December and January are the months when music lovers of all stripes and discopaths make their top 10 lists of their favorite records of the past year. We take pretty pictures, we announce loud and clear that we're going to do it, and for several days, even weeks, our news feeds - on all networks - are invaded by well-assumed subjective tastes. Sometimes argued, sometimes not. This mania for improvisation prescribing aesthetics nevertheless allows us to discover beautiful and rare music that would certainly have passed under our radar. So long live the tops!

Loving music is surely the only (and most beautiful) way to come to terms with loneliness. Listening to music sends us back to our deepest subjectivity: those who write a top want to come out of their loneliness, to reach out to their fellow man. Communicating your musical tastes also allows you to stand out from the crowd, to make your mark in a social milieu - and the more cutting-edge your discoveries, the better you'll be perceived! We all know someone who's obsessed with lists: he or she seriously ranks his or her favorite artists, the films he or she has seen during the month and calculates the number of books he or she has read during the year. Unfortunately, this kind of list-collecting often misses the mark: rather than attracting interest, it repels, because the exhaustiveness of lists is exhausting.

But January is also the month of broken resolutions. So here are the top 10 vinyl records that you should have listened to in 2022 and that we'd like you to put on your turntables in 2023, not to talk about them on Facebook but just for the pleasure of listening. For this fifth review, exceptionally, the rules are changing: more records and less exegesis. In a totally random, non-hierarchical order.

Maxime Denuc - Nachthorn - Vlek
When intelligent musical hybridization meets a composer with a discerning clubber's ear, the result is this addictive UFO recording. Belgian composer Maxime Denuc uses MIDI* to control the Great Organ of Düsseldorf's St. Antonius Church. Thanks to this system, the organ is controlled entirely via a computer, the playground of an electronic music composer more familiar with computers than church organs. The result is minimal music with haunting, trance-like Baroque sounds.

Clarice Jensen - Esthesis - 130701 Records
A splendid and highly original work by American composer and cellist Clarice Jensen. It celebrates that sensation known as chromesthesia - where the ear involuntarily associates colors with sounds. Accompanied by the delicate pianist Timo Andres and the gentle voices of Emma Broughton, Francesca Federico and Laura Lutzke, this album plunges us into a colorful sonic bath between post-classical and ambient music for pure musical emotion.

Djivan Gasparyan - I Will Not Be Sad In This World - All Saints
It's about time this cult album by legendary duduk player Djivan Gasparyan was re-released. Almost forty years after its first release on the Melodya label, this beautifully titled record, which did so much to raise the profile of this Armenian instrument, has finally been re-pressed in its beautiful original sleeve, following a 1989 reissue thanks to Brian Eno and his Opal label. " Without doubt one of the most beautiful and moving recordings I've ever heard," said Eno. We believe him.

Toshi IchiyanagiMichael Ranta, Takehisa Kosugi - Improvisation Sep. 1975- Metaphon
This beloved recording is finally back in stores, mastered and carefully restored. Originally intended as a soundcheck session, this long improvisation in Tokyo by the three musicians has become a record and a work in its own right. A masterpiece of the underground avant-garde, it pays tribute to Ichiyanagi, the major Japanese composer who died in October 2022.

J D Emmanuel- Electronic Minimal Music(1979 - 1983) - Black Sweat Records
This triple album, reissued in 2022, reveals a discreet electronic music composer in his early experimental years, when the influence of Terry Riley's layers of sound (and illicit smoke) bore extraordinary fruit. This compilation of previously unreleased tracks by the Texan and still active American composer, known for his magnificent album Rain Forest music, has yet to attract our attention.

Jacqueline Nova - Creación de la Tierra: Ecos palpitantes (1964-1974) - Buh Records
This great Colombian composer, representative of her country's avant-garde and electroacoustic music, who sadly passed away at the age of forty, is slowly beginning to emerge from her purgatory. Buh Records has done a remarkable job in re-releasing her great and fascinating work, Creación de la Tierra. The unintelligibility of the voices of the indigenous U'wa people, transfigured electronically until the song becomes fully recognizable, makes this landmark work in the Latino musique concrète repertoire a moving and sometimes frightening musical object.

Jon Hopkins - Music For Psychedelic Therapy- Domino
This record should be dispensed with at the end of every day, when work fatigue, daily worries and the surrounding noise deafen us, and all we want is silence or easy music. This album is a happy medium: it fills the silence with splendid sonorities, and its ease of listening conceals a musical seriousness that is awe-inspiring. We begin with a sumptuous triptych captured in the Cueva de los Tayos, on the eastern slopes of the Andes. For the pleasure of the ear and the love of nature.

Pom Bouvier-b. -La fleur du bourdon - SILO Editions
They say it. " Not really a label, not really a publishing house, not quite a residency and even less an artists' collective. Nevertheless, the Silo is a magical place, with a rare and meticulous program. This former cooperative cellar contains a huge abandoned silo, which is now the ideal space for recording and performing experimental and sensitive music. This album is a success for Pom Bouvier-b., an electroacoustic composer who plays her own instruments - and here, her Lamineur. "Like an archaeologist of vibration, I take with me a series of chopsticks and objects that I can vibrate or use to tap, scrape, rub, generate sounds and capture them in the return of resonance. It's a game with place. The instrument, the Lamineur, is like an animal extension-together, we play at extracting this volatile flower."

Christian Schoppik - Läuten der Seele - Hands In The Dark
Beware, this record is surely the most touching UFO of 2022. It's a marvelous assemblage of sounds, moods and music from German films of the 50s, known as Heimatfilm or "German country films": films featuring beautiful, rural landscapes with happy little blonde faces, and romantic stories with happy endings. Of course, this type of film had its own "plan plan" music, which Schoppik has fun transforming, looping and exaggerating. A splendid idea for pastoral-experimental music.

Sarah Davachi - Two Sisters - Late Music
Along with Kali Malone and a few others (Lawrence English and Claire M. Singer), Sarah Davachi is increasingly making her mark in the contemporary music world on an instrument - the organ - that was thought to have fallen asleep in Bach, Widor and Messiaen. This recording, with its monumental, low-pitched sonorities, only confirms this trend. Between the carillon bells that open this double album, the sumptuously recorded strings and Dorothy Berry's voice, you're sure to fall in love with this ageless music, minimalist in its sincere purity and so enveloping.

François Mardirossian

* The MIDI system is a circuit or module that specializes in the exchange of information between different sources. MIDI is responsible for adapting the specifications of one device to another. From now on, all new synthesizers and digital pianos will be able to communicate...