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These are our favourite reissues, compilations, live albums, mixes, OSTs and etceteras of the last 12 months, as voted for by tQ staff, columnists and core writers
In 2022, I noticed that ‘old’ and ‘new’ ceased to become that relevant as ways of categorising the music I enjoy – it was only when dividing my favourites of the year into albums of the year and reissues etc. that I really made the distinction at all. Perhaps this is down to the fact that for the latter half of the year I took temporary charge of The Quietus as acting editor while John Doran was away on a writing sabbatical. Spending more time on editing than writing for the first time in my career, I found myself diving sheerly by circumstance into genres, scenes, styles and stories that would not otherwise have come my way.
One of the best live performances I saw this year was by Sarathy Korwar, whose new project KALAK is a palindrome of the Hindi and Urdu ‘kal’, which means both yesterday and tomorrow. To grossly oversimplify, his work explores that non-linear view of time prevalent in Indian and wider South Asian culture, and expresses it onstage by combining traditional and modern sounds into an intense whirl of jazz. At the sound’s heart is the relentless cyclical ‘Kalak rhythm’, as Korwar has dubbed it. He has also created a striking circular symbol to represent it, envisaged as a notation method more suited to a percussionist less inclined to view things linearly.
Another act that has stuck with me throughout 2022 are the folk group Shovel Dance Collective, who play traditional folk songs but present them as extremely relevant – whether by giving them a political edge by platforming the narratives of queer people and people of colour, a tendency towards avant-garde instrumentation, or simply by performing them with intense emotional gusto. As guitarist and vocalist Mataio Austin Dean told us in an interview last month: "I think this idea that you have to see the progressive and traditional as opposites is wrong." It’s for that reason that I found the reissue of The Watersons’ 1965 folksong collection Frost And Fire (among those listed below) to be as relevant to my everyday life as anything released in the last 12 months.
The list below is in some ways a celebration of that fact, rather than just a rundown of overpriced collectors items and cast-offs to make up the numbers. Every one of the reissues, live albums, compilations, mixes and more that we’ve selected this year has as much life as the records in our Albums Of The Year chart. Speaking of which, in his introduction to that list last week, Luke Turner made the point that if we are to continue bringing you such rundowns, we need your help to do so. Without banging on about it too much more, it’s a point I’d like to reiterate here. Sign up now and get an avalanche of genuinely phenomenal exclusive perks – essays, podcasts, playlists, music you can’t hear anywhere else and more. Find out what you get here, and get your first month completely free by signing up here. If you’re not able or not inclined right now, we hope at the very least you discover something you love as much as we do among the 100 extraordinary picks below. Time may not be linear, but without the help of you, dear readers, ours would have been up a long time ago.
Patrick Clarke, December 2022
This chart was compiled by John Doran and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede. It was voted for by Robert Barry, Charlie Brigden, Bernie Brooks, Jasa Buzinel, Patrick Clarke, John Doran, Christian Eede, Richard Foster, Noel Gardner, Sean Kitching, Jakub Knera, Anthea Leyland, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Peter Margasak, David McKenna, JR Moores, Mariam Rezaei, and Daryl Worthington
This is arguably the Venom box to end all Venom boxes, in that it contains pretty much everything that the original, groundbreaking, highly influential, deterritorializing, destabilising first incarnation of the group produced that you would ever want – and then some. So, we’re talking two essential albums, Welcome To Hell and Black Metal, plus the mixed-bag of At War With Satan, plus titles released after they had been leapfrogged by Metallica and Slayer and started to doubt themselves, namely, Possessed and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; along with the two legendary demos and a DVD of their (self-booked) headline show at the Hammersmith Apollo in 1984.
Ben Lovett updates the gothic sound of the original Hellraiser, pushing it into a transgressive vibe that melds orchestral and industrial, with a supremely grimy feel. Sleaze and seduction are intrinsically connected, and it edges you all the way, eventually simmering to a satisfying climax.
crash830 is the alias of Brooklyn-based artist Ben Bondy, an affiliate of the 3XL crew who count the likes of Exael, Special Guest DJ, Ulla Straus and Perila among their ranks. This record, captured during a live performance late last year at New York venue Baby’s All Right, is a reverb-drenched, lo-fi journey through shoegaze guitars which hits its peak on the gorgeous penultimate cut ‘rast’.
97.
Kristin OppenheimVoices Fill My Head: Collected Sound Works 1993-1999INFO
Released to coincide with an exhibition at London’s Greengrassi gallery, this collection of Oppenheim’s mid-’90s sound art is a revelation. With the simplest of materials – a short, repeated phrase or two, repeated over and over again by two or more voices drifting in and out of sync – the Brooklyn-based artist weaves hypnotic patterns with a remarkable emotional heft.
96.
Various ArtistsPierre Barouh And The Saravah SoundWEWANTSOUNDS
Pierre Barouh’s writing partnership with Francis Lai on the soundtrack to Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme Et Une Femme led directly to the creation of hugely influential French label and publisher Saravah, home to Brigitte Fontaine and Areski, Jacques Higelin, jazzers, prog rockers, contemporary composers and ‘world music’ before the term existed. WEWANTSOUNDS’ compilation provides an excellent introduction that should inspire further digging.
Under Georg Gräwe’s direction, trumpeter Horst Grabosch, saxophonist Harald Dau, drummer Achim Krämer, and bassist Hans Schneider operate with stunning unity and purpose, with explosive improvisations erupting from surprisingly pithy post-bop vehicles, as the band occupies the leader’s compositions with an ensemble-oriented drive. Both of these albums have already been available as digital downloads via the great Destination-Out , which administers the FMP catalogue online. But sometimes it takes a physical object to slap some sense into oneself.
A 40th birthday reissue issued almost to the day, this remastered and bonus material’d-up package puts the mind-frazzling debut album by Dublin’s Virgin Prunes back on vinyl and into a contemporary context where it more than stands up. …If I Die, I Die could be called post-punk or gothic rock in a shorthand sense but ventures way beyond those boundaries; if more bands didn’t follow them, you suspect it was for a lack of flair, fortitude or both. Its second disc comprises various early mixes, demos and 12-inch edits, plus an early-’00s remix of the band’s best-known song ‘Baby Turns Blue’ by Colin Newman, the album’s producer.
93.
Various ArtistsJon Savage’s 1977-1979 – Symbols Clashing EverywhereAce
I’ve had an infuriating earworm for about 37 years now. Every so often I start hearing John Foxx barking the chorus to ‘Young Savage’ except the words he uses are: “Jon Savage! Jon Savage!” For many years Gary Numan was accused of being nothing more than a Bowie rip-off. It was a weak observation, Numan getting much of his initial inspiration from Foxx, who admittedly did bring a bit of Bowie (and a bit of Ferry) to the post-punk party. Both Tubeway Army and Ultravox feature on this 100% recommended compilation from Jon Savage! Jon Savage! Lots of people talk a good game when it comes to the links between disco, reggae, punk, dub and so on, but few can locate the exact intersections with such laser sharp precision.
On this album, the virtuosity of Jim O’Rourke and Mats Gustafsson is found in the sharing of small, intricate and tempered gestures. The hour-long album flies by, filled with space and thought. The meeting of these two luminaries of the international experimental music scene, is both exciting and profoundly grounding, and of course it is. It’s bloody Mats Gustafsson and Jim O’Rourke.
I typically don’t care about remix albums, and if you ask me, 10-inches are a cursed format, so trust when I say this baby is the stuff, the real deal, because generally speaking, I’d avoid this kind of thing like the plague. An addendum of sorts to XAM Duo’s slim-but-stupendous second outing, XAM Duo II, XAM Duo RMX unsurprisingly finds James Holden, The Early Years, and Richard Pike putting their spin on choice selections from II. What is surprising is that all three of these offerings are as worthwhile and creatively potent as the sax-and-synth outfit’s outstanding originals. Even more surprising is that – far from a toss off – Holden’s eleven-and-a-half-minute remix of ‘Cold Stones’ is among his absolute best work. That’s saying something, and if it doesn’t make this slab essential, I don’t know what does.
One of my favourite newcomers of the year, the Jordianian supertalent Toumba takes us on an uncannily hard-hitting, bass-worshipping, and expectation-defying musical journey on this mix for the Untitled 909 blog. It veers between low-slung slow burners and hyperspeed, genre-crossing blends with no let-up in energy.
Some of my happiest moments dancing with friends in 2022 were soundtracked by Canada-born, London-based DJ Peach. With a knack for combining hidden house gems from the ’90s with turbo party music very much of the now, sets at festivals like Houghton, Dimensions and Body Movements were all dispatched over the summer with ease. It was amid the period of those festivals in August that she played at US queer techno weekender Honcho Campout, from which this set recording is lifted. Journeying through euphoric prog house, hardgroove techno, a Missy Elliott edit and much more, and coming out the other end with an encore play of Eliza Rose’s smash single ‘B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)’, the mix takes me back to all those aforementioned moments under the sun.
Howard Shore’s score for the latest David Cronenberg body-horror opus is intensely creepy and insidious, but also intelligent. It constantly feels like it’s evolving, like it’s trying to break the surface and reveal something new and revolutionary, like Cronenberg himself, really.
Hitomi Moritani, today known for her ongoing solo project in experimental electronica as Phew, was involved with cult label Vanity only on one occasion with her avant garde post punk outfit Aunt Sally, releasing the self-titled Aunt Sally in 1979. Despite the label’s cultivated obscurity her release had a striking presence, her vocals cutting through dissonance to deliver a cunning pastiche in no wave minimalism. A piece in Rock Magazine in September 1980 introduced the curious escapism of her lyrics, set against a dark urban setting of vagabonds and faceless crowds – “I want to pursue dreams, even if its an illusion… the sounds of Aunt Sally are probably more suited to me now than Brian Eno.”
86.
Jerry HuntGround: Five Mechanic Convention StreamsBlank Forms
Blank Forms continues to prove itself as one of the most important archival labels on the planet with this wild and ritualistic record by the late Jerry Hunt. Sounding at times like eavesdropping on some hermetic ritual, other times like someone rummaging in a drawer, Hunt’s music is consistently joyous, always taking you by surprise.
The first thing that attracts attention on this release is the grain of Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s voice. Sometimes he resembles Arthur Russell, Marc Almond or Jónsi from Sigur Rós. When the cassette was released, one of the journalists called him “Farinelli from Lviv.” The musician accompanies himself on the piano with a smear of reverb added, which creates a slightly artificial, but also unreal, atmosphere. The eight chamber pieces have a long, progressive form. One lasts only three minutes, the others are much longer, around six to eight minutes. Tsymbrovsky sings his own lyrics on two tracks while the rest is Ukrainian poetry: futurist Mykhailo Semenko’s writings from the 1930s, and poems by Mykola Vorobyov, one of the leaders of the artistic underground of the 1970s and the founder of the Kyiv School Of Poetry.
Colombia’s TraTraTrax label has been assembling an impressive discography of hip-shaking Latin club music since its inaugural release in 2020, and was responsible for one of summer 2022’s biggest dance floor hits in Nick León’s ‘Xtasis’. Rounding off the label’s year, no pare, sigue sigue takes in big room ‘Raptor house’ energy from Venezuela’s DJ Babatr, propulsive, high-tempo rhythms courtesy of Bitter Babe, and dystopian dembow from Ecuadorian pairing PVSSY x Entrañas, among much more. For an insight into the various interconnected Latin club music scenes currently thriving across North, Central and South America, which have given us some of the year’s best dance floor-focused music, this compilation is essential listening.
83.
White HillsThe Revenge Of Heads On FireHeads On Fire
Most anniversary reissues settle for dumping a bunch of unreleased tracks at the end of the original record, like paper legs stapled onto the bottom of the Mona Lisa. Taking greater care for far more satisfying results, White Hills weaved their six “lost” cuts throughout remixed and remastered songs from the original release of Heads On Fire, providing a full sense of the vision they’d had for it in the first place. It’s the Apocalypse Now Redux of hard-rocking space-psych.
Not much is known about All In One, one of a plethora of unsigned groups in the late 1960s who produced self-funded, extremely limited private presses of their material to be sold after shows and given away to friends and family. Undoubtedly, that obscurity is part of the record’s appeal as it receives its first proper reissue via Bella Union, but the music, too – spectral folk rock that is often magnetic in its sparseness – only adds to the intrigue that swirls around this long-lost gem.
20 years ago this mix blew the roof off the indie scene, setting the path for Justice and the Ed Banger Records crew, LCD Soundsystem and the DFA mob, and – closer to home – Erol Alkan and friends, to push the guitar-obsessed genre ever forward into the rave. You might say that the spark that Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson lit with Scremadelica really grew to flame at this point. It also opened my ears to a whole new world, as someone with a long-held antipathy to “all that guitar nonsense” when I bought it for a New Year’s Eve party at my first shared house in London. Then 22 and still in my clubbing honeymoon, now 42 and more of an occasional raver, it seems like a good time to look back. Especially as 2ManyDJs are doing the same by releasing a revamped edition, that sees it made available on streaming platforms for the first time ever.
Form Grows Rampant is a visually arresting piece of film, one whose inception emerged simultaneously with the music, but we can’t help but ponder what intentions lay behind the gaze. This would be an unfair concern in and of itself, but in light of prior work like the indefensible video to Coil’s ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, it becomes a more understandable query. If you’re going to make it a habit of flirting with this topic of sexualised youth, then it’s not uncharitable for the viewer to have such anxieties. I don’t think it’s enough to go: “Ambiguity yeah? You’re meant to feel uncomfortable yeah? Sleazy loved to shock, he was always a taboo buster!”
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