AOTY #15 Nine Inch Nails - Bad Witch

These EPs have all been great. He hasn't lost any of his one of a kind knack for really immersing you in the music and saying a lot with sometimes the simplest words. It really makes you feel the darkness in society today. However you feel about this release, there's no question that Trent (with Atticus now), continues to push and challenge. I appreciate it so much for showing me that an artist in (in spite of) the music business, can continue to grow and maintain relevance well into his 50s.

AOTY #17. Loma - Loma

I love how they use oppositional elements, and weave them together in a way that is so complimentary. The sultry vocals, the haunting ambiance, the hypnotic minimalism. It doesn't get much better.

Cluster

Krautrock icons Cluster - the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and the late Dieter Moebius  - were part of the same extraordinary art and music scene centred around late-60's Berlin that produced Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler and many others. In these heady early days of the scene the anything-goes ethos was strong. Moebius and Roedelius were making music with found objects and electronics and experimenting wildly, performing long improvisations on stage and releasing a series of improvisational albums with Schnitzler under the name Kluster.

Joel Graham

"An obscure tape release discovery by Red Light Radio founder and close friend of the label, Orpheu de Jong, led to Music From Memory’s latest release. This two track 12” highlights the work of electronic music pioneer Joel Graham, a San Francisco based artist who self released two cassettes in 1984/85.
Originally recorded and performed live on pre-MIDI analogue equipment in 1982 as an outline for a live performance, these visionary tracks provoke much of the same sensibilities found in both contemporary dance music as well as in works of more established vanguard artists of the time. Slowly unravelling and deeply hypnotic, Joel Graham’s music seems to manifest a doorway to a profound new world and can be seen as a forerunner of what was to come in electronic music."

Sigmataf

Starting out with Prohja hip hop group, he continued as a lyricist and performer with Babylon under the stage name Koraki, and since 2010 has been releasing his albums as Sigmataf. You listen electronic sounds, heavy basslines and strong beats but you feel the cynicism and a sarcasm vibe. Trully a nice project.

 

Gold Zebra

The first clue as to what Gold Zebra sounds like is to notice that they are signed to Visage Musique – a label out of Montreal that specialized in the darkest, smoothest, most arpeggiated electronic pop. This is a seriously wonderful label, so their endorsement of a band speaks volumes to their quality.

AOTY #3. EMA - Exile In The Outer Ring

I want to explain to outsiders that the people where I come from arent beyond hope and reason , says EMA, I want this record to bridge a divide. The album is unique in its mingling of gender politics with American working-class anxiety. The voices we hear in these songs druggy, surly societal outcasts; Byronic nihilists bringing down fire speak to a kind of rebellion that s typically reserved for men, and the archetype of the dirtbag teenage boy dominates the album. Yet EMA claims some of that same dirtbag alienation for women a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole, as EMA puts it and uses it to interrogate both her own vulnerability and how male violence shapes the world, as on the anthemic Aryan Nation. The result is a deeply personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form. A Magnum Opus!

AOTY #4. Fever Ray - Plunge

‘Plunge’ is an album that was worth waiting for. It’s a bold and exciting body of work that pushes and pulls and confuses and delights in equal measure. Maybe it will be another 7 or 8 years before the next release by FEVER RAY, but one thing is for certain. Cool is still intact.

AOTY #5. Code Orange - Forever

Forever is indeed a hardcore record, but without sacrificing the aggression, brutish intensity and passionate vehemence that makes it so, its tropes and conventions are toyed with at every turn, either accentuated or subverted completely. The first listen is an absolute thrill ride, the listener quite simply strapped in, tossed around in wild different directions and told to deal with it. The joy of further listens comes not only in that maintained visceral high but getting inside those twists and turns and becoming part of the mayhem.

AOTY #6. LCD Soundsystem - american dream

American Dream represents a high point for Murphy, not only as a songwriter, but also as a meticulous sonic architect and an exuberant performer. He’s constructed and executed most of these songs on his own. Sometimes they’re mind-bendingly knotty, but they’re always immensely satisfying. As the album progresses, a slow burn early on, synth flourishes, drum beats, and guitar riffs build to tantric levels of foreplay without obvious climaxes.

ΑΟΤΥ #7. Zola Jesus - Okovi

This record...Such a statement! Such a nice/bad vibe to get and feel to the fullest her emptiness at the highest level with a small dose of positiveness. Zola Jesus magnum opus is here to stay and me to love her. Literally, great evolution into her sound.

AOTY #8. Feist - Pleasure

So this is what we get after six years away. Juno Award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter Leslie Feist’s long-awaited fifth LP Pleasure continues the trend of 2011’s Metals, heading in an even more esoteric direction than her smash hit record The Reminder. Mostly recorded live in studio, this latest offering is a cagey and defiant record that is admirable for its obstinacy. Pleasure is easily Feist’s most difficult album, far from the immediate accessibility of The Reminder, but she's a captivating performer and it may well be her richest statement. Feist has no need to impress anymore, having long earned the right to live however she likes. By the sounds of it that satisfaction has been hard-won.

AOTY #9. Ghostpoet - Dark Days + Canapes

Twice the Mercury Prize bridesmaid and never the bride (he was nominated for his 2011 debut Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam and 2015’s Shedding Skin), could the fourth album from Obaro Ejimiwe aka Ghostpoet finally see him take the prestigious award?
“The glitchy electro of his early work has now evolved into something more organic as guitar, bass and drums amalgamate with his DIY sound.” – Steve Harnell

AOTY #10. Timber timbre - Sincerely, Future Pollution

Written as the nadir of 2016 was coming into focus, it paints a somewhat dystopian vision of a society out of control and typifies the record’s tone of, in his own words, “utter chaos and confusion.” This is a good thing for ‘Sincerely, Future Pollution’, whose nine tracks have a deliciously inky, retro feel, like Nick Cave fronting a bitter ’80s Vegas house band. So what if it’s a little strange? Given the world we live in, we could do with more art that reflects such abnormal territory.

AOTY #13 Jlin - Black Origami

Black Origami is a modern electronic masterpiece, strikingly original and yet unmistakably part of a proud lineage of groundbreaking studio-bound music. Considering this is only the second full-length effort from a prodigiously young producer, the artistic and commercial potential for Jlin over the coming years is frightening.

AOTY #16. Karima Walker - Hands In Our Names

Fulfilling Funk’s post-postmodern vision, Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.

AOTY #18. Elektro Guzzi - Clones

Live performances of electronic music have gone a long way since the seminal decision of a few men from Düsseldorf to leave their Krautrock beginnings behind and to become machines. Since then, the list of successors is epic and technologically refined in the process: from the musicians who on stage incorporated electronics into their post punk aesthetics to today's laptop PAs blurring the lines between performance and DJ set in a club context.
 As digital as they may sound, they couldn't be more analogue, producing and performing with the most classic of all setups: bass, guitar, and drums. But however traditional they may look as a band, they certainly do not sound like one. As fascinating as the resulting music already sounds on their debut releases for Macro (produced by Austrian legend Patrick Pulsinger), the band is perfectly able to bring it on stage. There, they connect the hypnotizing force of their analogue techno with the visual treat of a band doing it all right in front of your eyes. Take everything above, put it on a studio album and you have a bomb. You hear it, you witness it, and you dance...

AOTY #19. Red Axes - The Beach Goths

From hard rock to dance-floor music, the Tel-Aviv based duo, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi, widely known as Red Axes, stand out as eclectic DJs and sophisticated producers. With ‘The Beach Goths’, the first album released on their own label, Garzen Records, Red Axes deliver twelve unpredictable tracks that evoke dark and tropical vibes.

Lena Platonos

Lena Platonos is a Greek musician, pianist and music composer. One of the pioneers in the Greek electronic music scene of the 1980s, she remains active today.  She released 3 collaborative albums between 1981-1983 and her debut solo album in 1984. Her work is surreal, abstract, in places futuristic but always full of unpretentious honesty and tenderness. Through complex imagery, telegraphic lyrics, and analog synths accompanied by the Roland TR-808 drum machine, she paints an intergalactic and elusive soundscape capable of transforming punchy and haunting basslines into cryptic messages. Like the untranslated poetry of Platonos it makes sense beyond the usual; beyond it's own time, beyond words.

The Product

The Product were a minimal wave duo from the small villages Kvistgaard and Espergaerde, in the north of Denmark. They met in the Autumn of 1982 and recorded their sole album "Alive Again" over a weekend. It was self-released on cassette in 1983 and limited to 50 copies. "Alive Again" features 11 songs recorded in two short live takes directly onto one cassette. The Product employed a basic set up of Micromoog, Roland JX-3P and TR-606 Drumatix. With these three instruments they crafted melodic, icy electronic rhythms with detached vocals. They were influenced by UK post-punk bands Second Layer, This Heat, Wire, Gary Numan, Fad Gadget and most noticeably The Cure's Pornography album. Lyrics revolve around growing up in broken homes, alienation and romance. Each song has been carefully remastered from the original cassette master for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. "Almost afraid of it" is a sneak peak into the world of Danish post punk bedroom cassettes.