I used to rejoice in a lot of Post-Rock music. I've slightly lost touch, but still need to mention two obvious picks for this year. MOGWAI - Rave Tapes
THEE SILVER MT ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA - Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light Over Everything
Here my tastes are much more influenced by critiques, blogs, trends and obviousness. I think my choice of label, 'Electronica-Ambient-Experimental', is a lazy holdall, a place to gather everything that I listen too in these very specific contexts of absentmindedness. Or is it everything that falls outside the huge labels of pop and rock? Or the not-easy-listening? Or with instrumental dispositions? Well here is the list of what I appreciate more for the textures, soundscapes, patterns, loops, arrangements, clubbing or whatever.
10 - SBTRKT - Wonder Where We Land
09 - BEN FROST - A U R O R A
08 - TODD TERJE - It's Album Time
07 - HUDSON MOHAWKE - Chimes EP
06 - FLYING LOTUS - You're Dead!
05 - APHEX TWIN - Syro
04 - ARCA - Xen
03 - THOM YORKE - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
02 - CARIBOU - One Love
01 - GAZELLE TWIN - Unflesh
"Matching supermarket bleeps and blinking surveillance cameras with disquieting carnal imagery and a low-slung, half-whispered crawl, this is a paranoid glance over the shoulder in music video form. It churns away as mechanically as a barcode scanner, but feels as instinctive as breath on the back of your neck."¹ This is an artist who fixates on daily socio-alienations to engulf her art, dragging her whole body-mind discomforts in the mix. The music is of genuine violence, with remarks on public/private schizophrenia, pulsing with carnal estrangements in the realm of technology, the horror of having to fix your own bodily existence in the world. In these themes she explores paranoid identities (she performs with her face hidden) and alienated embodiments (the album is titled Unflesh, with an album highlight titled "Anti-Body"). But despite these broad global commentaries, these are songs that really look inward, inside Elizabeth Bernholz's guts: bowelism, belly, maggots, meat, I feel blood, miscarriage, and her own Body Dysmorphic Disorders. I haven't seen such convulsions being portrayed so vividly since the gorgeous, otherworldly Upstream Colors (Shane Carruth, 2013). The lyrics are sharp and concise:
I can feel the eyes Looking over me Following my skin Cannot cease to be
she signs on "Anti-Body", on a nervous backdrop of electro bleeps (weirdly very danceable). "It's coming at me / it's coming at me" she warned desperately on the opener title track. Quite suitably, the music will leave a mark in your flesh, with no immediate redemption, eating raw your own ability to sleep and forget.
LISTEN TO THE ELCTRO PLAYLIST HERE (press shuffle):