Best electronic albums of 2020: sixteen

16 – Nathan Fake – Blizzards (Cambria Instruments)

For this entry in the 2020 album countdown, we go over to our reporter Fat Roland. Fats, can you hear us?

    "Yes, I can, Fat Roland."

Fat Roland, what can you tell us about Nathan Fake's fifth and best album?

    "Erm. Nothing much."

What? Oh. I thought you were going to tell us about Blizzards.

"Don't really like music, sorry."

Apologies, viewers, we seem to have a technical fault, in that Fat Roland is technically an idiot. Instead, we can cut to this piece Fat Roland wrote for the Picky B*stards website:

"The cracking thing about Nathan Fake’s Blizzards is that it does all the best albums at once. The breakbeats of Cry Me A Blizzard have the nostalgic giddiness of Octo Octa.... North Brink seems to blend the icy hi-hats of Shinichi Atobe’s Yes with the melted warmth of Khotin’s Finds You Well to make a temperature that’s, erm, just right.... Blizzards works on its own terms too, powered by a frustrated energy, its rhythms rising from the foundations of the clubs we no longer go to."

Even it did drop down my Best Of 2020 list since I wrote that piece (read it in full here), Nathan Fake is on his best form here.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Best electronic albums of 2020: twenty

20 – Khotin – Finds You Well (Ghostly International)

Do the Boards of Canada androids dream of electronic music? And when they do, does it sound like this Edmonton producer's super-hazy take on detuned downbeat? Or do they just have nightmares where they're in school assembly without their pants? 

Probably the latter.

Khotin's Finds You Well is possibly the most likeable album on my list. If it popped round for dinner, I'd let it beat me on the Playstation then let it into the garden to jump on my trampoline. It's a huggable nostalgic treat, and very much the opposite to a terrible 2020.

In once sense, you've heard this before: my opening reference was quite deliberate. Plaintive head-nodders meet pining analogue synths and scratchy vocal samples, all with a healthy element of fuzz. But it's incredibly well done.

During one moment of dying ambience, Khotin's kid sister appears, sing-songing "the world is wonderful".  I can't help feeling that Finds You Well doesn't sound like an album we want right now: it sounds like the album we need.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Best electronic albums of 2018: these sounds are out of bounds

Hey, reader. As the top 20 best albums of 2018 chug on like a happy little tractor, let's pull into this lay-by and have a look at some of the ambient albums that didn't make the list.

It was a stonking year for ambient music, so it's no huge surprise that I'd forgotten The Orb had an album this year. Their 15th long-player No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds (Cooking Vinyl) was a mixed affair, but Pillow Fight @ Shag Mountain had Jah Wobble on bass and saw them at their Blue Room best. Meanwhile, just missing out on a top 20 place was Pariah, who swapped muscular bass music for swirling ambience on Here From Where We Are (Houndstooth) – all twinkling with hope and dignity.

Laurel Halo's Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency) boiled down her work to simplistic melodies rolled across a shallow mist of textures, while there was true serenity to be found in Khotin’s Beautiful You (self-released), its pastoral simplicity an ambient highlight of 2018. And there was more than a little twinkle in the, er, album eye of H Takahashi's Low Power (White Paddy Mountain).

Those people that sniff at modern music saying “that’s just noise” clearly haven’t heard Metasplice’s Mirvariates (The Trilogy Tapes), the duo really giving us a lot of different noises. Dronist Tim Hecker employed a Japanese gagaku ensemble for Konoyo (Kranky), not that you’d recognise them when reduced to this level of shredded brokenness. And Ilpo Väisänen, under his moniker as I-LP-ON, paid tribute to his musical partner Mika Vainio on the minimal and statically charged ÄÄNET (Editions Mego): he took sound snippets from an old world tour with Mika and turned them into something remarkable.




Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.