Best new music 2025
The year’s best music, and a personal reflection on 2025, exactly 366 days after the last one.
reviews
Best new music 2023
Better late than never, here is my annual blog post listing my favourite new releases from 2023. It’s been a rather trying festive season this year because the rich soup of respiratory viruses making the rounds have ensured that my various holiday writing projects, including this one, got pushed and pushed.
Best new music 2022
Every year, I somehow commit myself to spending a few days writing up the best new recorded music I heard in the previous 12 months. Here’s the 2022 edition.
Best new music 2018
2018 was another year full of outrageous distractions, the misconfigurations and abuses of the public sphere relentlessly encroaching on whatever space one tried to carve out for thinking, experiencing beauty or getting some rest. A year to test our commitments, … [read more]
Four books January 2018
Starting this year, I will occasionally post lightly commented lists of books I’m currently reading. My tendency is to occupy myself with nonfiction, erring on the side of theory, anthropology, philosophy, politics. For those who got to know me (or … [read more]
Best new music 2017
This year’s best music list comes in the middle of the Great Deep Freeze of 2017, where it’s apparently colder in Canada than at the North Pole. Winter has come. This time, I have no summary words of political, cultural … [read more]
On Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow
Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, at two and a half hours, is neither light entertainment nor what most would think of as a seasonal movie. It is currently in an extended run in two of Toronto’s theatres supporting more cerebral fare … [read more]
Best new music 2016
As 2016 plowed on, it revealed itself as an annus horribilis. Many of the world’s temporarily dormant or subdued evils really came alive this year, and there’s no need to enumerate them here. Music lost more than a few important … [read more]