Top Albums 2019 Part V 10 – 01

10. Kelman Duran – 13th Month

Actually released in 2018, 13th Month saw a first vinyl release in 2019. From those producers and electronic minds working on pushing the dancefloor to resemble an art space, or rather breaking the idea of spaces of art being secluded from real experience, music, and places of dance, Kelman Duran´s second record feels like an archeologist, anthropologist and DJ engaging in research of global sounds, local sentiments and the politics of oppression at once. Initiated by a stay a the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and a film documenting the living conditions of the Native Americans amidst social depravity and political troubles of the prominent pipeline, Duran chose his mode of beat making and clashing dembow riddims, reggeaton, dancehall, hip hop, and even some batida among other influences to a introspective collage of subversion. Powerful statements and lyrics become slowed down, stripped of their original background and music to reoccur for Duran´s work and unique spacing of sounds and sentiments in what sounds like the dancefloor coming to haunt the hegemonical offspring that chose to dance to forms of grappling with oppression and finding a voice. While the reference to Burial ring true in many aspects, Duran is closer to Andy Stott and Fatima Al Qadiri. Duran channeling the sounds of the global south is a challenge to what dance music and experimental sounds can mean and how this meaning is posed to be received. Academic research and the poetics of creating art coalesce in 13th Month to become a testament of political struggle, poverty, suicide in the method of moving bodies to enjoy and dance apart from these experiences. 424 years later, let´s hope this display sharpens the knives of those trying to escape and build for themselves.

09. Holly Herndon – Proto

The best extra-musical thing Holly Herndon did this year, was to school both Grimes and Zola Jesus on a charged debate about how artificial intelligence might or might not replace "real" music and musicians altogether. By some simple tweets, Herndon let two other artists dwelling in electronic music and especially Grimes – who made shit-posts about the end of music while prepping her third album – know by the hand of someone actually working with A.I. and trying to create from it, not behind or apart from the technology. PROTO is a testament to her work, using her own A.I. able to detect vocals and choir schemes, letting it learn through live recordings of vocal ensembles and arriving at powerful futuristic music that is always set on synthesis then playing into the hand of pundits and those that would rather retreat to Luddism for the sake of a vision of nature that never existed. Centering all songs on the power of voice and expanding upon the idea of having a voice, using it and influencing your environment in a personal and political way through the voice, PROTO redefines categories of beauty and co-existence with technology. Going from the idea of using machines to create and enhance music, up unto the notion of giving and letting A.I. machines create their own voice, Herndon nurtures the machine and invites it to learn and collaborate as an equal partner in her music. Nothing is more beautiful as the imperfect enhancements on songs like "Frontier" or the warbling noise on "Swim", pulling you towards human and machine in concordance and letting affect become cultural, natural and technological all at once.

08. Hire Kone – A Fossil Begins To Bray

Going from the vision of co-existence by Herndon, Nicky Mao as Hiro Kone pulls you back from the future and visions into harsh realities grappling with institutional uses of technology and how the incessant need to be present within digital spheres is disintegrating lifestyles and ways of being and sensing. Focusing on the idea of absence and incorporating this concept within the production of A Fossil Begins To Bray, Hiro Kone conjures some of the most menacing non-techno sounding scapes and environments this year. There is tension and violence in the air, states of surveillance and freedom at risk might not only be a luxury problem or alarmist opportunism, but practics put in place by (mostly) non-western and non-democratic states and tendencies emerging as unquestioned practice. While we in the west are obsessed with being online and pushing out images of our being into wide spaces of reception and evaluation for free and for the sake of being commodified personas, the usage of data as means of surveillance is an actual problem within the hands of the Chinese Governments. It is ironic to post a selfie onto Instagram in hopes of reaching other people and even possible sponsors in order to gain from being connected while other countries are turning towards fears of being digitally captured, rendered into a set of data and political or ethnical affiliations and categorized to whichever end there may be. In the past fascist regimes resorted to sowing stars on people's clothes to make them visible and focus a visceral hatred on them, nowadays this might be possible by cameras and a passport alone. In this, A Fossil Begins to Bray sounds like the breaking and screeching machine of political and ideological desires creating a cage, whilst also leaving a space for resistance in the given ambiance and void of Hiro Kone´s production. The beats and hard punches might be there, but most tracks can dissipate in an instance, revel in their droneing atmosphere and sway back and forth from being horrifying landscapes to letting you sit in this experience and ponder within pockets of respite and vastness.

07. Tool – Fear Inoculum

13 years after 10.000 Days Tool finally released another album and it was everything I expected it to be. For a band that came onto the scene with crazy visuals, trippy song structures and overall feel of King Crimson going mental and psychedelic, Fear Inoculum is the band's most mature and strangely meditative work yet. Anger and disgust are huge parts in Maynard James Keenan´s songwriting, abuse, addiction and societal unrest playing as much a role as did the need for being overtly abrasive and as misbehaved as pubescent youth learning about sex. Thankfully Tool, collectively reaching an age of 55+ have grown up, ended their puberty with 10.000 Days and reach a more contemplative edge in their yearning questions and musical adventures. Fear Inoculum deals with themes of aging out, becoming mistrusting of ego and your own thought processes, engaging in the idea of oneness and relation beyond ones own body in forms of empathy – nothing the band hasn´t explored before, but after the suspenseful work of Aenema and Lateralus, a certain tranquility prevails in most tracks. Keenan, supposedly recording most of his vocals during harvesting his own wine, has shown his awe of life and living things on many of his best tracks as Puscifer and with the help and musical genius of Danny Carey and Adam Jones his explorations of humanity, reason, nature, and spirit reflect statements like "drifting into this madness of our own making" or "we are all one spark" in their complex rhythmic density and extensive force. For those still missing the aggressive side of Tool, closer "7empst" is the updated version of "Aenema", every bit as concerned with doom and the powers that control and subdue, but less accusatory and strangely sure of justice and the forces within succeeding nonetheless. Tool are on their way to become a purer form of energy and we can hope the will be able to hone their craft for another offering yet again, I will be listening even if it takes 13 years and Keenan takes breaks from rice pudding and winemaking to bind the music together.

06. Velvet Negroni – NEON BROWN

Imagine a classically trained musician with religious parents shielding him from secular music until he moves out to college and the whole world of music is able to collapse and flood into his aptitude to create by himself. Jeremy Nutzman described this experience for the rollout of Neon Brown and his first full length for 4AD. Against the voices claiming an artist channeling funk, RnB and hip hop music might go with the trend of indie labels admitting one artist into the roster for the sake of diversity, Negroni, like serpentwithfeet on Secretly Canadian or Sequoyah Murrary on Thrill Jockey deserves his spot amongst contemporaries like Big Thief, Holly Herndon or Low. Neon Brown is rowdy disregard for genre and fitting into prerendered images of how music is to be made. Nutzmann is able to recall the Weeknd on tracks like "Confetti", channel the rainbow of bands like Vampire Weeknd on "Wine Green" or go for his very own funky Buddhist chanting on "Nester". On every turn, Neon Brown expands on the widening array of alternative RnB and left-field electronics revamping the genre. Apart from being drugged out, you hear Nutzman siphoning his adolescence, a universe of sound that structures pop culture through his own hands and feelings, venturing towards territories the mainstream will certainly pick up.

05. Drab Majesty – Modern Mirror

Marrying the spectral synth-pop of Drab Majesty with the myth of Narcissus and taking these themes into the technological age makes sense without ever hearing a single song of Modern Mirror. Returning from The Demonstration and shedding their alien skin, Drab Majesty turn baroque in their expressions of antiquity and exploration of self-obsession, love and societally disregard for emotion in the wake of centering your whole existence on building an impeccable image of self. Depeche Mode will forever remain one of my favorite bands, but Deb Demure and Mona D. understand the infectious nature of synthesizer music in its most emotional extend, you might even think some of these songs and passions were penned by Martin L. Gore in his early twenties and the darker periods of DM. From the beginning incantation of "Don´t Say You Love / If You Don´t Say I Love Who You Are Now" on "A Dialogue" towards the looping peak of "Out of Sequence"  with "Am I Out of Sequence or In The Times / The Day I Cried" Modern Mirror feels like mythical beings conversing, doubting and wailing with a greek choir of serene guitar and drum beats. The theme of self-indulgent love, losing yourself within images of self while feigning to love another ring through in Drab Majesty channeling Narcissus as well as questioning contemporary times and this approach bends in on itself through a duo making the highly anachronistic sounding vital and innovative.

04. Future – Future Hndrxx Presents The WIZRD

Future, the monster turned Future Hndrxx turned WIZRD. Whatever moniker Future uses to express his multiple musical sides or current iterations of his sound, he is steadily building his impeccable oeuvre of trap anthems, lust, hurt and riches colliding into a man of contradictions and always yearning for redemption, forgiveness, and understanding. Future has quietly moved away from singing about drugs and still every time a young rapper finds his early demise through drugs, there is an echo that seems to be felt in his music and persona as pillars of this legacy were build upon drug abuse. Regardless of questioning Future´s responsibility or if he needs to actually take any blame, his WIZRD takes his signature rap style and hallucinogenic beats into a polished whole. This album skips the seclusion of the self-titled album and Hendrixx for the great congregation of sounds that DS2 and his mixtapes of this era seemed to suggest. Future appears as a man that is as much in love with his riches as he is an insomnia driven victim of his success. "Never Stop" sums up and introduces these components to the album, the track alone serving up enough honest swagger within heartbreak that must have made FKA twigs consider the trapper to be her only feature on MAGDALENE. From here only hits follow without tiring out the experience of listing to Hendrxx go off. "F&N" is the best banger, coma-inducing beat switch up included. "Temptation" goes for the introspection of being the richest sad man imaginable, struggling with drugs and being a moral being while "Krazy But True" takes the same mood with spite and swagger about his own legacy and impact on the genre. And while all tracks move between these sentiments and serve up layer after layer of Future and his personas, his legacy and impact are apparent on WIZRD: A look back on his discography as a relentless proof of concept – the rapping singer, singing rapper entangled with auto-tune, his ego and being as proud and incognizant as he is hurt and looking for a way out.

03. Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code

The Sacrificial Code leads me to marvel at the power of organ music every time "Glory Canon III" reaches its somber conclusion. Growing up secluded from any religious music that would use the organ and only experiencing it as an instrument in recorded music for many years, the first experience of the shattering sounds of an organ climbing the room and filling whole churches with its atmosphere gave me better chills then any abrasive musical set could have. There is no denying the religious power of organ music, the power to reclaim and make audible as well as tangible a feeling of higher purpose and transcendence lingering within the air you breathe. The Sacrificial Code through recording the sounds close to the pipes leaves out the huge atmospheric colors of organ music but helps to show that the heightened beauty of yearning pipes doesn´t need any locale or scenic reference to work. Within its 100 minutes, you get to experience the purity of chimes and whistles resonating and sustaining their grandeur within their smallest possible spaces and carrying your listening towards a headspace that feels like building your inner church. There have been works on the essence of voice or strings, I hunt for every iteration dealing with modular synthesis and believe the electronic to be closer to our lived experience, but Kali Malone might have crafted the definite opus on organ sounds and sounds that will inherently carry the metaphysical within them. Sound is vibrating air and everyone obsessed with music will bear witness to why vibrating air has been called God or the holy spirit since the beginning of time.

02. FKA twigs – MAGDALENE

The repose of "Cellophane" teased not only a great departure from FKA twigs previous music but also showed incredible growth since her 2014 debut album. The visual presentation of twigs pole dancing her way through fragility and towards an encounter with a mythical beast ending in cleansing mud still felt very much reminiscent of her impeccable sense of urgency as a performer, and yet, the piano ballad eschewed her lecherous use of beats for a different prism of love. As a conclusive statement to the best album of 2019, the song ties up a transitioning existence wrought between beauty and making a baroque monument to hurt. We start at the end of a relationship, with the last plea of "thousand eyes" reassuring that the end might set off new cycles of falling in love, but the distance will bring emotional numbness as well. Between twigs becoming her own choir and her lamenting falsetto, last looks and an unwillingness to let go enfold in slow-motion, resting in something that has long become inevitable. "home with you" takes you into the operatic building of wonder and unlimited possibilities while leaving this nagging sense of leaving something or someone behind. The heart of MAGDALENE is shared between "sad day", "holy terrain" and the self-titled track. The lines "taste the fruit of me / make love to all you see" feel like letting go of your loved one between the push and pull of knowing you´ll ruin them and needing to let go to avoid destroy something that brought beauty to your life. This might be the best break-up song in the sheer density of having a universal conversation in which love and reason will never find semblance, telling your loved one, there might be a possibility of return but hoping the other will move on and find happiness beyond you. Reverence and dysfunctionality collide on "holy terrain" with twigs enlisting Future for the most complex and evocative performance of his musical career. Twigs is pleading for trust and honesty in a blooming relationship, taking Future´s whole persona into account and his contribution boiling to the apologetic sweeps of "I cry, I cry, I cry" and "I try, I try, I try". This pairing, twigs curating a song seeping with feminity to feature the rapper that is known for his own sadness of constantly failing betterment in his rages of being rich and unequivocally potent male highlights her meticulous artistry, building her song with the same care as her dance performances. "Magdalene" builds the holiness of womanhood in twigs becoming the equal of Jesus Christ within her own reading of the figure of Mary Magdalene. A transcendental being, seen as devoid of sense and perceived as the downfall of man, but carrying the key of lust and creation within her. MAGDALENE is close to a perfect album in the construction, arc, and instrumentation being tied together by twigs performance as a songstress and visual artist alike. While other artists might always allude to a greater vision beyond the music, and twigs previous effort might now fall into this category as well. here every aspect is crafted and polished on record. Yet, this will become most apparent when seeing twigs performing her songs on tour, introducing each element with ease and calculation, letting song and dance weave together and performing incredible feats as a dancer and performance artists herself while not once wavering to bring her falsetto to full effect, let the lustfulness and swagger take center stage or frailty become opaque and almost tactile for every audience member to endure and adore simultaneously.

01. Vatican Shadow – Reissue Series

While most of the music released by Vatican Shadow in 2019 wasn´t technically new and rather consisted of vinyl and digital remasters of material from the early offerings, hard to find ephemera and off-cuts, the music under Domick Fernows second greatest moniker stands as the ultimate synopsis of the decades aural fields of disarray leaning on techno and ambient frameworks as channels of communication. Without wanting to make a list of the greatest albums of the decade, the output of Vatican Shadow ranges precisely from 2010 until 2019. Under this name, the harbinger of noise and doom electronics Domnick Fernow aka Prurient chose to try his hand at club-oriented offerings, expanding his claustrophobic assault on eudaemonia and renouncing his shouts or spoken word for the purity of drones and drum machine alone. And yet, things were never that simple: Fernow infused his music not just with an industrial atmosphere, which most of his later work as Prurient wasn´t actually far from, he build a different universe around constant warfare, surveillance, and conspiracy. Naming albums Pakistan Military Academy, Byzantine Private CIA, Kneel Before Religious Icons (which also saw a remastered release this year), Washington Buries Al Queda Leader At Sea, Kuwaiti Airforce, American Flesh For Violence or Opium Crop Airstrikes carries with it an air of obsession with current affairs, political cabal and armed violence. Vatican Shadow with a name suggesting the looming shadow of vice within ancient institutions, bits of sexual violence between religious and political terror perpetuated by fanatism, sounds desert sands, towering buildings, unjust wars and evil instigators with hidden agendas. This is as much musical paranoia as it is a sobering looking-glass for events past and present. Fernow solidifies this in his use of images of known gunmen tagged terrorists, portraits of presidents or global events that would stand to test the fragile line between diplomacy and warmongering time and time again. Capturing the 5+ hours of music released this year is then again like visiting Fernow´s own altar of worship, marshaling husks of religious chants, military drum fused to bassy drum patterns, interrupting synth shrieks or melodic exercises in restraint in ambiance within lounge tracks titled "Bin Laden´s Corpse". As most tracks might be hardly danceable in their traditional sense, Fernow employs his concept-heavy approach to the music of community, corporality and even in its darkest tendencies the mantra of PLUR to evoke feelings of suspicion and deception. Arching these sounds to the best works of this decade, albums like To Pimp A Butterfly or 2018´s Double Negative, Vatican Shadows albums feel like worshipping the evils of society while giving them the CNN treatment of feigning objectivity while never leaving the grounds of political agenda and hegemonic blindspots. Other artist have given you personal accounts, spoken up as parts of an ethnicity and social image or expressed impressionistic takedowns of current affairs while Fernow´s drawn-out compositions of eerie machinist friction and release might try to comprehend the sensation of dread in realized that there is no bigger picture to be had, no grander perspective to achieve or loophole and trap to be avoided. As music can be an empowering instrument of communities and individuals, Vatican Shadow released the bulk of his catalog as a renunciation of empowerment and awareness, being ensnared in unfinished opinions and led by interest groups unfaced by larger cries for humanity, dignity or caring about anything other than profit while pushing their political and religious agendas forward by prayer, guns or product.