Been a while, but as in previous blogs it seemed time I actually wrote a bit about the music I listen to, for posterity at least. It’s been a funny old year but bothering to try and listen to new music hasn’t half helped.

My self imposed rules this year are:

1. No order of importance, but make it vaguely listenable as a mixtape end to end
2. No more than one track per artist, unless they use a cunning disguise
3. Try and pick a less obvious track, or not the one that originally grabbed me

The net result is that the list is long, so feel free to skim and make snap judgements with at best incidental relevance to the music at hand. You can also avoid reading me doing the old “dancing about architecture” below by using the playlist at Spotify or on YouTube.

Metronomy – Night Owl

Metronomy does Chillwave? Summer 08 is that usual pleasing retro and Joseph Mount may have lost his band and run off to Paris, but seemingly the sound remains.

Islands – The Joke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJs–NE-wAo

A crowdfunded album, well, pair of albums indeed from Islands this year. The Joke is from the better of the two, Taste (despite the art work above!). Yes, that is a Morricone-esque flourish in there but it’s the lyric “While the world burns, we just warm our feet” that makes this a 2016 song to linger in the mind.

Haley Bonar – Skynz

I got tired of all of my music and tuned back into 6music around about September and at that time Stupid Face burrowed deep into me. It was the drums first, which are also a bit odd here in a damn pleasing fashion. Bonar’s album Impossible Dream is I think rather brilliant, and the regretful tone and (it must be said) utterly amazing drumming snared me. In a time of Brexit and Trump a song bemoaning complacency from a millennial is right on the money, isn’t it?

The Avalanches – Subways

There was no way the second album from The Avalanches would be anything but a disappointment. But to be able to get even one track that approaches the effort they put into the first album was enough for me, in retrospect. Album never quite grabbed me, but I’m minded to give it a listen free of any expectation.

The Moulettes – Pufferfish Love

The Moulettes’ Preternatural pitched up as a concept album and shows a lot of effort going into their sound as well. The science all checks out here, as it’s based on how the puffer fish mates. I will have to snag them for a pint and see if I can get them to make an album about cycling research. Make that two pints.

Cavern of Anti-Matter – I’m the Unknown

Gane and Dilworth of Stereolab here along with Holger Zapf on synth, but I am just in love with the experimentation here. Which reminds me of Sterolab a lot. There’s even a whole album but I somehow got enough from the mini-EP this was on that I never reached it.

Mogwai – U-235

From the soundtrack album to Atomic, a film marking 60 years since Hiroshima released late in 2015. I found myself thinking as I watched going “gosh, this is getting a bit like Pye Corner Audio” and then chastised myself for not listening to more Mogwai.

Pye Corner Audio – Ganzfeld Effect

A firm favourite of mine for many years </hipster credential seeking> Pye Corner Audio seems to have started becoming a fixture on the soundtrack of Adam Curtis documentaries. Not a bad home for him. His two albums on Ghost Box have I think been the best that label has been able to release and also the most cohesive in his discography.

Head Technician – Zones (listen at Bleep)

Sounding suspiciously similar to Pye Corner Audio, as if he was another name for the same artist Head Technician made a lurid vinyl version of his Zones cassette and managed to improve on perfection. There’s definitely something in the art of fictional creators that helps define some of the Ghost Box / Hauntology kind of scene (that desperately needs a name as simple as chillwave, still). Utterly pretentious twaddle, so of course I love it.

John Carpenter – Utopian Facade

Well, maybe the whole Ghost Box etc. thing should be known as Carpenterism? I’d missed John Carpenter’s first album of Lost Themes in 2015, but found both it and the sequel this year (Vortex was really good on the first). It is astonishing he’d never managed to release music in his own form until now.

The Pattern Forms – Black Rain

Ghost Box does Chillwave. Sort of. Or maybe they’re just going more John Foxx. Or is it Italo Disco? I don’t know, I haven’t scratched my chin enough but it’s good stuff with a surprising number of shifts through the song especially when the beat comes in the first time. But maybe it’s more Friendly Fires does The Advisory Circle as that’s the actual collaboration. Maybe we need a whole indie roster to pair up with the Ghost Box artists for a special album? Alright, maybe I need that.

VHS Glitch – Chrome Death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NA0GcbrDSo

Discovered courtesy of the excellent Project Moonbase podcast (though I can’t remember if it was the Stranger Tunes or the Escape edition of their imaginary 80s universe). VHS Glitch is a frighteningly prolific man in Japan. Maybe it’s just really 80s there. Chrome Death actually is a retro game as well, but I’ve yet to give it a try. Maybe once I finish Portal, as that’s become quite retro for me to still be playing anyway…

Trentemoller – Circuits

I really have fallen into a hole of retro sounding music haven’t I? Oh well. This should be the soundtrack to some kind of continuation in the Lotus series of driving games for the Amiga perhaps. Or some kind of really amazing scrolling shoot-em-up.

Concretism – Normal Service Will Be Resumed

In a rare event, a friend suggested I should be listening to Concretism and I actually hadn’t come across him yet. I love the relaxed approach to a retro electronic sound here. The title is perfect and you can feel this being the moment of a slightly classier intermission in some regularly programming. At first I feared this artist was being too contrived in doing the retro aesthetic but I actually think they’ve just mastered it in a subtly different way.

SHXCXCHCXSH – SsSs

The album cover looked pleasing so I gave this a try. It’s incredible – crunchy loops a bit like Boards of Canada (sampling them even?) but with a really hard edge. The guys behind it are beautifully obtuse but I fear for the day when I discover there’s a Pete Waterman style svengali behind all of this stuff I seem to like so much.

Steve Hauschildt – Strands

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SqNxSncgJU

Oh, this was about the album cover as well. Someone should really tell all the vinyl heads that little thumbnails on websites do in fact sell albums (after a quick preview listen). What got me about this is that now even 90s targeting retro is doing that analogue distortion thing – which is weird. I guess we just want it to sound like fading memories rather than fading cassettes.

DJ Shadow – Bergschrund (feat Nils Frahm)

I would take a whole album of Nils Frahm and DJ Shadow. This just works obscenely well – beats underneath, distorted spacey electronic over the top and a nifty breakdown.

Clarke:Hartnoll – The Echoes

Vince Clarke and Phil Hartnoll produce what you’d sort of expect though some have said it sounds more Orbital than Erasure. It is bloody good, but they do need to get a bit better at sharing their work online. All I can do is embed the lead single, but it is quite good as well:

Teleman – Superglue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s82nI9W5Th8

Yes, don’t worry I am still weak and feeble when it comes to resisting indie when it involves lost and confused lovelorn men and a bit of fragile guitar and a synth. And especially when it’s Thomas Sanders late of Tap Tap and Pete and the Pirates. Pity he’ll never top Codeine, though.

David Thomas Broughton – Plunge of the Dagger

David Thomas Broughton is as the documentary about him made plain, a rather ambiguous and prolific character. But screw that, it’s his experimental nature I love and Crippling Lack was a lot of interesting experimentation and collaboration. Luke Drozd’s spoken contributions here crack me up every time, especially the mid-way “When I am dead, I will sleep forever. It will be amazing! I won’t have to get up or anything. I can’t. fucking. wait.”. It’s an indulgent nine and a half minutes, but I bloody love it.

Meursault – The Fix Is In

Meursault are back. That’s about all that matters, really. Annoyingly I can’t make you skip to The Fix Is In which stuck in my head most, but the Simple is Good EP works better end to end anyway.

The Strokes – OBLIVIUS

I tried arguing myself out of including this on the grounds that it’s The Strokes and it’s a bit derivative and something like that, but screw it. I actually like this more than anything else they’ve done. Is it good enough to click through from the embed due to daft restrictions in playback? Probably, at least for the first 30 seconds. The daft lyric video style suits this rather well.

Justice – Safe and Sound

Lyric videos are clearly the in thing. Maybe it’s a karaoke thing. Anyway, it’s a video with a cross in it, and more frenchy electro fun.

Pet Shop Boys – The Pop Kids

“Remember those days, the early 90s” this starts and we’re off into a strange half-imagined half-true (or is it alternative fact?) based story of a pair of boys meeting and sharing a love of music. Delightful stuff.

Barry Hyde – Monster Again

Remember those days, the early 00s? Well, The Futureheads are over, but Barry Hyde has recorded a solo album. Part of the Malody Suite and illustrated above with a rather cute little animation this is Barry working through material that could once have been a Futureheads vampire musical (that and more in this Guardian interview) into a heartfelt use of his (still!) stunning voice to let out the demons within. It’s stripped back, it’s simple and it bloody works. Monster Again is only part of a wider whole, but it reminds me a lot of what I loved in The Futureheads – sparse lyrics delivered strongly working far better than any endless series of verses and choruses.

Field Music – How Should I Know If You’ve Changed?

Also in Sunderland, Field Music keep going. and Commontime was a really bright sounding selection of songs that made this XTC fan quite happy for relatively obvious reasons.

Clark – Omni Vignette

Actually a Clark soundtrack album, but it all works remarkably well. Omni Vignette is at about 2:30 in this, and it’s just Clark mixing a very simple piano line, but it’s cracking.

Aphex Twin – 2X202-ST5

New Aphex Twin, hurrah. At least he’s not naming the songs after computer viruses this time or taking the piss and just releasing a song based on a picture of himself. On the other hand, I have to share the video for a different song from the Cheetah EP because it’s all that’s online. Oh well.

Of course, what’s also remarkable is that this is a video from a 12 year old fan in Ireland who also made this piece of brilliance.

Helen Love – Thank You Polystyrene

Poly Styrene was a bloody wonder. Helen Love are a bloody wonder. Mike Read is a bloody wonder. My love of this song is inevitable and I have nothing more to say.

Let’s Eat Grandma – Eat Shiitake Mushrooms

If it was still the late 00s and I was still going to something like the Brainlove all-dayers this is the kind of thing I’d have seen then wondered what happened to it (come in Octagon Court, your time is up!). However, it’s 2016 and I’m an old man so I heard about a strange pair of young women from Norfolk by listening to NPR’s best of 2016. It’s purposely young and experimental, probably tries to do too much and tries too hard, but that’s what I like. So, never mind. The YouTube video has complaints it was overhyped but reading that six months later when you just got hooked by one odd song seems a bit off. I hope they at least get enough pop stardom to afford mudguards for their bikes.

Mathew Bourne – Alex

Using a specially altered Moog, this is remarkably lovely and it is in no way a coincidence that I wound up picking a track from the album that matched my name.

If you made it to the end well done. Too many men in there, alas. But 2017 appears to be starting with me listening to female helmed electronica so maybe I’ll adjust course.