A Closer Listen
This year’s Top 20 list is noteworthy for its variety, a reflection of the wealth of music on the market. For every 200 albums submitted to ACL, only one makes our final list. This makes it all the more remarkable that our Album of the Year was a runaway favorite.
2023 was a great year for music, marked by creative genre blends and instinctive collaborations. Our top artists hail from different continents, but share a love for experimentation. Whether exploring glaciers or volcanos, commenting on social issues or global war, or adopting tones from nostalgic to euphoric, these artists captured our attention in 2023 and prompted repeat plays. We hope that you’ll enjoy our selection of the best albums of the year!
1) Tujiko Noriko ~ Crépuscule I & II (Editions Mego)
Remarkably, this is the first album by Tujiko Noriko we have covered. But we’ve made up for that oversight by voting Crépuscule I & II our Album of the Year. In our defence, the prolific output of Noriko’s first decade or so – roughly an album a year – has slowed down during the site’s lifetime. It’s nine years since My Ghost Comes Back, her previous album on Editions Mego, and there’s been a greater focus on producing film soundtracks. This is the real deal, though, and one that ignores the prevailing fashion. In a year when albums seem to be getting shorter, with tracks becoming more concise – a side effect of streaming, and the shift towards vinyl – Crépuscule is over 100 minutes long and split over two cassettes or CDs. The title gives the best indication of when to experience the music – this is twilight listening, as the day gives way to night and we can properly engage and focus for the duration. We’re in safe hands: Tujiko Noriko has produced a record that flows beautifully, gradually expanding in scope – it’s an album you can fall into and stay there quite happily until the final notes fade away. Crépuscule I & II is ambient music at its finest: graceful and luminous, considered and comforting. (Jeremy Bye)
Original Review
2) Aho Ssan ~ Rhizomes (Other People)
Conceptual richness enables a certain kind of poetic sensibility, in which the music overflows with potential associations. In the case of Rhizomes, this means myriad collaborations, but also a sharp, incisive approach to electronics that striates and extends the patterns of genres and styles, from ambient to hip-hop. In experimenting with electronic music as a body instead of as a mechanical device, Aho Ssan lets collaborators breathe distinct lives into each piece, every element thriving in an environment of free interactions that do not feel fitted into each other, but growing and diminishing through touch, like a sensitive plant. The sheer density of these interactions prevents this listener from conceiving the music as purely linear – it sways in multiple directions at once, every step of the way, in a manner that does not feel like building up a tension that might result in destruction, but rather, a tension that if driven too far will result in creation, in outgrowth. In other words, there’s an album in each of these tracks, a powerful register of creativity, the rare feat of artistry we’re lucky to be able to bear witness to. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
3) Matana Roberts ~ Coin Coin Chapter Five: in the Garden … (Constellation)
Former member of the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Matana Roberts knows something about infusing music and improvisation with a political consciousness. Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden is the latest installment of Roberts’ ongoing, research-based exploration of African-American history. In chapter five Roberts refracts the still fraught reality of womanhood through the story of an ancestor who conducted an illegal abortion. Across the album’s sixteen tracks Roberts shifts between explosive full-band improvisations, moments of gentler solo performance, and her powerful and deftly delivered spoken word. Her own horn is prominent throughout, insisting that it be heard even as it shares space with the talented ensemble of musicians with whom Roberts improvises. This chapter is more steeped in the musical dynamics of group performance than others, mirroring the shared experience she narrates across the album’s length as she repeats over and over: “My name is your name. Your name is my name. We are named.” The album ends as a fife and drum duet, accompanying a faint series of overlapping voices, slowly fades out in a gesture that feels less like an ending and more like a transition between this story and the next one. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
4) Hollie Kenniff ~ We All Have Places That We Miss (Western Vinyl)
Hollie Kenniff’s We All Have Places That We Miss is an exploration of nostalgia, inspired by the artist’s loss of a family summer home. The album is every bit as poignant as its title suggests. It’s sweeping and airy, at once comforting and sorrowful. One of the three tracks that features Kenniff’s husband, Goldmund, is called “Eunoia,” a word which is commonly translated as “beautiful thought.” The album reminds listeners of the beauty that accompanies loss– we all remain with memories of people and places no longer present in our lives. Perhaps these memories are the beautiful thoughts Kenniff refers to, and perhaps the universality of longing to return to times passed makes them all the more beautiful. The album seems to embrace listeners with the consolation that these thoughts and memories are enough. (Maya Merberg)
Original Review
5) KMRU ~ glim
We’ve been fans of KMRU’s work since before the release of his breakthrough Peel (2020), and have happily watched his reputation grow with each subsequent release. While he has increasingly embraced the synthesizer, field recording remains the core of his practice. Even if Dissolution Grip, released just a few months ago, features no audible field recordings, Kamaru still interpreted the waveforms of selections from his archives as graphic scores for compositions. But glim, released at the beginning of the year, finds the Berlin-based Kenyan artist continuing his delicate fusion of ambient field recordings and meandering synth tones, to great effect. Avoiding the cliches of both practices—no water or bird sounds, no bleeps or bloops—KMRU continues to grow as a composer. Like the album title, all but the final track consists of one word titles, offering a poetic but mostly inscrutable glimpse into the meaning lurking behind the aural scrim. Full of delicate textural manipulation and dynamic arrangements, glim continues to reveal new aspects on each subsequent immersion within its confines. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
6) Zoë Mc Pherson ~ Pitch Blender (SFX)
Like the sharpened blade of your kitchen blender, this album whirs past in a dizzying blur. Rapid-fire breaks, polyrhythmic footwork, woofer shuddering bass, vocal pronouncements, and cerebral ambience are all in the mix. Rather than becoming a homogonous mush, this album keeps all its multicoloured chunks fresh and crunchy. This is an album of breathtaking energy, whether you’re at a Berlin club or nodding along in your pyjamas. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
7) Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci ~ Chthonic (American Dreams)
Probably the heaviest album on this list, Chthonic carries some serious heft. Listening to it can be quite the experience – even on inexpensive headphones, you can feel the physical power of the music pounding through your ears. Never mind cranking up the vinyl on a decent stereo, bringing up entirely fresh vistas in the sound. This impact is a deliberate choice by the duo of Bertucci and English: they are responding to large-scale meteorological and seismological events that occurred before humans started wrecking the planet and will continue long after we’ve disappeared from the Earth. Collaborations can often fire wide of the mark for any number of reasons but the immense Chthonic hits because the two musicians’ contributions complement each other. Lea Bertucci’s instruments respond to Lawrence English’s field recordings, channelling the sound seamlessly. If only humankind could show as much sympathy and understanding with each other as this duo does. (Jeremy Bye)
Original Review
8) Bex Burch ~ There is only love and fear (International Anthem)
There is only love and fear, plus death and taxes. We might add joy, which Burch’s music brims with. In birdsong, breath, wind, and street sounds, there is a satisfying organicism to this album. At its centre are the wooden tones of xylophone percussion, leading us through African rhythms, American minimalism, moments of electronic amplification, and surges of forceful jazz. Threading it all together is a disciplined sense of adventure, as Burch and her collaborators follow their artistry wherever it takes them. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
9) Philip Jeck & Chris Watson ~ Oxmardyke (Touch)
Oxmardyke would have appeared on this list even if it weren’t the last work by the late Philip Jeck, but that fact undoubtably lends extra weight to this collaboration with Chris Watson. Jeck edited and manipulated Watson’s recordings from his hospital bed (not unlike the production of J Dilla’s Donuts), though this is not necessarily palpable in the music itself. The long-in-the-works collaboration between two titans of the underground is, perhaps more to the point, the result of a collaboration between two friends. Beyond his work with Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio, Watson has become internationally recognized as one of the world’s premiere field recordists, as comfortable recording wildlife sounds for the BBC as creating sound art installations. Watson gave recordings made at the Oxmardyke rail crossing to Jeck, who was fascinated by the area’s history, including connections to the Knights Templar. Best known for his idiosyncratic approach to vinyl manipulation, Jeck digitally manipulates Watson tape in ways that call into question the supposed distinction between the natural and the non-. On some tracks Jeck’s touch is subtle, others less so, but Oxmardyke is a true collaboration, sounding like both and neither at the same time. The backstory of Oxmardyke the album, like the history of Oxmardyke the place, lends additional significance to these sounds, but true to the caliber of these two artists, the record stands on its own as a deeply compelling work of art. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
10) Mary Lattimore ~ Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (Ghostly International)
The fading ambience of a hotel before renovation. This is an apt metaphor for life in its impermanence: the layout shifting just as we start feeling at home. Mary Lattimore’s harp has a patient and knowing evocation of change and loss. Set against textures of synth, voice, and guitar, Lattimore strings together melancholy narratives that straddle the intimate and the unknown. A delicately haunting beauty is the end result. (Samuel Rogers)
Original Review
11) Giuseppe Ielasi ~ Down on Darkened Meetings (Black Truffle)
Though experimental approaches to the acoustics of guitar sounds are varied and many, few dig as deep as this album does, treating tones as an arrangement of particles bouncing off each other, producing nano-soundscapes that last mere seconds at a time, beautifully coming together as a tranquil harmonic mass. The album cover shows a flash-illuminated bush against a darkened electricity pole: in a sense, it is an organic feedback loop, the camera’s photons traveling back – absorbed by the green leaves – to an opaque source of electricity; a micro-narrative, a micro-landscape, emerges within this circuit, as granular and detailed as the world itself. Tones that repeat are never exactly the same, new ones are never free of previous atomic clustering, variations clue listeners in to structures that last but an instant. Our ears are the small tree, impacted by sounds as they travel back to a source we know exists but cannot see, each second a crucial point in an infinite-yet-diminutive story of an entire aural world made by a mere singular instrument. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
12) Heinali ~ Kyiv Eternal (Injazero)
Kyiv Eternal opens with the ambient sounds of a subway: The rustling of air, the beeping of the doors, and the announcement of an upcoming stop. The recording is joined in mere seconds by the entrance of Heinali’s quivering, crescendoing drones, gently accompanying the bumps and scrapes of the train. As the album continues other recordings— birds, the ringing of a phone, the rustling of glasses—surface from his warbled loops and drones, both elements of sound emerging in fits and starts from the album’s gentle silence. At times Kyiv Eternal is more soundscape than music. At others it is unabashedly dramatic. It’s not just through the field recordings spread across the album, so obviously of Ukraine, that Heinali is able to achieve such a delicate sense of pathos on the album, although it isn’t not that either. We wrote in our round-up of the best Ukrainian music of the year that the album sounds a note of optimism and it does, in the way only shimmering drones and simple melodies can. But it’s an optimism drenched in that particular experience of happiness in sadness, persistence in the impossible. Complex affects Heinali evokes here through the sonic image of both the train that pushes forward throughout the album, as well as the drone, a figure that can also be two things at once, in motion through stillness. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
13) Kate NV ~ WOW (RVNG Intl.)
Kate NV’s WOW contains the whimsy of a Picasso painting in the form of sound. It is ear-catchingly colorful and disjointed. The album is fast-paced, bouncy, and fun– an almost comedic collage of field recordings and acoustic instrumentals. For all of WOW’s playfulness, it is not lacking in depth or complexity. This is an album with layers and surprises– one could listen to it on repeat and always discover new sounds on each play. (Maya Merberg)
Original Review
14) Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Ella Ollikainen ~ ARCHORA / AIŌN (Sono Luminus)
ARCHORA / AIŌN is a deep and immersive orchestral experience. The twenty minute opening piece “ARCHORA” begins like a vast, dark Icelandic winter before bursting into a thumping climax and then settling into a still somewhat unresolved finale. Aion, which comes in three movements, sees more dynamism than the first piece (inevitably, as its movements are titled “Morphosis,” “Transcension,” and “Entropia”) and ventures into higher registers. Though each section is unique, a certain foreboding murmur permeates the work from start to finish. ARCHORA / AIŌN seems to speak to the unfathomable reality lying behind our human perceptions of universal forces– energy, time, space. (Maya Merberg)
Original Review
15) Galya Bisengalieva ~ Polygon (One Little Independent)
A devastating, wide-reaching policy of deliberately poisoning a land and its people is the inspiration behind Polygon. In a manner similar to her 2020 release, Aralkum, Galya Bisengalieva takes an element of Kazakhstan life that has been negatively affected by governments and bureaucrats and uses it as inspiration for her compositions. The Polygon was the name of a Soviet nuclear testing site that ran for 40 years and was responsible for irradiating over a million Kazakhs in an area that was previously the cradle of Kazakh culture. Unsurprisingly, there is a profound sense of melancholia channelled through Bisengalieva’s violin, permeating the record. Field recordings and drones provide enough texture to place the listener within the Polygon itself. There’s anger, fear and sorrow at what happened – but also a sense of unwavering optimism that the area will recover and the people will go on. This album is a fitting memorial. (Jeremy Bye)
Original Review
16) Marja Ahti ~ Tender Membranes (Black Truffle)
Marja Ahti’s Tender Membranes explores the liminal spaces in-between the familiar and the extraneous, dust and light, rendering environmental sounds deceptive by re-contextualising them amongst static and electronic signals. The opening track “Shrine (Aether)” builds on from “Shrine (Still Life With Glass Bottle, Flower and Microphone)” included in her previous album Still Lives. The echoing ripples of a bowl gong, or a tolling bell, stretch until stillness eventually merges with high frequencies competing with the buzzing of an insect and the low tones of what could be machines from an industrial habitat. The sonic terrain explored by Athi is haunted by half buried sounds and ghostly voices as well as musical instruments brought to life in hushed phrasing like shallow breath that uses intercostal muscles rather than the lungs. If narrative intrudes where digital meets analogue, the sense of dislocation short circuits the unfolding of any possible fictional outcome. One is left meandering in suspended animation. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Original Review
17) Cruel Diagonals ~ Fractured Whole (Beacon Sound)
Having first captured our attention with Monolithic Nuance, her 2018 work for Longform Editions, Megan Mitchell’s Cruel Diagonals has continued to impress with each new work. With Fractures Whole, she set herself the task of producing an album using nothing as her voice as raw material. Opener “Penance” begins with Mitchell’s voice, lovely and clearly decipherable, but it is not long before the first turbulent elements emerge, portending a darkness that carries through the arc of the entire album. While she deserves recognition as a gifted vocalist, she deserves at least as much praise for her production work, alchemically transmuting her voice into a wide range of instruments and textures. But there’s no need to puzzle too hard over her process; when the results are this captivating, it’s best to just let yourself be carried away. Reparation isn’t always possible, but wholeness can take many forms. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
18) Francesco Fabris & Ben Frost ~ Vakning (Room40)
As a composer Ben Frost is well-versed in musical extremes. He crafts dark music that dwells in the treacherous place where fear and brutality cross over into beauty. It’s a slippery affect that applies equally to the lure of dangerous natural phenomena such as volcanos, which Frost, along with the field recordist Francesco Fabris, turned attention to on Vakning. Recorded on location at Fagradalsfjall in Iceland and mixed by the duo, Vakining is a stunningly detailed representation of volcanic activity. Periods of eerie quiet, nothing audible but the wind and faint rustling, exist alongside periods of dense noise that sounds like world being ripped in two and your speakers with it. The sound of the earth tearing, if experienced with a certain, arguably the proper mode of attention, should be terrifying but it’s also fascinating. Vakining also serves as a reminder of the intimate relationship between the sounds of nature and those of music. On a track such as “walking like a royal snake,” the banging of what one imagines to be rock against rock, sounds just like the beating of a drum. The sound of scraping, that of a violin. Vakning is a dynamic record that revels in the eerie slippage between synthetic and recorded sound even as it encourages listeners to stand in awe of the natural phenomena Fabris and Frost managed to capture. (Jennifer Smart)
Original Review
19) Grails ~ Anches en Maat (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
It would seem this band will never cease to amaze. Every release – years and years in the making – is a surprising renovation of post-rock form, an exploration of a space where the band are basically a lonely rocket charting a course towards the unknown. Ever since a minor section of guitar-led post-rock started settling into the musical grooves of the 1970s, Grails has been distinct in its collapsing of old and recent styles, treating them less like vital motors of long-duration, emotionally propulsive psych and more like a ruin from which the ghosts of something far greater than rock n’ roll loom. Among them is perhaps post-rock’s Cold War unconscious, a cinematic wilderness of lead, the subversion of prog-rock elevation and clarity by hazy conspiratorial fogs of darkened rituals, a secret history of the loud-soft-loud catharsis that does not tend toward enlightenment but sublime obscurity. Inhale its surreal smoke, and let yourself sink away into the underground, where a scarred, lost, hungry old mole lives. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
20) Matthew Herbert ~ The Horse (Accidental Records)
The ritual manipulation of the bones of the dead is strongly connected with ancestor cults, but bones, even human ones, have also always been used as musical instruments. In fact, early music was played with animal skin utilised in drums and bones doubling up as flutes. It is only fitting therefore that The Horse begins in a cave, conjuring up images reminiscent of the “Dawn of Man” sequence from 2001 A Space Odyssey. The album becomes gradually more intricate with a community of cross generation researchers constructing anything from a pelvic lyre to electronic samples. Anything equine goes with horse merch ending up in a cement mixer to provide a rhythmic pulse. The stellar cast of contributors ensures a tribal, quasi-shamanistic re-interpretation of the full-size skeleton that, triggering an altered state of consciousness, conveys a sense of the numinous. The Horse is an album that talks about our symbiotic relationship with the universe, one that we are at danger of compromising. By a fortunate stroke of serendipity, the horse amulet reproduced on the cover was found by a metal detectorist on the grounds of Herbert’s home studio during the making of the album. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Original Review
Fri Dec 22 00:01:04 GMT 2023