Jujupiter

Ambient music is not super mainstream so I dedicate it an award every year because I love that genre. It’s a bit demanding, you need to sit down, be quiet and maybe focused in order to enjoy it but it’s a good way to slow down, kind of like a meditation.

Since I enjoy my ambient wordless, I will not give further comments on those tracks.

Here are the 5 nominees.

Stretching Spirit by Daniel Bachman

Caelum, No. I by Zakè

Du vindem (3minTankestrek) by Karl Seglem & Alfe Magne Hillestad

Chronicle #3 by Rhubiqs

The Ship by Arthur Mine

The winner is Caelum, No. I by Zakè.

#JujuAwards2025 #AmbientActOfTheYear #JujuAwards #BestOf2025

Well, again, I got into a lot of French musicians this year. Interestingly, I noticed the French acts were all singers-songwriters who were very good with lyrics. But I also liked other stuff! Let's see how many Frenchies made it to my top 5 this year.

Léonie Pernet

A fully accomplished musician who keeps putting out the good tunes and mixing all kinds of influences together. Definitely one of the most exciting acts France has produced recently.

Bonnie Banane

I've heard her stuff for a while but this year I properly explored Bonnie Banane's discography and I loved it. Plenty of good songs and this year, she has released an album of sexy songs with Joseph Schiano di Lombo. Really like her bold persona. Also saw a surreal interview of her. Instant gay icon. Love her.

Flavien Berger

Flavien Berger shot up to my top 5 artists in my Spotify Wrapped this year and with good reason. I dived into his discography and loved what I found. Also saw interviews of him and he was talking about his creative process, it was very interesting. I wish I was living in France again just to attend all of his gigs like a groupie, screaming his name and throwing my t-shirt to the stage wet with my tears.

Confidence Man

My friends and I spent a weekend in the countryside and they started playing songs from this Aussie band. It's just efficient, fun pop and the band is a bit crazy, composed of four members: two of them always masked and taking care of the beats while the other two, Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, sing and do the silliest choreographies on stage. I really like their video for Holiday, which was filmed in Australia with some scenic shots in gorgeous landscapes.

Ami Dang

A singer-songwriter of South Asian heritage who mixes sitar with electronic beats to produce soothing soundscapes. Great for timelapse Sunset stories on Instagram.

And the winner is... Flavien Berger! Every year I usually give the awards to different artists but it sometimes happens that an artist is so good they score two! OMG, what an honour!

#JujuAwards2025 #MusicActOfTheYear #JujuAwards #BestOf2025

The music section is the one with the most categories in the #JujuAwards! We did the Track of the Year, now we are doing the #AlbumOfTheYear, next we'll do the Act, the Ambient track, the Dance track and finally the Gig! (Apparently, this is some kind of teaser.)

Interestingly this year I listened to a lot of French musicians. Is nostalgia hitting me that hard? Is my midlife crisis reaching a new stage? Am I homesick?! I don't know but there is a lot of good stuff coming from my birth country.

Here are the 5 nominees.

Poèmes Pulvérisés by Léonie Pernet

I really liked Léonie Pernet's previous album, Le Cirque de Consolation. She is keeping the momentum, delivering the tunes and ever better lyrics – seriously good writing, actual poetry. She mixes electronic beats with African drums or classical instruments such as the piano and strings. She also diversifies the emotions between dance music, nostalgic ballads and chants from protests. A real trip. I especially enjoy the tracks Réparer Le Monde, L'Horizon Ose, Paris-Brazzaville and Nymphéas.

Contre-Temps by Flavien Berger

I'm so late with this, this album was released in 2018, I had briefly listened to it years ago but rediscovered it this year and it's full of good stuff, whether it's instrumental flights or lyrical puns, Flavien Berger shows his talents for a full hour on it. He also has duets with two other amazing French artists: the fiery Rebekah Warrior and the enticing Bonnie Banane. The tracks I would like to single out are: Brutalisme, Maddy La Nuit, and the title track, Contre-Temps.

Ultratonics by Ryoji Ikeda

Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda came to Melbourne for the Now Or Never festival and graced us with his Ultratonics show which plays this album fully. It was a great experience in itself (I will talk about it further in the Gig of the Year section) but the music is just so amazingly well crafted. The level of detail, the experimentalism... A electronic masterpiece. My favourite tracks are the soberly named Ultratonics 01, Ultratonics 07 and Ultratonics 13.

Watt by Bertrand Belin

Don't you love a mononymous album title? Björk always names her albums with a single word. In fact, she even has an album called Volta, a name linked to electricity, like Watt. I barely knew Bertrand Belin before, I had heard a wee bit of his music ages ago but hadn't been charmed because I thought it lacked modernity, as in, it wasn't electronic enough to my taste. With Watt, he is definitely embracing the times while still keeping in character. He has aged since his big 2010 breakthrough, Hypernuit, and his voice is featuring something more vulnerable and it just makes it more raw and personal. I love being positively surprised by an artist's evolution. On this album, I especially enjoy the tracks Berger, L'Inconnu En Personne and Ni Bien Ni Mal.

Dance at Oscar's by C.A.R.

French and Canadian musician Chloé Raunet is back with a new album and is as good as ever. It's still her great electronic, almost brutalist self but she doesn't hesitate being downright funny or emotional this time. I'm very curious to see what she will do next. My faves are: The Pageant, Shyana and Anzu.

And the winner is... Poèmes Pulvérisés by Léonie Pernet! Wow! Woohoo! Aya! Yay! Etc.

#JujuAwards2025 #BestOf2025

I have this self-indulgent thing I do every year that I call the Juju Awards. I nominate my favourite artists and artworks in diverse categories over the past year and name a few winners. It's an occasion for me to share pieces I find interesting and give them a wee bit of publicity, at my humble level.

2025 was a horrible year geopolitically with democracy and international law at bay, and 2026 is not shaping up to be any better. But last year, one thing gave me hope: culture. I attended the Melbourne International Film Festival and saw so many good movies, honestly a strong highlight this year. I explored a lot of music and read a decent number of books, notably a few essays and scifi short stories. We tend to become cynical easily these days by saying art has become too formulaic or commercial but it's not true: people constantly put out original ideas, express new viewpoints and showcase different kinds of beauty. And a lot of it is available online.

I always start the Juju Awards with the Track of the Year category, which lists the songs I have enjoyed the most over the past year and elects the track that has marked my year the most. Because, what can bring you back to a time as easily as music?

Here are the 5 nominees for this year!

Summer Is Almost Over by Polo & Pan

The Frenchies Polo & Pan keep serving the good tunes with a track that is both feelgood and nostalgic. It strangely resonates with the current mood, bidding farewell to an era.

I Can’t Lose You by Confidence Man

Australia has many good music acts and Confidence Man, a crazy band from Queensland, is one of them, producing pure fun. The video reflects that with singers Janet Planet and Sugar Bones baring it all while flying over London.

Nymphéas by Léonie Pernet

The French electronic musician is back this year with a great album and this is the closer. It evokes nostalgia again with a melancholic piano but also a message about not worrying anymore.

Les Véliplanchistes by Flavien Berger

I knew French musician Flavien Berger, notably since he collaborated with Etienne Daho, but didn't know most of his work. This track is from one of his first ever EPs and is an invitation to come check out the windsurfers with him. It's not about love or anything like that, just about appreciating something as simple as the reflections of the Sunlight on the sea.

Looking At Your Pager by KH

I had no idea Four Tet had an alias and had released this beautiful track a couple of years ago. He even played it to close his set at the Sidney Myer Bowl in Melbourne this year.

And the winner is... (Suspense! Drumroll! Panic attack!) The winner is Les Véliplanchistes by Flavien Berger. What a soothing yet uplifting track.

Do hashtags work on Write.as?!

#JujuAwards #JujuAwards2025 #TrackOfTheYear #BestOf2025

On New Year’s Day, I put out a playlist that contains the 100 tracks I discovered the previous year that I’ve enjoyed the most. So here is my Best Of 2025 in music: BO2025 – hope you enjoy.

U-0055 is an “antimeme”, an entity that somehow escapes people's memory. It sits in a secret facility but no one remembers how it landed there. In fact, no one can even recall it's there or what it is. Is it an object, a person or could it be just an idea? It could be a major threat but no one can come up with a plan to defeat it since no one is aware of it.

This is only a summary of the prologue of this book and it got me hooked. I was in for a ride because things only got crazier from there. The novel is described as at the crossing between scifi and cosmic horror, with a terrifying enemy that no one is even allowed to remember as just thinking about it would invite it. The story focuses on Marie, the head of the Antimemetics Division, who discovers many people in the organisation have disappeared and no one even remembers they were there, meaning something is at play. There is a “no one is safe” approach and Murphy's Law is in full swing, especially halfway through the book when the situation goes from bad to way worse. Another thing is that pretty much every detail serves a purpose in this book, everything resufaces at some point. There were some really good ideas. Special mention to the idea around the character of Adrian Gage was, even though he only appears in one chapter. It's a short but intense book, just like I like them ❤️ Definitely one of my favourites this year.

NB: I read a new edition with a different cover and minor story differences but I preferred this one so I picked it for illustration.

In this essay, Austrian psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl reports his experience in concentration camps under the Third Reich. He also elaborates on logotherapy, a new psychotherapy method he based on the importance of the meaning of one's life.

I read Primo Levi's If This Is A Man ages ago but it's always shocking to read about the atrocities that occurred during Nazi Germany. Of course, there is the never-ending list of crimes perpetrated by the regime, notably the arbitrary executions, the starving, the enslavement, the beatings, the extremely dire life conditions and all-around dehumanisation of the prisoners, but I had forgotten some things, for example, that a number of companies used forced labour from the camps, despite these individuals looking clearly unwell.

Frankl gives the most earnest account possible and articulates his existentialist perspective on the horror. He believes that someone who could find meaning in their suffering was more likely to survive. He recalls seeing several inmates going through a mental breakdown and giving up only to die mere days later, like a psychic death preceding the physical one. Of course, a lot of the prisoners, whether they could find meaning or not, could not escape their fate, because those in charge had decided to kill them for whatever reason. Frankl relates escaping death several times, not out of wit but out of pure luck. The importance of meaning appears as well when Frankl got arbitrarily beaten. Suffering is one thing but suffering for no valid reason is even worse.

In that respect, Frankl's book is an important account of what happened and we need to remember what atrocities a fascist regime can commit because, of course, we need to prevent it from happening again. That said, despite some good insights, I was expecting more from the logotherapy part. This is not a scientific treatise, it's just an outline of an approach, but it's an interesting collection of views.

A French essayist offers an interpretation of the geopolitical tipping point we are experiencing. She asserts that, in 2025, we already live in a technological dystopia.

First of all, I really enjoyed the writing in this book, Asma Mhalla has a talent for neologisms and catchy sentences. Now, when it comes to the content, I agree with her analysis: the situation in the US is critical and its technological preeminence means it will reverberate across the world. Democracy is at bay. One thing though is that because the book analyses the current moment, it can't back up its claims with studies, data or even investigations because those things take time so it can only interpret what we know. I'm not sure whether everything that has happened so far was deliberate in the collusion between some companies and the State. For example, I don't think social networks were designed to push directly for fascism, they were made to make money and it so happened that outrageous content was very good at keeping people engaged and therefore was more profitable. But it is true indeed that in the future, those side effects might be chosen rather than coincidental.

The book ends with a short “anti-conclusion” in a way to challenge us to think for ourselves and make our own interpretation, because we have to stop eating the slop and we need to put our brains to work. It's very light when it comes to solutions though Mhalla gives some advice as to how to survive this new era. Interestingly, among other things, she mentions humour as a way to resist, because it conjures the fear away and allows to think more freely. It's funny, earlier this year I read a post from a HIV activist (which I unfortunately could not retrieve) saying what was happening was reminding them of the peak of the AIDS crisis and one tip they had for the new generation was: dance. I guess the idea is that you have to survive, you have to fight for your rights but one important way to do that is to keep living fully and authentically, as much as possible.

Hello World!