1. Lambchop: Showtunes
Ein Wunderwerk, und wenn ich die gute halbe Stunde höre, etwa auf weissem Vinyl mit 45 Umdrehungen pro Minute, gibt es keinen überflüssigen Moment – all diese Samples, akustischen Vignetten, dunklen Winkel, Midi-Verwandlungen, Murmelmelodien etc. fesseln und entfesseln ohne Ende. Von den lyrics und dem Hund auf dem Cover ganz zu schweigen. Verwegen, wie Kurt Wagner Motive des Erhabenen (Oper, Broadway, Sinatra) in eine erfüllte Leere laufen lässt. „Maybe I’ll break into the movies / Become a star upon the screen / And blow a kiss to a song.“
Flüchtig gehört, könnte „Showtunes“ arg fragmentiert wirken (ein wildes Puzzle verlorener Momente aus verlorener Zeit), dabei ist es formvollendet. Man stelle es ins Plattentegal neben „Mark Hollis“, „Trio Tapestry“ (das erste Album), „The Marble Index“, „Open, to Love“, „Nerve Net“, „I Trawl The Megahertz“, „Music For A New Society“, „You Want It Darker“, und Jacques Brels letztem Studioalbum, das mit den Wolken und dem blauen Himmel. In genau diesen Regionen bewegt es sich, und bleibt doch ganz bei sich. „It‘s so hard / the air has second thoughts.“
2. Floating Points w/ Pharoah Sanders and The LSO: Promises
3. Portico Quartet: Terrain
4. Pino Palladino & Blake Mills: Notes with Attachments
5. The Coral: Coral Island
6. Nik Bärtsch: Entendre
7. The Mountain Goats: Dark In Here
8. Low: Hey What
9. Jon Hopkins: Music for Psychedelic Therapy*
*“Long after I finished playing ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’ I was still trying to work it out. So much so that I played it straight away to try and delve deeper into it. The album isn’t ambient, chillout, downtempo, classical, drone, or bio-music but what, like all of Hopkins best work, it distils those into something breath-taking.“ (Nick Rosenblade, Clash)
10. Damon Albarn: The Purer The Fountain…
11. Lana del Ray: Chemtrails over the Country Club
12. Marc Johnson: Overpass
13. Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When…
14. Richard Dawson and Circle: Henki**
15. Trio Tapestry: Garden of Expression
16. Allison Russell: Outside Child
17. Sons of Kemet: Black To Africa
18. Nova Materia: Xpujil
19. Andrew Cyrille Quartet: The News
20. Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis: She Walks In Beauty
**There’s often a paradox in Dawson’s songs that if you read them off a sheet of paper they’d be as depressing as hell, yet on record they sound absolutely triumphant. It resonates with Voltaire’s grappling with existential scaled misfortune. In Candide, the French writer depicts a world which always seems determined to heartlessly throw up a new obstacle to happiness, yet somehow the story never feels melancholic. Dawson and Circle don’t have the French satirist’s cynicism; none of the characters in Henki naïvely believes they’re living in „the best of all possible worlds.“ Most of them seem to know they’re having a terrible time of it, yet their stories are flipped into strange fables of the triumph of the human spirit.“ (Daryl Worthington, The Quietus)