Album of the Year 2024: Meemo Comma - Decimation of I

I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.

It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era.  

And yet, and yet… life persists, culture persists, community persists, bloody-minded resistance and innovation persist, and on we keep buggering. I’ve never been more glad of art, music, and the communties around them, from the global to the hyper-local. At a time when the glut of hyper-availability and the threat of AI slop has risked making cultural production seem pointless, in fact it is more precious than ever. Every act of expressing joy, catharsis, bewilderment or even just a howl into the void, even – especially – if it never reaches beyond a small circle, is still a reminder of what we live for, and the level of fear and tension is a reminder of what nourishment for the mind and soul really feel like and why even people in the most dire of straits continue to make music by any means. 

Our mission to save theartsdesk has been a big part of this. In spreading the word, I’ve had to sum up what this site is for, and in running our BlueSky account I’ve been reading almost every article every day and been reminded all over again of the delirious, bull-headed passion that has always driven us. Writing the book fabric, celebrating the London club’s 25^th birthday, has likewise been a reminder of how mad individual vision and collective love for its expression can generate cultural movements and peak moments over and over again. And running my Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest mailout with Brian David Stevens has been a deep, deep dive into the intersecting personal stories that make up culture. 

One of the interviewees in that mailout this year was Lara Rix-Martin. As Lux E Tenebris, half of Heterotic and then Meemo Comma, she has consistently been a fascinating electronic producer – making concept albums based on everything from white working-class machismo to the South Downs landscape to the intersection of Jewish mysticism with anime plotlines. Last year’s Loverboy delved into hardcore rave, but most of her records have been broadly ambient soundscapes, and she returned to that for her fifth and best Meemo Comma LP. It’s based on the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – which inspired Tarkovsky’s cult film Stalker – and it’s extremely eerie. 

Rix-Paradinas told me she wanted to write from the perspective of an entire ecosystem that was being invaded by something alien – “It's the environment that's the sensory part, not the human” – and it’s certainly easy to feel this as dissociated from normal human intentionality. All of this makes it a perfect soundtrack for a world gone not just wrong, but holistically, inexplicably wrong in ways that are felt reverberating through entire systems from global to micro level. It captures a sense of weirdness that’s everywhere and felt collectively.

If that sounds high-falutin, the experience doesn’t have to be. While it captures a pervading uncanniness, everything on this records uses familiar tropes from ambient and synth music – including old Russian synth experiments – and even the most rarefied of cosmic prog/goth rock, but also harks back to baroque composition and folk melody. Its strange new world is disquieting, but still contains richness, comfort, meditative space. It carries an undercurrent of intentionality and determination in the face of the unknown (and maybe unknowable) even if it's a not-quite-human intention, and it’s often just beautiful. It’s anything but Valium for the ears, and yet it does provide a sanctuary where thought can unwind and expand and slow, and for me has given a lot of succour in this terrible, terrible year. 

Three More Essential Albums from 2024

DjRUM - Meaning's Edge

Ganavya - Daughter of a Temple

Juls - Peace and Love

Musical Experience of the Year

I hate to say my own DJ set BUT again, this was about the people, about connection, about succour and sancturary that isn't just numbing escapism. Playing from 2-4am in the beautifully fairytale-like Once in a Blue Moon Tea Tent at We Out Here festival, I started intensely, with Sinead O’Connor singing “Soon I Will Be Free From the Troubles of the World”: the song I’d ended with in the same slot the previous year, just a week after her death, and the gathered people seemed to respond. I slipped and slid through Monolake, both John and Alice Coltrane, Dvořák, Sade, Tunng and when it became clear that the people were going to stick with me, I kept getting weirder and weirder still with drones and wigouts and eventually dropped Gilli Smyth’s entirely tripped-out radiophonic folk tale “Taleisin”. At which point, two young women appeared at the door, nodded appreciatively, did a very good and committed interpretive dance routine for the whole nine-minute duration, bowed flamboyantly to enthusiastic applause from the tent and skipped off into the night while I rubbed my eyes and went “what the fuck?”. From there on in, the dreaminess only intensified, and the rest of the set passed in a sate of slightly hysterical bliss. 

Track of the Year

Joni Mitchell - "Amelia - Demo", from Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980)

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