1. Harmonies, Frames and Words: Music
My top 12 listening experiences that filled me with wonder in 2023
1. Pauline Oliveros - Deep Listening
After decades making music on the grid, my ears are now drawn towards anything that can’t fit into a grid. This is a seminal work that I discovered recently. Books have been written about it, and like a lot of art, it can help to read why and how it was made before you listen. Unless you like strange things happening in your ears like I do, in which case, dive in and let the reconfiguration of time and sound transport you.
2. Eva Lunny - Sonics & Meditations
This bridges the gap between my favourite harpists (Andreas Vollenweider and Alan Stivell) and Bjork-esque experimental 90’s cut-up trip-hop. Organic and space-age, it feels like a conversation between the old ways we need, and the future we’re building.
Listen to Sonics & Meditations
3. Kate Alderton - Here To Go
Naturally I have a certain bias about this track, Kate since I helped produce the song. However, I can attest that most days after travelling through London to get back to my studio-nest-home, this is the first song I put on when I get inside from the madness of inner-city life. Whilst the music holds an authenticity of wellness, escape and retreat, there’s something in Kate’s delicate voice and cross-London accent that throws me into female fronted 90’s Shoegaze nostalgia. I also love song titles that say something simple and profound about humanity in less than 4 words. Beautiful.
4. Robert Archer - Nature's Dream Harp
I’ve written an entire blog about this album which you can read here. Suffice to say that Nature’s Dream Harp does sound like what one might imagine a church service on Mars might sound like. Music not made by humans, but not possible without their assistance. An ego breaking experience for the creator and the listener. Life-changing.
5. Sequentia - Canticles Of Ecstasy (Hildegard Von Bingen)
Like most of Hildegard Von Bingen’s compositions, this speaks to some spiritual part of us that needs unearthing now and again. It soothes and sets an atmosphere that inspires ritual and reverence. With thanks to composer Claire Van Kampen for turning me on Hildegard Von Bingen many years ago.
Listen to Canticles Of Ecstasy
6. Mahler - Symphony No. 4
In the summer of 2022 I rode my bike to Hampstead Heath with an old fashioned ghetto blaster shoved in the front bag. I’ve long stopped listening to music on streaming services, only really being able to enjoy music that is not connected to the internet. There’s an inconvenience to charging my iPod, rewinding a tape or turning over a record that feels like a sacrifice which I love. My ghetto blaster is on it’s last legs, but I do love having something big, bulky and heavy that produces music.
As I arrived on the heath, sun blazing and a caress of a summer wind over the dried golden green of Parliament Hill Fields, without announcement, the third movement of this symphony began to play. It seemed to come out of the earth as I pushed my bike towards the mixed ponds to meet Kate. It was heaven on earth, and as the piece evolved (which I’d not heard before), the world, and everybody in it, looked more beautiful than I could possibly imagine. I have listened to this almost every day since.
7. Richard Norris - Music For Healing
You don’t need to know the intention of this album was to provide healing, to feel healed by it, but it’s inspiring to find an artist who is pouring his instrumental talents into the music and healing field. This album hasn’t left my side since 2020. Whether our discord of modern life is a dull ache or a full blown trauma, Richard Norris’ Music for Healing makes everything more hopeful. Listen here.
8. Peter Gabriel - I/o
Outdoing Kate Bush in ‘album incubation’ with 20 years since his last album, this is going to grow and grow the more you listen to it. If PG were a contemporary of mine, I may have got in touch with a music lawyer after listening to this for the first time, lol. There are so many lyrical similarities between this record and my last two albums ‘When Staying Alive’s The Latest Craze’ and ‘Super Connected’. Specific lyrics, humour, tone and thematic focus. But he’s not a contemporary, he’s a musical father paired with a musical mother in Kate Bush who has infused and inspired me and my creative process since the 90s when I began making albums. So it’s a heartwarmingly syncronisitc to think we’re looking at the world through a similar lens for our songs.
I did meet him once in the early 2000’s in a tiny music venue on New Oxford Street. I blabbered something about Druids, the Holy Grail and Stonehenge to him. He was warm hearted and as much like Merlin as I had imagined when I was a child. There are some brand new PG classics on this album and I feel very lucky to be alive at a time when an artist like this is releasing music like this. The two versions of the album played one after the other is a wonderful way to experience it.
So Much (Dark Mix) is my favourite track of the year.
Relevant, vital and studiously revelatory. Listen here.
9. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
The one indie folk artist that I’ve followed through thick and thin. This album is umbilically linked to the loss of Stevans’ longterm partner. His raw ‘unpack it all’ style makes his loss universal. Impossible not to think he’s singing about all of us. Listen.
10. Winter 2023 - Regan and Bricheno
There are some singers one would pay good money to have them record every good song in the world that’s ever been written. Somehow, you just want to hear them sing everything, because you know it’s going to make the song sound better than the any other version. I will never be able to hear enough of Julianne Regan’s voice, and as all All About Eve fans know, this release with Tim Bricheno marks a very exciting return.
11. Depths - Signature Gold
Brighton based alt-rock band have been on my radar for some time. There are few contemporary bands in the alt rock genre who possess all the components of a world dominating act. Depths is only one example of their anarchic alchemy. Lead into gold indeed. Seek them out. Something very special is stirring here.
12. The Avenue - Moon Idle
If you’re regularly tuned into BBC Introducing in East Sussex, you’ll most likely have come across Moon Idle already. A panoply of genres are curated here with a masterful in-band production style , but it’s Quilla Robinson’s voice that binds the multiverse of Moon Idle into a singular, unique and original genre all of it’s own. Listen here.
Read my best films of 2023.