Top 2024 (Part 5)
The top 5!
Before I get into it, I want to record for posterity that in Lisbon last Saturday night I heard not one but two of these tracks played out — both instances being the first time I heard someone not myself play them in a club. I feel like that has some significance?
Either way, these are the top 5 tunes/EPs that I found myself reaching for this year. Endless gratitude to the producers and labels putting out music made to last.
Peach - Charmed EP [can you feel the sun]
I already said it back in June (here), but the A side of Peach’s EP on Call Super and Parris’s can you feel the sun? label feels very specifically like 1992, the year that saw the release of the original Artificial Intelligence compilation on Warp Records, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and The Bionaut’s Everybody’s Kissing Everyone.
It’s in the swooping alien melodies and detuned harmonies of ‘A Pretty Planet’, with its blend of softness and scratchiness, and it’s in the title track’s funked up bassline and choral pads. These elements were already present to some extent across Peach’s prior releases on her own Psychic Readings label (check ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Gay Dreams’) but there is a level of sophistication and control to this particular set of tracks that elevates them, and makes mention of those 1992 classics justified.
In describing the B side track ‘Sugar N Spice (Deep Dub)’ earlier this year I name-checked Swayzak and “Scandinavia”, by which I meant the likes of Thule or Börft once it had gone housey in the late 90s, but in retrospect I think a closer comparator is California’s Lucas Rodenbush aka E.B.E.. And indeed the ‘Rollin Dub’ of the same track, which closes out the EP, speaks to the more techy, tribal end of Rodenbush’s output.
Dropping the ‘Deep Dub’ around 7.30am in Pbar was a personal 2024 highlight, and when I heard DJ Caring playing ‘A Pretty Planet’ early doors at Lux just this Saturday gone, it put the biggest smile on my face. If there’s any justice in the world we’ll be hearing this EP out for years to come.
Jump Source - ‘Balance’ [Jump Source]
With production so good it’s actually intimidating, this perfectly formed instrumental pop song comes barrelling out of the gate in second one with its flat kick, bouncy ball bassline, snares compressed like crispy wafers, and downbeat pads. Mysterious trails bubble through the centre or drift overhead. Around the minute mark the trails and bassline momentarily fade out and everything cuts for a single snare, a split second of silence and then: the big bang.
It’s the riff of the year! Irresistibly catchy, unashamedly saccharine, six stabs, two chords, pure bliss. The explosion is over in 30 seconds, and in a sense it’s just rinse and repeat from there on out, with subtle modulations and the occasional delicate yet devastating voice line introduced in bittersweet counterpoint, before the next big bang crashes back in.
Whenever I’ve wanted to mix into this track the harmonies have never quite worked out, and it’s only now, after months of playing it, that I’ve realised the bassline in the opening 8 bars seems to be detuned from the rest of the track, its flatness creating a subtle (if DJ-unfriendly) prologue effect until the pads, once they come in, somehow drag the key up a semitone. It’s not clear if this is an auditory illusion, completely intentional, or something else going on entirely. Whatever it is, it’s the kind of detail that you know Jump Source (aka Priori and Patrick Holland) have spent hours if not days experimenting with and perfecting in the studio.
How a track so tooled to within an inch of its life can sound so free and easy and spontaneously FUN is something amateurs like me will never understand. Thankfully, professionals like Priori and Patrick have done the homework for us.
(Obligatory dues must also go here for another track of the year, James K’s languid ‘blinkmoth (july mix)’, co-produced by Jump Source and about as far from the tightly-wound ‘Balance’ as you could imagine.)
Peverelist - Pulse Echo EP [Livity Sound]
Reviewed in full here.
Pev (unwittingly) gave us so much entertainment this year, from the Pev Knee epidemic at Freerotation (here) to the ‘Pev Colada’ bath mat (here) to the moment in early November when Pearson Sound sent us all into a spin by pronouncing his name ‘Pev-EH-re-list’. Yet above all the DISCOURSE rises the music. I guess you could say we’ve all been well and truly #pevved.
Boys’ Shorts - ‘On The Highline (feat. DJ City)’ [Live At Robert Johnson]
DJ City’s autumn album Paris, Rome is one of many records I enjoyed a lot this year but which don’t appear on this list because I didn’t play them out. The same isn’t true for ‘On The Highline’, which I played in Hanoi, London, Mannheim, Newcastle, New York, Ghent, Berlin…should I go on?
I can’t call myself a fan of Boys’ Shorts’ usual brand of bright and shiny nu-italo euphoria; it’s just too algorithmic to give me the feels. But that fact helps to identify the crucial ingredient that makes all the difference with ‘On The Highline’: DJ City, of course, whose lyrics, “by turns mystical and mundane” (quote from, uh, me in last year’s top tunes round-up here), and delivery — 80% deadpan, 20% suggestive — are the opposite of algorithmic.
In fact they build small universes, like the one belonging to this narrative’s protagonist, he of the boiling blood and vicious pride, the intoxication and erotic ecstasy in another world, or perhaps only in a commonplace bed in the shabby upstairs room of a back alley pub. This world belongs to these characters, but they themselves “never belong”, and this simple statement of negative affect, of unbelonging, becomes the pivot around which the whole mood of the track turns.
In the end, it could be the brightest, most uncomplicated piece of music in the world, but DJ City’s contribution transforms it into pure melodrama. And finally we learn that we, too, are implicated: “Even now as I write this text/I am drunk again/I am drunk with you.”
(Side note: I’m pretty sure Johan told me that Boys’ Shorts actually cut up the lyrics he’d recorded for this track, and so the narrative we hear in the final version is a collage, to put it politely, of what he originally intended. I actually think knowing this might lend the lyrics even greater poetic charm than if they had remained in a more logical or linear configuration. What was that about an algorithm?)
Will Hofbauer - Four! Beats! EP [Aus Music]
If you’ve made it this far, then I must thank you for apparently caring about all this as much as I do. This isn’t a showy list. There have been only a handful of tracks on this top 40 that I would call outright club bangers, and I also wouldn’t describe many of them as particularly trendy or even that cool, at least beyond the confines of my own personal taste. But most of them are musically adroit and aware, informed by the past and using that knowledge to their advantage, often with a playful angle. I guess that’s kind of the thread I see running through my own work.
And it’s also a pretty good précis of Will Hofbauer’s music, and why barely a set of mine goes by without one of his tracks making an appearance, and why this EP is in this position on this list. Almost everything Will produces has a lightly comic element to it, be it the unplugged cable on ‘Hiccups’, the manic events planner on ‘Party Tools’ or the rhythmic ribbits and meows on ‘Pond Party’. The natural world is in fact a constant, and while the birds and frogs and donkeys can sometimes get a bit much, by this point we have to accept that these sonic jokes are simply part of the Hofbauer package. (This is, after all, the man who sat down one day to make a Jingle Bells refix of his own tune.)
So, we come to the bats. When the Four! Beats! EP appeared on Will Saul’s Aus Music back in March it immediately felt like something new. First of all, the lead track ‘Ah! Bats!’ comes in at a cool 136bpm, unusually fast for Will. Second, its driving dembow-meets-techno pulse, breakdown and bass drop are the kind of big-room dramatics you could imagine Will indulging in with an accompanying nudge and wink, yet here he plays them very straight. Well, apart from the bats! But if bats can be subtle, these ones certainly are, and in truth it took me several months to connect the track title with the fact that there are actually bloody bats in the middle break. It’s fire on the dancefloor and, like most of Will’s tracks, an absolute joy to mix with.
That brings us to ‘8 Bar Baile’, my most played track of the year and what Will himself describes as a case of “mild appropriation”. Did we really need a geeky white boy to mash up baile funk and 8 bar grime into a basic drum track and stick the occasional Loony Toons noise or police siren over the top? Being a geeky white boy myself, I don’t know how anyone could hear ‘8 Bar Baile’ and not answer in the affirmative. It’s puerile, addictive, and one of the few instances where I’d actually mix a tune for minutes at a time. I still can’t get enough.
Then there’s the B side, on which Will forgoes the silly sauce for two frankly gorgeous tracks at house tempo. ‘Scrumble’ crosses deep tropical house with striking Stinsonian accents, a contrast that shouldn’t work but does. Finally, ‘Moss On’ sees Will return to the mulch house bandwagon that — credit where it’s due — he’s been driving since the beginning, except here the drips and croaks and splooshes are kept firmly in the periphery. When I played in Globus for the first time earlier this year (here) I dropped this track in a tribute to the club circa 2000, and it landed exactly how I intended.
(A quick roll-call of the other Hof tracks I rinsed this year: the pinging 140bpm ‘Diiing’ on Optimo; the equally knick-knacky ‘UKA’, made in partnership with Sangre Voss as Whirm; the aforementioned Pond Party EP on his own Third Place label; and finally the sleazy remix he did for ‘Heart Shaped Mole’ by Cola Ren.)
One last thing: it would be remiss of me not to shout out Diogo/DJ Doggo’s marvellous split EP on my own label Welt Discos, which I would rank up there with the best of these releases. Check it out here if you haven’t already.
That’s it! Thank you for reading.