A farewell to one of my favorite years on music - 2016

Didn't catch up to much new music this year as past ones, also hold on to my favorite labels, but I've found some music that made it into my all-time favs. The reasons? Techno ceased to be plain and cold (most notably this year) and emotions are pouring out of the artist in ambient releases, almost as if jagging into the brain, because of a notable reach of naturalness to fearlessly experiment. I feel this year has the same emotional weight as early 00s, when electronic music had it's technique mastered and jumped into super melodic mental treats.

Note: This list has no special order.


Ex-terrestrial - Paraworld This has everything I look for in music: soft-beat techno, crisp idm ear-candy, playful time patterns and some ambient on top to create that goddamn super-lucid atmosphere that holds throughout the entire album. A very talented guy with a clear vision.

Parallelism - Angular geometry When I said on that introduction something about emotions jagging the brain, this release was in my mind. This induces a very powerful emotionally-charged experience very similar to a lucid dream or an out-of-body experience. This piece really makes you go places. The space you sense as yourself, the building or the world will lose it's limits and expand and contract. This album makes me think about the power of music, and I can only compare it to masterpieces like Harold Budd and Brian Eno's ambient albums, Aphex Twin's ambient works and Tetsu Inoue's beautiful, unforgettable music.

1991 - No more dreams Even more deep feelings but this time specially charged with nostalgia. This one sounds very similar to some lo-fi-like parts of the Parallelism's album. Super melodic, slow-paced and with a low energy, it encompasses some sense of resignation, tragedy, melancholia, overcame loss, grief and its relief. No wonder the feelings here are transmitted effectively, and that it is a good companion at those painful times.

Dimitar Dodovski - Dérive Another talented guy just like the first two, but this one with a wonderfully playful experimentation with super organic sounds. Since I heard his beautiful live set early this year at Kanal 103 I had to get more into his style, since there aren't out there too many pieces to make one's mind just flow in a clean, coherent current. His organic sounds + the naturalness of his playfulness with them gives me the lucidity I look into music for. Another jewel from one of my fav labels: Shimmering moods.

Live @ Kanal 103:

Halftribe - Luxia Archives is absolutely 100% quality, and their ambient releases are super tranquilizing and sometimes come with a bit of dub. This one release gives some extra emotional charge but not too much; it keeps the lucidity, doesn't make one's mind go wild with the emotions, in fact all the contrary, it gives the mind and the 'soul' some freedom from attachments and, taking into account the neat quality that is characteristic of the label, it leaves you fresh and with a sensation of clarity.

UBX127 - Constant permutation part 1 I don't like dull techno. A good sequence is not enough, it has to be playful, it has to make me feel the human factor, some emotion has to be transmitted. This album is the perfect example of good pure techno, and it doesn't need to have a load of ambient or other styles, it is PURELY techno, which is hard to keep interesting. Kudos to this guy, he has mastered it.

Body-san - Shining the money ball Now the next 3 on the list are going to be full of energy. This label, 1080p, the same as the first release on this list, is absolutely the perfect one to chill to. The whole label screams CHILL. This one has super good vibes and tropical, groovy beats. Life becomes lighter and you..... you stand up and can't help it, you just start to move.

不覚にもムエタイ - その話にはまだ続きがあって The Worst is a label that releases some hyper-energetic lolicore, it's sweetness traps you in the middle of  a confusion of fucked-up anime covers and smashed samples. This one got my attention more than any other release, since it doesn't just fall into uncontrolled shattering and repetitive sequencing of samples, it actually makes good compositions out of it and transmits a wonderful amount of energy, ordered enough to make sense and make you feel you're just some convulsively-dancing figurine... with feelings.

Karen Gwyer - Prophase metaphase anaphase telophase Highly energetic, carefully composed, playful patterns transposed. I love the layering of this music, and how they come to life together. Another piece that isn't at all dull, hard to achieve in the genre.

Aythar - Astronautica A very beautiful space ambient release that will enchant you. Highly relaxing, clear and deep sounds, it reminds a lot of the emblematic label Fax +49-69/450464, which leaves nothing else to say.

Isorinne - Recollection of forgotten dreams Field recordings sorted into mellow, emotional compositions. It will make you trip into your very loneliness, into your very self, if not into your childhood. Another great companion for those nostalgic times, when light seems to be weak.

Murkok - Inconsistency Another quality label, Tehnofonika, releasing some clean ambient music. This one is charged with special emotion, and it's specially haunting. With a great introspective power, it leaves you feeling something is missing inside...

R Wong - Life principles One of the best techno albums I have heard in my life. It's full of life and very playful, very rich, substantial, coherent, solid, mature... simply perfect. I have not many words about it, it just speaks for itself. Definitely someone to look forward for, and probably my very favorite album this year.

Coppice Halifax - Urceolatmospherion This guy is a prolific artist who has been pouring his talent into beautiful music, but this one release got me with the second track which gone directly to my heart. It reminds of Aphex Twin's SAWs, with its sweetness and perfect pace, subtle drums and otherworldly complementary sounds. I leave this one to the last, so one can just say goodbye to 2016 to this long piece, which leaves one with a renewed spirit for the year to come...

The mood brought by machinal time and space compression

(Basically a note to self:)
On my way to develop and fully accept only the consistent part of me, I have to erase the socially constructed fear-based traits; spotting those traits is a work of being merely a conduit, denying identification, categorization, definition, relation and recognition.

Happiness is (just) an indicator.

There are some things that indeed give weight, but it works for balance.

Keep lucidity through spatial control.

A moment of deep silence

Identification with everything from the reality around you. Identification with every space of life, with all you like and all you do. Identification with (and of) every image you see, all you hear... even every word; it's not something you choose to see but you choose to give it more or less importance or meaning. Dreams that talk only for you. Most individual identification, atomic identification, the death and rebirth of what you actually are, the total control over it, mind and body almost disconnected. Identification with things that are just the same as the things one is running from identification with.

MSC #4

Blind morality

Concerning the ever-raising violence that we have been attesting lately:

Society seems to be creating a new way of doing violence in a legal (morally accepted) way because the moral behind the reasons weights heavier than the violent act and even completely justify it in the name of common sense. One example is the violence in response to minor crimes, like robbers being tortured and amputated. It's dangerous how people, by no way excluding me, can immediately think that they deserved to be treated with such violence and can't see beyond and behind that seemingly absolute judgement.

Beyond that judgement I can see we are engaged in a competitive, ever-worsening way of relating to eachother, creating separation and at the same time favoring identification with what we possess. People steal by necessity, and that, as a violent act, comes from the same line as the violence against it. The same conditions that made people steal are the same conditions that makes one think that with more violence we can make things even. A very sick way of seeing it if you think about it the slightest. It's important to be aware of all this because the people who do the violence to the criminal is showing a doble moral that shouldn't be favored by any means: they want their rights to be respected while they don't respect or even try to understand others'; you can't be a criminal by committing a (way more severe, if you ask me) crime over a criminal claiming s/he deserves it for being a criminal. Even if at this point some could say it can be justified by saying "The robber violated their rights first" there's no justification for the lack of judgement on their act, which brings on a way bigger problem about good and bad.

Behind all this I can see the figure of a hero being favored all along (and specially explicitly in pop culture: movies, comics...), and which is used as an effective justification for their violent act. It reminds me of charity which, although undoubtedly necessary, isn't making any effort to erase the problem from its roots, meaning finding the source of, say, hunger, which frees the problem-maker (companies, gov. and all that support them) from the responsibility of fixing an obvious problem. Becoming an organ that fixes another's faults will make more problems sooner or later. It can't be compared to violence against violence, tho, since that is a more serious problem, with more moral value behind and beyond it. So the figure of a hero seems to be morally accepted by now, which is bringing violence to a "normal" status, which is very dangerous. As the saying goes: "Eye for an eye and the world goes blind", except this violence has a moral support strong enough to take limbs for a good.

MSC #3

MSC #2

MSC #1

In a flux

There's a point in the life of a nihilist person where he realizes that what we call our suffering is only our boundaries to cope with the world around us and that define ourselves, and where he won't be holding anything anymore, so he can choose to do and be whatever he wants.
Images swirling all over like gears... Such is the stability of our being. Changing or always holding. Changing because it always holds, holding because it always changes. Images swirling all over like gears of our own mind.

Is humanity just a characteristic?

There's humanity as the body of humans and humanity as a characteristic, and there is characteristic as some specific abstract feature and characteristic as in "being characteristic of..." which is more general.  For both words the one definition paradoxically kills the other and holds it existent. This duality is the very existence of things. One ideally can't but see the dual system once one got to the thing. Everything as a flow of relations of contraries; what else could have made it move in the first place? Everything works towards contraries, ceasessly trying to assimilate eachother, probably in search of a gain which never gets to come into existence before becoming one new member of another dual system.