Dreams and Bridges – a look back at 2023
by John Wohlmacher
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a strange moment while sleeping. Together with two friends, I was in a small one room house that was well lit and inviting. When we stepped out, we found ourselves inside a bright forest. To our amazement, we realised that the room was built into the fossil of a gigantic creature, whose crustacean body was mostly overgrown by adjacent trees – a strange, red cross of an octopus and crab. The image stuck with me. Analysing dreams at times seems a fruitless venture, as they exist within their own recurring universe that defies rationality. Still, with the way much of 2023 played out, it felt strangely symbolic, as if to suggest that we found ourselves living within a very old, gargantuan creature’s belly. And while the moment in the dream held an aura of awe and sublime beauty, the past few months played out like a bad nightmare.
And to be honest, I don’t want to reflect on the personal experience of getting through the year. Exchanging notes with friends and colleagues, it seemed that a strange cosmic unrest set in with summer and autumn. Various people close to me confided they experienced the worst time of their lives, having to confront sudden loss and mortality – as I had to as well. Simultaneously, the world slid into a modus of insanity that felt all too familiar to the student of past European and world history. “Can this decade please just chill out?”, I heard people say. So what to do when the world slides into a bad dream and collectively society is evading to wake up? Embrace the dream as thought-form? Possibly: as a symbol, it seemed to be everywhere…
Record of the year: Kelela – Raven
My personal favourite ended up the BPM choice of our #1 album, and it makes a lot of sense to me that it captured our collective imagination. Kelela’s utopian work, bookended by images of diving down and breaking through the surface of water, broke down spacial barriers that exist between the communal and the intimate, the public and private. A dance-floor suddenly merges into a bedroom, hotels and roads and clubs and blankets all tangle up, as possibilities abound and desires become flesh. It’s an incredible album, that analyses subconscious emotional workings and transcends the corporeal boundaries of life. To dance, to dream, to love, to mourn – it’s all part of a constantly shifting, transforming environment. I can’t name many records which rendered music in such a fashion without turning overtly academic, losing the very sensual process in submitting to the swaying movements of itself.
Movie of the year: Kyle Edward Ball – Skinamarink
A much darker dream came with the haunting and elusive Skinamarink! An avant-garde horror film, Kyle Edward Ball’s strange vision was the story of two young siblings who get up one night to find all windows and exits of their house gone, their parents strangely absent. Completely lost, they huddle in front of the TV. Draped in blankets and their toys strewn across the living room floor, the two soon find themselves confronted by whatever it is that has entered their house – or possibly had been waiting there all along.
Composed of long, uninterrupted interior shots, the film is almost completely bereft of actors, rarely showing the protagonists. Instead, it derives immense tension from the slow progression into an apocalyptic nightmare: there’s an odd logic to the movement of objects and broken visuals, with the children locked in a cruel game of an inhumane force that just keeps on highlighting their powerlessness. No definitive explanations materialise, simply because there aren’t any behind the antagonist’s motivation: the things that happen unfold simply as a means to their own end. After months – years – that saw us confront nonsensical cruelty and immense strangeness, Skinamarink feels like an exorcism that only succeeded in so much as that it freed a demon imprisoned within to the outside world. Its last seconds, laden with doom, are the most frightening thing I’ve seen in a very long time, and their implications still haunt me.
Other voices…
So how to face the inevitable? So many other artists pondered this question in 2023. John Wick 4 saw its protagonist grapple with being caught up in a constant fight that gradually became a sisyphean task, embodied in a bold and hilarious slapstick scene of him trying to master a Paris outdoor staircase in a fixed countdown – for every inch he gained, he was thrown back down again. Possibly the best of an iconic franchise, it embraced melancholy and philosophy as much as it satirised the tourist attractions of the modern world (the waterfall-bearing Berghain holds some of the funniest in-jokes).
Just as ponderous was Michael Gira’s latest effort, The Beggar, which directly reflected on mortality and the decline of age. Fusing together all previous iterations of Swans, from gothic folk to Noise Rock and featuring an expansive 44-minutes sonic collage, it is a new career high for the chameleonic entity that is Swans.
Likewise, billy woods’ Maps stood as the rapper’s best effort yet. Working with former collaborator Kenny Segal, the airy travelogue becomes infused with diaristic sensibilities of the places visited and flavours consumed, all under the ever-invasive memory of a recent suicide and rumination on mortality. It’s such a joyful and life-affirming work that it is especially necessary in this era of unrest!
Barbie proved that we can progress societally, but also that for every moment of empowerment, we gain another shackle in return. Directly spinning gender norms on its axis, having the Kens embody societal and behavioural roles traditionally ascribed to women, while the Barbies ran a matriarchical and self-centred society, the film was able to uncover not only how absurdly prefabricated individualism has become, but also how prepackaged identities lead to depressing and ultimately self-destructing systems. Barbie proposed a truce, but acknowledged that this meant just a new set of issues. A brave and funny as hell movie, it presents many arguments and criticisms to our modern philosophies of existence that could be studied for generations to come. Because it embraces that things only get more complicated rather than easier, no matter our solutions. But then the most effective response to oppression remains active confrontation.
In the albums of Naked Lungs, Mandy, Indiana and Model/Actriz, a new iteration of Punk embodied itself: Futurismus is the new noise of 2023, a lightning strike of expressive guitars and clattering beats, situating itself between gothic Industrial and brutalist Post-Punk.
Contrasting that, a host of Shoegaze releases – albums, EPs and songs – took the internet by storm, collecting millions of plays on TikTok and streaming services. Drop Nineteens, Full Body 2, Motifs, Slowdive, Julie, Della Zyr – the list goes on and on! 32 years after Loveless, the genre is more vibrant and exciting than it has ever been, pointing towards a bright future!
It’s hard to be optimistic in times such as these, but in all the works I’ve mentioned, there’s an air of acceptance and hope, the promise that perseverance will lead to a moment of clarity. But this won’t come without the very hard work to undo the reigns that led us here! So while we march onward into 2024, maybe we should dare to dream a little more, and embrace the images within those worlds. What do you see when you close your eyes? Be brave, and dare to fight for it.
No matter where you are, or how you feel: I’m thinking of you. At the bottom of this page, there’s some songs I made into a mixtape, just for you!
Thank you. And as in every minute of this life: I love you!
___
John’s top 50 albums of 2023:
Yes, it was a great year for music – so much so, that I found it nearly impossible to cram every record I loved into my top 50! A few fell by the wayside, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cherry Glazerr, Home Is Where, PinkPantheress, Lil Yachty, MIKE, Cailin Russo, Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night, Youth Lagoon and OLTH getting a shoutout here.
And now, here’s the big ones!
1. Kelela – Raven
2. billy woods & Kenny Segal – Maps
3. Armand Hammer – We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
4. Swans – The Beggar
5. Naked Lungs – Doomscroll
6. Drop Nineteens – Hard Light
7. Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert
8. Model/Actriz – Dogsbody
9. Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist – Voir Dire
10. Mandy, Indiana – I’ve seen a way
11. Liv.e – Girl in the Half Pearl
12. Animal Collective – Isn’t It Now?
13. Full Body 2 – Infinity Signature
14. JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown – Scaring the Hoes
15. Xiu Xiu – Ignore Grief
16. L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog
17. Anna B Savage – In|FLUX
18. Godflesh – Purge
19. Slowdive – Everything is alive
20. Fatboi Sharif & Steel Tipped Dove – Decay
21. ANOHNI and the Johnsons – My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross
22. Danny Brown – Quaranta
23. MS PAINT – Post-American
24. shame – Food for Worms
25. McKinley Dixon – Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?
26. George Clanton – Ooh Rap I Ya
27. Wilco – Cousin
28. Titanic – Vidrio
29. Depeche Mode – Memento Mori
30. Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World
31. Spring 2005 – Ellie Kemper
32. terraplana – olhar pra trás
33. Noname – Sundial
34. Wednesday – Rat Saw God
35. PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying
36. Wolf Eyes – Dreams in Splattered Lines
37. Geese – 3D Country
38. Squid – O Monolith
39. Vagabon – Sorry I Haven’t Called
40. NODUO – Noduo
41. Jeff Rosenstock – HELLMODE
42. The Murder Capital – Gigi’s Recovery
43. Amaarae – Fountain Baby
44. Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily – Love in Exile
45. Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings
46. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin
47. Portrayal of Guilt – Devil Music
48. André 3000 – New Blue Sun
49. Lana Del Rabies – STREGA BEATA
50. yeule – Softscars
