The Sensual Physics album is probably my favorite of the year by a nose over the others. Axel Boman’s “Holy Love” is the track that sticks out most in my mind. I’ve managed to hammer out some descriptions so if you’re interested in checking some of these out, you’ll have a bit of guidance hopefully. Best of it to you, have a safe New Year’s and be sure to be gettin down somewhere, somehow.
Otherwise tied alphabetically:
actress – splazsh – darren cunningham complimented a review i wrote of an early werk release a few years back. i didn’t know it was him at the time. we could have been best friends. regardless, this would have made it for the thriller tracks alone. granted, there was a lot of music coming out this year that sound like this, but nothing else sounded like this.
AFTA-1 – FORM – an amazingly deep beat-oriented album – probably this year’s motionflow. there’s an edge and darkness to this that pushes it beyond “downtempo” realms while at the same time being consistently evolving past the point of hiphop loops.
altered natives – serial vendetta/tenement yard vol 1 – seemed like this guy had four albums out at once. these two were almost back to back. every time i’d hear something crazy and catchy come on the random/shuffle, it would be something from one of these.
art bleek – message to the dreamer – you don’t have to be from detroit to be detroit. that’s a good thing.
aybee – ancient tones – you can argue that this is an ep but save it for the forest path or pursuit grooves entries. five tracks at ten minutes roughly each easily qualify this as one of the most rewarding deep listens of the year. oh yeah it was also only officially released on cassette.
bardo pond – bardo pond 2010 – there are very few holdovers from my postrock days that i genuinely get excited to hear a new album from. bardo pond is one such band and on this release they are at possibly their best. just so much killer sound and “i can wait” is probably my favorite song right now.
christopher rau – asper clouds – an outstanding example of how to make a full length album playing on the strengths of the output that got you there in the first place, while at the same time, taking advantage of the opportunity to take the whole thing to the next level.
deftones – diamond eyes – i am not sure there was a more malicious and aggressive album that i heard this year, and that’s working with kids who listen to nothing but top 40 rap. drywall, beware.
echospace – liumin/liumin reduced – the kings return with another round of crushingly stripped shimmer, and then release another version of the album with even more space.
envy – recitation – some of the metal kids i work with told me this was hardcore. i’d heard that on the internet somewhere but seriously, this is envy, i have no idea what they are saying, screaming or not because it’s in japanese. but the tones of the voices and of course the volume and composition of what they are doing here blows away the vast majority of guys in crappy vans driving around the mountain west region playing shows in basements.
demdike stare – liberation through hearing/forest of evil/voices of dust – i would hate to see the modern love camp move away from the stunning works of claro intellecto, andy stott, ar the rest of the earlier portion of their catalog towards the darker arts of their friends in the downward crew. it’s really hard to argue though when this sort of compendium of releases is able to invoke both the fear and desire of giving in to the night so compulsorily.
f – energy distortion – one of the best things to happen to dubstep this year was that those who wanted to keep ahold of that name in order to get a part of of the marketing rights were allowed to do so, and everyone else worth paying attention to going forward got off the sinking ship. while f’s handful of preceding eps were clear signals that he was someone to watch, his work on this album stretches across so many threads while maintaining a common root. after this one, it was clear it was over.
fluxion – perfused – to me, nothing sounds better than layers of dub techno working together in a mix, filters and eq’s drifting in and out to the point you forget you are dancing. fluxion continues to make the type of music i want to hear, and here they just do it in album format. that’s how it should work right?
forest swords – dagger paths – boards of canada contender of the year here, which thankfully was able to pick up a lot more attention as the year moved on. clear in the execution of its concept, this begs for classic chambara on a big screen behind it
KORT – incredibly lonely – lambchop’s kurt wagner and courtney tidwell team up for an album of country duets. yep.
jesu – heart ache & dethroned – look i get it, it’s a reissue and some extras tacked on. i don’t care. and yeah a 22 minute song pads it to album length. again, don’t care. go listen to “dethroned”. hear how those drums are mixed? hear how crushingly loud that is without being stupid? that’s why.
jason fine – our music is a secret order – it took 2562 and heinrech mueller a few years back doing a pair of remixes for me to find out about fine, but since then i’ve been keeping up. this album just kept coming with the deep cuts over and over again without making me feel like a child.
jatun – blanket of ash – yes scott is associated with this site, and i credit him with really helping me get started with making my own music. but let me tell you this – this guy knows what he’s doing, and so do the people around him. i think the thing that has always fascinated me about jatun’s music is how expressive it is – it always reminds me of watching a fireplace.
lights out asia – in the days of jupiter – i’d been thinking lights out asia might not be up to meeting my expectations after their first album garmonia and their work in aurore rein. granted, it took four years for that second album to come out, and while there are a few notes or lyrics here and there i might have to think over a bit, there’s no doubt they have consistently been one of the most interesting bands i’ve paid attention to over the last few years.
marcel dettmann – dettmann – duh. you should be dancing.
marconi union – a lost connection – tracks from this album kept coming up on my mp3 player and would so often just sit in the moment. more constructed than folktronica and with a sense of beleaguered melancholia to it, this was one of the weird ones that seemed to just be there when it needed to be.
mt kimbie – crooks & lovers – the best thing these guys could have ever done was let james blake go do his own thing. while the previous eps are genius, there was a growing audible tension between what they wanted were trying to achieve and what he wanted to do which was beginning to affect the work. this album is a completely elevated work and i am very excited to see what they do next.
oneohtrix point never – returnal – i thought i was over “drone” music a couple of years ago, but daniel lopatin has consistently managed to find the sweet spot between jesu, boards of canada, and bvdub without being unnecessarily crushing or overwhelming.
oriol – night & day – this album soundtracked my drive to and from a 10-day stint on jury duty i had this year. i never fell for the funky/bmore/whatever crowd, and i feel like the current love of juke/footwork is being handled like a marketing campaign. that being said, i’m glad that this album missed all of that despite being released on planet mu, because it doesn’t fit in with any of it, despite some common structural touchpoints.
pulshar – inside – i have been a big fan of deep/dub house producer pablo bolivar for a few years now, and his more dub-leaning work in pulshar is what originally drew me to him. this release is stacked from top to bottom of pure deep beauty. the vocals here are so well done, the mixdown so professional – this is undoubtedly one of my favorites of this year. “sacrifice of love”, “s.t.a.r.s.” and “mantisstyle” will be on mixes from me for a while to come.
pursuit grooves – fox trot mannerisms – it’s short. it’s an ep probably. fine. but get this – every single track on this came up at one point or another in the middle of an hours-and-hours long random/shuffle session. each time, i had to stop what i was doing and check what it was. undeniably deep and mature, this is the sort of thing that everyone should have the opportunity to soundtrack a part of their life.
ripperton – niwa – originally, it seemed like ripperton was just this guy that kind of hung out on the weirder side of uk garage/dubstep that was moving towards the wonky/funky thing. then something, somewhere changed and while his compositions at times had a flair for the dramatic, there was no denying the depth at play as well. this album was, to me, the sea change for ripperton from a producer who was getting better at being hit instead of miss to now being a guy that you could count on to pull it off. in his work since then, he hasn’t disappointed.
roof light – kirkwood gaps – when the first couple of roof light eps showed up, i was torn. do i run out into the street, shouting at the passing cars about the greatness of this new talent, or do i keep him to myself, the perfect secret weapon, only to be used when absolutely required? not being surprised by greatness is no reason not to praise it, and this is what i want to see out of the future of uk garage.
rxry – rxry – rxry follows a similar path here as roof light, actually. early eps went sort-of under the radar because, in the singles/ep driven world of electronic dance music, if it ain’t “bangin” it’s definitely up against diminished odds for getting much notice. there’s also a backlash against the deeper side of dubstep that should be accounted for, but regardless of what the marketing department is going to support, it’s producers like rxry that are pushing the horizons of what garridge can mean.
san soda – immers & daarentegen – san soda does so many things well on this album that it might be easy to forget just how great of a job he did just putting this thing in order. while deeper, minimal-ish leaning techno is the order of the day, there’s plenty of moments where the rhythms vary. this is one of the few albums that i played from end to end just to examine how the pieces worked together as a whole.
scuba – triangulation – scuba, martyn, kode 9, 2562 are names that come to mind when i think about an interesting comparison between “techno” and “dubstep”. like the coven of original detroit producers, these guys represent both the old guard and the new wave of their respective movements. the breadth and substance of this album – so much of which is conveyed through negative space – is both rapturous and rupturing. paul rose destroys the barrier between sound and listener, creating so many wholly genuine moments that are reading fully from his script. it is this usage of z-axis negative space that propels an artist into a magician.
sensual physics – boundary of set – my album of the year here. i know one evening i listened to this for about three straight hours. i’m a sucker for the swayzakian school of deep tech house and while this varied enough from that schematic to retain its own identity, there had been really no question from first listen that this would be the one for me at the end of the year.
shed – the traveller – i entered into this album lightly, fearing that it might suffer from the pressure of everything going on in the berlin scene over the course of the past year or two. while i figured this would be an album removed from the onslaught of the dettman/klock/etc camp, i was surprised to find that it was removed instead in the sense of showing what was missing from so much of the music being made within this particular scene. pawlowitz seems to make this album by take everything he desires to hear coming from his scene, and then tears away everything he’s actually hearing from it.
shlomi aber – chicago days detroit nights – given this album’s title, i think it’s fitting that this was one of the most tenacious albums of the year for me. it seems like long after i had moved on to other releases, this kept popping up in the rotation, always at the right tempo and on the right chord for whatever happened to be going on with me at that moment. i’m pretty sure it’s okay to include an album on the list for that.
silex – alphabet – i include this album largely from a sense of nostalgia. sadly, it is a nostalgia for what could have been, namely if autechre would have continued making records like incunabla or amber. while there are a few shear moments in this one, they work as a “this is what could be happening” for everything else around them on the album. the controlled chaos here so often morphs into something that’s both alluring and perplexing.
sone institute – curious memories – this is a careful, largely quiet album of organics and electronics drifting together. i don’t get around to too many like this anymore, which is somewhat understandable when the bar is set high with releases like this.
soulphiction – featured artist – i wasn’t initially very interested in this album. i’d been fairly into soulphiction’s remixes and his singles and eps had some really nice moments on them, but it reminded me of what it used to be like to plunk down the cash for an artist’s album after a successful run of singles only to find out the quality wasn’t sustainable in that format. i think what i ended up liking about this album is that despite its flaws, which there are couple, it really made an effort to be everything it could. so i guess A for effort, good job.
starkey – ear drums and black holes – starkey, over the years, has been both jaw-droppingly amazing and ridiculously laughable for me. somehow, on this album, he managed to straddle the razor’s edge between both in a scenario i see being played out more and more in dubstep. the balance sadly seems to be listing to bombast’s side, and this might be looked upon as a last hurrah, but all in all this one will provide the backdrop to a pretty good party when it’s said and done.
sun kil moon – admiral fell promises – it really doesn’t matter what mark kozelek does anymore. as long as he continues sounding like himself, playing guitar like himself, or writing the words that he does when he’s not dramatically re-arranging other artists’ work, then he’s going to make the list every time.
tears run rings – distance – i gave this album a chance despite the fact that i hadn’t been particularly impressed by a couple of previous tears run rings releases. i’m not sure what changed in the interim, but i’m glad i gave them another shot. while always based in the shoegaze sound, tears run rings had, in the past, seemed to lean more towards a gothy, almost baroque sound. while it’s easy to say “not anymore!” it’s also probably true that this difference might not be obvious to detect for others. while the approach is not so much volume-shredding as a place to bury strangers nor is the sound as inventive as classic kevin shields, there’s just something about this loud, semi-aggressive album that just clicked.
tevo howard – crystal republic – i think about the submarine that serves as the logo for the UR webstore submerged when i think about where detroit – and chicago – producers are at today. producers like tevo howard, jamal moss, kyle hall, et al are in a position where that submarine is finally breaking back through the surface. it’s not to say they ever went away – they didn’t – but for artists to be at the forefront of both dancefloors and critical opinions while at the same time making uncompromising, highly self-reflecting music that leaves it up to you as to whether you want to call it dance music and whether you want to dance to it or not is really what i’m here for. more importantly, it reminds us that there is a difference between those two things in the first place.
the embassadors – coptic dub – fine, this came out in november of 2009. i’m using the new car model year guide on that one. this is one of the heaviest, most enduring dub albums i listened to all year, and i really enjoyed playing tracks off of this for people who didn’t quite get where dub’s influence has stretched to today.
the national – high violet – probably the only “human band” album i looked forward to all year, and they didn’t disappoint. bands like this, early interpol, and the twilight sad have this beautifully dour post-hangover approach to music – this is the worst the best is going to get. this album is the time it takes to run a finger over a scar.
wareika – harmonie park – the death of “minimal” has left a significant dead zone in the world view of its critics. yes, on one hand the world has probably had just about enough of the experience, the by-numbers approach to the music, the zeitgeist of laudable heroes carrying a scene on their backs until they just can’t anymore. but there’s another side to that that is unfortunately getting lost in this, and that is all of the music that didn’t “fit” with the mouse-farts and cricket-chirps, that stood out as having its own soul and identity, of doing its own thing and, thankfully finding champions who could hold that work up to a larger audience. this perlon release stood on its own, and while a 4/4 beat and some organic drums might not be anything new, in this instance it was at least new again.
wehbba – full circle – another one that seemed threatened by wrong-place/wrong-time syndrome in the dying world of minimal techno, wehbba’s full length kept cementing these moments for me this year where i needed something uptempo, funky, and interesting without being too much all at once. it’s releases like this that keep me hoping producers continue to sidestep the buzzwords and flashbulbs and instead put their energies into creating their expressions, not our expectations.
zzzzra – obehixa – this one confused me initially, as it seemed like an amount of buzzing and some distortion when it would come on. once i put myself in a position to listen carefully, i was surprised at how much i’d been missing by just relegating this to the ambient plane. not difficult, but not easy either, just . . . interesting, i guess.
1000names – illuminated man – i think what i liked about this album was that it tried to take the wobble side of dubstep and do something different, something engaging with it. sadly, that’s a quality that has been missing from that facet of dubstep for a couple of years now, and as it becomes more and more americanized (bro-step) it will be harder and harder to find. i’ll be honest, this is probably the one on the list that i questioned including, so i’m going to give another A for effort and give 1000names the play-in round win. sorry kanye, better luck next year.