regresssion

aoty25

Perhaps the pure, strict concept of art can be derived only from music, while great literature and great painting — and especially great literature and painting — necessarily contain something material, projecting outside the charmed aesthetic circle, not dissolved in the autonomy of form. — It is precisely the logical, profound aesthetic which is fundamentally inappropriate to significant literature, as it is to novels. Hegel, unlike Kant, had some awareness of this. [13]
Benjamin’s concept of aura… may touch on the music-like quality of all art [14] (Adorno, Beethoven (1998), 7)

I am tempted far beyond my knowledge to suggest that, faced with the need to defeat theatre, it is above all to the condition of painting and sculpture—the condition, that is, of existing in, indeed of secreting or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present—that the other contemporary modernist arts, most notably poetry and music, aspire. (Fried, Art and Objecthood (1998), 167)

There is a risk involved in the criticism of music that other forms don’t seem to involve. I would have intuitively drawn painting into the same circle: artforms which retain an indeterminacy to their encounter which can’t be expunged. But Adorno places painting firmly on the side of literature in the category of forms which cannot be dissolved away, and I think to the degree that fine art is experienced in the narrow confines of the gallery as a discrete, momentous object that captures an instance of viewing and releases you when you walk away, it differentiates itself from music.

An essay I keep returning to, both because I think it holds a secret key and because it infuriates me, is Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’. It is an attempt to take down a certain strain in minimalist art, the ‘literalists’, doing the rounds in the sixties. The ‘literalists’ produced work which was programmatic, self-narrativising and total, in the sense that it was an explicit attempt to bypass mediation and demonstrate to the viewer, maybe involve them in, a moment or experience or presence that can only be found in the most direct recreation of the totemic scene, avoiding representational device or speculative distance. Fried thinks that this is anti-art - ‘theatre’ in his coinage - and a mistake. I often wonder whether he means that the artists are mistaken in their vain hope to bypass mediation as a moment, or whether he thinks the art is failed as it is not art at all but rather theatrical spectacle.

I wonder this because I just like a lot of the art he is criticising and want to rescue its worth for my own pleasure, and I am sensitive to a critic that I think critics I respect respect disliking the art I like. I am suggestible like that.

I think visual art generally ends up getting experienced in this totemic way, as a duration of awesome extent whose breeze we catch and then find falling still when our attention drifts and we amble to the next position in the gallery. The aesthetic unity that Fried confers to the modernist artists he likes is a phantasm, I think. Here is a long quote from him.

Here finally I want to emphasize something that may already have become clear: the experience in question persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that, I have been claiming, is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless, or indefinite, duration… The literalist preoccupation with time—more precisely, with the duration of the experience—is, I suggest, paradigmatically theatrical: as though theatre confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as though the sense which, at bottom, theatre addresses is a sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective. This preoccupation marks a profound difference between literalist work and modernist painting and sculpture. It is as though one's experience of the latter has no duration—not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.

Noland, Olitski, Smith and Caro are deemed to produce art that is whole and self-expressive, such that the full achievement of the experience is instantaneous. This seems wildly optimistic to me. I don’t want to just say that any process of human experiencing is temporally bounded and time-extended, though I think that’s pretty trivially true. I rather want to say that I’ve gone into a gallery which has both a ‘literalists’ (Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt) and ‘modernists’ (Anthony Caro, Jules Olitski) together (it was probably SFMoMA) and absorbed and come to understand what I take to be an aesthetic experience in the same way. An object intrudes into ambient space, taking the white walls and bleached wooden floors as its contrast case, and demands you to pay it some duration of attention until either you feel a kind of satisfaction that you know what you feel, or you are bored and feeling does not arrive. The works are temporally indifferent to you, and will be here tomorrow when you will not. Your time with the artwork is not bounded by its exhaustion or completion, but just however long it takes for experience to condense in a satisfying way, whether we notice all the expressed details or not, or the vastness of the entire room covered in construction lines or the mangle of steel’s patina and geometry to reach our senses. I think I am a mundane viewer of art, in this sense. We construct our own theatre walking through the gallery, and cannot help but make objects of the things that Fried alleges are anathema to literalism. Sorry.

Fried offers a cursory remark about the relegation of music to the status of theatre and therefore non-art:

What this means in each art will naturally be different. For example, music’s situation is especially difficult in that music shares-with theater the convention, if I may call it that, of duration—a convention that, I am suggesting, has itself become increasingly theatrical. Besides, the physical circumstances of a concert closely resemble those of a theatrical performance.

This seems obviously true, but just as trivially so as the argument I wanted to avoid that aesthetic experiencing is time-extended. The quality of music as listening is not like the indefinitely extended pure object or the you-just-had-to-be-there experience. The worst and most sickening art is devoted to the remarkable quality of immediate experience, the type which Fried would call ‘interesting’ and I would probably more type as ‘impressive’: when you are enthralled by the mere fact it is happening. It is why Classic FM-core, contemporary jazz and also Jacob Collier are basically the same as a very elaborate Rush 7 MIDI file.

Unfortunately, music that really is art demands the kind of aesthetic synthesis Fried is talking about, reckoning with the expression of a whole object even as the parts that constitute it are not divisible yet unfold together in time. This act of recomposition isn’t strung together with the sutures of material culture or anything as vulgar as language; in its purest state, whether it’s Adorno talking about Beethoven or Schoenberg, it is its process of not-quiteness, of being almost literal and then withdrawn. Music is an unfolding, not a determination. Unlike the artwork you can trust to be there forever and look until you know what you feel, music is a finite thing that still moves faster than your feelings.

The most important moments of durational listening I have had in the last while, prone as they might be to the bane of theatricality, have been drone performances. Last year, in London, I saw Kali Malone’s overwhelming final act to the live version of All Life Long played on the enormous and viciously bright organ of St. Martin’s in the Field, just off Trafalgar Square. I remember, for tracks like ‘No Sun To Burn’ and the closer ‘The Unification of Inner & Outer Life’ a repeated sensation of continuous downward spiral at first, followed by a horrendous vibration that moved through a variety of parts of my body, from my guts to my shoulders and head and then down to my limbs until I was shaking more or less uncontrollably by the end of the several minute long drones which ended each section. The knocking of just intoned semitones and sevenths wormed its way out of the air and into my nerves, needing to travel through the skin until they could be expelled. A similar thing happened during a recital of some of Elaine Radigue’s new work in Bristol a few years ago, where I walked into the venue with a headache and walked out with something else, whatever it was. An ensemble of double-bass, harp and violin, it swelled and creaked with the change of bow strokes, an interrupted and undulating tableau that felt extraordinarily different in its momentary features from its global structure. And Ellen Arkbro, in the early part of the Berlin winter, in the much more austere Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Kudamm, the glass brick octagonal counterpart to the bombed-out shell of the original standing next to it. The organ was at a greater distance, softer and reedier, like a clarinet or recorder ensemble. Nightclouds is a fun album that I wish was equalised and balanced differently on the record; it came alive in a setting which offered itself as part of an enveloping warm pressure, fluffy and aqueous, that sprang from one side of the room and settled, like cumulus clouds, among the pews where I lay in a sticky stupour.

All of these moments of time-extended playing could have been defined by their indefinite time extension instead depend, really consist, in their vibrancy. They literally get their sensuous intensity from the vibrations, of tones against their neighbours, of the pressure of bows dragging against strings, of the pillowy texture of a room’s ambience getting roiled by the chord changes. Each moment appears in its continuity with what precedes it but points to unceasing and often violent change hiding in moments or whole compositions structured around constancy. The vibrancy of the music is not some remarkable feature of these durational compositions, but rather a feature of how any kind of music makes itself known: as the succession of moments which explode in their individual complexity and difference but make a whole which only makes sense in the duration of all of these moments together. Music never loses its singularity, its there-ness, its aura, because you cannot reorganise the process of experiencing its duration; that’s just remixing. Maybe that’s why music is the artform most amenable to streaming, as with a minimal amount of hardware the process of experiencing can be reconstituted for anyone anywhere in a way that the copying of a file or physical medium hardly interrupts. Every listen is a new becoming of the same durational complexity, but knowing what is coming does not stop us from needing to experience that synthesis anew each time.

The ‘music-like quality of all art’ must, to my mind at least, point to its ability to make this continuous synthetic gesture, one which is bound to fail given the impossible task of holding the instant of meaningfulness in your mind and allowing it to speak for the whole thing. I love criticism that can zoom in to the production decisions about a single snare drum and its sonorous pop, or the greasy peeling sensation of a cascade of harmonics introduced by a particular filter, or the powdery bloom of an old digital hardware reverb. It is the kind of stuff I think I do best, and that I find really juicy and delicious when I find it in others. Each of those decisions can be meaningful and correct and contribute to making the whole what it is, but none of them are expressive of the whole, nor are they constitutive building blocks that can be discretely taken from it, the couplet underscoring the sonnet. Every wondrous sensation can only be experienced by its sequential ordering in a whole that does not permit being taken apart, and grasping for each moment on its own means taking a cleaver or a wrecking ball to the experience itself. Each decision and present part of music is an act of communication, but an indefinite and embedded one, offering only the process of interpretation in time and not the discrete decomposition of units of meaning in sequence that can be composed into a whole. Adorno, in ‘Music, Language and Composition’ (1956), contrasts music to the language of poetry and literature in this way:

In comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely different type. Therein lies music’s theological aspect. What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form [Gestalt] of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings.

This is why I reserve only meaningfulness, but not meaning itself, for music. Every moment is an attempt to construct and offer meaningful experiencing over time without the ability, or imperative, to have a determinacy.

At least when I watch a film or read a novel, I trust that the determinacy of words and language and the grammar that extends from such language to the image is going to hold my experiencing close enough that I’m not going to miss the artwork. This probably offers more power to narrative than it actually holds and too little power to the ‘second nature’ that Adorno identifies in the same essay as the link between immediate musical experience and our familiar vocabulary for its elements which, while still not definite, organise it in time and texture as if it were such a language: “The traditional doctrine of musical forms has its sentence, phrase, period, and punctuation. Questions, exclamations, subordinate clauses are everywhere, voices rise and fall, and, in all of this, the gesture of music is borrowed from the speaking voice.”

The rank indeterminacy of music still plagues my listening though. I feel as if I return can return to a book or poem and trust that the text will still have the sense it had when I left it, and that the particular differences in my interpretation moment to moment (caused by my changing mood, or the last thing I idly listened to on a podcast, or the growing familiarity with navigating the work) are more or less superfluous to the interpretive task, because I can always return to the text and tell what the words mean. Even the most figuratively obvious music does not seem to work this way: I don’t trust that the process of experiencing that I go through with music is not deeply integrated into my meals and work schedule and the smell of the library or train carriage and above all the way that sensuousness strikes my mind, which is a fickle and outrageously unreliable thing. There have been so many times, from this year and many in the past, where I find myself having deep convictions about a record and yet doubting myself because I am unsure whether I’ve had an experience correctly. Maybe there was a context or a listening session or a frame of mind I skipped or didn’t quite capture and the best, most important new work will instead skate by me. Or maybe my rank hatred of a work that other people like is being caused by nothing objective in the work, and is really an artefact of prejudices I’d like to strip out, or familiarities I haven’t picked up yet. As I said, I find myself suggestible to the work of other critics, and I think this is to the detriment of my ability to articulate my own thoughts. I am at least glad when I find popular things I detest because it is a reminder that I do have a taste and discernment particular to myself that I want to hold onto and that I wish spoke more loudly and forthrightly when it is put to the test.

Music is the form of art I love the most and have the deepest feelings about, and yet trust my convictions about the least, because it feels inherently like a less didactic and surefooted terrain of criticism. The music will not simply say what it is, it must be experienced in the glistening or wretched moments that pervade every corner of an uneven life. There is no text with its determinate meanings to go check and check again, only the experience. I think my extended friend and music-listening group take the new OPN album, Tranquilizer, to be the consensus album of the year. I like it, and it has no grip over me, certainly not in the way that the records Dan Lopatin made a decade ago do. This disjunction fills me with terror, I feel like I want to passionately love the album and my experience won’t let me, and I can’t help think I’m the wrong one despite me being the only one party to my experience and the only one accountable to my taste. This will happen again when I read the many amazing musicians and cool friends contributing lists to Boomkat whose listening I am so delighted to get a window into, but who have tastes I cannot get to grips with. It will happen again as I read Tone Glow, whose writers I respect deeply and usually think get it right in the aggregate, but only after a lot of kicking and screaming on my part.

I haven’t ever committed to music writing seriously because I think it demands more conviction in my experience that I can muster. I think most music writers are probably also nerds with anxiety (at least after the gen Xers have been shuffled off into irrelevant dusty corners) so I am unsure how they get over it. But it seems like they do, and I wouldn’t mind getting in on the action. I have done a lot of podcasting myself because it’s fun and we only really bothered talking about stuff we enjoyed and it is less accountable to speak to your friends than to commit things to writing. I guess the temporal aspect of speech really does differentiate it too.

There is still a reason that Adorno valorised the arch-modernists of the 1910s and 20s above all others. The ‘New Music’ promised a system of meaningfulness after the disorganisation of our second nature, a renewal of both the problem of composition and the challenge of listening and interpretation freed from the ingrained vocabulary of tonality and temporal structure, and towards a renewed musical and cultural sensibility. In ‘Towards an Understanding of Schoenberg’ (1955/67) he spells out this wish:

Schoenberg fulfilled the Wagnerian wish that music should finally outgrow its baby shoes. He no longer allows us to abandon ourselves to pure harmony, or to doze in a mood. The ear must identify his music in order to feel it. In particular, his music presupposes an ability that it is hardly possible to acquire in traditional music elsewhere than through Bach — the ability to follow the various melodic lines simultaneously and in their relationship to each other. Even the individual chords are internally polyphonically organized down to the last note. The listener must not just receive them as mere tonal stimuli, but must listen into them, as it were, must feel out all the tensions and shadings that each one of these chords contains.

In order to achieve such a wish, the form of Schoenberg’s work must be unfamiliar and unconventional, and follow principles not of organisation in categories of common understanding but of deliberate estrangement, to demand not a music that must be intently thought but rather experienced, directly and concretely, anew:

Compared with this kind of intellectual effort, which, properly understood, is immediate, and not a task of reflective thinking, the outwardly alienating features of Schoenberg’s music carry hardly any weight. The melodies with the unaccustomed intervals; the so-called dissonances, which in truth are only many-toned chords; the supposed disintegration, which is nothing but the lack of the crutches of an accustomed symmetry — all these are merely byproducts of Schoenberg’s music. Once the hearer has understood them starting from their inner principle, he will quite naturally accept their sensual and tonal deviations from the conventional. The decisive thing is the density of composition, which no one ever conceived of before — its concreteness, not its abstraction.

The music that I hope to find and love is like Schoenberg’s in that it demands an abandonment of old vocabularies of meaningfulness and an approach to the intensity of new experiencing, a feeling out of tensions and shadings in the immediate listening that cannot be organised for me by my prior experience and hacked-together vocabularies of genre form. This is an exhausting and confronting process, and different moments in my life have made it more available.

This is the second year in a row I have felt an obvious disappointment with my listening, in that those challenging and confronting meetings with the new were pretty intolerable. This is mostly just down to circumstances and mood, I really wasn't up for a challenge most of the time. I think another part of it is drone music, or at least a certain Euro art world strain of it, becoming tame to me. I now have the vocabulary to make sense of new releases by Ellen Arkbro and Ferdinand Schwarz in a way I didn’t a few years ago, and so this chunk of music that was forcing me to abandon conventions and expectations of listening I hand clung to and enter a new mode of experiencing is now something I can hold onto just fine. I still have those remarkable experiences - Schwarz’s Views Of A Sculpture was an exhausting, exhilarating first listen that I cannot stop thinking about - but I no longer feel like I have music that is new in form and tolerable in content reliably to hand. The problem isn’t with the music, it is with how little I am tolerating right now.

The top of my albums of the year list is full of the kind of music I recover and retreat to, that I want to envelop myself in in treasured or difficult moments. I have had a need for that this year, but I didn’t really last year and it still more or less worked out that way. I think the most obvious case though is the album I not only played but relied on the most this year, and which tops the list, which is oklou’s choke enough. It occupies a similar place to Nilüfer Yanya’s My Method Actor did last year where I really do love it, and I listen to it loads, but I stare at it at the top of the list sometimes and think, ‘really?’. Like I expect there should be something formally challenging or revelatory charging up the list to grab my soul and reshape it, and pretty much every year before 2024 there really was. Instead I pick an album that I am not convinced does the things I want really sparkling art to do for me, but still is the most special and important record I could possibly choose.

And so my lists for this year are below, with some blurbs for the top albums. I’ve been trying to blow the cobwebs out and express in music writing why music writing is so frustrating for me for a while. I think in truth I’ve been frustrated with music just as much as I have needed it desperately to hold me, distract me, soothe me, and ever so often take me elsewhere.

Albums of the Year

  1. oklou - choke enough

This is the album I hold as a counterpart to my high-watermark of last decade’s devotional and melodically expansive electronic music, Barker’s Look How Hard I Tried EP and album Utility. It’s pop music reduced to its most dynamic parts, every piece of percussion and extraneous pad synth that could weigh it down and stop it from flying is jettisoned. Only with such sparseness can the enormous Eurodance and trance leads feel so intimate, more a kid’s singalong from a fondly remembered TV show than a Eurovision entry. The melodies, drawn as they are from these fragmentary anthems of childhood, history and left-behind places, are both intensely homely and abjectly haunted, and the playful approach and recession of the melodies and the voices that carry them into the stage, which is sometimes cavernous and sometimes tucked under the sheets with you, is the grand trick that the album employs with constant skill. The pinnacle is the title track, twisting and arcing around a kick that will never arrive, trancegated chatter and ping-pong delay filling the copious space with a density and closeness that tempers the glassy synths. Like the burning sensation of holding ice for too long, then feeling it start to melt.

  1. Maria Somerville - Luster (4AD)

This record is two sections - the first three tracks followed by an album-length comedown utterly necessary and deserved. ‘Projections’ is stringy and stuffy, the pick noise too sharp, the drums too dense and the vocals filling up all the upper registers with a fog that cannot be excised. I find myself breathing together with the track really often; it moves air like a bellows or a small church filled with choristers. As it finds its conclusion, the fog starts to clear, the vocals come into relief, and the bassline anchors this wobbling mass more securely, right up until the bottom of the world falls out and ‘Garden’ begins, waves crashing into granite. Using such dramatic meteorological metaphors is something I am reading in from the narrative of this album's writing, but the fog of phaser and reverb is sculpted with care and tenderness as it blows through. The lyrics throughout the record are declarative, plain and bracing, and after the utterly blistering first few tracks, it seems as if the rest of the album is simply there to examine the wreckage they leave in a near therapeutic register. By the time it reaches ‘Violet’ and the sound is able to reconstitute itself from the cataclysm, she is forthrightly able to sing, even in the peaking feedback, “I believe in life, and love, and life.” I believe her.

  1. Lucy Liyou - Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name (Orange Milk)

I feel like there must have been some kind of injunction against melodrama that did the rounds among trans musicians over the last decade, because it is a territory so few dare to approach. One of my favourite records, Dear Laika’s Pluperfect Mind, enters its emotional territory in a disguising cloak of classical counterpoint and creates something unique for it, but Lucy Liyou’s last few records have targeted devotional love, dependence and desperate need so directly and forthrightly. ‘Arrested’, with its allusions to peak RnB and twisting through vocal timbres makes me feel the same biting, bracing discomfort of being invited to ask for an impossible pleasure as the quiet middle tracks (‘Is It Cold In The Water?’, ‘Infatuation’) on Sophie’s Oil of Every Pearl. Being desperately in love, with all of its bloody and febrile consequences, seems unfashionable, or at least unseemly, and certainly not the kind of thing that can be united with the trans bodily narrative of insecurity and instability. Lucy Liyou synthesises them without a moment of second-guessing, and makes love as gorgeous and transformative as I know it to be.

Having written off-handedly about ‘impressive’ music I am thinking back to when I saw her play at Café Oto when she was touring Dog Dreams and, clumsily, as she packed up, I kept telling her in a kind of stupour that playing so virtuosic shouldn’t also be so emotionally gripping. This record restrains her remarkable piano playing even further, other than the bubbling motifs of ‘No Tide Aorta’ and the beautiful turn which closes the verses in ‘Jokes About Marriage’, before both retreat into the ambience. The album has such a definite structure, a need to put the voice and its pain in the foreground, and it makes an address to the needy self and the loves we find enthralling or lacking so clear and blistering.

  1. caroline - caroline 2 (Rough Trade)

When I got to see the early takes that would form this album live, I chuckled when I saw the setlist had ‘song 2’ and ‘coldplay cover’ back to back, as if they knew there was a joke to be made about a big British band swinging for the fences of scale and drama. The difference is that this isn’t really a rock band aiming for the stratosphere, it’s a folk band that plays in the round that sorta happens to get loud. Every song they play is a raucous threat to overspill its boundaries, which is what happens frequently on this record, the material and the recording medium stressed to its limit, keeping things coy and plausibly deniable whenever it threatens to turn into Para-, para- paradise singalong. It is never quite comfortable in its own skin, the visible sutures needed to say that all this open-tuning open-heartedness comes with costs, or difficulties, or interruptions that need to be shown as well.

  1. Joanne Robertson - Blurrr (AD 93)

This is one of those albums that feels both like it spontaneously arrived perfectly formed, and that it required no effort or thought, casting off incidental images of itself as if the process of producing an album were as natural as living itself. I think that is as close to the improvisatory ideal that she espouses as an artist as we could possibly hope to get. Aside from the deeply Jonny Greenwood moment of orchestral attention-seeking on ‘Always Were’, every moment is scaled and controlled deftly, even as different voices poke to the surface; the vague allusion towards blues singing on ‘Why Me’ is just as much owned and mastered as the soaring ‘Gown’.

  1. foot foot - still waters, empty house (self-released)

I've finally found one of these nerdy ass British indie bands I like. Emo nerd shit, post-punk freak outs lurking around every corner, spiky and emotionally raw and incredibly direct. I have this awful thought that has been lurking in my head that many bands I like would be much more interesting if they were fronted by women, and I don't know if the fatigue of being told I ought to like bands that feel so concerned with themselves and deeply unconcerned with how it might feel to listen to them is making me think the misandry is onto something. This album is knotty because the feelings that need to be expressed and turned over and transformed into texture are knotty, I think about the last few tracks on Grizzly Bear's Shields and the streets I walked up to capture a photo that lines up with the cover of Jabu's A Soft and Gatherable Star just up the hill from the bar I've seen foot foot play and the city I love that I am leaving and think that this band will capture a microcosm of a strange swirling moment that I will need to come back to.

  1. Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer (Warp)

Like, it's still good. There's been this strange, long-running narrative I don't understand that OPN makes new age music, which I think is just shorthand for outdated synth textures in the minds of rockist critics. The vocabulary of each OPN project is intensely specific, but in the service of its own kind of symbolic collapse or miasmic intermingling: of 2D and 3D space in R Plus Seven, of authorship as loyal service and dismal act of violence in Garden of Delete, of all of his modes of symbolic play into each other in Again, lest we acknowledge the roughly similar gambit of its predecessor. Finally we have an album which is about the tranquil fragility of decaying beautiful sounds, which sounds like what some of his early releases are about but really isn't. This is the new age OPN album, the easy, breezy and ultimately comfortable ambient listen that I really do now place alongside some of the more active Steve Roach projects and the modern Iasos releases as deep investigations of a paradigm of sound production and its patterning by spiritually authentic experiencing. For once on an OPN project, I can remember moments but I cannot remember any tracks.

  1. Carrier - Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love)

Perversely, when you take a flight and enter a 'pressurised' atmosphere, the pressure sustained is lower than it would be on the ground. The air gets thinner as the aircraft climbs and then locks in its cabin altitude at maybe 8000 feet above sea level while the plane will continue to climb to its cruise altitude, likely above 35,000 feet. The air you breathe is thinner than normal, while the vessel you are seated in sustains an immense force trying to rip it open. I feel like the Carrier album is the aircraft pressurisation moment in Guy Brewer's catalogue, where the earlier releases under the Carrier moniker were submarine, full of density and noxious, suffocating pressure. This is the release where the fidgety, busy tendencies are excised fully and are replaced with a tightly controlled atmosphere with deftly placed, sculpturally integral objects populating it. But it is shockingly thin and sparse, threatening hypoxia rather than a smothering, and under a constant barely-bearable tension.

Alongside Basic Unit's rediscovered and reissued Timeline, these two albums conjure the intensity, anxiety and science fictional command over atmosphere present in the early techy DnB scene, beat science turning clinical and sparse. The lineage from peak Photek through to the precise and clearly post-Autechre abstraction of the artists that came to define labels like Nonplus, Exit and Modern Love culminated in the eventual synthesis of British club music with techno, a process Guy Brewer has had a direct hand in shaping. The attitude that persisted through each iteration of this sound, of neurotic and nauseous pressure, is conjured so deftly, not in density but the uncanny holes left in the wake of the excavation of its most skeletal and bare forms.

  1. Baths - Gut (Basement's Basement)

I feel like the line "Fucking all the men in droves (That's that!)" is followed by an ironic 🙂 emoji: gay sex suffuses Gut but it is always tainted and stained with its horrid psychic and enteric residues. And Will Weisenfeld carries these on his shoulders and in his voice with superficial ease and studied, vicious antipathy directed both at the world and himself, delivered with a generous and sarcastic smile. Romaplasm, another album I adore, takes after its cover art in reflecting a specular, HDR-rendered image of immaculate love and infatuation tempered by a careful and slippery investigation of its underbelly: 'Yeoman' and 'Human Bog' are truly exemplary tracks reflecting the two modes that record worked in. Gut takes the second domain and runs its thought process into present, explosive crisis rather than reflective depression. There is ecstasy throughout the album, but always overwhelming and overflowing even when it is pleasurable ("I'm a spring cupped to his lips / Slip into my ellipsis"), until it starts to stink and curdles and leaves something horribly bitter behind. The moments of release and explosion are just as much compromises with this overwhelm rather than cathartic releases from it and, in a very familiar and heartbreaking way, I understand and recognise these compromises. No moment on this album delivers its undeniable force without pointing towards all the moments of rejection, terror and repression they drag with them, and there is no gayer way to make a pop record.

  1. svn4vr - fleshdeath (icsu)

It is always scary to even invoke Frank Ocean's name, but hearing fleshdeath was the first time I really heard the meditative, insular mode of prayer and self-reflection that made Blonde so singular and shocking reproduced in its quiet resplendence. svn4vr finds other zones to work in, a jim legxacy-like glide over Midwest emo and acoustic riffs being a big part of it, but instead of jim's laser-like glide over top of the math-drill, svn4vr is buried in its emotional and sonic world even when his lines are in double time. He is fully in the confessional mode of both the singer-songwriter and sinner. The world which runs continuously between emo, digicore, Afrobeats and folk is inhabited by way more people than we ever could have dreamed, and fleshdeath sits at its most vulnerable and solemn edge. No, it isn't a fully realised artist with a fully realised project, but it's a glimpse of at least one part of the future.

  1. Kevin Drumm - Neither Here Nor There (VAKNAR)

The undisputed best way to spend your money on Bandcamp is a Kevin Drumm sub, but it is a collection of older material that was the soundtrack to endless moments of respite and meditation. It often became a part of my home's architecture to the point where it didn't quite feel complete without it.

  1. U.e. - Hometown Girl (28912)

I am continually trying to make sense of the location, or dislocation, going on in Ulla Strauss' music, because it is constantly signalling, most strongly in her unique and mesmeric processing of voice, that this music belongs 'elsewhere' in the most profound sense- and yet I keep bringing it home.

  1. jim legxacy - black british music (2025) (! / XL)

jim legxacy is slightly at risk of turning into a madlib version of himself, where 'he does his really beautiful vocal performance over an unexpected and nostalgic blend of styles with roots in London' can run into slightly absurd endpoints, and I want a version of him that really does find the singular emotional heft in that strategy that he undoubtedly hit on 'dj' and 'old place' which were my tracks of the year, utterly without question or challenge, for 2022 and 2023 respectively. And then after humouring this new mixtape, I arrive at the back to back combination of 'i just banged a snus' and 'dexters phone call' which come really, really fucking close. The magic is here, and I want it to stay.

  1. They Are Gutting A Body of Water - LOTTO (ATO / Julia’s War / Smoking Room)

What I really want to do with this slot is have the julie record from last year, my anti-aircraft friend, all the way up at number 4 or 5. Instead, the other loud guitar album I filled many angry days with can make it onto the list itself. It's a strange beast, reminding me quite a lot of the way Alex G's electronic forays in the last few records have resulted in much more indirect access to otherwise exceptional songwriting, so LOTTO at once has more clean lines and easier to read surfaces than the band's older work and also feels like it holds itself much further apart from its surface appearance. I really do love what TAGABOW sounds like when they get loud though.

  1. Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (hermine)

What I really want to do with this slot is just put Windswept Adan, again likely several spots higher, but Luminscent Creatures still has utterly sparkling moments, 'tower' being the absolute highlight. An album of balletic poise.

  1. 7038634357 - Waterfall Horizon (Blank Forms)
  2. Basic Unit - Timeline (Sneaker Social Club)
  3. Lucy Railton - Blue Veil (Ideologic Organ)
  4. aya - hexed! (Hyperdub)
  5. lime68k - Live @ NaN Festival, Karlsruhe, DE (29.11.2025) (self-released)
  6. Darling Farm - Darling Farm (Bible Jail)
  7. Ferdinand Schwarz - Views Of A Sculpture (Superpang)
  8. Shlohmo - REPULSOR (R&R)
  9. Kaho Matsui - Ultimate Devotion Plus (self-released)
  10. Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer (NLV)
  11. Steve Roach - The Reverent Sky (Projekt)
  12. John Glacier - Like A Ribbon (Young)
  13. Ethel Cain - Perverts (Daughters of Cain)
  14. goat (jp) - Without References / Cindy Van Acker (Latency)
  15. Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek - Greyhound Days (Mondoj)
  16. Kali Malone & Drew McDowall - Magnetism (Ideologic Organ)
  17. james K - Friend (AD 93)
  18. crushed - no scope (Ghostly Intl.)
  19. Giant Claw - Decadent Stress Chamber (Orange Milk)
  20. Jenny Hval - Iris Silver Mist (4AD)
  21. Yawning Portal - Anywhere (YEAR0001)

Tracks of the Year That Aren't Just Good Tracks On Good Albums

  1. Underscores - 'Do It'
  2. Amaarae - 'S.M.O.'
  3. hearts2hearts - 'Focus'

Old Albums of the Year (alphabetical)