2020 In Music & Words

2020 Lists: The year's favorite sounds, and the year's archive of relevant writing on musical, cultural and historical spaceways

Happy New Year! We’re all pretty much thinking the same thing about the seasonal transition, so I’ll neither belabor the point nor repeat the notions of a million IG/Twitter posts. Suffice to say: Thank You for reading, I hope this note finds you and yours in good health, and hopeful about the future. Below you will find three lists. The top one gathers and groups my favorite recordings of 2020 (themes, sounds, artists, notions I followed through the year), while also moving into related musical experiences and media, making connections and contexts (which is how I tend to think about music and culture). (Some of these ideas will be expanded upon in the next few days.) The second is a pure long list (alphabetical order) of other albums, songs, mixes and music videos I enjoyed a lot this year. The last is a list of what I think are the best (or most important to me) pieces I wrote in 2020. But 2021 is gonna bring a whole new bag.

2020 Sounds & Words

Somewhere along the line, simply making a list of albums or songs (and especially ranking them) stopped being any sort of a useful marker. It was the connections between recordings, performances and related sounds—some overt, some tangible—that became the primary reason to even bother attempting a year-end summing up. With absolutely no respect to the year currently in question, the task became how does 20/20 hindsight affect the meaning of what we listened to, how we listened to it, and why we did so? Below, you’ll find an overview of my year as I currently see and hear it, its biases and fears, its joys and aspirations, things I noticed and started doing, and (by omission) things I ran away from. I won’t bother you with deep-dive curios like “The Dead shows I listened to most” (no need - contact me off-line if yr interested), and tried not to stray too far off the musical path. Though I do not promise that I won’t in the future. Dada Strain is about context and connections between music and our daily lives; and the more complicated the latter become, the more we try to wrench meaning from the former. The most important thing I was reminded of last year was that “God is change.” I understand “change” as a study of improvisation; I also understand accepting “change” as a study of developing rhythm. Rhythm - Improvisation - Community. Those are the things guiding me forward. And those are things that power this list.

Angel Bat Dawid, “Transition East”/”No Space For Us” (International Anthem) // Angel Bat Dawid & the Brothahood, Live! // Daoui, Message from Daoui (self-released) | A couple of current working musicians greatly influenced my 2020 outlook, and one of them was Angel Elmore (a.k.a. Angel Bat Dawid). It’s hard to sufficiently emphasize how much her approach to life and “WErk” (which in her own words should include “we”) pushed me in a specific direction that involved creating this Dada Strain space, and developing a clearer idea of music’s role in the societies we want to live in. Angel makes an enormous amount of music, all of which generously pushes and pursues meaning and spirit towards a grander philosophic point, where the evolution of sounds and activist and metaphysical thought intertwine. No surprise then that her single (full disclosure: I wrote its introductory notes, see below) and live album were deep reflections of the year’s pervasive energies, both positive and negative. In 2020, I also followed Angel’s ears more closely. I’d initially met her at Chicago’s Hyde Park Records, where she was buyer/braintrust, and you can now hear her exquisite taste in old and new music monthly, on her NTS show. But she’s also expanding who she plays and records with. The album she made with the Chicago producer Oui Ennui—a genre-free romp through hip-hop beats and loops, clarinet solos and outer-space drones, funk and freedom—radiated a limitless sense of musicians having fun while permeating every note and syllable with social implication.

Carl Craig (feat. Moritz Von Oswald), Party/After-Party (Dia Beacon, March 6th) // “St. James Joy” (Brooklyn, Summer 2020) // Lovers Rock (dir. Steve McQueen, Amazon Prime. November 2020) | For many people who never know what they have until it’s gone, the communal dance took on greater purpose and weight in 2020; but for many of us, its ceremonial intentions were always primary to how/why we pursued the dance with as much fervor as we did. Amazing then how Carl and Moritz’s performance, during the opening weekend of Craig’s Dia installation just before quarantine, prefaced the ensuing solitude, actualizing the importance of what many previously regarded as simple social interaction. Those of us there now carry the significance of that moment—its feel, the otherworldly sounds, intimate spacing and people’s hugs—in our limbs forever. But even for the social distanced, there were opportunities to dance safely, collectively and meaningfully thru 2020. No gathering was more responsible for helping me maintain a kind of sanity than St. James Joy. It was an at-first-nightly 7p celebration of essential workers with DJ equipment and bassbins; by June, it had had turned into a (strictly) hour-long disco-house party on a Clinton Hill street corner, a celebratory observance of Blackness and related reprieve for those shuttling to and from the protests. (As the summer progressed it developed into something more expansive and unruly, though still a positive expression of a communal dance emotion.) An immense thank you goes out to the Vill family for their dedication and sacrifice in creating St. James Joy, a new tradition like absolutely no other. When it dropped in November, Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock felt like a ghost echo to it and to the whole year of dancing.

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters (Sony) // Sault, (Black Is) (self-released) // Moses Sumney, Grae (Secretly Canadian) // Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul” (Sony) // 7p Cheer (universal sounds) | Living with music in isolation meant that a certain social inherency we desire from it—the communality—was no longer accessible. The isolation also required us to create our own narratives of what musically coping at this f*cked up time meant, and how to carry on individually And at first, the musicians seemed as much on their own as audiences. But, oh how glorious were the occasions when artists were not only plugging into the tone of our individual navigations, but uniting many of us in our solitary spaces. A different kind of network was activated. Even before I learned that many of the sounds on Bolt Cutters were made by using the house she was pod’ing in (and metaphorically trying to escape from) as a percussion instrument, I loved listening to Fiona Apple those first few weeks of its release, because of the knowledge that others were too. Sault’s drop on Juneteenth in the midst of the #BLM uprising was even more of a visceral and literal plugging into a communal feeling, while blowing away many traditional suppositions about the sonic make-up of Black music. Moses Sumney destroyed those same suppositions, also also also and and and numerous others, but by using a completely different set of textures, a gentle therapy for damaged psyches, and for so much more. Dylan’s best song in years was a wander through the historic subconscious, but also 100% an idea of how time is warped, and how we think we’re living linearly, but in no way are we. Was it a surprise that “Murder,” recorded in teh middle of the Obama administration, came just as we were discussing deep-state machinations and the malleability—stopping and transposing—of time? But the drone remained the drone, even when it manifested as a whole bunch of banging pans for a few minutes at the same time every day.

Irreversible Entanglements, Who Sent You? (International Anthem) // Luke Stewart, Exposure Quintet (Astral Spirits) // Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes, Heritage of the Invisible II (International Anthem) | It’s been many years since the question of identifying “the world’s best band” had come up—I’ve never been an ILX regular, or drawn into such discussions on other listservs—and it’s not like it came up consciously in 2020 either. Yet at some point, contemplating the punk jazz ferocity of Who Sent You?, the question arose, and the more I thought about it, the more Irreversible Entanglements fit the profile better than any other working unit. Which raised a far more interesting question: what the hell does it mean for a group making free verse, improvised music with hardcore’s intensity and activist visions, made up of multi-gender, multi-racial members, all of whom live in different cities, to fit the profile usually reserved for Beatles, Stones or Radiohead or Sleater-Kinney? It means the world’s changing. IE qualify because their collective power is absolutely immense—personally, I trust no mainstream “Best Music of 2020” list that doesn’t include Who Sent You?, an absolute beast of a progressive hardcore jazz record about the neoliberal supremacist years. But the breadth of the members’ individual work also informs their explosion; and the staggering volume of that work is part of their gift and legacy. At last check in mid-December, poet/electronic synthesist Moor Mother (born: Camae Ayewa), trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes, bassist Luke Stewart and saxophonist Keir Neuringerhad led the line on over 20 releases this year. Stewart’s Exposure Quintet was one of my two favorite free jazz-informed albums of the year, deep on rhythmic drive, great tunes and loaded with playing that fell apart and came back together. Navarro and Homes’ Heritage of the Invisible II was an electronic improvisation blast: trumpets, synths and beats, aligning in loud, rhythmically ballistic duet plays readymade for an abstract jazz-dance party. (Other individual IE releases are strewn throughout this post too.) Neither sounded like the Entanglements, but you could hear how they fed each other, and how the collective voice was rising just as its most required. Maybe not “best” so much as “the only band matters”!

Kassa Overall, I Think I’m Good (Brownswood) // Asher Gamedze, Dialectic Soul (On the Corner) // Gerald Cleaver, Signs (577 Records) // Jeremy Cunningham, The Weather Up There (Northern Spy) // Moses Boyd, Dark Matter (Exodus) // Quin Kirchner, The Shadows and The Light (Astral Spirits) // Tcheser Holmes, …the T is Silent (self-release) | Another question: What does it mean that 2020 turned out to be the year of the drummers? (And of Sun Ra…a related but separate post.) Before this garbage year had even begun, the theme of more and more drummers escaping from behind the kit as leaders, vocalists, producers, composers, conceptualizers, with something more to offer was clear: Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science’s debut dropped in November 2019; Kassa Overall’s I Think I’m Good and Jeremy Cunningham’s The Weather Up There had been done for a while and simply looking for a label; the first tracks off Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter were appearing, and so on. None of these offered even the slightest standard notions of “jazz” records, even though they were conceived and produced by drummers who came into renown in that musical space; yet in different ways, all of them kept the soul and power of great improvisational music in their narratives. But being drummers, they also made grooves like MFers. The veteran Gerald Cleaver essentially made a “techno” album. The great young South African Asher Gamedze made a soulful, political quartet+vocalist album was informed by dancing to freedom swing. Tcheser Holmes’ solo EP was spectacular abstract funk-jazz. Quin Kirchener used the interstellar arkestral model to record oversize jams full of weird horn comobs and even weirder synths. Kassa and Jeremy told personal stories that were also political AF; and Moses seemed to make a musical diary of what living with Brexit in London feels like (without mentioning it once by name, I don’t think). So, again, what’s it say that all this took place in 2020, and summarized the year so well? That those who make rhythmic stories with other people, for other people, decided to write the stories for themselves, often splitting the damn difference between the producer and band-leader models? I would love to meet so much of this music on a dance-floor that is not my living room, to engage this music in real time.

[EDIT: Sometimes you have a brain-fart, and sometimes you fall asleep when you drive. Forgetting Tyshawn Sorey in this section, and his Sextet’s immense Unfiltered., is far more the latter than the former.]

The Beneficiaries, Crystal City is Alive (Axis) // Jaki Shelton Green, The River Speaks of Thirst (Soul City Sounds) // Thulani Davis, Nothing But the Music (Blank Forms) // Heroes Are Gang Leaders, “The Day We Gave the Globes Back, A Sing Along!” (live at Issue Project Room, September 30th)” // Moor Mother & billy woods, Brass (Backwoodz) | Is there a more dorkily pretentious (or, to borrow my friend Sam’s favorite 2020 word, “herb”) statement than, “I got into poetry this year”? Compounded by the cliche that most lyrics really don’t do it for me nowadays, so now I go looking for spoken word. Maybe it wasn’t quite “this year,” but 2020 was full of different types of intersections of poetry and music. (Have they always been there or have I simply begun seeking them out?) Some of it came from the new hip-hop records I listened to, most of them “underground” or “backpacker” or “lyrically abstract” (or whatever is the proper descriptive for word-/image-heavy tracks that eschew mainstream hip-hop and trap tropes) and approach spoken-word deliveries. (See the fantastic, year-ending Moor Mother/billy woods collaboration.) More often, engagement with the poetic arrived from the improvisational side, reaffirming a connection with the Black Arts Movement, when music and poetry and dance were all part of the same artistic expression (and, coincidentally, when people were out in the streets). That this feeling was in the air may have been best expressed on an album by The Beneficiaries, Detroit legends Jeff Mills and Eddie Fowlkes creating techno soundscapes for poet Jessica Care More. (Watching Mills escape the techno/club cul de sac the last few years has been a joy.) North Carolina’s first Black woman poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green dropped a record with minimalist instrumental backing that chronicled the atmosphere that begat the summer’s uprising, putting to tape what usually remains on a page. (Why now?) The poet Thomas Sayers Ellis- and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a big band which mixes poetry, spoke-word, theater and improvisational narratives made an excellent sophomore album (below), but it was their livestream performance at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room that was among my favorite moments of 2020, full of joy, noise, funk, despair and dance, comedic explosion and beautiful beautiful words. And then Thulani Davis dropped a book of verses about music and clubs, and the shape of the year felt complete. Or at least, less broken. In lieu of social dance-floor divinations, these words were the rhythms and patterns in our heads which could help us recognize the world as it was, see through the veils or draw our own curtains.

Theo Parrish, Wuddaji (Sound Signature) // We are All Gorgeous Monsterss (Soundcloud) | The first dance I went to in 2020 was a Theo Parrish set at Brooklyn’s Nowadays, where the music was, in retrospect, the aura of Wuddaji. At the time, I described the set’s overall sound as “Black marching band music played with drum machines and MPCs,” and I kinda stand by that. For the four or so hours I was there (as is often the case, I can no longer keep up with Theo’s all-nighters), the music was magnificent, flowing, relentless, rarely approaching “song”-oriented records. Outside of the exalted “This is For You” with vocalist Maurissa Rose, Wuddaji doesn’t either, feeling like a producer’s solo expression of group-dance music made from parts usually improvised on together by numerous musicians. (This might actually be the truth, with Parrish shepherding studio performances into his mixer and chopping them up; but his process is a complete mystery to me.) Wuddaji was supposed to drop in the Spring but due to 2020 circumstances, arrived almost secretly in late September. And yet it was also in the air all summer long, due to We are All Gorgeous Monsterss, an incredible, since-deleted six-part audio collage that was Theo’s response to the #BLM Uprising. Made up of autobiographical stories, YouTube clips, beats, and random records, it felt like Theo’s take on archiving his story of American Blackness, in the vein of Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message Is Death. He tinkered with it for a few weeks, changing parts around and putting up different versions, before (at last check) taking it down. It was a temporary scream at the white supremacy elements that Parrish has faced, and couldn’t help but inform what Wuddaji sounded like to ears that heard both. The two pieces of music seem accidentally interconnected, but also purposefully so.

HAUS of ALTR 10-12 (Haus of ALTR) // New York Dance Music I - IV (Towhead) | It was interesting to watch white dance music critics and publications, especially those startled unaware by the summer’s #BLM Uprising (and especially those who’d previously minimalized—if recognized at all—global dance music culture’s undeniably Black roots), react with…well, all kinds of content. One of their consensus favorites became HOA10 and HOA11, a pair of comps from HAUS of ALTR, a label started by Acemo and MOMA Ready, two Brooklyn-based producer/DJs with growing reputations; and which featured younger Black artists who made club music on the techno/house/rave continuum. HAUS of ALTR had actually been curating such comps for a couple of years, plugging into a young Black dance music narrative; and they weren’t doing so in a silo, but in community with, among other Brooklynites, the booking agency Discwoman, the Black dance music festival Dweller (both co-founded by Frankie Hutchinson), the radio station Half-Moon, and the writer/artist/thinker DeForrest Brown Jr (aka Speaker Music). Together, they’ve been imagining a Black dance-music culture outside of white supremacist institutions and systems. So, interesting then, that in June, those institutions began seeking them out; and that with Bandcamp Fridays, which the HOA comps and similar comps on NYC’s Towhead Recordings were timed to, there was a flow of white tears-enabled capital to aid in this reimagining. More interesting that in all the unpacking of the media’s cultural baggage—VERY little of it overt or accepting of their/our own guilt in the matters—the music was almost a critical after-thought. And there was so f•cking much music—the seven HOA and Towhead comps released between March and September featured nearly 150 tracks by almost 40 artists—that you couldn’t turn around an actual proper critique on a deadline, especially when the Black protest media wave could end at any moment. And critique was the best thing you could do, because while there was an enormous amount of great music here, there was also a lot of perfunctory rave sounds as well. What the comps undoubtedly did was plant a very loud flag for a community of young Black producers doing the hard work of staking ownership of their new dance “underground.” It also produced a fair warning to those who want to participate in their re-imagining but come from outside marginalized communities, those who deemed their professional and/or political inclinations as giving them an allies pass: Wake up to the possibility that we’re not all on the same side, and that temporary critical lip service (or a Bandcamp Fridays purchase) does not supplant the work of changing the values of institutions. Or the absolute need to overthrow them and start again.

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MORE 2020 Music (Rhythm Electronics Movement Improvisation…)

Acid Paulli, MOD // Anteloper, Tour Beats Vol. 1 // Aquiles Navarro, [TOTAL IMPROVISACIÓN] // Black Meteoric Star, Disco // Ase Manual, Black Liquid Electronics // Authentically Plastic, “Anti-Fun” // Azumah, Long Time Ago // Batuk, Again She Reigns // Bless The Mad // Boof, Rebirth Of Gerberdaisy // Byron the Aquarius, Ambrosia // Celebrity BBQ Sauce // Cleo Sol, Rose in the Dark // Charles Tolliver, Connect // Common Saints, Idol Eyes // Cotonete, “Super Vilain Wants Love (DJ Deep & Romain Poncet Remix)” // Conclave, “Sunny” // Dam Swindle feat. Jitwam, “Coffee in the Morning” // Darryn Jones, …presents Chi-Town // Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger, Force Majeure // DJ Python, Mas Amiable // Duval Timothy, Help // Dyani, Under // Eric Revis, Slipknots Through a Looking Glass // Etuk Ubong, Africa Today [Night Dreamer Direct​-​To​-​Disc Sessions // Four Tet, “Baby” (and video), Parallel // Gabriels, “Love and Hate In a Different Time” // Gavilan Rayna Russom, FACT Mix 767 // Heroes Are Gang Leaders, Artificial Happiness Button // Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids, Shaman! // IG Culture presents LCSM, Earthbound // Immanuel Wilkins, Omega // Jay Daniel, SSD // Jim White & Marisa Anderson, The Quickening // Jimi Tenor, Metamorpha // Jneiro Janel,  After a Thousand Years // Julion De'Angelo & Viola Klein, We // Kahil El'Zabar, …America the Beautiful // Keleketla! // King Britt, Back 2 Black // Krust, “Anti-Gravity Love (Masters at Work remix)” // Lady Blackbird, “Collage (Bruise remix)” // Linkwood & Foat, Linkwood & Foat // Liv.e, Couldn't Wait To Tell You... // Mabuta, Signs of Life (Urban Sessions Live Stream) // Mary Lattimore, Silver Ladders // Mausiki Scales, “The Solution” // Moor Mother, Circuit City // Nicolás Jaar, Cenizas // Nduduzo Makhathini, Modes of Communication: Letters From the Underworlds // Nicole Mitchell & Lisa E. Harris, EarthSeed // Nikki Nair, Number One Slugger // Nubya Garcia (feat. Ms. MAURICE, Cassie Kinoshi, Richie Seivwright), “Source” // Omar-S, Fuck Resident Advisor // Oneness of Juju, African Rhythms 1970-82 // Otis Sandsjö, Y-Otis 2 // Patrick Cowley, Some Funkettes // Photay, “The People (Penya Universal Riddim Mix)” // Pink Siifu, Negro // Raymond Richards, The Lost Art of Wandering // Sault, (Rise) // Shabaka & The Ancestors, We Are Sent Here By History // Shackleton & Zimpel, Primal Forms // Speaker Music, Percussive Therapy // Standing on the Corner, G-E-T-O-U-T!! The Ghetto // Sun Ra, Egypt 1971 // Superposition, “Bilawal” // Thelonious Monk, Palo Alto 1968 // Vibration Black Finger, Can You See What I'm Trying To Say // Whoarei, Love Spectrum // Yaeji, What We Drew // Zara McFarlane, “Roots of Freedom” // VA, Afro-Synth presents New Horizons // VA, Neroli: The First Circle // VA, Parabellum Detroit

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Some Words I Wrote

An Interview With Luke Stewart and a Blacks’ Myths DJ Mix (AFROPUNK)

Noah Davis’ Artistic Legacy Finally Arrives in New York City (AFROPUNK)

Still Saving The Day: David Mancuso’s The Loft, the Most Influential Dance Party In History, Turns 50 (NPR)

On Theaster Gates and the Abstract Gospel of the Black Monks of Mississippi (The Vinyl Factory)

On Florian Schneider & Tony Allen’s Trans-Global Beat Expressions #RIP (Tidal)

At This Time… A Reaction to the Killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the #BLM Uprising (Raspberry Fields & Maggot Brain)

How the Rock’n’Roll Sci-Fi Novel A Song for a New Day Predicted Our Pandemic Dystopia (Pitchfork)

The Darkness & the Daydream: The Grateful Dead in 1970 (Tidal)

Legacies: RBG & #GrowingUpOrlov (Raspberry Fields)

How South Africa’s Blue Notes Helped Invent European Free Jazz (Bandcamp)

On Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics and How Punk Begat The Eighties (Tidal)

Pitchfork reviews of Kassa Overall, Greg Foat, Oneness of Juju and Theo Parrish

And the connecting essay between Emma Warren’s Makes Some Space and Angel Bat Dawid’s “Transition East”/”No Space For Us,” a poster screed for International Anthem entitled “Make Some Space For Us.”