Top 30 Releases of 2020: No. 10-6

10. Barbican Estate – Barbican Estate
This cassette EP was one of the year’s early delights, introducing a band who radiate promise at a time when the future seemed to be closing down rapidly. Barbican Estate released another three excellent new songs over streaming services, but the dark, dramatic psychedelic 4ADream with which they introduced themselves was a powerful statement you can actually own.

More about this release here.

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9. nessie – salvaged sequence
Hailing from Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaido, Nessie are a curious and subtly uneasy band — smooth and clinical in their delivery but fanatically dedicated to upending every possible expectation in their melodies and rhythms. They were featured on the Mitohos compilation featured earlier in this list and definitely fit in with the curious musical Galapagos ecosystem that album sketches out, but their queasy art-pop witchcraft is all of their own.

More about this release here.

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8. Nisennenmondai – S1 / S2
Released to raise money for underground music spot Ochiai Soup, these two long tracks add up to an EP formed of the ghostly outlines of rock music, where the band’s minimal structures sketch out the spaces where parties might once have lived. Needless to say this was one of the most 2020 releases of the year.

More about this release here.

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7. Eiko Ishibashi – Orbit
Like her frequent collaborators Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi filled 2020 with a string of experimental online releases, comprising six albums and album-length works. In that sense, picking just one from this series of undeniably individual yet also semi-permeable entries feels like it diminishes the context in which they arrived. That said, if I was to pick just one, Orbit, which snuck in towards the end of the year, takes the listener on perhaps the most extraordinary journey across the most expansive terrain. Ishibashi is an artist whose singer-songwriter material and experimental work feel increasingly part of the same dreamlike continuum — something she shares with Riki Hidaka (with whom Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke collaborated this year on another impressively textured soundscape) — and Orbit is perhaps the place where that can be felt most strongly, the music frequently falling within gauzy visibility of the spaces you could imagine her vocals beginning to play.

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6. meiteimahi – Aru Bakuhatsuteki na Nani ka
This EP/mini-album from newcomer duo Meiteimahi was one of the year’s most unexpected delights — a raw, tortured but playful and obliquely catchy collection of songs that recalls early Phew (including her Aunt Sally days) and on third track Kubi the insistent clang of This Heat, but nonetheless sounded completely at home in the unreal permanent hangover of 2020 Tokyo. Beginning its course deep in a pit of drunkenness, derangement, squelchy synths and distortion, it gradually emerges into something sweeter, although no less distorted and psychedelic, and with a lingering trail of corruption at the end.

Top 30 Releases of 2020: No. 15-11

15. Various Artists – MITOHOS
This compilation, put together by Shigeru Akakura of the band Loolowningen & The Far East Idiots, is subtitled “A Guide to Japanese Galapagaized Music, Volume 1” in reference to the theory that Japan’s relative introversion, culturally and technologically, has led it to develop ecosystems independent from global trends. Arguably, the way the mainstream is so cut off and inaccessible to independent musicians means that indie music here is its own “Galapagoized” ecosystem, and this album seeks to navigate the listener through some of the rhythmically deranged and melodically unpredictable undercurrents of contemporary Japanese underground music. The Loolowningen boys kick off the compilation and, as you might expect, they make for a pretty reliable indicator of the sort of barebones, Beefheart-via-math rock experimentation at the album’s heart. It really is a very comprehensive portrait of this rarely articulated thread of underground music in Japan. In that sense, Mitohos is as much a work of music journalism as it is a piece of art, linkling together artists throughout Japan (from Nessie in Hokkaido to Doit Science in Kumamoto) and presenting them in a way that lets their similarities resonate just as their diversity shines. Essential.

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14. Boris – No
Boris are such a well established part of the music landscape of Japan that it’s hard to offer any really new thoughts about them. They always cover an impressive range of territory, from shoegaze-inflected dreamscapes and drone to metal and stoner-influenced heavy sonic menhirs, with a tremendous amount of confidence and ease, and they do so here in a way that is both powerful and concise.

More about this release here.

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13. Mikado Koko – The Japanese Rimbaud
An album of early Showa-era poetry readings interwoven with electronic music that draws on the atmosphere of 1990s Warp Records, this album occupies, as James Hadfield points out astutely in his own review, a very similar eerie psychocosmos to Chris Morris’ Blue Jam radio broadcasts. Mikado Koko delivers the poems of Chuya Nakahara (the “Japanese Rimbaud” of the title) in the retro-modern melodramatic flair of Showa-era theatre amid a sparkle and rattle of beats, blips and glitches that are both unpredictable and captivating. She finished the year with another release in the Nekomata EP, so check that out as well.

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12. Kiyoaki Iwamoto – Sougi+
The core of this release is a resurrected 1980s EP by an enigmatic 1980s punk-era artist, recorded with minimal drum machine and guitar arrangements and encompassing five quietly intense tunes that teeter infectiously on the border between post-punk and folk. Most striking is the cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart that closes out the Iwamoto solo portion of the album, the original’s glistening pop sheen and raw power wrung back to something harsh, fragile and constantly on the brink of falling apart. The first of the additions is a reworking of Iwamoto’s Love Will Tear Us Apart by Escalator Records-ish Osaka duo Chisako & Junta that provides an interesting expansion on the track that thankfully doesn’t overwhelm Iwamoto’s recording with the duo’s accustomed smooth coffee table vibes. It closes, meanwhile, with an untitled live recording of Iwamoto’s old duo Birei, the synths wavering through the analogue tape like a multiply overdubbed Italian horror VHS, and quite lovely it is.

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11. neccc – Yabatopia
Neccc are more an occurrence than a band. The members and guest musicians who populate this EP are an interesting non-alignment pact of post-punk and noise-rock figures, familiar from artists like The Neso, Yokoscum, Manchurian Candidate, Jailbird Y, P-iple and more, and they make for a playful and entertainingly unhinged mental breakdown of a record. Echoes of Pere Ubu, Tuxedomoon, Der Plan and other barebones iconoclasts of the 80s, with a mischievous willingness to push repetition into irritation when it suits them (the 13-minute track that fills side B of the tape but which may not be available on the online edition is an especially wild ride), Yabatopia is an irrepressibly good humoured but utterly uncompromising dadaist art accident pretending to be a punk band.

nessie – salvaged sequence

CD, 5B Records, 2020

Sapporo’s Nessie specialise in pastel-sweet avant-pop with a scientific devotion to finding pleasure spots outside the expected. They give you a quietly determined manifesto of what to expect in the opening Kugutsu, with no note ever landing where you expect it, no shift or melodic phrase falling into a familiar shape, the vocals barely on the human side of vocaloid, the faintest hint of melancholy sentiment permeating the emotionless matt plastic of the immaculate delivery. There’s something disconcerting in the way the delivery and production approach with the soft, edgeless tones of background smooth jazz, while the vocal and instrumental arrangements dance around each other disorientating and dreamlike, notes avoiding the music’s underlying chords, different rhythms overlapping, guitar solos spiralling through the middle, free from the distortion pedal mania that afflicts many of Nessie’s math rock contemporaries but discordant and sending you spinning off balance nonetheless. But while these seven songs never come close to doing anything as vulgar as the familiar, they do so in a way that is nonetheless hypnotic, with a precision and perfectionism that hints at something between Steely Dan and Stereolab at the peak of their Sound Dust softness. It comes with an otherworldliness that is all their own though, insinuating itself with a soothing, accessible demeanour, from a Lynchian alternate dimension where pop music is just done differently to here.