My Favorite Things
In honor of list season, a brief-as-I-can-manage rundown of my favorite records of 2023.
It has only been four newsletters since my last big list, but it’s already that time of year again. Just about every corner of the internet is reduced to a barrage of lists throughout December, and Attenuator is joining the fray just a few hours before you can safely throw out your physical 2023 calendar.
I’ve been making year-end lists of my favorite records since 2006, beginning on an old personal blog that has been lost somewhere in the far corners of the internet. When I was writing for Time Out, I always contributed a write-up or two to the global “Best of…” list and I’d usually compile an annual list of my favorite albums by Chicago-based artists. More recently, I’ve just posted a list of records I dig — probably the most efficient way to go about this whole process.
The act of compiling a list has always been the most fun part for me, mostly because it’s a great excuse to pour over my spreadsheet of albums and re-listen to some of my favorites (while pouring over records I haven’t heard on lists from The Quietus and The Wire). Actually sitting down to write about said favorites has always been a little harder for me — it’s often very difficult to briefly pin down exactly what made me latch on to a collection of songs.
Still, I couldn’t close out the first year of this newsletter’s existence without trying to concisely describe why a handful of records spoke to me. You can scroll through all of it below — and I might have one more list to share during the early days of 2024, so hit the big orange button to subscribe if that’s of interest.
My 25 Favorite Records of 2023
Adeline Hotel - Hot Fruit
The comparisons to lush, instrumental records by the likes of Jim O’Rourke, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and William Tyler led me to Hot Fruit, but Dan Knishkowy’s ear for wistful acoustic guitar melodies is what made me fall in love with the record. Originally conceived as a solo guitar record, Knishkowy entrusted a group of musicians with improvising piano, pedal steel, clarinet, violin, flute, and rhythm arrangements atop his compositions. The resulting tracks surround Knishkowy’s playing with embellishments that accentuate his work, like the gentle swells of pedal steel that give depth to "Seeing Yourself Seen” or the clarinet and flute flourishes that respond to finger-picked patterns on “Little Chili.” It’s a lovely suite of tracks made more beautiful by Knishkowy’s faith in his collaborators, who turned a solitary pursuit into a communal triumph.
Bandler Ching - Coaxial
It’s not until about halfway through the second track on Coaxial (“Awpril”) that a sax riff (one that’s not laden with effects) rings out and you realize that you’re listening to a jazz combo that can also pass for a post-rock band. The first issue of this newsletter was devoted to Bandler Ching, mostly because I’d been listening to a lot of Belgian jazz fusion (which will crop up several times on this list) and the group’s debut album felt exemplary of the scene’s dynamic, genre-fluid approach. A product of improvisational sessions that were honed and rearranged, Coaxial moves from subdued jazz balladry to jittery electronica with a sense of purpose and consistent synth-dappled ambiance.
Black Duck - Black Duck
You had me at “three prominent Chicago-based jazz-adjacent experimental rock musicians improvising together.” Thankfully, the debut album from the trio of Doug McCombs, Bill MacKay, and Charles Rumback isn’t just a one-off jam session — these three have been playing together long enough to understand the intricacies of their interplay, taking their various stylistic leanings in unexpected directions. By the time the motorik strum of late-album track “Lemon Treasure” reaches its crescendo, I’m left hoping that Black Duck is just the first of many heady flights helmed by this trio.
Cero - e o
I’m pretty sure that this record is one of many I discovered via writer James Hadfield’s excellent Tokyo Dross blog — a great resource for anyone looking to keep up with interesting Japanese music and the latest concerts in Tokyo. On the surface, Cero is a pop band that traffics in immaculately layered vocals and a few jaunty piano-backed tunes, but the trio is most intriguing when it’s bucking current J-pop trends. There’s plenty of that happening through e o, which contains a ballad that’s built around what sounds like dial tones (“Cupola”), a funky synth anthem (“Fdf”), and an airy R&B-style track (“Sleepra”). Listen to these tracks with vocals first, then check out the instrumental version of the album to fully appreciate everything that’s happening behind the voices.
Chogori - Minor Green
German duo Chogori is an exercise in contrast, with one player embracing the warm acoustic qualities of a double bass and the other channeling pulsating synth arpeggios. Gregor Kerkmann and Ralf Stritt have taken this interplay in various directions, weaving cinematic instrumentals on Lake and dance-friendly electronica on Heat Haze, but Minor Green is more of a jazz album. Drummer Martell Beigang’s restrained rhythms help set the tone, with Kerkmann and Stritt filling out tracks that traffic in funk (“Sun”) and the avant-garde (“Steam Train”). Like some of my favorite duos, Kerkmann and Stritt are able to quickly alternate between musical conversation and cooperation, and Minor Green does an excellent job of putting that quick rapport on display.
Corto.Alto - Bad With Names
I’ve long associated Glasgow with the cavernous instrumental rock of Mogwai and the indie-pop of acts like Franz Ferdinand and Camera Obscura. But Glasgow is a jazz town, too, and trombonist Liam Shortall (better known as Corto.Alto) is one of the scene’s figureheads, a kid who enrolled in a music conservatory at age 16 and spent the past four years recording singles with a band of friends squeezed into his shared apartment. Bad With Names was also tracked in Shortall’s flat, but its outsized ambition is conveyed via lush string arrangements and taut grooves. And while much of the record evokes UK contemporaries like the Ezra Collective and Alfa Mists, Corto.Alto’s debut offers further proof that the nation’s burgeoning jazz scene isn’t confined to London.
Dishwasher_ - Dishwasher_
The saxophone is an immensely expressive instrument, but much of the debut album from Dishwasher_ tries to squeezing even more range from the woodwind by piping it through effect pedals. It’s a trick employed by many of their Belgian jazz scene contemporaries, speaking to a larger trend of augmenting jazz tropes in favor of accentuating the genre’s ties of electronica, hip-hop, and more. Dishwasher_ finds the trio cycling through bass-heavy grooves outfitted with Balkan brass-inspired licks and microtonal melodies, interspersed with a few stripped-back moments that remind you of this group’s roots as a versatile improvisational jazz outfit.
Dustin Wong - Perpetual Morphosis
Across his trio of Thrill Jockey solo albums, Dustin Wong established himself as a masterful manipulator of looping melodies and daisy-chained effects pedals, conducting stomp box symphonies with sock-clad feet. Over the course of several self-released records, Wong has developed an even more complex method of creating collages of loops, employing as many as four looping pedals simultaneously and adding a suite of electronic instruments to his palette. Perpetual Morphosis exists in the uninhibited and uncharacteristically organic margins of electronic music, dreamed up by a musician in complete control of his tools and unafraid to embrace the beauty of (perceived, if not actual) chaos.
Grand River - All Above
Composer and musician Aimée Portioli didn’t set out to make an album about grief, but her tearstained face on the cover of All Above is indicative of the emotions that flow through these tracks. Completed in the wake of the untimely passing of Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg (to whom this record is dedicated), the compositions on this album swims in carefully-arranged collages of atmospheric drones, sparse piano melodies, and layered electronics. There are somber moments, but Portioli’s representation of mourning isn’t uniform — there’s room for arpeggiated glimmers of hope amid this reflective suite of sinuous instrumentals.
Jake Acosta - Retrospector
There’s an art to making extended pieces of music that hold your interest, shifting between distinctive and deftly intertwined ideas over the course of more than 20 minutes. Chicago music scene conduit, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Jake Acosta knows how to accomplish this feat — he created an engaging 27-minute composition on 2022’s Rehearsal Park, and on his latest release, Retrospector, he goes (almost as) long once again. The lead track, “Psilopsychosomatic,” meanders with purpose, gradually transforming a sparse strum into a glitchy, energetic cascade of looping melodies and rhythms. Acosta’s music is dense, generous, and ideal headphone music for anyone who appreciates the intricacies of a melange of riffs unfolding between your ears.
Jamie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War)
There’s a certain amount of dissonance in grieving a departed musician and listening their final recorded work — part of you is happy that there’s a posthumous document of what they were most passionate about, but it’s difficult to put aside the fact that they’re no longer around to witness their creation being appreciated. Characteristically varied and brimming with ideas, Jamie Branch’s final album alongside her Fly or Die ensemble sends her trumpet (and voice) ringing out across synth-dappled cosmic jazz numbers and a folksy cover of the Meat Puppets’ “Comin’ Down.” In light of Branch’s passing, it’s a record that invites you to imagine what she might have created next, while remaining grateful that you were around to hear what she shared with the world.
Koma Saxo - Post Koma
Swedish bassist and producer Petter Eldh is a musician who harnesses post production as a tool to add density and unexpected turns to his work, chopping and sampling his own recordings in a way that evokes the work of Chicago bandleader Makaya McCraven. The latest Koma Saxo record revolves around the shifting interplay of Eldh’s buoyant bass lines and drummer Christian Lillinger’s busy rhythms, with melodies coming into focus atop the jumble. During its most interesting moments, Post Koma balances on the razor’s edge of incongruence, sending a hard bop lick on a collision course with a free jazz freak-out or interrupting a mellow sax ballad with a frantic, chopped-up rhythm. The abrupt evolutions are a feature, not a glitch.
Lance Gurisik - Cull Portal
There are four tracks on Australian producer Lance Gurisik’s Cull Portal that I keep coming back to, always in sequence. It begins with “Cull pt. I,” on which Gurisik’s improvised piano chords and murmuring synths underpin the wistful sax melodies of Jeremy Rose. By “pt. III,” Rose’s sax is mostly lost amid the sequences of a Yamaha CS-80 (Vangelis’ synth of choice), giving way to the electronic onslaught of “Portal.” There’s orchestral quality to these pieces (and much of the album) despite the fact that the instrumentation is more limited, with the repeating motifs and ever-shifting balance of acoustic and electronic elements rewarding repeated listens as you journey deeper into Gurisik’s futuristic jazz portal.
Leo Takami - Next Door
Tokyo composer and guitarist Leo Takami has explained that when he sits down to write a song, “the basis is the landscape in my mind. I am trying not to let myself be persuaded by musical theory and so on.” It’s the kind of thing you can really only say with conviction if you’re a very talented musician (Takami studied jazz guitar), but it’s an approach that I can hear throughout Next Door, with every track shifting in instrumentation, tone, and genre. Whether he’s indulging in jaunty electro-jazz or a contemplative ambient tune, Takami’s music has tendency to sound deceptively simple, but if you’re willing to listen a bit more closely, its intricacies reveal themselves alongside your interpretation of the vistas his melodies and rhythms may represent.
Magic Carpet - Broken Compass
It’s been years since I’ve seen Magic Carpet perform, but when I started going to street festivals in Chicago more than a decade ago, the group’s psychedelic jazz could often be heard wafting from the stage. It took me a few years to realize that local jazz legend Fred Jackson Jr. was the person playing the sax, and a few more years to recognize jazz scene star-in-the-making Makaya McCraven behind the drum kit. It’s almost fitting that the group’s first proper album was actually recorded back in 2016, with the tapes aging gracefully until Oak Park label FPE Records finally released them this year. The product of a single weekend session, Broken Compass captures the loose-yet-controlled sound of a group of players who bounce off of one another with ease, cooly flitting from funky fusion numbers to Middle Eastern-inspired melodies.
Modern Cosmology - What Will You Grow Now?
The last time Letitia Sadier released a full-length album was in 2017 (the beautiful Find Me Finding You), so the arrival of this Modern Cosmology record really scratched an itch. What’s more, it’s an album that seems informed by Sadier’s past, with Brazilian band Mombojó creating arrangements that combine the laid-back, lounge music feel of Stereolab’s earlier albums with the electronic experimentation that characterized the band’s later work. “Why wilt away with age / When it is time to thrive?,” Sadier cooly intones on the record’s closing track — I’m not sure if it was intended as a tease, but she does have a long-awaited new solo album dropping in February.
Moses Yoofee Trio - Ocean
Despite forming back in 2020, the Moses Yoofee Trio has always been precious about sharing studio recordings of its music (I discovered the group via an Instagram video), so it’s no surprise that the band’s debut clocks in at concise five tracks. Ocean is quality over quantity, establishing the Berlin trio’s ability to lock into a taut R&B-informed groove and allow it to blossom into something more. The album’s most expansive track (“Minor Issues”) is an apt summation of the trio’s dynamic, with its busy rhythms and rapid keyboard melodies always managing to coalesce rather than compete with one another.
Ratboys - The Window
As this list makes evident, indie rock isn’t a genre of music that connects with me the same way it once did — I still listen to it with some frequency, but it’s rare that a record sinks its teeth into me. The Window is the exception and I fell for it as soon as I heard twangy early single “Black Earth, WI,” a guitar solo-ridden track that is essentially the Ratboys equivalent of “Impossible Germany.” Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, The Window is swimming in memorable riffs and vocal melodies that were refined during the eerily quiet months of Covid lockdown and eventually honed to razor sharpness in the studio. As always, it’s the distinctive voice of frontwoman Julia Steiner that ties these tracks together, adding an emotive quality to every lyrics, whether they deal grief or listening to Maps & Atlases songs with someone you love. I can’t describe it any better than Steven Hyden: this is “Just Good-Ass Indie Music.”
Rozi Plain - Prize
The unhurried songs that populate Prize provide the perfect canvas for London singer-songwriter Rozi Plain’s full-throated embrace of avant-pop, filled with arrangements that offer plenty of space for embellishment. Nearly every track on the record contains gentle synths that swell in the background, complementing and accenting Plain’s warm delivery of her labyrinthine lyrics. By the time that Danalogue shows up to turn “Painted the Room” into an unabashed synth-pop track, it’s difficult to imagine Plain returning to the sparse, guitar-driven sound of her earliest records — the cozy, inventive sound of Prize feels revelatory.
Siema Ziemia - Second
There’s room for one more electronic music-inspired jazz fusion album on this list, this one care of Polish quartet Siema Ziemia (which roughly translates to “hello Earth”). It wasn’t until I watched a recording of a recent performance at Bimhuis in Amsterdam that I realized how seriously this group commits to the conceit of performing electronic music with instruments instead of pre-programmed sequences — it just takes a lot of synths and plenty of coordination. Second sends sax riffs flying over four-on-the-floor beats, balancing rhythmic melodies with improvised interludes that set up Siema Ziemia as the heir apparent to The Comet is Coming now that Shabaka Hutchings has officially retired his sax.
Slowdive - Everything is Alive
During a year when the latest shoegaze revival kicked into high gear, it’s fitting that one of the genre’s progenitors returned with another excellent LP. Birthed from a batch of tunes that frontman Neil Halstead had written for a solo electronic album, Slowdive’s latest album once again reestablishes the group’s shoegaze bonafides — it’s a little quieter than their previous album and strewn with synth embellishments, but the breathy vocals and reverberating guitars that populate Everything is Alive reliably build to some very beautiful crescendos. If TikTok is helping keep Slowdive’s second act afloat, so be it. I’m just glad that the band is being given its due while being afforded the opportunity to forge ahead.
Sunwatchers - Music is Victory Over Time
It’s very difficult to accurately describe the sounds that instrumental group Sunwatchers is channeling on Music is Victory Over Time (trust me, I’ve been trying for a few minutes now). There are moments that remind me of new wave-adjacent Akron punk band Tin Huey and passages that sound capture the focused energy of contemporary experimental rockers Horse Lords. You can alternatively classify the band as krautrock, jazz, punk rock, and maybe even klezmer — sometimes within the confines of a single track. If you’re in the mood for music that’s stylistically unpredictable but reliably fascinating, Sunwatchers deliver.
Wata Igarashi - Agartha
Tokyo producer Wata Igarashi has always had a taste for trippy techno, but it’s telling that there are only a handful of tracks on his full-length debut that feel like they were written with a dance floor in mind. Agartha is an electro-opera that could pass as a soundtrack to a forgot ‘80s sci-fi flick, imagining a voyage through a mythical subterranean world via an atmospheric collage of synths. The various outtakes that Igarashi has released drive home Agartha’s origin as an outlet for journeying beyond four-on-the-floor beats, taking sounds honed in sweaty clubs and transporting them to another realm.
William Tyler & the Impossible Truth - Secret Stratosphere
I lauded the transportive quality of this live album in a previous newsletter, and my feelings about it haven’t really shifted too much since then. It’s still thrilling to hear some of my favorite William Tyler songs imbued with some twangy psych-rock fuzz, performed in a way that distinguishes them from their studio counterparts without losing the character of the compositions (and it’s a gift to finally have a professionally-recorded version of live set staple “Area Code 601”). I’m finally going to see Tyler perform with the Impossible Truth at Constellation in January, and I’m approaching the experience with a bit of apprehension — I hope the show I witness can live up the one that’s slowly taken shape in my mind while listening to Secret Stratosphere.
Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music
Yussek Dayes has previously put out records with the likes of Kamaal Williams and Tom Misch, but the drummer’s debut release under his own name carries all the weight of a “first album,” reflecting on everything that has lead to this point. It’s an expansive collection of songs (clocking in at 74 minutes) that zips along, thanks largely to a long list of guests — from London jazz scene heavyweight Shabaka Hutchings to Jamaican singer Masego — and its stylistic diversity, bouncing from psychedelic funk to synth-heavy jazz fusion. More importantly, it’s a record that seems to encapsulate Dayes as both an artist and an individual, with audio of his young daughter and his childhood drum kit placed amid a collection of songs establishing him as yet another UK jazz musician who is unconstrained by a genre label.
Thanks for reading all of (or at least part of) that — I hope you found something new to listen to. If you know of someone looking for some fresh tunes to add to a New Year’s Eve playlist, feel free to hit that share button and put this in their inbox.
While I have you: One of the best perks of writing a newsletter is fielding travel recommendations, so if you know of any great restaurants or record shops in Lisbon or Porto, please send them to me before my wife and I fly to Portugal for in February! Enjoy the remaining hours (or minutes?) of 2023 and I’ll see you back here in January.