For a long time cultural value has been measured in terms of innovation or impact: what moved things forward, what arrived first, what captured the moment. Listening back across the year just finished, it’s harder to feel convinced by that language. We’ve become sceptical of innovation, linking it to the threat of AI, or the dystopian visions of tech lords. To claim that something is innovative sounds like we’re floating a start-up or creating a market bubble. This year more than ever I have sensed our tastes are in retreat. We’re sheltering ourselves in comfort food and a nostalgia for music we recognise to be human made.
This has had the unexpected effect of making me more aware of how private my own listening has become. The music I’ve spent time with this year feels less universal, less recruited for allegiance, and more likely to fail at acquiring new advocates. Which is to say: the list that follows is not an argument for anything, but a ledger. It exists primarily to tell me what kind of year I’ve had. If there is a general mood, it is one of fragmentation: diverse, personable, increasingly indifferent to consensus.
I have the sense that we have been listening inwardly. The revolution in computer-generated sound has produced, paradoxically, a renewed commitment to music that insists on its humanity: its grain, its fragility, its stubborn attachment to feeling.
Whether this is resistance or fear is unclear. Perhaps we are responding to the threat in the only way available to us: by running headlong toward whatever still makes us feel irreplaceable. Or perhaps we are already rehearsing our obsolescence, clinging to what consoles us before the ground shifts again. It may be both.
At the risk of sounding unbalanced, I should admit to a private conspiracy theory. It concerns Cameron Winter and Geese, both of whom I’ve heard live, Winter twice, with another Geese show looming next year. I find both records excellent. And their popularity may be emblems of our collective retreat to music that foregrounds human yearning. Yet I can’t shake the suspicion that Winter may be using AI to generate chord progressions. Many of the songs carry conspicuous musical references, assembled with such ease that they feel prompted rather than discovered. His voice is remarkable, expressive, unmistakably human, and his instinct for melody elevate the material into something genuinely affecting. Those elements I don’t doubt. But I can imagine a learned musician, steeped in knowledge and tradition, knowing exactly how to phrase the right questions to a large language model and then building something personal atop the results. Whether this theory has any basis in reality, I couldn’t tell, but it’s at least a record of my own scepticism and the anxieties I now carry when listening to music.
If this is the future, it will not be a simple one. Our relationship with machines is poised to become both intimate and adversarial. They threaten creative labour, even to certain definitions of human distinctiveness. There is something queasy about using them, simultaneously, as tools for emotional excavation. I am not sure I want to stand in a white cube, listening to an omega bomb rewired for contemplation, and debate whether it qualifies as art.
This anxiety is not new. Modernism taught us to distrust the visible hand of the maker. Flaubert’s insistence that the artist should be present in the work as God is in creation “invisible everywhere, and visible nowhere”was later refined by T. S. Eliot into a doctrine of self-erasure. The progress of the artist, Eliot claimed, was a continual extinction of personality.
What has struck me this year is how little patience I have left for that idea. More than ever, I have been drawn to music that is resolutely personable, in which the fingerprints of its makers are pressed deeply into the sound. I could draw a line between my new music picks and Lola Young’s Messy. A line that would make Flaubert reel and weep.
I’ve come to see that what now endures is neither technical assurance nor ingenuity, nor even the brief cultural lightning of a work that seems to arrive at exactly the right moment. Technical prowess, after all, is increasingly something that can be performed or convincingly masked by technology, while the creation of a ‘cultural moment’ often leaves music functioning as little more than the soundtrack to a circulating social-media mood. These things have begun to fall away. What remains, what appears to matter more than ever, is whether a piece of music can hold a particular emotion steadily enough for someone else to recognise themselves within it.
Perhaps that, finally, is what these émotions amount to: a preference for music that does not pretend to be inevitable, disembodied or optimised. Music that admits who made it, and why.
Arianne Churchman, In The Ghosts of the Forest we Hear them Sing (Thanet Tape Centre)
Christer Bothén, Donso n’goni (Black Truffle)
France, Destino Scofosi (Standard in-Fi)
Helviofox, Rodeado de Batida, (Príncipe)
Laura Cocks, Fathm (Out of Your Head, Relative Pitch)
Marc Sabat, Bach Tunings, (Another Timbre)
Mike Gangloff, April is Passing (VHF)
Rat Heart, Dancin’ in the Streets (Shotta Tapes)
Toshimaru Nakamura / Gintė Preisaitė, live at Ftarri (Ftarri)
Yara Asmar, Everyone I Love is Sleeping and I Love Them So Much (Time Released Sound & Time Sensitive Materials)
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