I hope you're enjoying my countdown of the best albums of 2018, and that you're bitterly resenting these constant interruptions of albums that didn't make the final 20.
I missed a couple of old reissues. Smith & Mighty reminded us of how good they were on Ashley Road Sessions 88-94 (Punch Drunk). And following the rerelease of his classic classic ‘If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It’, covered elsewhere in these blog posts, Christoph De Babalon’s brought us some drum ‘n’ bass rarities with Exquisite Angst (A Colourful Storm). Listen to that awkward drum loop of Are You Talking To Me? – no wonder Thom Yorke counted himself as a fan of De Babalon’s work.
Now other stuff. The summer vibes were strong in the laid-back Detroit cuts of Jay Daniel’s Tala(Watusi High), while I enjoyed the wonky jazz of Palanquin Bearing Monkey on Yoshinori Hayashi’s Ambivalence (Smalltown Supersound). Ooo yes, and I can't forget the mystical ritualism of Aisha Devi's DNA Feelings (Houndstooth) – a strange but fascinating listen.
Also not quite making the cut were the belly-dancing beats of TSVI’s Inner Worlds (Nervous Horizon), which mixed Sufi percussion with grubby grime rhythms. Finally for this section, the caustic sound of Renick Bell’s Turning Points (Seagrave) led the charge for code-based algorave, while Tadd ‘Dabrye’ Mullinix had the entire history of rave on his mind when making X-Altera’s X-Altera (Ghostly International), throwing a lot of jungle and techno at the wall, making the wall sound really good.
In compiling my top 20, there are lots of albums I have to screw up and throw into the bin. That doesn't mean I don't value them. It's a nice bin, with little frills around the edge.
This count-down will be peppered with little summaries of the dozens of albums that didn't make the final list. That includes compilations and rereleases, which I have excluded for simplicity.
So before we kick off the top 20 proper, here are some also-rans.
There's no space for hardcore getting dirty on the reissued broken breakcore of Christoph De Babalon’s overlooked 1997 album If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It (Cross Fade Enter Tainment) or the experimental South American drumism of Suba’s early-90s work Wayang(Offen Music). Nor did I include Time To Tell (Conspiracy International), a reissue from Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti which was a more interesting album than suggested its inspiration suggests – namely, a lecture at Leeds Polytechnic.
I also didn't include Takecha’s ear-tickling skeletal house retrospective Deep Soundscapes (Love Potion) was a real ear-tickler, the wonderfully familiar IDMisms on the unearthed Challenge Me Foolish (Planet Mu) by µ-Ziq, the messy joy of the superb compilation Don't Mess With Cupid, 'Cause Cupid Ain't Stupid (трип) or the expanded box-set reissue of Move D’s 1995 techno album Kunststoff – if the name rings a bell, he was on Volume Four of the Trance Europe Express series.
I also tried to keep my list as techno / IDM as possible, because that's what rings my electronic bell. So not much room for hip hop or jazz, with a couple of notable exceptions. And, to my shame, I excluded two classical behemoths. Firstly, Nils Frahm’s All Melody (Warp Records), which was delicate, like a unicorn made of snowflakes, if it was armed with a piano in each hoof. And Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Englabörn & Variations (Deutsche Grammophon), which was overflowing with melancholic elegance like bins wot ain't getting collected until some time after the new year.
