My Favorite Music of 2022

No, that’s not a typo. I wrote most of these notes in early 2023, then I let them simmer for twelve months. I made slight modifications to the writing, but the picks themselves remain unchanged after another year of listening.

The majority of the music I listen to gets categorized, in my family, as “A/E”: that can stand for ambient/electronic or, perhaps more accurately, abstract/experimental. I separate it out from my other listening because, well, my kids are unlikely to want me to play albums of experimental harp music or doom-organ or power electronics when we’re driving to a play date on a Saturday morning. Increasingly, however, this is the music that I identify with, that moves me. Here are some notes on my favorite A/E music of 2022.

Mat Ball, Amplified Guitar. (Bandcamp, Apple, Spotify)

The art that I find most resonant often presents variation, decomposition, or struggle within an identified system or set of rules. So it is with my favorite record of the year, Montreal musician Mat Ball’s Amplified Guitar. Playing an instrument he built himself, Ball recorded each track in a single take. There are no overdubs or adornments—each piece is a dance between Ball’s mournful, blues-inflected playing and the amplifier that is projecting (and refracting) each note. As the album’s short trailer video makes clear, the dance between Ball and his amplifier is literal: at one point, he presses the head of the guitar into the amplifier; at another, he upends the instrument and drags its head across the concrete floor in swooping arcs to bend and extend its wails. Ball searches for feedback and, as it comes, he improvises a response. But it’s not an album of complete improvisation, as he returns to figures and themes in three interwoven “movements”: “To Catch Light,” “Within the Billow,” and “Steel Wound Arteries.” These waver between searching and searing, between towering masses of noise and the gentle strumming of individual notes.

I latched on to its melancholy when the album was released in July. As the year progressed, that emotional resonance deepened. Throughout the summer I thought, “This is my favorite guitar record since Alan Sparhawk’s Solo Guitar,” which was released in 2006 (Silber Records, Apple, Spotify). The connection, to me, is not only that the albums share a deadpan title, or that Sparhawk likewise offers a “second attempt” at the same melody, or the references to the blues. It’s that in both cases, especially when listening via headphones, it can feel like you’re in the center of a very large room that is vibrating with noise. No matter how massive the sound, there remains a sense of space—it is not claustrophobic, but rather a sound you can explore. It’s an atmosphere. I couldn’t shake the connection throughout the fall and toggled often between the two records. Then, in early November, Sparhawk’s wife and bandmate Mimi Parker died at age 55. Her early death not only affected how I heard the music they made together as Low, but also how I heard Ball’s record.

The other connection I keep making is to artist Christian Marclay’s 2000 video Guitar Drag (UbuWeb excerpt)—yet another piece with a deadpan title. That fourteen-minute work features a guitar being dragged along a Texas roadway behind a pickup truck that has an amplifier in its bed. It squeals and squelches as the guitar slides along the pavement or bumps over dry grass and gathers dead leaves. Another kind of improvisation, the work is a reference to the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., at the hands of white supremacists. (At the outset, Marclay ties a rope around the guitar’s “neck.”) It is one of the most profound artworks I’ve experienced.

These connections, and others, take the plangent sound of Ball’s record and give it additional meaning for me. I’m grateful to Ball for making the album and to Vanessa Ague for the Pitchfork review that introduced me to it.

Maya Shenfeld, In Free Fall (Bandcamp, Thrill Jockey, Apple Music, Spotify)

This record, which introduced me to Shenfeld, came with a stamp of approval and a key piece of context: it’s released by Thrill Jockey, my favorite hometown record label, and is titled after an essay and artwork by Hito Steyerl. A classically trained guitarist and composer, Shenfeld sets the record’s themes from the opening track: its mix of live and synthesized sound, its structure of slight variation emerging from repetition, its languid pace. As she puts it, “I’ve always been taken by the way music can seemingly stretch, bend, and even break time, its ability to touch something in you, emotionally, and the fact that it’s a resolutely physical experience.” Shenfeld’s February 2024 record Under the Sun is one of my most anticipated this year.

Rhodri Davies, DWA DNI (Bandcamp, Apple Music)

Another musician new to me in 2022: Welsh artist and improviser Rhodri Davies. He has been active as a solo performer and group member for more than two decades. The first two words in the Boomkat listing for the record, “radical harpist,” piqued my curiosity. Eight months later and I still don’t have the language to describe this music, which somehow evokes folk traditions, rituals and rites, Minimalist compositions, and computer glitches at the same time. Snippets of melody come into and fall out of focus. All the song titles are presented in Polish. My favorite translates as “Or in other words.”

FINAL, It Comes to Us All (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify)

I’ve been listening to Justin K. Broderick’s music for decades. Yet somehow I didn’t know about his alter-ego FINAL, which, according to his Bandcamp page, has “existed sporadically since 1986” and is meant to “traverse sombre, ambient themes.” This is the kind of “dark ambient” that first attracted me to the genre and which I am now incredibly picky about. But when it’s done right, as here, the results are gently shifting textures that I can listen to for hours …

Kali Malone, Living Torch (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify)

Two long compositions by the Stockholm-based high priestess of pipe-organ drone that incorporate horns and reeds, sine-wave generators, and synthesizers. Slow, uniquely tuned, probably best experienced in multichannel surround. Seeing her live at the Cathedral of St. James here in Toronto was a highlight of the year.

Whatever the Weather, Whatever the Weather (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify)

Loraine James was rightly celebrated for the exuberantly complex programmed drums and hybridity of her album Reflection. That record had ambient interludes that foreshadowed what was to come on this album, which lived up to the hype. Can we give her a pandemic-lifetime achievement award yet? Also really enjoyed her WtW Beats In Space mix on Apple Music.

The Fun Years, Typos In Your Obituary (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify)

Much of my favorite music this year was made by artists new to me. But I’ve been listening to The Fun Years, Ben Recht and Isaac Spark’s ambient-with-humor project, since 2008’s Baby, It’s Cold Inside. From an interview pegged to that album’s release: “The TFY doctrine is pretty simple in that respect: from quantity comes quality. When we get around to putting an album together, we put the hundreds of hours we’ve recorded on our music players. After numerous listens, the few seconds or minutes of good material comes out, and we work to expand on that.” Fourteen years later and they’re still blending guitar, snippets of old records, and static. And it still works.

Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, Recordings from the Åland Islands (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify)

Chicago musicians Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer traveled to the Åland Islands, in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, in 2017. Taken by the landscape, they returned two years later to perform a concert in a medieval church, and the recording of that session became the basis for this album, which mixes field recordings, that live performance, plus improvisations on viola, organs, synthesizers, and more. More meditative than the other albums on this list, Recordings from … is nonetheless just as evocative of a particular place.

My year-end list of A/E albums to add to my library includes seventy-one records. Here are a few more that I particularly like (all links to Bandcamp or Boomkat):

• Sarah Davachi, Two Sisters
• Kevin Drumm, 120121
• Maxime Dunec, Nachthorn
• Steve Fors, It’s Nothing, but Still
• Yair Elazar Glotman, Speculative Memories
• Yui Onodera, Too Ne
• Bill Orcutt, Music for Four Guitars
• Salamanda, ashbalkum
• Shida Shahabi, Alvaret OST
• Skee Mask, Iss007
• Zimoun, Guitar Studies I–III

Did any of these records mean anything to you? Write to me about it! I love talking about and sharing music.