Dec. 16, 2023
I spend a lot of time checking out new music (mostly on BandCamp). To be honest, there is so much being released that it becomes a bit of a blur. Consequently, I find myself skimming through a lot of it and rarely coming back to listen to anything more than once. So rather than refer to these as the Best Releases of 2023 or even My Favorites, it feels more true to say these are things that stuck out to me in a very crowded field – albums I hope to spend more time with. So this is kind of a placeholder for my own future listening.
This list skews toward experimental stuff (occupational hazard), but I like other things too, and there are quite a few gems here spanning genres, though little of it approaches anything mainstream. Capsule descriptions in “quotes” were lifted directly from the album info. Artists with their names in bold either live in the Pacific Northwest currently, or did in the past.
Abstract Black (Jayve Montgomery) - florida
Deeply reverberant, dark ambient made entirely with saxophones that do not sound at all like saxophones.
John Luther Adams - Darkness & Scattered Light
"Darkly beautiful, mesmerizing, virtuosic music for double bass (two solos and a bass quintet), performed by the late bassist extraordinaire Robert Black.”
Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (fka Christian Scott) - Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning
A New Orleans jazz musician/Mardi Gras Indian "bridges past and future by marrying the folkloric styles, ceremonial and ritual practices of the Maroon and Afro-Indigenous Chiefdoms, and culture of New Orleans with Stretch Music. The result is a spellbinding exhibition of Afro-New Orleanian and West African expression where music, dance, and cultures unite."
Susan Alcorn - Canto
”Pedal steel innovator and Septeto del Sur combine Chilean folk and nueva canción with free improvisation and contemporary classical.”
Luis Fernando Amaya - Cortahojas (Mexico)
The composer/percussionist "is interested in animals, insects, plants, and living beings beyond humans. Somehow, he manages to generate sound worlds that invite listeners to hear reality from that perspective. Some of his pieces sound as if you were in the middle of a swarm of bees, others sound like hundreds of ants sneaking into their nest."
Amor Muere - A Time to love, a time to die (Mexico)
"A fusion of haunting cello, hypnotic electronics, enticing vocals, and enchanting violins showcasing each artist's mastery of their craft, reaching sublime and transcendent heights."
Between - Low Flying Owls
Patient ambient accretions made with mostly acoustic instruments from an all-star group: Taylor Deupree, Stephen Vitiello, Marcus Fischer, Corey Fuller, Federico Durand, Michael Grigoni, Molly Berg.
Niecy Blues - Exit Simulation
”Captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations…emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household.”
Michael Byron - Halcyon Days
”Except for the final track (a piano solo written in 2016), these percussion pieces are from the mid-’70s, when he composed unique and remarkable minimalist-styled music…clangorous clouds of polyrhythms and simple, direct, quiet works, both of which explore rich harmonies and bespeak a sense of transcendent motionlessness.”
Ben Chasny & Rick Tomlinson - Waves
Intricately woven hypnotic acoustic guitar duos that suspend time.
The Coal - Recorded Remembered (Greece)
"A comprehensive spectrum of influences, from classical music to jazz, rock, blues and ambient to melodies inspired by traditional Mediterranean music. They investigate new musical paths that redefine the limits between genres, introducing a new territory that can best be described as avant folk."
Cruel Diagonals (Megan Mitchell) - Fractured Whole
"Constructed entirely with sounds generated by her own voice – chopped up, warped, rendered unrecognizable, ringing out in hymn-like incantations – a powerful and timeless exploration of vulnerability, resistance, and the freedom to be yourself."
Claire Deak - Sotto Voce
Emotive neoclassical chamber music that borders on ambient. "This album began as an exploration of the music and worlds of two women composers from the early baroque era, Francesca Caccini (1587-c.1645) and Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). Deak set out to experiment with the surviving historic traces left behind by these two women."
Decuma - let's play pretend
"...sits at the intersection of hip-hop, ambient, and experimental music...Decuma reflects on his own childhood trauma—racial violence, physical and sexual abuse, the particularly horrible nexus thereof—and its many echoes throughout the process of growing up, trying to heal."
Tom Djll - Speed of Silence
This yummy photo book + CD "is a chronicle in pictures and sounds of the passing of the world as we move through it. Many of the images come from a 13,000-mile road trip through 37 of the United States undertaken in the depths of the Covid pandemic. Digital and analog electronic sounds, broadcasts, field recordings, trumpet and processed trumpet."
Dogwood Tales - 13 Summers 13 Falls
I have a soft spot for these moody, windswept alt country-tinged songs in the lineage of Uncle Tupelo or Jesse Sykes. In a just world, these guys from Virginia might just "make it."
Eluvium (Matthew Cooper) - (Whirring Marvels in) Consensus Reality
Lush music from Portland merging orchestral and electronic. "Taking initial inspirations from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, [the album] inherently deals both with humankind’s need for meaning, and the emergence of algorithms reflecting the feedback loops of humankind’s interactions with machines themselves."
Enji - Ulaan (Mongolia/Germany)
Utterly enchanting. "An elegant blend of jazz and traditional Mongolian song, with trusted collaborators Paul Brändle on guitar and Munguntovch Tsolmonbayar on bass, Mariá Portugal on drums, and Joana Queiroz on clarinet."
Entrañas (Daniel Gachet) - Pisos Térmicos (Ecuador)
Dramatic, abstract, and dense electroacoustic music made from field recordings subjected to granular synthesis.
Marcus Fischer - Dodecalogues, Vol. 1
Dreamy ambient electronic music. "A series of twelve-minute long improvisations focused on slow explorations on a single instrument – an Akai MPC 1000 that was played by hand without sequencing."
Peter Garland - The Basketweave Elegies (2023)
"An elegant and beautiful nine-movement work for solo vibraphone," performed with gem-like clarity by percussionist WIlliam Winant.
Jeff Greinke - A Thousand Year Flood
Another beauty from this veteran ambient composer, joined by Seattle violist/cellist Heather Bentley. "An engaging balance between consonance and dissonance, timbre and shade, ambience and aura. His impressionistic ambient chamber music shimmers in the passing light of melodic stringed textures and shifting electronic shadow."
Joana Guerra - Chão Vermelho (Portugal)
"Ritualistic, lamenting pieces influenced by the increasingly dry ground of the surrounding area of central Portugal from where cellist and singer Guerra resides. As a murmur or a pagan prayer, the pieces evoke the ever imminent possibility of regeneration."
Haarmannhommelsheim - Die Umrandung des Nichts (Germany)
Very intimate and restrained sound works for speaking/singing voices (German/English), various instruments, and sounds of the world, reminiscent of old-school European hörspiel (radio plays). I don't speak German but I'm smitten anyway.
Holly Waxwing - The New Pastoral
Electronic music that is lively, effervescent, charming, and joyful in its clarity.
Islandman w/ Okay Terniz & Muhlis Berberoglu - Direct-to-Disc Sessions (Turkey)
"Balearic folktronica meets percussion genius on a unique one-take recording that finds Turkish downtempo specialist Islandman in triple conference with legendary percussion innovator Okay Temiz, and contemporary saz virtuoso Muhlis Berberoğlu."
Carmen Jaci - Happy Child (Canada/Netherlands)
More zippy and bubbly fast-paced electronic music. This feels like a new, yet-to-be-named genre emerging (see also Holly Waxwing above). "A record about exploration, play, and rekindling with a sense of childlike wonder. The artist’s introspective approach reels us into a surprising, surreal and sometimes theatrical universe where the intimate meets the eccentric."
Mayssa Jallad - Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Lebanon)
Beautiful and emotionally moving. "A concept album merging singer/songwriter Jallad’s two vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. Written in collaboration with producer Fadi Tabbal, the music builds upon Tabbal’s spatial approach to sound and Jallad’s research on the “Battle of the Hotels”, a 5-months battle that took place in Beirut's Hotel District at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War."
Nyokabi Kariuki - Feeling Body (Kenya/US)
Electronic hymns for self-soothing during a time of illness. Lovely and gentle songs chronicling the artist's struggle with long covid, "reflecting on how being sick suddenly gave an urgency to my understanding of the body I live in — suddenly seeing my body from the inside out, not the other way around."
Mbuso Khoza - Ifa Lomkhono (South Africa)
There's a long history of interesting jazz from South Africa, and I'm glad to see that it continues. This beautiful vocalist (singing in Zulu) brings something new to it that is really striking. Reminds me a bit of Milton Nascimento – I love me some falsetto.
Ly Trang - Syenite (Vietnam)
Really interesting, dense, hard to pigeonhole electronic music/sound art "grounded in a sense of alienation, first when she left home and moved to Hanoi for school, and latterly when she relocated to Moscow just a few months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
Desire Marea - On the Romance of Being (South Africa)
A bold, brash, and busy mash-up of lots of elements, "with Marea stepping out from behind the laptop to front a 13-piece band culled from South Africa’s avant-garde jazz and experimental music scenes. Together, they take a leap from Desire’s digitized churn to swooning orchestral soul, dancing across the divide between flesh and spirit."
Mira Martin-Gray - Hen's Teeth
A hushed, late-night acoustic vibe that "explores dichotomies of “songs” and “sounds”, bridging an artificial divide by someone who wants to make — and hear — both. This is music that trades in small domestic sounds and small domestic moments — but more than being merely observational they are political (like Pauline Oliveros is political) and sexy (like Vulcans touching fingers is sexy)."
Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane, Linda Catlin Smith - Folks’ Music
Two contemporary choral pieces and a string quartet that should greatly appeal to people (like me) who love Early Music. Conducted by the esteemed Paul Hillier, who has built his reputation on straddling the Middle Ages and our own.
Naima - This Must Be the Place
Not quite ambient, but subdued, gentle, jazz-inflected music for saxophone, percussion and electronics. Doesn't really sound much like Jon Hassell, but I wouldn't hesitate to put this in a DJ mix with him.
Jonny Nash - Point of Entry (Netherlands)
Gorgeous acoustic guitar + electronics, reminds me of early Durutti Column, early Ben Watt, or John Martyn’s more atmospheric moments. “Exploring an imaginative and idealized “personal folk music” that combines elements of traditional acoustic music with the producer’s richly immersive interpretation of ambient.”
NAVVY - V
On the one hand, this is sort of classic downtempo electronica with ethereal female vocals – nothing terribly groundbreaking. On the other hand, it’s done really well and sometimes classic downtempo with ethereal vocals is just the thing. I’m a sucker for this kind of singing.
Buffalo Nichols - The Fatalist
"Carl “Buffalo” Nichols does things with the blues that might catch you off guard. There’s 808 programming, chopped up Charley Patton samples, washes of synth. There’s a consideration of the fullness of the sonic stage and the atmospherics of the music that can only come with a long engagement with electronic music."
Nite Bjuti - Nite Bjuti
”…(pronounced night beauty) is a US-based, Afro-Caribbean, woman-led improvised experimental trio...who weave together multiple strands of storytelling using voice, bass, electro percussion, turntables, Haitian drums, dance and visual projections. All 11 tracks on this album are entirely improvised" – but they sound more like worked-out songs.
Yann Novak - The Voice of Theseus
Conceptually rigorous ambient drone. "Two of my favorite vocalists (Dorian Wood and G.Brenner) recorded vocals for me to manipulate throughout the album... How far can these vocals be pushed while still remaining attached to the vocalists’ identities? Where lies the separation between the source materials and the objects they’re used to create?"
Kassa Overall - Animals
An adventurous jazz/hip hop hybrid that sounds absolutely contemporary and not in the slightest bit nostalgic on the jazz end of things.
Jeffrey Roden - Diabelli Miniaturues
Very sparse, spacious, and patient solo piano works in the vein of the Wandelweiser group of composers, "based upon the note sequence from the original Diabelli Waltz."
Joana de Sá - Lightwaves (Portugal)
”A collection of sounds recorded in Porto, Viseu, and Lisbon, combined with guitar and synthesizer. I would like to show and to share my personal experience while being and listening in these places. Each one of the pieces refers to a specific site.”
Salami Rose Joe Louis - Akousmatikous
Breathy vocals, jazzy drumming, and some seriously warped keyboard sounds.
Zeynep Toraman - In a Dark House (Turkey)
"Full of allusions to 19th century repertoire and imagination, In a Dark House...brings together synths, field recordings, e-guitar, samples from a fortepiano that is very dear to me, and various perfect and imperfect string samples gleaned over the years."
Kalia Vandever - We Fell in Turn
Warmly melodic trombone improvisations. "A stark palate of solo trombone, voice, effects, and little more."
Various - Afghan Music in Exile (Afghanistan)
"Captures the talent and suspenseful expression of classical and folk Afghan musicians living in exile - to create art in Afghanistan would have invited attacks, arrest, torture or worse at the hands of the Taliban."
Lady Wray - Piece of Me
”R&B with the textures of analog Soul, but there is a heavy Hip Hop influence... Boom-bap drums and chunky bass lines are front-and-center creating a perfect head-nodding backdrop for Lady Wray to take on the good, the bad, the difficult, and the joyful.”
Yungwebster - Yungwebster
"An astonishing debut album of ambient rap that stretches saturated 808 kicks over dissociated AutoTuned vocals and glyding, amniotic bass...It was only a matter of time before rap and ambient merged into a full syrup..."
Zaumne - Parfum
"At the intersection of flickering dub-pop and ASMR soundscaping...faded pop is fleshed out with surreal elegance: all flickering neon and half-heard whispers suggestive of blurred late night fantasies; liminal, abstract, and highly evocative. Sounds hang in the air like incense, caressing the senses with an intentionality that's missing from so much landfill ambient."