a composite of our favourites from 2005 by Alex, Dan, Miranda, Jack & Sara

a composite of our favourites from 2005 by Alex, Dan, Miranda, Jack & Sara

GRIME(Jack)
>bass snare high hat (Jack)

>Skepta! Grime superstar of the year. One producer-gone-MC who suddenly seems like our brightest hope. In his own words, the clearest voice on the mic and also a top producer still: Duppy with its 4x4 revival and the midi all-in-one riddim that all the merkege went down on this Autumn are two of my favourite instrumentals of the year. (Alex)Skepta's catchphrases: 'Oh my diddy!', 'it's Skepta the African hotty', 'oooonnnnnghhhhhhh I would kick you ooooutttta!', 'Gowonen gowonen!', 'if you're single, then mingle'. Most of these are lyrics not catchphrases, but when you hear things that often… we even started playing 'count the diddys' at FWD>> and got as high as five one night.(Dan)

>Ruff Sqwad! (Sara) The bittersweet 80s Vice-style productions and the tinny drum breakdowns on Guns And Roses volume 1. Slicks' voice (Alex)

>Young Dot. This kid came out of nowhere with his Bonanza/Bazooka riddim, which found its way everywhere really fast, mainly due to being the freshest, roughest, spazziest instrumental the scene has had in ages! He's now an Essentials mainstay and we're expecting big tings to come! The great thing about Young Dot, appart from the way he crams in more sounds into a space than even mentor Davinche, is his sense of humour. Take the aforementioned Bonanza - it takes a riddim-making genius to stick that retarded 'ungh' sound on the end of the most immediate instrumental of the year. Same sort of thing on new track Erh No - 'yr not a badboy urh no / yr a nobody erh yeah' goes the vocal hook - the hook says that! (Alex)

>Heartbreakingly sweet r'n'b, chipmunked (it's a verb now) into grime riddims: Wizzbit's 'Nicole's Groove', Ruff Sqwad's 'I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight' [and Music To Yr Ears (Alex)], Davinche's 'Sometimes' and Low Deep's 'Jedi'. These are actually probably my four favourite tunes of the year.(Dan)

>the tail end of Rawblaze / Raw 90.00 FM last winter (Alex)

>other faves: Bossman doubling up the Bongos on Bongo Eyes VIP; Davinche exploring slower dubby territory on Phaze, Countdown Riddim and Countdown Remix, man like Plasticman and Kode9 respectively mixing up grime and dubstep like they're two halves of a greater whole (duh), Risky Roadz volume 1 radio sets, South Of The Thames volume 1, Wiley's tunes: outburst + sidewinder + firefly, Terror Danjah's piano madness + green street + sonar, Team Shadetek getting involved, Doctor's twin flows: yard/english, Riko & Godsgift double team, Skepta - Private Caller with guests (Alex)


DUBSTEP

>bass bass bass (Jack)

>Dubstep's explosion into my life. DMZ's 'Neverland', Loefah's mix of Skream's 'Monsoon', the Vex'd album, all of these made my head rumble like an old washing machine in the best, best possible way (Dan)

>Skream - Midnight Request Line (Alex & Dan). I remember how good this tune first sounded at FWD because it still sounds that good more than a year later! Given a new lease of life after being excepted into grime rotation by all the big DJs, Request Line has that rare bruckout quality absent in most of the rest of dubstep, which is what makes it such awkward, occasionally frigid dance music. I hear that Request Line might chart in the UK after finally seeing a release on Tempa this autumn. Undisputed tune of the year. (Alex)

>Digital Mystikz - Anti War Dub. I'm really seeing what Blackdown is on about with the 'up' tunes these guys make. Here, they isolate one heart-rendering micro-melody and give it enormous non-stop momentum with marching snares, double-time analog clicks and steel pan pops. Combined with the vocal, this is another tune that has the bruckout factor (Alex)

>Loefah - Goat Stare et al. How Loefah has moved on this year! He's achieved the perfect formula for causing mad shockouts with the most minimal of ingredients. There's nothing still about his half-step which is VITAL. Good halfstep, to me, is all about causing the most impact with the least ingredients. Loefah traces around the outlines of that congaline skank, your feet fill in the rest. (Alex)

>Kode9 + Space Ape's drumless specials cover. Yet again more dub than step but makes for a blissful moment inna dance. (Alex)

>Hyperdub. I feel like Kode9 takes an approach with his label that is slightly sideways of the rest of the dubstep scene. Two big favourites to drop this year are Pressure (aka the bug) + Warrior Queen's delicate but potent Money Honey and Burial's murky wood-block heavy dubbed-out-2step South London Boroughs (Alex)

>Joe Nice - he's lovely he is (Alex)


DOING NOTHING(Jack)

>the Resonance FM nigh loop: specifically, the vintage American radio plays circa 1950s they put on where characters are 2-dimentional cornballs and product placements are heavy-handed (Alex)

>Inklink and my Inklink screencaps http://photobucket.com/albums/v122/manara/inklink/ (Sara)

>refreshing Audioscrobbler (Sara)

>Sky Mangel from Neighbours. Ridiculously hot anyway, she then compounds my love by becoming a rabid anti-capitalist activist on a mission to expose Paul 'Satan' Robinson, and namedrops Roots Manuva and TTC. Hot damn. (Dan)

>Family Guy (Sara)

>'The Thick of It' on BBC4. Apart from The Office this is the best sitcom ever made. (Dan)

audioscrobbler

>getting Audioscrobbler changed my life. No hyperbole - it's an amazing way to track the passing of time in the form of mp3 statistics. (Alex)

>Audioscrobbler becoming Last.fm and me hating it
>getting back in to Audioscrobbler even if it is Last.fm I forgive you (Sara)

>GTA: San Andreas. POP POP POP POP POP!!!! Best game ever made, so worth losing 2 entire weeks to (Alex)

>getting rly rly back in to lucas arts games like Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle (Sara)

>the recent Myspace resurgence, since the grime scene realised about it. Now it's fun again. Did i meet u @ FWD??


DOING SOMETHING(Jack)

>the public Pillow Fight outside St Paul's Cathedral. That was this year right? It feels like this year (Alex)


>Labour getting re-elected in May. Because otherwise we would have a Tory government now. And if you even think about saying 'it would make no difference if we did, they're all the same' man will slap you in the chops with your own self-satisfied, self-imposed detachment from the political process. Like people never heard the expression 'the lesser of two evils', let alone understood it. (Dan)

>DMZ @ 3rd Base, Brixton. Rare enough to feel truly special, not to mention the amount of new dubs that get built specifically to have their debut here. Hugely warm 12k PA helps too. The last soundsystem in London? (Alex)

>Duracell at the Spreadeagle, London. Merzbow at ATP, Camber Sands.Exile at Resonance FM, London. Radio kamerorkest + Mum meets Xenakis at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam. Battles at Sonar, Barcelona. Rolf Hind playing Morton Feldman at the RFH, London. (Miranda)

>FWD>> the best club night of the year hands down. Fresh and surprising every time, 2 thursdays a month. Natural home to the dubstep scene, somehow FWD had also become a safe haven for true grime, maybe because it's about as far from Top Of The Pops as it gets. Where else would you get everyone you want to see from Roll Deep spitting over a Geeneus mix, in an 'arena' the size of a bedsit. Nowhere else, trust me. Plasticpeople also gets the prize for best PA, maybe ever. (Alex) Kode9 @ FWD (Miranda). Bossman dropping 'God Save The Queen' at FWD>>: an awful song to have as our national anthem, but in his Midas-like hands turned into pure brilliance. The two Essentials sets at FWD>> this winter were the two live highlights of the year by about a mile. Southman it's about time we slew!! (Dan) *Five rewinds in a row of 'Request Line' during Tubby's set at FWD>>, especially the desperate, needle-busting way it was done. (Dan)

>exhibitions:
Christian Marclay at the Barbican, London. For the pillow. Dots and Lines at the Jerwood Space, London. For the Raster-noton microfilm, stickered walldrawing, and Golan Levin's Messa di Voce. the KW, Berlin, for the slide, the VHS archive, the independently published archive, the cowboy history + karaoke. M/M Paris at the Toyko Palais, Paris, for the alphabet. Barry McGee at Modern Art, London, for the cubes, and the squeaking hinges of the hooded boy. Her Noise, at the South London Gallery, London, for Kaffe's bed, the yurt, the performances, the archive, and countless funny recordings. Tapies Foundation, Barcelona, for this:
(Miranda)

>Cesky Sen (Alex, Dan, Miranda) - aka Czech Dream) – it had Prague, it had anti-capitalist art stunts on a massive, flawed scale, and the wit and cynicism that comes from 50 years of oppression by Nazis and Commies respectively. What more do you want? (Dan)


PLACES
>Barcelona (Alex)

>the woods (Sara)
>beaches (Jack)
>Odessa (Alex)


RECORDS AND THINGS
>KRUNK (Jack)
>is it cheesy to include Missy Elliott in an end of year chart? Is it cheesy to resurrect an old-skool electro anthem in modern hiphop? Not if you crunkify it as much as Missy did to that crazy Cybotron produckie on Lose Control. TUNE! (Alex)
>Animal Collective & the Paw Tracks mandem (Jack)
>great superproduced 'urban' pop - Amerie's 1 Thing, Ying Yang Twinz - Wait, Ciara - Goodies
>Ariel Pink - Worn Copy (Alex & Miranda). What made this a special album for me, rather than just an interesting one like his previous ones, is that it seems he learned to use that 70s-tape-melted-in-car sound to write incredible timeless songs. Not at all as cynical as it might seem at first. (Alex)
>Alva Noto - transall series & Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - insen (Miranda)

>Kanye West - Late Registration. Kanye refines his thing. He's on Jay-Z levels of making timeless pop from a rap perspective now and making it seem just as effortless as Jigga himself (Alex).

>The Books - lost and safe (Miranda)

>bass bass snare (Jack)

>it's been kind of a slow year for Constellation Records (Alex), but, silver mt. zion memorial orchestra + tra la la band - horses in the sky (Miranda)

>Black Dice - Broken Ear Record: they keep it moving. As many others have pointed out, it's so easy to follow the trend of making dark and gloomy experimental music. That they manage to invent new sounds that are wondrous and joyous is a mark of genius (Alex)
>Autechre - untilted (Miranda) Wow, is a fun Autechre record?? (Alex)

>Rinsessions volume 1 mix CD pack - just a very very good pack of mixes! (Alex)
>Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett (Alex & Miranda). Here's a man that knows when breakcore is dead, so instead moves on to, um, morose Hungarian(?) string arrangements about winged rats. Brilliant (Alex)
>Why and 65dos moving on with their new LPs. The former to poppy indie, the latter to more sophisticated glitchy post-rock. (Dan)
>Aim High volume 2 - while lethal, kano and -admittedly- roll deep are busy putting out shit albums, there's Target quietly dropping what is essentially a end-to-end grime-pop masterpiece of a long-player. Every track is an exclusive which makes this an album not a mixtape. (Alex)