Sleepless nights (a list & a whisper)

Buried Dreams

Sarah Davachi – Cantus, Descant

Tatsushisa Yamamoto – Ashioto

Oliver Coates – skins n slime

Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Actress – Karma & Desire

Kassel Jaeger – Swamps/Things

Jam City – Pillowland

Sarah Hennies – Reservoir 1

Autechre – SIGN

Entities Inertias Faint Beings

Jim O’Rourke – Shutting Down Here / Daniel Lopatin – Uncut Gems OST / Oval – Scis / Ben Vida – Reducing the Tempo to Zero + The Quarantine Concerts, April 10 2020 / Kate NV – Room for the Moon / Rian Treanor – File Under UK Metaplasm / Rhodri Davies – Telyn Rawn / Legowelt – Unconditional Contours / John Bence – Love / Charli XCX – how i’m feeling now / Jan St Werner – Molecular Meditation / Phoebe Bridgers – “Kyoto” / Nate Wooley – Seven Storey Mountain VI / claire rousay – Both / Kassel Jaeger – Meith / Kassel Jaeger & Jim O’Rourke – In Cobalt Aura Sleeps / Horse Lords – The Common Task / Moor Mother - Circuit City / Nozomu Matsumoto – Sustainable Hours / Minor Science – Second Language / Robert Merlak – Finomehanika / Raviv Gazit – Ze / Laurel Halo – Possessed OST / KMRU – Peel / Eiko Ishibashi - Hyakki Yagyō / Helm – Saturnalia / FUJIIIIIIIIIIIIITA - iki

Lost Shadows

Burial – Tunes 2011-2019 / Ernest Hood – Neighbourhoods / Beatriz Ferreyra – Echos+ / Peter Ivers – Becoming Peter Ivers / Michele Mercure – Pictures of Echoes / Mike Osborne & Friends – Live at the Peanut Club / Phew – Vertical Jamming / Valentina Goncharova – Recordings 1987-1991 / Caroline Polachek - Pang / Haruomi Hosono - Watering a Flower / the Creel Pone youtube playlist, but especially Thomas Hamilton - Pieces For Kohn and Gil Melle - The Andromeda Strain / Klaus Schulze - Blackdance / Can post-Future Days playlist / soundtrack to The Sopranos seasons 1-4, especially Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul - “Affection” and “Inside of Me”, Them - “Mystic Eyes”, The Rolling Stones - “Undercover of the Night” / Takatoshi Naitoh - In The Forest / Max Eilbacher - Schizophrenia as Architecture / Jim O’Rourke - Insignificance, Eureka, Bad Timing / John Oswald - Plexure / Harold Budd - “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” / Viktor Vaughn - Vaudeville Villain

I recall a few weeks ago a music writer I otherwise respect wondering loudly where those records responding to “white supremacy and police brutality” (or words to that effect) were on the end of year lists of white critics. A quite reasonable criticism on its own terms, but it begs a question: what sort of contribution is it to human liberation to put a record on your individual “end of year list” in a year where suffering, boredom and the tide of needless death were the predominant facts of time’s unspooling? The criticism betrays its own premises: that in the face of world-historical revolt and the daily iteration of bare life, unfinished at the time of writing, the interrupted parlour games of culture are at their most satisfying memories of the last instance when knowing who had released what seemed to matter. No more water cooler conversations when there’s no office to go to and even tentpole releases exiled to 2022 or just one lifeform among the streaming ecosystem. This may complete the balkanisation of taste people were already diagnosing, whether in celebratory or sorrowful mode, when I started writing about music in the late 2000s: no big publication’s end of year list replicates any other this year and any given list’s denizens—the Pitchfork top 10 for example—I either won’t have heard of (Jessie Ware?!), not been motivated to listen to (Dylan), or not been impressed by (Fiona Apple). Nonetheless, I like the personal list: it’s like an overmap in RPGs, giving you a bird’s eye view of a much more granular journey through the villages and dungeons of time. It’s now the most minor of journalistic genres, one that takes the least real effort and the most satisfying labour, bordering, like Borges’s “certain Chinese encyclopedia”, on an actual insight into the world that its surface repels. Take the above with that proviso, that it can’t even be described as a piece of spiritual autobiography but the afterimage of an experience that never actually happened.

Oddly, thinking of my end of year writing since at least 2014, those pieces haven’t so much been about the individual years themselves but attempts, at a meta-level, to think through what culture could do to give time some shape. I’d long since gone past the point of thinking the culture industry’s factotums, noting the ebb and flow of record release schedules, could be helpful in this regard. Rather than the potentially fruitful trends I missed by not being a staff writer obliged to care about them, I spent the last months of 2015 thinking a lot about songform, about the way that the individual inflections of vocalists or jazz soloists—hovering syllables, the disjecta of breath, rogue harmonics and overblowing, hesitation and reservation over moments of maximal expression—connected and inverted or destroyed the meanings of the reified traditional components of song. An imaginary of organised time seems, in the face of the events of the 5 years that followed, naive, like the dinky, fragile worlds of miniature railway enthusiasts. And yet culture itself has frequently followed it as invisible structure or disavowed utopia: in the collages of Speaker Music, Klein or Quantum Natives the idea of song structure—the regular tempos of house or techno, the expressive wholeness of soul and gospel, the pop ‘hit’ as post-war culture’s image of universality—remain as an ideal or discarded heritage, while in the brutalist accumulation of Chino Amobi, Dante’s tripartite schema of slow movement towards eternity persists as the idea of a destroyed and scattered present. Looking back last October, when the coronavirus was merely a cluster of unreported pneumonia cases on the other side of the planet, at my end of year reflections for 2014, I felt that the argument I’d been trying to unfold then about the relationship between artistic enclosure and engagement (as the French always called it) was really an argument about time, about form as a “seismograph”, as Adorno called it, for the sparks of the political—the thing being that while retreat is a “privilege”, we all have to live in the cyclical and horribly intensifying texture of contemporary time. The relationship between the cellularised individual and “the collective” has quickly become a cliché as an Important Theme this year, not least because a whole variety of agents—mutual aiders, post-Marxist theorists, the defenders of Third Way politics, pro-state democratic socialists—have had to think anew and with few tools what the latter actually means. Culture might, at its furthest edges, its fissures, its zones without responsibility, give us an image of that relation through its dreamed time. My sleepless nights aren’t just my own: social media consciousness basks in permanent daylight, the continual and distracted attention of anxiety. Dreams, William Burroughs remarks in one of his least compelling books, “tell stories, many stories” in the same way that Cézanne’s paintings contain multiple perspectives compacted into one, “digression and parentheses, other data seemingly unrelated… now another flash of story… a long parenthesis.” The moments of culture’s eclipse of consciousness, its instances of incoherence, lightness, generative derangement, might be the point where such other, multiple times emerge.