2023 In Sound
My favorite music, books, movies, and sonic experiences of the year
It’s list season, which I both like and find limiting and dumb. The “best” music of the year? There’s no such thing, only favorites filtered through your personality and context. Some lament the end of consensus or the death of the “monoculture,” but I like our messy present, where it’s relatively easy to dig deep and wide into the vast world of music. And yet, so many publications and media organizations don’t. Give me the idiosyncratic lists, full of obscurities and oddities. The only downside: without a consensus, you can feel awfully lonely in your unique musical corner. Which is why I’m writing this: to see if anybody else out there was moved, and by what, this year.
I’m borrowing my friend
‘s technique of list-making, because just a list of my favorite albums would be boring and not true to my sonic experience this year. My years are spent listening in all sorts of ways: new albums, old discoveries, writing and recording music, writing about music, seeing films, reading books, going to concerts, listening listening listening. We all move back and forth in time like this, spiderwebbing out. So this is my web.Favorite Albums
Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World: the indie rock institution keeps subtly evolving and writing killer songs. This one thrashes, but in a quiet, insular way.
Being Dead - When Horses Would Run: an album I played on repeat all summer. Fun, goofy garage rock, and then the lyrics on “Last Living Buffalo” or “Daydream” stuck in my gut. There’s a sweet sensitivity to this band beneath the weirdo exterior.
The Serfs - Half Eaten By Dogs: Fuzzed-out synth punk from Cincinnati.
Art Feynman - Be Good The Crazy Boys: Electro-funk grooves that made me dance.
Lael Neale - Star Eaters Delight: Very lo-fi, but the tape hiss adds to the otherworldly charm. The mantra-like lyrics are exceptional.
Arthur Russell - Picture Of Bunny Rabbit: Russell’s World Of Echo is a top 5 album for me, so it was exciting to hear this treasure-trove of songs from that same period. More somber, but just as searching.
Hiroshi Yoshimura - Surround: Another great reissue. Like a lot of Japanese ambient music, this album wrings a lot of warmth and depth from thin, digital tones. It reminds me of what Laraaji said to Marc Maron recently: what separates ambient music from the New Age/background fluff is heart and dedication.
Laraaji - Segue To Infinity: Tossed-off recordings discovered by a grad student on Ebay and given a box set release this year. Laraaji’s longform improvisations sound soothing, discordant, and exciting.
The Clientele - I Am Not There Anymore: The British band returns with a messy double album that expands what the Clientele can sound like. They wanted to stuff every idea into this one, so their dreamy jangle-pop merges with electronic touches, spoken word, atonal chamber music, and psychedelia.
Daniel Bachman - When The Roses Come Again: Another artist expanding his boundaries. His woodworking led to homemade banjos and this homemade sonic collage of digital dust, field recordings, drone, and folk melodies, all inspired by the Carter Family’s song “When The Roses Come Again.” He’s helping define what’s folk music in a tech-obsessed age.
Gunn/Truscinski/Nace - Glass Band: I’ll buy anything Gunn-Truscinski puts out, and guitarist Bill Nace is a nice addition to the lineup. Searching, searing psychedelic improvisations.
Jeffrey Silverstein (
)- Western Sky Music: A late-year discovery for me. I’ve enjoyed his writing and interviews for The Creative Independent, and here he makes weirdo cosmic country music. A record I could listen to infinitely.GEE TEE - Goodnight Neanderthal: Scuzzy Australian garage punk. A great record to lift weights to.
Mark McGuire - A Pocket Full Of Rain: An album inspired by German kosmiche music from the ‘70s, but filtered through a guitar and endless loops.
Purelink - Signs: Dubby electro, full of airy synth textures and drums beating as soft as heartbeats.
Wilco - Cousin: It sounds like a cousin to 2019’s Ode To Joy, and like that album, it’s weary, every song about to fall apart. But in true Wilco fashion, they transform that heaviness through catharsis, and you feel less alone.
Young Fathers - Heavy Heavy: An invigorating, pulsing mix of electronic, rock, polyrhythmic percussion, hopeful chanting. I don’t know why this Scottish band isn’t huge.
Other Favorites
Going to New Zealand with my wife and six-month-old daughter. A pilgrimage to Flying Nun Records in Wellington, which features a lot of Flying Nun classics, new New Zealand records, and old zines. I bought a shirt, and the clerk turned around and she was wearing a “SXSW” shirt—she’s toured through Austin a lot. A few doors down at another record shop on Cuba Street, I was astounded at the country section, featuring records by Willie, Townes, and Asleep At The Wheel.
The Jurassic Park-esque sound of Zealandia, especially the tui. Hearing Lorde and Crowded House while on hold with Air New Zealand (they’re proud of their musicians). Finding a copy of Hippies, by the forgotten Austin band Harlem, for the equivalent of $80 in a mountain town of 2,000 people outside Christchurch (how did it even get there?). Listening to the University of Otago student radio station blast drum ‘n’ bass while driving past field after field of sheep. Rod Stewart’s concert in Dunedin being national news in New Zealand. Radio New Zealand featuring a ten minute conversation with a guy who once met Rod’s opener, Cindi Lauper. Not an interview with Cindi—an interview with a guy who once met her.The somber mortality in the Beatles’ “last” song, “Now And Then.”
Solid indie rock from France’s En Attendant Ana and England’s Far Caspian.
My favorite song of the year: “Barley,” by Water From Your Eyes.
Fuzzy noise pop: Feeble Little Horse’s “Tin Man” and dreamTX’s “Get Around.”
The modernist folk music of “Bloom” by Blue Lake. Quiet joy: New Zealand’s Tiny Ruins with “Out Of Phase.” Nathaniel Russell, one of my favorite visual artists, with “Bloodsucker.”
Dreamy electronic: Four Tet’s “Three Drums,” C-Thru’s “Awake (In A Dream),” and Rings Around Saturn’s “Lansky’s Vision”
Latine rhythms: jazz-influenced from Chicago’s Daniel Villareal. Electro-psych-influenced from Austin’s unclassifiable Nemegata.
Slather on the funk: “Grateful” by El Michels Affair and Black Thought. Black Pumas returning with the beautiful soul of “More Than A Love Song.” Genesis Owusu’s Prince flex, “Tied Up.” Kassa Overall’s jazz-hop, “Make My Way Back Home.” WITCH’s multi-generational Zamrock, “Avalanche Of Love.”
Twitchy indie rock: Lifeguard’s “17-18 Lovesong” and Palehound’s ecstatic “The Clutch.”
Movies: The Elephant 6 Recording Co., This Is Sparklehorse, and The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart docs. Alexandre Desplat’s twinkly score matched with cheesy ‘50s country classics in Asteroid City. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s emotional score for Living. The sound design in Oppenheimer. “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie. Seeing Stop Making Sense for the first time, in a theater, where a family got up and danced in the aisles. The incredible Afrofuturist sci-fi musical Neptune Frost. The patient rhythms of Past Lives, the best movie I’ve seen in years.
Books: The musical prose of Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and now partly through Harlem Shuffle). Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, where even old songs can’t trigger disappeared memories. Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty And Being Just: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people…we continually put ourselves in the path of beauty: staring, going out of our way, reading, watching, listening, seeing.” Stanley Donwood’s horrific-but-beautiful art for Radiohead in his retrospective, There Will Be No Quiet. Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s meditative conversations in Faith, Hope & Carnage. Jenny Odell’s provocative and righteous Saving Time: “Under the rush of the water, I felt my heartbeats as words. They were saying what they always had: Again. Again.”
Substacks:
, , , , , ,, ,Writing for Aquarium Drunkard: an essay/review on the strangeness of the American South in The Elephant Six Recording Co. and This Is Sparklehorse. Interviews with Lael Neale and drone/avant-garde legend Arnold Dreyblatt.
KUTX guest DJ sets: hitting 500 productions this year (!!!). Some favorites: The chaos and fun of Being Dead. Nemegata’s South American influences. Audio engineer and advocate Lisa Machac (and having the tables turned and being on her podcast). Artist Will Gaynor. Reminiscing with Balmorhea’s Rob Lowe about early aughts Austin. Cosmic country weirdo Garrett T. Capps. The voice of Austin FC, Adrian Healey.
Deep dives: Peso Pluma and regional Mexican music. The Anthology American Folk Music. Re-loving the Band, after Robbie Robertson’s death. Ambient house and the KLF’s Chill Out. Growing’s calming and cathartic drone metal.
The sounds of my daughter: her squealing with delight at the sight of a mug. Her discovering the boundaries of her voice. Babbling. Learning animal sounds. Her questioning “eh?” sound when she wants to know what something is called. Her intuitively using a capo and tuner as slides on my acoustic guitar. Singing “Ram On” and “Shady Grove” to her, and her immediate calming. Her laugh. Her fist pumping and maniacal grin when we sing the “ABC’s” to her, like she’s at a Black Flag show. The simple, hypnotic rhythms of kids’ books.
Recording eight songs, getting closer to finishing my album. Morning music routines.
Concerts: seeing the Smile with Austin Kleon. Being Dead at End Of An Ear.
Podcasts: One By Willie, especially the Vince Gill, Kacey Musgraves, and Roseanne Cash episodes. The Franz Ferdinand and Alvvays Song Exploder episodes. Laraaji with Marc Maron:
MARC: How old are you?
LARAAJI: The body is 80 years old…that’s a lot of toothpaste [deep, deep laughter]Videos: Blake Mills’ “There Is No Now.” A simple synth demo turns into a tearjerking meditation on peace, music, connection.
Nick Cave’s beautiful, angry defense of art and humans in his critique on AI.
The songs of cardinals and purple martins in spring, cicadas in summer.
And that’s it. Thanks for reading and listening! Find my 2023 playlist here, and my 2023 discoveries/deep dives playlist here. See you next year.
So happy to find you on Substack, Art!
Looking forward to checking out your post, music, and art.
I can’t say I’ve made too many year end lists so to be included in this one, packed with stuff I’m into and stuff I’ve never heard of but can tell I will be into, is a thrill! Thanks and can’t wait to dig in!