BC151 - Michaelangelo Matos’s RA 2000-25: The Century in Electronic Music ballot
The envelope, please
I was surprised and delighted to hear from Resident Advisor’s Hattie Lindert back in the early fall: RA was doing a quarter-century best-releases listicle; would I like to vote? Sure! I threw a ballot together fairly quickly, but it’s one I am happy to stand by. Much of what I voted for wasn’t included, but that’s the breaks; they’re great lists, ready for immersion. I wrote about number 32 on the list of the 200 Best Tracks, plus the introduction for the first quadrant of the 50 Best Mixes, covering 2000 to 2005. My editor on the latter, Bella Aquilina, deserves thanks as well.
Here is the ballot I sent them back in September. The releases are in chronological order, not by preference. I didn’t include any comments in the ballot; I am including some here.
TOP TEN ALBUMS
Luomo, Vocalcity (Force Tracks, 2000)
I put this on while I was going to bed the night I got it, and it seduced me immediately. Quite a setting—I lived in a loft above the Seattle Pottery Supply Company (its wares got decimated when the March 2001 earthquake took place a block away), and in addition to my own bedroom I had a quarter of the artists’-loft half of the residence. I would sleep there on warm summer nights. The doubt that riddles this album felt very real to me then—an experimental musician feeling his way through house music, giving it contours few more straightforward house producers would think to. Number 33 on the RA releases list.
Basement Jaxx, Rooty (XL/Astralwerks, 2001)
I remember sitting at the 6 station on 23rd Street in Manhattan, waiting for a train, listening to this on headphones, overwhelmed by how good it is. It’s so funny that they didn’t cross over—they had it all, and on this album they compressed it into old-school vinyl length.
Daft Punk, Discovery (Virgin, 2001)
I still prefer its glossy, gorgeous vistas to Homework, even as I understand why the debut is better. But the debut didn’t come out during this century. RA’s number 7 release.
Superlongevity 2 (Perlon, 2001)
Woozy as all fuck, sexy as a close-up of a neon sign, a two CD mix by Perlon co-proprietor Zip that still makes a room humid like nothing else.
Total 3 (Kompakt, 2001)
This is number 88 on the releases list. Here’s what I wrote for Bandcamp a while back:
Few compilations have the effortless weave and flow of Total 3. Its timing was perfect—this volume crystallized the label’s cult following in the States—and the label’s artists had never been, and would never be again, so completely in sync in terms of sound and sensibility. Even when it steps out rhythmically (The Modernist’s “Abi ’81” struts like it’s made of glitter), the whole thing is just so fuzzy and cute—no wonder techno hard-liners sneered. But in the ears, where it belongs, it’s a fully realized artistic entity—the mix of pure atmosphere and sublime pop of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, only with luscious kicks and the friendliest filter sweeps you’ll ever hear.
DFA Compilation #2 (DFA, 2004)
It’s true that the opener is so titanic that it threatens to obviate the whole. But there are so many killers here: “Sunplus,” “Bellhead,” “Alabama Sunshine,” “Get Up/Say What,” to say nothing of the LCD cuts. As brick-like and teeming as compilations ever get, or got.
Lone, Emerald Fantasy Tracks (Magic Wire, 2010)
I actually reviewed this for RA! Holds up.
Disclosure, Settle (PMR/Island, 2013)
I went to Miami for Ultra Music Festival in early 2013 for the book, and the most amazing thing I saw, bar none, was the medium-sized bowl stage go from 15 percent full to rammed in the time it took for Disclosure to walk onstage and then leave it after performing. I was floored—I knew a couple of remixes and a FACT Mix, but not only was the music impressive, the sheer head-swiveling next-thing-ness of it was manifest. I pitched it to a couple of editors. One of them told me outright that he didn’t have time for my “rabbit hole”—at a festival that was outdrawing everything, and I mean everything, his publication covered. When this album debuted at number one in multiple countries at once, I forwarded it to him: “Here’s your ‘rabbit hole.’” (On the RA releases list, Settle was a Further Selection for number 92, PinkPantheress’s to hell with it; the other F.S. was Kaytranada’s 99.9%.)
DJ Koze, Amygdala (Pampa, 2013)
Reviewed this for Spin. Holds up!
Jessie Ware, What’s Your Pleasure (PMR/Island, 2020)
This announced itself as a classic immediately, and unlike so many albums that do so, it continued to grow rather than falling back on itself a little. A classic disco album by retrospective design, it’s a classic disco album, period—it stands with any you can name.
TOP TEN TRACKS
Underground Resistance, “Transition” (UR, 2000)
RA’s No. 5 track, and as I wrote in Rolling Stone, “the most soulful self-help manual in techno.”
Closer Musik, “Maria” (Kompakt, 2002)
The end-of-night gem to top them all.
DJ Koze, “Brutalga Square” (Kompakt, 2004)
Building and building and building and then suddenly demolishing the room, this may be my favorite ever techno track.
House of House, “Rushing to Paradise (Walkin’ These Streets)” (Whatever We Want, 2009)
Absolutely epic—a long piano solo followed by a chesty-voiced man singing the blues—this fifteen-minute monster strides like a mighty steed.
Walter Jones, “Living without Your Love” (DFA, 2009)
What I wrote at the time for The Singles Jukebox:
You can dismiss this as mere retro if you like. It sounds precisely, utterly like circa-’82 roller-boogie electro, with the same guitar plucks and Prelude Records-era plastic synths, both warmer in retrospect, and in Jones’s hands more overtly melancholy, which the low-medium tempo aids. So little changes musically that when the chords switch up at 2:57 on the bridge (haha, “bridge”) the shift is unexpectedly huge, an emotional surge in a track pregnant with feeling but doing its best to keep everything in check. The throwback quality makes sense for a song whose only lyric (the title, not counting the occasional “oooh, na na”) communicates the kind of longing only deep immersion in memory can soothe. My single of the year. [10]
Nebraska, “Soho Grand” (Rush Hour, 2010)
Disco heaven. (Not to be confused with the later re-recording, which is trash.)
Shur-I-Kan, “One Night in Tokyo” (Freerange, 2010)
A perfect recording, endlessly rich and tensile, one of my most-played tracks ever in any category, because it never stops building or changing or surprising. It’s a tech-house jam doing business as a spy-thriller soundtrack that also features a piano part that comes straight out of, no fucking kidding, Thelonious Monk.
Tensnake, “Coma Cat” (Defected, 2010)
Number 200 on the RA list; number one around the world forever in my mind.
Zebra Katz feat. Njena Redd Foxxx, “Ima Read (MikeQ & B. Ames Remix)” (Jeffrees/Mad Decent, 2012)
RA’s number 132 track, though it doesn’t cite this specific remix. Nonetheless, their description matches this version to a tee; it cuts like few records even in its approximate orbit.
Eche Palante, “A Discussion Between Saxes” (Talent Pool/Spinnin’, 2015)
Made by a kid who signed a track to a major label subdivision and was never heard from again, this is a soaring sax solo cut up over brightly bouncing kicks and hats—it’s house, not EDM. The only way I know it exists is that it made the Top 100 of the Beatport charts—specifically, number 99—during a period when I was covering that chart for their briefly-lived blog. But it swings so assuredly, is such a shot in the dark, that it sounds like an undiscovered classic.
TOP MIX
Greg Wilson, Big Chill 08.08.10
The Donald Fagen in an OK Boomer T-shirt of mixes.