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Sofia Kourtesis is a Berlin-based Peruvian dance producer, “Madres” is her debut album which follows on from a 2021 EP “Fresia Magdalena”. Cover of Madres by Sofia Kourtesis It was trailed by several singles, including the title track which caught my attention back in May. The album is dedicated to her parents and there are also songs dedicated to the surgeon who performed life-saving surgery on Kourtesis’s mother. The whole album is a heady mix of positivity and dedication to both music and to family.

For me, ten years on from my trip to South America, I think my response to this album has been to its fusion of European and South American dance music, perhaps reminding me that it is possible to incorporate the experiences one has in other places into our viewpoint on the world. It seems to be that we are in a point in history that rather than acknowledging that we are interconnected and responsible for and to one another, that we have instead lurched into a protectionist and selfish mode of thinking.

“Cool artwork! No, we don’t have it but it’s coming in next week.“ Cover of Imagine This is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities by James Holden

“Cool artwork! We haven’t had a copy in but I can order it for you.”

Me picking it up a week later: “Cool artwork!”

“Imagine This is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities” is definitely album title of the year, made all the more topical with the intrusion of Chat-GPT and the like into the cultural conversation. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT work by absorbing large amounts of textual data (i.e. this blog, helping to make all those instant album reviews you can write now just a tiny bit more shit) and breaking them down into tokens, with each token having a meaning and a grammatical role and so on. These meanings and roles form higher dimensional spaces in which the tokens are vectors, where the rules of the LLMs help determine which tokens live near to one another and which pairs are likely to sit together in ‘meaningful’ sentences etc etc.

Some albums you come to one way: a good review on a blog you respect, Cover of When Will We Land by Barry Can’t Swim a track appearing on a playlist by someone whose taste you trust, etc and so on. And sometimes you get directed to something multiple times. This is what happened to me this year with the irrepressible “When Will We Land?” by Barry Can’t Swim. Anyway, tracks by “Barry” appeared in mixes a lot this year and the album kept popping up in eagerly anticipated lists.

I’ve listened to this album a lot but I still have questions. Like is “can’t swim” his last name? Was he not made to learn in detention at lunchtime in the school’s outdoor pool in an English April like yours truly?!

The album starts with the title track, a nice minimalist piece that is nearly “not dance music” in the way that so many opening tracks on dance albums are. It puts me in mind of Steve Reich played by Bonobo. The next track “Deadbeat Gospel” is an impromptu rap by an old school friend while on a night out sampled and cut to fit the beat, it’s pretty cool but I’m glad it’s near the beginning so I can skip over it if I’m not feeling it.

It’s probably no surprise that as we reach the top four (or five if you like) we also Cover of First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National get to the two albums The National released in 2023. The first, “First Two Pages of Frankenstein”, was trailed with a big reveal early on in the year, while the second, “Laugh Track”, was dropped all of a sudden in October. Once I got to know both albums, I swung between liking each one more for a while, hence putting them both at the same point in the list and not considering each separately.

For the purposes of this list, we can consider both albums as one homogeneous collection of songs, though some reviews did pick out that “Laugh Track” has more live drums and the songs on that latter album are looser and longer than their “… Frankenstein” counterparts. I think there are songs that are similar to one another on both albums, and that for those tracks, the song on the first album is a bit better than the one on “Laugh Track”. Some of the songs on “Laugh Track” are almost invisible on the first few listens, songs like “Dreaming”, “Hornets” and “Tour Manager”, though the latter of those three has become one of my favourite songs on both albums.

It would be remiss of me to claim that this is a placeholder for any number Cover of Strange Disciple by Nation of Language of (quite different sounding) song based albums that came out this year (Yves Tumor, Wilco to mention two) but it feels that way. This album came high up my list of listens because it’s a very good breakfast album, one to listen to while getting the Day started - though there are also some bangers on here too.

Nation of language are a three piece band from New York. I think one of them is famous for being in a band I’ve not heard of (or is that their producer, I must do some fact checking) and two of them are married, even going so far as to have had a gofundme or whatever for the band as a present at a wedding. (That doesn’t give off future “we are a duo now” vibes at all!)

Grails are one of those bands who always get played a lot at my house. Cover of Anches en Maat by Grails There’s something about their slow incremental instrumental pieces that my brain just loves to get lost in. Anches en Maat, their first album in six years or so, and the first with the entire band in the studio together since 2008, is their most Grails-y album in a long time.

There isn’t a great deal I can write about The Ancient Truth without sounding vague and anodyne. Cover of The Ancient Truth by Maara While I try to come think about different forms of music and go into some analysis of what makes one album more interesting than another, sometimes you end up just saying “this album is great because I like it and I always have a good time listening to it.”

As you get older nostalgia becomes an ever important part of listening to music. Cover of Fuse by Everything But The Girl It often feels like the business relies on convincing an aging population of fans to part with their money on new versions of old material. It’s nostalgia, the feeling of recapturing something you loved in your youth, that often makes this acceptable. Of course it’s also nice to get new music from your favourite bands, especially when it’s as good as “Fuse”.

Radical Romantics, the third album by Fever Ray was released in April. I bought a copy on red vinyl which is a beautiful sight to behold. Cover of Radical Romantics by Fever Ray I listened to a lot when it was released but eased up a bit until listening to it a couple more times while writing this list. It’s a great collection of songs, probably better than their second album “Plunge”. The cover art is just as scary though.

Agartha is the debut album by Japanese electronic artist Wata Igarashi. Cover of Agartha by Wata Igarashi I don’t really know much about him, but I do know that I enjoy releases on the German record label Kompakt and I have really enjoyed Japanese techno in recent years. Over lockdown I discovered Haruomi Hosono’s “Polyharmony” album and re-discovered the work of Shinichi Atobe, particularly their album “Love of Plastic”. Both of those albums could be future understated classics and while both are by Japanese artists working in electronic music, there the comparison ends.

Another year (nearly) over and so starting from tomorrow, I’m going to count down my top 10 albums of 2023. The rules are:

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote my last Civ VI leader post about Amanitore of Nubia and there’s been a whole host of new leaders and personas added to the game since then. Among these the number of Chinese leaders has increased from two to five. Therefore it’s probably a good time to start writing about one of them, and where better to start than the OG himself, Qin Shi Huang. The recent leader pass has created a new persona for him but today we shall focus on his original version, which is now referred to in-game as his “Mandate of Heaven” persona.