The Top 10 Records of 2013, Mark Morford
Every year at this time, my friend Andy sends out a hotly excitable email asking his most music-crazed friends – sound engineers, clubsters, DJs, me, anyone for whom music is less a casual dalliance and more like lifeblood – to compile their personal lists of the year’s best music, so we can all discover something new and/or gently mock each others’ weird tastes in African banjo disco, kazoo jazz funk or ambient doom metal.
As usual, I dive into this venture with an all-consuming fervor, ignoring how I’m no music critic by training and instead opening wide to 30+ years of serious music obsessiveness; couple it to a bottle of Casa Nobles while I blithely ignore everyone else’s obvious year-end picks (Kanye, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, etc), and it’s all sorts of delightful indulgence.
Here’s my contribution for 2013, a damn fine year for music indeed…
10) A-Black – A-Black
Google won’t help you. Nor Wikipedia. That’s because it’s this young British producer’s very first record, and his moniker, A-Black, doesn’t exactly make it easy to track him down (I discovered this debut, purely by chance, on Beatport). Here’s Dharma Records’ description: “Classically trained Alexis Mavropoulos has a weird and wonderful taste in music that has shaped his eclectic electronica style. We tried to label it with a pretty genre, but it lives in it’s own little nook of ElectronicaLand and we love it.” It’s a little bit of Burial-grade dubstep, moody hip-hop, dance and unique production expertise. Whatever it is, he’s the most promising new electronica artist of the year.
The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/12/24/the-top-10-records-of-2013/
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