End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated lists too.
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.
Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:
I first heard Zed Bias's Biasonic Hot Sauce – Birth of the Nanocloud last autumn. He may have been one of the key players in the London-centric sound of UK garage, but he was never of that scene. Based in Milton Keynes through the first phase of his career, he releases through a Brighton label and is now resident in Manchester.
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop.
It's become a fairly common trope for herbally enhanced rappers to hype up their individuality by referring to themselves as an “alien”, but with Wiley you could believe it. In “Can I Get a Taxi”, the odd extended skit that forms the centrepiece of this album, he inhabits various London archetypes – the yardie, the cockney wideboy, the posh bloke – but while his accents are hilarious, it all feels strange, curious, like a child poking at creatures in a rockpool, and his ever-wayward stream of thought keeps veering off course.
Against all the odds, I find myself going into 2012 with a strong sense of optimism. And the reason? I am a born-again rave zealot. I saw it at Outlook Festival in Croatia, I saw it at Sónar in Barcelona, and I saw it at the Big Chill where I was running a stage; participatory, constructive, creative partying, where the crowds go not just to be entertained but to plug into something bigger, to be part of something.
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.