Culturedarm’s Songs of the Year for 2023

In the year of 2023 artists from Tyla, Bad Bunny and NewJeans to Vagabon, Tems and Sofia Kourtesis continued to redefine the borders of contemporary pop, while Cassandra Miller covered Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ and Arvo Pärt looked back a couple of centuries to a ‘tiresome footling little Anglican parson’ as the Estonian minimalist reworked his Littlemore Tractus. Familiar faces like the R&B supreme Tinashe ducked down grocery store aisles and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy discerned folk by their perennial value as Gabrielle Cavassa over the sonorous saxophone of Joshua Redman emerged as one of the great voices in jazz music. This illustrative list of some of Culturedarm’s favourite songs from 2023 serves as a complement to a compendium of best records, while a selection ‘from the vault’ recognises that even the brightest of minds keep one eye firmly on the posterior.

Aditya Prakash – ‘XenoF.O.B.’

Created in his garage studio during lockdown, on ISOLASHUN the virtuosic Karnatik vocalist Aditya Prakash explores the discrimination and upheaval which elides or otherwise animates life across his two homes, questioning the weight of privilege which informs Indian classical music and the Karnatik tradition, while on ‘XenoF.O.B.’ he examines a history of political rhetoric around immigration to the United States, juxtaposing Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks upon signing the Immigration Act of 1965 with the incendiary bombast of the Trump presidency.

Aging – ‘Keening & Crying’ (Laila Sakini Rework)

Back in the autumn of 2014, the multi-instrumentalist and Tombed Visions label owner David McLean pushed out the second effort under his Aging monicker, which had grown from a solo piano and reverb project referencing the likes of François Couturier, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Misha Alperin into a two-piece as he partnered up with the drummer Andrew Cheetham. Described as a ‘suite of noirish balladry and bar room dirges, painting a murky portrait of a man under the influence’, on Troubles? I Got A Bartender slow-strummed guitar, wailing saxophone, melancholy loops and dissolving effects were buttressed by skittering drums as McLean and Cheetham pored over an emptying pint glass, savouring and languishing in the precious last drop. Now for Reworks (Rewoven) the Berlin label Vaagner have handpicked a series of artists to revamp the five tracks of Troubles? I Got A Bartender, with Laila Sakini tackling the album closer ‘Keening & Crying’ by swapping its slow and specious tread, trailing saxophone urges and fog of Fender Rhodes and organ for some spectral post-bar chatter which lingers on the precipice of the sidewalk. Yoking the horns which strain and falter through the murk, in Sakini’s hands ‘Keening & Crying’ is suspended mid-air, rendered as a sort of smudged plainsong.

Aho Ssan – ‘Cold Summer Part 1’ (feat. Blackhaine)

The Parisian composer Aho Ssan pairs with Blackhaine to scram the early morning streets and survey the post-industrial decay of salubrious Preston, one of the nodes of collaboration on Rhizomes which also features Richie Culver, Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Nicolas Jaar, Nyokabi Kariuki, Moor Mother, Valentina Magaletti, Kassel Jaeger and Angel Bat Dawid and was commissioned by Ina GRM, Other People and Donaufestival.

Animal Collective – ‘Broke Zodiac’

On a record which skews long, Animal Collective bring some of their recent penchants and interests – Panda Bear’s proclivity for drumming, Deakin’s tinkling on the old ivory keys, and Avey Tare and Geologist’s burgeoning fondness for the hurdy gurdy whirs and gilded polyphonies of Renaissance music – to bear in miniature on ‘Broke Zodiac’.

Arvo Pärt – Littlemore Tractus

In a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver as he sought psychiatric treatment for his daughter Lucia, struggled with his failing eyesight and laboured to finish Work in Progress, which would become Finnegans Wake, the Irish author James Joyce with a flash of defiance wrote that ‘nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church’. He was talking about John Henry Newman, a poet and prose stylist as well as a theologian and educator, who became a cardinal after converting to the Catholic Church and in 2019 was canonised as a saint.

On his latest album Arvo Pärt blends the timbres of choir and string orchestra, starting with a new version of the Littlemore Tractus which was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Newman’s birth, based on the final lines of one of his most famous sermons which builds on the exhortation ‘be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’ to end with a prayer for safe lodging, holy rest and eternal peace. Recorded last year at the Methodist Church in Tallinn, the album also features the compositions Greater Antiphons, L’abbé Agathon and Cantique des Degres whose soaring choruses, pliant drones and silvery strings are performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste.

Azu Tiwaline – ‘Long Hypnosis’

Saddled with field recordings from her home in the desert of El Djerid plus tombak and modular arrangements from the Franco-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy, the Tunisian dub practitioner Azu Tiwaline engenders a state of prolonged hypnosis through one of the entheogenic rave rhythms at the heart of her latest album The Fifth Dream.

björk – ‘oral’ (feat. ROSALÍA)

Honing in on the small village of Seyðisfjörður, which lies diametrically opposed to Reykjavík surrounded by mountains on the east coast of Iceland, the oral obsessor and dauntless utopianist Björk dusts one off from the vault as a means to fund and support ongoing protests against open-pen salmon farming. The track stems from the Vespertine era and was rediscovered earlier this year, with Björk enlisting Rosalía and Sega Bodega to add vocals and production effects to the dancehall beat, luring a Spanish-language audience as an added boon as intensive salmon farming has proved especially controversial and widespread in Argentina and Chile.

Blue Cranes – ‘Gaviota’

Closing in on twenty years as a collective, following their previous album Voices which featured an assortment of vocalists including Laura Veir, Holland Andrews, Peter Broderick, Laura Gibson and Edna Vazquez, the Portland quintet Blue Cranes starring the saxophonists Reed Wallsmith and Joe Cunningham, the drummer Ji Tanzer, the keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn and bassist Jon Shaw turned towards twelve-tone, through-composition and non-linear modes of songwriting in a bid to break through their own perceptions of an incipient harmonic rut. As much a retort to the strictures of twelve-tone serialism, on the standout track ‘Gaviota’ from their new album My Only Secret the quintet evoke the minimalism of John Adams through intertwining melodies and an extended coda, where rattling percussion plays off the lilting upswing of John Powers on trombone and John C. Savage on flute.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – ‘Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You’

Hard on the heels of his hermetically sealed and domestically abundant twenty-first studio album, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy both lifts the lid and screws the cap on his Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You era as the folk crooner eases on down the road with a holdall in the form of that record’s title track, bringing Emmett Kelly, Blake Mills, Shahzad Ismaily, Jim Keltner, Heather Summers, Lacey Guthrie and Katy Peabody together as part of a wider ensemble. Now just relax . . .

Camille Thomas, Jane Birkin and Julien Brocal – ‘Jane B’

With the Stradivarius Feuermann in tow and Julien Brocal behind the piano, the Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas closes the first chapter of her three-disc journey devoted to the life and works of Frédéric Chopin with an homage to the inimitable French actress and chanteuse Jane B. The slinky centrepiece of an album-length love letter, the original composition was arranged by Arthur Greenslade as an adaptation of Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E Minor for the Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin collaboration also known as Je t’aime . . . moi non plus.

The video for Camille Thomas’s rework of ‘Jane B’ was released back in June, mere weeks before Birkin’s death at the tender age of 76. Here the singer reprises her old vocal with a wistful redolence, sounding lustrous and honeyed as ever while Thomas and Brocal slowly envelop her voice in an aching swell of strings and keys.

Cassandra Miller – ‘Thanksong’

For her first release on vinyl, the acclaimed composer Cassandra Miller coils and contorts two disparate pieces of music in the form of a song by an anonymous Sicilian cart driver, recorded by the ethnologists Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella sometime in the mid-fifties, and the third movement of Beethoven’s late string quartet in A minor, a ‘holy song of thanks from a convalescent’ as the German maestro at least temporarily recovered from an intestinal illness. While the caterwauling of her ‘Traveller Song’ might have ‘more in common with a quasi-shamanistic keening than anything Sicilian’, for her interpretation of the ‘Thanksong’ the composer sought to sustain an atmosphere of hushed reawakening and thoughtful reflection.

Miller recorded herself singing along to each of the individual parts of Beethoven’s quartet, establishing an aural score which she then handed to her longtime collaborators Quatuor Bozzini. Listening to their respective parts through headphones and playing by ear, the Montreal foursome are joined by the British soprano Juliet Fraser, who sings ‘as slowly and quietly as possible’ over the resultant piece. A far cry from the mannered style of so much contemporary music, where Beethoven dedicated his ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ to the deity instead Miller, Quatuor Bozzini and Juliet Fraser suffuse the sacred with the mundane, as a smattering of recording booth chatter towards the close of ‘Thanksong’ adds to the air of communality and companionly uplift.

Daniel Villarreal – ‘Sunset Cliffs’

In the fall of 2020 in the backyard of Chicali Outpost in Los Angeles, the drummer Daniel Villarreal was joined by the guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Anna Butterss for the first in-person recording session any of the participants had mustered as an ensemble since the start of the pandemic. Some of the resulting music appeared on Panamá 77, the verdant suite of jazz-laced folk-funk which Villarreal released through International Anthem last year, but most of it remained hitherto unreleased. Through the insistent taps of two drum sticks and an arcing bass which descends like a knife through the proverbial cream stuff before lilting guitar licks linger in the gloaming groove, over ‘Sunset Cliffs’ an unhurried Villarreal introduces Lados B which pulls from those two autumnal afternoon sessions, informed by the Latin funk of Fania Records and the otherworldly trance of Brain Records while Parker and Butterss draw upon their extensive shared experience playing free.

DJ Manny – ‘Lost In Da Jungle’

Dissembling 160 beats per minute, for Hypnotized the surreptitious footwork stalwart and former DJ Rashad protege DJ Manny takes a romantic tread through laid-back and reflective rhythm and blues, whose deftly nocturnal pleasure-seeking by turns gives way to acid basslines, frantic dubstep numbers, jungle homages and passages of dark minimalist techno. The album opener ‘Hard Drive’ features the mixed-media artist SUCIA! while from the vault, ‘Ooh Baby’ is a previously unreleased Rashad collaboration which has knocked about via an old μ-Ziq mix from Rotterdam ContainerFest and a lakeside hoedown on YouTube, with ‘Turn Me Up’ described as something like Paul Johnson at his most wild and the penultimate track ‘Lost In Da Jungle’ depicted as a moment of ‘enjoyably hype daftness’ in the manner of early LTJ Bukem.

Fatima Al Qadiri – ‘Mojik (Your Waves)’

Unspooling one of the threads which served to characterise Medieval Femme, a decadent suite of songs inspired by the classical poems of Arab women, the producer Fatima Al Qadiri pairs up with her fellow Kuwaiti vocalist Gumar for an homage to lamentation singing. From restive shadows eloquent airs ruminate and coalesce around the theme of unrequited love, with ‘Mojik (Your Waves)’ the first outing from an extended play which is also titled Gumar, a rendering of the Arabic word for ‘moon’.

Hourloupe – ‘Green Navy/Rain’

As Hourloupe, the duo of Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov draw inspiration from a late-nineteenth-century newspaper society column for the cinders and pearls which make up Three Nights in the Wawayanda, the final release in a triptych of records exploring time, reality and the natural world. A staggered treatise on ecological balance, cohabitation and the submerged other told through steady spoken word poetry and the shifting spectres of their sonic landscapes, on ‘Green Navy/Rain’ they imagine the masked faces and stone vertebrae of sailors whose ship has become one with the forest, moss-swept and lost long ago to a flood.

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids – ‘Thank You God’

Draped in the fullness of strings, through blazing horns and call-and-response vocals, Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids condemn police brutality and issue requiems for their ancestors, summoning the science fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the interlocking Afrobeat rhythms of Fela Kuti, and the cosmic wanderings of Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra while celebrating their own continuing growth as they mark their fiftieth anniversary.

Irreversible Entanglements – ‘Nuclear War’

With its lilting grooves and wry lyrics on a perennial hot-button issue, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra recorded ‘Nuclear War’ in 1982 the bandleader took the cut straight to Columbia Records, thoroughly convinced that he had a hit on his hands. That summer New York City played host to the largest anti-nuclear protest to date and one of the largest single-city protests in history as a crowd of around one million people converged on Central Park and Midtown Manhattan to coincide with a United Nations special session on nuclear disarmament, while as the Cold War simmered, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later reflect that ‘Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades was the situation in the world as explosive and hence more difficult and unfavorable as in the first half of the 1980s’. Perhaps it was a sign of the times then that Columbia rejected ‘Nuclear War’ and its brusque imagery, with the track heading up a 12-inch and featuring on the limited album A Fireside Chat with Lucifer but mostly languishing in obscurity until it was reissued by the Atavistic imprint Unheard Music Series in 2001.

Taking a self-conscious approach to the topic, with Sun Ra on electric piano and Samarai Celestial on drums the Arkestra engaged in blithe call-and-response, asking all of the pertinent questions like ‘whatcha gonna do without your ass?’ in the event of nuclear annihilation, while describing the potential outbreak of nuclear war as a ‘motherfucker, don’t you know’. Despite the receding air of resignation, the humorous piece stands as one of the most accessible in the band’s vast catalogue, less siren call than an invitation amid the wreckage to pinch those cheeks and dance. On the compilation album by Red Hot, the nonprofit which combats AIDS and promotes equal access to healthcare through pop-culture collaborations, the organisation uses the iconic track by Sun Ra as both an inspiration and a call to arms. Climaxing with an extended interpretation of ‘Nuclear War’, the quintet of Keir Neuringer, Tcheser Holmes, Aquiles Navarro, Luke Stewart and Camae Ayewa as Irreversible Entanglements offer a scorched take on the original through brassy squalls and clattering percussion, carrying us right into the fiery heart of the action with charred-black banter then out the other side as all of our trifling concerns fuse with the posterior or flicker like fading sparks and embers in the rear-view.

Jack Sheen – Solo for Cello

For their first compact disc, The Trilogy Tapes present a studio recording of Solo for Cello by the Manchester composer Jack Sheen. Exploring his interest in mictrotones and written specifically for Anton Lukoszevieze, the artistic director of Apartment House who have won renown for their renditions of work by John Cage, Jim O’Rourke, Pauline Oliveros and Morton Feldman, throughout the piece the cello is retuned and prepared with a heavy metal mute, thinning out its sound by dampening the instrument’s natural resonance. Played predominantly on harmonics, whose light touch fills the musical space with glitching and ghostly reveries, Solo for Cello features rapidly descending arpeggios and splintered, pointillistic isorhthyms, cutting a tenebrous swathe from the polyphonic masses and motets of the fourteenth century to the seventeenth-century viol suites of Marin Marais, from the systemic spasms of Mark Fell to the radiant whorls and glacial shivers of Éliane Radigue. Bathed in a wash of background electronics, described by Lukoszevieze as like a ‘moto perpetuo’ of extreme intensity and delicate beauty, the 35-minute piece premiered to acclaim in October of 2022 at Wigmore Hall.

Jake Meginsky – ‘2521’

An outlier on his new album Trinities, which commemorates the life and work of his friend and mentor Milford Graves and explores triplet forms as a foundational rhythmic principle, the minimalist electroacoustic percussionist Jake Meginsky composed ‘2521’ as a celestial lullaby in the birthing room of a hospital as he welcomed his daughter into the world and watched over her while she slept.

Jay Glass Dubs – ‘Innocent Again’ (feat. Louis Chude-Sokei)

Jay Glass Dubs embarks on a bass-heavy trip, whose woozy rhythms and deftly padded breaks linger in the porous space between dream pop and dubtech as the writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei leads a slew of features, intoning ‘I’m not who I was, but I’m always what I did’ with a lust for escape and a self-accusatory glint before a keening horn drops the anchor on a wave of slender ritualism.

Jeff Lederer with Mary LaRose – ‘On the Beach’

Tramping the boardwalk at Coney Island interspersed with studio footage and snatches from the whirring archives of packed beaches, tiger tamers, rollercoaster rides, twists and carousels, the clarinetist Jeff Lederer unveils a new song cycle based on the early vocal works of Schoenberg and Webern with Mary LaRose as the featuring artist, alongside Patricia Brennan on vibes, Hank Roberts on cello, Matt Wilson on drums and percussion and Michael Formanek on bass.

Jess Williamson – ‘Topanga Two Step’

The opening salvo of ‘Time Ain’t Accidental’ and ‘Hunter’ provided the hook for Jess Williamson’s fifth solo album, literary and urbane with their references to Raymond Carver novels and the Shangri-La, which scans as a reference to the Santa Monica hotel as much as to mystical Tibetan mountains, before ‘Chasing Spirits’ stretches out into a surprisingly earnest yet pliable form of Americana with its wide vistas and open roads. But come the end of the year it’s ‘Topanga Two Step’ which remains stuck in my head with its cyclical structure, tripping headlong just life the waif child who opens the first and last verse. Older then and younger than that now but still a little bit wiser, Williamson unfurls a heartfelt vocal whose brevity belies its languorous heartache, as ‘Topanga Two Step’ proves a perfect sonata over nagging synths and a lilting, hiccuping backbeat.

Jessica Pavone – ‘Nu Shu (part 1)’ & ‘Nu Shu (part 2)’

A syllabic script with elongated strokes and fine lines, adapted to better fit embroidery patterns, Nüshu which developed among the rural women of Jiangyong County has been described as ‘the most revolutionary and thorough simplification of Chinese characters ever attempted’ and ‘the world’s only script designed and used exclusively by women’. Coming to fruition in the eighteenth century when the women of Jiangyong County were largely confined to the home, the script was passed down through generations of female family members and friends, concealing a hidden patchwork of letters or used for writing biographies, sending glad tidings and singing songs of heavenly yearning and earthly lament, its lingering remnants a source of inspiration for novelists and symphonists, linguists and anthropologists, with the Chinese government in 2006 designating Nüshu as part of the country’s intangible cultural heritage.

Rethinking the notion of women’s work through the push and pull of metered notation, communal improvisation and indeterminacy, on Clamor the composer and violist Jessica Pavone titles three movements after historical innovations by which women sought to circumvent the checks on their freedom. In two parts at the heart of the record, ‘Nu Shu’ features the solo bassoonist Katherine Young in bristling and staggering dialogue with the ensemble.

Jessy Lanza – ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’

After moving to the capital of car culture, the Hyperdub songwriter Jessy Lanza’s fresh start in Los Angeles almost went awry when she narrowly avoided the onrushing wheels of a motor vehicle. Instead on her first standalone single of 2023, she turns her propensity for bubblegum hooks, pulsing beats and piquant dancefloor dysphoria into an upbeat entreaty in the form of ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’, wishing away the cars as they make haste through the sunset haze leaving palm-lined streets strewn with trails of vulcanized rubber.

Jo Lawry – ‘Acrobats’

Between supple takes on classic songs by Frank Loesser, Vernon Duke and Cole Porter, the Australian vocalist Jo Lawry tumbles headlong on ‘Acrobats’, a demonstration of alacrity and support composed by her close friend Gian Slater. On the album of the same name, the musician’s singer is joined by the bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Allison Miller, with Lawry describing a trio record as ‘the hardest thing I could do’ while depicting her function therein as more akin to horn player.

Joshua Redman & Gabrielle Cavassa – ‘Chicago Blues’

With nods to Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing and Sufjan Stevens, who once conceived the writing of fifty albums for each of the American states, on ‘Chicago Blues’ the saxophonist Joshua Redman pays homage to the Windy City bolstered by the breathtaking vocals of Gabrielle Cavassa, part of a celebration and critique of his country as the acclaimed composer and bandleader marks his Blue Note debut.

Julia Holter – ‘Sun Girl’

Since releasing her last studio album Aviary back in 2018, the balmy troubadour, memory wanderer and stranded silhouette Julia Holter composed the score for Eliza Hittman’s award-winning drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, wrote and performed a new live soundtrack to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc with the 36-strong Chorus of Opera North, reimagined through rippling warmth and dark lustrous reveries the Keyboard Fantasies of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, featured alongside Call Super and from memetic phobias to moss-green curtains and the smell of conifers, elaborated the song cycle Behind the Wallpaper with Alex Temple and Spektral Quartet. Dappled and playful, her latest single ‘Sun Girl’ is a summery incantation which makes soft-hued psychedelic use of fragments of flute, field recordings, the Yamaha CS-60, bagpipes, Mellotron, drums and fretless bass.

Manchester Collective & Hannah Peel – ‘Neon 1: Shinjuku’

Hannah Peel uses samples from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo to evoke teeming scenes and nightswept reveries on the title piece of the fourth studio release by Manchester Collective, describing Neon as ‘opulence and decadence, bustling activity and loneliness’ as she sends chiming missives from the world’s busiest transport hub.

Mariam Rezaei – ‘GLASS BASTARD’ (feat. Teresa Winter & Bobby Glue)

Described as the central panel of a triptych which also includes BLUD and SKEEN, both previously released on Graham Dunning’s Fractal Meat Cuts imprint, on BOWN the acclaimed turntablist Mariam Rezaei leans into a slew of carefully selected collaborators, blurring the lines in sometimes bludgeoning fashion between the wild pop of Gwilly Edmondez, the dramatic soprano of Alya Al-Sultani, and the gusty reeds and fissured surfaces of free jazz, asking the question ‘How can I make the turntable sound as extreme as Roscoe Mitchell or Peter Brötzmann?’ to which one answer alongside Teresa Winter and Bobby Glue is the shatterproof climax of ‘GLASS BASTARD’.

Marina Herlop – ‘La Alhambra’

Hoarding songs as she toured and waited two years for Pripyat to be released, an album of choral trills and cascading production effects inspired by Carnatic music as she swapped the conservatory for the computer, for the first single from Nekkuja the composer Marina Herlop offered ‘La Alhambra’, a beguiling staple of her live sets.

Matmos – ‘Mud-Dauber Wasp’

In 1948 the audio engineer and music publisher Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a mission to put on wax not only traditional, secular and children’s music but poetry, language instruction, liturgical chants and field recordings from around the world. The earliest versions of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ by Woody Guthrie and ‘Goodnight Irene’ by Lead Belly were recorded for Asch, while in 1952 under the auspices of the filmmaker Harry Smith the still fledgling Folkways Records released the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which led to the rediscovery of such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Jim Jackson and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers and proved a key influence on the folk revival and the sixties Greenwich Village scene.

Looking farther afield, on Folkways Records you could also find Angolan prison spirituals and Alpine yodeling, Babylonian biblical chants or the religious music of the Ethiopian Jews, traditional Peking operas and Polynesian dances, or Alfred Wolfsohn’s experiments in the extension of the human vocal range, speech after the removal of the larynx, Soviet satellite sounds including the audible heartbeat of the space dog Laika, studies of the ground-dwelling Australian lyrebird and the sounds of American frogs. In 1987 the label was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, on the condition that each of its 2,000-plus recordings would remain forever in print regardless of sales. Now the dauntless electronic duo Matmos with contributions from Aaron Dilloway and Evicshen have diced, looped, stretched and otherwise recontextualised some of the non-musical sounds released by Folkways for their album Return to Archive, whose first offering ‘Mud-Dauber Wasp’ draws from the 1960 collection Sounds of Insects compiled and narrated by Albro T. Gaul.

(Did you know for instance that according to Dolbear’s law, as outlined by Gaul on the Sounds of Insects, you can count a cricket’s chirps for fifteen seconds and add forty to the total number to give you a close approximation of the current temperature in degrees Fahrenheit? Counting the number of chirps in eight seconds and adding five will give you a similarly accurate result for degrees Celsius!)

Me:You – ‘Field Tapes In Der Trash’

Cleveland Tapes co-owners and Mourning [A] BLKstar members LaToya Kent and RA Washington create an immersive world full of whirring percussion and washes of live instrumentation, with wriggling guitar lines and swooning vocals over sparely-plucked descending bass. Grimy and gnarled and politically conscious, unfurling embedded memories of a historical past while revelling in the ebullience and ardour of youth, abounding in a do-it-yourself punk ethos as gauzy electronics call to mind the peaks and lulls of avant-rock and illbient music, on Field Tapes In Der Trash it is the voice of Kent which provides the tonic, as moist reminiscences vie with words of concealed warning, like on the title track where through woozy warbling and nighttime persuasions she sings ‘lay down your weapons, my tongue is my knife’.

Michael Formanek Elusion Quartet – ‘Bury the Lede’

Living up to their billing as the Elusion Quartet, the stellar New York improvisers Tony Malaby on tenor and soprano saxophones, Kris Davis on piano and Ches Smith on drums and vibes join the bassist Michael Formanek to bury the lede on the barnstorming opener to their second album As Things Do, which gives way to lyrical detours, funk-rock grooves, limber cooldowns and winsome abstractions.

mingjia – ‘Saint’

Four years in the making, for her first full-length on New Amsterdam Records the composer and vocalist Mingjia Chen presents a collection of through-composed songs which still carry the discursiveness and formal spontaneity of recitative or more melismatic arioso, as half-scrawled thoughts and ribbons of reflections stack together in a manner at once reminiscent of the opera or Broadway, chamber pop with a folkish whimsy or something still more mundane, where collaged samples and passages of improvisation vie with the strictures of orchestration to produce an aleatoric music. Written for herself and the thirteen-piece Tortoise Orchestra, on the track ‘Saint’ buttressed by an eight-strong choir Mingjia warily probes and offers earnest entreaties to Santa Maria as she swings her thurible, chows down on curried chickpeas and contemplates an unholy tryst, the centrepiece of a record which draws inspiration from Chinese mythology and magical realism while weaving stories which are ‘truer than the outcome, little bubbles that are all their own. The story does not merely arrive at the truth, the story itself becomes the truth’.

mioriii – ‘Echoes’

Before she released three extended plays in the waning days of 2018, the artist formerly known as Ms. Indie Pop had nurtured an early relationship with music through classic bands like The Beatles and The Carpenters from her parents’ generation, a teenage obsession with the yearning melodramas of Dawson’s Creek, and a budding fascination with the radio, which she listened to every day. On Circle, Square and Triangle these influences manifested in a widescreen whimsy with a synth pop sheen, where glitching electronics, mournful keys, gossamer reeds and the tremulous reverberations of her vocals might call to mind early Grimes and Kedr Livanskiy or Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti and the Cocteau Twins. Then a week before she was scheduled to start performing, she began to suffer from a mysterious illness which culminated in an undisclosed surgery. Adopting the stage name mioriii, on Nature’s Way the Japanese musician constructs an ode to healing, foregrounding her voice on the opening and closing tracks while three instrumentals float with a sinuous shimmer, sometimes submerged and sometimes carbonated, echoing the walks along riverbanks and through nearby parks which during her convalescence have become part of her daily routine.

Nappy Nina – ‘Stone Soup’ (feat. Moor Mother)

At the pith or heart of Mourning Due, the latest album by the Oakland-born and Brooklyn-based emcee Nappy Nina, the spoken word poet and jazz visionary Moor Mother delivers a bravura verse which cuts a swathe through some of the most famous lines by Kanye, Tupac and Biggie in the service of shifting space-time while giving voice to the equalising force of black women. Seeking to brighten her mood while reminiscing over complaisant smoke shops and green spaghetti, on ‘Stone Soup’ the grilled cheese-loving rapper laments the feeling of an empty belly, gesturing suggestively towards the folk tale on the theme of scheming and sharing on a record which boasts a slew of collaborators including Mavi, maassai, Nathan Bajar, Cavalier, OHMi, Stas Thee Boss, JusMoni and Iojii.

Nicole Dollanganger – ‘Whispering Glades’

One of the canniest and craftiest lyricists of the contemporary landscape returned with a song whose wilting grandeur perfectly encapsulated the withered underbelly of Hollywood. Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel The Loved One – whose Whispering Glades were based on the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in California, and which was adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood into a 1965 film – Dollanganger eschews embalming techniques for a wispy and shifting melody over clip-clop percussion and queasy Wurlitzer keys, as she unfolds a minor grotesquerie about an arrogant and rapacious lech and the grim fate that awaits.

Oneohtrix Point Never – ‘A Barely Lit Path’

Oneohtrix Point Never illuminates a barely lit path with orchestral contributions from Robert Ames and the NOMAD ensemble, whose music video directed by Freeka Tet features fuzzy dice, a submerged succession of backseat board games and jigsaw puzzles, and a backwoods escape or a sort of star gate through a thicket whose crude assemblage of metal parts mirrors in heft and riveting affect the nineties heyday of Björk and Chris Cunningham.

phét phét phét – ‘Se Siente Como’

Named thrice after a Tibetan syllable which means to cut through, for his latest outing as phét phét phét the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jarrett Gilgore opened up byways from his old base in Baltimore to Mexico City, Guatemala City and Caracas. A decade’s worth of careful collaboration comes to fruition on Shimmer, where Gilgore is joined by Gibrán Andrade on drums, I. La Catolica on guitars, bass and other percussion and Mabe Fratti on vocals and cello, whose mouth mantras on the halting declaration of ‘Se Siente Como’ over fraying spirals of synth fittingly capture an air of breathless yet placid anticipation.

pmxper – ‘Lavender Milk’

Swapping ambient shards, acid cuts and cosseted refrains for something balmier as on ‘Lavender Milk’ with its driving rhythms and ‘warm hues of textures’, citing the flow and freedom of the classic Young Marble Giants album Colossal Youth, the duo of Pavel Milyakov and Perila debuted on wax ahead of a September outing at Berlin Atonal.

SABIWA – ‘Christal’

Born in bustling Kaohsiung and currently based in Berlin, the producer SABIWA takes her own voice and the ancient nature-mimicking musics of the Thau, Bunun, Atayal and other tribespeople from her native Taiwan as a starting point. Steady undulations punctuated by glottal stops give way to a psychedelic swirl of communal chanting, as SABIWA dissects field recordings and employs subterranean bass to turn her surrounds distinctly concrete, with bell chimes, drones and scabrous feedback serving to blur or mask the moment of arrival.

Sam Gendel – ‘Anywhere’ (feat. Meshell Ndegeocello)

Sam Gendel gets sultry and wet on his cover of ‘Anywhere’ by 112 and Lil’ Zane, slinky and soulful on the album closer ‘Water Runs Dry’ by Boyz II Men, troubleshoots early aughts online dating over the best of Aaliyah, and finds the middle ground between crooning All-4-One and Angelo Badalamenti’s cascading Twin Peaks theme as the shapeshifting saxophonist offers a unique take on fin-de-siècle R&B.

Sana Nagano & Leonor Falcón – ‘Expanding Universe’

What’s an expanding universe? An ineluctable outpouring of general relativity, a spatial property, a shift of light observed through the telescope as distant galaxies stretch farther away? Is it Moon landings and Mars living and Voyager probes destined to wander eternally the Milky Way? Or can the outward manifestations of an expanding universe be more mundane? Eggs boiling in a crowded saucepan, scribbles and scores scrawled down in a notepad or blotter, violin practice, creamy cat treats clawed between meals, the first feed after placid slumber of your firstborn babe? What might an expanding universe sound like amid such domesticity? The bend and creak of the floorboards, the whirring of an air conditioner and the pop of a toaster suffused by birdsong and passing traffic, all of those noises that together fall under the umbrella of house sounds and might even amount to home comforts, muffling the staggered quiet, tracing and colouring the everyday?

On the opening track of their album Peach and Tomato, the violinist Sana Nagano and violist Leonor Falcón bring a flurry of clipped notes and deft plucks to a clamorous climax through bowed melodies, stretched glissandos and metallic effects, demonstrating their classical chops on a record which also tackles the Sonata for Two Violins by Sergei Prokofiev and offers an homage to the folk stylings of Béla Bartók.

Shygirl – ‘Woe (I See It From Your Side)’ (Björk Remix)

Running with a glass egg, Björk and Shygirl showed a steady pair of hands earlier in the year on the remix to the Fossora single ‘Ovule’, where the South London singer added digitized squibs and soft-lipped blissed-out vocals over Sega Bodega’s sweeping production to the fanfare of retreating horns and processed timpani drums. The Icelandic artist returns the favour with a thoroughgoing remix of ‘Woe’ from Shygirl’s debut album Nymph, reaching for the sublime and scurrilously seeing things from both sides in a paean to desiring and not-getting buoyed by plosive beats and supple spines.

S!LENCE & Lungs – ‘Up The River No Paddle’ (feat. phiik)

Tangling rods with some of America’s finest bass anglers on their pandemic-era fishing expedition Catch and Release, the duo of Lungs and S!LENCE wade and snap through brackish waters on tracks like ‘Exposed Toes In Alaska’, ‘Bass Rats’, the grisly jazz vamp of ‘Midnight Mass’ and ‘Up The River No Paddle’ which features their frequent collaborator phiik.

Teresa Winter – ‘Flower Of The Mountain’

A swirling descent which clasps through the undergrowth, the whorling centrepiece of Teresa Winter’s new album Proserpine takes the climax of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy with its lapses of breath and mushed crumbs of seedcake passed mouth to mouth as a sort of leitmotif for desire, which it spreads thickly through gauzy organ drones and looped vocals like purpling rhododendrons producing their mad honey.

Theo Bleckmann, Alicia Olatuja, Dan Tepfer and David Hajdu – ‘Lou Reed Was Very Well Read’

David Hajdu and Theo Bleckmann doff their nightcaps and pour one out in memory of Lou Reed, who was very well read between writing all of those songs about giving good head and shooting up heroin. The future Velvet Underground and Coney Island Baby crooner studied poetry at Syracuse University under the diligent daydreamer and rapier conversationalist Delmore Schwartz, and in the seventies frequented a neighbourhood bookstore called Books ‘N Things at 64th East 7th Street, whose owner would regale interested parties with tales of the songs he sang in the back garden of the establishment alongside his friend Iggy Pop and the modernist wit Marianne Moore. In the back room singing old harmony tunes, equal parts Wallace Stevens and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, the climax of ‘Lou Reed Was Very Well Read’ arrives as the onrush of history nears a pivot point, part of Hajdu’s ode to an otherwise nondescript four-story brick townhouse which serves to capture in miniature the vanishing themes and cultural cycles of life in New York.

Yo La Tengo – ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’

Tree-lined with pristine views over the Hudson towards Greenwich Village and the gleaming skyline of New York, the scenic waterfront boulevard of Sinatra Drive is in need of an upgrade according to the city itself, with potted roads and critical gaps in pedestrian and bicycle facilities, but on the opening track to their seventeenth studio album This Stupid World, the indie veterans Yo La Tengo ride roughshod over the withered terrain, as the steely guitar of Ira Kaplan and driving rhythms of Georgia Hubley and James McNew culminate in an existential paean to the rising of the moon and the setting of the sun, their hometown of Hoboken bathed in an ashy afterglow of white silence.

Yussef Dayes – ‘The Light’ (feat. Bahia Dayes)

Reflecting another side of the pandemic, on ‘The Light’ the drummer Yussef Dayes celebrates the birth of his daughter Bahia, who features on the track through various voice memos. Born in 2020, the breakout London percussionist calls his ensuing months with Bahia ‘one of the most special times in my life’, describing ‘The Light’ as a lullaby song while adding that ‘being able to take time from touring and nurture my family at home was something I’ll cherish forever’.

Ziúr – ‘Eyeroll’ (feat. Elvin Brandhi)

Over serrated blasts of saturated electronics, the scratchings and scrapings of shell-less tunable rototoms, and the primal screams of the Welsh noisemaker Elvin Brandhi, the producer Ziúr turns her eyes in the direction of the Kampala upstart Hakuna Kulala, offering a panacea for our post-pandemic slumber in the form of communal release.

Zoh Amba, Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt – ‘Moon Showed But No You’

‘The cock crows / But no queen rises’ begins ‘Depression Before Spring’ by the elliptical modernist Wallace Stevens, a silvery wisp of a poem full of bird call and nonsense syllables from his debut collection Harmonium which was remaindered after selling just a hundred copies upon its publication by Knopf in 1923. An amber inversion, the track ‘Moon Showed But No You’ draws the curtain on The Flower School by the dauntless trio of Zoh Amba, Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano, collaborating for the first time with an impromptu session at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco the day after the drummer and tenor saxophonist wrapped a tour of the west coast. Putting a cap on his binding glue, Corsano’s circular rhythms sit this one out as the dazzling light and dewy brusqueness of the morning give way to the rippling tides of evening, the soft staccato pluckings of Orcutt’s electric guitar offsetting Amba’s soaring saxophone melody ‘As the spittle of cows / Threading the wind’.