While the entire visit deserves a full writeup, I can’t really muster the effort. I will however make this little picture album post about one of the highlights of the trip, going backstage on the 111 year old wooden coaster Rutschebanen.

This coaster predates the invention of the upstop wheel, so it requires a brakeman to manually regulate the train’s speed to keep it from flying off the tracks. After an hour of us ECC members having an exclusive ride session before it opened for the day, we were then given a guided tour behind the scenes of this coasters by one of the brakemen.

The coaster itself is an absolute airtime machine. I found myself often going first Woooo… as the train crested a hill, then …ooo-Ooof as I was slammed back down into the hard wooden seat.

One of the trains in the maintenance workshop. I asked our guide if he was able to tell the 5 trains apart just by feel when maneuvering them and he said ‘Absolutely’.

Part of the track blueprint. In the middle you can see a switch where the trains can be diverted to the left, into the workshop (the crosshatched area).

The coaster’s lift hill uses a steel cable that the trains grab onto. Here is a previously used cable that suffered some sort unpleasant-to-untangle failure. Our guide explained that Rutchebanen is THE attraction of the park. Many Danes have formative memories of this being their first ever roller coaster, something that they maybe remember riding together with their parents when they were young. If the coaster is out of order, this becomes reason for people demanding their money back. No other attraction evokes such a response when it is closed due to technical issues.

You cannot see it in the youtube video I linked above, but some of the tunnels where the track turns around have animal props standing around. I guess the polar bear heads need frequent replacing?

The machine room. The motor originally served at the docks and was made some time in the 60’s, but they do not know the exact year of manufacture.

The coaster was open to the public as we were given the tour, providing some interesting angles to observe it.

The trip was great fun! I will take a moment to list a few other highlights:

• The Christmas decor of Tivoli is bar none. They go all-in on lighting up the place.

• We had an exclusive ride session on the B&M coaster Dæmonen, just before midnight after the park had officially closed. I rode it back-to-back 8 times, with one of those rides departing on Saturday and arriving back in the station on First Advent Sunday as the bells of Copenhagen City Hall struck midnight. Very cool in both meanings of the word as the late November midnight in Copenhagen is not particularly toasty.

• The Tivoli hotel was probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever been to.

I’m locked in for two ECC trips this summer - one where we will ride every operating coaster in Finland, and one that tours some major parks of Poland. I’m pretty stoked!

Lyra Rebane, one of the people from the CSS Crime scene on cohost was also holding a talk about using CSS to develop games. What absolutely delighted me is that she used one of my CSS Crime games I made on cohost as an example of how to use the <details> html element to create a point and click game.

Here is a link to the talk in question, timestamped to the part where the details element is explained. My game, Cache Server Varnishing Game! is the one that was featured in the talk and is shown a half minute or so after the timestamp.

One of the goals when I started making this website was to host my old CSS Crimes. Unfortunately that project fell way back on the backburner because it turns out that reworking those things into something that works the same way on this site is very tedious and error-prone. It gets worse when it is an image-heavy game like the one featured. I should probably get working on rehosting that one on this site though - it is my favorite of the CSS Crimes that I made on cohost and it deserves better than just existing on archive.org which, while it is a great and important service for maintaining a historical record of the internet, is really slow and janky and not very nice to browse.

So yeah. It is fun to see that people still remember this stuff. I sure miss it as it was an excellent creative outlet for me. That chapter has ended but new chapters have also begun. So it goes.

rykarn

passengerprincess - PASSENGERPRINCESS

Fun listen. Very ‘kids these days’ I guess, good opportunity to at least stay a tiny bit with the times. Thanks polywolf!

Philip Glass - Philip Glass Solo

Chose to list this one just after the passengerprincess one to maximize the style-whiplash. There was a period in time where I would just stream the Kundun soundtrack in my noise cancelling headphones at work to stay focused. All because of that Fatal Farm video. If you do not know what I’m talking about, please set aside an hour and click that link.

Figured it was time to actually add some Philip Glass to my mp3 collection.

Lasse Marhaug - Provoke

My sister suggested a music festival for experimental music in her home town in Norway. Had a look at the lineup and this artist was featured, so I bought this to familiarize myself with the Norwegian noise music repertoire.

Vladislav Delay - in a lawless world there is strength in numbers

New Vladislav Delay, one of the many monikers of the prolific Finnish electronic musician Sasu Ripatti. His albums are always journeys into strange environments, this one seems to be a very rhythmic one and dare I say kind of upbeat? Looking forward to giving this an attentive listen.

emptyset - Emptyset

Filling in a gap of the emptyset albums that I used to listen to during my Spotify-using years. This is an early one in their discography, feels a lot more concrete and techno-like compared to how experimental and abstract their later releases became.

Others

I’m at a good number of embedded tracks now so I’ll just list some other releases I bought:

Zimoun - Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two

Dopplereffekt - Metasymmetry

Daphni - Butterfly

Hope you are also having a good time finding new music in 2026.

rykarn

I want to start out looking back at the resolutions I set for last year.

See my friend

Towards the end of last year we finally made plans to see eachother again. I stopped by his home in the university town where we met. Got to see his kids for the first time. All very nice and I hope this lowers the barriers to making future plans to hang out more again!

Pay attention to live shows

I went to two shows!

• Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Had a great time.

• VNV Nation. Had a great time there too!

Go on a Roller Coaster trip

I did this and loved it, despite all the head injuries I ended up accumulating.

Ditch Facebook

I deleted my Facebook not long after posting last year’s resolutions. It was easy and I recommend anyone reading this to do the same.

Keep doing stuff with Blender

I pulled this off too, unfortunately it was mostly as part of a side project that I want to keep segregated from my main site so it has not resulted in much art I ended up posting on this site. In fact, I only posted one animation on here. It is a really cool animation though, you should check it out.

Resolutions for this year

The only thing that comes to mind is that I want to get better at drawing and 2D art in general, so I’m making that my only resolution. The rest of my energy will be spent on maitaining the good habits of last year’s resolutions, because they were really the sources of all the highlights of 2025 for me.

Thank you for reading and I wish you a good 2026, despite it all.

rykarn

So here goes.

SHXCXCHCXSH - tttttttttttttttt

And I immediately start out by breaking the rules! This is not a track that I heard for the first time this year because it was released in that awkward spot between posting last year’s music rundown and the start of this calendar year. I’ll allow it.

The easily pronounced album ……t from the Swedish duo by the easily pronounced name SHXCXCHCXSH came on my radar via some bandcamp subscription, don’t recall which. I vaguely recall seeing their name somewhere but I guess I had dismissed them just by the name alone as some kind of indie-rock band or something. Had I known that they are a Swedish electronic act, one half being once a member of the legendary electropop group Slagsmålsklubben, I probably would have paid more attention.

In tttttttttttttttt we are inside a gigantic, dying machine. Mechanical shrieks give way to harsh electric buzzing and a heavy thud-thud, thud-thud conveying us forward as two hoarse square waves are being modulated on top of it all, creating their own polyrythm. It has accompanied me during my bike commutes many times this year. Helps me during climbs.

The album reminds me a bit of ASA - Radial which I covered in my 2023 music rundown. I think what appeals to me is that I can recognize the usual genres but interpreted in a way that is harsh and indifferent to what you, the listener, make of it. My way of consuming this album is also similar - keep it playing in the background and turn it off half way because it felt too rough to have on. Only after listening to it on its own terms I got the hang of it and was able to enjoy it.

Runner-up track from the album: tttttiiiilll

CRZKNY - TR-06

Staying with the theme of polyrhythms, I really liked Deadly Outlaw by CRZKNY. Again, this is something that reimagines genres on its own terms, in this case by programming the baseline in whatever time signature it feels like and construct everything else like as a scaffold around it.

TR-06 is a great example and a pretty laid-back listen. Dub chords echo on repeat in the background while a 9 beats long kick drum loop lends us support in the lower registers. Hypnotic. I also like the way it serves as a place to catch a break from the otherwise somewhat dark and heavy mood of the rest of the album.

VNV Nation - On other Oceans

I was excited to finally get the full album Construct after hearing the teaser tracks of it as well as having seen VNV Nation live here in Gothenburg.

I had it on in my noise cancelling headphones while testing my code on the shop floor where I worked during the first half of this year. (In this case, I was writing code that was run on physical machines with stepper motors and pressure cylinders and jackscrews and all sorts of stuff.)

It isn’t goodbye, it isn’t the end if we should part

This track came on, and while I was not really paying attention to the lyrics, I really liked the melody in the chorus.

Impressions and traces remain inside like shining stars

I put it on when I got home and was cooking dinner, this time being more conscious of the lyrics too.

One day i’ll find you out on the waves of other oceans

And it just got me super emotional.

I started to think about people in my life, ones who were once a huge part of it, people who I miss, people I want to keep in touch with. Maybe one day we will finally meet again, see where we are now, see how the times have changed us? It is not the end, even if it has been a while.

In a year filled with keeping in touch with friends recently made, friends newly made and finally meeting up with friends for the first time in a long time, this was a song I really needed. In a year wherein I tried new things, actually went out into the world once more and have made plans for further new things, the hopeful message it tells is something that really fits with what I’m going through. This year has been somewhat rough but also filled with specks of light that I need to hold on to.

The last time a song lyric got me that emotional was another VNV Nation song of course.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading this! I love writing about the things I love (go figure) and these yearly posts and they provide me an opportunity to really dig into why I like the things I do. Understand myself a bit better. I hope your year provided you with similar opportunities.

Take care,

rykarn

If you have done any similar writing about your year’s music listening, please let me know! I’d be happy to read it.

I do not use Spotify, so I don’t get any unwrapped list or other summary of my listening habits. Also, just throwing out an autogenerated list of your music consumption habits feels a bit impersonal to me in addition to all the downer bits about Spotify being a shitty service that does not compensate artists. Instead I will write a bit about 3 tracks that stood out to me this year, just like last year.

Emptyset - Cinder

I was really excited to see a pre-release of new Emptyset material, and I was even more excited after hearing one of the early access tracks, Cinder.

Man, this is nasty. I love the raw dynamism of the noise the duo’s strange repurposed A/V gear produce, the way it swells and moves to fill in the gaps between the percussive elements and transients, like it has heft, inertia. A rapid, distorted 3/4 beat pounds away, but never settles in to order, always giving a small intermission between every phrase to stay in the gray zone between structure and chaos.

This brings me back to my first time hearing them and their Collapsed EP on raster-noton, in particular the track Core with is non-linear rhythms and noise swells. A great return to form after their last couple of releases which unfortunately did not grab me as much as their early material.

I saw them live in Brighton a couple of years back, much recommended if you have the chance to see them!

ASA - Inconsciente Alfa

This album ended up on my bandcamp wishlist due to it being something from Raster-Raster and the description mentioning this being a collaboration involving Atom TM. I bought it on a Bandcamp Friday and then let it sit in my collection unplayed, save for the first few tracks, which I found myself struggling to get past. It took me a few attempts to really get it - this is not music for playing in the background when working or in some sense enjoying. ASA do not hate you for listening to their album, but there is a certain indifference toward you, the listener, that permeates the whole experience. You are free to take this album in, but you have to meet it on its own terms. The music is hard, stoic, brutalistic. Spanish voice samples are thrown in, sometimes with little regard to matching the actual rhythm or mood of the underlying track with Modernizaciòn Acelerada being a good example of this (this song is only present in the digital release).

Inconsciente Alfa is one of the more approachable tracks on the album, and is the track that sort of made me ‘get’ this album and enjoy it for what it is. A rhythmic mishmash of chopped-up radio stingers give way to a 4-step beat that builds the track up again in a nice fashion, and I always find myself bobbing my head along to it.

Low Roar - I Won’t Be Long

This year I finally got around to building myself a proper gaming PC, and I have spent a lot of time playing titles that I felt I missed out on during the time I daily drove an old macbook. I bought Death Stranding on a whim after hearing a clip of @drewtoothpaste talking about it on a podcast. This game accompanied me during a time of recovering from a small surgery this autumn. This was my first time playing a really big ambitious game and I was completely hooked from the point where Low Roar - Don’t Be So Serious starts playing as you descend down into a valley, just taking in the beautiful landscapes and great music.

This is not really the stuff I normally listen to, but there was so music from this game that made an impression on me, both from Low Roar and others. There are a bunch of different Low Roar tracks I could have chosen for this entry, but I went with the one above which (at least I think) is not part of the Death Stranding soundtrack.

On the topic of game soundtracks, a runner-up was the Outer Wilds soundtrack, another game I caught up with with my new PC. Tremendous game.

Rest in peace Ryan Karazija.

Finishing thoughts

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading about my musical tastes. I know these kinds of posts are kind of difficult get attention on - I know full well that I am quick to skip past music recommendations from others. There is just so much stuff out there and so little time. It is always easier to spend that time listening to the stuff you already know and that you know that you enjoy, you know?

If you liked this post or feel that your tastes seem to align with mine, you might also like my introduction to Pan Sonic, one of my favorite bands.

I don’t use Spotify so I do not have end-of-year summary of what I played the most. My main source of music streaming has been whatever I have in my Bandcamp collection, so instead I am going to list a few tracks I enjoy from albums I bought this year.

Vladislav Delay - Isoviha

Listen to it here (Embedding is unfortunately disabled for this track.)

Last year I listened a lot to the albums Rakka and Rakka II by Vladislav Delay. These albums were inspired by the barren Finnish landscapes north of the arctic circle. They cannot be described as ambient albums as they are much more forceful - the power of the molten rock kilometers below you, the mountain-eroding winds and rains, life and growth forcing itself through every crack in the earth.

The album Isovia from this year is a soundtrack to one’s return back to civilization from the wilderness. The tracks are short with rapidly changing themes, distorted voices trying to grab your attention, the stress of ‘normal’ life ever present.

For this reason I found the entire album a bit difficult to listen to unless I am in the correct mood for it. The album’s title track Isoviha stands out for me though and it is one I keep coming back to for another listen. It is something about the different textures, interrupted by the rhythmic bursts of voices and sections of constantly pounding base drums that makes the entire track seem cohesive despite jumping between so many different forms and shapes. Anger and energy, it gets me pumped up.

Amamelia - Colourbox

Bandcamp link

Turns out a catchy melody with vocals over the Amen Break makes for a pretty fun listen. Love the crunchy 3D graphics of its music video too!

Second Woman - 300528mj1

Second Woman’s self-titled debut album came out in 2016, which goes to show how out of the loop I was when it came to discovering new music during my Spotify-using years.

300528mj1 starts out in complete chaos. We only have a drum machine to listen to and it has gone haywire, its tempo is wildly oscillating and it is just mashing every instrument in order. In the background, a temporal foothold develops in the form of a dub chord stab which later is accompanied by a slim drum loop. Eventually, the orderly rhythm section takes over while the chaos fades away, leaving us with the most pared-down dub techno track - dub techno for skeletons.

Second Woman seems to have been a temporary collaboration between two established electronic artists (one half of Telefon Tel Aviv for instance) and they have not released anything new since 2018. A shame, because this is really up my alley, much like Cam Deas & Jung An Tagen - Presentism was last year for me. There is something about this kind of focus on unpredictability and clean sound design that hits it for me.

There were a bunch more music I enjoyed that also deserves a writeup, but I think leaving it at these three is a nice summary of the year. I hope you, the reader, also had a nice time discovering new music in 2022.