Culturedarm’s Records of the Year for 2023

It’s an old saw by this point to suggest that while the livelihood of the average working musician has never been more perilous, the curious listener has at the same time never before had access to such an abundance of quality music, from nagging earworms to the experimental margins and everything in between. In a year that saw bubbling anger over Spotify payments and major layoffs following the sale of Bandcamp, record labels from Kampala to Helsinki and from Lima to Shanghai to Hot Springs strove to cultivate local scenes with a global outreach, while artists like DJ K, Arooj Aftab, Klein, Lucy Liyou and Kara Jackson could create music which both suffused and skirted the mainstream. The following list of records counts as a broad assortment of what Culturedarm has been listening to in 2023, and is complemented by a likeminded list of songs plus an assortment of albums ‘from the vault’, which recognises that even the brightest of minds keep one eye firmly on the posterior.

ABADIR – Ison

For the sixtieth release on SVBKVLT, the club producer ABADIR who hails from the old Heliopolis suburb of Cairo absorbs a childhood routine of churchgoing as his parents took him on Sundays and feast days to the holy places of Egypt’s various Eastern Christian sects. Fascinated by their choral music, for Ison the producer uses segments and field recordings from Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Catholic choirs to present his own vision of fresh hymns or fictional chants, comparing the record to his last release with the suggestion that if Mutate was made to make the dancefloor burn, Ison instead ‘is intended to cure last night’s hangover’.

Akira Uchida – Kurayami

The instrument builder and multi-instrumentalist Akira Uchida was a working saxophonist until 2007, when he came under the tutelage of Satoshi Yoshida and began turning both hands to the piano with a penchant for tuning which carried him across Japan and far overseas. From 2015 he learned to make clavichords under the guidance of Masahiro Adachi, and in 2021 he constructed one of the instruments out of the aged hinoki cypress which once comprised the Kiyomizu-dera temple’s main stage. A popular stunt during the Edo period when the practice amounted to an aspiring leap of faith, the expression ‘to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu’ still carries resonance in Japan as a euphemism for risk-taking, with Uchida debuting his own clavichord as part of a dedicatory performance in the famed Buddhist temple’s main hall.

Collaborating with Kosaka Osho on the sutra drum and Tono Tamami who plays the seventeen slender bamboo pipes of the shō, Uchida brings all of his instrumental expertise to bear on a journey through the enchanted darkness for IIKKI, a project based out of Brittany which fosters dialogue between visual artists and musicians, with each release furnishing two physical imprints in the form of a fine art book plus LP or CD. For the two long sides of Kurayami, the bristling atmospherics and Buddhist chants proffered by Uchida draw inspiration from and engage in moonlit discourse with the photographs of Yamamoto Masao, who specialises in the medium of gelatin silver print and has exhibited from San Francisco and New York to Moscow and São Paulo.

Ale Hop & Laura Robles – Agua Dulce

Named after the most popular beach in Lima, on Agua Dulce the duo of Ale Hop and Laura Robles dust off the colonial legacy of the cajón, a percussive instrument cultivated from upturned fruit boxes and shipping containers during the nineteenth century as stretches of slavery roiled coastal Peru. The native sound of Afro-Peruvian music which later infused everything from the encompassing blend of música criolla to the Spanish flamenco, Cuban rumba and Mexican zapateado, on their electrifying debut Ale Hop and Robles harness the cajón as a symbol of defiance and transformation, reinforcing its physical character through recorded improvisations and a live performance at the Heroines of Sound festival, where they were accompanied by the dancer and choreographer Liza Alpiźar Aguilar.

Allen Lowe – In The Dark & America: The Rough Cut

Describing the worst time of his life, the saxophonist and music historian Allen Lowe circled the dark and brayed against the ravenous morning sun, unable to sleep or breathe then suffering from the lingering effects of peripheral neuropathy as he recovered from surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus. Somehow in the midst of all that he began to compose and the music poured out of him, culminating in two albums either side of a set of Wadi-Sabi ballads by Alan Sondheim for the experimental New York holdout ESP-Disk. Beyond its title and opening track, which wryly refers to kicking the bucket, on In the Dark the veteran jazzman swaps the quiet air of desperation for eloquent and rhapsodic compositions which sometimes break free of their moorings, featuring Ken Peplowski on clarinet, Aaron Johnson on clarinet and alto saxophone and Lewis Porter on piano, paying various ode to old Jews, Jelly Roll Morton, The Big Easy, Eric Dolphy and peasant life through the earthy tones and nubby forms of early Vincent van Gogh.

Meanwhile on America: The Rough Cut the artist diagnoses the failing state of the blues, a form over which he has obsessed for many decades and which he defines for its ‘disinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) society’ and ‘implicit rejection of basic tonal, sonic and harmonic rules’. Getting back to basics, Lowe invokes the Funky Butt Hall of Storyville, the boisterous gyrations of the Holy Rollers and the attendant whoops and hollers of the Pentecostal church, running through a ragtag blend of jazz, honky-tonk and gospel, minstrelsy, medicine show irony and one-chord ruminations which prefigured the blues, culminating on the album closer ‘At a Baptist Meeting’ with saxophone squalls that snatch and chafe towards spiritualism, tethered by rowdy percussion and the brio of live performance recorded from a concert several years ago with the late trombonist Roswell Rudd.

Ambrose Akinmusire, Bill Frisell and Herlin Riley – Owl Song

For his debut on Nonesuch Records the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire railed against the onslaught of the information age, bidding in his own words to ‘create something that’s oriented around open space’. To that end he enlisted the guitarist Bill Frisell, whose records Akinmusire would play in his youth, and the drummer Herlin Riley treasured by the composer for his ‘commitment to the beauty you can find in the groove’. On the album opener ‘Owl Song 1’ it is Akinmusire’s trumpet which pushes forth warily, carving furrows into the ground or wafting up into the aether, while the six-string of Frisell rounds corners and turns wafts into plumes as Riley on drums creates the possibility of movement in space, like a groundsman raking up leaves or a curler sweeping a rock as a means to decrease friction. The record continues in the same vein with Riley stalking out the space, Frisell tracing its borders and Akinmusire sending up smoke signals as ‘Owl Song 2’ brings everything down to a simmering mellow. Herlin’s lilting grooves hit with a little more swing and funk on ‘Mr. Riley’ before this nagging and gently explorative work draws to a close in fanfares of horn and Frisell’s softly spiralling figures.

Angel Bat Dawid – Requiem for Jazz

Partially inspired by dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s seminal 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz, which interspersed performances by Sun Ra and a series of conversations on the nature of jazz by a group of intellectuals in a club with scenes of life from black neighbourhoods in Chicago, the composer and clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid orchestrates a requiem with operatic thrust and a cosmic bent, adding interludes and post-production to a project that premiered in 2019 at Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Taking her cue from one of the most contentious lines from the film, which asserts that ‘jazz is merely the Negro’s cry of joy and suffering’, for the performance which became Requiem for Jazz the conductor was joined by a fifteen-piece musical ensemble, dancers, visual artists and a four-strong choir, plus special guests in the form of the saxophonists Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott of the Sun Ra Arkestra, manifesting the triumph of spirit over crushing restraints while carrying black classical traditions into contemporary settings.

ANOHNI and the Johnsons – My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross

In the spring of 1971 the release of What’s Going On saw Marvin Gaye switch things up with a song cycle written from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran, who returns to the United States to find a country in the throes of poverty, racial enmity, drug addiction and environmental degradation. A clarion call for the vulnerable, heartsick and downtrodden through soulful vocals, unhurried jazz and funk grooves, the singer turned songwriter and producer said ‘I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realised that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people’.

Now taking What’s Going On and the groundbreaking song ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ as a cue, ANOHNI returns for her first album in seven years, reshaping her band in a recurring memory of the gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, regarding climate collapse, the consequences of capitalism and fears of an apocalyptic future within a wider purview. From the frontal assault of Hopelessness the singer instead seeks succour for those on the front lines of environmental activism, repeating the refrain ‘It Must Change’ on the opening track to My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross over plaintive guitar and propulsive percussion which combine to provide a sense of sustainable uplift. ‘The truth is that I always thought you were beautiful in your own way. That’s why this is so sad’ she sings, more than a few crumbs for our collective comfort, embracing immanence as a process of doing as well as dwelling.

Between the burnished guitar lines of Leo Abrahams and Jimmy Hogarth, elegiac strings of Rob Moose, and drums and bass of Chris Vatalaro and Samuel Dixon who provide a rhythm section by turns febrile and sinuous, adorning the duelling identities of hapless scapegoat and guilty party or otherwise witless receptacle of hate, on ‘Sliver of Ice’ the singer ecstatically recalls some of the last words and sensations shared by her friend and mentor Lou Reed, while on the penultimate track ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’ she offers nothing recuperative but only the barest of testimonies, eyeing a world under duress and standing fast as a sigil of freedom.

Armand Hammer – We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

Still representing the backwoods boroughs of New York, on their first album for Fat Possum the duo of ELUCID and billy woods as Armand Hammer drop the trauma mic and reference the exposed bust of Bathsheba over the junk percussion and pungent production of DJ Haram, test the limits of Siri and grope for the heaving embonpoint over beats by JPEGMAFIA, and pay homage to the jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron on a line from ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’ which credits their Def Jux forebear El-P, mythmaking and ruminating with a steely glint across the trans-continental breadth of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips while kindred spirits like Moor Mother, Shabaka Hutchings, Willie Green, Pink Siifu and Kenny Segal serve to round out the features.

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily – Love in Exile

Taking the stage in 2018 for a spontaneous performance in their adopted hometown of New York City, the trio of Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily shared an immediate chemistry, a strange alchemy which Aftab has portrayed in aquatic terms as less like a shoal than a school. Seeking to recapture the same sort of energy before it slipped away effortlessly downstream, the iridescent foragers reunited for Love in Exile, a suite of songs recorded live with minimal editing featuring Iyer on pianos and electronics and Ismaily on bass and Moog synthesizers while Aftab sang in exquisite Urdu. Expanding thematically on her Grammy Award-winning album Vulture Prince, which drew from Sufi devotionals and odes to unrequited love, Aftab characterised the opening song ‘To Remain/To Return’ as the slow unfolding of a separation anxiety-induced fury, with the jazz innovator Iyer adding ‘I hear Shahzad and myself establishing these haunted cycles, then slowly transforming them, as Arooj glides across like a dark moon’.

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve – The Sport of Love

Conceived as an amorous response to the digital age, the steamy outpouring of soundtrack work for Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton and Bafic whose documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds poetically envisioned the Olympic quest of Sha’Carri Richardson, on The Sport of Love seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve unpick the yearning heart and flickering frailty of modern romance, where hot bodies surge to chafe or flash at the binary. Part of the roving band Moved by the Motion which also includes the artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, the dancers and performers Tosh Basco and Josh Johnson, and the poet and essayist Fred Moten, as a trio the pensive airs, radiating whorls and tangled bursts of Belaga and Svosve on flute, piano, cello and sax are spritzed by Maroof into sparkling fantasies, from the intoxicating first blush of ‘G Major Kinda Love’ to the extended centrepiece ‘The Stranger’ which features additional instrumentation from the percussionist Mathieu Edward and harpist Ayha Simone, squaring the circle between the chiaroscuro work of Arve Henriksen, the fourth world splashes of Jon Hassell, and the minor grooves and glissando blues of the jazz greats Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby.

Baaba Maal – Being

Fringed by mangroves, filaos and coconut palms, traditional fishing villages dotted with canoes or pirogues and opulent white sand beaches, between birdsong from the francolin and flufftail, coucal and heron, cut through by the flat floodplains of the westward-flowing river, the Senegalese fusion pioneer Baaba Maal pays tribute to tender Casamance nights on the closer to his latest album Being, still kicking strong on the approach to his seventieth birthday. Elsewhere the elder statesman of Senegalese music returns to the shores of northernmost Podor for a raucous celebration of local fishermen, and teams up with the Hoddu master and griot storyteller Barou Sall, whose instrument is a kind of lute central to the Fulani oral tradition.

Bendik Giske – Bendik Giske

Born in Oslo and splitting his childhood between there and Bali as he learned circular breathing through the resonances of the flute and didgeridoo, attending a music conservatory in Copenhagen before basing himself betwixt the heady nightclubs of Berlin, the saxophonist Bendik Giske spent ten years traversing the margins and peeling away the excesses of his instrument. Seeking a fuller manifestation of the body, drawing upon the diverse influences of gamelan music and techno, the queer futurity and ecstatic time of José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam’s low theory which describes the ‘utility of getting lost over finding our way’, on his third album for Smalltown Supersound the artist collaborates with the composer and synth builder Bridget Ferrill who serves as record producer, stripping away layers of melody to expose the pulses and sinews of his music through a mesmerizing focus on pattern and rhythm.

Carla Boregas – Pena ao Mar

Best known for her collaborative work, through live performances and site-specific sound installations with the multidisciplinary artist Anelena Toku as one half of Fronte Violeta, and with fellow Rakta member Mauricio Takara on two albums of limpid abstractions which lap at the borders between free jazz, drone, and kosmische, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and an accommodating Nel Frattempo Residency encouraged the São Paulo experimental scenester Carla Boregas to reexamine her solo output. Flicking through song fragments and the pages of her notebooks, she came across an old idea for a wind instrument which could be played collectively by several musicians, the strictures of lockdowns and quarantines coaxing a synthetic alternative with symbolic overtures to community and spontaneity despite the palpable absence of company as normal life screeched then ground to a halt. Seeking the mystery in mundanity, on Pena ao Mar the sound artist uses analogue and digital synthesizers, effects, the Wurlitzer electronic piano, field recordings, gongs, processed cactus sounds, and the ancient Armenian double reed duduk flute to conjure an imaginary wind orchestra, an ode to the diaphanous shifts and bristling indeterminacy of our shared environment which bears comparison to the medieval rhapsodies of Sarah Davachi or the deep-listening exercises of Éliane Radigue and Kali Malone.

Caroline Davis – Alula: Captivity

On her latest alula, sometimes called a bastard or spurious wing which birds manipulate to create lift and prevent stall at slow speeds or during landing, the saxophonist and vocalist Caroline Davis pays tribute to birds of captivity from the Waldensian ascetics Agnes Franco and Huguette de la Côte who were interrogated for many months before being burned as heretics in the 1320s, to contemporary activists like Jalil Muntaqim, Keith Lamar and Joyce Ann Brown who were repeatedly denied parole or fair trials or were else wrongfully convicted. Playing alongside the bassist Chris Tordini, the drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the turntablist and sampler Val Jeanty, some of the proceeds from Alula: Captivity will go to the grassroots organisation Critical Resistance which strives to end the prison industrial complex.

Chad Fowler, George Cartwright, Kelley Hurt, Christopher Parker, Luke Stewart, Steve Hirsh and Zoh Amba – Miserere

From the first Ayleresque thrum and steeped ritual of ‘Miserere’ to the wailing blues, doleful horns and overlayed piano on ‘Wonderful Words Of Life’ whose wispy middle section soon scrambles to a rapt climax, and from the percussive roils which shake up ‘Inhaling and Exhaling’ to accompany a reading from a book called Solo Gig by the avant-garde guitarist Davey Williams to ‘Ut Queant Laxis’ whose overtures to the didactic hymnal are carried away on the airs of the shakuhachi-like bass flute, a stellar and multi-generational group of players tread a misty line between Gregorian chant and Downtown experimentalism on the full-length Miserere, a quixotic jazz album whose noxious vapours might emanate from a terraced paddy, a spice bazaar or a wine-soaked brasserie whose musty tablecloths are flung out onto the rain-damp street.

The saxophonists Chad Fowler, George Cartwright and Zoh Amba, pianist Chris Parker, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Steve Hirsh and vocalist Kelley Hurt holed up in Little Rock to connect musical communities as far-flung as Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Washington DC, Minnesota and New York, with Fowler and Amba also airing their spellbinding proclivities as flautists, the Curlew founder Cartwright wielding the electric guitar, and Parker’s intonations adding to the sense of liturgy as they abut or echo Hurt’s coiled calls. Described as an attempt to evoke ‘both desperation and hope in a time rife with strife’, the title ‘Miserere’ which is Latin for ‘have mercy’ refers to the setting of Psalm 51 which was originally composed in the 1630s for exclusive use in the Sistine Chapel during the Tenebrae services of Holy Week. Replete with Gregorian recitations and late-Renaissance polyphonies, the traditional Tenebrae service in the Latin Church took place over three days and was marked by the gradual extinguishing of fifteen candles, then a ‘strepitus’ or great noise which occurred in total darkness.

Charlemagne Palestine – DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz ferrrr SSSOFTTT DIVINI TIESSSSS!!!!!!!!!

Drawn to the art of marginal living, between his first spurts on the conga and bongo drums as a backup musician for Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Anger and Tiny Tim and his more elaborate experiments of the late sixties, where he constructed kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye and devised performances with the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti, for seven years the artist Charlemagne Palestine served as the carillonneur of the Episcopalian Saint Thomas Church in Midtown Manhattan. Taking a uniquely clangorous approach to the unwieldy instrument, which traces back to the Low Countries and consists of at least twenty-three bronze-cast bells which are struck with clappers attached to the wooden batons of an oversized keyboard, Palestine loved the view from the lofty heights of the Saint Thomas bell tower, at some remove yet with broad access to the whole of the city, and it was there that he began to cultivate his distinctive brand of drone music replete with its partial tones and dizzying repetitions, describing the movements of the carillon as like ‘playing the entire building’.

Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish parents, in his youth he trained as a cantor and listened to klezmer bands, the first flush of a lifelong predilection for tethering spiritual refrains to the trance-like states of his secularism. Living in Manhattan in the sixties, Palestine studied under the poet Jerome Rothenberg, who published the collection of spiritual writings Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, and the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, whose raga stylings and focus on the precise phrasing of notes would exert a profound influence on musicians like Terry Riley, Jon Hassell and Don Cherry. Palestine found himself at the confluence of the Downtown scene, inaugurated in the loft of a Chambers Street apartment by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, which soon surfeited its roots in sustained tones and minimalism, and the loft jazz scene which sprung up almost overnight as a spiritual continuation of the free jazz ethos which had been nourished by the likes of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. In the eighties he founded the Ethnology Cinema Project, which was dedicated to the documentation of disappearing traditional cultures from all over the world, and at documenta 8 he exhibited Godbear, a massive devotional sculpture of a three-headed teddy.

In early November, Charlemagne Palestine was the honoree of the sixth annual benefit gala by Blank Forms, the New York City-based nonprofit which focuses on the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, where he was joined onstage by the Irish musician Áine O’Dwyer. To accompany the festivities, for the first side of his latest record on Blank Forms the visionary artist and self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ hunkers down under the high ceilings of his home studio in Belgium, returning to the carillon for an ode to his ‘divinities’, the thousands of plush toys which he has amassed and often performed or exhibited alongside stretching back some six decades. The flip side of the album issues for the first time on vinyl the inaugural Blank Forms cassette, a cathartic street recording of the maximalist composer’s 2018 eulogy for Tony Conrad, the drone music and structural film pioneer and Palestine’s longtime friend, which he performed above the hubbub of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue on the venerable bells of Saint Thomas.

Chrisman – Dozage

The Congolese club sensualist Chrisman, who has headed up the Nyege Nyege and Hakuna Kulala studios in Kampala over the past few years, unleashes his fiercest statement to date in the form of 35 tracks of crossbreed trap and Afrohouse mutations, sticky tarraxinha tempos and skeletal club rhythms, drill, gqom, hardstyle and amapiano, drawing from deepest Durban and the Indonesian pressure of Raja Kirik and Gabber Modus Operandi while calling upon a team of like-minded collaborators including Tracey the Rapper, Blaq Bandana, Ratigan Era, Mc Yallah, Aunty Rayzor and Ecko Bazz.

Cut The Sky – Esz Kodesz

After relocating to Poland from the United Kingdom, the composer and guitarist Alex Roth began to survey his surrounds, starting with a residency at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków as he traced the nature of his ancestry as a Detroit-born and London-bred descendant of Polish Jews. Roaming widely, he made a series of field recordings around the neglected cemeteries, forgotten monuments and former ghetto districts of southern and eastern Poland and western Ukraine, then approached two musicians who resonated on the margins of the Polish jazz scene in the form of the drummer Hubert Zemler and the clarinetist and folk trance practitioner Wacław Zimpel.

Using his field recordings as a basis for live improvisation, pandemic constraints meant that it was the spring of 2022 before the trio were able to embark upon the recording studio, by which time aspects of the initial sketches as well as Roth’s adopted environment had been absorbed into the interior. On Esz Kodesz, the Polish transliteration of a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘sacred fire’, rangy guitar and roving electronics, clarinet which whirs like a winnowing drone or soars up straight and cleaves the sky, and roiling or emphatic percussion coalesce into a three-forked excavation of the landscape, which closes with layered reeds, padded footsteps and the gentle clanging of cathedral bells.

Daniel Villarreal – Lados B

Back in August the announcement of Daniel Villarreal’s latest album Lados B seemed to herald the height of summer, with the track ‘Sunset Cliffs’ lingering in a twilight groove as Jeff Parker’s lilting guitar played off Anna Butterss’ arcing bass, which descended like a knife through the proverbial cream stuff. Instead the record – culled from the same sessions which produced Panamá 77 as Villarreal, Parker and Butterss gathered for the first time during the pandemic at Chicali Outpost in the fall of 2020 – proves a more sombre and reflective affair still animated by the frolic of playing free, as the drummer draws inspiration from the Latinate funk of Fania Records and the otherworldly trance of Brain Records.

Darius Jones – fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred)

Darius Jones turns his distinctive tone on the alto saxophone – described by The New York Times as ‘widely dilated, yet so rough it could peel paint’ – loose on a radiant manifesto to freedom, creating a Fluxus kit for anywhere art in four movements alongside Jesse and Josh Zubot on violins, Peggy Lee on cello, James Meger on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums as part of a commission for Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver.

David Lang – the little match girl passion

Seeking ‘a leaner version of the piece, a more human version, one that emphasises every breath, and that heightens the individuality of each singer’ the Bang on a Can composer David Lang updates his Pulitzer Prize-winning the little match girl passion featuring the vocal talents of Molly Netter, Kate Maroney, Gene Stenger, Dashon Burton, Sarah Brailey and his longtime collaborators Trio Mediaeval. The digital version of the album includes three additional tracks where Trio Mediaeval tackle ‘i want to live’, a movement from the staged oratorio Shelter, and offer a fresh version of ‘just (after song of songs)’, an Old Testament echo of intimacy which was adapted for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed comedy-drama Youth, while Brailey performs the album premiere of ‘let me come in’ as Lang renders fresh vistas of accessibility to a beloved work of modern choral music.

DJ K – PANICO NO SUBMUNDO

From its birth in the eighties the Brazilian genre of funk carioca cast a wide net, pulling from samba soul, Miami bass and Latin freestyle, the chanted vocals and hybrid rhythms of Afrobeat, the first boasts of gangster rap and seminal tracks like ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Nunk’ which created the short-lived template for boogified electro. Where Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker bonded over their love of the Kraftwerk songs ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘Numbers’, the first breakthrough funk carioca hit interpolated ‘Boing Boom Tschak’, which was known locally as ‘Melô do Porco’ as funk carioca began to emerge from Rio de Janeiro’s teeming favelas.

As the scene shifted to São Paulo in the 2010s, economic turmoil saw the aspirational sub-genre of funk ostentação with its pop hooks and odes to glitzy consumption gradually usurped by funk mandelão, a more sinister and nocturnal form steeped in horror tropes, minimalist beats, booming synths and dizzying repetitions. Today bruxaria which translates to ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ is harsher still, full of eerie tones and rippling distortions. Skewing more towards contemporary trends in electronic music, where funk mandelão sought to blow the speakers, bruxaria seeks to ruin headphones or make the eardrums bleed. And one of its foremost practitioners is DJ K, who this year unveiled his debut release for the Kampala outsider bastion Nyege Nyege Tapes.

Breaking out after a year of meticulous study via online tutorials for the digital audio workstation FL Studio, the electronic producer now helms the musical collective Bruxaria Sound and is firmly entrenched within the Baile do Helipa, the street party of Heliópolis which retains its title as São Paulo’s biggest favela. Through Arabic chants, blistering kicks and trilling birdsong, DJ K hones his ultra high-pitched tuin, a shrill siren call which baile funk enthusiasts associate with the auditory hallucinations caused by lança perfume, a cheap drug which mixes chloroethane with an essence or flavouring and provides short spurts of euphoria alongside sensitivity to high volumes. The sound of tuin then stretches towards the limits of consciousness, even as DJ K introduces PANICO NO SUBMUNDO with a nod to the ‘Erva Venenosa’ of the national rock icon Rita Lee.

Ensemble Dedalus & eRikm – Fata Morgana

Described alternately as a process of sieving or forestation, the composer, turntablist and visual artist eRikm turns his hand to the acousmographe, a software tool devised by Ina GRM for the graphical representation and analysis of electroacoustic music and other sound spectra, including those outside the field of human auditory perception. Scanning a diverse array of field recordings, including the sounds of cetaceans and amphibians recorded during trips to Australia and Tasmania, through the acousmographe before transposing them into musical notes and handing both parts to a group of outstanding musicians, the result is splayed as a kind of Fata Morgana, a superior mirage comprised of stackings and distortions of the original image. Encapsulated by the smudged strings and fraying electronics of ‘Ambre Gris’, on Fata Morgana the renowned collaborator teams up with members of the Dedalus Ensemble from Toulouse, including Didier Aschour on guitar, Amélie Berson on flute, Thierry Madiot on trombone, Christian Pruvost on trumpet, and the acclaimed duo of Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker on violin and cello.

Félicia Atkinson – Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe)

On her latest side for Portraits GRM, the label which now operates in collaboration with her own Shelter Press following the untimely death in 2021 of Peter Rehberg, the French musician Félicia Atkinson conjures the haunts and attitudes of the American modernist painter and draftswoman Georgia O’Keeffe through snatches of soft-spoken word, faint outcrops of piano, field recordings and the buzz and chime of arid electronics. Described as a meditation on the mystery of art and the act of creation, Atkinson draws not only from O’Keeffe’s cherished canvases but from her home in the village of Abiquiú, her summer house twelve miles north at Ghost Ranch and her New Mexico surrounds, as daybreak tones stretch like swathes of light over the plains or pitch and drop like searchlights ferreting out new vistas, waves of static decay play like fraying strings or the placid chirp of crickets, and piano keys fall in spurts like steep chasms or surge up in elephantine billows. Over the patient hum of these ‘somnambulic oscillations’, Atkinson would see through O’Keeffe’s eyes, addressing the painter directly or inhabiting her words, uttering lines like ‘my skin feels close to the earth when I walk out into the red hills’ which were presented in conjunction with the Tate Modern retrospective My Faraway Nearby a few months prior to the onset of the pandemic. On the flip side of the physical release, Richard Chartier of the LINE imprint continues to dwell at the frontier of audible sound, conjuring the electrical impulses of the sinus node and those heartswells which pinch and flutter at our heartbeat.

Fire! Orchestra – Echoes

Splayed and arrayed around the core trio of Mats Gustafsson on baritone saxophone, Johan Berthling on double bass and Andreas Werliin on drums, Fire! Orchestra embark on their most ambitious effort to date over the six sides and nearly two hours of Echoes. Upping the ante with a mostly Scandinavian cast of 43 members, the record features such longtime practitioners as Susana Santos Silva, Josefin Runsteen and Mariam Wallentin plus newfangled collaborators like Martin Hederos and Mette Rasmussen, maintaining a fine balance between high drama, bucolic wayfaring and moments of slapstick comedy, carefully brandishing the whip while loosing all constraints.

Structured around the seven parts of the title piece, Echoes buckles and sways between the cascading jazz vamp of ‘I see your eye, part 1’ and the galloping theatrics of ‘Forest without shadows’, while the screeching crescendos and blunt histrionics of ‘Lost eyes in dying hand’ are buttressed by drain pipe swirls and horn slides as the track maintains a bluesy dirge. Through choral swells and percussive surges, on ‘Cala Boca Menino’ the orchestra pays tribute to the bossa nova pianist João Donato, while on the reprise ‘I see your eye, part 2’ the great Joe McPhee on tenor and vocals boasts the last of the great finger wigglers, allowing the Fire! Orchestra to exit stage embers aglow under the cover of a starry night. Swapping out much of the lineup for a cross-generational blend of local musicians, Echoes was if anything even more visceral, more ribald and bombastic as the orchestra crammed the stage in Gustafsson’s hometown to cap the first full night of this year’s Umeå Jazz Festival.

Galya Bisengalieva – Polygon

Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests on the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, reshaping the surrounds while exposing an estimated 1.5 million people to fallout. These tremors and landmarks are the focus of Polygon by the Kazakh-British producer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva, whose unyielding drones tell the story of forty years of cultural and ecological devastation south of the valley of the Irtysh River.

Polygon offers a potted history of Soviet activity in Kazakhstan, from the bristling strings and winnowing tones of ‘Alash-Kala’ which evokes the provisional Kazakh government as it strove for an autonomous and democratic state between 1917 and the imposition of Soviet rule in 1920, to the emergence of Nevada Semipalatinsk, one of the first anti-nuclear movements in the USSR, and the date on 29 August 1991 when the Semipalatinsk Test Site was finally closed for good. On ‘Chagan’ and ‘Balapan’, the composer excavates the Atomic Lake which was blasted into the earth on 15 January 1965, when the Soviets commenced their Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program and produced a radioactive plume which was detected as far away as Japan, while on ‘Degelen’ she surveys the furtive aftermath of the site, as scavengers on the lookout for copper and iron threatened to come across stockpiles of undetonated plutonium.

Russian and American scientists worked for more than a decade to plug dozens of horizontal tunnels bored into the mountain massif of Degelen, bidding to secure the safety of the world to come. But radioactive contamination continues to blight the steppe, its flora and fauna and now mostly deserted villages, with some areas of Degelen now reseeded with perennial grasses, poplar, elm, Tatar maple and weeping birch in an effort to assess potential signs of recovery. With a watchful eye on this closing track, Bisengalieva works backwards, unfurling a spirit of hopeful defiance which gives way to neither reflection nor sublimation so much as a tautly-poised quietude in the face of lingering horrors.

Girma Yifrashewa – My Strong Will

Born in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian composer Girma Yifrashewa began his musical life on the krar, a bowl-shaped lyre long associated with secular song and the wandering Azmari, before being introduced to the piano at the age of sixteen. After joining the Yared School of Music, he completed his studies at the Bulgarian State Conservatoire in Sofia across two stints either side of the fall of the Communist regime. A preeminent soloist, Yifrashewa returns to his old stomping grounds alongside Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra for a new album of Ethiopian classical music which blurs the boundaries between African and Western traditions, sublimating Amharic and Balkan folk stylings with the track ‘Union’ at once a winsome pastoral and a rollicking anthem with the grace and sweep of a ‘Home on the Range’.

Hailu Mergia – Pioneer Works Swing (Live)

As the golden age of Ethiopian music drew to a close and the Derg regime began to crack down on all manner of artistic expression, one group continued to carry the mantle for local jazz and funk. While the capital’s nightlife crumbled under a citywide curfew and the Derg swiftly censored a previously booming penchant for vocal jazz, the keyboardist and arranger Hailu Mergia and the Walias Band embarked on the recording studio after years of honing their act in Addis Ababa’s upmarket hotels and clubs. Influenced by the jazz organist Jimmy Smith and harnessing their driving polyrhythms for a slightly mellower groove, Mergia and the Walias released the instrumental album Tche Belew in 1977, whose idiomatic appeal helped to spur a tour of the United States. But in the aftermath of the Red Terror back home, Mergia and three other members of the Walias opted to stay in America, with the keyboardist turning his hand to the accordion, studying music at Howard University, and releasing the solo album Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in 1985 while continuing to perform around the Washington DC area with his Zula Band.

Struggling to garner any sort of following outside of his native Ethiopia, in the nineties Mergia opened a soukous bar before falling into work as a taxi driver around Washington Dulles International Airport. It was not until 2013 that Brian Shimkovitz who ran the blog and fledgling record label Awesome Tapes From Africa came across Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument among a stash of tapes, whose reissue prompted a European tour, a show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn and a feature on the front page of The New York Times. Back performing ever since, finally Awesome Tapes From Africa bottles Mergia live from a show at Pioneer Works in 2016 where he played alongside Alemseged Kebede on bass and Kenneth Joseph on drums, as swinging original compositions like ‘Yegle Nesh’ sit happily alongside the traditional Ethiopian melodies of ‘Tizita’ and ‘Anchihoye Lene’.

Henry Birdsey – Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court

Beyond such luminaries as Sonny Boy Williamson, Larry Adler, Tommy Reilly, Toots Thielemans and George Winston, the list of solo harmonica practitioners would appear vanishingly small, but the humble free reed mouth organ fares better across the mountains and valleys of eastern and southeastern Asia, from the polyphonic sheng and saenghwang used in Kunqu opera and South Korean courtly traditions to the lusheng, still characteristic of courtship rituals and seasonal festivals among the Miao, the khene which is the national instrument of Laos and the hulusi or gourd flute with its twin drones. Described as a master of dualities, for Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court the composer Henry Birdsey reworked his instrument from the inside out by accidentally flipping the reed plate of a diatonic harmonica, leading to the discovery of a hitherto impossible arrangement of pitches, unintended dissonances and dense polyphonies. Blowing past the usual connotations of the harmonica, best known as a bastion of the blues, in Bob Dylan’s hands as an emblem of the Greenwich Village folk revival, or the brailleur of Americana as it barrels down broken highways or sweeps across sandstone buttes, Birdsey describes his sound in geological terms as ‘like gazing at the side of a sedimentary basin’ as layers of slowly stacked strata linger and glimmer suspended in time.

Hourloupe – Three Nights in the Wawayanda

At the house party on Saturday night Miss Cole boasted of catching rabbits. A trek ensued and she and Mister Carter, still in formal attire, set off spending three nights in the Wawayanda.

are the lines from a nineteenth-century society column which prompt the latest album by Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov as Hourloupe, a treatise on time and listening, commingling and doubling which tramps steadily through the undergrowth while gazing rapt at a cavalcade of stars. Like lurching watchtowers Badalov’s synth lines scrape and bow sometimes deluged by celestial choruses over propulsive punk rock beats, which in their clubbier moments conjure the flickering celluloid walls of a spectral discotheque. Meanwhile the coruscating spoken word poetry of Menchaca summons a strange cast of fellow travellers, including miners and trappers, a young florist in a cream-coloured apron, and one man made of charcoal plus another made of chalk, concluding this triptych which takes the mode of a hidden night city with the collision of future and past and impending catastrophe, as hand in hand we walk.

jaimie branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))

Between brusque takeovers, boisterous trumpet lines like on the joyous ‘baba louie’ and a staggering roots rendition of the Meat Puppets’ lapidary classic ‘Comin’ Down’, from a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts with her flagship Fly or Die ensemble, the inimitable Jaimie Branch and her fellow harbourers of free thought wade through the billowing smoke with upraised arms and clenched fists, even in death cleaving the way for a brighter morning.

James Brandon Lewis & Red Lily Quintet – For Mahalia, With Love

Accompanied by his Red Lily Quintet featuring Kirk Knuffke on cornet, William Parker on bass, Chad Taylor on drums and Chris Hoffman on cello, the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis follows his acclaimed tribute to George Washington Carver in the form of Jesup Wagon with a cherishing yet transformative take on some of the songs made famous by the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson, describing For Mahalia, With Love as much more than a tribute album, really ‘a three-way conversation between Mahalia, my grandmother and me’.

A stirring take on ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ opens through snatches of melody before an extended improvisation full of languorous yearning and wide rambling reassembles the refrain. And on the rumbling ‘Elijah Rock’, a traditional spiritual which bears some lyrical similarities to the civil rights bastion ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, the tenor of Lewis and cornet of Knuffke twine around one another buttressed by the bounding bass of Parker and Taylor’s sinuous  percussive swathes, turning chasms into bold edifices and smiting snakes in the grass.

Jess Williamson – Time Ain’t Accidental

The pandemic marked a change of direction for Jess Williamson, as a protracted break from a romantic partner and musical collaborator set the stage for a solo act of rare candour and freewheeling vigour. She recorded the stripped-back standalone ‘Pictures of Flowers’ at her home in Los Angeles, entered the local dating pool then collaborated with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee for the country parley of I Walked With You A Ways. That experience encouraged her to set her voice free from the choral harmonies and other accoutrements of her last solo album Sorceress. The iPhone drum machine stuck around as her backing of choice, and over spare accompaniment on the steel guitar, banjo, Wurlitzer organ, saxophone or clarinet her voice began to soar, as she set about compiling an album of evocative Western landscapes and ‘tear-in-beer’ anthems offering a uniquely modern take on some of the well-worn tropes of country music.

Always an elegant lyricist, on Time Ain’t Accidental the artist is more personal and profane, caught up in all of the various entanglements of romance, from the sore knees and peach cups of ‘God in Everything’ which eschews the worship of Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt for a kind of resolute windswept irresoluteness, to the dark back deck of ‘Stampede’ or the ‘angel in bed with me, his face between my legs’ of the title track. On ‘Time Ain’t Accidental’ and ‘Hunter’ – a killer one-two punch before ‘Chasing Spirts’ stretches out into wide open vistas – there is something furtive and even esoteric about some of the gestures and depictions of place even though the references are hardly obscure, like Raymond Carver novels by a pool bar, a journey through Odessa to Coahoma, and working ‘both sides of the Shangri-La’ which each suggest the sort of shorthands by which we might define ourselves or which might serve as the building blocks of relationships, even when it turns out we’re just passing through.

On the other hand it’s rare to hear lines like ‘hell is a real place’ or ‘the difference between us is when I sing it I really mean it’ and feel the sentiment both poignant and hard-won. Williamson’s voice with its Texan twang always provides the tonic, sometimes lovelorn but too self-reliant to be forlorn, cool and caustic or a place of respite as the world around her swirls. ‘Topanga Two Step’ is another earworm which proves a perfect sonata through the statement, development and recapitulation of its themes around naif innocence and wanton attachment, which imply that a lesson learned always plays second fiddle to the thrill of experience. And through the bottom of a pitcher, tumbler or stemmed glass, Williamson hones in on the elusiveness of these spirits, always back where we first found them while we too are more or less the same as we once were.

JJJJJerome Ellis – Compline in Nine Movements

Following the staggered basslines and aperture loops, babbling sonic streams and free-flowing etymologies of his solo debut, JJJJJerome Ellis lets his piano do the talking on the longform improvisation of Compline in Nine Movements. No less turbulent and by turns pensive or garrulous, the album, which was recorded back in December of 2017 in one long take, develops a theme from the Piano Tales which Ellis has performed in collaboration with James Harrison Monaco, a storytelling show which posits a woman on her death bed and invites the audience to choose which tales she will hear in her final hour by selecting a trio of objects from a small trunk.

Jolie Holland – Haunted Mountain

Almost a decade on from Wine Dark Sea, her soul-stirring, saint-summoning, Homeric-laden blues stomper of a sixth solo album, Jolie Holland returns on short notice with Haunted Mountain, a curled sibling of the Buck Meek album of the same name, with the pair co-writing five of the other’s tracks. Unspooling one of the richest and most dexterous voices in the business for the first time in too long, ‘2,000 Miles’ opens with a tingling trepidation reminiscent of ‘Catalpa Waltz’ before folding into something warmer, as Holland wraps her tongue around tangible distances and impalpable concepts like mirrored dreams and the barely pronounceable phrase ‘metaphysicists say’. ‘Feet On The Ground’ boasts a breathy industrial rumble which was created by running a drum machine through an amplifier into a vast barn, with even the whistling coda proffering the feeling of a ramshackle discotheque, while shredded strings give way to a plaintive duet with Meek on ‘Highway 72’, a road and riverside wayfarer which features Holland’s sublime playing on the violin.

Most of the songs on Haunted Mountain are performed as a trio, with Holland joined by the percussionist Justin Veloso and the guitarist Adam Brisbin. ‘Me And My Dream’ starts off demure and turns into a gospel roller, while ‘One Of You’ is defined by its spectral choir and spacious tread. The title track differs starkly from Meek’s high-pitched almost crystalline warble as Holland’s melismatic vocal over languid accompaniment and James Riotto’s fuzzy bass bring out the golden hues inherent to the lofty atmosphere. And on ‘Orange Blossoms’ the artist surveys the poverty, homelessness and environmental collapse of our workaday world, juxtaposing life on the precipice with the insipid ‘dick-measuring contest’ of contemporary politics before pigeons and crows sweep the empty sky and chirping cicadas bring down the curtain on ‘What It’s Worth’. Holland explains:

When the world is sacred, we are moved to protect it. Elves stop highways in Iceland. Fairies save forests in Ireland. Even though the numinous is beyond reason, it’s a motivating, communicative idea. You can tell it to a kid, and when the kid grows up they might understand it ecologically, or they might understand it aesthetically. The numinous is a huge idea.

Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble – Spirit Gatherer: Tribute to Don Cherry

The visionary percussionist and veteran bandleader Kahil El’Zabar guides his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and special guests on a rhythmic tour de force in celebration of the legendary jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, figured here as an urban shaman and spirit gatherer whose music continues to serve as a healing balm through troubled times. With El’Zabar on balafon, kalimba and cajón, Corey Wilkes on trumpet, singing bowls and other percussive instruments, and Alex Harding on baritone saxophone the heritage trio are joined by the Los Angeles leader and Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra vocalist Dwight Trible and by David Ornette Cherry on melodica, doussn’gouni and piano, as the expanded ensemble wade deep through a series of originals while embellishing spirituals by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Pharoah Sanders and the great fusion pioneer Cherry himself.

Kalia Vandever – We Fell In Turn

Following the steady exhalations and springtime exultations of Regrowth, animated by Immanuel Wilkins on the alto saxophone, Lee Meadvin on guitar, Paul Cornish on keys, Nick Dunston on bass and Connor Parks on drums, the trombonist and composer Kalia Vandever assuredly embarked on her debut solo album. Recorded over the course of three days in Upstate New York and rooted in an habitual process of improvisation through a stark sound palette of ‘solo trombone, voice, effects and little more’, on We Fell In Turn she murmurs in mirrored solitude and offers recollections from the shore, connecting the dots between early Grouper and the billowing guitar loops of Forfolks by Jeff Parker, inspired by childhood memories, her Hawaiian heritage and the intangible feeling of life as it stirs from a vivid dream. The stately yet luminous ‘Temper the Wound’ meanwhile finds a sonorous bridge between cosmic jazz in the devotional vein of Turiya Sings by Alice Coltrane and ‘The Anchor Song’ by Björk, shafts of light stretching homeward to dispel the tenebrous gloom.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

From hyper-literate Oak Park the former National Youth Poet Laureate and fledgling songwriter Kara Jackson holds folk and country music in her thrall, cast through a captivating blend of brusque imagery, dolorous tones and wayfaring melodies. Spurred by the death of her best friend and nourished by a small group of Chicago collaborators, including KAINA, Nnamdï and Sen Morimoto, on her debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? the singer and guitarist takes neither the gift nor weight of life for granted and still finds time to throw out some cactus-like barbs, squirreling romance while cutting off all the naysayers and dickheads.

Kris Davis – Diatom Ribbons Live at the Village Vanguard

Following up on the limpid rhythms, percussive riffs and shifting tectonics of Diatom Ribbons, which saw Kris Davis explore the hidden world of unicellular microalgae in the company of such luminaries as Marc Ribot, Nels Cline and Esperanza Spalding plus longtime collaborators Tony Malaby, Ches Smith and Trevor Dunn, the pianist unfurls a new live album in the same motley spirit, adding to the core trio of the bassist Dunn, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and turntablist Val Jeanty through the sonorous peaks and chasms of Julian Lage’s six-string.

With Lage roiling the waters, forcing the unconventional quintet to wade through in search of a new sound, Live at the Village Vanguard makes Davis only the fourth female instrumentalist to have led a recording from the iconic Greenwich Village venue, tracing the footsteps of Shirley Horn, Junko Onishi and Geri Allen, whose supple and sprightly composition ‘The Dancer’ serves here to frame the first side. Whereas Diatom Ribbons emerged out of a series of tribute concerts to Allen and drew inspiration from the Monk Centennial and the works of Cecil Taylor, who had recently passed away, Live at the Village Vanguard figures the birdsong and blues calls of Olivier Messiaen and Charlie Parker, the intuitive music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, plus compositions by Ronald Shannon Jackson and Wayne Shorter and snippets from Eric Dolphy, Paul Bley, Conlon Nancarrow and Sun Ra.

Laura Cannell – Midwinter Processionals

Laura Cannell splits the difference between the chordal drones and winnowing tones of her previous solo albums, which have featured the composer on recorders, pipe organs and her signature overbow violin, and the moonlit electronics which she has embraced under the guise of the Hunteress, most recently on a set of ten synth-clad torch songs which drew inspiration from the destruction horizon left by the ancient Iceni queen and glorious burnout Boudica. Fit for the season, on Midwinter Processionals violin, overbowed violin, bass recorder and double recorders are joined by surging synths as Cannell adapts improvisations recorded from the nave of Norwich Cathedral, underneath its booming beams, ornate roof bosses and lierne vaults which form patterns of lozenges and stars along the ridge.

Laurel Halo – Atlas

Described as ‘a suite of sensual ambient jazz collages, designed to take the listener on a roadtrip through the subconscious’, for her debut release on Awe the composer and producer Laurel Halo drew from the fourth-world missives, sinuous jazz piano and drone minimalism of her monthly NTS radio show, the slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and a stint at the Ina GRM studios in Paris, gradually folding acoustic instrumentation back into synthetic textures with accompaniment from Bendik Giske, Lucy Railton, James Underwood and Coby Sey. Gesturing towards late night drives and accented Parisian neighbourhoods, on the ten blurred graphs of Atlas the result sounds like nothing so much as submerged fairground music, spectres frolicking on the cusp of a wave or sloshing like slubbed ballast against the shore.

Lia Kohl – The Ceiling Reposes

Taking her cue from the radio, choosing select moments as she flicked between stations from an otherwise incongruous blend of weather reports, talk show segments, advertisements and musical interludes which she recorded out on Vashon Island in Washington State, the experimental cellist Lia Kohl curates transitory quivers on her diaristic new album The Ceiling Reposes, which intersperses her bowed strings and radio missives with snatches of birdsong, gushing waves and layered instrumentation on synthesizers, kazoo, concertina, piano and wind machine.

Lori Goldston & Greg Kelley – All Points Leaning In

Following the choppy tumult of High and Low, which saw the classically trained cellist duet with the drummer Dan Sasaki while paying tribute to her erstwhile friend, the illustrator and musician Geneviève Castrée, now Lori Goldston goes long with her Pacific Northwest collaborator Greg Kelley for the visceral strains and gossamer improvisations of All Points Leaning In. Recorded at the home of the renowned alternative producer Steve Fisk, the record finds the cellist and trumpeter exploring the outer edges of their instruments, with their fellow Washington native Phil Elverum portraying the results as like two freight trains barrelling forth or careening off the tracks as ‘sparks fly’.

Lost Girls – Selvutsletter

Eschewing the dilated forms and performative lyrics of their debut album Menneskekollektivet, on their follow-up Selvutsletter the Norwegian duo of Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden dive headlong into the shared memories and distilled experiences of their youth, mining the nineties for shreds of old band practices and the digitised squibs and pixelated bits which made up the formative years of the internet, recalled through a nocturnal clamour of swooping melodies, smothered drum machines and rattling guitar. In their own words the title Selvutsletter edges towards a sort of self-effacement, variously recognised as self-erasure or ‘Someone who is cleaning out themselves. Performing exorcism. Or perhaps just getting older, less interested in their own present self’. The result is the rush of renewal and a skirting of the borders of genre, as together Hval and Volden weave and unweave their bodies through a careening and helter-skelter flood of music, hollowing out the plush halls of avant-pop.

Lucy Liyou – Dog Dreams (개꿈)

What lies between water and the shore? Slipping inside the crevice of a dream, taking her title from a Korean term which encompasses everything from idle fantasies to intrepid night terrors, on her sophomore album Lucy Liyou swaps molten piano instrumentals and text-to-speech snippets for a staccato of saliva sounds and a more fulsome embrace of pansori, a genre of musical theatre performed by a singer and a drummer which emphasises the trials and tribulations of character within a national ethos of repressed sorrow or collective grief. Presaging the romance of ‘Fold The Horse’ and the woozy drama of ‘April In Paris’, an interpretation of the Vernon Duke jazz standard which figures the cruellest month as one rife with possibilities while honing in on a cemetery in Philadelphia where the narrator reflects on the reiterating horror of sexual assault, on the title track the artist recalls a dream of drowning and being pulled to the shore by someone who they first thought was their mother, but turned out to be a close friend. Climaxing with a tongue-twister of gushing tenacity and operatic force, Liyou asks ‘Why can’t you depend on me? When I need someone to need me?’, blending the twin torments of self-abnegation and codependence with the languid irresoluteness of limpid desire and the conquering bounty of trust.

Marina Herlop – Nekkuja

After swapping the conservatory for the computer screen, the Catalan vocalist and pianist Marina Herlop was forced to play a waiting game as it took two years for her debut album Pripyat to be released. Picturing herself as a domestic gardener, a stubborn horticulturalist who might prune her ornamentals only after first raking the muck and planting some seeds, on her follow-up Nekkuja choral trills and cascading production effects inspired by Carnatic music remain part of the mix, but in the process of honing these songs over years of live performance the structures have been trimmed and tightened while the air around the record has grown more sanguine. Harp plucks, reedy Mellotron sounds and field recordings soften the jagged and spiralling synths, while made-up words and nonsense syllables take shape alongside earthy exclamations and interpolations from the song ‘Damunt de tu només les flors’ by the Catalan composer Federico Mompou, like sunlight refracting through cracked glass jars or budding flowers whose vibrant petals and perfumed bouquets belie the tangled roots which coil underneath.

Mat Muntz – Phantom Islands

Mat Muntz wields the primorski meh on his first album as a leader, an obscure bagpipe from the Kvarner Bay and Istrian peninsula of Croatia which the composer plays in a bid to further his exploration of alternate tuning systems. Anchored by microtonal orchestrations for winds, guitar and percussion, Muntz is joined by Yuma Uesaka on clarinet, Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone, Pablo O’Connell on oboe, Alec Goldfarb on guitar and Michael Larocca on drums, with the title Phantom Islands conjuring the invented landscapes of old nautical maps as Muntz seeks to fill in the blanks while rendering ‘a folk music from nowhere’.

Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden . . .

Now well into its second decade, the Coin Coin project by the mixed-media artist Matana Roberts continues to explore African-American history through a recuperative focus on memory and ancestry, summoning a heteroglossia of voices through group recitations, guttural catharsis and plainspoken word, graphic and other aleatoric forms of notation, samples, loops and effects pedals and the torrents and cascades of their alto saxophone. Describing their practice as a process of ‘panoramic sound quilting’ which weaves together fragments of spirituals and other folk songs while naming the series after the freed slave and pioneering Louisiana businesswoman Marie Thérèse Coincoin, the project to date has veered from ensemble jazz and big-band live performance to solo noise collages buttressed by manipulated field recordings and swarming drones.

On the fifth installment of the project, Roberts turns to the timely issue of reproductive rights, telling the story of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion. Steadily unspooling the ‘old dusty saga’ through spoken word passages, squalling free jazz, solo saxophone reflections and Mississippi fife and drum blues, the artist is joined for Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden . . . by the violinist Mazz Swift, their fellow alto saxophonist Darius Jones, the clarinetists Matt Lavelle and Stuart Bogie, the percussionists Mike Pride and Ryan Sawyer, the smoky pianist Cory Smythe and the Alicuanta vocalist Gitanjali Jain.

From the opening figure in ‘ebony brown, bucket brown eyes a wandering’ and the affirmation ‘the women in my line whispered truth’, the narrator of In the Garden . . . who describes herself in passionate, downcast and bitterly ironic terms as ‘electric, alive, spirited, fire and free’ tells of her two ‘love bit boys’, an adulterous partner and the machinations of his family, who view her variously as an outcast and jezebel, her own fulfillment denied and her accomplishments ‘forever under review’. After finding herself again with child yet failing to sate the suspicions of her partner, she surveys ‘possible futures’ and winds up throwing herself down a long flight of library stairs, as dreams combust, sparkling eyes waver and voices splinter and sworl before being carried off on the gallop of equine feet. Then a wind chime commences its rattle, and spirituals become hauntologies, lullabies or requiems for the dead even as the act of remembrance opens up hidden pathways and portals, one woman’s voice unlike wagging tongues with the power to shape and reshape our present futures.

Mc Yallah – Yallah Beibe

Part of the East African rap scene since 1999, hosting the popular Ugandan radio programme NewzBeat while alternating rhymes in Luganda, Luo, Kiswahili and English, it was 2019 before Mc Yallah found international acclaim with the release of her debut on the Nyege Nyege Tapes offshoot Hakuna Kulala. Reuniting with the Berlin producer Debmaster, on the follow-up Yallah Beibe the artist gains a new lease of life through collaborations with the Japanese chiptune and gabber veteran Scotch Rolex and the Congolese club sensualist Chrisman, throwing kuduros and trap, qqom, cyber-rap, grime and death metal into the blender from the stomping lead single ‘Sikwebela’ to the title track’s pan-global foley-trap splatter.

Mendoza Hoff Revels – Echolocation

The guitarist Ava Mendoza and bassist Devin Hoff have circled each other’s musical orbits over the years and become fast friends without ever working together on record. Heading up Mendoza Hoff Revels the duo catch sparks like steel and flint, joined for their debut album Echolocation by Ches Smith on drums and James Brandon Lewis on tenor saxophone. Citing the thrifty punk ethos of Minutemen and the stunning tempo shifts of mid-eighties Black Flag, the harmolodic funk of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and the saxophone screeds and lurching sprawl of Fun House-era Stooges, the track ‘Diablada’ serves as an encapsulation of the record where the breathless clatter and kaleidoscopic patterns of Smith’s drums and the yearning arc of Lewis’s sax shape and smooth the serrated edges of their twin guitars, on a song which evokes the Andean folk dance performed on the highest plateau of South America.

Meshell Ndegeocello – The Omnichord Real Book

Quenched by a couple of cover albums in the form of her acclaimed 2018 effort Ventriloquism which ran the gamut of eighties and nineties classics in the vein of freestyle, quiet storm and new jack swing, plus an appearance on COOKUP by Sam Gendel which offered a unique take on fin-de-siècle R&B, for her Blue Note debut The Omnichord Real Book the Grammy Award-winning neo-soul artist Meshell Ndegecello lays down her spear, flowing with the current and embracing jazz and roots music alongside a stellar cast of collaborators including Brandee Younger, Ambrose Akinmusire, Jeff Parker, Joel Ross, Josh Johnson, Thandiswa and Julius Rodriguez.

Miaux & Lieven Martens – The Pels organ and Hemony carillon of St. Catherine’s Church in Hoogstraten

What Antonio Stradivari was to the string instrument the Hemony brothers were to bellfounding in the Low Countries, as Pieter and François in collaboration with the blind musician Jacob van Eyck cast the first tuned carillon in 1644. Within and without St. Catherine’s Church in the Belgian municipality of Hoogstraten, music accompanied the unveiling of a woven tapestry by the multidisciplinary artist Joris Martens in the spring of 2021, with Mia Prce as Miaux playing her own compositions on the Pels organ, while the Edições CN founder Lieven Martens converted bird sounds into musical notation whose trifles were translated for the Hemony carillon by the town carillonneur and improviser Luc Dockx. In two parts the results blend the tradition of monophonic plainsong with multivalent cinematic evocations from the cyber noirscapes of Vangelis through the wistful waterfalls of Angelo Badalamenti to the kosmische wayfaring of Popol Vuh, and organic birdsong with screwed tidbits which serve as a sort of homage to the composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, climaxing beatifically with a spirit of communal uplift.

Mike Reed – The Separatist Party

In the fall of 2015 the drummer and composer Mike Reed read a harrowing story in The New York Times about ‘The Lonely Death of George Bell’, a 72-year-old New Yorker who passed away sequestered inside of his Jackson Heights apartment, his body ‘crumpled up on the mottled carpet’ after going undiscovered for almost one week. A hoarder, when investigators working for the Queens County public administrator entered Bell’s apartment, they did so ‘clad in billowy hazmat suits and bootees’, wading through the detritus which included loose change, old snapshots, a silver Relic watch and multiple packages of unused Christmas lights and unopened ironing board covers, with one of the men adding ‘Since I’ve worked here, my list of friends has gotten longer and longer. I don’t want to die alone’. As told in the Times the death of George Bell proves a sad and solemn yet still strangely uplifting story, which whorls outwards as his estate takes fourteen months to laboriously settle, then radiates from within as a tangible life is assembled from a few loose scraps and threads.

Mike Reed then was already dwelling on the theme of isolation long before the coronavirus pandemic distorted life’s daily routine. At the onset of 2022 he assembled some of Chicago’s finest improvisers including the D-Settlement leader, poet and spoken word artist Marvin Tate, the cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, and Rob Frye, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan of the Bitchin Bajas for the first installment of a three-album cycle by The Separatist Party, whose name is a skewed reflection on their shared penchant for sometimes inhabiting the buffed halls and dilapidated streets of lonersville.

Weaving the mouth mantras of Don Cherry, the minimalism of Terry Riley, and the ecstatic fire of Pharoah Sanders together with the motorik beats of krautrock, aspects of Ethiopian folk music and the rumba of New Orleans rhythm and blues, Reed and his cohort interpret ‘Rahsaan In the Serengeti’ by the Windy City saxophonist Ari Brown, issue a eulogy or fond fare-thee-well to an old school friend and her father, who would have been one of The Temptations were it not for his propensity to drink, and keep things primal over inverted bass lines, siren synths and typewriter percussion as Tate delivers a communal exhortation, repeating with spirit the refrain ‘Your soul is a mosh pit’.

Molly Joyce – Evolution of Perception

John Koenig of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines ‘monachopsis’ as ‘the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach – lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home’. Realising their predicament, that ambient roar comes through all right on Evolution of Perception, which takes its emotional themes and queasy song titles from the evocative neologisms of Koenig’s dictionary, as part of a multi-disciplinary collaboration between the writer Marco Grosse, artist Galya Popova, dancer Anna Koblova, and composer and vintage toy organ performer Molly Joyce.

Moritz von Oswald – Silencio

Teasing out the tensions which exist between the vibrations of the human voice and the oscillations of vintage synths, for his latest album on Tresor Records the dub techno mastermind Moritz von Oswald turned to his own collection of classic equipment including the VCS 3 and EMS Synthi AKS, the Prophet-5, the Oberheim four voice polyphonic and the Moog Model 15. His pulsating abstractions were subsequently transcribed to sheet music by the Finnish composer and pianist Jarkko Riihimäki and performed at the Ölberg-Kirche in Kreuzberg by the sixteen-piece Vocalconsort Berlin. Drawing from the ensemble works of Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis as well as his own seminal output as one half of Basic Channel, whose stabbing chords and shifting timbres provided the slowed-down yet sumptuous basis for minimal techno, von Oswald proceeded to pull these choral recordings back into the synthesized parts of Silencio, furrowing out those liminal spaces between dark and dissonant and light and ethereal.

Nídia – 95 MINDJERES

Blowing the doors off genre delineations even as she masters single-minded kuduro, romantic kizomba, frenetic batida and syrupy tarraxinha beats, the Lisbon-born and Bordeaux-bred producer Nídia returns for her third long-play on the dance bastion Príncipe, drawing upon her mixed roots in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde while paying homage to the decisive role played by female freedom fighters as PAIGC struggled for independence from Portuguese rule during the sixties and early seventies.

Nondi_ – Flood City Trax

The city of Johnstown, around 57 miles east of Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania, since being settled in 1770 has borne three historic floods. The Great Flood of 1889 after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam killed 2,209 people, whereupon the relief efforts of a team of volunteers led by Clara Barton helped to establish the American Red Cross. Following a deadly altercation between a black man and several police officers, in 1923 the mayor Joseph Cauffiel urged all African American and Mexican residents who had lived in Johnstown for less than seven years to leave the city for their own safety. More fatal flooding deluged Johnstown in 1936 and 1977, while the decline of the local steel industry meant that by the early 2000s, national census data showed that Johnstown was the least likely city to attract newcomers across the entire United States, a circumstance ameliorated by strong health care and defense sectors, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown which brings thousands of students to the area, the annual Flood City Music Festival and Thunder in the Valley, a major motorcycle rally held on the fourth weekend of June.

Stranded on an island, wading through the debris or erecting her own private fort out of the flotsam and jetsam left over from a series of floods, the Johnstown producer Tatiana Triplin has hitherto helmed the internet label HRR, which specialises in web folk and nightcore, pitch-shifting the hardcore techno subgenres of breakcore and gabber plus club outpourings from Detroit and Chicago in the vein of juke and ghettotech to produce eerie refrains and a sort of somnambulist pressure, designed with a hyperpop sheen while deriving much of its imagery from Japanese anime and otaku culture. Now as Nondi_ for her debut album on Planet Mu, the artist pays skewed homage to the poverty and disintegrating history of her city, embracing the genres of footwork, breakcore and Detroit techno from the impervious remove of small-town Pennsylvania, using the internet and her dreamlike imagination to fill in the gaps. On the twelve pieces which make up Flood City Trax the result is at once unique and redolent of a twenty-first century electronic curvature, from the glitchy warmth and slow-wound music box melodies of the Icelandic outfit Múm to the atmospheric onslaught of Vladislav Delay, from the dizzying percussion and hyperreal Chicago-adjacent fabrications of Jlin to the Afrohouse mutations, skeletal rhythms, and sticky tarraxinha tempos of the Congolese club sensualist Chrisman.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Again

Billed as an ‘illogical period piece’ after time spent meditating on his musical identity during young adulthood, on his latest album Daniel Lopatin constructs a garden of forking paths which mines his own canon as much as the bricolage of seventies prog or early-nineties slacker rock, from the syrupy chopped and screwed eighties samples of Eccojams, which set the template for vaporwave, to the organ arpeggios, Omnisphere choral chatter and keening Americana of R Plus Seven and the scuzzier outcrops of Garden of Delete. Now with strings attached, through a dizzying plethora of static movements as Lopatin completes the semi-autobiographical trilogy which started with Garden of Delete and Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the track ‘Krumville’ serves as an early highlight of Again where sloshing water, strummed guitar and vocal gabber forced out of the audio cleanup tool Adobe Enhanced Speech give way to quizzical sighs, loping riffs and a gaseous funk comedown as Lopatin, backed by Xiu Xiu, discusses a lost friend and cast off stones, centering feeling poignantly on the perch of one Catskills street.

Palle Mikkelborg, Jakob Bro and Marilyn Mazur – Strands: Live at the Danish Radio Concert Hall

Best known for the Aura suite which was composed in tribute to Miles Davis and released as the American jazz icon’s final album in 1989, scored for a big band and blending jazz fusion with classical impressionism as he drew inspiration from Gil Evans as well as the composers Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives, the self-taught trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg had taken a break from the stage before his return to live performance at DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen in February of 2023. Ushered by the guitarist Jakob Bro, the set comprised material from their 2018 album Returnings and from Gefion, which marked Bro’s leader debut for ECM Records, with the duo joined on this occasion by Mikkelborg’s old Aura collaborator, the acclaimed percussionist Marilyn Mazur. The result was Strands which finds the trio of Danish improvisers gazing out over a low tide, as Bro’s rippling guitar textures lay the canvas for Mikkelborg’s restrained and elegiac yet still winsomely sonorous breaths on the flugelhorn and trumpet, while Mazur cuts a swathe over by the rock pools through burgeoning gongs, bowed metals and rumbling drums.

Paul r. Harding – They Tried to Kill Me Yesterday

With the bow of a double bass and the projection of a horn or trumpet, breaking out into arcing sighs and warbling quivers and occasionally faltering or forcibly repeating his words, the jazz poet Paul r. Harding recites staggered songs of loneliness and defiance, referential and freely associative, grasping up at the celestial heavens, trundling across train lines or groping incredulously through the misty haze of the gypsy dawn. Tutored by Archie Shepp and Charles Gayle while citing Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez as signposts and mentors, on They Tried to Kill Me Yesterday the poet is joined by his longtime collaborative partner Michael Bisio, a bassist with Joe McPhee and the Matthew Shipp Trio, and the percussionist Juma Sultan who remains best known for his part in the iconic Woodstock performance of Jimi Hendrix.

Raphael Rogiński – Talàn

I lived then in dusty Odessa . . .
There for a long time skies are clear.
There, hustling, an abundant trade
sets up its sails.
There all exhales, diffuses Europe,
all glistens with the South, and is motleyed
with live variety.
The tongue of golden Italy
resounds along the gay street
where walks the proud Slav,
the Frenchman, Spaniard, Armenian,
and Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,
and the son of Egyptian soil,
the retired Corsair, Moralí.

So wrote Alexander Pushkin in what he intended to be the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, published instead as fragments in an appendix to the main body of his novel in verse. Long seen as a gateway to Asia and a melting point between East and West, it was to Odessa and the Black Sea that the Polish guitarist and musicologist Raphael Rogiński was drawn as he composed his latest solo album Talán, an old Hungarian word with Scythian roots which translates as something like ‘maybe’. Writing and recording over the course of a couple of years as he sought to follow up his rangy and well-received takes on the music of John Coltrane and Henry Purcell, the guitarist explains his title as a comment on his compositional approach, adding ‘I take something in order to lose something else. It’s a constant process of achieving goals by getting rid of others and I’m fixated on this idea’.

Roberto Cassani & Fraser A. Campbell – poet / shuts / clock

Taking their record’s title from what3words, whose terse conjunctions gesture suggestively towards the bench in North Inch Park where the musicians met to jam while Perth like the rest of Scotland laboured under coronavirus restrictions, on poet / shuts / clock the bassist Roberto Cassani and saxophonist Fraser A. Campbell blend chipper urbanity with a winsome pastoralism, as on ‘moo’ where Cassani contemplates the paradoxical nature of language, suggesting that we behave more ‘like the coos’ before wondering whether even cattle lows might be more trouble than they’re worth. Finally hunkering down at the Tpot Studio outside of Perth, the duo were able to experiment with spontaneous lyrics, scored instrumentation and tape effects, inspired by Paul Motian and Paul Klee and bossa nova and the blues while tramping the cosy confines of improvised jazz and local folk idioms.

Spektral Quartet, Julia Holter and Alex Temple – Behind the Wallpaper

While the Spektral Quartet laid down their bows and strings last year, drawing the curtain on more than a decade of live performance, the violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy, violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen still had three recording projects on a stately afterburn. First up on New Amsterdam Records, the quartet joined with Julia Holter for Behind the Wallpaper, a song cycle by the composer Alex Temple which embodies themes of alienation and transformation through disparate scenes.

Blending elements of indie pop, Weimar cabaret, Elizabethan music and nineteenth-century Romanticism while set between such disparate locales as an eerie science park and masquerade ball, the song ‘Tiny Holes’ is about memetic phobias and imaginary diseases, with Temple adding that ‘Julia Holter’s music has a stylistic fluidity and vulnerability that made her the perfect choice for this dreamy, unsettling story. The piece tells the tale of someone undergoing a mysterious transformation and ultimately finding a home in another world’. So at the other end of the cycle, the quartet and Holter unfold the strange somnambulism of ‘Jolene’ through moss-green shutters, translucent curtains, and the smell of conifers and summer rain.

Susanna – Baudelaire & Orchestra

Still navigating the quixotic charms and cavernous obsessions of Charles Baudelaire, whose insatiable lusts, death whorls and sometimes rhapsodic depictions of the lives of rag-pickers and blind men, prostitutes and gamblers scandalized the tree-lined boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, the Danish chanteuse Susanna scales up her distinctive settings of the French bohemian poet’s classic texts with lavish accompaniment from KORK, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. Elaborating on the stripped-back solo reveries of Baudelaire & Piano plus the strange alchemies of Elevation, which saw the singer and pianist aided and abetted by the keys, woodwinds and cassette tapes of Delphine Dora and Stina Stjern, the eleven carefully enunciated songs of Baudelaire & Orchestra cap the communion between artists, conducted by Christian Eggen from arrangements by Jarle G. Storløkken and Jan Martin Smørdal, with vocal backing from Stjern and Anita Kaasbøll and production from the depths of the Audio Virus LAB courtesy of Susanna’s longtime collaborator Deathprod.

Theo Bleckmann, Alicia Olatuja, Dan Tepfer and David Hajdu – The Parsonage

A deep dive into the history of Greenwich Village spurred the author and lyricist David Hajdu to begin a song cycle in ode to a single building, an otherwise nondescript four-story brick townhouse at 64th East 7th Street in bustling New York. Built in 1889 as the parsonage for St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, home to the Reverend George Haas whose family died in the General Slocum disaster, the building subsequently served as the headquarters of the Russky Golos and saw the arrest of the Communist journalist Alexander Brailovsky, hosted poetry readings by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky as the beatnik coffeehouse Les Deux Mégots, birthed the first macrobiotic restaurant which counted a young Yoko Ono as one of its waitresses, and became a neighbourhood bookstore patronised by Lou Reed and Marianne Moore. Eventually handed over to the fashion set as a couture consignment shop before being gutted and sold as a single family townhouse in a sign of these sterilised times, Hajdu enlisted two singers, an instrumental ensemble and eight composers to realise each phase of the building’s cycle, starting with samples of Ginsburg and the scatological rock band The Fugs on ‘Translation, Two Cigar Butts’ by Ted Hearne.

Tujiko Noriko – Crépuscule I & II

Capping a long association with Peter Rehberg and Editions Mego, which stretches all the way back to the release of her melodic breakthrough Shojo Toshi in 2001, now Tujiko Noriko labours in crepuscule over a series of silvery synth fantasies which manifest her shift into the cinematic form, evoking everything from the Eduard Artemyev score to Tarkovsky’s furtive sci-fi art film Stalker to surrealist staples like Eraserhead and Carnival of Souls. In two parts with Crépuscule I reaching a bristling climax on ‘Bronze Shore’ and ‘Rear View’, the record also serves as a physical homage to Rehberg, released as a double cassette ‘by request of Noriko as it was this format she flung her debut Mego demo onto Peter in Tokyo many moons ago’.

Tyshawn Sorey Trio – Continuing

Following the delicate harmonies and swinging melodies of Mesmerism and the spontaneous combustion of The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism, which encompassed a three-and-a-half hour live recording from a performance at The Jazz Gallery in New York, the drummer Tyshawn Sorey embraces sprawl on the four long tracks of Continuing which once more juxtapose his expansive playing with the bass licks of Matt Brewer and the dexterous piano of Aaron Diehl. Featuring the standard ‘Angel Eyes’ alongside pieces by Ahmad Jamal and Harold Mabern, the record opens with a stately yet sensitive rendition of the ‘Reincarnation Blues’, which were composed by Wayne Shorter for the classic Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers album Buhaina’s Delight.

Zeena Parkins – LACE

The harpist and electroacoustic composer Zeena Parkins has spent years exploring the music inside of lace stitching, from the impromptu scores she glued to a black poster board back in 2008 for a piece commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, to a small studio in the French commune of Magalas where a group of women seemed to mimic musical gestures as they crafted bobbin lace by hand. Inspired by its lavish detail, intricate twists and knots, patterns of repetition and interconnecting threads as well as by the power and persistence of the lacemaker’s labour, Parkins unveils a boxset of artifacts whose scores with conditions were performed by the percussionist William Winant, electronic musician James Fei, cellist Maggie Perkins and the TILT Brass Sextet led by Chris McIntyre.

Zoh Amba – O Light, O Life Vol. 2 (feat. William Parker & Francisco Mela)

Like the triumphal march of truth which comes in fits and starts and whose course is furious and vexed or at best only circumambulatory, on O Life, O Light Vol. 1 alongside the legendary bassist William Parker and percussionist Francisco Mela, the tenor saxophonist and flautist Zoh Amba emerged from the Appalachian Mountains bearing the folk patterns, swirling incantations and full-throated sonority of Albert Ayler at his peak. On the second volume for the New York free jazz bastion 577 Records, the artist continues to honour her roots over two tracks packed full of folk melodies and spellbinding refrains, as ‘Dance of Bliss’ marks the dizzying summit, while ‘Three Flowers’ plays out as a staggered and watery descent as Amba lays down her tenor to lead with a sprightly ditty on the flute.