Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 60 Vorige editie

The year comes to a close, then. How was it for you? Here at Electronic Sound, we listened to more music than is really decent. We reviewed somewhere north of 700 albums, interviewed about 200 artists, and released some records of our own too.

As a decade we can finally give a name to arrives (the 20s, hurrah!), we’re already looking forward to doing it all over again. But in the meantime, we’re going to reflect on a year that has given us more excellent music than we could have hoped for. Selecting the best is always a fraught procedure. After all, how can you really say one particularly fine album is better than another?

Anna Meredith, we decided in the end, took the album biscuit this year and should therefore appear on our cover. Why? She’s taking electronic music and her classical training and sensibility, combining them with her own various obsessions, and is coming up with something entirely new. Meredith’s music is not a version of any of the things that have gone into its creation. It’s a dense hybrid that absolutely slays it in a live setting, where she hits a drum with such fury that you worry for both its well-being and her elbow joints. She also plays clarinet, glockenspiel and synths. She’s equally at home at a Royal Albert Hall BBC Prom performing a commissioned piece inspired by telegrams sent home by soldiers in the First World War, as she is cranking out a cover version of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ at a sticky-floored rock venue to a crowd of pissed up rowdies.

Michael Rother and Haiku Salut take the other main gongs, for best reissue and best soundtrack respectively, and we’ll leave you to discover all our other picks. You might not concur with our choices, but you’ll hopefully agree with us that it’s been a great year for music. Everything else? Not so much…