In what is quickly becoming one of my favorite annual traditions, I am back with news of eight of the best books I read this year and eight new ambient/experimental/jazz/whatever albums that make for a complementary listen while reading! This is not passive background music, we’re talking an immersive pairing of two pieces of art that work together to shut the world out through parallel vibes, thematic overlaps, and/or just being cool and interesting on their own and together. 

Land’s End Eternal by Cole Pulice and The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

The first book I read this year was also one of my favorites: Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington’s delightfully idiosyncratic debut novel The Hearing Trumpet. Following the misadventures of a precocious 92 year old woman who stumbles upon an apocalyptic plot to unearth the Holy Grail at her retirement home, it’s a deeply funny and strange work complemented well by the similarly surreal sounds of electroacoustic saxophonist Cole Pulice’s latest spacey ambient jazz excursion. Land’s End Eternal is full of eerily familiar sounds and textures cast in an unfamiliar light, using the palate of new age relaxation tapes to craft new sonic realities.

Weft by Blue Lake and The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti

Released in January, Blue Lake’s mini-album Weft has been a constant companion this year: five instrumental Americana pieces composed by bandleader Jason Dungan featuring a 36 string zither he designed and built himself. Weft’s pastoral atmosphere and patiently unfurling arrangements pair perfectly with Italian novelist Paolo Cognetti’s bucolic gem The Eight Mountains. Following the shifting dynamics between two lifelong friends who met as boys in the Italian alps and go on to lead very different lives, Cognetti’s quiet meditation on parenting, friendship, and self-reliance is enlivened when accompanied by this record full of performances on an esoteric, handmade classical instrument.

Disquiet by The Necks and Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

Australian jazz trio The Necks are responsible for some of the most mind-expanding music released over the last four decades across dozens of albums worth of hourlong improvisations. Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu’s postmodern experimentation across prose, poetry, and academic writing has solidified his place among the greatest of his generation. Both parties are responsible for sprawling, discursive tomes that broke my brain more than a few times this year. Across three volumes and 190 minutes, Disquiet is sort of an ideal introduction to the various modes The Necks operate in: glacially paced ambience, locked-in cosmic precision, and protracted exercises in tension and release. Solenoid, its textual counterpart, covers just as much ground across its 600+ pages, a circuitous series of increasingly strange occurrences that ostensibly exist in a inverted world where Cărtărescu himself never found success as an author.

Plunge by Flur and Berg by Ann Quin

Listening to London-based jazz trio Flur’s spare, intimate debut album is an uncanny experience, as moments of lush interplay between harp and saxophone bump up against off-kilter discordance and skittering, nervous drumming; it’s hard to get comfortable with Plunge on. It’s also a challenge to read Ann Quin’s 1964 debut Berg, another slim, mercurial bit of experimentation from another UK oddball. An oedipal tale full of twisty prose and mistaken identities, Berg may be difficult to follow at times but it’s even harder to put down. 

Once Was Ours Forever by Jonny Nash and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

A vicarious vision of Americana from a Dutch experimental musician, Jonny Nash’s sprawling Ones Was Ours Forever is the perfect pairing with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, an imagined history of a simple life spent on the margins of the rapidly developing American West. Nash’s patient guitar soundscapes and Johnson’s terse language complement each other well, as both use familiar tools to create something remarkable in their simplicity and emotional depth. 

Disiniblud by Disiniblud and Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller

I think of Disiniblud, a collaboration between experimental musicians Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, as an assembly of imagined worlds, fantastical, wide-eyed dispatches from a universe where the first few Sigur Ros albums were as influential as Abbey Road. Actor and writer Cookie Mueller charted similar explorations of alternate ways of living with a combination of matter-of-factness and childlike wonder in the essay collection Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black. Mueller documents her experiences embedded within some of the most important subcultures of the 20th century: the burgeoning hippie movement in San Francisco of the late 1960s, the avant garde art scene in New York’s East Village in the 1980s, and the underground film circuit, centered around John Waters’ magnetic camp orbit. 

Shrunken Elvis by Shrunken Elvis and Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník

This one’s sort of a fun at-home experiment you can do, throw on the new album from out there Nashville trio Shrunken Elvis and pick up the nearest copy of Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana. In no time you’ll be noodling on the fool’s errand of trying to make sense of modern history with some spaced out, motrik ambience in the background. It’s like a DIY Adam Curtis documentary happening inside your skull!

Cloud Time by Emily A. Sprague and Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

Influenced by the recently canonized Japanese environmental music scene of the 1980s, Emily A. Sprague’s Cloud Time features a collection of ambient improvisations recorded live on tour in Japan. A lot of ground is covered across the album’s seven tracks, as Sprague sublimates experiences from the trip into each performance, reacting in real time as a kind of sonic travelogue. The breezy textures of Cloud Time provide a gentle counterpoint to the spiky, lean writing and simple brutality of Kathryn Scanlan’s fictionalized memoir, assembled from interviews with a racehorse trainer. Kick the Latch’s Sonia shares stories of growing up poor and her struggles to fit into the male-dominated world of horse racing, a series of sharply defined vignettes whose heft I enjoyed counterbalancing with the gauzy atmospheres of Cloud Time.

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.