Some pretty great records came out in 2018... I've cobbled together a bunch of them here.

A little list of films that happened to catch and hold my attention in 2018. The release dates of some of these can be quibbled over but, in the case of the top spot (for instance), this year was when I was first able to see a screening in the cinema. There are notes for each film. Read 'em and weep.

The 10th November holds significance for a great number of reasons. It’s said to be the date upon which Henry Morton Stanley greeted a previously AWOL explorer with the now famous phrase “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” and, in 1989, it was on this day that the Germans began tearing down the Berlin Wall. For 2018, however, this date marked the live premiere of The Academy Of Sun’s latest opus – The Quiet Earth.

Since releasing the first entry in his Myth trilogy back in 2016, Marc Euvrie (aka The Eye Of Time) has been through the wringer. He now describes the path of his musical progression thusly: “Myth I : A Last Dance For The Things We Love corresponds to my falling into darkness, A Need To Survive to finding the energy to rise again and the last record which will be named To Heal, corresponds to me right now, feeling positively mature.” Whilst steering clear of specifics around his experiences, he

Since Philip Glass’s 1978 score for Koyaanisqatsi directors have sought to employ surging throbs to help distill and accentuate their stories. This year Colin Stetson’s brass bursts in Hereditary and the ambient washes in Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House have flown the flag for the unmistakable sound of drone. And now, with Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse, the first feature length film from writer/director Lukas Feigelfeld, MMMD have also picked up the baton. I first crossed paths with Mohammad

Suite For Piano and Electronics is the first “proper” CD release from Sanguine Hum’s Matt Baber. Initially starting his musical career as a drummer, Baber switched to playing the keyboard when forming the aforementioned band (albeit when they were still known as Antique Seeking Nuns). Since then he has been busy compiling ambient and electronic soundscapes in largely digital form, precious few of which have seen the light of day.

For his fourth solo studio record, Ólafur Arnalds has enthusiastically opened his arms (and his beloved pianos) to new technology. Stratus, a piece of software that composer and audio developer Halldór Eldjárn has spent the past two years collaborating with Arnalds to hone, links two self-playing, semi-generative pianos to a central, human-controlled piano.

Three years after the release of her debut, Paris-born, London-based composer, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch has returned with the enthralling Époques on FatCat imprint 130701. In fact, her new album was released precisely 17 years to the day after the label’s launch. Back in the spring of 2017, however, Levienaise-Farrouch headed to the Suffolk coastal town (and former home of Imogen Holst), Aldeburgh. Here she laid the foundations for much of the music contained on this record.

Revisiting your youth can dig up wide-ranging emotions and discoveries. It can be reassuring to find the beginnings of followed paths, humbling to realise wrong turns and misconceptions, and, as I found recently during an attempted rewatch of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, wince-inducing to discover quite how drastically your tastes and views have diverged from your former self.

It’s an interesting time for Tim Hecker to revisit these two early records. It’s been 17 years since the first album came out under his own name – he put out a few techno cuts as Jetone in the early 2000s – and, in that time, his sounds have evolved, shifted, and progressed far beyond those initial recordings. So much so that, on dipping back into them now, the music almost sounds typical, plain, even. Especially when compared to his recent work on Love Streams.

In the most recent series of Will Sharpe’s Flowers, the daughter Amy – a visionary but deeply discomposed musician (played masterfully by Sophia Di Martino) – is engulfed by the desire to pen a gothic opera based upon the folk-horror tale of her ancestors. She believes that, in doing so, she will achieve a form of redemption that will disperse the spectres of bi-polar disorder and depression that cast long shadows over her family. Her music is increasingly erratic and frenzied.

It was 14 years ago to the day that motivational hardcore punks Modern Life Is War last stopped off in Brighton. Finally, on a blazing hot June evening, they have returned to level the building, with the hotly-tipped Svalbard in tow. Starting the night off, however, are Swain. Their music is a rock stomp with phased pop-licks and vocals that add a snarl to ‘70s stadium fare.

If, as myth has it, sold his soul to the devil to play the blues, what if more of his enslaved countrymen had followed suit? Struggling through slavery whilst believing in a god that appears to condone and reward the oppressors seems counter-intuitive. What if the repressed had turned to the unholy spirit for solace instead? This very theme is explored by. Now performing with a full band,(the brains behind Zeal & Ardor) has expanded his approach from the “black metal performed by a gospel choir…

Manchester is synonymous with music. From the Factory Records days of Joy Division and John Cooper Clarke, to Muslimgauze, Samuel Kerridge, The Fall, and that nationalistic lump of ever-diminishing returns – Morrissey – a through line of fatalism can be felt. This is true of even the most disparate sounding of the city’s offspring. With a discerning ear you can also find a thread of melancholia in the output of Mr Scruff and The Chemical Brothers.

End Christian is a wild chimera. A beast of disparate elements all drawn together. From projects as diverse as Dälek (Alap Momin), Brutal Truth (Richard Hoak), Fad Nauseam (Gillian Dreadful), and Hex Inverter (Christian McKenna) comes a fascinating cast of characters whose experimental leanings manage to gel, surprise, and test on Bach Part One. Oh and their bassist – Vincent Rosa – wrestles on the side as Vinny the Fixxer.

CEEYS have created an album that is rooted in the division and integration of opposing concepts. A binary approach, if you will. Here we have two brothers, Daniel and Sebastian Selke, playing the two instruments that they first picked up age five. Their name is, in fact, a portmanteau of those instruments – ‘violoncello’ and ‘keys’ – and, like a portmanteau, this album is about the merging of disparate ideas to create a greater whole.

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it” Uniform and The Body. Two pummelling duos. One is responsible for releasing the first industrial sludge pop record and the other helped to cleave minds with two head-splitting tracks in last year’s return to Twin Peaks. Both inform their traumatic sounds with bleak references to cinema and literature – the titles for their most recent releases were taken from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note and an Australian film of booze-fuelled carnage

“Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might-have-beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?” It’s been four years since Pascal Savy’s last record – Adrift – and, on first listen, there would appear to be certain textural similarities between that exploration of a fictional island and his new album, Dislocations.

In the most recent series of Twin Peaks, amongst various inexplicable goings on, a dream sequence occurred in which Monica Bellucci (as herself) asked “We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?”. With The Long Sleep it feels as if Jenny Hval is attempting to answer this question.

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation. By means of it, one gets through many a dark night.”work has long been synonymous with viscera; their name alone conjures imagery of violent crime. Of decomposing flesh. Of human form beyond use. Factoring in their propulsive and all-consuming deranged noise-pop sound only solidifies this further. Their music pistons like adrenaline-flooded tendons thrashing for dear life.