ah! but how could we not ride around, one more time.
2024: albums of the year
A sure sign of my age, that all I want to talk about is the “album listening experience, man”.
Manuel Göttsching – E2-E4
This is from 1981, was recorded in one take, has only two chords, a drum pattern that no dance music producer would ever use, and I’ve seen Theo Parrish (see, more Theo) set dancefloors on fire with the first 15 minutes multiple times — but it for sure got a lot of play at home.
Dougie & The Tone Drifters – Mme Zin Zin
I talked about the sublime “Immigration Stumble” in my tracks post, but the whole thing is sort of amazing: two songs about bears getting married, a straight-up country record that sounds like a Tarantino movie, etc. And sneaky vocals by a Canadian accordion player, Marie-Laure Boudreau — of course, what more could you ask for.
Paul Simon – The Rhythm Of The Saints
Well, here we are at middle age. But for real, I got Simon’s “The Obvious Child” stuck in my head one day, which I would have sworn was on Graceland — which it is not, it is on this very good album. But, I don’t know a single other track from this record! Maybe I heard it on a Greatest Hits cassette? Unclear, but regardless, this record is pretty great — or maybe, Paul Simon knows some great Brazilian musicians — I’ll take it just the same.
musclecars – Sugar Honey Iced Tea!
The dons. I heard these two called “the future of house music” at a party a few years ago, and this record (as well as the killer remix double-pack) pretty much confirms it. The music is lush, personal, and not without a banger or two sneaking around in the whole “album listening experience”.
Danny Clay – No More Darkness, No More Night
This year’s “breath out” record, and a worthy successor to Clay’s Ocean Park, from a few years ago: plaintive and quiet and thoughtful and calm.
Catherine Lamb – Curva Triangulus
Ahh, but this one starts as a sort of pre-Baroque “breath out” record, there’s a nice guitar part, it’s very polite until THE LOW BRASS COMES IN, and it all gets a bit funky, really. I was expecting a certain thing from this, and was very pleased to see that, in fact, two things were going on.
Jacky Blaire & The Hot Biscuits – The Album
Back to Louisiana: how can you dislike an album with a song called “Let the mermaids flirt with me”, fives blues, a cover of Take Me Out To The Ball Game, and “I wanna be your cowboy sweetheart”? You can’t, simple as that.
Deeply honorable mentions to Kelela – Raven, which is sublime; to Nondi_ – Flood City Trax, which is scorching; to Kali Malone – All Life Long and Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthlin & Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II, both of which are gorgeous; and to Julia Holter’s Something In The Room She Moves, and Aaron Cheroff’s Cobalt Core soundtrack, both of which are maximalist in totally different ways and both of which are excellent.
2024: shows of the year
Somehow a lot to choose from in a year where I don’t think I went out that much, but it seems the floor was very high, pardon the pun.
Theo Parrish @ Nowadays Nonstop (Indoors)
I think I was already a big Theo Parrish fan, but this confirmed it — I’ll quote from the review I posted at the time: “I saw at least two people moved to tears at various points, someone brought a speaker cone to be signed, there were people who appear to have made their own merch for the show, etc” — and maybe I’ll add that he started from dead silence and an empty dancefloor, took it all in stride, and had everything locked in about 15 minutes.
Mutek: Water Drops AV, Kode9, Mateo Murphey, Cobblestone Jazz, Secret Jersey Club Fashion DJs
I spoke about this previously, but: a storming set of post-footwork from Kode9, Mateo Murphey’s dub-trance SAT-O-SPHERE excursion, Cobblestone Jazz’s we’ve-still-got-it live show, the astonishing water drops x strobe lights piece from Martin Messier … and not even at Mutek, the second stage DJs at the fashion festival playing redlined clu, zouk, and dancehall to about 12 people, all of whom loved it.
DJ Voices @ Nowadays Nonstop
Voices! The legend. The only thing I can say about DJ Voices is that my shazams for this set include a Moving Shadow record and a gospel ballad from 1976.
CCL, Four Tet @ Nowadays Nonstop
Well, Kieran’s a great special guest, but CCL ain’t no slouch: their set felt like taking modern bass music and dipping it in a trip-hop / shoegaze glaze .. and then adding totally obscure records (my notes say “this seems obscure” twice), and making it all make perfect sense.
Keith Fullerton Whitman @ Ambient Church
So I basically just go to Nowadays, but I make an exception to see KFW do his modern classic Playthroughs, live … at a church in Brooklyn Heights with full projection mapping, as one does.
Southern University Marching Band @ “Mystik Krewe of Mutts”, Baton Rouge
I think this was a pretty casual, “get off the bus, do the parade, and get back on the bus” from the band, but they were far and away the best thing going … and the sound of that much low brass is very, very special.
The Jambalaya Cajun Band 45th Anniversary @ Hideaway on Lee, Lafayette
I did a bad job of dancing a waltz with the local dancing teacher, but what a delight, and what great dance music. (I was also one of only three people between 23 and 60, but c’est la vie — and almost no good dancers of any age, tsk).
Delfeayo Marsalis @ Snug Harbour, New Orleans
Instant, and I mean instant, big-band jazz. Marsalis not only has a trombone with stained class in the crook, if no one takes a solo, he’ll point to some due with a horn who will, literally without missing a beat, jump in and blow for a minute or two.
Honorable mentions indeed, so much we’re just going to bullet-point it:
- Theo Parrish @ Mr. Sunday, killer again
- Objekt @ Nowadays Nonstop, see “Sets Of The Year”
- Lea Bertucci and Keith Fullerton Whitman @ Sleepwalk, flute ambient
- Verracco @ Nowadays, heavy avant-latin club
- Kanchelli @ Basement, doomscroll techno
- Avalon Emerson @ Nowadays Nonstop, sneaky-sleek prog
- Akanbi @ Nowadays Nonstop, deep afrobeats
- CCL @ Public Records, magic, magic, magic
- ANZ @ Mr. Sunday, Florida rollers
And a very special shoutout to everyone who stayed on the dancefloor for the torrential rain during Ariel Zetina’s Mx. Sunday set — we see you, we see you.
2024: sets of the year
CCL – A Night in the Skull Discotheque
Beginning a lot of talking about what a incredible year CCL had, this mix is a awfully close perfect — depth when you need it, works as a warmup and as a banger, heavy joints when you need them, etc etc etc. I continue to be very late on “bass music”, but I am still pretty happy about it.
Fauzia – RA 926
Lush, lush, and then lush again; lots of her own work, and all of it is luminous and wonderful and downtempo and still luminous again.
Full Circle – Back To Disco Valley (The Slow Goa Mix)
Recorded something like 12 years ago, this surfaced in 2023, and snuck into rotation pretty much instantly — draws the lines between Italo weirdness and psy weirdness, and “slow nrg” of pretty much every sort.
JD Twitch – All Arthur Russell DJ set, live at The Barbican, London
Another sign that I’m in middle age: I’m starting to get Arthur Russell. But for real, this set is wonderful because it is hopeful and uptempo without crushing the high end — enough so that when a lone Talking Heads track comes in at the end, it feels like an EDM banger.
Objekt – Live @ Nowadays, April 7
Yep, another one of these, if anything deeper than the last one.
Tom Moulton – The Sandpiper Mix
This is it, maybe the first disco DJ mix ever, and the one that launched Moulton’s career, which helped shape the course of disco history — and it’s just on the internet, and it’s kind of great, and of course it was made literally by hand, by splicing tape.
The Deep Ark – The Deep Ark
One hell of an achievement, maybe a little bit much, but my goodness, the apotheosis of the 1990s? Maybe, maybe.
Honorable honorable honorable mentions to CCL – Live at Freerotation, Nono Gigsta – The House Of Crocodiles Part 2 (Live at Freerotation), (Freerotation?!), Loidis – RA965, Haruka – XLR8R 845, KRN – RA951, and Laurel Halo – Awe on NTS – 05-21-2024.
(What on earth are these podcasts series going to do for episode 1,000? I well remember the conceit of record labels doing CAT001, say — it’s spectacular that a few places are going to do it).
2024: tracks of the year
Fewer bangers this year, but!
Dougie & The Tone Drifters – Immigration Stumble []
Well, if you had told me that I would spend most of the year losing my shit to a Cajun fiddle instrumental with a triangle part, I would have laughed at you. I bought this CD on a whim from Johnson’s Boucanière, which is not a record store and is a store that sells BBQ and boudin sausage, and it was nothing but winners — more about it in Albums.
Chaka Khan – Be Bop Medley Medley (Donut Edit) [Warner]
You can blame Theo Parrish and the “Donut Edit” (sp?) that he has for this one — but this is I guess post-Boogie, and it is really good, in either the original or the edit. Khan is also a demon of a vocalist, and her performance here covers a lot of ground, all of it very, very well.
DJ Marfox & DJ Nervoso – A Própria [Príncipe]
Those who are repeat readers of this website may recall a Príncipe show at Elsewhere in February of 2023 where I talked about “an unshazamable track with a man’s voice SCREAMING” — here it is (it’s from 2008, calm down), and it is not messing around.
Avalon Emerson – Karaoke Song (Ineffekt’s Two Day Version) [Another Dove]
Oh heck, I don’t even know if this is that good, but it gets me right in the feels with the cutaway to “How is your Mom? Where does the time go?”
Very honorable mentions to:
- Mother’s Pride – Learning to Fly (X-Cabs Remix), an ultra-deep Chris Cowie cut that I found on vinyl that is nothing but chrome and rocket fuel.
- BeBe Winans – Thank You (12″ Mix), a Nowadays classic
- Everyday People – I Like What I Like, a very deep 7″ dig in New Orleans … but then it turns out there’s a Danny Krivit edit, c’est la vie
- Peverilist – Pulse IX, one of those “what record is this, this is great” that surprises you every time you hear it
- David Holmes ft. Raven Violet – It’s Over, If We Run Out Of Love, the kind of record that makes you have faith, somehow.
- DJ JM – Pepper, pure heat and nothing but pure heat.
2024: concerts of the year
Another “normal” year — until November at least — but let’s get into it.
thinkdance/Jill Sigman – Re-Seeding @ Gibney
Thinkdance, or at least this iteration of it, is Jill Sigman, my friend dan Cole, Donna Costello, J’nae Simmons, Amala’ika Rinyire and Stacy Lynn Smith (names from the program, apologies for errors!)
This piece had a lot going on, but I want to talk about the actual thing itself: it was something like a hour of improv dance, with 4-6 bits for the dancers to hit, and all the rest being free movement between themselves and the props. Three moents stood out for me: first, how shockingly hard it is to do anything improvised for an hour and have it be remotely coherent. Second, a moment where all the dancers were doing a lap of the room, with their footfalls were sliding in and pout of time with the music. And finally, an ending filled with ambiguity in dance, but with a near-perfect resolution by the musicians (Kristin Norderval , Gustavo Aguilar and Miguel Frasconi in peak Downtown contemporary mode) who did a New Music Fadeout just after the traffic drone from the open window stopped — astonishing.
John Luther Adams – Darkness & Scattered Light @ BAM
This was at Long Play, the Bang On A Can festival, and there’s even a youtube link, and it was beautiful — Luther Adams wrote the piece for Robert Black, who recorded the canonical version and died in 2023. The album is worth your time, as is this performance.
Gyorgy Ligeti – String Quartets I and II @ BAM
Again from Long Play, the Ligeti Quartet — yes yes, you get the joke — did amazing runs through these very difficult, very arch, and very heavy-metal quartets. Getting good pictures of classical musicians is impossible due to reasons of class, so the above images is from the performance of a different piece … but it captures the what-is-going-on dynamicism of their playing pretty well.
Dmitri Shostakovich – Violin Concerto No. 1 @ Carnegie Hall
With the London Philharmonic and the magical/magickal Patricia Kopatchinskaja on violin! Kopatchinskaja is so stupefyingly intense that she goes past “oh, she’s a good player”, past “oh, she’s a bit weird”, past “she does her own thing”, and past it all again to be actually, totally sui generis. In the Shostakovich, especially in the quiet parts of the first movement, with the subway rumbling under the hall, she managed to cover all of the tragedy and wonder of Russian-ness in something like 9 minutes. (The image, again, is from another performance, but begins to capture her).
Honorable mentions to Music For 18 Musicians at Long Play, which was gorgeous; to my friend Annie Wu’s album release party; and to going to a Real Madrid game in Madrid, and hearing 50,000 both whistling an Osasuna player, and hearing 50,000 people cheering a Jude Bellingham goal.
on sexism at the highest level
I’ve been absorbing a lot of words about Trump’s victory, and I want to add something for the historical record: It’s the sexism, stupid.
There are, I think, many reasons why Harris lost — but I would bet a lot of money that a gender-swapped “Kam Harris”, a mixed-race lawyer from, say, North Carolina, would have run Trump at least as close as Trump ran Biden in 2020 — and I think good old Kam, who was a four-star college recruit at receiver and cornerback, might have just won the whole thing outright. (Remember Kam’s pick-six when he was at Ohio State? What a play! I’d vote for that guy.)
This is sexism, it’s deep misogyny: we know this. There are lots of other reasons why Harris lost (ask me about my kayfabe theory for keeping incumbent parties in power), but Trump has won twice against women, and lost to a dude who is turning out to be pretty lame. This is not just sexism — but vicious sexism sure has helped the Republicans over the last eight years.
mutek 2024
Ten years after my run at Mutek in 2014, some highlights, in no real order:
Colin Stetson on solo saxophone is pretty incredible — circular breathing for minutes at a time, singing via a throat mike, percussion via taps on the saxophone and the keys, etc. I don’t know if I 100% loved the music, but there was nothing with as much chops in the entire festival.
One day, I will work (work it!) as hard as Marie Davidson, but not today. A great live set to a really wonderful local crowd.
There was, secret, a fashion festival going on at the same time, on the other side of Place Des Arts, which I didn’t even notice until Thursday night. It had two stages, one with a catwalk, and this one — with frankly terrible sound, maybe a dozen people maximum — but with every one of them losing their heads to Jersey club, dancehall, trap, a zouk record, etc. I deadpanned “well, that kind of put Mutek in the dumpster”, and, you know, I was not wrong. Except for …
ZORA JONES + SINJIN HAWKE, and the giant projectors of the SAT-O-SPHERE, which saved the day multiple times. It turns out that a kinect plus some spikes looks amazing on a very big dome – to say nothing of a gopro video from the head of golden eagle.
and, totally different, Cobblestone Jazz were great — pictured here in an extended closing solo from Tyger Dhula.
At A/Visions, we had a flawless victory from Martin Messier’s “water drops plus strobe lights” piece. It turns out you can strobe it just right and make it look like the drops of water are moving up. (Honors out also to Myriam Bleau’s Second Self, with very strong LED lines and masks, but I did not sneak any pix from that)
Kode9 closing down the outdoor stage on Saturday with excellent, heavy footwerk and post-bass etc etc.
I was not expecting to dig Factory Floor, but I ended up really enjoying the pulse of two drummers, even when they slid a bit due to monitoring issues.
Lamine Fofana was much more dub and crackle and space than I was expecting, but I really enjoyed it — it felt like he had a real handle on the soundsystem.
Kara-Lis Coverdale was a dash uneven, and started with maybe a bit more noodling than I had in mind — but the last two-thirds came together really well.
But, let’s close with Mateo Murphey, Montréal techno veteran, and his dub/tech/trance live show in the Sphere, with visuals that started like this:
… and rapidly turned into this:
This was not … technically hard, and the Sphere gave a huge advantage — but I think this show had the most gasps of delight of anything at Mutek, which is not so bad.