photo: Elizabeth Leitzell
2020 ARTIST PICKS
In previous years, artists whose works were chosen for textura's year-end lists were asked to share their own favourites. A slightly different criterion was adopted this year, with artists whose releases appeared in the ‘2020 TOP 10s & 20s' article asked to select music, be it a complete work or song, that sustained them and helped get them through this extraordinary period. textura is grateful to those who contributed and thanks them not only for their generosity but also for the incredible music they brought into the world this year.
Nat Bartsch • Olivia Belli • Lakecia Benjamin • Scott Cossu • Tom Eaton • Endless Field • Anders Hagberg • Rebecca Hennessy • Mette Jul • Emily Kuhn • Ray Larsen • Chloë March • James Murray & Mike Lazarev • Elsa Nilsson • orchestramaxfieldparrish • David Ian Roberts • Roomful of Teeth • Phil Tomsett • The Westerlies • Eric Whitacre
Nat Bartsch (#3 Jazz: Forever More, ABC Jazz)
In 2020 I found a lot of solace in the album Kindness, Not Courtesy by Spirograph Studies. The band is led by double bassist, Tamara Murphy, who appears on my album Forever More, and features my friend/collaborator Luke Howard on piano. This post-jazz, post-minimalist album is deeply mindful, honest, and patient music. The group plays with such generosity toward each other. Solos in the traditional sense of the word are replaced by the slow, patient evolution of the music as an ensemble. Beautiful compositions, too! It has been a soothing soundtrack to our long lockdown in Melbourne and helped me to find my own sense of patience.
Olivia Belli (#4 Ambient / New Age: River Path, 1631 Recordings)
I spent my lockdown writing a lot of music but listened to a lot of albums too. This year I dedicated myself to listening to many historical versions of Beethoven's music since this year is the 250th anniversary of his birth. I relaxed a lot with reading: I chose three different genres to vary my days. I reread Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which is always revealing; I enjoyed Woody Allen's autobiography (and as a result reviewed many of his films); and also read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
Lakecia Benjamin (#4 Jazz: Pursuance: The Coltranes, Ropeadope)
I'm a big fan of Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya's album Sotho Blue. My favourite track is “The Mountain.” I have always felt this song brings me a deeper sense of peace. The mood and atmosphere he was able to create almost reminds me of being alone in nature on the world's tallest mountain and feeling the excitement and joy of life. There is a lot of uncertainty going on right now. Listening to this reminds me that no matter where we are headed things will be alright.
Scott Cossu (#3 Ambient / New Age: Memories of Water and Light, Heart Dance Records)
Memories of Water and Light includes a piece called “Cerulean Eyes” that really sustains me. It's a reflection of my inspirations from Chopin, Brahms, and Pink Floyd, and it's also a piece that I wrote and dedicated to my wife Debi.
Tom Eaton (#9 Ambient / New Age: Elements: Audio Environments Parts 1-4, Tom Eaton)
This year has been a year of looking back in time for safer spaces, familiar comforts, and soft music. Looking back reminds me that time is passing... which means that we'll get through the present moment. Dwelling in the past still reaps rewards, and the most frequently visited old friends this year were as follows:
Tim Story's Beguiled, The Perfect Flaw, and Lunz (with Roedelius): Tim repeatedly raised the bar for (mostly) piano-led ambient chamber music from his time with Windham Hill in the '80s through three albums on Hearts of Space in the '90s and beyond. His collaborations with Roedelius were more angular and surprising, but equally emotional and obscure. Eternally satisfying and always asking a different question that remains unanswerable after all these years.
Harold Budd and Brian Eno's The Pearl: Particularly poignant today as Harold has just left us, this album might be the most perfect ambient statement on record. Each piece is a world unto itself that doesn't seem to care if we wander in or out of it. It never fails to take me on a journey into places I'd love to live.
Dan Hartman's New Green Clear Blue: Who Dan was prior to this album provides no context for the beauty or depth of this music. But the why of this album is irrelevant once you play it. I do wonder what he would have made next (he passed away shortly after this release), but this album more than stands the test of time and provides a particularly safe and welcoming environment.
Endless Field (#3 General: Alive in the Wilderness, Biophilia Records)
In a year of reset and challenge, we are moved and nourished by Chris Dingman's Peace, a luminous, epic five-disc solo vibraphone release. His music looks simultaneously skyward and to the earth, designed to bring healing and comfort to all who listen and are in need of solace. Chris's thoughtful intentions and big heart fill every note.
Anders Hagberg (#13 Jazz: North, Prophone)
Jon Hassell's Maarifa Street: One of my important musical discoveries the last couple of years is the trumpet player and composer Jon Hassell. His atmospheric music is both accessible and soothing, yet complex, with intricate details. Some of his qualities as a wind player are things that I aim for myself, like how much he can express only with his sound on the trumpet. I recognize myself in his influences from many musical cultures, especially the modes and gestures from the Indian classical ragas and how to implement them in a contemporary improvised context. Humanity, warmth and connection are words that comes to my mind when hearing his music.
Rebecca Hennessy (#1 General: All the Things You Do, Rebecca Hennessy)
I've been listening to Kevin Breit's ambitious new album I Love You, which features thirty different singers and is backed by the Upper York Mandolin Orchestra. It is such an incredible album that keeps giving. Thank you, Kevin Breit. I love you, too!
Mette Juul (#8 Singles / EPs / Cassettes: New York - Copenhagen, Universal Music Group)
During our first Danish lockdown in March/April (a few days after I released New York - Copenhagen), I listened to some Dalai Lama talks on YouTube about the Covid 19 situation. It was very inspiring to listen to his thoughts, about remembering to think in a creative way, remembering that the virus will pass and that maybe we will learn something from it. I tried the best I could not to worry too much. Instead I spend time on getting to know new music, cooking, and taking long walks. During the same period I listening to Norma Winstone and her release Distances.
Emily Kuhn (#17 Jazz: Sky Stories, BACE Records)
This year, as I found myself grappling with a lot of questions about the relevance of the arts, I found some much needed comfort and inspiration by diving deeper into classic American Songbook recordings. In particular, I listened to Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” over and over. Her phrasing is emotionally gutting, and the lyrics could have been written in 2020, they're so relevant.
As for new releases, I loved Max Bessesen's album Trouble. Max is a dear friend and musical collaborator; his artistic voice is so present throughout the music on the album, and he assembled a truly incredible band to bring it to life. The album deals with themes of mental health and loneliness, which felt especially important to give a voice to this year.
Ray Larsen (#6 General: Songs To Fill The Air, Slow & Steady)
Greg Sinibald is a fellow Seattleite and should be one of our city's best-known music visionaries; I am awestruck whenever I hear him perform. Greg is a tenor saxophonist with a huge sound and a deep approach to form and harmony, an artist who has achieved that elusive ‘personal voice' and the ability to charge every moment of his music with power and meaning. But also Greg has recently repositioned himself as a pioneer of all possibilities on the Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI). Over the past five years, he has journeyed toward some frightening and mind-altering sonic discoveries. I have never heard anything like it.
In 2019, Greg released an album of EWI compositions, each with a video companion. The music is transportive and darkly comforting, and I have returned to it many times to find some solace and perspective during the pandemic. For anyone ready to dive into Greg's imagination, his 2019 album Voices is the place to start. Then check out Ariel from 2017.
Chloë March (#9 General: Starlings & Crows, Hidden Shoal)
Laura Groves' A Private Road (Bella Union): This is a gem of an EP consisting of six beautifully crafted songs of textural electronica. It has such an easy, floating sound yet is tinged with melancholy. Groves' clear layered vocals often have a lovely wide vibrato on the longer-held notes, and she has a talent for wonderful flowing vocal melodies that for a while made me hugely nostalgic without quite knowing why. I think now that I hear perhaps a little reminder of both Judie Tzuke, particularly in “Foolish Game” and also of Julee Cruise, but her sound is distinctively her own. These tracks are meticulously put together and yet sound airily effortless. I find it both elegant and gorgeously immersive.
Kacey Johansing's No Better Time (Night Bloom Records): This is another collection that is mostly breezy and often musically sunny and yet packs a deep emotional punch. The album was recorded over three days of live tracking with her band and that gives it a real warmth and energy. The musicianship is fantastic. There are doubled acoustic guitars, vibes, piano, strings and Johansing's distinctive, compelling, versatile and gorgeous voice.
There is a velvety ease in her singing, a lovely freedom of moving through scales and registers. Her delivery and timbre occasionally reminds me of Alison Goldfrapp, but she has an unmistakably distinctive voice. In “Even A Lot Feels Like Nothing” there is a deep emotional weight delivered with such deft lightness of touch. In “Let Me Walk Right In” I hear a hint of late-career Kate Bush in a lush reverie of an emotional ballad with gorgeous swooping vocals and a disquieting and subtle undertow that slowly reveals itself. The sense of melancholy and loss is palpable—within the lyrics, the minor key descending vocal lines, and the unsettling electronics. The album is ‘an exploration of love' and it gets straight to my heart.
James Murray & Mike Lazarev (#10 Singles / EPs / Cassettes: Suññata, Home Normal)
(James Murray) The soundtrack of my year is an unreleased work whose title can't be revealed just yet. Anne Garner's next album follows 2018's Lost Play—album of the year on these very pages—and has been by far the most involved and challenging production we've embarked on together to date. This constant companion to a turbulent and surreal year represents a further, significant evolution in the sound of a truly singular recording artist, and I'm very excited to share it with you just as soon as we can.
(Mike Lazarev) The record that resonated the most throughout my dwelling this year was Richard Chartier's Room40 release, leaving everything to be desired as his Pinkcourtesyphone project. There is something about the disassociated state of being, existing in the present moment yet completely in the past; focusing on the world around you yet seeing everything in the peripheral; hearing the melody looped on end yet getting lost in the smudges of its echo. It's a suspended piece of music, reverberating through a life on pause, like a struggling insect at the tip of a jello pudding or a page of a poem slowly drowning in a frozen lake or a drying tear on a thorn of a flower. It perfectly captures the feeling of waking up to another repetition, looking straight into the mirror, and asking your tiring and aging reflection, "Is this it?”
Elsa Nilsson (#20 Jazz: Hindsight, Bumblebee Collective)
Ron Miles' Rainbow Sign: This year has been... one where it has been difficult to sit with both my internal and external world. At some point I shut down and disconnected. This record brought me back. I have loved Ron Miles' approach to existing in music since I first heard him when I was eighteen, and so I looked forward to this album as soon as I knew it was coming. The day it came out I listened to it all the way through. The journey the album takes made me feel alive again, and since then I've listened to this record at least once a week. Sonically it is beautiful and spacious, a needed contrast to how pressured the world feels right now. The playing is patient and direct, the compositions clear and beautiful. When I listen to this album I feel like things are going to be okay. Miles' and his band's mastery of phrasing and expression remind me to look beyond skill and into the reason art needs to exist in our culture; artists are the guardians of the human spirit. Creating requires great skill, but the skill isn't the point. Without the arts, we break.
This record sounds like community to me, with everything that is implied there. Love, growth, loss, joy, conflicts with resolutions, silently enjoying each other's presence—in short, all the things I miss in the isolation of this past year. The album was written as a tribute to Miles' father's passing, the transitioning from one state to another. Musically this is captured beautifully with a shifting landscape of composition and improvisation that transitions the listener through all of our own states. Yes, I like this record a lot.
orchestramaxfieldparrish (#2 General: Guitar Improvisations I-VI, Faith Strange)
(Mike Fazio) I unfortunately do not listen to as much newly released music these days as I once did, for various reasons, so I'm afraid I have been out of the loop on many excellent new releases. This year, I preferred to go inward, to be free of the outward, and thus dismissed the negativity, especially the death and suffering that was all around me in NYC. But I couldn't have mentally survived this year without steady listening to two. Unfortunately both are long out of print for anyone that would wish to seek them out.
The first is Sphyx by Organum, which originally came out in 1994 and was re-released in an expanded form in 2002. David Jackman has been a decades-long favourite of mine, and his Organum project is something I deeply cherish and has influenced me in immeasurable ways.
Another album that has been very much a part of me and always has been since its release in 2006 is Blue Eyes Of The March by Andrew Chalk. Words cannot express how much this album has affected me, how it has become a constant companion, and how it continues to give me strength to this day. I am blessed to have Andrew as a friend.
Both of these albums are ‘Desert Island Selections.' Both of these albums are love songs to the Heavens.
David Ian Roberts (#11 General: From the Harbour, Cambrian Records)
The piece that I've probably listened to the most and enjoyed loads recently has been “Dandelions” from the Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP by Kurt Vile. It's a beautiful, repetitive song that sounds like it's sung to his daughters and so has a real sweetness. It seems to hang in the air on the same two chords for six-and-a-half minutes. It's dreamlike and light-hearted, so I think I was drawn to it to take me to a good state of mind. Gorgeous production too, with loads of pretty sounds drifting in and out. I'm also getting really into the way he sings; there's so much more skill in his delivery than you might think at first. It's definitely a comforting song and has helped make a lot of mornings a bit easier.
Roomful of Teeth (#1 Singles / EPs / Cassettes: The Ascendant / Just Constellations, New Amsterdam Records)
(Dashon Burton) Because I can't say old episodes of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I'll have to settle for saying Thundercat's It Is What It Is. Brilliantly titled before that phrase was callously stolen, it brought me so much peace and comfort through his grief at the state of the world, but as always, through the intensely curious and unapologetically ironic lens of the greatest bass playing and singing on the planet. Apologies to anyone who has asked me to recommend anything in the past few years; the answer has always been Thundercat.
(Esteli Gomez) Brittany Howard's Jaime has been my album of the year. It came out in late 2019, and I can't stop going back to it: her idiosyncratic vocals in “Short and Sweet,” her infectious confidence in "13th Century Metal,” the mixing and lyrics in “Stay High.” It's a damn masterpiece.
(Avery Griffin) Van Halen's Tokyo Dome in Concert: It's impossible to listen to this album without smiling and smiles were in short supply this year. RIP Eddie.
(Thann Scoggin) Ever since collaborating with Tigran in 2018, I eagerly anticipate every new release of his, and The Call Within blew us away. In addition to the harmonic creativity and virtuosity we've come to expect, he and his rhythm section double down on the polyrhythmic magic that mesmerized us on 2015's Mockroot (even inviting Animals as Leaders' Tosin Abasi to join on one track). I love hearing Tigran's singing voice take on a more prominent role as well.
Phil Tomsett (#15 General: The Sound of Someone Leaving, Fluid Audio)
The one album that got me through 2020 and everything it threw at us was Farewell Islands by Slow Reels (Ian Hawgood and James Murray.) It's almost a cliche to say that music, particularly ambient music, creates imaginary places for the listener, but this album truly did. The first two tracks are absolutely mind blowing. “Lakka” had this effect of opening up a space around me and showing everything from a new perspective, and the whole album has a fantastic transformative quality. Listening to Farewell Islands became a morning ritual, not necessarily an escape from what was going on in the real world, but a way to keep it all at arm's length.
The Westerlies (#5 Jazz: Wherein Lies the Good, The Westerlies)
Secret Sibling's “Half a Second”: Secret Sibling is a Brooklyn-based experimental pop band featuring the music of Michael Sachs, a longtime friend of The Westerlies. There's a lot to love about this song (and the whole album)—clever lyrics, beautiful melodic writing, dynamic harmonic progressions, a super satisfying laid-back feel—but what I find most striking about it is the orchestration. The variety of timbres and the way they blend together is just so satisfying—synths, voices, acoustic woodwinds—it's an immense sonic palette that offers much for the ear to latch onto. Special shoutout to Zubin Hensler (one of the original members of The Westerlies, who has since moved onto other endeavours) for mixing this album!
Eric Whitacre (#2 Classical: The Sacred Veil, Signum Classics)
Choosing my favourite album of the year is easy: Jacob Collier's Djesse Vol. 3. It's not just that Jacob has a once-in-a-generation gift or that he seems to easily master every part of the process (he wrote the music, and played dozens of instruments on this album, and recorded and produced it, and directed the accompanying videos). No, the most amazing part is that the way he thinks about music is truly original, truly unique. His ‘uniqueness' just pours out of him, pure and unfiltered, a boundless riot of joy and colour and youth.
December 2020