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TA best Of 2020

Well, it seems like this place is inching ever closer towards death but I've been making these yearly threads for almost 10 years now, so in the name of tradition and also to order my own thoughts, here are my favorites of the year:

Beatrice Dillon - Workaround. This seems to be the one record that's placed high on all the lists I've looked it. Hectic, complex, non-4/4 drum programming has really come back into fashion recently in a big way, although it often ends up feeling try-hard, unsatisfying and overproduced. This record offers a more thoughtful and deliberate, almost structuralist take it on that, picking up where artists like SND left off. Definitely one of the smartest records this year.

Sleeparchive - Trust. Given how uninspired, watered down or downright pop-ified most techno has become in the past two years, something like this almost feels like a statement record now. It seems like Sleeparchive heard all of the garbage techno, said "fuck that" and went all-out - Techno doesn't get more pure, powerful and monolithic than this. When you are as invested into techno as I am, it is quite reassuring to hear that it can still be done properly, which is probably why this is my record of the year.

Andrea - Ritorno. This didn't make it on any end-of-year-lists, even though it is a very impressive album, perhaps because by now the "Ilian Tape sound" has become familar and it came out early in the year. It's probably the best non-ambient/experimental home listening electronic record of the year though; great drum programming and lush, emotional, memorable synths. Also very impressive engineering throughout.

Echium - Disruption Of Form. Sferic has been one of my favorite labels for a while and they had a good year again. I think the award for "best sound design" goes to this one - great mix of lush, hazy pads and chords, acoustic sounds, field recordings and glitchy digital sounds.

Ulla - Tumbling Towards A Wall. There's been quite a few good albums from the West Mineral camp (spread out among a whole slew of labels like C-Minus, Motion Ward, Lillerne Tapes, Experience ltd etc.) this year, although by their nature they tend to all blend together a bit. This one is probably the most memorable, great textures and an inventive, playful sense of melody and harmony that transcends the usual ambient fodder.

In a sort of more general reflection, I didn't think it was that good of a year for dance music overall, although part of that impression might just be the subjective experience of the whole Corona situation - to say that this year has been one big blur is probably going to be an understatement for most people. Pretty much everyone I've talked to about their yearly favorite has said that they've had trouble at all keeping up with new music and found it difficult to even remember what came out this year. Even for those who traditionally kept up with new music, with the entire situation this year and the ever-increasing onslaught of new releases coming out every week, it's been an increasingly seductive proposition to just stop paying attention to new music alltogether. Despite trying to at least somewhat pay attention to new music, my favorite musical discoveries this year were all older music, from shoegaze (Whirr) to experimental jazz (The Necks) to contemporary electro-acoustic composers (Iancu Dumitrescu and Jakob Ullmann) and postwar academic electronic music (Jaap Vink and Roland Kayn). And it's not that there haven't been any decent new records, there's been loads, they just didn't seem all that memorable or exciting compared to what still lurks in the archives of the past - especially in dance music. Early in the year, people were predicting a slew of great "lockdown" records but I don't think this really has come to fruition (which I find surprising, given how much more studio time most professionals have had this year), which either proves how dependant dance music is on the studio-dancefloor feedback loop and/or further proves that the genius of the struggling artist is largely a myth and that people in precarious situations (e.g. most non-millionare DJs this year) aren't necessarily in a great position to just bash out some timeless music.

In trance related matters, it seems that, apart from all the 90s hard trance / euro trance influenced techno cheese, early 90s prog influences have become a big thing in many more underground records; generally in the form of some nebulous anachronistic assemblage of rave-y 90s style. It's all fairly pleasant but personally, I don't find it particularily interesting (which might also be because early 90s prog and proto trance has never been a sound I really have a soft spot for) and it just seems to further prove that in lieu of any new musical movements, people are still frantically mining for any possible resurrection or synthesis of 90s style that hasn't been done yet.

On the plus side, while (apart from writing my own music, which I've done relatively consistently) I haven't engaged with music as much as I would've liked, I started reading fiction again this year, something I've done very little of as an adult. I read a ton but my favorites were Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Richard Powers' Orfeo.

Re: TA best Of 2020

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Originally posted by Woony Even for those who traditionally kept up with new music, with the entire situation this year and the ever-increasing onslaught of new releases coming out every week, it's been an increasingly seductive proposition to just stop paying attention to new music alltogether. Despite trying to at least somewhat pay attention to new music, my favorite musical discoveries this year were all older music... And it's not that there haven't been any decent new records, there's been loads, they just didn't seem all that memorable or exciting compared to what still lurks in the archives of the past - especially in dance music.

Sounds similar to a conclusion I came to many years ago. Still am in that frame of mind, if I'm honest. Yeah, something current may catch my attention, but when there's so much more that slipped by in the past, who's got time staying up to speed? Besides, if it's truly a great record that came out now, the test of time will undoubtedly keep it burbling in the discourse for rediscovery in the future, unlike so much toss-off bilge that's annually released as disposable product.

Even then though, I drastically cut back on my music explorations this year, past or present. For whatever reason (COVID panic; work stress; political shitshows; just getting old), music hasn't been as important to my daily going-ons. Felt like I needed proper breather from it anyway, let me catch up on things rather than let my 'to listen' pile keep growing and growing.

Which is all just a roundabout way of saying that I, uh, don't have any actual content to provide the topic of this thread.

Oh boy, I was catching up on releases on Beatport and came across these. This is the kind of stuff that passes as "techno" these days. It's not even good as trance cheese - none of these business euro techno producers can write a decent trance arpeggio - but try explaining that to those vintage Fila wearing 19 year olds that like this stuff...

Seriously, they're trying to call that techno?

I mean, sure, proper trance has been in 'melodic, hypnotic techno' denial for over a decade now, but still...

Re: TA best Of 2020

quote:

Originally posted by Woony In trance related matters, it seems that, apart from all the 90s hard trance / euro trance influenced techno cheese, early 90s prog influences have become a big thing in many more underground records; generally in the form of some nebulous anachronistic assemblage of rave-y 90s style. It's all fairly pleasant but personally, I don't find it particularily interesting (which might also be because early 90s prog and proto trance has never been a sound I really have a soft spot for) and it just seems to further prove that in lieu of any new musical movements, people are still frantically mining for any possible resurrection or synthesis of 90s style that hasn't been done yet.

This is certainly the biggest trend I've noticed this year, perhaps because it chimes with my tastes but also because RA keep posting mixes full of what they insist on referring to as "trance bombs", which invariably turns out to be this kind of tackle. I can't help but be amused by RA's equivocation towards the T-word: they now use it freely but don't seem to want to write any kind of editorial addressing this reclamation of a style that was treated like poison until very recently. The description of Boris Johnson's leadership style as "waiting to see which way the crowd is going and then running in front shouting 'Follow me!'" springs to mind.

As for the sound itself; I enjoy it, obviously. The Northern Exposure CD1 sound is probably the style of dance music I cherish the most, but I never thought I'd live to see it considered anything more than a particularly un-hip strata in the dance music fossil record, so to have it emerge as probably the trendiest zeitgeist of the distant future, AD 2020, is pleasantly disorientating. And although every single sonic trope being used is older than dinosaur bones, it feels fresher than it probably should just because these ignorant Gen Y kids are sticking random bits together with gleeful disregard of the old stylistic boundaries, resulting in mash-up combinations of triceratop heads on top of allosaurus rhythm sections.

All that said, I do wonder how long the trend can last before it burns itself out. I could throw out everything on my USB stick and play like 1993 never ended, but I feel like the kids will be onto some other fad in a year or two, just like 2012 was briefly the year of old school garage house, and then abruptly nobody cared anymore.

Re: Re: TA best Of 2020

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J And although every single sonic trope being used is older than dinosaur bones, it feels fresher than it probably should just because these ignorant Gen Y kids are sticking random bits together with gleeful disregard of the old stylistic boundaries, resulting in mash-up combinations of triceratop heads on top of allosaurus rhythm sections.

That point really reminds me of how people were discussing post-dubstep and future garage producers like Lone that were mashing up different eras of the hardcore continuum.

Ironically, even that sound itself is now going through a bit of a revival now - I've noticed that producers like Martyn, Shed and Sully have been back to releasing stuff that sounds like what they did ca. 2008-2010 in the past one or two years. I think that's a revival that actually has some potential to be fresh because that whole sound was suddenly cut short by the Skrillex explosion and dubstep becoming a dirty word way before it actually ran out of creative juice.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J All that said, I do wonder how long the trend can last before it burns itself out. I could throw out everything on my USB stick and play like 1993 never ended, but I feel like the kids will be onto some other fad in a year or two, just like 2012 was briefly the year of old school garage house, and then abruptly nobody cared anymore.

I would say it's going to burn out soon but then again, I've been predicting "peak trance" for years now and it's been just getting bigger. I do think that whole cheesy business techno 1994 Frankfurt trance sound is going to crash eventually though, just because at a certain point you can't go any harder or cheesier. It's also a classic bandwagon sound, most of the producers doing it were putting out stripped down non-melodic techno even just a few years ago. I think that imploding might create a kind of general anti-trance backlash that would also make the more tasteful trance stuff uncool again. Or perhaps trance will just eventually lose it's luster for these kids like it did for us eventually. Although the scene is very different from what it was in 2012; there's many more different revivals and sounds going on at the same time now and I feel like all these kids raised on mish-mash Spotify playlists and algorithm are much less concerned about staying on the cutting edge and maintaining genre purity than earlier generations.

For the first time in a long time I've listened to a lot of new music this year. It's made me realise that there is a lot of good modern trance, prog and techno around but the more I listened the more I got to appreciate the old sounds and styles which originally got me into the scene.
I got to appreciate that, on average, a lot more thought and effort was put into making records in the 1998 - 2002 period when I first got into the scene.

I also listened to a lot of pre 1998 music which I never had the motivation to listen to when I was younger and here discovered so much quality, intelligent and complex productions. It made me understand why a lot of folks who had been listening to electronica since the late 80s/early 90s complained at the state of the music in the late 90s/early 2000s, calling it generic, cheesy, etc.

Nevertheless, I can now see that the cut off point for what I consider to be the golden age of electronic music is somewhere around 2002. By this year a lot of the vinyl record labels that were active in the 90s and at the turn of the century had either already gone out of business or were soon to be. Even the mighty Hooj Choons went bust around 2002/2003.
The quality output of these labels ceased and it was usurped by the vast amounts of digital music, most of which was produced with a fraction of the originality and effort.

The wonderful thing about the internet though is that through sites like Doscogs, ebay and youtube it's easy to explore music through different ages and get your hands on the old material you never knew existed or you wished you had owned at the time. So I think that now is a great time to be a music fan and collector. In the current scene there is a huge amount of dross but enough quality material seeps through to make it worthwhile being a fan.

As a side note, I do hope that this site is upgraded at some point and does not die a slow death. There are enough music fans still around who were there when the site was first established, we have similar tastes and outlook and there are very few places on the net that cater to this demographic.

i wish i liked mainstream music, music searching would be so much easier. i think about this often. i feel like a twat when people ask me what i like and then i have to describe how techno is different from business techno or edm. i went through my music i purchased or in cart to try to contribute but i don't think i have a best of this year. will say there was a lot of things i like, but none that were the quintessential reminder of the year musically. favourite to listen this year was probably old Aux 88

https://www.discogs.com/Ilyes-Gauva...elease/14661682
https://www.discogs.com/Featherston...elease/14960360
https://www.discogs.com/Vladimir-Gn...elease/15795327

Probably some more that I can't recall now. I've also been enjoying stuff that Sound Synthesis (electro) and HVL put out.

01.Aly & Fila with Plumb - Somebody Loves You

this is one of the few trance songs and one of the only dance songs i heard this year that had mental health as the theme,

02.Rodg & Sarah De Warren - do it all again
03.Cirez D - The Raid
04.oliver smith - warehouse
05. Aly & Fila - Te Espero Aqui
06.David Guetta - Kill me slow
07.james dexter - desire
08.butch- lale

Annnnnyway... here's some albums I liked from 2020. Just don't expect them to define "the year in music" or have appeared on lists or any of that tedious shit:

Cell - Live In Corfu
Not the sound of Club 18-30 as the title might suggest, but rather the most majestic psy-chill album in years masquerading as a live album. All new tunes in studio quality that flow together seamlessly.

Sam McQueen - Dreams In Sepia
Lovely Detroit ambience somewhere between B12 and John Beltran, released very briefly in Japan only at the back end of 2019 and now available everywhere.

Route 8 - Rewind The Days Of Youth
Low-key but extremely listenable fusion of ambient, dub techno and throwback house and breaks.

Halftribe & Spinnet ‎� Patterns Of Sync
Deep space ambient with beats slower than your heart rate in cryosleep.

Space Dimension Controller - Love Beyond The Intersect
Technically this came out at the tail end of 2019, but Woony always jumps the gun with these threads so it didn't get mentioned last year. Beautifully mellow retro house and nowhere near as daft as the last album, for better or worse.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Cell - Live In Corfu Not the sound of Club 18-30 as the title might suggest, but rather the most majestic psy-chill album in years masquerading as a live album. All new tunes in studio quality that flow together seamlessly.

Ah, I actually forgot that was released this year. Would likely be on my list too.

Can also add:

Norken & Nyquist - Synchronized Minds
Is it electro? Acid? Ambient techno? Yes. Yes to all those things, and it's good too!

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Cell - Live In Corfu Not the sound of Club 18-30 as the title might suggest, but rather the most majestic psy-chill album in years masquerading as a live album. All new tunes in studio quality that flow together seamlessly.

This album is fantastic!

"Spinning Whale" should be in the next Tron movie

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Annnnnyway...

Always check out yours.

Quite liked this one:

Not a single great album this year.

Computer Data and ASC are probably the artists i would recommend based on 2020's output.

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