It's the end of the year again, so following my efforts in 2008 and 2009, here's my look back at the year in music as I've heard it.

Before I do however, I need to highlight the end of an era. I never listened to John Peel on the radio but his influence continues to range wide and far. Whereas many may say that he was the reason they got a break or simply fell for music in a big way, for me the two people who filled that role were Tommy Vance and Mary Anne Hobbs. Tommy sadly passed away several years ago, but Mary Anne has continued to fill my ears with new and challenging music since the mid-nineties. Sadly she decided to leave her radio show after some fourteen years at Radio 1 in November, albeit with a bang. She will be sorely missed by all (except those lucky enough to be doing radio courses at Sheffield Uni at the moment.) Thank you Mary Anne. You'd definitely be one of my dinner guests.

Back to now.

Whereas last year's sources of new music were dubstepforum, boomkat and various electronica sites, this year I relied almost entirely on Spotify and the various blog sites highlighting new additions to the service to guide my listening. Spotify's 'What's New' service began the year as a weekly spreadsheet listing the latest additions but this quickly stopped as Spotify themselves changed the way they monitored imports. The Spotify UI itself is too rigid to allow anyone to see anything but the first 100 or so tracks recently added but various sites like Pansentient and Spotinews have managed to put a filter on the firehose that is the 'what's new' search results returned by the Spotify API itself. Sadly there's no genre information though so there's a lot of luck in what you notice has come out.

In any case, what follows are my track and album highlights of this year. All of these are streamable on spotify. The track playlist is here.

1. Meet Me On The Outside - Melissa Auf Der Maur
   Out Of Our Minds is only Melissa's second record since leaving the Smashing Pumpkins some ten years ago and as a concept record based around viking myths and such like, it's surprisingly delightful, pitched nicely between rock and (yes) pop. Meet Me On The Outside starts almost timidly before the chorus warms it up and energizes it out of the viking snow. A track to go out to.
2. Come Undone - Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
   A lushly orchestrated smoulder of a song - romantic and yet not whimsical, a melancholic remnant of a MGM musical never filmed.
3. Tempting Time - Animals As Leaders
   I love extended range guitars - those with seven or more strings. Typically it's jazz and classical players that really make use of those extra strings while rock and metal players use them purely for lower power chords. Not Tosin Abasi from Animals As Leaders though as Tempting Time demonstrates. Drums and two eight string guitars playing a heavier jazz/metal fusion with more style than I've heard in quite some time.
4. Safe in the Steep Cliffs - Emancipator
   A happy recommendation from a friend at work. Emancipator's second release is download / stream only and this title track is a lazy sunny day with daisies floating through the air as you lay on the riverbank hearing the water flow past.
5. The Calm – Dave Weiner
   Steve Vai's rhythm guitarist and Riff of the Week maestro released his second album this year. At 76 minutes with ten tracks, it's an ambitious slab of progressive instrumental music. The Calm is its brief prelude, less story telling and more mood setting, as the name would suggest.
6. Hangar 18 (Live) – Megadeth
   The seminal Rust In Peace is 20 years old but like the Big Four thrash bands themselves (Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer) it hasn't aged at all, still as urgent and vital as it was when first released. To celebrate, Megadeth played RIP in its entirety on the anniversary and recorded it for posterity.
7. 8 Ball - Seasick Steve
   Far and away the most fun three minutes of music appearing in 2010, 8 Ball should be regarded as mandatory listening to all and sundry. Joyous hobo blues.
8. Golden Room – Joe Satriani
   Joe’s latest is a far sight better than Satchafunkilus collection of a couple of years ago. His Chickenfoot collaboration in the meantime seems to have given him a lot of joy in his music and it’s reflected in pretty much the entire of his latest Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards album. This has got a set of great riffs and a cool Indian vibe.
9. City Building - Johann Johannson
   Move over James Horner. Your soundtrack to Inception is an immense record but Johannson's 'And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees' tells almost the same aural story twice as well in half the time. City Building even makes sense in terms of Inception too.
10. Devil's Spoke – Laura Marling
    With a voice that belies her age (only 20) and rivals Lanegan's for timbre, the entire of her album, I'll Speak When I Can, is a lesson in traditional folk with modern values. Standout track Devil's Spoke is an upbeat whirl-y-gig with a more serious calling.
11. The Siren's Sound – Collapse Under The Empire
    This is a builder, starting from a simple heart beat, adding layers into a near maelstrom until the storm blows itself out, some nine minutes later. A splendid piece of post rock magic.
    Good video too

Albums

Teimo, Permafrost, Nunatak 3 disc reissues – Thomas Koner
The era of the digital download has put pay to the concept of an album as a single piece. Thanks to Amazon, iTunes and the like, we punters can buy individual tracks and lose entirely the glory of the full work. That's why Pink Floyd haven't released their albums legally to the web. There isn't a single standout track on any of the three albums in this reissue. Instead we have three complementary polar soundscapes, cold, barren and elegant in their minimalism. A challenging listen but ultimately worth it for the small tingles on the back of the neck they produce. (On Spotify)

Hawk - Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
If he were British, I'd be petitioning for Mark Lanegan's voice as a national treasure. The well worn bass-baritone of the Screaming Trees singer reverberates deliciously wherever he sings - and fortunately he's a frequent guest voice on other people's albums when not bringing out solo material. Hawk is the third collaboration with the ethereal, fragile soprano of Belle & Sebastian's Isobel Campbell (the first that acknowledges Campbell as the writer of all the original material) and while the first two were OK, Hawk really refines the balance between the two to a tee. To whit, it has received a lot of radio coverage since release and justifiably so. Save track 1, the songs are lush, friendly and warm like a summer Sunday matinee. (On Spotify)

Potentially one of the most useful round robin emails I’ve ever had included an Outlook *.hol file containing all the Soccer Football World Cup fixtures dates for this Summer. Wanting to share the wealth, I include it here. Simply download it and open it for the dates to be added to your calendar as if by magic. Thanks to whomeever created it in the first place.

A new year then and a wife to share it with.

A book and a being to bring into the sunshine.

New jokes to hear and old ones to remember.

New ideas to ponder and current ones to make something of.

Thoughtful wittering from Dr K, A and W to read and absorb.

Lives, code, music and films.

All to listen to. By me. By you.

Happy new year all.

I really tried to get a full ten top tunes for 2009 but stopped short at nine.
I had more disappointments than pleasant finds this year - that's what you get for trying to immerse yourself in a different genre without a guiding hand. So here we go by best order to listen to them, rather than rank

1. ? (Question) – Mark Pritchard
   A cold, hard, unfeeling opening, like waking up on a black marble floor and being approached by a silicon snake
   
2. Drumming Song – Florence and The Machine
   Lungs is the perfect name for the album from the bat-caped Florence Welch and while others prefer Dog Days, I'm swayed by her pins in the vid. It's soon to be cheesy chart pop - I only need shallow reasons to like it
   
3. Soap on a Rope – Chickenfoot
   Daftest band name ever. Best part-time supergroup. A great cut of summer time arena rock.
   
4. Alice! Live at the Natural History Museum – The Life Force Trio
   First track on the Echo Expansion compilation. A little harp from Alice Coltrane (yes, a relation) and a little dub underneath. Solid on its own and a good opener for an album worth picking up.
   
5. Sacrifice – Clint Mansell
   I love Clint's soundtracks and could have picked pretty much anything from his Moon soundtrack, but this 3:30 piece encapsulates most of the themes across the record. Loneliness, despair, tinges of desperation, determination. All in a simple piano lead with a punch from the orchestra here and there. Magical
   
6. Otacon – Reso
   Even though Reso's only putting this masterpiece of evil, grimey electronica out as part of an actual EP at the start of 2010, I heard Otacon first in February I think. It is by far and away my favourite single track this year. A vast slick of music that envelopes and then throws you about in its whirlpools and eddies until reaching the eye of its storm you're given respite before further infiltration of the senses leaves you awed and bewildered at the end of its six minutes.
   
7. Losing Streak – Jesu
   Opening track from this year's Opiate Sun EP. We stand, we fall, we contemplate inwardly, we realise that Losing Streak is the aural accompaniment to becoming lost our daydreams.
   
8. Axe To Fall – Converge
   Axe to Fall is pure insane, whiplash fury. A welcome return to form then for the Bostonians.
   
9. The Last Baron - Mastodon
   It has taken me ages to grok Mastodon. Metal press loved them when they released Leviathan a few years ago and Blood Mountain got similarly goo-stained reviews after that. But their crossover prog-metal never really rang true until they released Crack The Skye this year. It is, incidentally, my album of the year. Finally they don't sound like they're trying to force motifs into their music which impress on us the concept of the album: something that jarred a lot for me with Moby Dick-themed Leviathan. Instead, there's just them and bravo for it. The Last Baron is the final track on the album, a 13 minute tale winding its way through shifting sands of legend.

I wish I could articulate this better. Ghost in the Shell, my favourite film of all time, was finally released on a UK-playable blu-ray disc this week. However, the main feature is an upgraded version of the film, featuring 

• Some cell animation scenes with CGI or underlaid some scenes with new CGI backgrounds
• Completely re-recorded the soundtrack in 6.1
• Rewritten some of the English subtitles – for the better I might add.

Hi-Def Digest had this to say about the release. And while I think there are some definite improvements in the new version – subtitles and audio stand out for instance – I have one major gripe with this release. All I wanted from a GitS Blu-ray release was a transfer to 1080p with the some loving attention to detail that was clearly lavished upon the new version, rather than the careless, jaggy-prone ‘original as a bonus’ included on the disc.

That’s not to say that the upgrade presents a ‘Lucassed’ version – that would imply that the film itself has been ruined somehow in plot or action. It hasn’t, but it hasn’t been improved either. And I genuinely wish that I didn’t now have to resort to having the TV upscale my original DVD copy rather than watching it on the new bluray.

Sigh.

The ironic thing is that if you fully take the ‘you’ve Lucassed it’ view, you’ve actually rejected a core tenet of the film which is that entities should embrace their ability to adapt and change and recreate themselves in forms that derive from but are not the same as the original – exactly as GitS2.0 has done.