Brian Sholis

Chicago musicians Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer traveled to the Åland Islands, in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, in 2017. Taken by the landscape, they returned two years later to perform a concert in a medieval church, and the recording of that session became the basis for this album, which mixes field recordings, that live performance, plus improvisations on viola, organs, synthesizers, and more. More meditative than the other albums on this list, Recordings from … is nonetheless just as evocative of a particular place.

Two long compositions by the Stockholm-based high priestess of pipe-organ drone that incorporate horns and reeds, sine-wave generators, and synthesizers. Slow, uniquely tuned, probably best experienced in multichannel surround. Seeing her live at the Cathedral of St. James here in Toronto was a highlight of the year.

This record, which introduced me to Shenfeld, came with a stamp of approval and a key piece of context: it’s released by Thrill Jockey, my favorite hometown record label, and is titled after an essay and artwork by Hito Steyerl. A classically trained guitarist and composer, Shenfeld sets the record’s themes from the opening track: its mix of live and synthesized sound, its structure of slight variation emerging from repetition, its languid pace. As she puts it, “I’ve always been taken by the way music can seemingly stretch, bend, and even break time, its ability to touch something in you, emotionally, and the fact that it’s a resolutely physical experience.” Shenfeld’s February 2024 record Under… More

The art that I find most resonant often presents variation, decomposition, or struggle within an identified system or set of rules. So it is with my favorite record of the year, Montreal musician Mat Ball’s Amplified Guitar. Playing an instrument he built himself, Ball recorded each track in a single take. There are no overdubs or adornments—each piece is a dance between Ball’s mournful, blues-inflected playing and the amplifier that is projecting (and refracting) each note. As the album’s short trailer video makes clear, the dance between Ball and his amplifier is literal: at one point, he presses the head of the guitar into the amplifier; at another, he upends the instrument and drags its head… More