Every time the end of the year rolls around, I always find myself wishing that I had listened a little bit more—to a few more records, podcasts, and audiobooks; to more birds singing, thunderstorms, waves lapping on various shores. The truth is, one of the curses of being an audio editor is that we often just run out of time or steam for a whole lot of extracurricular listening. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but I have had variations of this conversation with a lot of folks: "Hey, did you hear that cool new thing?" "Dude, I am buried in my own thing right now!" Some days, it feels like I want to put a lot more in my ears than they can handle.
And yet my tired little ears still experienced a lot of joy this year. Despite what many of us might think about the state of the podcast and music industries, cool sounds abound. So here are a few things that I enjoyed listening to this year. These might not be the "best" documentaries or albums of the year, but they are the ones that I found the most sonically interesting or curious or special.
And if there is something not on this list that you truly loved, hit me back and let me know. I'm all ears.
Documentaries and Field Recordings
Cecily Fell - East Piano [Falling Tree Productions]
A story about a Ukrainian musician-turned-soldier where the form and the narrative are perfectly intertwined. This is the kind of story that I'm always after as a listener: a story told in sound that is about sound. To use a film studies term, everything feels diegetic: the score, the field recordings, the interview. It's all one lovely, braided piece.
Nigel Wrench - Switch off that Machine [The Tapeworm]
I wasn't familiar with the radio journalist Nigel Wrench until I came across this tape collage he recorded in South Africa between 1986 and 1988, which was released by The Tapeworm in May. Wrench was on the ground in South Africa in the '80s filing stories for the CBC, NPR, and others. This is not only a stylish overview of his work during that period but also a portrait of the oppression of apartheid. The title comes from a police officer who confronted Wrench, a reminder of the power of audio recording in the face of injustice. The description provided by The Tapeworm sums it up nicely: "The time is apartheid South Africa. The resonance is now."
Scott Carrier - Old La Sal [Transom]
There is a moment in every single Scott Carrier piece where I cry a little. But that's the thing: just a little. Because Carrier never hits you over the head with it, he always brings his emotional wallop in through the side door. Which is a clumsy but apt metaphor for this piece, where he really just visits with his neighbors in a very rural part of Utah. No one is as vulnerable and open in interviews as Carrier is. His approach is the perfect counterpoint to the performative expertise that dominates so much of today’s media, social and otherwise. It's also more evidence that Scott Carrier remains the master of finding the beauty in everyday people and everyday conversations.
Laura C. Boulton - Let everyone hear my crying: Field Recordings from Colonial Mali, Cameroon & Nigeria, March-August 1934 [Canary Records]
In the 1920s and '30s, Laura Boulton took a few trips to Africa. To say that these visits changed her life is an understatement. Despite never finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, the material she collected on these expeditions—including these field recordings—became the basis of her career as an anthropologist, ethnographer, author, and traveling lecturer. I learned all of that from reading the liner notes to this collection, a remarkable group of songs in their own right, but especially for this time period. Please do yourself a favor and read from the extensive research and liner notes by Ian Nagoski, who runs the reissue label Canary Records.
Joshua Bonnetta - The Pines [Shelter Press]
I had The Pines on my “to listen” list for a very long time. That’s because The Pines is very long: four whole hours. But once I finally committed, I found myself immersed in one of the best field recordings I have heard in a very long time. Taken from 8,760 hours (!!) of recording a single pine tree in upstate New York, it's broken down into the four seasons, one hour per season. Sonic "time lapse" has a long history as an editing technique for extended field recordings (this Folkways release from 1952, for example, was designed to condense 24 hours into 24 minutes), but something about the breadth, fidelity, and editing of this release makes it feel like the momentous accomplishment that I think that it is.
Albums
Milkweed - Remscéla [Broadside Hacks] (Apple / Spotify / Bandcamp)
I like folk records that have an archival quality to them; Milkweed takes this idea to its absolute extreme. This sounds like a Folkways record made on a remote English-speaking island in the 1940s that was then physically buried for 80 years until it was accidentally unearthed and played back on a vintage phonograph in a museum. To add to the overall historical feeling, the thematic core of this record is the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an epic of Irish mythology. From the texture to the concept to the music, I just love it.
Ø - Sysivalo [Sähkö] (Apple / Spotify / Bandcamp)
Ø was a recording project of Mika Vainio, who passed away in 2017. He was a member of Pan Sonic and recorded under several aliases in addition to Ø: Kentolevi, Philus, and Tekonivel. I feel like I was always kind of aware of Pan Sonic, but this is Vainio's first album that I really spent a lot of time with. It's a posthumous release that he had been working on for years that’s both spare and epic, bleak and exultant. It's an incredible 60 minutes of music.
Purelink - Faith [Peak Oil] (Apple / Spotify / Bandcamp)
This is an ambient electronic album that just has a massive amount of space inside its 38-minute runtime. The p4k narrative on these guys is that their music is 90s-throwback-ambient, and I get that, but to me there is also something that feels really fresh about it, even as it reminds me of what I love about Khotin. In addition to all of the instrumental vibes, the vocal tracks on this are also great, with a smooth turn by Loraine James and a spoken word track by Angelina Nonaj.
Claire Rousay - A Little Death (Apple / Spotify / Bandcamp)
Claire Rousay is an archeologist of the everyday. Most, if not all, of her albums are peppered with "field recordings," but the field is her life, her home, the conversations she has with herself and others. On this record, there is a track called "Somehow" that features an interview with someone talking about how rude Claire was to them years earlier. It’s the kind of conversation I would never even want to have with someone, let alone record and put on an album. Which is why I'm a coward and Claire is a genius.
M. Sage - Tender / Wading [RVNG Intl.] (Apple / Spotify / Bandcamp)
Speaking of field recording, this record by Matt Sage features some bona fide recordings of fields: wide-open spaces in Colorado where Matt and his family returned to after years of living in Chicago. With this instrumentation (lots of clarinet!) and concept (field recordings!), it would be very easy for this record to feel cheesy, but I find it incredibly moving—a great example of the power of space and place in soundmaking. I have an interview with Matt coming up in a future issue, where we discuss this album and also his role in the truly delightful Chamber Music for Lawnmowers.
Gear
Landcape HC-TT (Human Controlled Tape Transport)
I think this device has been in production for a while, but it seemed to have its viral moment this year on Instagram when suddenly it was everywhere. It's essentially a small tape deck without a motor—you have to advance the tape by manually turning a knob. It also has a reverse knob, so you can play a tape backward and forward and create an effect that sounds a lot like turntablism. This was an instant buy for me, and I'm excited to use it for some weird sound design moments in future productions.
I could write a book about the Sound Devices MixPre series. The first pro field mixer I owned was the MixPre-D (really saved up for that one), and then later I bought the first version of the MixPre-6 series. But the MP-2 has been kind of a holy grail device for me. It has some very nerdy features that I won't get into here, and it also has very clean pre-amps and an interesting legacy of being built for and loved by Phish tapers. Plus, my friend Michael Rapheal never stops bragging about his, and I wanted him to stop. So I found one in really good condition for a good price, and now it lives in my sound bag.
Newsletters
Ben Seraton - My Big Break
I first found Ben Seraton through some Bandcamp rabbit hole, and I have come to love his records like Allora and Youth Pastoral. His writing, like his music, feels really direct to me. He writes quite candidly about being a touring artist, which includes some very bad days and also days of transcendent joy. He crosses paths with interesting people and interviews them. And each issue comes with its own soundtrack: an improvised jam that I make sure to play while I read.
Julia Barton - Continuous Wave
Julia Barton was a producer at Pushkin who got a Neiman Fellowship a few years back and has now gone really deep into radio and broadcast history. I'm all for people who go back to the past to help us understand our present moment, so I usually gobble this up right when it pops into my inbox.