rykarn
2024 Music Rundown and looking back at the year
2024-12-12

I am no fan of Spotify, nor the ‘Your year unwrapped’ that you see crop up around the end of the year. It is just so impersonal I think. Sure, somebody listened to all that, and maybe I can recognize something matching my tastes, but other than that it is mostly chaff. There are stories to be told: Why did you listen to that track so much? What did it make you feel? A statistical summary of your listening habits elide all those details. Tell us the story!

Cohost taught me: The internet is getting smaller and more impersonal. You should counter that. Posting an algorithmically generated rundown of your Spotify consumption is not the way. Be personal.

Two years ago I started what I hoped would become a yearly tradition for me. List 3 good songs I had not heard before the start of the current calendar year and write about them. This was done as a direct way of going against that Spotify Unwrapped garbage.

So, here are 3 tracks that stood out for me.

Lemna - N19

Lemna was not an artist I was aware of before the start of this year. I checked out one of her tracks after reading a Bandcamp update email listing a new review from one of the people I follow there. In this case, it was for the EP Mantis 14 by Lemna.

Lemna is heavy music. Big structures looming in the fog. Repetitions, polyrhythms. Static, yet disorienting and hypnotic.

The track N19 linked above is… I just love it. Nothing against 4/4 tempo, but anything deviating from that is a cheat code to my heart. The way the track just drives, it just goes, and then it kicks into high gear around the 3:00 mark. It gets me pumped.

Would absolutely love to see her perform live.

The opener track N17 from the same album was my first exposure to Japanese rap too.

Gábor Lázár - Message

I was excited for a new Gábor Lázár album Reflex being released, this time on raster-raster. And it was nice. It was ok. I was not blown away. The entire album bears his signature style of weird additive synthesis techniques and it is a fun listen, but I think the way the same aesthetic is repeated on every single song grows kind of old. My first exposure to his work was Unfold and it is such a nice mix of different styles, the wonky head-bop-inducing techno of Squeeze, the aggressive dubstep-like mood of Elastic or the SND-style constant chord-barrage of Repeater makes the album still feel fresh to this day.

So while I was not that impressed by the album as a whole, but the track Message summarizes the entire album in a nice way. I love how bold it is in its steady repetition. This is the pattern we’ll be hearing, get used to it and enjoy the modulations. The crunchy clap/snare element that is added at 1:50 is just so satisfying to hear.

Can a clap make a track worthy of my end of year list? Yeah.

Finlay Shakespeare - Get

I found out about Finlay Shakespeare via the Editions Mego newsletter. I put his latest (last ever?) album on my wishlist and had a listen to its title track every now and then. It felt intriguing, a bit outside my usual wheelhouse. Once I finally got around to buying the album the track Get made me realize what a fun artist this is.

I bought a bunch of his earlier material and there are some bangers that were in contention for getting a spot on this list. She says / Nothing ends would have been my pick, but I don’t like the track’s tonal shift midway, so it sort of overstays its welcome in my opinion. Still a nice listen.

Looking back

This year was.. eh. Spring was nice, Summer was nice. Fall sucked. Cohost shutting down sucked. I’ve been unhappy about work, and I’ve been battling recurring issues with my anxiety and a general background radiation of existential dread. I’ve started going to the gym for the first time in more than a decade, so that’s nice. It helps that they opened one super close to my home. I’ve gone from being able to do 0 pull-ups to 2 so far. Go me.

I like working on this site. I make a little render in Blender and I put it up here so I can keep my art collected here at one place. I can do a thing and write about it. It’s nice to be able to use the internet this way.

Adding Likes to my posts was a great idea. It’s been nice to see names I recognize from Cohost in the little pull requests that appear in my github repo for this site whenever someone submits a Like. To each one of you who seem to have me in their RSS readers and ping me every now and then this way - you rule and it is nice hearing from you!

I hope you, the reader, had a good 2024, that you had a good time listening to music and that you will have a good 2025 (despite it all).

Thank you for reading, you are the best!

rykarn

Parts of this post was initially posted on Cohost after the one-month shutdown announcement.

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