22 Favorite Releases of 2021

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share my favorite releases of the year. Not exhaustive, just some personal highlights. Happy new year!

Previously: 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015

A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory, 1991
buy
Beat Happening – Dreamy, 1991
buy / download
Carlos Maria Trindade & Nuno Canavarro – Mr. Wollogallu, 1991
buy / download
Dip In The Pool – Aurorae, 1991
buy / download
Enya – Shepherd Moons, 1991
buy
Flipper’s Guitar – Doctor Head’s World Tower, 1991
buy / download
Harold Budd – By The Dawn’s Early Light, 1991
buy / download
The Hilliard Ensemble – 
Carlos Gesualdo: Tenebrae, 1991
buy / download
Jean C. Roché – Rossignols: A Nocturne of Nightingales, 1991
buy / download
Keisuke Sakurai – Is It Japan ?, 1991
buy / download
Laurie Spiegel – Unseen Worlds, 1991
buy
LFO – Frequencies, 1991
buy / download
Main Source – Breaking Atoms, 1991
buy / download
Mariah Carey – Emotions, 1991
buy
Massive Attack – Blue Lines, 1991
buy
My Bloody Valentine – Loveless, 1991
buy
Mychael Danna – Sirens, 1991
buy / download
Nirvana – Nevermind, 1991
buy
The Orb – The Orb’s Adventures
Beyond The Ultraworld, 1991
buy
Primal Scream – Screamadelica, 1991
buy
Roberto Mazza – Scoprire Le Orme, 1991
buy / download
Talk Talk – Laughing Stock, 1991
buy

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 61

A kind of sequel to last month’s mix, this month’s episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is more deeply autumnal sounds: private press folk, psych, early Fleetwood Mac, a very good and strange Bono cameo, Bridget St. John covering Buddy Holly, and many more great things. I think of it, very loosely, as a “70s meltdown,” even though there are plenty of non-70s things in here–it feels very 70s in spirit. I hope you like it! If you do, you can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Hudson Brothers – So You Are A Star
2. Wool – If They Left Us Alone Now
3. Virginia Tree – Make Believe Girl
4. Gavin Bryars – Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (Tramp With Orchestra III, No Strings)
5. Dave Van Ronk – Hang Me, Oh Hang Me
6. Fleetwood Mac – Man Of The World
7. Durutti Column – William B
8. The Fleetwoods – Truly Do
9. John Martyn – Don’t Want To Know
10. Emitt Rhodes – Lullabye
11. Bill Fay – I Hear You Calling
12. Fairport Convention – Who Knows Where The Time Goes
13. The Feelies – On The Roof
14. Karen James – The Morning Dew (James McHree)
15. Bridget St. John – Every Day
16. Daniel Lanois – Falling At Your Feet
17. Lou Reed – Satellite Of Love
18. Judee Sill – The Kiss

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 54

Here’s my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. I wanted it to be an over-the-top shot of dopamine, songs that make me feel euphoric and credits-rolling optimistic. I’ve been trying to be a little bit more adventurous in combining genres and decades, so there are some odd transitions in here–hopefully they make you feel good as they do for me. I’m very pleased to say that this episode gave Jessica Simpson her first ever airtime on NTS. Happy spring–I hope you and your loved ones have all gotten vaccinated and that the world feels a little brighter. You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Jun Miyake – Relaxn’
2. Jessica Simpson – I Think I’m In Love With You
3. Ahmed Fakroun – Nisyan (Edit)
4. Renée Geyer – Be There In The Morning
5. Blondie – Sunday Girl
6. Throwing Muses – Not Too Soon
7. Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons – C’mon Marianne
8. Bananarama – Shy Boy
9. The Three Degrees – When Will I See You Again
10. Forrest – Rock The Boat
11. Plustwo – Melody
12. Brandy – Top of the World ft. Mase
13. Pet Shop Boys – What Have I Done To Deserve This ft. Dusty Springfield
14. Ryuichi Sakamoto – You Do Me
15. Mr. Twin Sister – Expressions
16. George McCrae – Rock Your Baby
17. Jon Secada – Just Another Day

Jane Siberry – The Walking, 1987

I’m about to revert to a mode of musical description that I strongly dislike, which is: comparing female musicians with other singular female musicians, specifically female musicians who often get lazily categorized as “weird.” I’m sorry, I don’t like it either! But Jane Siberry is slippery to describe. I’ll do my best anyway.

The Walking is the fourth full-length from Canadian musician Jane Siberry. It’s the follow-up to No Borders Here, which was a highly ambitious record–and yet The Walking feels even moreso, both incredibly intricate and enormous, rapidly oscillating between macro and microcosmic. While Siberry found critical acclaim in Canada, her records–as I understand it–mostly flew under the radar in the US, in ways that feel both legible and surprising. There are elements of these songs which feel like they could have been commercially marketable to the art pop crowd, in spite of everything: there’s a theatrical spaciousness that’s difficult not to compare to Kate Bush or Laurie Spiegel, and a navy blue moodiness with cavernous percussion that suggests Talk Talk. Ultimately it seems that it was the songs’ length that kneecapped their commercial viability, at least for radio play, which is unfortunate given how easy it is to picture the jangly and ecstatic “Ingrid And The Footman” rolling through the ending credits of a John Hughes movie. The Walking functions as a series of eight mini-suites, only one of which is shorter than five minutes, and most of which comprise a series of movements, or, as Siberry refers to them, “emotional clearings”–which, if we are to take the title of The Walking at face value, starts to make sense as an extended metaphor.

And still, in spite of all of the tones and colors that she wrings out in less than an hour, she speaks in interviews of having “more to say than [she] could fit into a song,” and of having to abridge tracks that stretched over 30 minutes down to nine. Perhaps it’s this condensation which, in spite of how expansive these songs are, produces the feeling of rolling a many-faceted prism in your hands as it catches the light. It’s rare to hear a musician who so effectively combines poetic lyricism and razor-sharp, stunningly beautiful musicianship. Joanna Newsom’s Ys and its mode of mythical, longform, large-scale storytelling immediately come to mind. Not much else does.

For me, the most emotionally pointed track on the record is “The Lobby,” which, lyrically, paints in large, dreamlike gestures: it provides the flint-spark of pathos, gorgeous musical bones, and a lot of empty space. The rest is up to the listener, left to drape their own emotions and projections all over the structures that Siberry has built for us. I don’t know what this song is actually about, but I don’t need to, as I’ve already stuffed it full of my own stories. Listening to it provides the odd sensation of long fingers rooting around in your psyche, prodding deftly at the parts that hurt the most. There’s catharsis here too, though. If pain is a movement in Jane’s suite, then so is joy, and so is self-realization.

Thank you Nick for introducing me to Jane–you can read Nick’s post about her record No Borders Here from a few years ago, and read his more recent and very good interview with her here.

buy / download

15 Favorite Releases of 2020

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share my favorite releases of the year. Not exhaustive, just some personal highlights. Happy holidays!

Previously: 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015

Ali Akbar Khan – Signature Series: Three Ragas, 1990
buy / download
Angelo Badalamenti – Twin Peaks, 1990
buy / download
The ARC Gospel Choir – Bound For The Promised Land, 1990
buy / download
The Art Of Noise – The Ambient Collection, 1990
buy / download
Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas, 1990
buy
Dead Can Dance – Aion, 1990
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Deee-Lite – World Clique, 1990
buy / download
Depeche Mode – Violator, 1990
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Mariah Carey – Mariah Carey, 1990
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No Smoke – International Smoke Signal, 1990
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Pet Shop Boys – Behaviour, 1990
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Pixies – Bossanova, 1990
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Prefab Sprout – Jordan: The Comeback, 1990
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Soul II Soul – Vol. II (1990 – A New Decade), 1990
buy / download
Woo – Into The Heart Of Love, 1990
buy / download

25 Favorite Releases of 2019

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share some of my favorite releases of the year. Such a brooding year for music, with some really strong aesthetic and political statements and boundary-pushing uses of both guitars and electronics, suggesting many exciting changes on their way in the next decade. Obviously this isn’t meant to be exhaustive or authoritative; just some personal highlights. Quite a few of these are giant major label releases, so I’ll be taking down those download links quickly or leaving them off accordingly. Let me know if links are broken. Happy new year!

Previously: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015

A.C. Marias – One Of Our Girls, 1989
buy / download
The B-52’s – Cosmic Thing, 1989
buy / download
The Blue Nile – Hats, 1989
buy / download
The Cure – Disintegration, 1989
buy
De La Soul – 3 Feet High And Rising, 1989
buy
dip in the pool – Retinae, 1989
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Forrest Fang – The Wolf At The Ruins, 1989
buy / download
Galaxie 500 – On Fire, 1989
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Harry Case – In A Mood, 1989
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The Hilliard Ensemble – Pérotin, 1989
buy / download
Haruomi Hosono – Omni Sight Seeing, 1989
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Inner City – Paradise, 1989
buy
Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation 1814, 1989
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Joan Bibiloni – Born, 1989
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Julee Cruise – Floating Into The Night, 1989
buy
Kate Bush – The Sensual World, 1989
buy
Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine, 1989
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Nirvana – Bleach, 1989
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Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis – Deep Listening, 1989
buy / download
Piero Milesi & Daniel Bacalov – La Camera Astratta, 1989
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Pixies – Doolittle, 1989
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Ryuichi Sakamoto – Beauty, 1989
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Soul II Soul – Club Classics Vol. One, 1989
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The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses, 1989
buy
Woo – It’s Cosy Inside, 1989
buy / download

[RIP] Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis, 1998

Guest post by Nick Zanca (Quiet Friend / Mister Lies)

I’m 20 years old, leaning against a window of a train from London to Edinburgh. The two other guys I’m traveling with, young producers with MacBooks and MIDI controllers in tow, are sprawled out in the seats across from me, eyes closed, dead to the world. At the start of that year, I had put out an LP (my first) of music I had felt unsure of, spent nearly every weekend of my sophomore spring semester in a different city, spun into a whirlwind, eventually dropping out of college to tour full time. Now it’s summer and I’m abroad and unready, unable to slow my racing mind. Instead, I retreat into my headphones, staring out at the passing Highlands in all their viridescence. In my ears sits a lone voice over a tranquil bed of strings, the ghostly hum of a vibrato circuit on a guitar amp lurking: “step right up / something’s happening here.” Sleeplessness becomes body high as the sun starts to rise.

This is how I fell in love with Laughing Stock. That record, and later Spirit Of Eden, became instant companions through the months of endless travel and alienation that followed. The music of Mark Hollis would only hypnotize; it would help me process the change in direction of my life–a pointillist’s attention to detail, a fluidity I dreamt of possessing, a texture thick to the point of becoming a security blanket. Listening repeatedly, you feel as if you’re walking through an aviary of disparate songbirds, much like those depicted on the artwork, improvising in full awareness of their impermanence. In the midst of mental illness or writer’s block, I always use these records to recalibrate. To me, they’re sound of earth and sky meeting; above all, they taught me to embrace solitude through silence.

That silence is elevated even further on Mark Hollis, the solo record I arrived at later, quietly released seven years after Talk Talk disbanded. All electric instruments and studio magic are eschewed – instead, two microphones are placed at the front of the room, leaving the musicians in pursuit of their proper place in the stereo field as it was in the beginning of recorded sound. What we get, then, is that intimate, transcendental purity found in the films of Bresson or Tarkovsky or the music of Nick Drake or Morton Feldman–existing totally outside of time. Rather than utilizing chance and accident like the two preceding records, everything here was written down and scored–and somehow still, the music appears loosely structured, out of thin air, delicate as stained glass. Woodwind textures spurt, a harmonium breathes deep, cloistral voices whisper soft invocations. Often Mark’s voice will barely rise above the creaking of his chair or a ticking watch. You couldn’t find a quieter pop record if you tried. 

In her essay The Aesthetics Of Silence, Susan Sontag describes art as “a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism.” She says: 

…Formerly, the artist’s good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art. Now, it’s suggested that the highest good for the artist is to reach that point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art.

Of course, the relationship Mark Hollis had to silence was never limited to sound–he withdrew completely from the public eye to focus on his family shortly after this record was released. He would claim that the work behind him was so close to how he imagined music that he couldn’t possibly dream of how to move forward from it. Many of us held out for one more record, one more sign of life. It would never come, and even as heartbroken as I am now that he’s gone, to ask for more would be selfish. One listens to these records at least once a week and still learns from them. 

A little over twenty years later, the music industry has eaten itself. As a discovery platform, streaming services reduce even the most unorthodox music down to exclusive, rudimentary listening contexts– dinner parties, “mood boosters,” “lo-fi beats to study to”–as if it wasn’t bad enough that they barely compensate. Young artists online hardly thrive, if ever, on transparency and instant validation–to keep your work close to the chest is somehow to become estranged; we assume the role of “wearing” our music beyond simply letting it sing for itself. At the time of writing this, I’m holed up finishing a project that I struggle with keeping a secret. I’m sometimes so swept up in considering how and where it’ll be placed–contexts that I can’t control, try as I might–that I forget to be honest with myself. I listen to the work my hero left behind and I hear a vision of sound uncompromised, a commitment to the organic, an atmospheric intuition, and those troubles are kept at bay. I’m forever indebted to the standard Mark Hollis set and am inspired to stay true to all of the grey areas. I only hope the people introduced to his work for the first time this week will stumble upon a similar solace. 

If this is your first listen, wait for a quiet moment to press play. In his words, “You should never listen to music as background music.”

buy / download

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 27: 60s Special

My most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is an all 60’s special, which means that in addition to making a good case for the comeback of short songs, I was able to fit a lot into an hour. Featuring: a teenage Dolly Parton, a spaced out Joe Meek oddity, brutal heartbreak soul, a take on “Bend Me, Shape Me” that weighs a thousand tons, Peruvian garage rock, Ronnie Spector spitting pure rage at an unnamed man, an absolutely deranged Brian Wilson-produced version of “In The Still of the Night,” a cameo from the queen of rockabilly, an Indonesian Beegees cover, and of course, plenty of girl groups.

I love how 60s vocals sound as if everything is being sung with the caps lock on and too many exclamation points–they really grab you by the throat. I love how a song about a woman being disinterested in having sex manages to be anything but prudish or coy, and instead sounds like a venomous, gravelly diatribe delivered from somebody’s dirty basement. I love the unabashed melodrama and the blown-out, gritty production. I love how markedly less prim the musical ethos was than what preceded it, how much more raw and punk. This is one of my favorite musical eras and a lot of these songs make me cry–perhaps least explicably, “Egyptian Shumba,” which is still one of my all-time favorites–so I hope you enjoy this music as much as I do! You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Lou Christie & The Tammys – Outside The Gates Of Heaven
2. The Exciters – Get Him
3. Timi Yuro – What’s A Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)
4. The Cookies – Softly In The Night
5. The Cats Meow – La La Lu
6. Little Frankie – I’m Not Gonna Do It
7. Claudine Clark – Party Lights
8. The Models – Bend Me, Shape Me
9. Screaming Lord Sutch – Don’t You Just Know It
10. Wanda Jackson – Fallin’
11. The Ronettes – He Did It
12. The Honeys – In The Still Of The Night
13. Joe Meek – Orbit Around The Moon
14. Rosie Lopez – I’ll Never Grow Tired
15. The Crystals – He’s A Rebel
16. Dream Team – There He Is
17. Los Saicos – Ana
18. The Ikettes – I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)
19. The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba
20. Dara Puspita – To Love Somebody
21. Ben E. King – Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)
22. The Shannons – Little White Lies
23. Solomon Burke – If You Need Me
24. Dolly Parton – Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can)

25 Favorite Releases of 2017

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share some of my favorite releases of the year. Obviously not exhaustive; just some personal highlights. Quite a few of these are giant major label releases, so I’ll be taking down those download links quickly or leaving them off accordingly. Let me know if links are broken. Happy holidays!

Previously: 2016 | 2015

Alice Coltrane – Divine Songs, 1987
buy comp / download
Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir – Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Vol. 2, 1987
buy / download
Cleaners From Venus – Going To England, 1987
download
David Sylvian – Secrets Of The Beehive, 1987
buy / download
Depeche Mode – Music For The Masses, 1987
buy
dip in the pool & Masahide Sakuma – 黒いドレスの女 OST, 1987
download
Dolly Parton, Linda Rondstadt & Emmylou Harris – Trio, 1987
buy
Elicoide – Elicoide, 1987
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Eric B. & Rakim – Paid In Full, 1987
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Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle – Baby Wants To Ride/Your Love, 1987
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Geoffrey Landers – Many Hands Make Light, 1987
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George Michael – Faith, 1987
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Haruomi Hosono – The Tale Of Genji, 1987
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Ichiko Hashimoto – Mood Music, 1987
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Isabelle Antena – Hoping For Love, 1987
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Laraaji – Essence/Universe, 1987
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Masahiro Sugaya – Music From Alejo, 1987
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Meredith Monk – Do You Be, 1987
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Michael Jackson – Bad, 1987
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Pet Shop Boys – Actually, 1987
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Phuture – Acid Tracks, 1987
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Pizzicato Five – Pizzicatomania, 1987
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Prince – Sign O’ The Times, 1987
buy
Sinead O’Connor – The Lion And The Cobra, 1987
buy
Yasuaki Shimizu – Music For Commercials, 1987
buy / download

 

Dolly Mixture – Demonstration Tapes, 1984

Really gorgeous, stripped-down new wave and punk-tinged pop rock recorded between 1979 and 1983 and then self-released as a double vinyl in 1984–the trio’s only full-length. Though Dolly Mixture’s sound hits a sweet spot between punk and girl-group pop (unsurprisingly, as the story goes that the band was born from a mutual love of The Undertones and The Shangri-Las), the three actively pushed back against Chrysalis Records’s attempt to market them as a girl group, keeping their sound loose and lo-fi and their songs short and sweet.

This is more rock-centric than what we usually post around here, but that’s what I grew up listening to, and I’ll always love it. Demonstration Tapes has an immediate appeal: swooning harmonies, sophisticated top lines, and a room-tone warmth slightly ahead of The Vaselines and Beat Happening. Disarming in how dry and direct (but still irrefutably pretty) it is. Good for fans of Marine Girls. Kurt Cobain would have loved this. I’m always surprised it doesn’t get tossed around more. Ideal late summer headphones music.