Total Vibration

Sometimes NPR Music likes to keep the year-end list deal tidy. Top 10. No more, got it? I get it: wheat, chaff, etc. You can read my opening spiel and blurbage for my top 10 “outer sound” records of 2012 there, but get everything else here. At some point, these things just become bullet points of the dumb stuff I listened to, so these are the records that I really hated to cut, feel me?

The list in alphabetical order because ranking is silly. There are also links to stream full albums where available. And by year’s end, I’ll publish my personal top 25 here — you know, the one with “Call Me Maybe” on it (seriously).

The “top ten”…

• Aaron Dilloway, Modern Jester [Hanson]
• Holly Herndon, Movement [RVNG Intl.]
• Jason Lescalleet, Songs About Nothing [Erstwhile]
• Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Motion Sickness Of Time Travel [Spectrum Spools]
• Ricardo Donoso, Assimilating The Shadow [Digitalis]
• Richard Skelton, Verse Of Birds [Sustain Release]
• Scott Walker, Bish Bosch [4AD]
• Six Organs Of Admittance, Ascent [Drag City]
• Swans, The Seer [Young God]

15 more for a neat 25…

• Black to Comm, Earth [De Stijl]
• Clint Heidorn, +33° 58’ 41.85”, -117° 49’ 13.74” (The Oak Tree) [self-released]
• Daniel Bachman, Seven Pines [Tompkins Square]
• Demdike Stare, Elemental [Modern Love]
• Gunn-Truscinski Duo, Ocean Parkway [Three Lobed]
• High Aura’d, Sanguine Futures [Bathetic]
• Jon Mueller, Death Blues [Taiga]
• Julia Holter, Ekstasis [RVNG Intl.]
• Keiji Haino / Jim O’Rourke / Oren Ambarchi, Imikuzushi [Black Truffle]
• Keith Fullerton Whitman, Generators [Editions Mego]
• Kyle Bobby Dunn, Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn [Low Point]
• Lee Gamble, Diversions 1994-1996 [Pan]
• Mike Shiflet, Merciless [Type]
• Nicholas Szczepanik, We Make Life Sad [WeMe]
• Panabrite, Soft Terminals [Digitalis]
• Superstorms, Superstorms [Experimedia]
  

Bonus: 5 reissues/archival releases…

• Don Cherry, Organic Music Society [Caprice]
• John Cage, Shock [EM]
• Maggi Payne, Ahh-Ahh [Root Strata]
• Pauline Oliveros, Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music [Important]
• Tsege Mariam Gebru, Spelt Eigene Komposition [Mississippi]