As I write this I feel the inexorable rush towards the end of the year, when you blink at Halloween and by the time you open your eyes it’s Christmas Eve. The release schedules are really reflecting this too. It feels like everyone who’s been working on a record now seems impatient to get the thing out before the year closes out, if only for the desperate need to finally pass it onto someone else and begin again refreshed in 2025. And yet we the critics remain fully submerged in the year just gone, prepping endless end of year lists for whatever raft of publications we contribute to.
It’s also my turn to host the end of year Late Junction roundup, and as well as the usual albums lists I’m plugging in my top earworms of 2024. The melodies that got superglued to my resting mind were ‘Machine D’Amour’ from The Castle II by Tomo Akikawabaya, reissued by Polish label Mecanica earlier in the year; ‘Jerusalem’ by K. Yoshimatsu, out on Phantom Limb back in August, and this mad and brilliant enigma of a synth-pop track from 1984 called ‘Windy Outside’ that sounds like Bowie in a spooky Western scene. It’s by Tuxedomoon’s Blaine L. Reininger and Mikel Rouse and it has become a chronic problem in my household. We cannot now unhear that lonesome cowboy sing.
Perhaps in reaction to the flurry of releases, I have burrowed further into my own listening hole in recent months, and away from music journalism. I can often be found in a tunnel network frozen in a state of temporal gloom, which I have populated entirely by industrial-leaning post punk 1979-1982, 1990s digidubs, and experimental music from Japan 1968-1999, popping my head above ground to feed on regular drops of archival material from Les Rallizes Dénudés and Robbie Basho. (The imminent live Basho box set has been bumped from this column to full review, incoming on The Quietus next month.)
Aside from the odd commissioned article I realised that this column, and Late Junction, are the only two places I can really be considered a regular, whether as a writer, or where I pass on opinions as a disembodied voice on the wireless. I noticed this partly because of recent blips in this routine, writing a few hundred words on Jennifer Walshe’s Ursonate on this fine site, and a feature on Valentina Magaletti for The Guardian – the latter was a particular joy to interview; a fast-talking no-filters person who is propelled forever into the next new thing by unceasing appetites for more. It refreshed my fondness for interviewing.
Outside of this I have been writing sleevenotes and album essays, some with a byline, some without. I enjoy the feeling these give, of being secretly present. You might have a record I wrote the notes for right there on your floor stack. I wonder what changes in the reading, if you do not know who wrote the notes? Does anyone care about anonymity except the author? It drew me back to research from recent years, and I thought again about the poet-nun-potter Otagaku Rengetsu, who undermined any notion of authenticity by collaborating with those who bootlegged her work; about Soetsu Yanagi bemoaning how many modern potters signed their work; and about of all the early music made by persons now unknown. As we pass into the final weeks of the year, I have been thinking about being absent and present at the same time.
Kumio KurachiOpen TodayBison
Excited to receive news of a new album by poet, illustrator, multi-instrumentalist Kumio Kurachi, incoming on Bison (home of Still House Plants). Bison is the only label to have released Kurachi outside of Japan since he started in the 1980s (this is a co-release with one of his other labels, the excellent Enban), but he is apparently well known over there because he won the national championship of NHK’s Poetry Boxing in 2002. Open Today builds on the core palette of solo guitar and vocals present in 2019’s Sound Of Turning Earth but adds drums, bass, strings, keys and multitracked vocals, all performed by Kurachi. I Iove the cello on ‘Cheap Flat’; I love the way he rolls around a drumkit on ‘Year One And Public’, and the flamenco wash on the guitar on ‘Castle Ruins’ is utterly charming. Where I would have filed some of Kurachi’s previous albums alongside other rawer Japanese folk singers (his references to the prosaic, domestic and mundane make him feel like a friendlier, less bawdy Kan Mikami sometimes) Open Today sits somewhere else. The rich instrumentation; the crescendos and choruses, means I’m filing this one alongside Jim O’Rourke’s Insignificance. (Appropriate, since O’Rourke has recorded Kurachi’s albums in the past).
Crystabel Efemena Riley6.9.24Takuroku
Recorded at one of my favourite gigs of the year, the Incapacitants residency at OTO in September, this is, finally, an actual solo release from my favourite drummer around. I love to watch Riley play. She moves around a kit that is both simplified and extended, which usually consists of a couple of toms and a snare, maybe a kick, with a couple of objects – scrap metal and the like. She stalks the drums like prey, stabbing, poking at skins, circling them as curiosities, finding a sound and searching out a tone, rolling into rhythms that feel more appropriately called instinctive rather than improvised. Her sets flow, unfurling around a bodily rhythm not a percussive structure. If you have the chance to catch her playing, do not miss it. I want this release to be the first of many. More please!
Joseba IrazokiGitarra Lekeitioak (Onomatopeikoa II)OTOROKU
If you don’t like Bill Orcutt you won’t like this. Basque musician Joseba Irazoki follows up his 2017 album Onomatopeikoa, with these 23 tracks, many of them just a couple of minutes long: brief and insurgent attacks on an idea or toe dipping in radiant exercises. At times it bordering on imitative (as in opening tracks ‘RO 276’ and ‘E’) which I have no problem with at all, Irazoko’s distinction being an extra shimmer and wibble on his guitar tone, like his motifs have been distorted by the hazy mirages coming off a two lane blacktop under a blazing sun. This intensifies on the charming and downright bongy ‘RO27’ which sounds like a drunk digital doorbell trying to get home, or on noisier pieces like the collapsing sonics of ‘1920’. Elsewhere on the album there are duos with Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies and Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński, the former a dance of spangly bright strings, the latter an easy, slow rally between two guitars. Have not seen much pickup for this, which is a shame, because it’s brilliant.
FelintoUtopia MilhãoBokeh Versions / Glossy Mistakes
Whenever I play records out in bars, I play something from São Paulo artist Felinto’s 2021 album Futuro Antigo Perpétuo, and without fail, someone asks for a track ID. I will now refresh my bag with this, the third in his triptcyh, and a much more sonically complex album that draws from an expanded pool of sounds and textures. There are dog barks to open the heads down heavy dub stepper ‘Sol Na Cabecça’; breaks vs trumpet on ‘Utopia’, there are vocals, and more crackle and grime than I’ve heard from him before. I did initially hit a wall with the opener ‘Utopia’ because I don’t love breaks, but that’s because I have my own hair trigger bad associations with breaks and has nothing to do with your listening experience, and the sharpness of the horn alongside a gnarled break is objectively a killer combination. Second track ‘Tilt’ wears the breaks lighter but leans back into his recognisable style, where glassy polychrome synths and bubbling electronics render far reaching vistas, all offset with grit and bite in the foreground. The kicks in ‘Encanto Banga’ and the rolling low end on ‘Milhão’ will sound transformative on a big system in the dark with people you love, and there is euphoria to be found in the full-field rising up of ‘Brecha’. But look, I’m talking about the music here and there’s quite a lot of other stuff going on: it’s actually about life forces and politics, and is an abstract channelling of some of the clinical psychology research Felinto does into the dreams of Black communities, with collaborators including a raft of characters from the São Paulo underground, from members of Deafkids, to singer Kiko Dinucci, among others.
Mark Fell, Limpe FuchsDessogia/Queetch/FauchBlack Truffle
I feel like I have to stand on my head to listen to this album. Something about its specific sonic textures – the rub of the wholly object/skin led sound of Limpe Fuchs and the in-the-box digital-ness of Mark Fell’s palettes – makes me cock my head like a confused pet being offered an unusual treat. It is, importantly, extremely bold to try and make this work, but a natural proclivity for boldness has at least something to do with how and why these two have come together in the first place. Watching them play live at Oto a few months ago, I couldn’t get my head around it at all, they often sounded fundamentally incompatible, and the set felt like an orientation exercise, their own odd sort of alap that ended just as the body of the thing was falling into place. I think they felt this too, as Fell said, “We were only just getting going!” when it wrapped. On this full length release though, they find a space in which to operate in tandem, and the more I listen, the more I hear, with some sections that are quite unlike anything else I have ever heard.
Meredith Young-SowersAgartha: Personal Meditation MusicIMPREC
I was initially unsure of what to make of this 7CD box set on Important, which is one of the most reliable record labels around if you’re looking for enlightenment via minimal and/or durational frequencies in some form. I wonder, was I just thrown by the cover art? It’s very New Age Anthea Turner/Princess Diana fan art. It is from that era as well, originally released on cassette in 1986, when executive sheen had ironed out much of the oddness in earlier New Age Musics, but this stuff, by Meredith Young-Sowers, founder of theStillpoint Foundation spiritual community, remains curious, and if you liked Light In The Attic’s crucial box set I Am The Center, do not sleep on this. It has the same qualities of some of that private press music, which was made outside of the Music Industry proper, and made with a function, by people feeling their way through equipment to manifest that effect. I can’t find a reference to what was used to make it, but in the quest to make something that can (as suggested by the artwork) aids the dissolution of the self, they made music of value in a different way. May I take this opportunity to thank Imprec for sticking to CD with this, it is at its best as a no-flip listen.
AOB
If one of my favoured UK music festivals doesn’t book Greasy Bitches and/or Bacon Grease next year I will be having words. This one’s great. I am convinced it will be more impressively greasy live, than piped through the clean(ish) wires of my stereo and headphones.
Finally: I must mention a few other things I missed, or that came in too late to write about, or that got stuck in the stack: Firstly, this previously unreleased album of on RVNG Intl by the duo of Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, made in New York in the 1980s. Its fourth world vibes contain moments of early Sakamoto shimmer in the electronics, and Deyhim’s vocal work are rooted in (she trained as a musician in Iran), or evoke (as in the case of the Romanian polyphony I hear in the opener), various traditional singing forms. Secondly, this murky, dubby post punk from the Antipodes by a duo called Pelican Daughters who are neither daughters nor big-gobbed birds. It’s like hearing outtakes from The Shivering Man piped through a pool of stagnant water. I only caught it in the restock but it was out in September. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I really enjoyed the simple movements and clarity of this new album by Tim Parkinson, of duets between piano and strings.
