This has been a strange year. In air miles, imagination and sometimes both I’ve spent most of it far away. Since it’s been about twelve months since I last did this, here are some music recommendations – stuff I’ve been listening to while out there.

I brought a whole bunch of great music back from Japan. The album I probably love most – though it’s far from comfortable to listen to – is Seven Idiots by World’s End Girlfriend. This is Les Enfants du Paradis:

I think it sounds like a fairytale, perhaps by Oscar Wilde or Hans Christian Andersen, in which you do a deal whereby you get to live a total life of passion, thrills and wild romance on the condition that the whole thing is compressed into seven manic minutes then you die.

Zac Bentz, under the name Dirty Knobs, is making some of my favourite new music in the world right now. I first heard about him via Warren Ellis who linked to Bentz’s majestic and desolate Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell, and I’ve been a fan since. October’s Hallow was the highlight of my pumpkin season, but my favourite album of his at the moment, one that’s grown on me enormously in the last six months, is Ghost Geometry.

This music is huge and slow. Listening to it I imagine wandering through vast, echoing, eternal spaces, sometimes scared, sometimes inspired. Click here to hear or download it for yourself.

Best rediscovery of my year was Sonic Youth. I hadn’t listened to them since I was a teenager – and was therefore all the more awed and delighted to find out that in all the years they’ve now been playing together they’ve never stopped making new and wonderful music. You’d have to search hard to find another band who’ve so consistently kept pushing themselves, each other, and the possibilities of what guitars, bass and drums can do. Here’s Washing Machine.

From classic roots it grows and spreads until gloriously weird new territory opens up around you.

Here’s to that.

Sam