2018 Quarterly Roundup: 11 Favourite Albums of the Year, So Far

While 2018 seems to be off to a pretty amazing start musically, it has also proven to be one of the more interesting and rewarding years in terms of my own listening habits. Starting a blog has completely changed how I go about discovering new music; following labels and artists closely through mailing lists, regularly checking blogs and forums, as well as the entirely new aspect of album submissions directly from artists and labels, setting me up with an incredibly diverse assortment of music from around the world. It has also effected how I relate to music on a much smaller scale. Albums I may not have spent as much time listening to as critically, or as closely, are now sometimes poured over for hours on end, becoming the backdrop to elaborate stories and interpretations which, for some crazy reason, I have decided to start sharing with the world over the last few months.

As a result, what I'm left with is an overwhelming amount of incredible new albums to obsess over, and an even more overwhelming urge to share as many of them as I can. Unfortunately, that's not always possible. I try to keep the reviews to once or twice a week, and each week am backlogged with even more amazing music, and no time to share it all.

So here is my compromise: Every three months, I will do my absolute best to cover some of my favourite albums that I haven't otherwise had time to write about. The reviews will be short and concise, and possibly a little frantic in my attempt to fit in as many as I can, but at least I no longer will have to carry around the guilt of leaving out so many incredible albums from the blog. It is the very least I could do in return for the sounds that carry me through my days and nights. Thank you for all the beautiful music.

RAMZi - Pèze-Piton

[12th Isle]

Here in Toronto, the first few months of the year are always specifically tough to get through. On top of the month long mental hangover that always seems to follow the holidays and new years, it's usually around January or February when the winter fatigue truly begins to hit, that turning point in the season where the mind is constantly exhausted, the body constantly cold, and all you can think about is the glorious impending thaw of the spring. Luckily, Phoebé Guillemot has been there to help see us through to the warmer months with her newest album as RAMZI, acting as a travel guide through beautiful and exotic locations, inviting the listener to stay with the locals and to try the food, to learn the names of the plants and the birds and the stories of the land and to better understand the delicate balance of nature and man. The warm circular chugging of tropical hand drums stop and start in dizzying cycles, creating unpredictable patterns as hints of half formed rhythm peak timidly from behind lush greenery before finally latching onto a solid groove, forming thickly woven canopies of sound and colour overhead.

https://ramzii.bandcamp.com/album/p-ze-piton

Bass Clef - (minimum wage) (zero hours) (infinite forest) [OPEN HAND REAL FLAMES]

An album of disorienting and constantly evolving long-form techno that unfolds patiently over the course of an hour like a slowly growing dust storm. Bringing to mind Ricardo Villalobos at his loosest and most improvisational, the music breathes circularly and sweeps up all matter, both synthetic and organic, in a twisting maelstrom of intricate rhythms and ghostly, half heard counter rhythms that create the sort of impossible patterns that can only be revealed through chance and constant variation, like watching a supercomputer cycle through an infinite number of mathematical sequences and potential equations.

https://openhandrealflames.bandcamp.com/album/minimum-wage-zero-hours-infinite-forest

Simon Mann - Shadow Ranger

[Controlled Violence]

A cold, sleek, and dangerous sounding minimal techno record that moves like a highly advanced stealth weapon, stalking menacingly through dark skies and even darker waters, absorbing light and travelling undetected toward it's target with a frightening tactile efficiency. Glowing sonar displays ripple outward while muted inner-ear bass pulses from somewhere deep within, mechanics clicking uncertainly through a variety of functions like the moral anxieties of the pilot made real; finger on the button, a harbinger of silent destruction equal parts flesh and steel.

https://soundcloud.com/controlled-violence/simon-mann-shadow-ranger

Facechain - Accensor

[Dream Catalogue]

Despite having one of the busiest and most consistent release schedules out of any label that I know of, you can always be sure that whenever Dream Catalogue releases an album, no matter the genre, it is going to be well worth your time. This time around, we are treated to the labels unique take on dub-techno, a genre that, as a fan, I must admit can often fall victim to certain formula. Facechain, however, has managed to set a course entirely their own, creating an instant classic that diverts from all expectations and breaths a whole new life and vitality into the genre, abandoning the usual aquatic, languid pace of techno-dub for something noticeably more aero-dynamic and flight-ready, self-assuredly carried by a mysteriously formidable internal power, a glowing atomic heart pulsing at the centre of a living ship.

https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/accensor

Space Afrika - Somewhere Decent to Live

[Sferic]

Transmissions from a long abandoned space program, echoes of its inhabitants last dying breaths finally reaching the earths airwaves forty years later in half heard warbles and synthetic groans, as if transformed upon contact with some celestial force. Warm ambient textures and thick, dubbed out bass provide the framework that acts as a mere template for deep transformation, like the human biology of long lost astronauts deconstructed into their basest components before being reassembled into something otherworldly.

https://sferic.bandcamp.com/album/somewhere-decent-to-live

Steven Porter - Journey to the Star

[10 Label]

Crawling through tunnels of smashed concrete and broken glass, the overdriven industrial techno sounds of Japanese 10 Label's Yuji Kondo and Katsunori Sawa seem to barely make it out of the speakers unscathed. Hyper compressed 80's drum-machines and stuttering vocal samples are wrapped in tight coils of razor wire, deprived of their nostalgic charm and re-appropriated into something cruel and dangerous, leaving behind a dance-floor of smashed disco balls and bloody dance-prints, newly formed street gangs leaving the rave bleary eyed to wander the streets and spread terror into the early morning.

https://soundcloud.com/10-label/sets/steven-porter-journey-to-the

Angelo Harmsworth - Overture Untitled

[Summer Isle]

An album of sweltering, distorted beauty released back in early January on E-Saggila's Summer Isle label, the two tracks on Overture Untitled play out like what I'd imagine the inside a storm cloud might sound like, pockets of blistering, supercharged noise distorting the air and vibrating with an impossible, barely contained power. Disembodied vocals descend from the heavens and feedback squeals are pulled skyward in an increasingly volatile clash of opposing forces, tearing a hole in the very fabric of reality and unleashing something celestial and infinite in the process. This is music of the ether; and into the ether shall this music deliver you.

https://summerisle.bandcamp.com/album/overture-untitled

Byron Westbrook - Confluence Patterns

[Umor Rex]

Kaleidoscopic galleries of twisting light and sound render space and time meaningless on Byron Westbrooks newest album on Umor Rex, synthesizers acting as conduits to an alternate reality where the only form of communication is through elaborately dancing light patterns, shared telepathically. Electrified tones weave through darkness and muted fireworks explode overhead, frozen in stases in the choked atmospheres of outer space, while physical and perceptional constructs such as shape and size are constantly thrown into question with dizzying arpeggios that act like funhouse mirrors to the minds eye.

https://umorrex.bandcamp.com/album/confluence-patterns

Celer + Forest Management - Landmarks

[Constellation Tatsu]

Before I start on the music, can we just take a minute to appreciate the album art on this record? I'm not sure what it is about the image — like some sort of half formed memory of a place I'd once been to, or possibly even dreamed of as a child — but there is something in it that stirs up a profound sense of comfort and familiarity. I want to live in this image, to spend hours in this perfect moment in this perfect orchard on this perfect summer afternoon, captured forever on the idyllic past of faded celluloid. And yet somehow, Will Long (Celer) and John Daniel (Forest Management) manage to match the utter transportive quality of the album art with some of the most delicate yet profoundly beautiful drones of either of their careers, drifting through the air like strands of silk in a gentle wind. Field recordings, scattered spaciously throughout the album, act as an anchor to the earthly and elemental, fluttering birdsongs and echoing cave drips providing a natural warmth at the centre of the intangible.

https://celer.bandcamp.com/album/landmarks

Ugasanie - Ice Breath of Antarctica

[Cryo Chamber]

Cryo Chamber hold on firmly to the (personally appointed) title of "best ambient label in the game" with an arctic drone record from Belarusian Ugasanie that rumbles with a towering, nearly physical enormity, and offers a glimpse at both the beauty and the cruel, relentless danger of the natural world in its most extreme climates. Like finding yourself trapped at the centre of a frozen yet rapidly thawing ocean amidst a slowly building earthquake with no solid land in sight, the music of Ice Breath of Antarctica threatens to swallow the listener up at any moment in a frozen and eternal embrace, but not without the promise of a final, illusory heat, a desperate trick of the mind serving only to ease you more calmly into the inevitably of an icy tomb.

https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/album/ice-breath-of-antarctica

David Terry - Sorrow

[Opal Tapes]

Opal Tapes continue to defy my expectations with each release, this time with an album of dark, mouldy drones of ritual and sacrifice that seem to pour from the sewers like a noxious mist, revealing a buried tomb-city of the occult laying hidden for thousands of years just below the surface of everything you once knew to be true. Over the course of three immense tracks that tread the fine line between patience and massochism, David Terry conjures some sort of dark, universal truth; the horrible, barely hidden realities that hide just beyond the veil of our sanity, threatening to drive the mind to utter madness, if only you stare into the void for a mere moment too long.

http://opaltapes.com/album/sorrow