Best album from the 2015 EOY ballot poll that received only ONE top 3 weighted vote

Zomes

from what i've heard via random listening, i enjoy Nadia Reid, Northaunt, Julien Baker, and Matthew Shipp. I own Miami Horror and that's a good one! But I only voted for one of the tracks.

that FIDLAR album was...not good

Lol, I'm responsible for three albums ending up on this list.

FIDLAR was my #1!

i was gonna vote for tribulation but somehow didn't see it in the nomination list and assumed no one had nominated it

Molly Nilsson is good. I quite like Julien Baker too.

three of these are mine

write-in for William D. Drake, who came 3rd on mine and 4th on my gf's. we sort of count as one person, idk

really really really want to hear The Thompson Fields

the Brinkmann is good palate cleansing metallic drone

I will say that I really liked what I heard of the White Out/Nels Cline when preparing my ballot, so I might vote for that

Hiatus Kaiyote SHOULD have been completely my sort of thing but it came off in the end as a bit of a mess. Not ruling out liking it again at some point though

Huh, three NZ releases, w/two of them from Young, Gifted & Broke affiliates.

The Thompson Fields is big epic orchestral jazz, nb k. Washington fans

I love Nels Cline but I couldn't click with this one when I tried.

fuck it dog life's a risk

altho i have only heard three of these tbh

What I heard from Hiatus Kaiyote sounded pretty good, but somehow I never went back and listened to the whole album. (I remember what I heard sounding heavily indebted to Stevie Wonder, even if fed through current technology.)

wow julien baker only got one vote? i seem to recall a long-ish thread for that album

I thought the Hiatus Kaiyote album was going to be good but it was not.

i didn't really get enough proper time with the fatima yamaha album before doing EOY lists, ballots etc, but at this point it'd make my ballot

went for Miami Horror as it's the only one I recognise. that said, it was quite high on my ballot and soundtracked a good portion of my summer

Northaunt was mine - minimalist arctic ambient which, quite bright the first hour and then glacially shifts into darkness.

(*which is quite bright, etc.)

that was my vote for the fatima yamaha album, i'm surprised i was the only one

Hmm well, since I'll be responsible for >7% of the bafflement, I'd better check out all the rest of this stuff too. From a cursory glance, there's plenty of exciting stuff.

Listening Links...

( * = only 1 track online. Plz feel free to correct if possible )

Art Melody - Moogho

FIDLAR - Too – (thread)

Esther Stephens & The Means - Esther Stephens & The Means

Poulenc/Louis Lortie/Hélène Mercier/BBC Phil./Edward Gardner - Piano Concertos; Aubade – (previews)

Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle – (thread)

Maria Schneider Orchestra - The Thompson Fields – (previews), (about), (thread)

Molly Nilsson - Zenith – (previews), (* "1995")

State Champion - Fantasy Error

White Out / Nels Cline - Accidental Sky – (NC thread)

Adult Mom - Momentary Lapse of Happily

Average Rap Band - Stream Of Nonsenseness

Fatima Yamaha - Imaginary Lines

Northaunt - Istid I-II

Oshun - Asase Yaa

Power Monster - White Single Female

Thomas Brinkmann - What You Hear (Is What You Hear)

Tribulation - The Children of the Night

Zomes - NetWorks Album 2: Phase Portraits

muffin - 茂みとイバラ Bushes and Briars – (previews)

Chuck Bettis - Pixel Bleed

Gacha - Send Two Sunsets

Hiatus Kaiyote - Choose Your Weapon – (thread)

Magic Circle - Journey Blind

Matthew Shipp Chamber Ensemble - The Gospel According to Matthew and Michael – (thread)

Miami Horror - All Possible Futures

Nadia Reid - Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs

Sevish - Rhythm and Xen – (thread)

Huh, three NZ releases, w/two of them from Young, Gifted & Broke affiliates.

Yeah man, NZ owns the lower rungs of this poll result. Two of them were me, mostly because it's music I'm likelier to actually hear in the year it came out. Or the Year Of Impact. (Not sure if that phrase is appropriate for this thread or ever.)

julien baker!

I liked a few standalone Hiatus Kaiyote tracks, but didn't get along with the full album.

Art Melody's Moogho has to be my frontrunner from the top of the list. Good solid Burkinese flute-rap

Molly Nilsson by far

fun names! julien baker is fantastic, would've voted for it if I had voted

Some more of the list, in reductive form:

Oshun - absolutely awesome :-D <3 Some background here to the duo, and how they got started.

White Out/Nels Cline - great noise, although for me it never quite seems to get going (but I'm def misunderstanding what 'get going' means in this context)

Northaunt - ambient/found sound, a combination I'd somehow never knowingly heard. Hope it won't seem like faint praise to say, this'd be perfect atmosphere for "natural world" museum exhibits. Maybe less so at Rockheim

Adult Mom - cosy '90s-style indie music, in a good way. Too low!/Others too high!

Fatima Yamaha - really nice, and holds together well for a collection of tracks that were, afaik, recorded over several years

Fantasy Error - raucous folk-rock with gusto (middle tracks esp)

Julien Baker - SAD = GOOD. Obviously gonna win, I will check it out some more, but I'd vote for something much more ignored

Poulenc - didn't know he had a new one out

Wait so someone other than me voted for Swami John Reis and the Blind Shake? Hi whoever you are, you're awesome.

Julien Baker - SAD = GOOD. Obviously gonna win, I will check it out some more, but I'd vote for something much more ignored

lol dont be so sure, i thought she might place when i gave her 50 pts sooooooo

oh i actually really hate that adult mom record

I had been going to ask jokingly why K Vile made the 77 and not Adult Mom, but that would've been a can of worms too far

xxp Looking thru the Julien Baker thread, it's weird that she didn't get at least a few more EOY votes. Ah well.

Hmm this Power Monster one isn't as harsh as all that. Or maybe I need better speakers.

voting for my #1

Poulenc was my #1 but I might actually vote for Zomes (my #2). It became one of my default going-to-sleep albums.

Moving on from Power Monster's less-harsh-than-they-think noise wall - more of a noise fence...

Thomas Brinkmann, whose music defies description. I couldn't really go for it until I read the blurb, which is a piece of genius:

(from Editions Mego, Bandcamp)

...‘What You Hear (Is What You Hear)’ Brinkmann moves further to separate his art, not only from descriptive musical terms that oppress creative output, but also removing the individual or the notion of an author from the act of creation. The 11 tracks on display form a series of self perpetuating rhythms which exist more as sound structures than any kind of traditional sound forms.

Any associations, emotions and reactions are purely in the reasoning of the listener as the artist makes a strong and deliberate move away from intent. This is a strident development in the conceptual thinking of Brinkmann’s solid career, one which places the listener simultaneously inside and outside objective parameters.

There may be jokes (it's art wankery, of course there's jokes), but I love the ideas in this. The question of whether music terminology can damage creativity? Seems dubious, but it's not so far from Joan Crawford Loves Chachi's idea about lazy "near referents", which definitely happens to some music listeners, at least. Dunno if any of that really causes 'worse' music to be made, but it's a point worth raising.

Also, "a strong and deliberate move away from intent" would be a fine defence for any Worst Song nominee, which is why it must be kept under wraps.

(Most recent related thread is thomas brinkman s&d . Apparently he used to use drum loops, what a sellout.)

Neat idea for a poll - Power Monster and Chuck Bettis were on my ballot.

xp kinda reminds me of when mark fell said it takes longer to listen to his tracks then it does to make them

Lol. Well, Spotify's ad breaks may have put a few more albums into that category.

Thanks to all who nominated these (and the unlucky ones that got two EOY votes and thus missed out). I'll try to hear them all before the deadline.

Fidlar - great fun, if you're into screamy rawk. Just don't try to write an accompanying Brinkmann essay.

Nadia Reid - late-night acoustic easy listening melancholy = I've run out of adjectives

Chuck Bettis - these terrible puns on old musicians' names are getting too cryptic. Fortunately the music makes up for it, though it doesn't sound very Chuck Berry-ish.

(from Bandcamp:) Pixel Bleed is an exploration of decay and repetition all done live via Max/Msp with absolutely no overdubs nor sequencers. It is the product of utilizing the pop formula of A/B/A/B or the mild variant A/B/A/C and superimposing it over the cut-up techniques of musique concrete, but all done live in one-take in real-time! THIS IS LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC!

Recorded between 2014-2015 direct to hard drive

Seems obvious when you know, but just that idea is novel to me: that you can keep the structure and throw out almost everything else, and make a weird fucked-up version of pop music. Speaking of which, NZ radio played a "Hotline Bling" remix a while back. Doesn't really matter which one – it kept about half the song unaltered – but the other half replaced the vocal with comedy squeaky bird-type noises, and iirc they were a lot like the sounds in Bettis's "Thirteenth Nocturne", and a great improvement.

Apparently people like Matmos have been doing a similar type of parallel-universe pop for years. While everyone else struggles to learn Max/MSP anyone? (Btw earlier I may have got "found sound" confused with "field recordings", damn descriptive terms)

Zomes NetWorks 2 - lovely album, as everyone's said. Apparently the previous one, NetWorks Album 1: Could-be Music, will be deleted from Soundcloud to make room for album 3, so get it while you can.

There are at least two artists called Zomes - this one (Shawn Bell in Montreal), and the duo of Asa Osborne from Baltimore & Hanna Olivegren from Stockholm.

Gacha - very relaxed Georgian chill-lectro (the country, not the line of kings)

Miami Horror - kinda wish more of it could've been like "Love Like Mine", but then would the funkiness be justified?

Magic Circle - more entertaining if you imagine the band are dressed like
http://s16.postimg.org/9vffjv785/stonecoldmagic.png https://www.sandwichrec.com/PhotoPool/Large/53668_17066.jpg http://s16.postimg.org/6sepghs9h/sam_the_wizard.png

glad zomes is still at it. gotta admit that i stopped paying attention when that group gained a vocalist though

Zomes NetWorks 2 - lovely album, as everyone's said. Apparently the previous one, NetWorks Album 1: Could-be Music, will be deleted from Soundcloud to make room for album 3, so get it while you can.

Ha, has anyone else been saying this?? I was surprised when one other person gave it props. I'm glad more people are getting into it, though! Shawn's a really good composer of guitar music as well. I love "Currents II".

Two people = consensus

Muffin - Japanese folk-country? Or at least, acoustic guitars with added pedal steel on this EP. It's pretty obscure (even in Japan, I gather), but at the same time familiar-sounding, and really nice, judging by the free preview. And it turns out she's supporting Aki Tsuyuko in concert right now in Shimokitazawa and we're all missing it... bummer.

Hiatus Kaiyote - looking forward to hearing what else they've done. There's some cool stuff in here, but maybe trying to throw in too much all at once.

Sevish (Microtonal IDM/Chiptune Guy) - some unexpected Microtonality late in the poll. A pretty easy listen all in all - if anything, maybe it could do with being more strange, but accessible is what Sevish was aiming for (while totally missing the point of blurbs. They're supposed to be pretentious!)

Forget the dance music tropes, this music ain't for DJs - it's for armchairs and road trips. And it's also the perfect music for blocking mind-altering radiation.

Latest thread on xenharmonics etc was Strange scales and temperament, tracks and discussion

That was my #3. I got a lot of replay value out of it.

Glad to see someone else enjoying it. There didn't seem to be that much interest here, except for a couple of people.

Matthew Shipp Chamber Ensemble - not gospel as the title suggests, but improvised chamber jazz! (I'm v tired, sorry.) But S. Victor Aaron's review is a good commentary. As well as this album on Relative Pitch, Shipp's trios had two other nominated albums in 2015 - The Conduct of Jazz and To Duke, from which "In a Sentimental Mood" is on Soundcloud.

Voting for Oshun's Asase Yaa mixtape, after much deliberation and arbitrary snubbing. There's really too much to choose from itt, but tracks like "Șango" really put it over the top for me.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

White Out/Nels Cline - great noise, although for me it never quite seems to get going (but I'm def misunderstanding what 'get going' means in this context)

I listen to it as a psychedelic album, personally.

I voted for the Shipp, but for his chamber jazz I prefer Elastic Aspects, from a couple years back (actually one of my favorite Shipp albums in general). The Gospel According to. . . is a little less accessible.

I never got to hear To Duke. It's not on Spotify and I have had ridiculous expenses this year so I've avoided CD buying, though if I'd seen it at the right moment, I probably would have gotten it. The psychology of ordering it online is just different.

What I heard of the Conduct of Jazz was too jazzy for me.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Whaaaaaaaat >:O ...Nah, it's a good 'un.

That Fatima Yamaha album also on SoundCloud, it turns out.