Adult-oriented Ambient, etc.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Two things. 1. I’ve tried really hard but ultimately failed to resist the urge to get some kind of yearly overview out of my music-critic system. 2. Normalize publishing end-of-year coverage in January! It’s the best time, really. Not only is the year you’re writing about actually over and whatever releases were supposed to come out actually came out, but also – not much goes on in January anyway. It’s the perfect time to revisit all the favorites from the previous year and catch up with the stuff you might have missed out on. Anyway, here goes.

If I’m being 100% honest, the record I listened to the most in 2022 was Japanese multi-instrumentalist and composer Eiko Ishibashi’s soundtrack to Drive My Car. Its heavy rotation had much less to do with the film than it did with the album itself. With lush instrumentation supporting gentle melodies, Drive My Car is simultaneously melancholic and optimistic; and works just as well as an immersive focused listen, as it does as a lovely background soundscape.

The topic of the (under-)representation of Eastern European artists may have gotten more attention in the international music media in the past couple of years, but the question of what contemporary Eastern European music could be has flown under the radar. While many artists draw inspiration from their local folk heritage, the results often amount to little more than kitschy takes on traditional music with some electronics slapped onto it to make it sound contemporary. On her debut album Szabadság, Adela Mede avoids any such pitfalls. Singing in Hungarian, Slovak, and English, Mede effortlessly drifts between experimental, ambient, and folk, gelling it all together with some top-class songwriting (see: the gorgeous closing pair of tracks “Na Jar Sa Všetko Roztopi” and “Voda Sa Vráti Tiež”). The outcome could be regarded as a sort of blueprint for contemporary Slavic music. Szabadság is getting a vinyl release courtesy of Night School this year – so if you slept on it in 2022, it might still be eligible for your best-of-2023 list!

Adela Mede was also a part of one of my favorite live shows of the year, and it just so happened to have been a double bill with Claire Rousay – presented by ALICE at The Union in Copenhagen. (Actually, it was a triple bill, but the third guy really didn’t fit into the lineup, so let’s just ignore him.) Rousay took the advantage of the tiny venue’s coziness to sit down on the stage and have a chat with the audience before kicking off the show, offering us a choice between her usual ambient set, and a new, text-based one. The responses varied, but my artist friends screamed “TEXT! TEXT!!!” as if their life depended on it, so a text-based performance it was. A couple of people left, but everyone else was in for a treat. Both live and on her 2022 album Everything Perfect Is Already Here, Rousay displayed a unique talent to derive beauty from the mundane by submerging home/field recordings and spoken word in a delicate amalgam of ambient and modern classical music.

Although Claire Rousay is the artist primarily associated with the “emo ambient” tag, I would argue that it’s a description very well suited to Tomáš Niesner and his record Bečvou – one of the highlights in a strong year for the Warm Winters Ltd. label. Inspired by the eponymous Czech river and an ecological disaster that happened there, the record brings to mind the warm early 00s electro-acoustic sound sported by the likes of Fennesz. Speaking of stunning releases inspired by geographical sites, Francesca Heart’s Eurybia was another 2022 standout.

The Sierra Leonean producer Lamin Fofana put out quite a few releases over the course of the year, but the most stunning body of work was his album trilogy comprised of Ballad Air & Fire, The Open Boat, and Shafts of Sunlight. The three releases offer an extensive reflection on displacement and migration, the perception of time, the space for marginalized voices, and the Black diaspora experience. Fofana gently navigates the journey, fluctuating between epic elegiac compositions, crackling sounds, and Drexciyan underwater ambiance.

Laila Sakini’s first release on Modern Love, Paloma was yet another proof of her unique mastery of nocturnal mood. Elsewhere, the late-night vibes were generously provided by the Bristol trio Jabu on Boiling Wells, a mixtape made up of demos recorded between 2019 and 2022. On his short but sweet EP 1 and the remastered reissue of his 2020 break-out album Glass Lit Dream, Dawuna served some of the year’s finest after-dark r&b.

When it comes to more beat-oriented electronic music, one of the releases that hit pretty hard was Alandazu, a collaborative EP between Tunisian producer Azu Tiwaline and Al Wootton, the UK producer and one-half of the duo Holy Tongue with Valentina Magaletti. Speaking of dubby electronics, I have a weak spot for this specific, occult-tinged blend of that and industrial music with a splash of spoken word, and the self-titled release by Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm was pretty much all I needed in that department. 

Halfway between the club and the bedroom, Varnrable’s debut Air Born masked sharp and humorous observations in catchy pop tropes. Another one among the most eccentric 2022 favorites was the head-spinning mish-mash of pop, electronic music, folk, spoken word, ASMR, and everything in between delivered by the duo Voice Actor on Sent from My Telephone. I have no idea where I’d come across this release, why it has over a hundred tracks, or why they’re alphabetically ordered, but I do know one thing – they’re all good?! A marathon collection of both fleshed-out songs and stream-of-consciousness track sketches, this one is not to be missed by fans of the Hype Williams extended universe.

Is there such a thing as adult-oriented experimental music? As in, something ambitious, exciting, and adventurous, yet at the same time quite polished and accessible. Lucrecia Dalt’s ¡Ay! is all that, and more. Probably her best album so far, ¡Ay! is the year-end-list darling most deserving of the hype it received in 2022. Another daring Latin American record that deservedly got a lot of attention last year was Se Ve Desde Aquí by Guatemalan cellist and composer Mabe Fratti. A somewhat more crude affair, the songs on Se Ve Desde Aquí meander in unexpected directions providing a commanding and engaging listen.

And finally, the thing that always comes in handy is some quality background music for work. Some of the 2022 favorites in that category include World in World, another dazzling instrumental record by the guitarist and composer Julia Reidy, Taro Nohara’s intricate Poly-Time Soundscapes / Forest of the Shrine, and Roméo Poirier’s chill-out-reviving, aptly titled Living Room.