Our Favorite Albums, 2021: Individual Contributor Lists & Reflections, Part 1
Tone Glow writers reflect on 2021 through albums, songs, and more
Each of our writers was asked to submit a list of their 10 favorite albums from this year. They also had the option to list their 10 favorite songs and to create another list of any 10 things of their choosing. Below, find reflections and individual lists from our contributors, listed in alphabetical order.
Vanessa Ague
I’ve always thought Earth was majestic, but I don’t think I fully realized the full effect of its beauty until 2021. It’s a dark morning, 4AM to be exact, on the endless highway between Yellow Springs, OH and Columbus, OH. I can’t see much. There’s an abandoned shed on the side of the road that pops up out of nowhere, headlights blaring into my astigmatism-affected eyes, and miles of open land that feels almost too open, so open it’ll swallow me whole. But again, I can’t see much. Everything is shrouded in midnight black, stars glimmering on the asphalt. We get to the airport. Columbus airport is curious to me because the security guards ask me if I’m ok being patted down before they pat me down. Perhaps it’s that good old Midwest niceness. I get on the plane and I still can’t see much. We’re inching toward the runway. We turn and I look out the window. The sky is bright red and pink and orange, exploding. I turn around—behind me, it’s still a gaping hole of nothingness. But in front of me, a gleaming orb of magical color. We fly right into it, right into a seemingly infinite number of pink, fluffy clouds. Is this real? I can’t believe what I’m seeing. We’re floating on a sea of cotton candy and I’m looking out into this fantasy world, a planet I’ve lived on but never really known. It’s a rocky start but I still take out my phone (on airplane mode, of course) and try to snap a picture. I swiftly drop my phone and don’t get a photo until that 10-minute blip of a sunrise has long passed. It’s alright. I’ll never look at my surroundings the same way again.
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Brendon Randall-Myers & Miki Sawada - A Kind of Mirror (slashsound)
Grouper - Shade (Kranky)
Yvette Janine Jackson - Freedom (Fridman Gallery)
Karl Larson & Scott Wollschleger - Dark Days (New Focus Recordings)
Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt - Made Out of Sound (Palilalia Records)
Body/Dilloway/Head - Body/Dilloway/Head (Three Lobed Recordings)
Éliane Radigue - Occam Ocean 3 (Shiiin)
Catherine Lamb - Muto Infinitas (Another Timbre)
Patrick Shiroishi - Hidemi (American Dreams Records)
Pamela Z - A Secret Code (Neuma Records)
Top 10 Walks I Took in 2021
Laps around Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn
Stairs to the top of Mount Bonnell in Austin
Walking three miles to the Williamsburg Pier in Brooklyn (bonus points if it’s at sunset)
Getting lost in the Shoal Creek Greenbelt in Austin
Meandering around MASS MoCA and downtown North Adams, MA
Glen Helen trails in Yellow Springs, OH
Laps at Foote Park in Branford, CT (the park I grew up walking in)
Perusing the Wildflower Center in Austin
Laps around McCarren Park in Brooklyn
Walking around farmlands in Bennington, VT
Matthew Blackwell
Not much to say about 2021 other than good riddance to bad times. It’s amazing that these people made these things ever, and especially in our continually straitening circumstances:
Top 10 Albums of 2021
RP Boo - Established! (Planet Mu)
L’Rain - Fatigue (Mexican Summer)
Keith Rowe - Absence (Erstwhile)
RAP - Junction (Jolly Discs)
IZ Band - Drops by Old Heaven Books (Old Heaven Books)
Éliane Radigue - Occam Ocean 3 (Shiiin)
Aaron Dilloway and Lucrecia Dalt - Aaron and Lucy (Hanson)
Anne Gillis - “…” (Art Into Life)
L’ocelle mare - Sans Chemin (Shelter Press)
Oren Ambarchi - Live Hubris (Black Truffle)
Top 10 Songs of 2021
RXK Nephew - “American tterroristt” (NewBreedTrapperRecords)
Alan Licht - “A Symphony Strikes the Moment You Arrive” (Room40)
Irreversible Entanglements - “Keys to Creation” (International Anthem)
Aryo Adhianto - “1975” (Divisi62)
Richard Youngs - “Sudden Thoughts on Slow Insurrection” (Blue Tapes)
Pamela Z - “He Says Yes (from Echo)” (Neuma Records)
Jim O’Rourke - “Machine Sapora Pt. 3” (Steamroom)
Sarah Rosamond Hartnett and Kieron Livingstone - “The Changing of the Guard” (Ghost Lore of Britain)
Necking - “Abyssal Joy” (Marginal Frequency)
oxhy - “cannot see” (xquisite releases)
Dominic Coles
Recently, I’ve been thinking over a passage from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. He writes: “The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic: the reverse would be better.” Voluptuous life. It’s become hard to imagine what exactly that means. And art ascetic? There have been many ascetic musics through history, but somehow the compositions produced in that vein this year hit differently. It’s been a year for barren music—a music that is reduced to the point of near total desolation. A music whose contents are extreme, caustic, fragile, uncanny and uncompromising. Later in the same text Adorno writes that: “To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality… the most advanced arts push this impoverishment to the brink of silence.” This year my ears have been ringing with music that is spacious, cut with silence, and constituted by an extreme and uncompromising material specificity. The records below share a penchant for sparse, fractured forms and focused materials. But curious listeners, have hope yet! These releases are not just, “as crepuscularly grey as after sunset and the end of the world.” They also contain moments of levity, of humor, and joy. They open themselves to the world and are constituted by it. This means that these works take on all that is bleak and rotten, but also all that is full of warmth, possibility, humor, and connection. And those moments in this music are moments of voluptuousness that can re-enchant us to the world. For all that’s happened—for all that is happening—there have been glimmers of light, of friendship, of community, and possibility. Voluptuous life. For now we can dream of what exactly that might mean, and when—but we can also find it living in the crevices and cracks of this music. Perhaps it will blossom into something? And perhaps we can play our part in that growth too?
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Jean-Luc Guionnet - l'épaisseur de l'air (Thin Wrist)
Yan Jun & Axel Dorner - i agree (self-released)
Kieran Daly - A few sequential electroacoustic contributions (Madacy Jazz)
John Wall - v02 Variations [I-IV] (self-released)
Babe Roots - Through We (System Music)
Sydney Spann - Oceanic/E.L.M. (Reading Group)
McKain / Murray / Radichel / Suarez / Weeks - The Running of the Bulls (Radical Documents)
Eli Neuman-Hammond - Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent (Edition Wandelweiser)
Leo Suarez - Circle Tension (Dinzu Artefacts)
Bryan Eubanks & Xavier Lopez - Natural Realms (Sacred Realism)
Mark Cutler
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Lolina - Fast Fashion (Deathbomb Arc)
THIS Ensemble - Brown Paper Business (Shame File Music)
Joseph Shabason - The Fellowship (Western Vinyl)
Li Weisi - 车间四重奏：警报器操作指南 / Workshop Quartet : Guide of Hand Operated Siren (self-released)
d’Eon - Bijoux (self-released)
Christina Vantzou & Lieven Marens - Serrisme (Edições CN)
Li Daiguo - 笑功 / Xiao Gong (WV Sorcerer Productions)
Downwardly Mobile Renaissance Man - Seeing The Elephant (Regional Bears)
Yan Jun / Zhu Wenbo - twice (Erstwhile)
Terrine - Les Problèmes Urbains (Bruit Direct Disques)
Marshall Gu
2021 was weirder than 2020 for me. At least in 2020, we fell into a routine of permanent anxiety and isolation. By contrast, here’s the physical timeline of 2021 living in Ontario: we began the new year with a state of emergency and government-mandated lockdown which was phased out and then promptly followed by another shutdown that took us straight into June. And now, here’s my mental timeline of 2021: boundless and ceaseless depression for the first half that seemed to stretch on for eons! And just as everything opened up, the year seemed to just end with the new year looming with uncertainty.
I turned 30 this year, an event which I’ve been dreading the moment I turned 29. I don’t remember the exact words, but speaking with my high school English teacher as a depressed teen, she said “your twenties will be the best years of your life” as an assurance to that things would, in fact, get better. They did: my twenties were confusing and wonderful and teenage Marsh would be thrilled to hear she was right about it.
Here’s the thing, almost 15 years later: I hope she was wrong. I hope she was wrong that my twenties will be the best years, and that my thirties will be excellent and my forties and fifties beyond that. And to ensure that they are, I’m going to write lots, read lots, listen lots, lift lots (of weights) and love lots. My favourite part about writing for Tone Glow was that it gave me space to say all this. Because otherwise, I would have just held it in my heart of hearts. But now that it’s out there, it’s like a promise to myself.
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Binker Golding, John Edwards, Steve Noble - Moon Day (Byrd Out)
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch)
Dawn Richard - Second Line (Merge)
DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches & One-Offs (Comatonse)
Giant Claw - Mirror Guide (Orange Milk)
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introverted (Age 101)
Pardoner - Came Down Different (Bar/None)
RP Boo - Established! (Planet Mu)
Skee Mask - Pool (Ilian Tape)
Wild Up - Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine (New Amsterdam)
My Top 10 Books I Read This Year
Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
Elfriede Jelinek - Three Plays
Eugene O’Neill - Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Greil Marcus - Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
Robert Christgau - Is It Still Good to Ya?
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps
Sasha Geffen - Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
Tobias Wolff - The Night in Question
Vivi Hansen
Trying to be an advocate for The New and measuring albums against their potential future significance felt like a uniquely tedious, unrewarding ritual this year. “Nothing felt exciting” puts too much onus on the artists themselves, who were undoubtedly as exhausted as the rest of us; it’s perhaps more honest to say that my own life had so little room for spontaneity and catharsis that “excitement” just felt like either a false promise or a veiled threat. On the other hand, I’ve also come to believe that a professed desire to see “innovation” on a near-constant basis is often just a way of intellectualizing one’s own personal appetite for novelty. Thus, I will not apologize for the presence of an archival Prince album in my top albums list, nor the fact that my Top Ten Songs list is roughly 50% indie rock this year. The more you call me “normie,” the stronger I become, for it confirms that I am all that you fear within yourself.
All that being said, I did experience the Shock Of The New once this year, and that was in reaction to the uncomfortably funny, free-associative amorality of RXK Nephew, a guy who would almost definitely refer to me by a slur and released a diss track about his ex-girlfriend 48 hours after she died. I’d imagine a lot of critics in my position would use this as a jumping-off point to try and unpack their own moral standards (or lack thereof) in relation to the art they consume, and hey, good for them! If you or a media conglomerate that you represent wish to hear my own thoughts on the matter, I will gladly produce an essay-length reflection on this topic for only double my current blurb rate (available upon request from toneglow@gmail.com.)
One final note: even a couple of years ago, my “comfort genre” was ambient music and not indie rock. Do you think that that maybe speaks to some kind of broader sea change or even decline in ambient music? Maybe someone should write something about that.
Top Albums of 2021
DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches & One-Offs (Comatonse)
Injury Reserve - By the Time I Get to Phoenix (self-released)
RXK Nephew - Slitherman Activated (Towhead)
Telex - This is Telex (Mute)
Cannibal Corpse - Violence Unimagined (Metal Blade)
Really From - Really From (Topshelf)
Prince - Welcome 2 America (NPG Records)
Top 10 Songs of 2021
RXK Nephew - “SlitherMan SOLO Set” (New Breed Trapper)
Cannibal Corpse - “Inhumane Harvest” (Metal Blade)
Another Michael - “New Music” (Run for Cover)
Little Kid - “John Arnott” (Solitaire Recordings)
Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen - “Like I Used To” (Jagjaguwar)
The Mountain Goats - “Mobile” (Merge)
serpentwithfeet - “Fellowship” (Secretly Canadian)
CFCF feat. Sarah Bonito - “Heaven” (BGM Solutions)
Ivy Hollivana - “Genesis” (self-released)
Really From - “Apartment Song” (Topshelf)
The Remaining 10 Comedians I Still Feel Okay About Liking
Tom Scharpling
Tim Heidecker
Bob Odenkirk
Chris Fleming
Eric Andre
Chris Gethard
Patti Harrison
Nathan Fielder
my friend Aurora, who I've never actually seen perform but I'm sure is probably alright
YOU! if you're a comedian
Vincent Jenewein
How much music was there in 2021? Too much, too much? Too little, too little? Did you listen to all the albums, or none of the albums? Have you perhaps, like me, dialectically, listened to all the music and yet also none of the music? Of course, the music was there, and it was “pretty good”—but did it change up your musical situation, did it make you reconsider things that you thought to be true about music? Among a certain group of people—always eager to put Mark Fisher’s hypothesis of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ to rest—there appears to be the received wisdom that somehow, somewhere a nineteen-year-old is refiguring music as we know it, breaking boundaries, opening up new grounds, all unbeknown to us. But do even those that exclaim this truly, truly believe in it? Of course, many people believe that the search for musical novelty is passé anyways—who really cares when there is so much music, and so much of it is “pretty good”? Who even has the time and energy to look for excellence, radicality and progress, when we are so drowned in prettygoodness?
For a while now, I’ve now held the opinion that, for a variety of reasons, progress in music has become less a matter of rare geniuses coming forth with radical innovations, but rather a kind of scientific research project—specific groups of people chipping away at the tree of knowledge in the tiniest increments, amounts that probably appear irrelevant to anyone not engaged in that particular project. The fragmentation of music into a myriad of micro-scenes has even made end-of-year lists like this appear suspect. The best, the newest, the most radical, according to whom? The person that has listened to every old school inspired UK garage record? They’ll hear shades and differences in their specific niche of music that no one else will.
Same with the person that sees their musical taste represented in, for example, a best-of-sad-whispy-female-singer-songwriter list or that one person that has compiled a top-100 of the most obscure Jersey Club SoundCloud bootlegs. Not only is it impossible for all of these people to come to agreement over a common canon, social media’s “filter bubbles” have made it so that there is barely even a space where they could discuss their musical differences. Almost every week I come across artists, even in genres that I know well, that I have never heard of and that yet, to my surprise, seem to have amassed a substantial and loyal social media following. In 2021, it is possible to reach most of the planet’s people that are potentially interested in your particular niche micro-genre. Marginal musics reach more people than ever before, but everywhere, marginal musics are parasitically feeding on their own histories and traditions, seemingly unable to overcome the burden of their own history.
Inevitably, my own list is also embedded in such micro genres and their traditions—where I hear timbral and compositional innovations, others might just hear “more of that woozy ambient stuff”. But, even when keeping all of this standpoint epistemology nonsense in mind, I do sincerely think that some of the records on my top 10 list have managed to put forth some objective micro-innovations. Listening to, for example, Blawan’s high-pressure modularized timbres and limb-twisting rhythms on Soft Waahls; Shifted’s spectral miniatures on Constant Blue Light; Lorraine James’ abstracted bass sculptures on Reflections; Éliane Radigue’s sublime microtimbres on Occam Ocean; Tau Contrib’s haptic sonic architectures on Encode or Priori’s primordial trance-bliss on Your Own Power: I do think that, even if we perhaps aren’t yet winning the battle for a future music yet unknown to our ears, there are, at the very least, people who are trying. And that is already quite something.
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Blawan - Soft Waahls (Ternesc)
Éliane Radigue - Occam Ocean 3 & 4 (Shiiin)
Sky H1 - Azure (AD 93)
tau contrib - encode (Sferic)
Calibre - Feeling Normal (Signature Records)
Loraine James - Reflection (Hyperdub)
Priori - Your Own Power (NAFF)
Hoavi - Invariant (Peak Oil)
Jim O’Rourke - Too Compliment (DDS)
Shifted - Constant Blue Light (Avian)
Top 5 ambient-ish consumable music-products of 2021 that the ambient-industrial-complex spat out into the ambient-sphere for the countless legions of ambient-enjoyers, and most importantly, all those that have continued to adore and savor every bit of the immortal science of Twitter’s ‘ambient discourse’
Nueen - Nova Llum & Circular Sequence (Quiet Time Tapes)
mu tate - Let My Put Myself Together (Experiences Ltd.)
Perila - How Much Time Is It Between You And Me? (Smalltown Supersound)
Jake Muir - Mana (Ilian Tape)
You'll Never Get To Heaven - Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train (Séance Centre)
Top 20 techno and house labels that weren’t funded by global hedge funds or the CIA and kept real techno and house alive in 2021 without releasing any business euro hard trance tschtranz, and their respective best releases this year
Regelbau (C.K - Tracking Patience)
Blundar (Komet / Byetone - Untitled)
OOM Records (Jacobworld - Circadian Rhythm)
Perlon (Bruno Pronsato - Do It At Your Funeral)
Novel Sound (Levon Vincent - Cyclops TRX)
Klockworks (Stef Mendesidis - Stalker)
Wandlung (Morten B - Handlung 002)
Workshop(Willow - Workshop 30)
Spazio Disponibile (Mike Parker - The Devil’s Curators)
In Dust We Trust (Chaos In The CBD - Brainstorm)
Amphia (Cristi Cons - Out of Cycle)
Delsin (VC-118A - Spiritual Machines)
Mote Evolver (The Lady Machine - Magnify)
Clone (Head Front Panel - Phonetic)
10 fiction and theory books I read this year that have taught me something about music and/or the musical nature of language
Mircea Cartarescu - Solenoid
Pascale Criton - Gilles Deleuze: La Pensée-Musique
Eliane Radigue - Intermediary Spaces
Marcel Proust - Swann’s Way
Iris Dankmeyer - Die Erotik des Ohrs
Thomas Pynchon - Against The Day
Maryanne Amacher - Selected Writings
Mark J. Butler - Playing With Something That Runs
Isabella Van Elferen - Timbre
Lucie Faulerová - Staubfänger
Jinhyung Kim
As 2021 went on, I spent more and more time on books than on music. Erika Balsom's monograph on James Benning's Ten Skies is a must-read—no other text has made me think as much about what the defining qualities of film as a medium are; in general, all the titles published so far in Fireflies Press' Decadent Editions series are phenomenal. Incalculable Loss is a provactive collection of (anti-)theoretical riffs on cannibalism, sociolinguistics, experimental video games, and more; Canopy’s lush illustrations of deeply unsettling personal allegory haunt me to this day. I owe both to my partner, who got me them as gifts (’cause she’s the best). Xiaowei Wang does a terrific job tracing the sinuous geopolitical threads that make up the fabric of 21st-century global capitalism in Blockchain Chicken Farm. Feyerabend’s Against Method is a classic in the philosophy of science—think Kuhn, but with even more radical epistemological claims. And anyone with any interest in the history and legacy of the NYC art underground should pick up this wonderful anthology of interviews by Alan Licht. Oh, also: props to Fred Jameson for explaining Deleuze and Guattari to me.
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Jack Callahan/Asha Sheshadri - Misfired Empathy (Stellage)
Dominic Coles - everyone thinks their dreams are interesting (Edition Wandelweiser)
Field Dept. - Room Assignment #2 (Modern Concern)
Duncan Harrison - Two Channels of Unedited Voice Memos (Takuroku)
Nick Hoffman - Parallel Bars (Pilgrim Talk)
L&M - Recordings 11.1.2020 - 2.1.2021 (self-released)
Liv Landry, Sean McCann & Eric Schmid - St. Francis (Recital)
Museos de la Bomba e Soledad - Revolutionary List (4) Venice Biennale (purge.xxx)
Jana Rush - Painful Enlightenment (Planet Mu)
Yol - viral dogs and cats (Crow Versus Crow)
Top 10 Songs of 2021
brakence - “argyle” (Columbia)
Grouper - “Kelso (Blue sky)” (Kranky)
Hakushi Hasegawa + Yukichikasaku/men - “Sukuinote” (Moment Scale Inc.)
Jeph Jerman - “Simple” (tsss tapes)
jinhyung kim/zachariah cook - “live 01072021” (self-released)
NTsKi - “On Divination in Sleep (feat. Dove) (Giant Claw remix)” (Orange Milk)
Old Nick - “A New Generation of Vampiric Conspiracies” (Grime Stone)
Andrea Pensado - “Lucid Joy” (Refulgent Sepulchre)
Rx Papi - “Therapy Session” (self-released)
Max Syedtollan/Plus-Minus Ensemble - “The Remainder” (GLARC)
Top 10 Books I Read in 2021
Manuel Arturo Abreu - Incalculable Loss (INCA Press)
hannah baer - trans girl suicide museum (Hesse Press)
Erika Balsom - Ten Skies (Fireflies Press)
Karine Bernadou - Canopy (Retrofit/Big Planet Comics)
Paul Feyerabend - Against Method (Verso)
Fredric Jameson - The Political Unconscious (Cornell U. Press)
Alan Licht - Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995–2020 (Blank Forms Editions)
Agustín Fernández Mallo - The Things We've Seen (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Xiaowei Wang - Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSGO x Logic)
Frances Yates - Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (U. Chicago Press)
Joshua Minsoo Kim
I was aiming to make a “Top 10 Top 10 Lists” to capture the full breadth of my arts diet this year but I ended up with seven. I could’ve easily made three more (a list for Brazilian songs, a list for dance music, a list for arts-related books) but decided that I’m tired and don’t need to spend more time thinking about any of this. I don’t feel dejected, though; it's better for me to embrace ephemerality lest I become consumed by the unending task that is cataloguing everything. No hangdog face here. This is all to say: Here’s to a 2022 where self-burdening doesn’t become my undoing.
Top 7 Top 10 Lists to Summarize My 2021 in Art:
Top 10 Albums/Songs of 2021
Hakushi Hasegawa - “わたしをみて” (Moment Scale)
James Emrick - Worlds (Kinet)
underscores - boneyard aka fearmonger (self-released)
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Revolution Shuffle (Erstwhile)
Yvette Janine Jackson - Freedom (Fridman Gallery)
Wild Up - Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine (New Amsterdam)
Juçara Marçal - Delta Estácio Blues (Mais Um / QTV)
Índio da Cuíca - Malandro 5 Estrelas (QTV)
Hanne Lippard - PigeonPostParis (Boomkat Editions | Documenting Sound)
Barn Sour - Belgian Gelding (Penultimate Press)
Top 10 Archival Releases
Henry Kawahara - Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm: The Essential Henry Kawahara (EM Records)
Mário Rui Silva - Stories from Another Time 1982 - 1988 (Time Capsule)
Rod Summers - Mythen (Slowscan)
Various Artists - Heisei No Oto – Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age (1989-1996) (Music From Memory)
Mesías Maiguashca - Música para cinta magnética (+) instrumentos (1967-1989) (Buh Records)
“Blue” Gene Tyranny - Degrees of Freedom Found (Unseen Worlds)
Remko Scha - Guitar Mural 1 feat. The Machines (Black Truffle)
Arsenije Jovanović - Entire Bandcamp Archive
Uman - Chaleur Humaine (Freedom To Spend)
Germán Bringas - Tunel Hacia Tí (Smiling C)
Top 10 Amapiano Songs
Busiswa (ft. Mr JazziQ) - “Makazi” (single edit)
Cassper Nyovest (ft. Abidoza, Boohle) - “Siyathandana”
DJ Sumbody (ft. Drip Gogo, The Lowkeys) - “Iyamemeza”
Focalistic & Mr JazziQ (ft. Lady Du, Mellow & Sleazy) - “Gupta”
De Mthuda & Sir Trill (ft. Da Muziqal Chef) - “Emlanjeni”
Junior Taurus (ft. Sino Msolo) - “Top 7”
Aymos (ft. Mawhoo) - “Olwangempela”
Davido & Focalistic - “Champion Sound”
DJ Cleo (feat. Bucy Radebe) - “Gcina Impilo Yam”
Tyla (ft. DJ Lag & Kooldrink) - “Overdue”
Top 10 Korean Releases
Sumin - Miniseries (EMA)
aespa - Savage (SM Entertainment)
Seventeen - Your Choice (Pledis)
STAYC - “ASAP” & “Stereotype” (High Up Entertainment)
Parannoul - To See the Next Part of the Dream (Longinus)
Joyul - Earwitness (Helicopter / Psychic Liberation)
NET GALA - 신파 SHINPA (SVBKVLT)
Liu Lee - Jasmine (NBDKNW)
Ryu Hankil + Kim Changhee - In the Mouth of Micro-Improvisation (dingn\dents)
Choi Joonyong’s Tone Glow live set
Top 10 Films Released in 2021 (World Premiere)
The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
The Tsugua Diaries (Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro)
Worlds (Isaac Goes)
Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance)
Water from the Tremulous Stream (Javiera Cisterna)
FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset - VIOLET] (Nicolas Schmidt)
Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky)
A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (Zhu Shengze)
Delphine’s Prayers (Rosine Mftego Mbakam)
Top 10 Older Films I Watched in 2021
A Day in Barbagia (Vittorio De Seta, 1958)
Gestures (Hannah Wilke, 1974)
Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)
Looking for an Angel (Akihiro Suzuki, 1999)
Love Hotel (Shinji Sômai, 1985)
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
Petit Mal (Betzy Bromberg, 1977)
Sopyonje (Im Kwon-taek, 1993)
The Stone Wedding (Mircea Veroiu & Dan Pița, 1973)
V.W. Vitesse Women (Claudine Eizykman, 1974)
10 Interviews I Conducted in 2021 That I Keep Thinking About
Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro (unpublished)
HTRK
Yvette Janine Jackson
Low
Lustmord
Valérie Massadian (unpublished)
Rosine Mftego Mbakam
Rhayne Vermette
Terre Thaemlitz
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Sunik Kim
In February of 1946 I was felled by a heart attack. For the first time in my entire life I was brought suddenly to a halt, confined to a life in bed.
Blood circulation sluggish. Thinking slow.
Ahead lay several months of absolute sameness. I was even glad.
I thought, At last I’ll be able to take a look at myself, glance backward, think things over. And I’ll understand everything about myself, about life, about the forty-eight years that have been lived.
Let me say at once: I understood nothing. Not about life. Not about myself. Not about the forty-eight years that had been lived.
Nothing—except perhaps for one thing.
That life had passed at a gallop, without a backward glance, in constant transit, leaving one train to chase after another. My attention riveted all the time to the second hand.
Hurrying somewhere—Not to be late. Managing to get here. Managing to get away from here.
Fragments of childhood, segments of youth, strata of maturity, flash by as from a train window. Bright, varied, whirling, full of color.
—Sergei Eisenstein (from his autobiography, Immoral Memories)
Top 10 Albums of 2021
Jana Rush - Painful Enlightenment (Planet Mu)
Jean-Luc Guionnet - Totality (TakuRoku)
DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches & One-Offs (Comatonse)
Julius Hemphill - The Boyé Multi-National Crusade For Harmony (New World Records)
Lucy Liyou - Practice (Full Spectrum)
Klein - Harmattan (PentaTone)
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Revolution Shuffle (Erstwhile)
Max Syedtollan - Four Assignments (& Other Pieces) (GLARC)
Richard Youngs - CXXI (Black Truffle)
Haptic - Weird Undying Annihilation (Notice Recordings)
Top 10 Songs of 2021
Trippie Redd & Playboi Carti - “Miss the Rage” (TenThousand Projects)
Earl Sweatshirt - “Tabula Rasa (ft. Armand Hammer)” (Tan Cressida)
Organ Tapes - “AWM, AWY” (self-released)
Lucy Liyou - “You are every memory” (Full Spectrum Records)
John Wall - “v02 [ II ]” (self-released)
Elysia Crampton Chuquimia - “Sombra Blanca Misteriosa y Rara” (self-released)
Jana Rush - “Moanin’” (Planet Mu)
Klein - “baller alert” (self-released)
bela - “칠채 chilchae” (Appærent)
RXK Nephew - “Early Age Death” (Towhead)
Top 10 Films I Watched This Year
The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (Heiny Srour, 1974)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1927)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
L’eau de la Seine (Teo Hernández, 1983)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962)
Spacy (Takashi Ito, 1981)
Matthew LaBarbera
nibble at the continents. The needle rides towards the center.
When I was younger, I was always deeply frustrated, when in the wake of some tragedy or personal calamity, someone—an always well-meaning someone—declares, “every end is just a new beginning.” Not merely for its triteness, its peerless position among the clichés we offer up in the wake of grief and trauma, but for the impersonal materialism that lies at its core. Because it is certainly the case that from the atomic perspective, every dissolution of a thing begets a new formation. That corpse I planted last year in my garden, it will sprout and it will bloom. I cry when I read that Rossetti poem, but this is nothing, no solace, for me, the subject subjected to experience. Nor does it really give anything to those flame-farewelled. The sentiment provides nothing but a nihilism to offer in response to the call of the dumbfoundering abyss. Après moi, le deluge.
“Vade retro!” “Vade ultra!”
No, it is painfully obvious to me that ends are ends. That they are not new beginnings does not mean they are sharp demarcations, a walk off a cliff. Rather, our ends are odd, non-conformable—they overflow and spill out of themselves and whatever compartments we seek to secret them away in. They seep out into the present and launch themselves far into the future. An age that has not yet ended is an open wound and our future histories a description of a scar.
As this year winds to close and winds up to 2022, not one among us believes, despite all the celebration and sabrage on New Year’s Eve, that what has happened in 2021 will be cordoned off, neatly sectioned and contained. Just as the same was true every year preceding for all of human time. Even arbitrary ends (Zeno’s “last cigarette”) demand their closure. And we provide it; we march into the New Year carrying all the rest of the years on our back. Things come back, always, even if they have well and truly ended, in some form or another. A welcome and welcoming specter or blooded ghoul—as the ceaseless parade of reboots and revivals makes evident, not even IP may enjoy its repose.
What do I hope to achieve by thinking of ends? As one might expect, I don’t know. I think we desire closures—neat ones that beget neat beginnings—because we have a fear of having gone nowhere, ending up exactly where we started, or worse, being nowhere, lessened, caught without orientation in undifferentiated experience. We all have our preoccupations with an end or the end, but where our living is forced to be in mediis rebus, our thinking can at least pretend to extend towards a beginning. Of course, what we find at the beginning is already in circular motion.
The Thalian hypothesis of all things flowing from water, the Heraclitian notion of becoming, and the Democritian doctrine of atomism all point to a universe in recurrent flux, without rigid terminations. The Stoics imagined the universe cycling like a phoenix in ekpyrosis. In Aristotle’s Problemata, he remarks on a curious phrase from another philosopher, “Alcmaeon says that the reason why men die is that they cannot join the beginning to the end.” Jean-Pierre Vernant, commenting on a fragment of Alcmaeon describing the relationship of blood’s circulation in the body to death, writes, “In allowing the end to meet the beginning, the exercise of memory becomes the conquest of salvation, deliverance from becoming and death.” I am inching my way towards the beginning and end of time.
Philo of Alexandria, writing in the time of the historical Jesus, tells us:
It was God’s will to prolong the existence of nature by immortalizing the kinds and allowing them a share in eternity. Hence he brought, indeed hastened, the beginning to the end and caused the end to return to the beginning; for from plants comes the fruit, as it were from the beginning the end, and from fruit the seed which contains within itself the plant, that is, from the end the beginning.
Notions of the cycle, the wheeling of stars and seasons, seem baked into the thinking of our cultures. Mythology from any culture will tell you why the seasons recur, why events that only take place in certain instances will do so again, faithful to a logic that reaches from the farthest shell of the stars to the banks of the Nile. In Polybius’s Histories, governments themselves are subject to the dictates of the cycle, even as he claims Rome’s tripartite structure will safeguard it from collapse.
Of the global religions, Christianity is perhaps the most anxiety-wracked of them all. For while there can be no such thing as Christian tragedy (“a notion in itself paradoxical,” cf. George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy), Christian thought has long been plagued with the millennial curse (“Forget chiliasm, I just wanna chill”). The central narrative of Christianity, that of the Bible, is precisely that, a narrative with all its entailments: beginning, middle, and end. The cycle is meant to be broken and it is predicted to be broken, so when will it be broken? Forever doomed by the sense of an ending, ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt.
Many scholars have commented on the Church’s efforts to thwart wide acceptance of specific dates for the Apocalypse. The reasons are clear: firstly, one might wish to avoid the chaos in society that an imminent end would bring about, and secondly, one might also wish to keep their followers around when the imminent end is disconfirmed. I find in the Très Riches Heures of the Limbourg Brothers one way to escape this problem. In very clear ways it reestablishes the power of the cycle, reasserting the perfect place and proportion of everything from the zodiac down to the serfs in the fields. This is what it means to live on a wheel turning into the future. Another strategy to avoid this is advanced by theologian Rudolf Bultmann, that is to imagine that “In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.”
The problems with an eschatology, either imminent or immanent, is that it must necessarily build to something. Each of the early apocalyptic prophecies of Christianity had required stages through which we must pass before the end may actually come. For instance, in Adso of Montier-en-Der’s De ortu et tempore Antichristi, he tells us quite explicitly that the end cannot come about until a Frankish emperor unites the world in peace and then renounces his sovereignty on the Mount of Olives. Later writers would revise the signs to fit the times, but there were always thresholds that must be passed before the ends may pass. The needle rides towards the center.
I wonder how much of our idea of progress actually comes from our belief in apocalypse. By way of the translatio studii, France and eventually all of the major European powers, came to see themselves as the inheritors and finishers of the best of the world’s knowledge, a likely driver behind the idea of ‘The West’ to begin with. Here, life and civilization cease to be cyclical but instead climb towards greater heights. This culminates, perhaps, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in which we find that “Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.” Hearing this, I long for cycles again, anything to avoid being trapped in the unceasing “Germanic world.” We mistake process for progress, the latter of which, if it can be said to hold any purchase at all in the realm of life and experience, must be necessarily asymptotic. I only know revolutions from newspapers.
Is this all this merely a sequence of intricate evasions? I think of this as the pilgrim’s problem. You walk the road. And you keep walking. You recite your prayers. And you keep walking. Your sandals slicken with blood. And you keep walking. Your staff splinters against the rocks. And you keep walking. Your soft flesh singes and shrinks and furrows with thirst. And you keep walking. Your prayers pass from your lips and heart to the whole of your body. Cracking of limbs, lisping of road beneath step, whispering of tatterdemalion attire, all marshalled into service, attending to your orison. And finally you scrape yourself up to the precipice, where the saint many years ago exploded into a million jacaranda petals—fluttering down into the valleys, blessing all they touched—while her soul ascended, borne on a small scrap of silver nimbus, into heaven. You look out at the ravines and gullies, this everlasting universe of things, and you take in that holy reek, the odor of sanctity. If there were any rectitude to it, you would be struck down on the spot. But you will not burst in glory nor rise like incense. You are no saint. You have a life to live. You have to go home. But what do you really have to return to?
“Will there be beds for me and all who seek?” “Yea, beds for all who come.”
Perhaps it is running away from an ending that will get us there sooner. The slow shuffle and the headlong rush will soon each find themselves at quietus. I find myself ambivalent. I do not want to actually dance the Radioactive Flesh (“Tendrás que aguantar hasta el fin”), but it’s impossible to not feel it compel once you hear the music. And though, I might have railed against cycles earlier, or later, there’s still an obvious comfort in them. I just want it all, the succulent fruits leaning low and the rarae aves bespangling the boughs. All the indulgence of the emperor, all the wisdom of the caloyer.
He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.
Most of our modern media—recorded music, film, the novel, video games—all bear this same ambivalence towards cycles and ends. Obviously, they all end, and they do so in ways that something like sculpture does not, but they also insist we revisit them, go through the whole rigmarole again. The needle rides towards the center, the side ends, you flip the record, the needles rides towards the center, the side ends, you flip the record, the needle rides towards the center. You re-watch A Christmas Story or Love Actually or something similarly digestible every year with your family. You re-devour the same books, and you endlessly replay their dramas in your imagination.
The video games I played this year largely belonged to the conceptual/mechanical category of the roguelite. It’s a type of game design in which the end and the cycle are brought quite near to each other. You finish the game quickly, either by ignominious defeat or valorous victory, but that is never the end. Instead, you are meant to start right back at the beginning, fresh again for a new run. Repetition with a difference. Even the most difficult and mechanically frustrating of these games offer an easy comfort; you come to understand and eventually master the cycles, each individual play-through finding its greatest meaning as a part of the trajectory of your total play. Though, you can never really exceed the end of the game.
One of the few non-roguelite games (though it also might be one) I played this year was Inscryption. A somewhat disarming experience and good in some of the specific ways games can be, but what kept me returning to it, in play and mentation, was its attitude towards ends. It was one of the few games I have played that actively sought to dramatize this tension between the comfort and enjoyment of a cycle, one the player gains increasing command over, and the malaise and frustration of being unable to transcend it. In a way, the game senses when your imagination begins to rub up against the walls and push off the roof of the cabin, and consequently, it tries to accommodate, expand into new loops and diversions. Where it all ends up, I won’t say, but mostly because I can’t. The needle rides towards the center.
The art I thought most (not enjoyed the most, necessarily) about this year engendered in me a similar, conceptually if not sensationally, effect. That is one of exploring these tensions between endings and repetitions, in ways that often extend the experience outside of the art itself. These are works that encouraged me to go deeply, towards new connections or places outside of normal time. As an example of the former, I think of Ghouljaboy’s Dreamcore which ends with him thanking his listeners for making it through the album. But then, he invites you to add him on Epic Games, providing his username, and play some Fortnite with him. As to the latter, the pseudo-documentary of Nimcová and Dobie’s DILO generates a half-real place caught somewhere between our time marching forward and one vanishing into memory. When you can’t tell the album has ended.
I’m thinking of Pig which tells us that closure can come from reopening the wound and letting it flow freely over you. And of Blutsauger, a tale about how history reproduces itself and how we often fail to summon strength in service of a new future. Trapped in our immobile verrition. As an utter fool once wrote, “No beginning or end, just circles cutting circles, wheeling widdershins along an interminable present.” Ultimately, I don’t think I could ever adequately explain how any individual item ended up on my lists, but I count them all as totems of resistance against the varied regimes of time and its (in)terminations.
Yes, it has been a great year for endings that never ended and beginnings that never began. Next year probably will be too, but now I find myself tired of endings and nauseous from cycles. What is that I what? Perhaps to set sail with the crew that never rests or to lounge on a cloud for all of aeviternity. All I know is that “time is a hurdy-gurdy, a lampoon, and death’s a bawd.” I cry when I read that Rossetti poem because I can think of no greater end than a bed for all who come. I tremble to think such an end impossible. This hand full of crumpled leaves. As Peter Porter so famously wrote, “We have our loneliness and our regret with which to build an eschatology.”
In the end, or, rather, the beginning, I find myself exactly where I started, or, rather, ended. What conclusions can we draw about that which never concludes though conclude it must? A glance towards the future. “Who, therefore, denies that future things as yet are not? There is already in the mind the expectation of things future.” It does not bode well. The fear of ends and the desire for ends, neither dissolves within the other. I cry when I read that Rossetti poem. For all its certainty, the end is all so uncertain. Death’s a bawd. The wheel keeps turning, the malediction of Armageddon keeps roiling within us, the tides of Time
Music of 2021
TIBSLC - Delusive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions (Sferic)
Ghouljaboy - dreamcore (BMG)
Lucia Nimcová & Sholto Dobie - DILO (mappa)
MMMD & Alem - L’âge de l’absolutisme (Antifrost)
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Revolution Shuffle (Erstwhile)
Alessandro Bosetti - Didone (Kohlhaas)
Mabe Fratti - Será que ahora podremos entendernos (Tin Angel)
Picnic - Picnic (Daisart)
Cop Tears - Theodor Adorno: Piano Works (Reading Group)
Yvette Janine Jackson - Freedom (Fridman Gallery)
Movies of 2021
Blutsauger (Julian Radlmaier)
Pig (Michael Sarnoski)
Azor (Andreas Fontana)
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Ste. Anne (Rhayne Vermette)
Titane (Julia Ducournau)
El Planeta (Amalia Ulman)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader)
Me You Madness (Louise Linton)
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)