20 Great Albums from 2012 (and one from 2011)

[D_Davis]

Figured we could have two best of 2012 threads.

Anyhow, I'm kicking this list off with....


2012's 2011 Album of the Year

This is the best album from 2011 that I heard in 2012.


The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble - Mr. Machine

http://i.imgur.com/xIDFY.jpg

Live, minimal electronica, with hints of jazz and prog; groovy, robotic rhythms with live and varied instrumentation. I hope these guys are the future of music, because I want so, so, so much more.

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[D_Davis]

#20
Still Blue Still Turning - Hurricanes

http://f0.bcbits.com/z/12/06/1206148990-1.jpg

This great, and free, ambient album hit in February of 2012 and set the stage for what would be an amazing year of ambient music. It's a long album, with two tracks over the twenty-minute mark, and contains elements of shoegaze, drone, and post-rock. Almost a year later, and I still listen to it. That's good.

http://stillbluestillturning.bandcamp .com/album/hurricanes

[D_Davis]

#19
Motorpsycho & Staale Storloekken

http://assets.boomkat.com/images/550358/333.jpg
Probably the closest thing we'll ever have to a modern-day King Crimson album. Motorpsycho. What can I say about this criminally underrated band? They've released like 19 albums ranging from some of the best pop-music ever made, to metal, to progressive rock, and to Sonic Youth-like art/noise rock. These dudes are insanely talented and shame most of their contemporaries, and yet they are largely unknown, but they continue to plug away.

The Death Defying Unicorn is an epic masterpiece of orchestrated progressive rock. Nothing else I've heard all year sounds anything like it, and I don't think I've heard anything like it since the first time I heard King Crimson's Lark's Tongue in Aspic. It's a concept album with a cohesive story, a metal album with amazing electric instrumentation, and a rock-opera with a grand and soaring score.

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[D_Davis]

#18
The Meditone Project - Volume 1

http://f0.bcbits.com/z/37/54/3754125797-1.jpg

Bandcamp (http://themeditoneproject.bandcamp.co m/album/vol-1)

Another one of my most listened to ambient albums this year. This was my go-to nap-time/reading album for many months. It's short and to the point, and perfect for endless loops and getting lost in the music. I liked the album so much that I contact its creator and we'll be working on something together in 2013.

[D_Davis]

#17
Tor Lundvall - The Shipyard

http://i.imgur.com/TmkYa.jpg?1

Tor Lundvall is a creator of landscapes; sometimes he works with paint, sometimes he works with sound. His art and music are haunting and mysterious, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dark, and almost always mysterious. The Shipyard is a time-and-place ambient album, harkening back to Brian Eno's seminal work Ambient 4: On Land. Lundvall's shipyard is a harbor for giant, ghostly vessels, being loaded and offloaded by phantom stevedores in a cold and misty bay jut slightly removed from our own reality. You can smell the brine and taste the salt in the air, and hear the creak of the old dock under a foot heavy with working boots and wool socks.

Lundvall's music, while historically OOP, rare, and almost impossible to find, has just now started to appear on MP3 services. If you've never experienced his work before, treat yourself in 2013.


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[elixir]

Looks like I'll be getting a lot of recs here. Cool.

[Boner M]

Love what I've heard of Tor Ludvall, will have to hear that album.

[D_Davis]

Love what I've heard of Tor Ludvall, will have to hear that album.

Wow! I'm glad someone else has heard him. He's great. I like his vocal stuff a lot, but this album is all instrumental.

[D_Davis]

#16
Holy Other - Held

http://images.hhv.de/catalog/old_detail/00285/285929.jpg

I don't know much about this guy except for that he hails from Manchester, UK, and he makes great IDM. Holy Other's music sounds a little lazzy; it's super chill, kind of disjointed, almost broken sounding at times with samples warbling in and out of tune and drum beats not hitting in drum-machine style typical to the genre. In other words, even though it's technologically new, it sounds old and vintage, not completely unlike another favorite of mine, Tycho, although it's darker and more mysterious than that.

Here's the whole album - it's only 35 minutes long, so take a listen.

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[Derek]

#16
Holy Other - Held

Ooh! I heard a track off their EP from last year and really liked it. Totally forgot about these guys...til now!

This thread is gonna fill up my January playlist. :)

[D_Davis]

This thread is gonna fill up my January playlist. :)

And yours mine, I'm sure.

(already have a few to listen to.)

[D_Davis]

#15
Simiram - The Lost, The Last

http://i.imgur.com/AH3KZ.jpg?1

Bandcamp - Free (http://elpamusic.bandcamp.com/album/elpa84-the-lost-the-last)

Simiram is a Latvian artist, and this is his 3rd release for Elpamusic, an Eastern European netlabel. The Lost, The Last is in the tradition of later period Future Sound of London, Carbon Based Lifeforms, and Solar Fields. It's super digital, chill-out, downtempo electronic music; a mix of ambient and IDM. It's not original or groundbreaking, but it is incredibly solid, and expertly made, invoking the inner-workings of some strangely engineered alien world; it's a perfect soundtrack for the science fiction film in your mind.

[D_Davis]

#14
Mark Eitzel - Don’t be a Stranger

http://cdn4.pitchfork.com/albums/18304/homepage_large.cf14e436.jpg

The original mope-rocker, the godfather of depression-rock, Mark Eitzel returns with another collection of melancholy, somber, and sarcastic songs to be enjoyed with a good alcoholic drink on a hot summer's night. Unlike Mark Kozelek's latest album (Eitzel's fiercest competition for the grumpiest/saddest old sadsack in San Fransisco), Don't be a Stranger is a tightly focused collection of songs, and not nearly as gut-wrenchingly personal (while I do enjoy the latest Sun Kil Moon, some of it is a little too FML/LiveJournal to really enjoy); I get the sense that the narratives in these songs are more fictional than not, and Eitzel handles his stories with the care of a great master, pairing each set of lyrics with the perfect instrumental arrangement.

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[Derek]

And yours mine, I'm sure.

(already have a few to listen to.)

Btw, sorry I didn't ask if you wanted to do the thread together. It had already gotten so late in the year so I just started mine in a rush. Let's combine forces again in 2013...it's more fun that way. :)

[D_Davis]

Btw, sorry I didn't ask if you wanted to do the thread together. It had already gotten so late in the year so I just started mine in a rush. Let's combine forces again in 2013...it's more fun that way. :)

No worries, and sure thing!

I didn't ask because I knew you did 30, and I couldn't come up with a solid 30 this year.

[D_Davis]

#13
Port St. Willow - Holliday

http://f0.bcbits.com/z/23/96/2396535303-1.jpg

So many feels.

I'll appeal to authority:

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/s480x480/68952_10200233993521799_565805 701_n.jpg

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[D_Davis]

#12
Earth House Hold - When Love Lived

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a8NXotRucDQ/UD4cz7CTfcI/AAAAAAAAfxg/9NvOLaY44UY/s320/Earth%20House%20Hold%20-%20When%20Love%20Lived%20%2820 12%29.jpg

Brock Van Wey (aka Earth House Hold, Bvdub) has quickly become one of my artists, and this album is a perfect example of why. Five of the seven tracks on When Love Lived are over ten-minutes in length, and they all justify their running time with deep, slow house beats and interesting sonic textures the fade in and out, shimmering along the way, blending and mixing into a tapestry rich with nuance. And, what's more, Wey still maintains a focus on melody. This is music to get lost in, and that's my favorite kind of music.

Expect more from Wey later on this list.

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[D_Davis]

#11
Olafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm - Stare

http://assets.boomkat.com/images/550445/333.jpg

Minute for minute, this is one of the most consistently pleasing albums of the year. Three tracks of pure ambient bliss. I've listened to this close to a hundred times this year. This was produced specially for 2012's Record Store day, but it can also be purchased digitally.

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[D_Davis]

#10
Marconi Union - Weightless

http://crashchords.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Marconi-Union-cover.jpg

We were blessed with not one, but two new Marconi Union albums this year. This is the 2nd best of those two. It's a masterpiece. Like everything they do is. In 2011 they were contracted to create the most relaxing song ever recorded, and they did. Then they expanded it to a six-part album. Once again, MU proves that they understand sound better than anyone else working in the field. Listening to MU is a humbling experience. We are very, very lucky to be living while these masters are doing their thing.

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[D_Davis]

#9
Adrian Sherwood - Survival and Resistance

http://i.imgur.com/XsKtO.jpg?1

This album is cull of confidence. It's minimal. There is nothing superfluous about it. It is, simply, modern dub at some of its finest.

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[D_Davis]

#8
Dalis Car - InGladAloness

http://godsandalcoves.files.wordpress .com/2012/02/ingladaloneness1.jpg?w=640

Peter Murphy + Mick Karn = perfection

Unfortunately, Karn passed away before this album was finished. Rather than complete it with someone else on bass (an impossible task seeing that there isn't another bass player alive that could possible do what Karn did), the surviving members decided to release only the finished tracks, and thus what we have is a 5-track EP.

It would have appeared on this list even if only the first song, "King Cloud," has been released.

It's amazing how fresh and exciting music like this sounds today. This collective of musicians and artists are truly unique.

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[D_Davis]

#7
Bvdub - Everything released in 2012

http://i.imgur.com/ZG11P.jpg?2

http://i.imgur.com/RzEc8.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/I6qL3.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/Iaqyo.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/yUl3K.jpg?1

The hardest working man in electronic music has already appeared once on this list with his Earth House Hold project, and now here he is again with his Bvdub project. Picking just one album to represent this massive body of work is impossible, so I'm choosing all 5 releases. In all, 21 tracks, over 200 minutes of completely blissed-out ambient techno music, each release as good as the other, all completely amazing.


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[D_Davis]

#6
Norah Jones - Little Broken Hearts

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a0HajcZJLYM/T4xLsAaS2sI/AAAAAAAANJk/UcKYmc54hxE/s400/norah_jones_320.jpg

Norah Jones,

I love you. You're beautiful, insanely talented, and you have the greatest female voice in modern popular music.

Also, you write wicked-cool songs.

Sincerely,

D_Davis

P.S. "Miriam" is my track of the year.

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[D_Davis]

#5
Willits + Sakamoto - Ancient Future

http://c438342.r42.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/willits-sakamoto-ancient-future-260x260.jpeg

Ryuichi Sakamoto is a living legend. Christopher Willits is not, but if he keeps creating projects list this one he could end up being one. This is the second collaboration for these two composers, and one of the most interesting albums I heard all a year. 2012 was a great year for ambient music, and this is one of my favorites.

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[dreamdead]

Lot of great ambient stuff here that I'll be checking out periodically this year. The MU "Weightless" release needs more time in my ears, since I've listened to their other stuff far more than that release. Need to buy that one up, actually.

Yours and Raiders' pimping of the Norah Jones finally led to my buying that one. It's generally solid, and I agree with you on the excellence of "Miriam." It needs more listens, though. It was a Christmas purchase, so I'm still unfamiliar with most of the other tracks.

Love the Willits + Sakamoto album. So relaxing to listen to while working, but it has enough depth to remain a demanding listen at the same time.

[D_Davis]

#4
Simon Scott - Below Sea Level

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41NsARVa7EL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

What begins as a pretty and peaceful ambient-combination of guitar, synthesizer and natural field recordings, changes over the course of the album into an exercise in psycho-acoustic, spatial wizardry that completely envelopes the listener into its stereo-field. This is one of the most sonically-adventurous and interesting albums I heard all year. To be listened to on a quality pair of headphones.

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[D_Davis]

#3
The Orb, featuring Lee "Scratch" Perry - The Orbserver in the Star House

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bPVIYxRbEDo/UEK9e_3eCMI/AAAAAAAAAng/4ymq6_kG7b8/s1600/The-Orb-featuring-Lee-Scratch-Perry-The-Observer-In-The-Star-House-Limited-Numbered-Edition.jpg

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that The Orb would be capable of making something this good again. I thought that for sure their glory days were far, far behind them. But damn. They did it. Not only is this one of the best albums of the year, but its one of the best albums The Orb has ever made. It's not quite as adventurous as their past treasures, but it is incredibly well-made, infectious, groovy, and, ultimately, playful thanks to the mad, insane ramblings of the original dub god, Lee "Scratch" Perry.

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[D_Davis]

#2
Devin Townsend - Epicloud

http://maytherockbewithyou.com/mtrbwy/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DevinTownsend-Epicloud.jpg

50 minutes of in-yer-face heavy metal with a gospel choir, beautiful and powerful vocals, expert instrumentation, and enough hooks to over fish the seven seas.

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[D_Davis]

#1
Marconi Union - Different Colors

http://i.imgur.com/XfJqc.jpg?1

I don't listen to Marconi Union with the ears of a passive listener; I listen to Marconi Union with ears of a practiced musician, producer, and engineer, and every time I do I discover something new about my craft. Marconi Union makes music for people like me, people interested in timbre, sounds, composition, recording, layers, and texture. I understand why they are not as popular as others who make similar music with non-musician listeners, and I also understand why other similar musicians hold them up in such high regard. They are the masters at what they do, and to listen to them with the ears of a musician is to be humbled beyond measure. This is the level we all strive for - this is the bar.

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[dreamdead]

You've identified lots of ambient material that need my attention.

Glad to see the Devin album place so high. The stellar material, of which at least half of it is, is truly fantastic, and representative of the depth of Townsend's range. I do admit, though, that it's an album where I skip around to the quality cuts and don't go straight through. Tracks #3-5 don't especially resonate; the second half of the album, starting with the re-recording of "Kingdom," do dominate.

The #1 Marconi Union album has lingered nicely. "Time Lapse" is phenomenal; the structure and movements there are understated but always progressing and not static like the most basic of ambient tracks. "Alone Together" is also excellent. I will say, though, that at times so much drops out sonically (I'm thinking of "Always Numb" here) that I find myself returning to Willits and Sakamoto.