Another year flies by. The best year in the garden yet. Three years ago it was a paved rectangle, at its peak in summer I felt like I was in one of Rousseau’s jungle paintings among the lilies and crocosmia. The rewards of cabbage whites eating baby plants are the butterflies that come later; the ‘woodland zone’ (a single tree stump planted with ferns) looked lush and the moss pots survived the summer.
I got back on the pottery wheel in the tiny spider-filled shed and set myself the task of replacing all the mugs in the house in the months after my book on clay came out. I am making good progress, affixing my handles Tori Kudo-tribute style. For the London launch of the book a geochemist from the Natural History Museum photoshopped me into a little rocket for his talk about clays on Mars. It was a definite highlight.
I really felt a lot of love for London this year. It is a city which can be fickle and demanding, but I saw things I simply couldn’t anywhere else in the UK. At Darbar Festival at The Barbican I saw one of my favourite shows of all time in L. Subramaniam. The Brötzmann memorial shows at OTO were sensational, as was the Incapacitants two-nighter. I’ve got something like 15 years’ history with this venue now, and my life in the city would be far poorer without it. I saw the Hijikata school of Butoh performed by Kentaro Kujirai; Anne Gillis in a church; went on a tour of The Cosmic House, and Stephen Wright’s House Of Dreams. I saw Ithell Colquhoun’s paint textures up close; lusted for the collages of Penny Slinger, and hammered an obligatory nail into Yoko Ono’s nail painting… all in this city.
In terms of listening, my hurdy-gurdy obsession persisted and was fed well, not least by two France shows recently. This column really is turning into an experimental hurdy-gurdy round up, but I will not stop. Non-new release related digs often reverted to comfort zones: monochrome post-punk, the Bruce Gilbert extended universe, Medieval-leaning folk experiments, 90s digidubs, commercial dancehall, Colin Potter and his IRC label, psychedelic rock from 1960s-70s Latin America. I recently said to a friend that I think I’ve found all the music I like… in Japanese post-punk 1979-1982. Now I simply have to find it all for less than the Discogs asking prices of £250+ for a single 7″. Wish me luck.
TOMOVielle-ElectronicaKnotwilg
I know I’m talking about an experimental hurdy-gurdy record made by a Japanese improvising musician here, but having played this out and had more track ID requests than ever, I know there are more gurdy fans out there than you’d expect. Seriously though, this album should have had much more attention. Out on tape and digital via the ever-reliable Knotwilg, it has still not sold out. TOMO runs through a suite of styles – distorting traditional tunes on one moment then onto sparser more lyrical playing, and onto some proper gurdy minimalism. Absolutely essential for all gurdy fans – I know you’re out there.
Fred Moten, Brandon Lopez, Gerald CleaverThe Blacksmiths, The FlowersReading Group
Unquestionably my favourite album of the year, and while I love improvised music and free jazz, the challenges of structure and form mean that it rarely ends up in the ‘anytime jam’ or heavy rotation pile. I picked this up in OTO’s excellent record shop after having the digital on repeat, and barely a day has gone by when I haven’t heard a side of it (there don’t seem to be many physical copies in the UK, so pick it up while you can). The space, the through lines, but most of all the language – the lustre of Brandon López’s double bass, and Gerald Cleaver’s drums shimmer under the bright fire of Fred Moten’s pyrolytic vocal delivery, to borrow a word from the album. There are lines in it that have affixed themselves in my psyche – the raw missives stick as much as the transcendent poetry. It’s the second album for this trio, recorded live at 411 Kent in Brooklyn in the summer of 2023.
Bobby WouldRelics Of Our LifeDigital Regress
The most dour to ever do it, I found Bobby Would’s Relics Of Our Life to contain some of his stickiest songs since the fishnet-dressed Styx from 2022. I like the slow, dirgelike pacing; I like the ease and melancholy of the melodic motifs, and I really like his vocal drawl against the chiming tones of the guitars. Now, whenever I go back to it I feel at home, like I’ve dropped myself on a deep sofa in the dark.
Limpe FuchsPianoonFutura Resistenza
Confession: I don’t actually like much solo piano music. Important exceptions are Pat Thomas (who also released an amazing album this year) and Limpe Fuchs. I notice that sometimes musicians just seem to play with a rhythm or instinct that syncs with my own – that they could play anything and it would cut through and connect on a level I cannot fully explain. Limpe Fuchs is one of those people for me, and I regularly reach for her album Via. I took a while to get round to Pianoon, because I thought I didn’t like piano, but once I got there, I found myself returning again and again, especially when out of the house, trundling around town with the ivories rumbling and tinkling in my ears.
Rafael ToralSpectral EvolutionMoikai
There was so much love for this album upon release it already seemed well-trodden ground by the time I had a space to cover it, so I skipped it and continued onwards, until Uncle Music played it in a canalside pub in Wiltshire one Sunday morning. From there I went back to it often, later catching its woozy, hazy lines at a matinee show at OTO (another rush of love for London, popping in and see Rafael Toral of a lunchtime). I text Uncle Music from that show with the sentence: ‘the ketamine cowboy falls asleep in the suburban allotment’. It is a beautiful and strange record that is so nearly not weird, so nearly too easy going, but the bending colour sprays of its particular palette spread across the empty desert of my dreams, and its intractable envelopes of sound remain perplexing. When I came to write about it again for these end of year lists, I found a note to the effect that it is tuned to 432 Hz, in some approximations the ‘natural’ resonance of the entire cosmos.
Bacon GreaseConceptFort Evil Fruit
Stalwart Irish tape label Fort Evil Fruit had a really good year. I also loved the tape they released by Masami Makino, which wins best hair on cover photo award 2024. I could’ve picked either of those releases for this EOY spot, but I’m going for Bacon Grease because it opened me up to the wider world of Greasy Bitches. They make banging and grimy synth-punk in Florida, and something about it is always gummy and wrong. It often falls out of sync, and the vocals are like someone with a hallucinatory fever trying to give it a bit of Alan Vega bedroom karaoke over a drum machine they haven’t set up right.
Linus VandewolkenOude Geuze Uit NiemandaalMorctapes
Medieval-ish is one of my favourite genres that doesn’t exist, so I loved these torchlight-at-the-feasting-hall compositions from McCloud Zicmuse, aka Linus Vandewolken, an American in Belgium. He plays the Flemish hommel – a relative to the Appalachian Dulcimer – and some very quacky home-made pipes that sound in the opening track like a duck trying to sing a ballad. Morc are one of the steadiest labels around, and this was a real highlight from them this year.
Still House PlantsIf I don’t make it, I love uBison
At time of writing, no EOY lists are out, but it is my prediction that this one features in many. It is a high-water mark for this trio, one where many feelings became interlaced in their tumbling repetitions and halting motifs, without a jot of sentimentality or overwrought angles. Back in March I wrote about how their structures are made of triggers and units; “elastic tempos almost always of a lurching kind as if they were hypermobile” but that on this album, structures condense and become almost solid, almost songs. “Previously the joins between each actor in the triptych were fleeting and spidery; unsteady and sometimes teasingly so in their pleasing, halting moments of synchronicity,” I wrote. “Here it feels like the contact points have doubled or tripled.”
FauneDes FantômesLa Nòvia
This came out right at the very end of 2023, and I covered it in January 2024 so it’s going in. The previous Faune records is one of my most listened to out of the La Novia camp, and so was very glad to see another this year from the duo of Guilhem Lacroux (Tanz Mein Herz) and piper Jacques Puech (pipe fans check this one). Sourced from collections of French folk music gathered mainly by Catherine Perrier and John Wright, among others, I said it was like “trad folk sharpened on a knife block; like medieval troubadours who’ve heard Desertshore; like the cover to Airs & Graces crossed with Henry Flynt,” – descriptions which still stand.
AOB
I’d also like to give honourary mentions to Christina Kubisch Cuneiform Tabs, Goldblum, Rat Henry, Sun Araw, and Pelican Daughters. Below you will find joint top ranking for my most listened to reissues of the year, which may be tangentially connected. I said the Akikawabaya album sounded like a 1980s Japanese coldwave musician having a weird dream about Scott Walker’s post Drift releases, and that’s still the best I’ve got.
Tomo Akikawabaya – The Castle II
(Mecanica)
R.N.A. Organism – R.N.A.O Meets P.O.P.O
(Mesh Key)
