it's list season again

... and this blog still hasn't got going. i love me a list but don't know how people do it so quickly. while i can roughly date releases around the hifi by dust layer thickness, regular play shakes off some of the dust and adds oily fingerprints, so this method lacks scientificness and doesn't work for vinyl at all. also you need time for the dust to gather and the media to find their favorite crawl spaces. still i'm willing to put in the work, so here finally is my list of 20 favorite records from

2019, sketched out in rough order of excellence:

dan melchior: squirrel ii (the sequel) (chocolate monk, his best so far in a strong run (disregarding his career in dad rock))
loren connors/daniel carter: the departing of a dream vol. 7 (family vineyard)
toshiya tsunoda: extract from field recording archive (erstwhile)
aldous harding: designer (4ad)
don brown & dan reynolds (cough): d=d (sacred realism)
embla quickbeam: stones that move and grow (chocolate monk)
brötzmann solo: i surrender dear (trost)
jason lescalleet: this is what i do vol. 21 (glistening examples, there were too many of those to follow with any amount of curiosity, but then this finale was great again)
dean blunt: zushi (files dropped somewhere i forgot where)
natalia beylis et al.: house sparrow settle back (crow vs crow)
akiyama/ikeda/hatakeyama: erroribus humanis et antinomy (otooto)
thom yorke: anima (xl, sorry)
r.p.m.: circle line (icr)
james rushford: the body’s night (black truffle)
kate tempest: the book of traps and lessons (american)
torba: musique inconcrète (fragment factory)
dax pierson: live in oakland (ratskin, mostly for the a side)
berrocal/fenech/epplay: ice exposure (blackest ever black)
marja ahti: vegetal negatives (hallow ground)
the comet is coming: trust in the lifeforce of deep mystery (impulse, without the “dub” track)

now the idea would be to relisten to these over time and see if they are ranked correctly. this should take about a year, and then in 2022 we could start the best of 2020 thing. it's a plan. let's see if we can get this started.