90: ATOM TM
‘WEISSES RAUSCHEN (ERSTER TEIL)’
(from LIEDGUT, RASTER-NOTON)

In Liedgut, the terrifyingly prolific Uwe Schmidt produced a work to rank among his very best. A tribute to Schubert, Helmholtz, Kraftwerk and an Austro-Germanic romantic tradition that doesn’t distinguish between science and art, it’s full of rich, enthralling pieces, but none more so than the heartbreakingly pretty ‘Weisses Rauschen (Erster Teil)’.

89: SHONTELLE
‘T-SHIRT’ (CRAZY COUSINZ REMIX)
(WHITE LABEL)

While Scratcha DVA, Cooly G and more pushed UK Funky in new directions, last year’s champs Crazy Cousins kept on doing what they do best: hard tribal house tracks (‘Sonar’, ‘Inflation’) and giddy vocal jams; this refix of Shontelle’s ‘T-Shirt’ an unofficial successor to last year’s incredible ‘Do You Mind’. The track’s best moment had nothing to do with its producers though – that goes to Shontelle’s lyrics, which turn from sexual to sad in one couplet: “with nothing but your t-shirt on / ’cause I wanna be close to you.”

88: LIL WAYNE feat. PHARRELL
‘YES’
(MIXTAPES)

Between Plastician’s Dubstep LA mixtape, Snoop’s infamous “who up in here likes dubstep?” tweet and subsequent ‘Millionaire’ (a vocal of Chase and Status’ ‘Eastern Jam’) and Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture 2: Enter the Dubstep, some will remember 2009 as the year hip-hop met dubstep. But the only ones who did it particularly well were Wayne and Pharrell, both getting super raspy one minute and drawing for the Auto-Tune the next over this LFO-swamped beat. Good to see Wayne doing it for the ladies too: “yes I eat that pussy ooh how do I love that panty-pie / keep my head shampooed and yes I keep my hands sanitized.”

87: YEASAYER
‘AMBLING ALP’
(SECRETLY CANADIAN)

Yeasayer returned this year after work on Bat for Lashes’ Two Suns album, sounding bigger, brashier and poppier than before. Speaking to FACT this year, the band’s Anand Wilder described ‘Ambling Alp’, the first single from new album Odd Blood as “a reaction to perception of Yeasayer as some sort of freak-folk, hippie outfit”. Here’s where they proved they could do grand, sweeping pop anthems with MGMT and the rest of them, and still get weird when it matters.

86: ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
‘DISCONNECTING ENTIRELY’
(from ZONES WITHOUT PEOPLE, ARBOR)

Daniel Lopatin’s epic, isolationist synthesizer jams recall Monoton, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis, but he also achieves the kind of noise-savvy textural density you might more readily associate with Touch and Mego artists like Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi. His music benefits from deep, extended listening (seek out the recently released Rifts for a triple-disc anthology), but ‘Disconnecting Entirely’ is a fine introduction to his beguiling new-age-gone-dark aesthetic.

85: SPACE DIMENSION CONTROLLER
‘LOVE QUADRANT’
(KINNEGO)

A friend recommended we listen to this 12″, describing it as “kind of post-dubstep disco”. We didn’t know what he meant until we heard the A-side and title track; the work of an Irish newcomer, it’s firmly in the chug-house tradition but has a bassweight and viscous funk to it that means it could only have been made in 2009. A real gem this one, from a producer we’ll be keeping a very keen eye on indeed.

84: INTERNET FOREVER
‘COVER THE WALLS’
(TWENTY YEARS OF BOREDOM)

Meeting via the comments section of vocalist Laura Wolf’s blog, few bands have captured the second half of this decade’s DIY approach to pop with more gusto than Internet Forever. The band’s break-up song, ‘Cover the Walls’ chorus featured the sort of headfirst rush through a tunnel of guitars that Times New Viking must have thought they’d made their own, punctuated by Wolf’s slight, almost spoken word verses.

83: HOT CITY
‘HOT CITY BASS’
(RAMP)

London’s Hot City ended 2009 as one of FACT’s favourite producers and DJs, and all his production trademarks – cut-up vocals, pummeling 4×4 basslines, a sense of humour and a debt to hardcore rave – found themselves demonstrated to shocking effect on this Ramp 10″.

82: THRILLER
‘FREAK FOR YOU’
(THRILLER)

Played relatively straight, with only a few tough drum and scratch edits deviating from its rolling boogiedown bass and vocal, this latest anonymous 12″ from the Thriller camp was the label’s best to date, with a female lead that manages to be weirdly empowering in its submissiveness.

81: JAY-Z feat. ALICIA KEYS
‘EMPIRE STATE OF MIND’
(ROC NATION)

Jay-Z’s often at his best when painting vocal pictures of New York (see: er, all of Reasonable Doubt for a start), a Scorsese influenced vision where Afrika Bambaataa has equal standing with Sinatra. Lyrically ‘Empire State’ lacked the strength of past hometown tributes, but it’s brought to life by a timeless, piano-heavy beat by Al Shux and an overwhelming chorus by Alicia Keys.

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