A year in music: eight random things from 2019

Here again, for all you many fans of Niluccio on noise ephemera, are my eight random things in music from 2019. Why eight? Why not? And whatever else, I'm sure they're at least as interesting as your eight random things.

1: Best moment when music rescued me

Being stuck in a traffic jam on the M11 near Stansted for more than two hours (or was it 14?) was turned from disaster to near-triumph through listening to my ancient iPod on shuffle mode. Yes, a true tale. Months later, I can't actually recall what was played by my not-exactly-fashionable Apple music machine, though the Psychedelic Furs' We Love You and the Fall's Rowche Rumble definitely featured. For my money, shuffle mode on a well-stocked music player is one of the great things in life.

My car is the 27th one from the front of this photo

2: Most important clear-out

It's a toss-up this year between the - comparatively light but long-overdue - purge of the CD shelves (jettisoning about 25, including, perversely enough, at least one thing I only acquired this year), or the whittling away of the batches of 12"s I bought throughout the year (lots of early-noughties dance stuff, some good some not). Nowhere near as drastic as disposing of all of my classical music on vinyl (in 2018), it was still … satisfying. Anyone half-serious about music needs to do this - periodic clearances, cracking down hard on mediocre/inessential stuff lurking among crowded shelves of vinyl, tapes, CDs, whatever. Chuck them out.

3: Best purchases

Quite a few this year, though I'm still clutching pretty tight to those music-buying purse-strings. A few picks, I guess, would be:

Charles Douglas, Not Your Kind of Music: The Basement Tapes 1995-1999

39th And The Nortons, The Dreamers

McDowell, Rooks Wedding

Taos Humm, Flute Of The Noodle Blender

John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett, John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett

Volcano!, Beautiful Seizure

General Echo Soundsystem, General Echolection

Fruit Tones, No Flies On Me

Several Aztec Camera singles

(I won't bother with potted descriptions. You either already know what these sound like or could easily find out.)

New(-ish) product

None of these was a full-price purchase (that's something I left behind decades ago) but, as I mentioned a year or two ago, I've been cautiously dipping my toe into the world of online buying in the past few years (only discount stuff though). Seems to me that as second-hand vinyl gets marked up to ever more ridiculous prices by the "cool" new music shops, you're often better off getting the odd batch of unfashionable CDs from a decent indie record label. Or, you can always just ... buy nothing.

4: Most typical mini-disaster

I could mention the various gigs I got to too late/too early/on the wrong day for/failed to notice they were happening until three days later, but the stand-out fail for 2019 was the upended-cactus-on-the-lovingly-arranged-7"-singles disaster recounted here.

5: Random stuff I’ve enjoyed listening to

On top of everything else that's been ploughed into a bewildering/annoying array of Niluccio on noise compilations during the year or formed the basis of some of my fascinating blogs and rants, these are a few Niluccio "sounds of 2019":

Lag Os, Not Alone - excellent haunted electro-dub mitherings

Heavy Lifting, LCD - a plaintive electro-pop mini-drama

Lives Of Angels, Look Out Kid - excellent overlooked 80s outsider-pop

VDTB and ITTA, Trembling Flowers/Unsettled Ghosts - a recent-ish South Korean work-out from David Thomas Broughton

Hamer, Hamer - speedy Damned-meets-Hawkwind psych-rock

EP/64, EP[Copper]64-50 - pretty indescribable dub-industrial psychodrama improv set

Bad Idea, Boy Racer - madly infectious drama-pop stuff

Ossia, Noods radio shows - beyond-inventive murk-dub/electro weirdness

Quinie - stripped-down, history-drenched Scots songs

Things Disappear, Threads radio shows - silky house-through-to-obscure-funk/soul from a workmate, Lee Kirk Fagan

Saint Abdullah, Mechanical Flirtations - New York-Iranian soundscapes and psycho-political dramas

Thistle Group - a halting voice from across the eternal divide (or maybe New Zealand)

The Caretaker, Everywhere, An Empty Bliss - a gramophone in search of lost time

Leather.head - some recent live stuff

Lighght, Gore​-​Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs - mutant dance music, sampled weirdness and pulsing/manic beats (Lighght is also good on Twitter)

Artwork for the EP/64, EP[Copper]64-50 on Soundcloud (though now taken down it seems)

6: Most typical tweet on current listening

In a way they're all "typical", in that they're all semi-antagonistic. Mainstream music bores me to tears, and so does the stifling hype around it. Every Niluccio music tweet is a tiny pin-prick in the giant edifice of commercial music. (Yes, it is!). Anyway, with lots to choose from, this could well qualify as my most typical tweet about current listening from the year:

7: Best archival activity undertaken

My whole life is a sort of ongoing archive project, especially the musical side of it, but a Saturday morning session of re-labelling old mini-discs of live recordings (mostly done in London) from the past 10-15 years, was probably this year's highlight. It was a roll-call of now-defunct bands playing in now-defunct venues. In a few more years I'll be defunct myself, but for now … onto number eight.

8: Best dream featuring a musician

Musical figures invade my dreams more and more these days, meaningless though these dreams always are. A year or two ago I had some sort of weird encounter with a surly Nick Cave in one nocturnal adventure. This year, there was a dream where I was worried because Screaming Lord Sutch was coming to the house where I grew up - things were a mess and my mother was due back any minute (oh no!). The best 2019 dream, though, was one where I was in Tehran. John Maher was there (naturally), making a film, and he proceeded to rope in me and some other people who were hanging around in the street. All the time Maher was saying things like "so this is what you’ve got to do", giving us an on-the-job tutorial. And then, I guess, I woke up. Ever woken up from a dream you shouldn't have woken up from?