January 2024
Andy Beta on Ryuichi Sakamoto, collections of kankyō ongaku, Australian ‘80s underground rock, and the Afrodisia label, plus fifteen new album recommendations
Welcome to the new format! The newsletter will be a less frequent going forward, monthly rather than weekly, but we hope it’ll be a little more fun to read. We’re also working on a new look for the website, that’ll take a bit of time though, you can look forward to that in February or March. Please do let us know if you have any annoyances with the site, features you’d like to see, etc. — caleb@theshfl.com, or just comment on this post.
If you’ve any interest in writing for the site please get in touch as well, especially if you’re a writer who we already follow — the general idea is to create a vast yet navigable repository of human recommendations, we don’t use any kind of AI or algorithmic systems here, so if you’d like to be a part of that I’d love to hear from you (especially if you know everything there is to know about country, latin, or classical music).
Best of 2023
This list is unranked and not the result of consensus — I imagine pretty much anyone can find something they haven’t heard in this list. 188 albums all told, and every one of ‘em worth listening to, enjoy!
Andy Beta on Ryuichi Sakamoto
Throughout his career Ryuichi Sakamoto struck a balance between West and East, between the European classical canon (which he absorbed while earning his master’s in music composition at Tokyo University) and the cutting edge technology emerging from modern Japan.
Collections
Megan Iacobini de Fazio on Afrodisia
…they released hundreds of records capturing the plethora of sounds that were igniting the region’s music scenes, from jùjú to Afrobeat, highlife, psych-rock and, later on, soul and disco.
Shy Thompson on Kankyō Ongaku
The Japanese term, translated literally as “environmental music,” was coined primarily to describe the kind of music Brian Eno was making starting with Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
Jon Dale on ‘80s Australian underground rock
…what I want to do here is shine a spotlight on the groups that didn’t quite make that leap – groups who achieved some degree of success in their home country, who may or may not have had limited success overseas, some relocating for a time, some not, but who didn’t quite achieve the infamy and continual critical hosannas of a Nick Cave or David McComb.
Reviews
Nate Patrin
Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World
Album #17 is their first that’s wholly self-produced, with no outside hands touching it until it was given to Greg Calbi to master, so it’s not out of the question to call this their most autonomous and unfiltered album — at least, unfiltered once they streamlined all their longest-simmering ideas into it.
Fatboi Sharif & Steel Tipped Dove - Decay
As a hip-hop head with just as much affinity for alt-rock’s metal-to-grunge-to-noise continuum, Sharif’s partnership with Steel Tipped Dove on his first album for Backwoodz has produced something that the term “horrorcore” isn’t quite sufficient enough to convey.
Vanishing Twin - Afternoon X
Playing with a long basis of post-rock/psych exotica mutations has given them a lot to work with, and the Broadcast/Stereolab kinship they’ve become known for is easy for them to extrapolate on; at this point, their hauntology of Cold War-era art pop and its ’90s pomo echoes almost feels comfortable.
Hank Shteamer
André 3000 - New Blue Sun
Each piece feels like a sort of sonic installation, conjured mutually and lovingly by Andre and collaborators including percussionist Carlos Niño, guitarist Nate Mercereau and keyboardist Surya Botofasina…
Rick Anderson
Beauty Farm - La Rue: Masses
Even those who generally prefer the sound of larger or mixed-voice choral groups are strongly urged to give Beauty Farm’s recordings a try; this one exemplifies the ensemble’s unusual ability to conjure a rich, colorful sound from its small forces, and the dark timbre of the voices is a particularly good match for the somber and introspective mood of De la Rue’s music – a flavor that may be owed to the famously melancholy mood of his patroness’s court.
Pere Ubu - Dub Housing
Part of what makes Dub Housing such a great album is the fact that it manifests the distilled essence of Pere Ubu’s music: the tension between weirdness and virtuosity.
Shy Thompson
Satoshi Ashikawa - Still Way
With Still Way, he sought to iterate on Eno’s idea of composing a soundtrack to defuse the anxiety of busy life, saying that his music “should drift like smoke and become part of the environment.”
Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music for Nine Postcards
Hiroshi Yoshimura’s very first composition, “Clouds for Alma,” was written on a postcard. The short piece only took up a single measure on a page of sheet music — the perfect size for scribbling on a card.
Harold Heath
Yazmin Lacey - Voice Notes
So: a singer with a wonderful voice and delivery, a rich, clever, shifting production aesthetic that references and transcends all sorts of genres and then, making this album a bona fide triple threat, there are the songs themselves: full of gently soaring melodies, enticing little vocal hooks and with an intimate, diaristic feel.
JIM - Love Makes Magic
The first album from JIM — AKA house producer Ron Basejam, AKA Jim Baron, co-founder of UK house outfit Crazy P — is a wonderful debut, toning down his dance floor production chops and presenting a shimmering, melodic confection of Laurel Canyon-style singer-songwriting, blue-eyed R’n’B, yacht-rock and acoustic soul, full of strummed acoustic guitars, rich vocal harmonies, and with a gentle, introspective feel.
Chris Catchpole
Dave Evans - Elephantasia
Released in 1972 and until recently out-of-print, his second album is a beguiling, bewitching gem.
Plastikman - Sheet One
Recorded in just 48 hours, Sheet One bucked against the prevailing Chicago-influenced sounds of the time and created a world that felt both trippy and fluid, yet minimalist and raw, due in no small part to Hawtin’s masterful manipulation of the Roland TB-303.
Ricardo Villalobos - Alcachofa
However, for all its crystal-clear precision and technical wizardry, far from feeling cold and clinical, Alcachofa gurgles and mutates with an organic spontaneity: motifs and sections many producers would kill for appear once and then disappear as the natural selection of the records’ evolutionary flow works its own meandering magic.
Jon Dale
Mina - Mina Canta o Brasil
Mina Canta O Brasil sees her taking on some of the great songwriters of samba, bossa nova and Brazilian pop; her voice is made for the brassier, more spirited numbers…
Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta
…there’s something about the way the groups keep these songs afloat, across a tangle of threaded guitars, that’s beautifully compelling.
Ned Raggett
The Veldt - Illuminated 1989
While the Veldt’s full length career had seemingly started in 1994 with Afrodisiac, on the heels of the 1992 EP Marigolds, the truth of the matter was that they’d recorded a full length back in 1989 with a hell of an insane pedigree – the Chavis brothers found themselves not only in London, but working in the new studio September Sound with one of its founders, Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie, as producer.
Peter Gabriel - i/o
When collated and presented as an overall album featuring each set of mixes at the end of that year, what was essentially a fragmentary experience became an enjoyable late career sweep through a variety of sonic styles he had long demonstrated skill and success with.