One week old and already forced, kicking and screaming, into making a list. So be it. In coming up with this, our best records of 2010 – and officially our first collaborative list – we’ve created what can stand as a kind of Liminal manifesto. These are the records that best sum up 2010: the ones which kept us awake at night; the ones which kept us awake during the day; the records that made us want to start a website and shout about their existence.

In explanation of the two lists: the top ten are records we all agreed on, and are ranked accordingly; the second twenty are more personal choices but still reveal a shared level of interest. Rather than fight over a running order for these we present them alphabetically. If you like one from either of these lists, hopefully you’ll be interested in all of them. Go seek…

1. Demdike Stare – Forest of Evil / Liberation Through Hearing / Voices of Dust (All Modern Love)

Quite a year for Demdike Stare all told. With this unholy trinity of albums they managed to reference minimal techno, dub, noir-ish soundscapes and the Radiophonic Workshop; yet with their ties to the Lancashire landscape, they also managed to make their sound ancient and telluric – there is age in this wax, age that reeks of the films of Michael Reeves, and the musty camp of Aleister Crowley. These three records were as much a work of psychic dredging and incantation as they were about sculpted beat science.

2. Richard Skelton – Landings (Type)

It seems almost unfair to include this on a list of albums, for this was so much more. Richard Skelton’s Landings Diaries elevated this into a compelling study of grief and renewal, achieved in collusion with the landscapes and ruined farmhouses of the Pennine moors. A remarkable achievement, even by Skelton’s remarkable standards.

3. Philip Jeck – An Ark for the Listener (Touch)

Jeck’s rumination on a stanza from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutchsland” may have marked a return to familiar themes after his involvement in a version of The Sinking Of The Titanic, but the depth was greater. On An Ark For The Listener he was (w)ringing some crackly recordings of bells for all they were worth, summoning the all of water.

4. Chris Abrahams – Play Scar (Room40)

In which synthesizers, a ruined old church organ and a Hammond all fall under the spell, and the fingers of Necks pianist Abrahams. This is a far more diverse and more intricate set than you’d expect given his role in that most minimalist of piano trios: the track “Twig Blown” even shows off some impressive musique concrete chops.

5. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths (Olde English Spelling Bee)

The windswept Wirral comes alive with ghostly presence on the LP debut of Matthew Barnes’s one-man project. While much here is dubbed-out and distant, the spidery guitars and brittle beats stride ahead through the fog. The currently common themes of hauntedness, (mis-)remembrance and hypnagogia have rarely been taken on with such confident and accessible style.

6. Autechre – Oversteps (Warp)

The first, less ‘beaty’ of Booth & Brown’s two offerings this year comes on a little like their late-to-the-party 80s homage with a sound palette strongly reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto/Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japan. Oversteps is one of the duo’s most stately and melodic sets for a while, but this wouldn’t be an Autechre record if those melodies didn’t fight against themselves at least a little…

7. Rangers – Suburban Tours (Olde English Spelling Bee)

The Olde English Spelling Bee label was really on it this year, whatever the hell “it” actually was. On Suburban Tours, Joe Knight taped 80s FM pop and funk to mangled cassettes and took them for a cruise around his native San Francisco. This strange, wholly other sound transported you somewhere totally alien.

8. Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me (Drag City)

The narrative might go that Joanna Newsom damaged her throat and in re-learning her voice found a new layer of sweetness she’d so far ignored. Or it might go that she hid herself away and found in the long shadows of the afternoon her California singer-songwriter self. Or it might go that maybe she just stopped trying, and in stopping trying she found this great well of untapped songs that she could simply draw and draw from. Whatever the reason, Have One On Me is a different kind of animal to the flighty intricacies of Ys. In its (long, winding) way it’s just as ambitious as that record, but, on the surface at least, it slips by an awful lot easier, and peversely doesn’t have the feel of an epic. Yet as the year rolls round and you still find yourself stumbling across new tracks, let alone new passages in the longer tracks, you wonder at the life in this thing. It’s difficult to know for certain just yet, but this may well be her masterpiece after all.

9. Keith Fullerton Whitman – Disingenuity/Disingenuousness (Pan)

After a relatively quite couple of years, the sounds of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s modular synth completely filled 2010. More than just being another great KFW release, this gorgeous slab of vinyl was an homage to his heroes, a distillation of 50 years of electronic music into just under forty minutes.

10. Shackleton – Fabric 55 (Fabric)

If there was one person who could get away with making a mix for Fabric of just their own music, Shackleton is that man. Proof positive that he’s not a one-trick pony, this is the sound of an artist revelling in the ability to explore any aural avenue he chooses. Moving beyond the “dubstep” genre he was initially seen as a flag-bearer for, his move to Berlin has seen him embrace a raft of new influences. This Fabric mix is a pointer to the future.

The next 20

Actress – Splaszh (Honest Jon’s)
Beach House – Teen Dream (Bella Union)
Caribou – Swim (Merge)
Clang Sayne – Winterlands (Clang Sayne)
Eleh – Location Momentum (Touch)
Evan Caminiti – West Winds (Three Lobed)
Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting – Bubblethug (Weird Forest)
Ikonika – Contact, Want, Love, Have (Hyperdub)
James Blackshaw – All is Falling (Young God)
Julian Lynch – Mare (Olde English Spelling Bee)
The Lowland Hundred – Under Cambrian Sky (Victory Garden)
Mark Fell – Multistability (raster-noton)
Mats Gustafsson – Needs! (Dancing Wayang)
Omar Souleyman – Jazeera Nights (Sublime Frequencies)
Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal (Mego)
Oval – O (Thrill Jockey)
Ufomammut – Eve (Supernatural Cat)
The Village Orchestra/TVO – We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Broken20)
Winterfylleth – The Mercian Sphere (Candlelight)
Yellow Swans – Going Places (Type)

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