Top Ten Late Night Records (NR10)

The following ten records are best enjoyed in the small hours with just a decent pair of headphones for company.

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10. Bochum Welt: Module 2

Plastic phosphorescence in green and white, at times lonely, at times uplifting.

9. The Fall: Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall

A genuinely wonderful and frightening record, they were not equivocating. Mark E. Smith’s lyrics usually get all the critical attention, however the music itself is a wonder. Basslines swelter amongst discordant guitars, only to be released into uneasy melodic choruses; beauty and sentiment is never allowed to subsist without being undermined; guitars are ugly and affecting, never quite pitch-perfect. It’s incredible how much Pavement took from them, but especially the gritty realism Smith used to reflect modern Britain. A band (or rather a man) who deserves respect in the least for his tenacity, his refusal to do things other than on his own terms. 

8. Astrobotnia: Part One

Like Bochum Welt, also on Rephlex Records, Astrobotnia produces music of reflective loneliness, uplifting melancholy. This is appropriate for night listening as this is usually the state that one is in at this time, preparing for perhaps the second loneliest thing we do in our lives. Gloomy luminosity, like grey ablaze; intangible insecurities, distant glimmering warmth; uncomfortably sterile synths like cold reminders. 

7. Hervé Boghossian: Mouvements

A truly intense night record; a record of never-ending horizon lines, like the ‘magic hour’ where light refracts in fragments around the earth, the dividing line between light and darkness. In Antarctica, because of the latitude the sunset has a luminous band of green, blistering bright amongst the reds, yellows and oranges. This seems an appropriate visual correlation. 

6. His Name Is Alive: Detrola

A delicate, ethereal record that seemed to slip by unnoticed, Detrola feels like it is hanging in the balance, that it might deteriorate at any second, underscored by fragile understated rhythms. Of their discography, this was the most honest, affecting I have heard. It works late at night for its lethargy, with smoothly sung vocals and vulnerable melodies. There seems to be a discourse with (or influence from) folk music, largely through a sort of provincial expression that is pained yet buoyant, familiar, and genuine. 

5. Wilco: A Ghost Is Born

Subtlety makes this record what it is. The method of construction, thematically and atmospherically was explored on The Wilco Book – a worthwhile read. Jeff Tweedy at his most artful and conceptual. A Ghost is Born was the natural successor to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but loosened up and at ease. The absence of Jay Bennet must have facilitated Tweedy’s creative process, as it felt all the intensity of the previous record had been relinquished. 

4. The Microphones: Mount Eerie

Phil Elverum’s “life”, from cradle to the grave. So organically satisfying, so appropriately atmospheric in all the right places. At times gruesome, lethargic, perhaps even religious. Never has a collaborative effort felt so lonely in the universe as Mount Eerie. The tribal-carnival rhythms were more free-spirited and genuine than any of his communal/group recordings, reflecting an enthusiasm that is all too fleeting throughout his work, but at times glorious.

3. Fennesz/Sakamoto: Cendre

Entirely efficaciously tranquilizing, composed, almost like a Japanese garden: meditative. Christian Fennesz takes a well-judged backseat, whilst Sakamoto does as he does best, with his Debussy-like tonal exploration of the piano. Cumulatively, Cendre works as a coherent whole, as the piano and organ wash over you like rain. Fennesz lays the rouge-coloured foundations of brittle ambience for Sakamoto to pinpoint and manipulate with melodic intonation. Dreaming of the Kyoto suburbs, temples, the hillside graveyard, the peculiar paradox of urbanity and peaceful green landscape. 

2. Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks Soundtrack

What I imbibe from Lynch – visually, aurally, atmospherically, more than anything, is the multisensory perception of “the uncanny”. The uncanny is viscerally attractive, repulsive, frightening, comforting: “The sensation of ‘uncanniness’ was an especially difficult feeling to define. Neither absolute terror nor mild anxiety, the uncanny seemed easier to describe in terms of what it was not, than in any essential sense of its own.” (Anthony Vidler) Freud admitted “the uncanny is uncanny because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is ‘repressed’” The threat is “perceived as a replica of the self, all the more terrifying because its otherness is apparently the same.” This dichotomy lurks in dreams, bolstered by Badalamenti’s score, perfectly underlining this duality. 

1. The Dead Texan: The Dead Texan

From source to the ocean in a dream – in the same southern expanse that Stars of the Lid have interpreted for years, but this was compactly realized in a pop structure. Late night contemplative dead-ends, immersed in the flux of relaxation. The Dead Texan seems to inhabit that stage of dreaming whilst one is still three-quarters awake, as the mind has begun to filter and process hundreds of wild thoughts – seemingly arbitrary fragments splinter then disappear on the moment of focus: the intangible processes of the brain in flux. The range and depth of sound on The Dead Texan seems to reflect this, as does the unabashed, unrestricted engagement with emotion that makes this album near perfect.

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