musicAddicted

(10)  Okkyung Lee - Noisy Love Songs

Just very few people can express more emotions through a single instrument than Okkyung Lee does with her cello. Equipped with few field recordings and loops of her playing, Noisy Love Songs finds her tempting the limits of the cello and testing the openness of her listener. These uneasy provocative, but at the same time elegant compositions are a must for a free-form lover.

(9) Kyle Bobby Dunn - Ways Of Meaning

If there was a record sounding like a great meadow of blue calm this year, it would be Dunn’s Ways Of Meaning. Dynamic in its inner constancy, sorrowful in the secret harmony of the organ, this album finds the glory in an unlimited time and space.

(8) Sandwell District - Feed Forward

Shadows are the nearest quasi-object expressing the unapproachable character of Feed Forward, a genius collection of four minimal techno LPs. No light, no stroboscope, no diodes of technics are seen in this dark place under the club. Just the subdued beats and conjuring basses sinking even deeper into a dazed mind.

(7) A Winged Victory For The Sullen - A Winged Victory For The Sullen

The first collaboration between Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie sounds as if they wanted to pair never-ending silence with the most beautiful single tone of some of their chosen instruments. This record is unashamedly spacious, offering a calm escape from the world.

(6) Daniel Thomas Freeman - The Beauty Of Doubting Yourself

The inner darkness and fear has two faces: it eats the human from the inside, but also stimulates his most hidden talents and imaginations. This release finds the author in post-darkness phase, reconciling shadowy essence of his own’s soul gloominess.

(5) Hauschka & Hildur Guðnadóttir - Pan Tone

Almost an hour of improvisation performed by a moving sound of cello and a craziness of prepared piano which often sounds more like a percussion belongs to one of the most daring releases this year. Its qualities lay in the carefree nature of its creators and their simultaneous challenge to come with new sounds with preserving the consistency. Like its name, Pan Tone is an oceanic morphing beauty.

(4) Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason - Sólaris

Reykjavík-based duo has made an ambitious, almost unreachable goal: to illustrate the psychotic difficulties of one’s mind in a extreme conditions of an astronaut being squeezed of his secret emotions by an undecipherable alien force. Frost & Bjarnason reached the odd scariness of such situation through spacey passages of silence and dense fragments of dissonance. Not only those contrasts made an icy impression but the uneasy nature and thoughtful structure materialized the fears of Lem & Tarkovsky at their best.

(3) Juv - Juv

There has hardly been a harder and more difficult album this year than Juv – debut which has been waiting for its release for 13 years. Document of the sufferings and pains of growing up and changing from a creative youth into a self-realized adult is just part of Juv’s success. It’s the desolate murkiness and imaginative hopelessness that wins a broken heart of the listener.

(2) The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

One of the most emphatic works of last few years comes from the hands and mind of Leyland Kirby who imagines a fragmented and half-broken memory of patients suffering from Alzheimer. From frostiness to a touching absolution, this music is a full bliss beyond the grayness of the life.

(1) Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

Destruction of the art through the destruction of the sound as the underlying tool of music itself is a smart concept in an even smarter realization. As long as the synthesizers shiver and the church organ hums, one can’t get rid of those goosebumps that don’t want to go away. An impressive journey with a massive ideological basis.