Jace Clayton is an artist and writer based in New York also known for his work as DJ /rupture.
1
KODAK BLACK, “ZEZE,” FEAT. TRAVIS SCOTT AND OFFSET (Atlantic)
This was a terrible year to be a person of color in America. In this sense, it was like all other years. Rap sonics bypass language to evoke this exhaustion in a form that allows for joy. Here, the sweet-sad beat crafted around a hesitant steel-drum melody underpins the rappers’ ambivalence regarding success under such conditions: “All my niggas locked up, for real, I’m tryna help ’em / When I got a mil’, got me the chills, don’t know what happened / Pop pills, do what you feel, I’m on that zombie.” After writing these sentences, I learned that Black had been indicted for rape and remains incarcerated. In our current atmosphere of airborne toxicity, pop pleasure and civic responsibility can no longer abide such disjointedness.
2
MEARA O’REILLY, HOCKETS FOR TWO VOICES (Cantaloupe)
O’Reilly’s entrancing miniatures for wordless voices employ the age-old technique known as hocketing, which involves the distribution of a single melody across multiple sound sources. The results (O’Reilly performed both parts here) are oneiric and unadorned, rootsy yet extraterrestrial, and sound different depending on where you stand in the room.
3
SOTE, PARALLEL PERSIA (Diagonal)
Iranian musician Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote, builds precise, idiosyncratic sound worlds by revealing the organic connections between digital-audio synthesis and acoustic instruments like the santir.
4
LAUREL HALO, DJ-KICKS (!K7)
Your best options for feeling the pulse of club music in 2019 were to catch Venus X DJing live or to listen to this impeccably woven commercial mix from Halo.
5
CARL STONE, HIMALAYA (Unseen Worlds)
How much music do you really need? Stone’s work suggests that sometimes a second is enough. As he shows on Himalaya, real-time manipulation of tiny samples can yield extraordinary results, ranging from shattered-beat mosaics to oceanic stillness.
6
JENNY HVAL, “ASHES TO ASHES” (Sacred Bones)
This perfectly queered pop song from Norwegian musician-novelist Hval provides its own description, lest we overlook her oeuvre’s superimposition of distancing and intimacy: “It had the most moving chord changes / She was certain the lyrics / Went about burying someone’s ashes / And then having a cigarette.”
7
VESSEL, QUEEN OF GOLDEN DOGS (Tri Angle)
Electronic-music production allows for individual control over nearly every aspect of sound, yet the four-bar loop and other conventions dominate—but, thankfully, not here. A kaleidoscopic, baroque post-rave celebration of diversity
in the making.
8
DJ LAG, UHURU (Good Enuf)
The taut syncopations of gqom, a reductivist house-music strain from Durban, South Africa, continue to ward off four-on-the-floor comforts while sending dancers into a frenzy nonetheless. Lwazi Asanda Gwala, aka DJ Lag, remains the genre’s most in-demand ambassador.
9
GABBER MODUS OPERANDI, HOXXXYA (SVBKVLT)
Creation, distortion, catharsis, repeat: This Indonesian duo named themselves after gabber, a knucklehead Dutch hardcore-techno genre from the early ’90s whose fist-in-the-air adrenaline spikes they reanimate with infectious glee.
10
JENNA SUTELA, NIMIIA VIBIÉ (PAN)
Skittery, asphyxiated flute and contrabass recorder accompanied by glossolalia—Finnish artist Jenna Sutela’s two-track, twenty-five-minute-long EP provides standout weirdness even (or especially) without its pitch-perfect posthuman backstory involving bacteria, machine learning, and ersatz Martian-language revivalism.