Best electronic albums of 2019: mine's a 99! Mooo!

As my top ten favourite 2109 electronic music albums thunder across the internet like a pack of cows chasing an ice cream van, let's take a look at some ambient, classical-ish and pastoral albums that didn't quite make my final list.

Leading this longlist is A Winged Victory for the Sullen: the elegiac ambience of The Undivided Five (Ninja Tune) constantly reached for a perfect fifth chord: extra points for a track-title dig at Jacob Rees-Mogg. I liked what previous Fat Roland champion Clark was doing on his television theme album Kiri Variations (Throttle Records) – all a bit fancy. This year saw the joyous return of Telefon Tel Aviv with Dreams Are Not Enough (Ghostly International). Its track titles were to be read as a poem, but the true meaning came from the ever-expansive production design.

Also in my best-of-the-rest is Nils Frahm's All Melody (Erased Tapes), whose seventh studio album was classic Frahm with added trumpet. Parp! Tim Hecker gave us the rather coy Anoyo (Kranky), a brief ambient sojourn in which he was inspired, not for the first time, by Japanese gagaku music. And Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Allesandro Cortini picked up a guitar for the first time in his solo career and drowned it with spine-tingling analogue fuzziness on Volume Massimo (Mute).

The ever-reliable Bibio went back to bucolic on Ribbons (Warp), with strings so lovely I'd wear them as a vest. The fact that Panda Bear guests on Teebs' lush Anicca (Brainfeeder) tells you exactly what that album sounds like: dreamy and exquisite. And the delicate glitches of Leif's Loom Dream (Whities) made me feel like I was getting razzed on fazoomy on a glacier's edge. Whatever the heck that means.

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.