Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends make for something of a party atmosphere on the first tracks of the week for 2025. As new albums from the likes of Relative Pitch and ECM peek over the horizon other labels like 577 Records, Room40, Vaagner and ESP-Disk barrel right out of the gates with full-length releases while the artists MoMA Ready, Loraine James and Tiago Sousa return with their usual bouts of seasonal cheer.

Since way back in 2017 the electronic producer and Brooklyn scenester MoMA Ready has issued an annual grab-bag of old-school Detroit techno, futuristic house music and hyperkinetic drum and bass, with his Body series gradually shifting season to become an end-of-year extravaganza for those in the know. The latest collection Body 24 ups the ante from the crowd-led euphoria of ‘Eye2Eye’ which gives way to cramped intimacy to the gut-punch kicks, offbeat claves and wobbly bassline of ‘Organ Dance’ which leaves the listener with a hollow in the pit of their stomach. ‘Tokyo 24’ then dabbles in future funk before the neon risers or mallets and chimes of the pellucid if not outright watery later tracks.

One of those collaborations which seems to come out of left field while making eminent sense, for Mondoj the Los Angeles-based saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and wispy Warsaw-based composer Piotr Kurek link arms for Greyhound Days which follows up on their session for BBC Radio 3’s experimental programme Late Junction last February.

The archivists at Numero Group have dredged up some mid-nineties dreamo from the Inland Empire, as Dying To Tell compiles the entire four-song discography of the short-lived band Pennikurvers, where spindly melodies emerge from pummelling walls of feedback and other over-revved distortions in a manner redolent of riot grrrl atmospherics or the early noodlings of Smashing Pumpkins and Mazzy Star.

At its most sinister the new album by Ayumi Ishito may evoke a dystopia which is already creeping over the horizon, a seeping and bubbling satiny black ooze as people continue to go about their business, doing their weekly shopping and picking up their kids from school or walking the dog in some green-fringed park especially of the elevated variety, like the Coulée verte René-Dumont, High Line, Bloomingdale Trail or Seoullo 7017 as an army of drones with their prying cameras and officious manners swirl about overhead.

Perhaps it is only elaborating what already seems apparent, making plain our tangled morass as the era of mass surveillance which already infiltrates every inch of cyberspace hopes to spread out and permeate the metaverse. But on the second volume of Roboquarians the trio of Ishito with Kevin Shea and George Draguns are also playfully ebullient, so a fuzzier and friendlier comparison might summon a hyper-local battle for the future of our civilisation played out with foam blocks and mallets, or mecha of the anime and manga variety enjoying a hoedown beneath a blazing sunset.

One of Ishito’s foremost collaborators in the 577 Records co-founder and wind master Daniel Carter unleashes a new trio project with the guitarist Aron Namenwirth and the veteran sound engineer Jon Rosenberg on loops and effects, with Dawn After Dawn resolutely defying categorisation between the burbling timbral excursions and smeared reggae skank of the lead track from Home is where You Are.

Bookended by a couple of chasms or vortices, Pavel Milyakov and Lucas Dupuy present an hourlong record of electroacoustic ambiance inspired by nineties and early aughties new age, whose middle section abounds in staticky bursts which billow like smoke rings and gilded oscillations which glimmer underneath the gauze, as the duo also incorporate field recordings which were captured in Japan.

Keith Fullerton Whitman whose sketches, experiments and other works in progress are never less than exemplary issues a series of guitar, computer and Publison DHM 89 B 2 improvisations which he captured in November at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales studios in Paris. Making the most of the distinctive delay and pitch shifting capabilities of the Publison, over the four tracks of Never, Forever submerged liturgies and Wagnerian operas or luminous bathyspheres give way to what sounds like more of a lava dance on the third track ‘Riparian’ despite its title, where a brisk yet viscous tread might navigate an eroding riverbank or fallen ash and pyroclasts while ‘Aglet’ is more industrial, as those submerged liturgies swap out organ and choir for string sections which screech beneath the waves.

Klein divulges a great guilt on a loosie which carries the same scabrous dynamics as marked, a pummelling wall of distortion over ricocheting drums which swaps a few crashing keys for some of those guitars strewn with feedback as the producer and songwriter prays for a blessing ‘but the odds won’t stack’. And finally Laura Cannell draws another epic undertaking to a close, as after traversing the sunken depths of Doggerland, embracing the low tones of her spirit animal the raven and taking in the harvest she concludes her yearlong Lore series with some wintry drones on her violin as Molly men drag the Cutty Wren and plough through East Anglian villages.