Artists' rankings

Here are the ten records of 2018 chosen and reviewed by Stefano Santoni exclusively for OndaRock.

Field Music – Open Here

Definitely the most enjoyable and original record of the year. We live in an era in which it seems so hard to completely reinvent oneself and finally break free from the past; trapped as we are in a loop made up of endless revisitations of the last decades of the last century. Field Music, with their “Open Here”, don't seem at all keen to make an exception, but at least they do it by digging through the least explored folds of time: Xtc, Donald Fagen and, no less, all the products of the last gasp of the progressive pioneers, who landed and recycled themselves into the most cultured and candidly earnest pop of the early 80s, Peter Gabriel first and foremost (etc.).

 

The long wave of slowcore spills well beyond its spatial-temporal boundaries to reach our present day and wash over us with this wonderful album. Having finally made electronics fully its own, already timidly approached in previous albums, on “Double Negative” Low glorify it with harmonies and melodies that are decidedly genuine and utterly inspired.

 

“Your Queen Is A Reptile” is like picturing a Serbian gypsy wielding a bass tuba, John Coltrane, a raggamuffin singer, and Martin Luther King, all together, around a small table in a bar in Caracas. Globalized and globalizing, metropolitan and tribal, frenetic and delicate at the same time: a zeitgeist minestrone?

 

Now firmly established as a leading figure on the global electronic scene, Jon Hopkins, even with this concept album about the relationship between the human mind and the universe, keeps his output at an extremely high level: “Singularity” is, in fact, a wonderfully realized paraphrase of cosmic atmospheres and reactions. A record that perfectly follows the pulsing dynamics of the celestial. An extremely elegant sound, which at times tends to contract into its own mass, alternating moments of infinite expansion, even while risking the extinguishing of the very matter it's made of.

 

Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but definitely a record that stands out from others in the rich output of Ty Segall (already three albums released in 2018 alone). A decidedly well-written album, but one whose true strength lies in self-mockery. Back in the legendary 70s, the best-known rockers would show up bare-chested, tossing cascades of curly hair in a self-deifying stance in which they took themselves absolutely seriously. Ty Segall, especially on this record, flips the script and aims squarely at getting laughs, unleashing classic-rock riffs so oversized that they can't help but skirt the ridiculous, old-school guitar solos that even multiply, piling on top of each other in an egotistical delirium that's disorienting precisely because it's so obviously out of its time. The lyrics, no less, are there to top it all off. It's not every day you listen to a rock album and burst out laughing.

 

Daniel Blumberg – Minus

Among today's musical currents, while on one front the pursuit of production is advancing, with sounds that are ever more sought-after, elaborate and refined, on other fronts there seems to be a timid but growing need for a return to starker, purer sonorities. As if an awareness were reawakening that certain sonic scaffolding, especially in our time, doesn't necessarily benefit the underlying songwriting — if anything, it more often seems used as a device to hide the nothing, or at least the very little, that lies behind it. Daniel Blumberg's “Minus” is a striking example of this second strand: here everything plays out on a raw, tightrope-walking emotion, suspended in perfect balance on simplification.

 

With an attitude diametrically opposed to Daniel Blumberg's, this hazy figure belongs to the new breed of performative electronic producers: live, he doesn't stand behind a console nodding his head like most of his peers, but instead offers a show closer to Arca or, to push it a bit, to Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle. Discontinuous, varied, uneven; “Safe In The Hands Of Love” seems to be searching for a point of reference, a study for a future record and for the future itself. Ultimately, is it a gateway to other worlds? Or maybe just an attempt to conjure one up? However you look at it, this remains without doubt one of the most forward-looking records of 2018.

 

Full credit for this monumental work which, given today's record-industry dynamics, might come across as provocative: eight CDs (or twelve vinyl records), for a result of about 8 hours of music, made up mostly of delicate ambient rarefactions. A work that, however undeniably gripping at every moment, pushes to the extreme the attention span — now reduced to almost nothing — that characterizes our era. What better way to celebrate thirty years of career just concluded than to keep on amazing us? Autechre succeed brilliantly in their aim.

 

An extremely difficult but supremely successful feat of synthesis by Julia Holter, a tower of Babel of sounds and musical approaches among the most, at least seemingly, incompatible and improbable. Sounds coming from every era and every place: art rock, art pop, contemporary classical, ethnic music, pop-wave, world music, jazz… and we could go on for another 20 lines. In the mesmerizing sound of “Aviary” one can perceive such a variety of influences, so disorienting on first listen, that it becomes difficult to form an overall judgment of the album — unless one simply lets go and drifts on this wind steeped in the most disparate scents, inspired by the myriad multicolored birds crowding this aviary.

 

More rarefactions, which in this case evoke post-human landscapes, where ethnic instruments still echo (among others), by now rendered unrecognizable, disfigured by too much technology and too much time gone by. Desolate atmospheres that nonetheless, to some extent, seem to want to comfort and cradle us, brought to life by another hugely interesting figure like Tim Hecker, hailing from Canada, who by now can also be called a veteran of the new millennium's electronic language.