Dear Reader,
Another year is under our collective belt. Can you believe it? I always feel a little incredulous when December comes around and I try to think of all the things that I did over the last 365 days. Do you feel that too? Overwhelmed, maybe, with the evolution of living?
To be blunt: When 2024 began, I wasn’t sure I would feel any of life’s magic. I was certain I had messed up pretty much everything, that goodwill had left me as if I’d used up my three wishes and the genie was back in the bottle. It was far too scary to believe I can choose to prevail, even though I must. That’s a lot of pressure and I don’t like the feeling of the clock ticking.
Or wait — is it?
I’m ending the year in a different place than that one, a good one that has been rare for me to find in the past. That, of course, comes with its own set of fears and its own set of rules required to maintain it. But there is beauty in being able to say to myself that I can and I will, all on my own, in due time. Life is short and life is long. I want to fill it up with the good and remember that the bad is just as much of a blessing.
Whatever materially happened this year, music was, of course, its centerpiece. I like to have my headphones on. Actually I love it. I like to pull them over my ears and drown out my thoughts in waves of glistening reverb. I like to watch birds sit in trees to the sound of a gentle acoustic guitar and love songs flying away like a bird eventually leaves its branch. I like to hear things that make me feel in ways I can’t otherwise. Music is there for me as much in the times when I am not there for myself as those when I am full of joy. That has been the happiest discovery I continue to make.
Here I am, then, reflecting on 15 albums I loved in 2024 (sorry, I couldn’t stick to just 10, even though I know I promised you I would). A lot of this is stuff I’ve written about; some of it I chose specifically because I wanted to write about it. All is great music you should listen to.
I have a lot to be grateful for these days — especially this music, which provided space for understanding, observation, and presence in a year marked by the slow thaw of the heart. You’ll notice I was drawn to the image of fire, to loss, to letting go, to keeping on. I think that pretty much sums it up.
So, let’s say cheers to another year of listening. Will you join me?
Much Love,
V
~
[Ahmed], Giant Beauty (Fönstret)
Speaking of fire, did you get lost in the perpetual motion of Giant Beauty, too? In the surprises waiting to uncover in songs from years long ago? Maybe in a saxophone overblown to a point in which it becomes pure sound, as my college professor said? Or in the piano scales that seem to never end, ascending, descending, jumping, flailing, but always finding the beat? [Ahmed] serves as a virtuosic example of the fact that you can take the old and make it unimaginably new again.
Armbruster, Can I Sit Here (Dear Life Records)
Strip the violin of its sweetness and replace it with some smoke. Spark the rhythmic lilt of Irish folk melodies with a bit of fire. Play a phrase and then play it again, a little harder, a little stronger, until it dissolves into a grey cloud ready to rain. Just take the violin and flip it upside down — there is so much yet to explore. Armbruster’s music builds from a familiar foundation — gentle looped melodies equally inspired by classical minimalism and folk tunes. But add a bit more Kevin Shields-ian haze to those repeating phrases and you get the explosion of Can I Sit Here, a deep-seated pain released in the vibrations of the violin. The instrument itself carries with it a vast history; this record takes that history and finds a new avenue of expression within it and beyond it. And it rules.
Leila Bordreuil, 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire (Hanson Records)
On Summer, Huntington Garage Fire, Leila Bordreuil’s cello transforms into a noise-fueled vehicle fit for Mad Max: Furiosa. It may be soft and quiet, an eerie whisper spoken from beyond the horizon; it may be loud and boisterous, turning its sweetened melodies into static electricity. Summer, Huntington Garage Fire channels both, finding its voice in the recording of a garage fire. Bordreuil’s cello wraps around the flames, an abstraction of the devastation in motion. It is not all destruction, though: “Years Of Dreams” offers a moment of meditation, solemn electronics and notes swirling with the gloomy anticipation of doomsday’s wake, while droning closer “Open Field at the End of the World” has an ominous warmth, smoke as it rises from the ashes. After all, sometimes it takes razing it all down to emerge again.
Joshua Chuquimia-Crampton, Estrella Por Estrella (Puro Fantasía)
When Estrella Por Estrella dropped, I said that if heaven exists, I would like it to sound like the final minute of “Acidito,” during which the album’s booming electric guitars are razed in fire and left with intertwining curls of black smoke, then grey, then a clear mist that leads into the gently emo final title track. I listened to that last minute a lot this year. I carved it in stone and put it away for safe-keeping. Heaven only comes after the fall.
Tashi Dorji, we will be wherever the fires are lit (Drag City)
What does it mean to persevere? How does it feel? Is it worth it to keep going? Maybe it’s like free soloing a scraggy mountain, where the payoff comes once you find a vista and realize that despite the destruction, there’s a whole lot of Earth, a whole lot of beauty, a whole lot of community left to make. All of that is channeled into Tashi Dorji’s propulsive acoustic guitar. His bristling plucks drone with the force needed to keep on keeping on, a high-speed reminder that resilience is life’s strongest currency.
Nomi Epstein, Shades (Another Timbre)
Shades is both a culmination and an invitation. The album brings together three chamber works composed by Nomi Epstein between 2011 and 2023, each of which explores her eerily quiet approach to Deep Listening. These pieces unfold with patience; plenty of rest comes between each note as it is played and as it disappears, yielding equal space for rumination and breath. To play these works, ensembles must be closely intertwined with each other; to listen to them, the audience must hang on to every shimmer of a tone. It is a careful example of slowing down and zeroing in, a gradual presentation of the beauty that emerges from presence with each other and the self.
Charles Gayle / Milford Graves / William Parker, WEBO (Black Editions)
Sometimes there is a show in New York so electric, so alchemic, so beamed down from above that everyone’s still talking about it decades later. Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, and William Parker at WEBO — a long gone downtown loft — was one of those shows. And do the recordings deliver! Hearing Graves’ cool-frenetic sense of rhythm mesh with Gayles’ uninhibited squeal and Parker’s free-experimentation on the bass — plucking, tapping, pulling like gravel against tires, using whatever part of the bass he could to make sound — feels like capturing lightning in a bottle. A moment so free that it will reverberate, and echo and echo and echo, and never get lost.
Lori Goldston, Convolutions (Nyahh Records)
Convolutions is a celebration of the cello at its most bare, and the way that Lori Goldston corrals it into a vehicle for the spiritual. Goldston often distorts her cello into electric fuzz, riffing folk melodies within the plumes of smoke; she does occasionally here as well, but for the most part her gentle melodies are presented without much fanfare. She lets them sing out, crafting winding, looping paths. Culled from a tour around Ireland, in which Goldston improvised her way through the country, these four tracks present her cello at its most quietly exploratory. It’s music for the wanderers, the dreamers lost in not the woods but the sound of the cello, unvarnished, loved.
Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee (Realistik)
For a while, I saw Diamond Jubilee as an album for the loner lovesick guitar hero troubadours, whose want to yearn is stronger than the will to act. But to yearn is to know the truth of having had, to know beauty that has gotten lost in the dust of years of words left unsaid. A loner is only truly a loner by having lived and having lost and having wondered what it’s like to keep on living anyway. To know that “All I want Is you,” but the you you’re imagining is just that — a picture, a memory, a mirage. All you have in the end is you, and I’d venture to say that Diamond Jubilee’s unending romance is in its ultimate embrace of the you at the heart of it all, despite the noise of loss and being lost. Live in the warm embrace of the past, why don’t you, or maybe let it go in the roll of the car tires heading west as you finally leave it behind. 24/7 Heaven is a state of mind.
Alan Licht, Havens (VDSQ)
Havens is a testament to the craft of guitar playing, but nowhere is that more clear than on the album’s magnum opus track, “Frank Sinatra Drive.” If you write about music, or listen to and love enough of it, you may start to find yourself wondering what makes a good song a good song. Is it the way it follows the platonic ideal of sonata form, two phrases of four measures, one ending with a half cadence and the other tying it up in a perfect major bow? Is it the lyrics that sum up the ache of yearning in five potent words you’d never think of on your own? Or maybe it does something you’d never expect, taking you on a winding road through its wispy earworm melodies, leading you past the unknown and back. “Frank Sinatra Drive” is a good song because it does a little bit of all of that. You get a wistful sunset along a street in New Jersey where the heads used to play music; a sugary sweet strum taking its playbook from Electric Counterpoint until it turns into a blown-out squeal of four measure glory; a few final moments of ambient organ dreams, churchlike, eschewing a sunny cadence for the darker minor. The best music will find holiness in every part, and invite you to find it, too.
More Eaze, Lacuna and Parlor (Mondoj)
Lacuna and Parlor satisfies two overarching parts of me: The first being the music theorist and the second being the sentimental dreamer. It is, at its heart, a feat of genre-blending, a hallmark of More Eaze’s music that is expertly explored here. There are hints of Different Trains-esque minimalism mashed with autotune-tinged vocals (“blanking intervals”), canons of droning violins in conversation with each other and field recordings of chattering and packing up to leave (“materials for memory”), anguished rolled chords like The Bach Chaconne (“a(nother) cadence”), the haze of pedal steel lilt (“adagio for pedal steel ensemble and overdubbed room”). It is a picture of More Eaze as the experimentalist, the explorer. But no matter where each of these songs goes, or what technique it tries out or genre it references, the album is tied together by a thread of wistfulness, a forlorn melody or a minor chord. The feeling — and even sound — of one door closing while another slowly, gradually, creaks open. A gentle catharsis.
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, Four Guitars Live (Palilalia)
Bill Orcutt’s classical minimalism-meets-Television-meets-noise record, recorded entirely solo, Four Guitars, was a revelation for those who love interlocking rhythms born from the bristling punch of Orcutt’s electric guitar. Add in three of the best players going today — Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish — to reinterpret the music as a quartet (and improvise around it) and you’ve got fire on your hands. Orcutt’s compositions naturally shine through this group, but more importantly they take the music in new places, each bringing their own distinctive voice and playing style to Orcutt’s very specific, very deliberate playing and writing. It is a celebration of the many ways you can make an electric guitar rock, pure and simple and splendid.
Quatuor Bozzini, Jürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4 (Collections QB)
It’s fitting that String Quartet No. 4, a work of monumental observation, came out in January, which is the only time that New York feels still. During my January 2024, I felt the Earth had stopped spinning, or at least moved so glacially it was less noticeable than usual. Frey’s music, which is characterized by stillness, arrived as both a mirror and a revelation. Played by Frey experts Quatuor Bozzini, the piece is marked by the payoff of a slow build. It is quiet, nearly silent; it is slow, nearly out-of-time. Each subtle change is all the more noticeable, a color jumping out of the music’s snowy white landscapes. It is a reminder that, with patience, stillness reveals, laying all to bare and to be.
Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (Red Hook Records)
The meeting of two of the great creative music minds — Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers — was bound to be something special, but Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens goes beyond special and into indefinable magic. Myers’ free-flowing piano chords provide a meditative foundation for Smith’s trumpet, which hovers above in at-once gentle and bristling melodies. They move in sync, like two people on a walk through the greens together, a sort of give-and-take only possible with close listening to each motion. It is pleasant, it is meditative, it is delicate. But most of all, it captures the solemn spirituality of peering deep into the belly of the world around you and coming back, eager, content, to share what you found.
Water Damage, In E (12XU)
One note, one chord, one rhythm, one explosion. The sound of instruments in reverberation together, playing as loud as they can to find some sort of communal vibration. It is in the vein of Tony Conrad, or John Cale, or any of those downtown New York lofts that filled the city with the sound of a drone that seems to keep on going, and going, and going. Water Damage is imbued with a bit more Lone Star fervor, the kind of sound that is at once so overwhelming it is also isolating, an experience that takes you deep into your head to pull you back out and into reality. Or maybe it’s just really good crunchy explosive and, of course, rocking drone to bang your head to while you lose your mind in a sea of sound. You decide.
~
BONUS ROUND: 10 more must-listens from 2024!
Mat Ball, Amplified Guitar II (The Garrote)
Gerycz Powers Rolin, Activator (12XU)
Chihei Hatakeyama & Shun Ishiwaka, Magnificent Little Dudes Vol.2 (Gearbox Records)
Sarah Hennies, Motor Tapes (New World Records)
Leilehua Lanzilotti, forever forward in search of the beautiful (New Focus Recordings)
Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver, the blacksmiths, the flowers (Reading Group)
Patrick Shiroishi, Glass House (Otherly Love)
Laetitia Sonami / Éliane Radigue, A Song for two Mothers / Occam IX (Black Truffle)
Student Body, Student Body (Self-released)
Rafael Toral, Spectral Evolution (Moikai)