The top 10 records of 2012, Mark Morford
It’s that time of year again, when my friend Andy sends out a hotly excitable e-mail asking a dozen of his most music-crazed friends — sound engineers, clubsters, DJs, anyone for whom music is less a casual dalliance and more like lifeblood — to compile their personal lists of the year’s best music, so we can all discover something new and/or gently mock each others’ weird tastes in African banjo disco, kazoo jazz funk or ambient doom metal.
As usual, I dive into this venture with a great and all-consuming fervor, ignoring how I’m no music critic by training and instead opening wide to 30+ years of serious music obsessiveness; couple it to a bottle of Casa Nobles anejo while I blithely ignore all other overwhelming meta Top 10 lists like this one, and it’s all sorts of delightful indulgence. Plus I get to hear what an idiot I am for ignoring the likes of Frank Ocean and Grizzly Bear. Bonus!
Here’s my contribution for 2012, a damn fine year for music indeed…
(10) Too High to Move – Quiet Village remixes. Tough to classify, endlessly wonderful to sink into. Nearly two hours of deep, intimate, yet playfully epic doses of groovy, world-beated electronica with a hint of jungle rhythms, sunburned dub and international flavorings. Quiet Village, the moniker for producers Joel Martin and Matt “Radio Slave” Edwards (AKA Maxxi & Zeus), who collate some of their past recordings and most famous bootleg remixes to make this unexpectedly varied, groovy record, has/have an expert ear and makes every track from a wide variety of producers and defunct labels feel unified and sumptuously coherent. Best grower record of the year.
The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/12/27/the-top-10-records-of-2012/