Annual hairshirt

Apple-cheeked scamps roasting on an open fire, chestnuts ripping open their stockings in the dawn's half-light & - to complete this touching yuletide scene - LMYE donning the annual hairshirt of our Festive 30...
 
As last year, we've constrained our compilation of this list of 30 releases that particularly touched us in 2013. To spread recognition as widely as possible (& to try in some small way to acknowledge the arbitrariness of singling out a fraction of the year's great music...), each co-author was restricted to no more than one pick per artist or per label.

At the risk of cold-shouldering exceptional albums that fall foul of one or both of these 'rules' (Chris Watson's In St Cuthbert's Time (Touch) & Richard Chartier & Yann Novak's Undefined for farmacia901 come immediately to mind...), this builds some breadth into our choices - while making room for our fairly complementary tastes to have alighted on different pieces in the same artist or label's catalogue.

This year both of us were mostly listening on the run & in the cracks between other commitments. Perhaps as a result, our overlap was minimal (unlike last year) - with only Tim Hecker's blinding Virgins appearing in both of our first CVs.

We'll acknowledge other notable releases in a follow-up post soon. We'll also be running a label of the year-type piece.





Benjamin Dauer :: The Pace of Which (Twice Removed) [al]

Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Roanoke (self-released) [al]

Boards Of Canada :: Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp) [al]

Bruce Gilbert & DAW :: Diluvial (Touch) [jl]

Christophe Bailleau & Julien Demoulin :: Outshining Memories (Time Released Sound) [al]

Cory Allen :: The Great Order (Quiet Design) [jl]

Dalhous :: An Ambassador for Laing (Blackest Ever Black) [al]

Eluder :: Through Horizon (Infraction) [al]

Francesco Giannico :: Luminance (Somehow) [al]

Hakobune :: Nebulous Sequences (VoxxoV) [al]

 

 

Jon Hopkins :: Immunity (Domino) [al]

Kenneth Kirschner & Tomas Phillips :: Five Transpositions (Sad) [jl]

Kiln :: meadow:watt (Ghostly International) [al]

Le Berger :: Variations on not too much really (self-released) [jl]

Main :: Ablation (eMego) [jl]

Maps and Diagrams :: Timbre (Dronarium) [al]

Mohammad :: Som Sakrifis (PAN) [jl]

Orphax :: Un Coeur, Deux Coeurs, Un Coeur, Sans Coeur (Broken20) [jl]

Pausal :: Sky Margin (Own) [al]

PITRELEH :: PITRELEH (Important) [jl]

Ruhe :: Easing (Cotton Goods) [al]

Savvas Ysatis & Taylor Deupree :: Origin (12k) [jl]

Secret Pyramid :: Movements of Night (Students of Decay) [al]

Simon James Phillips :: Chair (Room40) [jl]

Slow Walkers :: Slow Walkers (Peak Oil) [jl]

Stephan Mathieu :: The Falling Rocket (Schwebung) [jl]

The Necks :: Open (Northern Spy) [jl]

Tim Hecker :: Virgins (kranky) [jl]

Tomonari Nozaki :: Une Histoire de Bleu (Invisible Birds) [al]

William Basinski & Richard Chartier :: Aurora Liminalis (LINE) [jl]

 

 

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.