Top 5 albums I listened to in 2015
Well another year is finally over! I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, and best wishes to everyone over the rest of the holiday season.
As the year draws to a close I thought I`d throw up the five albums that inspired me the most this year. Not all of these actually came out this year, but since I discovered them this year they still count for me.
Alessandro Cortini has been working with Nine Inch Nails since forever, and has a ridiculously expensive collection of synths and guitar pedals (including a Buchla easel), but there is a rawness and simplicity to his recordings that belies all his gear. Slow, pulsing and droning pads with large helpings of space echo and reverb puts your brain waves in sync with it. It sounds like he`s done it all live with no overdubs (you can hear him flipping switches occasionally throughout) and you have to give him props for that. Very minimal and raw synth tones.
This sounds exactly like what I`m aiming for with my own music - layer upon layer of field recordings, acoustic instruments and noise meticulously pieced together to make two seamless twenty-minute epics. This guy must have the patience of Gandhi. It has an amazing flow from start to finish, and a beautiful haunting undertone to it. It`s a soundtrack waiting for a movie.
Benoit Pioulard has had an astounding year, with no less than five releases! His music style is often rather eclectic, jumping rather haphazardly between lo-fi acoustic shoegaze (think Dodos or Bibio) and looping drones on many albums. Personally I am just here for the drones, and thankfully this album is nothing but! Gritty low-fi tape recordings of guitar, synth, a bit of voice and various acoustic instruments moaning and grumbling, with some beautiful builds and a lovely flow.
This is an oldie, and despite discovering Ben Frost last year and falling in love with By The Throat, I had somehow missed this one. Room40 recently re-released it on vinyl so I nabbed a copy quick-sharp. Ben recorded this one in a cabin along the south coast of Victoria, Australia, and the slow, haunting tone really reflects what it must have been like with the cold, grey Arctic ocean as his only companion in that time. Wonderfully arranged murky layers of slow guitar strums punctuated with snippets of mangled voices and field recordings make for a very gloomy but engaging listen.
This one I have to thank good ol` last.fm for; I was browsing "similar artists" to my own music and this guy was up there in the "super similar". I am flattered that I would be compared with him, although I must say his work is much more polished and carefully thought-out.
Ian William Craig is an artist and muscian in Vancouver, who explains his work as being composed using piano, synthesizer, tape and hand-built instruments (which he destroys after the recording is finished). I`m not sure what those instruments are, but they sound like dirty switch boxes and distortion/fuzz effects.
Transitions between instruments or parts of the song are made by gritty pops, fuzz-ins and sputter-outs that have a great organic feeling for someone who`s spent a lot of time using vintage electronic instruments with dirty switches and dials. His melodies are simple and often repeated as a theme throughout the album, each time mangled or otherwise treated in some new way. Much like Fennesz did in the title track of "Becs", he layers distortion over and over in a way that is really sonically pleasing. This is a fantastic album and I highly recommend everyone check it out. He has a few others up on his bandcamp too, all equally good.
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