Top albums of the year:

Janek Schaefer: Lay-by Lullaby [12k] and Unfolding Luxury Beyond the City of Dreams [Dekorder]

From Wire, regarding Lay-by Lullaby:

Janek Schaefer has regularly returned to the concepts and ideas from J.G. Ballard, with Lay-by Lullaby being the most recent. It began as a gallery installation which saw speakers mounted into traffic cones, receiving transmissions from a classy leather-bound radio, with the sound design itself a loosely composed work of field recordings from the M3 motorway on the outskirts of London in front of Ballard’s house….On top of these found sounds, Schaefer layers placid sonorities that recall Basinski’s tape loop mantras, offering similarly maudlin eulogies. A few of the tracks, such as ‘Radio 104FM’, sport a snippet of a Lynchian pop song that tumbles into narcotised reverb. Using the simple overlay of symbolic sounds it provides an accessible piece of sound art. As a composition fixed in time and space, the album variation offers a pleasant, unchallenging listen.

From Boomkat, regarding Unfolding Luxury Beyond the City of Dreams:

A softer, more tactile collection of signature ambient textures and slowly shifting space spread around seven sublime pieces united by an elegiac solemnity. They range from tributes to friends and family who’ve passed on, thru sweeping orchestral moments woven with field recordings, to one gorgeous number crafted from recordings made from a helium balloon and meshed with a piano loop robbed from The Carpenters, plus his theme tune for a site specific theatre production, and recordings made in Grand Central Station. Beautiful material.

 

The rest, in no particular order…

Home listening:

Marble Sky: Marble Sky [Students Of Decay]

 

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Songs of Forgiveness [Baro Records]

 

Grouper: Ruins [Kranky]

 

Fennesz: Mahler Remixed [self-released] and Bécs [Editions Mego]

 

Biographs: Must Dissolve [Reckno Tape]

 

Lawrence English: Wilderness of Mirrors [Room40]

 

Oneohtrix Point Never: Commissions I [Warp]

 

Martin Nonstatic: Inner Landscapes [BineMusic]

 

Best Audio/Visual Project of 2014:

Christopher Willits: Opening [Ghostly International]

 

Best Pre-2014:

Shinichi Atobe: Ship-Scope [Chain Reaction]

 

Most Anticipated Album of 2015:

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: A Year With 13 Moons [Mexican Summer]

 

On-the-Go:

Caribou: Our Love [Merge Records]