The criteria used by theartsdesk's critics in selecting pieces for this list are simple, but demanding: did a piece or a programme stir and shake us? Did it move us, and make us still - weeks or months afterwards - think, yes, I'd go see that again in a heartbeat?
It was the year of Pokémon Go, and it was the year the mainstream offered sequels. There were also some gems on console and mobile platforms. Steve O'Rourke and Steve Houghton look back on the developments in the world of gaming in 2016.
CONSOLE
2016 was the year that US underground titan Michael Gira began to wind down the current “iteration” of long-standing musical mavericks Swans and their final album, The Glowing Man, proved to be no whimpering exit. Intense and challenging sounds that still manage to convey a magnificent, if disturbed, beauty characterise the band’s swan song and it’s one that doesn’t let the quality dip for over two hours – despite several tracks of over 20 minutes.
Lyrics often remain half-heard over a sonic palette that moves from dreamy but dark psychedelia to menacing Gothic country blues and beyond. While the epic and terrible “Frankie M” and dark folk of “When Will I Return?” are more than fitting epitaphs for such musical giants, the title track is the shining highlight of The Glowing Man. A long, drawn-out apocalyptic blues that builds and fades away before developing into a forceful motorik groove, it’s a shamanic force of nature and well worth the entrance price on its own.
Swans, however, weren’t the only ones producing top-notch work in 2016. Soulwax’s soundtrack for Belgica was a work of genius that might have anyone assuming that the album was a compilation featuring 15 very different artists. In fact, it was entirely written and produced by the Belgian experimentalists but, while the sounds shift from one unrelated musical style to another, Belgica never sounds clunky but flows seamlessly from one cracker to another. Meanwhile, Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers’ Post Exotic is a lively twist on the Monkees’ good grooves with a bucket load of swagger and the knowing smirk, sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars.
Kuro’s set at the Supersonic Festival Launch Party was my gig of the year. An earthy drone of violin, bass, electronics and a pile of effects boxes turned out to be an unexpected treat with atmospheric and cinematic loops with intense crescendos and bursts of feedback. It was a set that defied easy pigeonholing but had a sizeable crowd enthralled and saw me scuttling to the merchandise stall for a copy of their debut album. My track of the year, however, was Barry Adamson’s “Up in the Air”. Infinitely more digestible than Swans and Kuro, this sassy piece of cinematic soul was more than enough to reinstate the Moss Side Jazz Devil as the coolest cat in town.
Two More Essential Albums from 2016:
Soulwax – Belgica (Original Soundtrack)
Bosco Rogers – Post Exotic
Gig of the Year:
Kuro at the Supersonic Festival Launch Party
Track of the Year:
Barry Adamson – "Up In The Air"
Overleaf: watch the video of “Up in the he Air” by Barry Adamson
French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.
In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Posessed of a distinctive, often plaintive voice, to add to the sometimes stark, 80s-influenced production, it is a hugely satisfying listen. There are no stand-outs as such, rather an overwhelming sense of cohesion to the songs which, for the most part, occupy a hinterland somewhere between the home and the club. It’s a collection that it’s very easy to lose oneself in, partly because of the life Autarkic finds in his ice-cold palette of sounds. While the songs boast an incredible degree of craft, this helps them to retain a pleasingly ragged – and human – appeal.
It’s also worth noting that the field this year has been very strong: the release of Gruff Rhys’ soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars was an unexpected delight, Steve Mason gave us his most fully realised solo collection to date, and Xam Duo and The Early Years both made a strong case for Sonic Cathedral to be hailed as label of the year (again) with their respective albums.
Special mention must also go to Hipnotik Tradisi, the extraordinary collision of cultures from George Thompson, otherwise known as Black Merlin. Were it not for the fact that I’d already reviewed it for theartsdesk back in July, it would have been a coin toss to decide which would take the honours for 2016.
Two More Essential albums from 2016
Black Merlin - Hipnotik Tradisi
Gig of the Year
Track of the Year
Vox Low - The Hunt
Overleaf: listen to "The Hunt" by Vox Low
The future direction of jazz has been the subject of anxious discussion for at least 50 years, and the last few have seen particular fervent speculation, usually provoked by another tedious “death of jazz” article. Fortunately, such pieces almost always foreshadow a renaissance, and the recent prominence of jazz-sourced breakthrough artists such as Gregory Porter, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Snarky Puppy has at least ensured the death-of-jazz polemicists have had to put down their poison pens.
It's a cliché to say that interesting times make for interesting music – and frankly not much of a consolation. Good tunes don't really make the march of extremist, violent and delusional politics any more palatable – but 2016 really has been quite extraordinary, at least in the world of club and electronic music. Not that there were any huge definable genre geneses, in the sense that, say, drum'n'bass or grime once were.
Rather, there was endless international fluidity between and within the existing genres, and a further blurring over what was for the club and what was for home listening, what was avant-garde and what was just fun. And for some reason, this seemed to mean that the album, rather than just individual track downloads, was resurgent.
You're in a disconcerting space between threat and caress, psychedelic meltdown and total bliss
To name just a few, this led to: a psychedelic restatement of how odd electronica can be by Belfast producer Space Dimension Controller, a throwback to '70s cosmic synthesizer exploration by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith from the far northwestern corner of Washington State which still managed to sound utterly new, Bjarki from Reykjavík revisiting the tropes of '90s rave and techno yet again managing to sound filled with vigour and invention, south London dubstep godfather Mala interpolating the music of Peru, and airborne hip hop dreams from Estonian enigma Quarah.
But among all these one-offs, there was one thing that really did feel like a movement, even if it didn't have a single sound or rhythm to define it. This was the coming together of a loose-knit network of musicians from the African diaspora worldwide and some allies, utterly undermining what is expected of “black artists” as such: playing bold games with identity (racial, national, gender), weaving bleak noise and pop, hip hop and ambient, dancehall and glitched-out electronics, the hyper-politicised and the outright weird, all into thousands of different puzzling, tricksy, challenging, funny, fierce forms.
A connecting thread among this was the NON label, run by the Congolese Belgian-in-London Nkisi, Capetown's Angel Ho and Chino Amobi from Richmond, Virgina, who had a vivid year full of great releases and art. But linked to them spiritually and/or materially were the likes of Londoners Babyfather (formerly Dean Blunt of Hype Williams) and GAIKA, the weird and wonderful Awful Records hip hop collective from Atlanta, the Bolivian-American Elysia Crampton, and the Tennessee-born, now globally itinerant Yves Tumor (pictured left). While all these musicians made truly great music in 2016, it was Yves Tumor's second album, Serpent Music, made for the Berlin-based PAN label, that really got under the skin.
His 2015 When Man Fails You was often beautiful, but also sometimes scratchy and tentative – an experimental record in the truest sense. But Serpent Music takes several significant steps up in confidence and assurance: it's just as weird as When Man..., but it has an expensive sheen, a richly-layered musicianship, an all-round elegance that make it uncannily easy to sit down with. It's very cleverly structured: opening with a seduction in the forms of tracks that hint at the haunted Eighties soul memories that Blood Orange, Solange and Jessie Ware do so well, then taking you into deeper and darker places.
Even at the beginning strange noises hover around in the mix, but they get progressively stranger until suddenly you're in an electronic percussion ritual in “Serpent I” and “Serpent II”, then meandering through hissing hip hop, forest field recordings, queasy erotica, and other more unclassifiable sounds. Yet though it veers into the far left field, it retains the sense of luxury throughout: always you're in a disconcerting space between threat and caress, psychedelic meltdown and total bliss. It never shouts any questions or slogans at you, but thanks to its sonics it leaves you with important thoughts and doubts like a taste remembered on the tongue. It is very strong magic, perhaps of a sort that we really, really need in these trying times.
Two More Essential Albums from 2016
Gig of the Year
Autechre at the Royal Festival Hall
Track of the Year
Members of the House - "Summer Nites" (Kornél Kovács Remix) (listen to it overleaf)
When, back in October, Donald Trump sulked that his political opponent was being a “nasty woman”, little did he realise the cultural impact it would have.
Five new albums released over the year have dominated 2016: Marissa Nadler’s Strangers (May), Mikko Joensuu’s Amen 1 (June), Jessica Sligter’s A Sense of Growth (July), Arc Iris’s Moon Saloon (August) and Wolf People’s Ruins (November). Next year, it’s likely Foxygen’s Hang (out in January) will be amongst those doing the same.
But Amen 1 is the one casting the darkest, longest and most inescapable shadow. One defined by an overarching sense that this is an unfiltered expression of emotion. What’s heard is what was felt. Marrying this to a classic melodic sensibility in the Jimmy Webb neighbourhood ensures the songs are accessible. Underpinning them with sparse string arrangements and a nod to Fred Neil’s approach to country brings further impact. Amen 1 showcases a voice questioning whether it is possible to be re-accepted by God after faith had been surrendered. This is no text-book testifying but commentary on a very real crisis of belief. An intense missive from the soul, Amen 1 is not about individual tracks but the album overall: it is a suite. It is also integral to Amen 2 and Amen 3, the albums which will follow.
In a previous guise, Finland’s Mikko Joensuu had form. His band Joensuu 1685 issued one, eponymous album in 2008. It was undercooked and underproduced, but they were astonishingly powerful live and took Neu! and Spiritualised to places they had never been. A 2010 single (a version of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”) caught the power. Then, in 2011, there was the astounding 16-minute single “Lost Highway”, recorded before the band split. His bandmates and (apparent) brothers Markus and Risto formed Sinaii but, beyond playing with singer-songwriter Manna, Mikko disappeared. Amen 1 is his return.
Two More Essential Albums from 2016
Arc Iris – Moon Saloon
Wolf People – Ruins
Gig of the Year
Träd, Gräs och Stenar, Café Oto, London, 10 September 2016
Track of the Year
Marissa Nadler – “Janie in Love”
Overleaf: watch the video for “Janie in Love” by Marissa Nadler
As the late Leonard Cohen once growled, “Everybody knows that the war is over/Everybody knows that the good guys lost.” That’s how 2016 felt. Perhaps the moment that encapsulated my year was standing in a very muddy Somerset field, two days after the Brexit disaster, part of an exhausted but defiant Sunday night crowd, singing along with LCD Soundsystem for all we were worth; “So it’s us versus them, over and over again.” That repeating chorus, circling and circling, summing it all up.
In 2016 the scales tipped when we weren’t looking. The “good guys” suddenly became the minority. Meanwhile, short-sighted, misguided powers drag the gullible, the self-serving and the unfortunate rest of us slowly towards catastrophe. Music has, as ever, been a salve and an impetus. The mainstream may now be dominated by the predictable (NB: a few grime artists rapping on sappy pop songs does not constitute a protest movement), but in strange nooks and crannies brilliance thrives.
The self-titled debut from Californian metallers Eerie boasts an eye-boggling, dodgy cover but contains grungey psyched hard rock that brooks no argument, Croatian techno producer Petar Dundov’s At The Turn of Equilibrium is a delicious retro-synth adventure, the opening shot from Polly Scattergood and James Chapman's On Dead Waves project gorgeously musters Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood by way of the Jesus & Mary Chain, and Beyoncé’s sometimes bitter Lemonade proves there’s a place for invigorating imagination in hyper-commercial pop.
However, the album that dominated my year is by two well-travelled sisters from London, Holly and Coco Chant, AKA Xylaroo, whose debut, Sweetooth, is a smörgåsbord of delicious harmonizing, strummed, campfire girl-pop run through to its core with doomed mysticism perfectly attuned to these dangerous times. It’s an album that's at once optimistic and bleakly hedonistic, containing philosophical poetry worthy of mighty old Leonard Cohen himself, while also capable of lightness and even humour (as on the smile-inducing “Narwhal”).
In another age Sweetooth would have been as massive as Joni Mitchell or Johnny Cash, but instead, it exists in the peripheries, waiting to be found, a gem weighted with subconcsious prescience of the darkness to come. Not just an album for 2016, but an album of the century so far.
Two More Essential Albums from 2016
Beyoncé - Lemonade
Eerie - Eerie
Gig of the Year
LCD Soundsystem at Glastonbury Festival
Track of the Year
Yeasayer - "I Am Chemistry"
Overleaf: atch the video for “I Am Chemistry” by Yeasayer