The Predatory Wasp
It’s been a solid couple of years for Seoul based electronic duo Salamander, as they’ve slowly but surely become more widely known in the West via glowing features in tastemaker outlets like FACT and Crack Magazine. Sing Together landed on Christmas Eve and continues in a similar vibe to their latest album In Parallel; skeletal but warm electronic meanderings with naive melodies and plenty of whimsy.
As is traditional, the first few weeks (possibly months) of 2024 will see me catching up on all the brilliant music I missed from last year. I expect everyone’s feeling exceptionally bleak after big nights out/in a couple of days ago, so here’s something soft and restorative from Amsterdam’s nthng, taken from their latest album There Is A Place For Me. For fans of DJ Healer, breakbeats and being reflective (or just a bit sad).
Described on its release by FACT as “Christmas story about love, confusion and sexuality, and the best thing he’s made since Untrue“, Burial’s Rival Dealer EP came out 10 years ago, and includes what has become arguably the defining mid-period Burial track Come Down To Us – a 13 minute epic that starts and ends with crackly static (obviously) and tackles themes of identification and loss via a speech from transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski, soaring melodies and what can only be described as Christmas bells. A decade later it remains both provocatively divisive and inescapably brilliant.
My favourite album of the year was a nostalgic reimagining of mid-90s rave with all the sharp edges removed, so it’s unsurprising that I’m similarly enamoured with Metro Riders’ backward-looking LP Lost In Reality, which examines 80’s proto-house through an extreme lo-fi lens. A project of Henrik Stelzer, this latest Metro Riders album aims to “map out an emotional geography of cities at night” and absolutely nails the sense of time and place, like a Roland-obsessed Burial for the Stockholm underground.
For the next few weeks the newness of the music featured here will take a back seat as I trawl through the many (many) end of year list and discover everything I missed. But hopefully much of it will at least be as new to you as it is to me, so we can still be friends. Popmatters’ ambient selections are always especially strong, and so it proves once again as they’ve introduced me to this beautiful piece from Sweden’s Prins Emanuel, taken from him album Diagonal Musik II.
Pale Jay is probably my favourite new musical discovery of 2023, and his album Bewilderment is one of the best albums of the year. I’m not familiar with the original Killing Flowers so not sure exactly how much he’s done here, but the results are lush.
Given how many people are likely to read this, the amount of time I spent deciding which albums made the cut this year is frankly ridiculous. I’ve listened to hundreds of albums this year, and barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface. And despite my best efforts, there’s still no metal.
My preference for meandering ambient, breathy female vocalists and nostalgia-inducing electronica still continues to dominate. If you’re into any of this, lucky you!
I’m genuinely relived to be putting my own selections out there so I can now start the far more enjoyable process of going through all the other end of year lists and finding everything I missed.
Here are my favourite albums of 2023.
TPW xx
After the soaring, organic beauty of 2021’s A Playground In A Lake, Clark’s new album Cave Dog is a bit of a hard landing back on digital earth, but not necessarily in a bad way. Take the very weirdly named Dogloch Dry As Ash, which comes in like a hybrid of Mylo and Boards of Canada with a sprinkling of the (original) Tron soundtrack; and if that sounds like an unlikely mix, then I agree – but there you have it.
Mark Kozelek goes full lounge on his latest single. It might be a joke, but I really like it.
Traumprinz / DJ Healer / whoever continues his annual tradition of releasing new music as we enter the festive season. This time it’s some additional material from 2022’s life, presumably recorded around the same time, alongside weltenbrände, which is an “associative prose poem” in German. So fairly niche, that one, but extra life at least is a welcome reminder that he’s still the undisputed king of emotional techno.
The Predatory Wasp 