According to Spotify Wrapped, I listened to 14,791 songs in 2023.

One thing I didn’t like from Spotify Wrapped was this:

Apparently, Spotify considers you to be some kind of mysterious shaman if you listen to albums all the way through – that is, if you approach the art as the artist attended.

Boo to that. I’m far from a purist, but I don’t like how disposable things feel these days.

I wasn’t too keen to write a list of my favourite albums this year, for numerous reasons. But then I remembered reading that this year’s reissue of Revolver was remixed “to compete with contemporary pop on streaming services”. That’s to say, it was specifically remastered to be played on shuffle, along with every other song ever released. Not even The Beatles expect you to listen to their albums anymore. In light of this, to champion the album as an artform feels like an act of defiance. A small one, yes. But an important one nonetheless.

Many of my dependable favourite released decent to excellent albums this year. But I don’t want to write about Animal Collective, Blur, The Clientele, Goat, Gong, John Cale, Peter Gabriel, Sigur Rós, Sparklehorse (except to say: NEW MUSIC FROM SPARKLEHORSE?!?!), Sparks, or Wilco. Nor do I want to attempt to rank their albums in terms of how much they moved me, or consider how to compare them to this year’s excellent reissues. But just to say, Mort Garson, Elizabeth Parker, Jezz Woodroffe: May we never run out of “forgotten” synth pioneers and their unexplored archives.

Instead of ranking my favourite albums of 2023, I decided to do something slightly different this year. If listening to albums makes me some kind of mystic, then let me present 10 findings from my deepest wanderings. You will soon see that I didn’t wander very far, or for very long. I’d call these “The 10 weirdest albums of 2023”, but most of them aren’t all that weird. And I can’t say they’re “10 albums from 2023 that you probably haven’t heard”, because you probably have.

So I’ll say this: With every passing year the world is getting unfriendlier, more unsafe, and more unhinged. And yet somehow, at the same time, it’s also getting a lot more tedious, and all the things that used to bring us joy are becoming increasingly shoddy, bland, and, like I said, disposable.

In a world that’s rapidly getting worse, these 10 albums all served to provide essential escapism and rejuvenation. This year, they served as indispensable – or should I say, indisposable – reminders that there is still some good out there.

Voyage Futur – Wellen

It means “Waves”. The artist describes this music as “cinematic tides of mandala electronics, utopian fusion, and elevated ambience … tracing liminal landscapes of sunset shores under pixelated stars … lit by the warmth of futures past.” Who could resist?

Above I mentioned how, year after year, we get treated to yet more discoveries unearthed from the dusty archives of forgotten synth wizards. With Wellen, it’s as if such a lost treasure has come into being today, like a still dripping water temple has suddenly manifested in the middle of Winnersh. A further hat tip to the fretless bass sounds, which give it the air of a late 80s new age odyssey by Mark Isham.

Active Presence – d a y t o n a

If your Sims started panicking after you deleted the ladder from their swimming pool, or encased them in a 1×1 prison with no doors or windows, and in their panic they rebelled against you, and smashed the system you’d created, and gathered at their local global coffee house, and jammed on the various keyboards and percussive instruments they found – it might sound a little like this.

Once the panic subsides, it’s replaced with the curious yet cautious joy of the newly self-aware. Go ahead and delete another ladder. It doesn’t matter: These Sims have learned to climb.

Egg Spectrum – Egg Spectrum vs The Void

That bloody void.

I fear the void – that bottomless absence of anything at all – and I applaud Egg Spectrum’s ongoing battle against it. There’s a late night feel to this – more can’t sleep than won’t sleep – and a deliciously lo-fi, desperately human feel, like an acknowledgement that our most powerful weapon against the void – that roaring abyss of nightmarish uncaring – is to revel in our scruffy imperfections.

As AI churns out torrents of shiny grey sludge to the mindless applause of those who have given up, the best thing you can do is pick up a guitar and scream your messiest thoughts into a cheap tape recorder. Take that, void!

She’s Green – Wisteria

I now own a very comfortable jumper on which is a picture of a frog, stretching to touch his toes, with a cup of tea within reach. Above this it says “Self Care”. You can’t hear the image, but trust me: This frog is listening to Wisteria by She’s Green.

Sometimes all you want to hear is sad guitars chiming over a drifting haze while indistinct female vocals sing the sort of melodies a sleepwalker might have stuck in their head as they walk down the foggy high street in their nightgown. It’s premium grade shoegaze, and listening to it feels like an act of self care worthy of that chilled frog.

Free Love – Inside

Sprightly and luxurious synth pop with vocals sung in both French and English. It’s all analogue, so it’s absolutely delicious, with beeps and beats to chew on for deep and invigorating nourishment. Even when the lyrics refer to mistrust and heartbreak, this sounds like an optimistic vision of the future, the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm for the potential of technology and human endeavour that you hear in all Kraftwerk albums that aren’t Radioactivity.

Memorials – Music For Film: Tramps! Pt. 1 & 2

Verity Susman of Electrelane collaborated with Matthew Simms of Wire on the soundtrack to a documentary about new romantics. The result is Tramps!, and it’s a hypnotic delirium of lo-fi electronics, squalling sax, and fuzzy drones; all bleary and disjointed like a strobing visual collage in music form. Even better is Tramps! Pt. 2, for which the duo cut their tapes to pieces and reassembled the spools into something even wilder and weirder.

Amazingly, this was not the only soundtrack they put out this year. They also gave us Women Against The Bomb, a collection of poignant protest folk that sounds like it’s by a completely different band. I like it a lot, but I much prefer the psychedelic rush of Tramps!. To quote Laetitia Sadier, who reflected on their performance when they supported Stereolab earlier this year: “Aren’t they good.”

Amber Meulenijzer – Saab Fanfare

Amber attached 12 speakers to the top of a Saab 900 and drove slowly through Pelt, a small town in Belgium. These speakers played a continuous chord, and as Amber drove through the town on that reportedly foggy October morning, she was accompanied by a marching fanfare band, who improvised along to the drone.

It’s like a funeral march in a major key, with that tremendous sense of time and space you only ever get from field recordings. This is some of the most peaceful music I’ve ever heard.

Amy Cutler – Sister Time

On which the artist duets with a younger version of herself. As a child in the late 90s she made lots of home recordings on her first tape recorder. As an adult, she’s stretched and distorted these tapes, adding synths here and there, and a worn VHS copy of The Land Before Time is somehow involved, too.

Mostly, these songs sound like singing ghosts, like the faint murmurings you hear drifting from the attic very late at night. But other tracks have an ancient hymnal quality about them, as if the artist has dug much, much deeper than she originally intended.

She recommends listening on cheap headphones in the backseat of a car. OK, but some of these incantations would feel most at home played by a barrow at midnight, where you could watch the shadows stretch and dance.

Seckou Keita – African Rhapsodies

It seems hard to believe, but it happened: Seckou Keita gave a solo kora performance in a church not five minutes away from home. Using just four fingers, two thumbs, and his voice, he created a rich and full sound, hypnotically repetitive yet constantly changing. And he looked so, so happy while doing it.

Most of my favourite music is warming, and Seckou lit a fire that evening. Of course I bought his CD. On African Rhapsodies he performs with the BBC Concert Orchestra. At first I thought it would be similar music to that which he performed in the church – a kora lead with orchestral backing. Nope. They instead incorporate the sound of the kora into the orchestra itself. The results are astonishing.

It’s one of those albums that I feel like I need, but which I don’t want to listen to very much, in fear of diminishing its power. Place it behind glass to be broken in an emergency: Evil doesn’t seem possible while it’s playing.

Aaron Dilloway – Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House

A veteran noise musician visited the Kathmandu Fun Park in Nepal with his son. They walked through the Haunted House, and he recorded the various sounds he heard on his phone, doing nothing to process, mix, or master the recordings afterwards. What we hear is what he heard, more or less.

The main attraction is a recording of the audio collage looping from the “extremely unprofessional and broken” PA speaker at the ride’s entrance. It sounds like Halloween gone wrong, with witches laughing at various speeds, lots and lots of demented gibbering and animal noises, and snippets of music that are apparently from the intro to a “famous Indian horror TV show”. To quote the artist, “It’s perfect.”

As a bonus, we get the recordings of two separate walk throughs of the haunted house, which the artist describes as a “pitch black maze”. You hear a lot of scuffling, a lot of footsteps, and the occasional laughter and muttering as they trigger the scares: “Old rotten rubber masks covered in spray paint and filth.”

We also get recordings of the bumper cars, of some geese feeding outside the haunted house (or “freaking out in meal time bliss”, as the artist puts it), and of the “great rhythm made by the exposed belt of the Ferris wheel.”

So my favourite album of 2023: The low quality, unmastered recordings of a sketchy fun fair on the other side of the world. It’s a gripping listen in itself, but above all I just love that this thing exists. It is pure. It is happiness.

Playlist Time!

I’ve made a playlist featuring excellent tracks from as many of these albums as I could find on Spotify. Amy Cutler’s not on the platform at all, and Arron Dilloway’s only uploaded a small selection from his vast discography. So to compensate I added a number of picks from my “dependable faves”, so you can actually listen to some songs after nodding along to the various drones and groans.

I might be railing against disposability, but I still love a good playlist:

The header image of this post, which I also used for the playlist, is from an early 90s issue of 2000AD I found in a charity shop in Crosby. I didn’t buy it, so I cannot give full credit. Sorry. Please get in touch if annoyed.