably did the same with The Glen Miller Orchestra and The Andrews Sisters. Youth should frighten middle age. This is the sign of a healthy culture.
My sense of losing touch is compounded by today’s condition of all-at-once, in which images and sounds hit our devices stripped of context and location and time, leading to a strange dual sensation of liberation and stasis. So this year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music I played most often or rediscovered or that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.
Scatterwound – 0.0 / MN / CB
Midira Records, 2017/2019/2021 | 00 | MN | CB
Ambient drone of the highest order. Each track ranges between fifteen and forty minutes, giving it plenty of room to slowly unfurl from the faint whir of an appliance into a monumental pulse that feels absolutely life-giving.
Date Palms – The Dusted Sessions
Thrill Jockey, 2013 | Bandcamp
Sun-soaked desert drone like the hum of a distant powerline.
Kevin Richard Martin – Above the Clouds
Intercranial Recordings, 2023 | Bandcamp
Music for a rain-soaked thriller in a fallen city: steam rises through the grates while trunk-rattling drums echo across windows with the shades drawn.
Reinhard Voigt - Robson Ponte
Kompakt, 1999 | Bandcamp
While dusting off my Speicher and Kresiel records, I rediscovered this unhinged ode to a footballer. Twenty-five years later, it’s still the best thing for running as fast as I can manage, and it still gets stuck in my head for weeks: Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Te. Te. Te.
Orville Peck - “Kansas (Remembers Me Now)”
Pony (Sub Pop, 2019) | Bandcamp
Woozy Americana that sounds like a half-remembered, rose-tinted fantasy, even if the song is about the murder of the Clutter family. “Come, Las Vegas sunset…”
Sandra Plays Electronics – Want Need / Sessions
Minimal Wave | Bandcamp
Late 1980s and early 1990s sessions from the muscle behind the indispensable Sandwell District and Downwards imprints. A concoction of new wave and no wave, punk and post-punk, industrial and pre-industrial, and every other genre that produces visions edging toward the sacred.
DVA Damas – Nightshade / Wet Vision / Clear Cuts
Downwards, 2014/2015/2016 | Boomkat
Voice, twang, and drums stripped down to raw spikes. Minimalism as a provocation, perhaps an act of seduction. Or aggression.
Plastikman – Consumed
Downwards, 2014/2015/2016 | Boomkat
A masterpiece and a monument, a cold hard tower of sound yet malleable like a Rorschach test depending on my mood. Twenty-five years later, this still sounds like the future.
Earth - “Coda Maestoso In F(Flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)”
Legacy of Dissolution (Southern Lord, 2005) | Boomkat
High-grade low-end head-nodding sludge. An essential tool for challenging times.
Philus - “Acidophilus”
Kolmio (Sähkö, 1998) | More
Mika Vainio's dirtiest teeth-grinding moment, and he delivered so many full-bodied moments.
Heart - "Crazy on You"
Dreamboat Annie (Mushroom, 1975) | More
A magnificent piece of songcraft, this is the plush sound of AM gold alchemized with some guitar shred. I played this song nearly every day in 2023, each time stunned by the sound of a band doing everything they know how to do all at once. It's like mainlining the 1970s in five minutes flat.
Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook – Sleeps With the Fishes
4AD, 1987 | More
Midnight music by turns haunted and reassuring, here is the 1980s ancestor that not only birthed Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s turn of the century gloom but the emotional bombast of early M83. And “Searching” is a stone brooding classic.
Robert Görl - Mit Dir
Mute, 1983 | More
Everything you need from a pop song: streetlights washing across the hood, a cigarette nodding on the lip, a memory of being cooler than you ever were, and a hook that will worm its way into your dreams because even though you don’t speak the language, you get the drift.
