the sun, again
It’s back, we’re back, we’ll be back – we go again.
2023: tracks of the year
Another big year, yes yes:
Oklou – God’s Chariot (SH Remix) [Welt Discos]
What’s such a big deal about a skippy garage-ish beat, a kind-of-an-organ bassline, and a sing-song vocal? Well, pretty much everything; the SH remix veers between Two Shell, early Jacques Greene, the “feels” of the original ballad, and the post-pandemic desire for Big Tunes with totally perfect aplomb.
Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – La Lega (featuring Coro delle Mondine di Bentivoglio)
Not a Big Tune, but another entry in my personal subcategory of folk music vs contemporary music. Tarozzi & Walker appear to have done the very difficult thing of doing nothing more than multi-tracking a song, adding a simple string part under it … and ripping my heart out every time I hear it.
georg-i – Statis
An unrepentant, spectacular DJ tool – 100% roaring, rubbery bass hits, with just enough weird noises over the top to make the whole thing unpatronizing.
CRJ – Call Me Maybe (AYA Edit)
You didn’t seriously think I’d spend a year without Carly Rae Jepsen on this list, did you? The Big Hit gets run through AYA’s modular, with predictable and spectacular results.
Suzanne Kraft – DJ Safety Track
This choppy, German / Detroit sort of record, on a very very hot summer’s day at Mr. Sunday, came within a millimeter of sending me into an altered state of consciousness.
Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes – Bad Luck (A Dmitri From Paris Disco Re-Edit)
Ronnie Baker on bass, at his finest – the edit makes a big tune even bigger. Even when you can sort hear the joins, they’re bringing the best parts back.
Minor Science – Workahol
Well, this is nothing more than a really big post-90’s “nuskool” bass music record … but, like, really, really, really, really, really, really big.
Pangaea – Installation
a) another BANGER ALERT; but, b, more interestingly, I think more and more that the reason this record works is the sampled speech, and how the emphases in the speech don’t quite line up with the boom-tss boom-tss drums, cheesy lead, and just-off-kilter-enough bass part.
Very, very honorable mentions to a long list of amazing tunes this year; all of the below are either in the BANGER or SNEAKER BANGER category:
- Olof Dreijer – Rosa Rugosa
- Jam City – LLTB (feat. Wet)
- Sofia Kourtesis – Madres
- Shanti Celeste – Shimmer
- Anz – Clearly Rushing
- Ghost Assembly – I Miss Your Love
- Louie Austen – Hoping (Herbert’s High Dub)
2023: albums of the year
A perhaps especially endless year for music, which is saying kind of a lot:
James Holden – Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities
What have I not said about James Holden at this point, sheesh. Let’s just say that as he continues to reach towards his final form, he insists to change, to make new things, and to dig up new sounds and new processes.
Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore
As per my comentary on the “single”, La Lega, it seems a bit unfair to have such affecting source material to work with … but Tarozzi and Walker are also good enough composers to not ruin the material. It’s perhaps a too-trenchent commentary on how the whole “very quiet and sparse contemporary classical music” things just wants to be sad folk songs, but what an amazing record.
Louth Contemporary Music Society – In C Irish
Whoaaaaaa, yes yes yes! Not as good as the glowing revelation of In C Mali, but millimeters away from that high standard. I am probably more than a bit biased about In C, as this one now means I have five recordings of the damn thing — this one is a strong entry into my collection.
Yu Su – I Want An Earth
Downtempo that sounds like a mid-90s video game sound track, in all the best ways: simple without being bleepy, replayable without being boring, and familiar without being saccharine.
Hiroki Kikuta – Secret of Mana (Original Soundtrack)
And the above Yu Su leads to this, literally, a mid-90s video game soundtrack! I had a very strange moment this summer, when a friend hit a mixing bowl and it made the exact sound of one of the weird “pitched percussion” synths used in this soundtrack … which inspired to me track it down, and being very pleased that I did. It’s not as magisterial as the Final Fantasy soundtracks, but it’s really good and has some very nicely out-there jams.
Laurel Halo – Atlas
Hard to find a better “and breath out” record this year; the quasi-Mahlerian moment when the strings come in is an awfully good one.
Wata Igarashi – Agartha
I did not love this album at first listen, and then came back to it more and more and more; it’s like a techno version of a phasing-era Steve Reich piece, or a lost Krautrock band, or some alternate history of 1970s electronic music in Japan.
Honorable Mentions out to to a lot of great albums this year:
- John Luther Adams – Darkness & Scattered Light.
- Natural Wonder Beauty Concept – Natural Wonder Beauty Concept.
- Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werlin – Ghosted.
- Avalon Emerson – & The Charm; which has perhaps my saddest lyric of the year on ‘Karaoke Song’.
- Lalo Schifrin – Enter The Dragon; hey, the 1970s!
- Conlon Nancarrow – Complete Studies For Player Piano Volume Two.
- Various – Love Saves The Day (A History Of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979) (Part 1).
- Mbilia Bel – Beyanga, Congolese dance-pop from the late 80s.
- Various Artists – Afghan Music In Exile; new recordings of traditional music.
- Deepchord – Functional Designs; wooooosh, depth, dub, wooooosh.
2023: shows of the year
Maybe, say it softly, just a normal year for going out: some winners, some “meh”. Still a lot of people wanting to go hard after the pandemic … but that feels like a more normal new normal, as it were:
Anz @ Nowadays
Anz! Anz was immense; she played countless huge drops (see Minor Science – Workahol, in tracks of the year), but also a fast techno remix of James Blake’s “CYMK” which had people rushing the stage and screaming. She casually dropped the original of Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On”, played a 160 bpm quasi-hardcode uplifting piano track straight into booty house, etc etc. The pluralism we need, says I.
Wata Igarashi x DJ Nobu, Good Room
Vrooooom, woooooosh, zzzzzaaaananaananaag! Techno, techno, techno! Xyyyyooooow, fphoooooooroormmm, zap! Techno! (But for serious: two great DJs at the height of their powers, having a great time, playing some really warped records to a we-are-here-for it crowd).
DJ Marfox, Nídia, DJ Firmeza @ Elsewhere
Príncipe came through the small room at Elsewhere, which is of course the best room. My notes for this show include “an unshazamable track with a man’s voice SCREAMING?!?”, which describes the level of heat pretty well.
Laurel Halo @ Smart Bar
Finally, I went to Chicago, and finally, I went to Smartbar. It’s a lovely place, spacious in the right ways and in the right places. Halo played a style I feel like I have seen from a few DJs this year, of rotating through a set of genres: two electro, two house, two techno, repeat – with a very high banger quotient.
Very very Honorable Mentions out to:
- Justin Carter @ Mr. Sunday; a borderline mystical experience due to the heat and the Detroit techno.
- Conducta @ Nowadays Nonstop; which was I think the most packed room I have seen at 0815, and one of the more packed rooms at Nowadays ever.
- Theo Parrish @ Nowadays; a very serious repository of wacko records – including two 10+minute jazz-techno-claps-on-the-1 records that I am still thinking about.
- Love Injection 8 Year @ Public Records; a delight with the best sound system in New York.
2023: sets of the year
James Holden – Bandcamp Weekly 640
Bad news, it’s another James Holden year, so you have to hear about everything single thing he’s done. Lucky for you, this set has not only a bunch of excellent “ambient” records in a row, but also James’s lovely, borderline-ASMR voice talking you through each record. On a scale of 0 to “vibes”, this one is a “super deep maaaaan”.
Kvanchi – Zenaari Mix 001
Staying ambient, this set out of Georgia is both generally great and has another occuance of this year’s “weird pitched percussion” subtheme, with an overlay of an old American folk tune over some serious gamelan music.
Horse Meat Disco – Rinse FM, April 2023
Very much not ambient: I recall I put on some random things from Rinse.fm in the spring, and found some of my favorite sets of the year. This one, a casual set of great disco records, was maybe my favorite uptempo set of the year, and one of my favorite disco sets since that whole thing that happened in 2020.
CCL – Liquidtime No. 9 – Cape Fear
Only 15 years too late, I am finally really enjoying “bass music” and “dub-step”.
JLin x Mike Paradinas – RA 903
JLin continues her campaign to not-so-secretly be the best composer of the last 10 years, as complied and mixed by the boss of Planet Mu.
Honorable Mentions to the following greats:
- Ben UFO – Live @ Pitch Perfect; b-a-n-g-e-r-s, what a set.
- Heiroglyphic Being – RA 888; deep weird house music.
- Colored Craig – RA 898; just plain wonderful deep house.
- Mori-Ra – Japanese Breeze Vol. 15; another Rinse find of city pop and early Japanese house..
- DJ Voices – Live @ Nowadays Nonstop, Nov 2023; DJ Voices!
2023: concerts of the year
Lucrecia Dalt @ National Sawdust
I did not know what to expect going into this one – Dalt has made both sideways torchsongs and geological ambient, among other things in her catalog. This was her with a synth + effects, and then a … dude … who I have learned is named Alex Lázaro, on a kit that looked like some sort of demented mobile. Dalt, doing mostly things in the “sideways torchsongs with electronics”, can sell you on the intimacy that National Sawdust often lacks. Lázaro, on the other hand, looks like a cross between Harpo Marx, an NBA shooting guard, and Ginger Baker — and plays enough like whatever that combination would play like to perfectly balance both Dalt and the venue.
Oliver Messiaen – Turangalila Symphonie @ NY Phil
The NY Phil came very committed to playing Messiaen’s literally gigantic Turangalia, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano and Cynthia Millar on ondes martenot. The piece is so much that it is hard to know what to say about it, but let’s try: this was a monumental thing and I am still thinking about the sixth (out of 10!) movements, and I highly recommend it.
Kate Soper’s The Hunt @ Miller Theatre
Wry and haunting and wondrous and modern and medieval, Soper’s chamber opera for three sopranos was very strong. The MacGuffin is “three medieval virgins passing the time while they wait for a unicorn”, while sending updates back to the King and his Court via Instagram – which means that Soper can lean into her intertextual magic, re-cut old plainchant, and so forth. I came out of the performance a bit unsure of how the plot landed … but having now seen more opera in The Magic Flute, perhaps the plot is not really the point of opera, when the vocal writing is this good.
The most honorable mentions to:
- Julianna Barwick at National Sawdust; lush and beautiful and overwhelming.
- Steve Reich’s latest at the NY Phil; which was notable not in the least because the guy himself walked by me and asked NY Phil staff which way to the men’s room.
- The Magic Flute; in English by Julie Taymor and The Met – featuring not only Kathryn Lewek’s laserbeam-brillant Queen Of The Night, but also the most “sexy flamingos” I have seen on stage at once.
