Viking’s Choice goes back to the future
Courtesy of the artist
“Time is never time at all,” William Patrick Corgan Jr. once sang — and so did I, once, in a Halloween cover band, forever ago — about being lost in the moment, which is very much something one yawps over a swell of strings as a 20-something with everything to prove. So why did I feel every single moment of this year in my body, but couldn’t tell you a thing about any of them?
In my 40th lap around the sun, time and space seemed to operate as a system of rubber bands — elastic memories and taut histories balled up into compacted feelings, their bounce trajectory unknown. The experimental music that spoke to me in 2023 did much the same, playing with concepts of simultaneity, recollection and liberation — not so much lost in a moment, but mapping how one got there and what was lost and found in doing so.
Viking’s Choice, my weekly-ish mixtape and newsletter, continuously finds the links between seemingly disparate sounds. My year-end podcast with All Songs Considered host Robin Hilton, however, connects epic Japanese storytelling, soul-sampling powerviolence, ambient rap and beautiful noise through thematic webs of time and space. For some semblance of order, this episode is divided into four chapters. Listen to a mixtape featuring all of the featured music via BNDCMPR. —Lars Gotrich
Chapter 1: Histories lost and found
So much of history is forgotten or even intentionally erased by powers seeking control of the narrative. When the storytellers die, so do their stories. These albums re-contextualize a record label’s storied catalog (Matmos’ Return to Archive), bring medieval epics into the future (PoiL Ueda’s Yoshitsune) and uncover a lost battle (Mayssa Jallad’s Marjaa: The Battle Of The Hotels).
Chapter 2: The past is ever present
We are in constant conversation with not only the past but also our past selves. On Tête-à-tête, Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood give a surprisingly sweet and intimate set of musique concrète that prominently features their voices. On A New Tomorrow, LA hardcore band Zulu samples soul music legends as a source of comfort and encouragement.
Chapter 3: Memory is a mystical measure of time
Memory doesn’t make sense, yet it gives us a sense of self. Yungwebster raps meditations over vaporous beats that speed and slow time while Liis Ring’s Homing leans into nostalgic haze.
Chapter 4: Where we’re going, we don’t need ____
We close the show with its raison d’être, helpfully provided by Sunwatchers: Music Is Victory over Time. Electronic collage artist Elysia Crampton, under the moniker Chuquimamani-Condori, and psychedelic party weirdos Sunwatchers both understand that not only must our music be free from boundaries, but also our people.
(This edition of All Songs Considered was edited and mixed by Tom Huizenga)