TOP 50 ALBUMS 2010 - 2019!

Tough question - a very, very tough question to me. Kind of impossible to answer (unless I bury myself for a week or more, doing only research on the topic... :shock: )

Instead of just giving a list of album titles (which only could be incomplete), I'd like to reflect a bit on how this decade was for me as a listener...

Prelude...

Before the dawning of the Internet (or before I started to use it, rather), which roughly means before the turn of the millenium, there was some electronic music in my collection (since many years), but it was limited - some albums by Klaus Schulze, a few by TD, a few by Vangelis and Jarre, a few by Eno, a couple of new age albums, a handful of techno CDs or other then contemporary electronica . As far as I was familiar with it, I loved electronic music, but it was only a part - and the smaller part - of what I listened to...

Came 2006, and a friend kind of dragged me to MySpace - which immediately exposed me to much more electronic (but also other) music than before - both new, but also old (but new to me). One or two years later, with the series of re-releases of the complete Klaus Schulze catalogue, I started to systematically explore his work - which kept me busy in the first place until way into...

...2010! When I did two major moves (in terms of discovering great electronic music) - (reluctantly) joining Facebook and (wholeheartedly) joining the EMPortal! :mrgreen:

And while I before already believed that I had discovered a lot of new music, it was only in this last decade when the gates swung fully open! :shock:
Not only became I aware of many new musicians - I became aware of whole scenes and categories of electronic music, universes still uncharted by me...
...and this process still is keeping on unfolding until today (see my post in the "favorite albums of 2019" thread).

For example (as I can't hope to mention it all...):

Around 2010, I was still very much in the process of digesting KS' oeuvre, when a (female) singer who I collaborated with made me aware of Robert Rich. So, I was late in discovering Robert's music, but as probably most of You know, I was right away overwhelmed by it - it really (like the best of KS' albums and then some others, but then in a different way still) seemed to speak directly to my soul, and immersing myself in it feels like being at home in my own mind (or inner self, whatever...), and exploring vast realms therein yet unknown to me.
(...pardon the grandiloquence, but I couldn't describe it any other way )

So, I started to explore Robert's back catalogue as much as I had explored KS' before (plus following his frequent new releases). But discovering Robert's work also put me in touch with the music of many other American electronic artists who before (with only very few exceptions) I had widely ignored, including Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Forrest Fang or Thom Brennan. And also the international ambient scene, with Alio Die, Vidna Obmana, Oöphoi and may other great artists...

In 2011, I discovered that Matthias Grassow was living more or less in my neighbourhood and got in touch with him - at that time, I only was familiar with one album by him, but after we had met one or two times, I also started to explore many of his many works. But this meeting also made me explore many albums by Peter Michael Hamel I had missed so far, and the vast catalogue of Matthias' idol, drone ambient pioneer Klaus Wiese.

Also via Robert Rich, I started to really take interest in Terry Riley's work, and in the wake of that, in the work of other minimalist composers, like Steve Reich or Philippe Glass - but also Pauline Oliveros, which in turn made me aware of further female minimalist and electronic composers, including Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Suzanne Ciani - but most of all Laurie Spiegel - and more recently contemporary artists like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Lisa Bella Donna, and many more...

Although I had seen Centrozoon (then consisting of Markus Reuter and Bernhard Woestheinrich) already early in their career on a small festival in 1999, and I already had met again Bernhard around 2007 on MySpace, it was only around 2010 that the full impact of the great music from both their band and solo projects, and eventually also most of the various other projecKts that Markus Reuter was involved in, did fully arrive at me - from then on, especially Markus grew quickly into my biggest musical heros, not only by strength of his (usually excellent) music as such, but also by his thought-provoking concepts and often unorthodox and fascinating ways of creating and composing.

Another huge discovery was the music by ['ramp] and Stephen Parsick's (other) solo work (of course, at the time I stumbled upon it, the former duo already had become his solo project, too). And via Stephen's inspirations, I became aware of another "school" of electronic music - not exactly (only) the "Bielefeld School", but rather the (apparently mostly British) tradition of "heavy Berlin School" music - with roots also in the industrial movement - as represented by Node, Redshift, Radio Massacre International or some of the solo work of Dave Bessell and more recently by The Rosen Corporation. Surprisingly (or not) there also exist some connections between this "scene" and the Centrozoon camp - as well as between Markus Reuter and Robert Rich - and Robert Rich and Ian Boddy and the DIN label (see below) ...

Speaking of Node and Dave Bessell, I need to mention a couple of labels - while I'm usually rather following individual artists and do not care a lot on which label exactly they release their work, it turned out that there are a couple of labels which so consistently release quality music that I started to take for granted that any album released there had something worth listening to to offer - like Ian Boddy's DIN label (including - but not restricted to - Ian's usually excellent own releases), Ultimae (including - but not restricted to - Aes Dana's brilliant releases), Spotted Peccary, Cryo Chamber, Synphaera or Winter-Light...

I also have to include the excellent work of some artists coming from a classical background embracing and incorporating elements of "classsical" electronica (or from the other direction: extending their scope to include modern classical elements) like Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Colin Benders / Kyteman Orchestra or Brand, Brauer & Frick...

And then - there's a complete "school" of more "commercial" (?) electronica rising from the original techno / dance/ chillout movement, and maybe transcending that, the main exponents of that seeming to be projects like Carbon Based Lifeforms, Biosphere or Solar Fields, and a whole "school" of artists (it seems) inspired by these...

There would be so much more - but I already wrote a lot (probably too much). But I need to mention the myriad of fellow "small" artists who have released a lot of great albums in a wide field between "orthodox" retro electronica in the vein of whatever hero they adore, and "avant garde experiments" as far out as anyone could imagine. I won't mention any names here - because no matter how many artists I mention, I would be doomed to forget many who had deserved it. There are so many gifted artists "out there", "doing their thing" - no matter if that "thing" is to add more great music to some "school" of electronic music, or coming up with something completely personal an unique (or something at some point between these poles...).

A list of favorite albums...? Suggest 50 random albums created by the artist mentioned above during the past ten years, and I will most likely agree - and there will be 50 or more still missing and spring to my mind some other day. There is no shortage of great music, on the contrary.

P.S. Oh, wait - here's one album I'll name, because it doesn't fit into any of the groups mentioned above, but I love it:

Mike Oldfield, Return to Ommadawn


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