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 #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.

Beau Wanzer

Beau Wanzer’s music sometimes makes me think of the kids I knew growing up who stayed up really late in their parents’ basements to smoke pot, watch B-movie horror flicks and discuss esoteric shit with a side of junk food. In aural terms, the Midwesterner producer makes spooky, straight-to-tape hardware jams that often feature samples of creepy laughter and unsettling vocal snippets, murky sound palettes and oozing rhythms. Take “Groove’s No Zone” from his first untitled LP: as echo-y whispers flicker in the periphery of the mix, a lurching, emetic synth rhythm woos the listener as if it were a sonic fly zapper seducing intoxicated bugs who want to, well, zone out to something groovy.

Femminielli Noir

Collaboration between Jesse Osborne-Lanthier (Noir) and Bernardino Femminielli ''To us, it is plainly obvious that the act of mixing traditional structured musical visions causes one to become extremely bored. We have chosen hybrids, and hybrids of hybrids. To put it concisely, the flowing forms of any given vision must never clash with the ultimately contrasting endeavour of transforming inventions. In the vapours of all this garbage art and shit music that floats around, misleading us and polluting our minds with mindless stupidities, we have decided to work for the better understanding of the future of conceptual music and performance. We advocate the use of provocative theatrical-devices, concurrently, contemporarily, creating a wide array of heterogeneous genres.''