I don't think of the Velvet Underground as punk. Pre-punk? Proto-punk? Sure. But for me "Punk" started with Raw Power. And I think plenty of bands have added to it, not the least of which is Sonic Youth. Also: Wire, the Cramps, Suicide, The Ramones, Joy Division, Fugazi, and tons of other bands with sounds as varied as the colors of the rainbow.

But I do see your point.

DAMMIT!

I forgot all about Young Fathers - White Men Are Black Men Too when I threw my album list together.

Fuck!

Ok, fuck it. Remove that list I posted from your memories completely. I still have work to do.

VU has like, four good songs. Lou Reedarted. I can't believe some people still take this joke of a band seriously.

Have you heard 13th Floor Elevators, Red Crayola & Pink Floyd´s two first albums? I think those all have really same kind of aggression and darkness in their music as Velvet. Also, this quite rare album from 1967 is really Velvet-mood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM_mp9mWLJI

How Velvet differs those is lyrics, Velvet was the only who sing about S/M & heroin.

No, Sy is not poor man´s VU. They added into Velvet base lot more than JAMC. As I said, I like JAMC but never find them great. There are not very much variations in JAMC career (third album they invent machine drums into their music, that´s all). BTW I have seen JAMC, they were very drunk but still quite great! Very noisy!

About the importance of influences making to other bands, it has said everybody who bought V.U. & Nico album started a band, I think it´s true, but really don´t believe that happend to everyone who bought SY, JAMC or Spacemen 3 -albums.

To me punk started in Eddie Cochran´s Summertime Blues & Nervous Breakdown. To me Sonics were first punk band. And Yes, almost all those bands you mentioned are really great and I am glad they have existed and made great music. But I don´t think they add really nothing more what VU, Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators etc. have already done. I think the great invention in end of seventies were bands like Birthday Party, the Pop Group & of course Minutemen, who have a great idea to mix punk & Beefheart.

Yeah, I'm very familiar with 13th Floor Elevators and early Ponk Floyd especially. Red Crayola, not as much.

My top10 of 2015 in order. This year has been a lot better in music than 2014.

1. CIRCLE: Pharaoh Overlord
The greatest experimental band in Finland has made the greatest album of 2015. They swim very deep waters in this one.

2. THE POP GROUP: Citizen Zombie
First I have doubts about this. But in a very first minute I noticed how this great band has made excellent comeback album. Maybe not as great as their other albums, but very near. Mark Stewart voice is still really great, songwriting is just awesome! I think no-one has mentioned anything about this in SYG.

3.FSA: Instrumentals 2015
Listened this band first time this year. Not been very excited about their earlier stuff, but this album is really great! David Pearce just creates fantastic, very much old Pink Floyd sounding masterpieces!

4.JSBX: Freedom Tower - No Wave dance party 2015
Their gig in 2014 & this album proved me JSBX is R´N`r band number 1!

5.CAVE/ELLIS: Loin Des Hommes
This soundtrack is not as great as Bad Seeds latest album, but still really great. Very meditative and strong! Again I think no mention in SYG.

6. PEKKA AIRAKSINEN: Afrodipankara
If Pekka had born in UK or US, he would be a electronic guru like for example Eno. But now he is just unknown genius with some very passionate fans around the world (I think he wanted to be that way). If I was synth-guy, I would definitely put this album the best of 2015!

7. LYDIA LUNCH RETROVIRUS: Urge To Kill
In this album past really lives! The best drumplaying from Bob Bert!

8. LEE RANALDO/ L`ORCHESTRE INHARMONIQUE DE NICE
Really great primitive piece, I don´t think Lee has done anything like this before (tell me if he has).

9. DEATH: N.E.W.
Didn´t expect much from this, but it is as great as their seventies stuff!

10. NEW ORDER: Music Complete
Really didn´t expect I would enjoy this album this much. Who needs Peter Hook?

Nice list, Mortte! You're definitely spot on about Flying Saucer Attack. I don't think Instrumentals 2015 will make my final top ten personally, but it was definitely a great album.

The early stuff is quite a bit different. More of an ambient/shoegaze vibe. I hope you get around to digging into it at some point, because it's really good stuff. Underrated in the grand scheme of things, but just as significant as a lot of the stuff that received more attention (MBV, Galaxie 500).

And I agree about Cave and Ellis. They are top tier score writers, up there with Reznor and Ross. :)

Sadly I didn't listen to the new JSBX enough this year for it to leave a lasting impression. I should get back to that one.

Still waiting for a list of top tracks of 2015.

Go on. Just name 'em. Look at your list of albums, notice the one or two titles that stick out the brightest and get typin'. Yes you. Am I fucking writing to myself here?

From an incomplete list I was working on a whole back that I hurriedly added some songs to.

DJ Koze - "XTC"
Hudson Mohawke - "Scud Books"
Hudson Mohawke - "Ryderz"
Pusha T - "Untouchable"
Car Seat Headrest - "Times to Die"
White Noise Sound - "Step into the Light"
USA Nails - "Laugh it Up"
The Flaming Lips - "Atlantis" (Donovan cover)
Kanye West - "All Day"
Rhianna & Kanye West (feat. Paul McCartney) - "Four-Five Seconds"
Drake - "6 pm in New York"
Drake - "6man"
Kool Keith & L'Orange - "Twenty Fifty Three (feat. Mr. Lif)"
A$AP Rocky - "Excuse Me"
Lupe Fiasco - "Mural"
AFX / Aphex Twin - "midi pipe1c sds3time cube/klonedrm"
Deerhunter - "Snakeskin"
Kendrick Lamar - "Alright"
Kendrick Lamar - "The Blacker the Berry"
Jim O'Rourke - Friends With Benefits
Jim O'Rourke - Last Year
Wilco - More...
Viet Cong - Continental Shelf

Blah.

Thanx!

Thanks. Really. But I think only six of those escaped my "Won't listen to again" list.

Hah! Fair enough.

Also"Sapokanikan" by Joanna Newsom. That one really grew on me.

Which six? Just curious.

This is the latest update, for those of you who care.

Expect at least one more.

Hell with it, I keep leaving out incredible albums.

I'm used to doing top 50 lists. Last year I had a top 100. 10 is too restrictive for me. I need 25 slots at least to show an accurate representation of my year.

EDIT: Version 3.0 (and still working)

10. Joanna Newsom - Divers
9. Pusha T - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prequel
8. Botany - Dimming Awe, The Light is Raw
7. Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete
6. Prefuse 73 - Rivington Não Rio
5. Young Fathers - White Men Are Black Men Too
4. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons
3. Viet Cong - Viet Cong
2. Jim O'Rourke - Simple Songs
1. Hudson Mohawke - Lantern

---

Fuck, there's no way Prefuse 73's Rivington Não Rio can not be in the top 10.

no AE_LIVE, no credibility

Oh, I finally did get to spend some quality time with AE_LIVE.

It's excellent. Absolutely excellent. Really.

However, my personal Album of the Year lists are usually studio albums only. Maybe that's a stupid rule... I tend not to include EP's or mixtapes either.

That's mainly because of archival records like Smart Bar - Chicago 1985. Or more recently, the Complete Mateix Tapes by VU. Those records contain music against which very little stands a chance, and it would hurt my brain to place those records on a list but beneath newer stuff.

Though AE_LIVE is not that kind of Live album. So I may reconsider.

Still a few days left before the year officially ends.

(Note: no Prefuse 73 also = no cred; no Hundson Mohawke = insanity; no Viet Cong = no balls... and so on ;) )

I don´t understand how there cannot be credibility to anyone´s list. Music is just different opinions & tastes, there are no truths. And anyway this is 10 best albums of the year, not all the great albums of the year lists.

Yeah, I agree. I was just being snarky.

Mortte, I really love the attitude you have about music. It's refreshingly unpretentious. You're right... how can a list of someone's personal preferences have or not have "credibility"? It's credible and valid of it accurately represents what that person likes, and that's all that matters.

Agreed

it's a fuckin joke, a jab at Severian. if i made a list, would it really matter what album ranked at #3, and what ranked at #7? it's completely inane and subjective. why fuss over what constitutes a "real" album or not.. if it really hurts your brain, make a classification system for different types of releases.

i realize it's a personal, "album" top ten, but is set in stone? you've already revised the list x amount of times, and have expressed your perpetual uncertainty. how can you reach a point of total, absolute certainty? what about all of the music you've not yet heard, under-the-radar -type releases. it's impossible to create a definitive list, unless you're ignoring reality. is it against the rules to make a list for 2015 music in 2018? What puts Pusha T one slot ahead of Joanna Newsom?

all i'm saying is that it simply doesn't matter what you put in a list, what is defined as 'x' and what isn't. ultimately, anything can be defined as music, you can call it what you want. personal listening experiences aren't so easy to define and "rank" above/below one another. it just seems like a futile exercise, not something that should require so much deliberation and thought. again, i realize this is an albums thread, my apologies for the rant.

No Cities To Love honestly didn't make anyone's list?? Stop trying to be so damned hip and eclectic

I think there are not real reasons to make any lists specially here SYG. It´s just fun of the music listeners. But some people here instead of making lists seems to have fun to comment like "you´re list is so boring". Sometimes I just forget that trolling is part of the internet.

It should probably be on mine. I fell in love with it late in the year, as you probably recall.

You're right, it's totally subjective and idiotic. I mean, I was re-ordering my top 50 of 2014 through most of 2015. It's just something I do to kill time. It's fun and it's also a tradition.

But yeah, it's absolutely arbitrary. No argument here. I've been doing it since 1993 in one form or another, however, so I doubt I'll stop. If I was a less neurotic person, I'd just have "Album of the Year" and list the rest of the top albums alphabetically or something. But if anything I'm far more neurotic than anyone realizes. Myself included. So that's that.

And for the record, my lists are definitely subject to change. I go back and reconfigure and reconsider and tweak fairly often. For example, my favorite album of 2010 was definitely not My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010. I was still "on the fence" about Kanye (read: I'd bought into the personality assassination campaign that the media was spearheading (with plenty of help from Kanye himself)... I don't even remember what my original album of the year was for 2010, because since 2013 it's been MBDTF.

(Think it was actually My Father Will Guide me up a Rope to the Sky)

And in 2013 I fussed over shit a lot. Flaming Lips! No, Black Bug! No, Fuck Buttons! Nope, it's Yeezus after all. But it's not like I stop listening to these albums. In 2015 I listened to Amygdala by DJ Koze more than any new record. It was originally st #5 for 2013, I think. Now, I have to admit that there's a good chance it has inched into the top spot, but I will have to revisit Yeezus again to be certain.

It's a way to occupy my extremely scattered mind. If nobody wants to hear about it, or I hear that others are irritated by it, I won't talk about it here anymore. But in a thread made specifically for top 10 lists, I feel like it's appropriate.

Off the top of my head:

75 Dollar Bill
Bardo Pond
Sarah Mary Chadwick
Elklink
High on Fire
Marianne Nowottny
Bill Orcutt & Jacob Felix Heule
Selvhenter
Spires that in the Sunset Rise
Kurt Vile
White Magic
Wolf Eyes

Everybody's kinda forgetting about Lightning Bolt, huh?

in no specific order -

meg baird - dont weigh down the light (drag city)
Hagerty-Toth Band - Qalgebra (threelobed records)
mv/ee - alpine tenement (feeding tube records)
mv/ee - alpine frequency (COM)
mv/ee - alphae lyrae (COM)
matt valentine - midden mounds (COM)
tom carter- Long Time Underground (threelobed)
nathan bowles- nansemond (paradise of bachelors)
chuck johnson - blood moon boulder (scissor tail editions)
white out with nels cline - accidental sky (northern spy records)

I just got the new *Parallelogram* threelobed set which has 10 artists, each with a side on 5 12"ers -
only 3 lobed could give us a bardo pond/yo la tengo split 12".

Nope

Great record. Sightings's album was great too.

I liked Amusers and Puzzlers a lot.

1. Julia Holter - Have You in My Wilderness
2. Maria Schneider Orchestra - The Thompson Fields
3. Arvo Part - Musica Selecta A Sequence by Manfred Eicher
4. Jim O’Rourke - Simple Songs
5. Built to Spill - Untethered Moon
6. Gnod - Infinity Machines
7. Wolf Eyes -I Am A Problem: Mind In Pieces
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress
9. Akira Sakata & Jim O'Rourke with Chikamorachi & Merzbow - Flying Basket
10. Protomartyr - The Agent Intellect

top 10, no order:
s. araw trio xi -- gazebo effect
helm -- olympic mess
haino/o'rourke/ambarchi -- tea time for those determined to completely exhaust every bit of this body they've been given
elklink - farm stories
levantis -- romantic psychology 1
tallesen -- inca
mark fell & gabor lazar -- the neurobiology of moral decision making
russell street bombings -- russell street bombings
fourth world magazine vol. ii -- pinhead in fantasia
flying saucer attack -- instrumentals 2015

others:
jason lescalleet & kevin drumm
visionist
choi joonyong, kevin drumm & hong chulki
akira sakata & jim o'rourke with chikamorachi + merzbow
seijaku
robin fox
haino/brötzmann/o'rourke
robert aiki aubrey lowe x ariel kalma
ashtray navigations
teklife
drainolith
blank realm
crys cole
tom carter
f ingers
jim o'rourke
food court
german army
dan melchior
father
heather leigh
ilpo vaisanen
dj roc
errorsmith x mark fell
fis
drew mcdowall
elysia crampton
jme
lolina
jam city
helen
mesh
james ferraro
john t. gast
graham lambkin & michael pisaro
rp boo
hour house
richard youngs
jg biberkopf
lst
oobe
dj clent
julia holter
ahnnu
viet cong
kelela
russell haswell
sk kakraba
aki onda, loren connors & alan licht
kode9
lil ugly mane
mika vainio & franck vigroux
black zone myth chant
wolf eyes
/f
myth
nhk
oren ambarchi & jim o'rourke
rabit
marcus schmickler & john tilbury
slug christ
theo burt


going to assume I've missed some stuff. honestly though ae_live takes a characteristically enormous dump on top of everything.

Hey, I like your style

Did you happen to listen to Jlin's Dark Energy? I'm guessing you did, since you seem to be up on her labelmates and others in the footwork spectrum, but does the fact that you didn't mention her mean you didn't like the album? Just curious. For me it was better even than Rp boo's album, which is saying a lot.

Also, I notice you've included Levantis - Romantic Psychology vol. 1. Excellent choice, and one that has been on surprisingly few year end lists. I wonder if people realize that it's Actress.

yeah did hear the jlin record, really just did not stick with me in the slightest. her tracks seemed overly skeletal and to be honest totally drained of any sense of joy. whereas rp boo's tracks are so minimal as to be somewhat formulaic, there's always a sense of forward momentum or some sort of melodic heft to what he's doing, not necessarily within an individual track but over the course of the record itself. what jlin's doing structurally with footwork is absolutely stunning and she deserves all the attention she's getting for it as the teklife guys dredge deeper into their sound (and in some instances have become arguably static), but her palette grates with me for some reason.


as for the levantis lp, I think a lot of people do know it's cunningham, but there was little (if any) promotion for it coming out on a sublabel designed for the purpose of low key releases. and I suppose in some respects it's a pretty minor record in relation to what's come before it under the actress moniker, what with the two longest tracks being versions of the same piece and the rest of the record being comprised of vignettes. it's a very strangely structured record and I would love to hear these tracks fleshed out but as it is it's a fantastic little record. suppose a great deal of his fanbase was alienated by ghettoville as well which could explain the lack of attention it received.

sorry for such a long list..hard to choose and I def. left out plenty. also included some ep's and 12" and reissues. wish to have everything in physical form.

Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising (reissue)
Jacob Kirkergaard - 5 pieces
Balazs Pandi, Mats Gustafsson, Merzbow, Thurston Moore - Cuts Of Guilt. Cuts Deeper.
Charlemagne Palestine - Ssingggg Sschlllingg Sshpppingg
Charlemagne Palestine - Bell Studies
Beatriz Ferreyra - GRM Works
Powell - Sylvester Stallone/Smut
Low Jack - Imaginary Boogie
William S. Burroughs - Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (reissue)
Restraint - A Time With No Hands
Ninos Du Brasil - Aromobates NDB
Plastic Palace People (Heemann, O'Rourke)- From The Host Of Late-comers
Aine O'Dwyer - Music For Church Cleaners Vol. I and II
Lawrence English - Viento
Trevor Wishart - Red Bird
Sabisha Friedberg With Peter Edwards - The Hant Variance
Mark Dwinell - Golden Ratio
Jim Haynes - Scarlet
DV Damas - Wet Vision
Dual Action - Back In
John T. Gast - Excerpts
John Wiese - Deviate From Ballance
Vatican Shadow - Death Is Unity With God
Rose - Having Never Written A Note For Percussion
Aine O'Dwyer - Music For Church Cleaners Vol. I And II
Connie Converse - How Sad, How Lovely (reissue)
Broken English Club - Scars (EP)
Nick Klein - Failed Devotee (EP)
Ames Sanglantes -Chindia Tower Impalements
Exploring Jezebel - On A Business Trip To London
Hecker, Leckey - Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera
Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud - Sahel Sounds
Biosphere/Deathprod - Stator
U.S. Girls - Damn That Valley
Michael Redolfi - Pacific Tubular Waves / Immersion (reissue)
Akkord - HTH035
Ennio Morricone - Veruschka OST
Beatriz Ferreyra - GRM Works
Sun Ra - Planets Of Life Or Death: Amiens '73
Pearson Sound - S/T
Metallica - No Life Til Leather (reissue of their demo tape '82)
Yannick Dauby - tsi̍t lâu tsuí (Penghu Experimental Sound Studio Vol.1)
Sergei Tcherepnin - Quasar Lanterns
Surgeon - SRX (reissue)
Rezzett - Goodness
Green Gums - Black Tongue (EP)
Lifted - 1
Ruscigan - Viaggio Nel Domani (reissue)
DJ Spider & Marshallito - Contest For Supremacy (EP)
Death And Vanilla - To Where The Wild Things Are...
Prurient - Frozen Niagara Falls
Thomas Brikmann - What You Hear (Is What You Hear)
Alberich - Vampyric Screams
Martin Gore - MG
Person Of Interest - S/t
The Masters Musicians Of Jajouka - Into The Ahl Srif
Nick Forte - Primordial Forms
Smackos - The Age Of Candy Candy
M.E.S.H. - Piteous Gate
Flying Saucer Attack - Instrumentals 2015
Loop - Array 1
Blawan - Hanging Out The Birds
Drew McDowall - Collapse
The Bug - Zim Zim Zim
Francisco Lopez - La Selva
Regis - Manbite
Russel Haswell - A Sure As Night Follows Day
King Midas Sound/Fennesz - Edition 1
Hour House - Chiltern
Mick Travis - Face Disappears After Interrogation
Diat - Positive Energy
Anthony Child - Electronic Recordings From Maui Jungle Vol. 1
King Kong - Tanzania
Steven Stapleton & Christoph Heemann - Painting With Priests
Caught On Tape Duo - Full Bleed

All right, finally some sense into this thread!