Like a Scientist

This year brought a musi­cal ton of sin­gles, albums, EPs, down­loads, com­pi­la­tions, mixes, and new artists. In this spirit, I’ve cho­sen to make my year-end exam­i­na­tion a multi-part extrav­a­ganza charm­ingly called LAS, 2010. Instead of sav­ing the “best albums” list for the end, I’m kick­ing it off with that ven­er­a­ble music critic’s main­stay. This is my state­ment on the 15 best music releases this year, mostly albums, with an EP and a com­pi­la­tion thrown in for good mea­sure. With­out fur­ther ado:

15. Lazer Sword — Lazer Sword (Inno­v­a­tive Leisure)

The two guys behind Lazer Sword, Low Limit and Lando Kal, made a mix for XLR8R called Future Blap­pin’ and that’s exactly what their debut album sounds like, some kind of far-flung club spot where the bass rat­tles the entire city. Guest vocals from “on another level” MCs Turf Talk, M. Sayyid, and Myka 9 com­plete the futur­is­tic feel to the entire album.

14. Take — Only Moun­tain (Alpha Pup)

I mostly encoun­tered this album on my head­phones walk­ing around the park this sum­mer, dis­cov­er­ing that this is the ideal envi­ron­ment for Take’s atmos­pheric beats. The melodies gur­gle and bub­ble over muted bass drums and ethe­real voices. There is a dis­tinct organic qual­ity to all of the sounds Take chose, build­ing on the gritty feel of pre­vi­ous album Earth­tones & Con­crete.

13. Ikonika — Con­tact, Love, Want, Have (Hyperdub)

One of this site’s best moments was when Ikonika tweeted that my nar­ra­tive look at her album was “the best review ever.” You never quite know what an artist will think of your thoughts about their work, so it was fun to know I was on the right wave­length with her video game inspired debut.

12. Skream — Out­side the Box (Tempa)

I wrote a very long and detailed review of this album over at Lit­tle White Ear­buds, so I’m not sure what else I can say about it. How­ever, I will say that this was actu­ally my first expo­sure to Skream, which was prob­a­bly a strange jump­ing off point, with so much of what made him pop­u­lar com­ing before it. Out­side The Box, though, is def­i­nitely the start of a new phase of Skream’s career, and it’s inter­est­ing to look at it with fresh eyes instead of the bag­gage of pre­vi­ous hype.

11. Scuba — Tri­an­gu­la­tion (Hotflush)

When attempt­ing to per­suade another music writer about the mer­its of this album, I sug­gested lis­ten­ing to the album at night with head­phones, mov­ing around the city. The night I really went head over heels for Tri­an­gu­la­tion was walk­ing back from a friend’s house around 2 am. The street­lights and sway­ing trees, the light wind, a car pass­ing by every cou­ple min­utes, all of these details came alive with the album’s atmos­pheric, smooth flow sound­track­ing it.

10. Fly­ing Lotus — Cos­mo­gramma (Warp)

The one point that bears repeat­ing from my review of this album is not even mine. When she started get­ting tracks to pre­view from it, Mary Anne Hobbs said some­thing that stuck with me when the album actu­ally was released: Fly­ing Lotus was speak­ing a com­pletely new musi­cal lan­guage here. The many chil­dren of Fly­ing Lotus’ sound are begin­ning to respond in this same lan­guage, but Cos­mo­gramma should still be seen as the moment that the switch was flipped.

9. Treme — Music From The HBO Orig­i­nal Series, Sea­son 1 (Geffen)

My review of this sound­track turned out to be one of the longest reviews I’ve writ­ten, and the col­lec­tion still fills me with delight and sad­ness every time I lis­ten to it. Incred­i­bly pow­er­ful music was recorded here, all in cel­e­bra­tion of an attempt to cap­ture the con­tin­u­ing vital­ity and strug­gles of one city under siege from nature and its government.

8. Ter­ror Dan­jah — Unde­ni­able (Hyperdub)

I actu­ally found this album more dif­fi­cult to write about than I imag­ined. Antic­i­pat­ing it for months, after going some­what crazy for the Power Grid mini-album, Unde­ni­able arrived like light­ning in a bot­tle, volatile and pre­cious. Ter­ror Dan­jah shows him­self to be a true mas­ter of grime in all its forms, with a keen sense of his­tory and acute aware­ness of the now.

7. Autechre — Over­steps (Warp)

I reviewed Over­steps for this site when it came out, but also wrote a short look back at it for Lit­tle White Ear­buds where I built upon that ear­lier review when I said: “Autechre’s place in elec­tronic music has often been slightly ahead of every­one else…The post-dubstep bass tex­tures cou­pled with beau­ti­ful melodies on Over­steps find Autechre with their ear to the ground in 2010 even while con­tin­u­ing their career trend of con­stantly look­ing a step beyond.”

6. Ital Tek — Mid­night Colour (Planet Mu)

In one of my first reviews for LWE, I noted that Ital Tek “…expands into the com­plex beat styles of the LA post-hip-hop scene, the bass gym­nas­tics of Glas­gow, and the 8bit sounds of mod­ern grime and Scan­di­na­vian skwee, all the while build­ing on the cav­ernous atmos­pheres of Lon­don bass music.”

5. Four Tet — There Is Love In You (Domino)

The moment I knew this album was some­thing spe­cial was lis­ten­ing to “Plas­tic Peo­ple” on repeat in some bru­tal win­tery traf­fic with a big smile on my face. Being stuck on an on-ramp, let­ting Four Tet’s epic ode to his res­i­dency cycle over and over, I really appre­ci­ated the sim­ple melodies and stark, dry drums of this album. I had never been a fan of Four Tet before, but There Is Love In You’s post-Burial grit and techno-with-live-sounding-instruments sold me.

4. Kanye West — My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy (Roc-A-Fella)

Yeah, this album. Does it seem out of place? I don’t know. All I can say is it’s really fuck­ing good, and I feel some­what bad for music fans that won’t even give it a try because West is annoy­ing, pop­u­lar, com­mer­cial, what­ever. My lengthy review is here.

3. Slu­gabed — Ultra Heat Treated EP (Planet Mu)

Just going to paste the open­ing line of my short review here: “This is the shit that keeps me going with music: sounds like its the club music on a space­ship zoom­ing around the outer rim of the galaxy (sip­ping on Pan-Galactic Gar­gle Blasters, ya’ll).” Also, this EP has more bass and wildly careen­ing ideas in it than most albums.

2. Starkey — Ear Drums and Black Holes (Planet Mu)

I had never heard Starkey’s pre­vi­ous out­put but came across his pro­mo­tional mixes and his amaz­ing “Gut­ter Music VIP” from the Wild Angels com­pi­la­tion late last year and was sold on his “Street Bass” style. Long time read­ers of my reviews know that hip-hop is my heart and soul, so any­time an artist is using that as his inspi­ra­tion to cre­ate new and inno­v­a­tive music, I’m there. Here’s my pre­vi­ous review and I still can’t get over how amaz­ing “Cap­sule” is nor how good Cere­bral Vor­tex sounds on a Starkey beat.

1. Rudi Zygadlo — Great West­ern Lay­men (Planet Mu)

I feel like I’ve been talk­ing about this album all year even though it only came out in May. Of course, the “Reseal­able Friend­ship” sin­gle pre­ceded it and became one of those rare songs I actu­ally find myself try­ing to sing in idle moments. Guest shots on Elec­tronic Explo­rations and Mary Anne Hobbs also fueled the antic­i­pa­tion for me. And now, in con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple who ask me the dif­fi­cult open-ended ques­tion “So what are you lis­ten­ing to now?,” I tend to say “That ques­tion is too big, but I’ll tell you my favorite album of the year is still Rudi Zygadlo.” I also fol­low that up with “That Kanye West album is so fuck­ing good,” too. Great West­ern Lay­men is just the wildest, most excit­ing take on elec­tronic music I’ve ever heard. In my long and fevered review, I made allu­sions to both Slu­gabed and Griz­zly Bear, very dif­fer­ent music acts that work in very dif­fer­ent sounds. Some­how, though, Zygadlo has made a kind of mar­riage of the bass heavy psy­che­delic hip-hop of the one with the sophis­ti­cated har­mon­ics of the other. I’m almost afraid to see where this genius goes next. I’ll be there with antic­i­pa­tion when­ever he releases his next mind-warping music.

Label Of The Year: Planet Mu

Every time I started to make my list for the 2010, I ended up with three or four releases by Planet Mu in the top lev­els of that list. That’s kind of crazy. There are cer­tainly sim­i­lar­i­ties between the three above, not the least of which is that they have all remixed each other’s music at one time or another, even though all three releases are com­pletely unique inter­pre­ta­tions of this thing we call “bass music.” Before spend­ing a large por­tion of the lat­ter half of the year on juke and foot­work, Planet Mu was month by month putting out some of my favorite music. Here at the end of 2010, those releases have stood the test of time and count­less other excit­ing releases to main­tain their spots at the top of my list. For that rea­son, I’m mak­ing this small adden­dum to say that Planet Mu was my Label of the Year.

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