Show #2574 - Saturday 30th December 2023
My Favourite Welsh Bangers of 2023
This week's show (10-1 tonight on BBC Radio Wales) is my celebration of my 49 favourite uptempo recordings from Welsh artists in 2023.
Or - at least - it's most of them. Today.
Listen here / via BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ts1p
I could burn many thousands of words explaining the whys and wherefores but the only pertinent answer as to why these recordings feature above the 1500+ tracks I played in 2023 is that I liked these the best. These are the recordings I would throw onto a lifeboat if 2023 hit an iceberg. Of course, if 2023 could provide icebergs floating off the coast of Wales we'd have very different problems to worry about than those we actually face.
There are recordings that I adore that I couldn't squeeze into proceedings because 180 minutes is a small jar to squeeze a year's worth of the best Welsh musical ace into.
CELAVI and yxngxr1, in particular, released albums that have excited my atoms in the past year. But the musical stones just didn't fall in such a way that either album fitted into this particular programme.
This isn't an attempt to provide you with a definitive list of the Greatest Welsh Music of 2023. You and I both know, love and respect music's subjectivity. It's the ying of much of my favourite uptempo Welsh music from 2023, to compliment the sublime yang of last week's programme - 'Peace Transmission Module' - that shimmered with much of my favourite downtempo Welsh sounds of the last 12 months.
I hope you enjoy what you hear. The songs are arranged in a very unacademic alphabetical order. It's as good a way of sequencing these things as any.
There is a lot of truly brilliant, heart-racing music contained therein. We - a country of 3 million-ish - punch well above our weight when it comes to musical creativity. It's not that we're the land of song, we're the land of bleep, of scream, of riff, rhyme, twang, sub bass thunder and so much more.
A deep and profound thank you to any of you who've taken the trouble to listen to the programme this year. You make the show more than just an onanistic audiophonic exercise. Although it's a lot that, too.
Happy new year / blwyddyn newydd dda.
See you on the other side x