Driven by our shameful national rent crisis and housing shortage, this has been in train for some time now, as my tQ co-pilot John Doran discussed in his New Weird Britain series on BBC Radio 4 back in 2019. COVID-19 undoubtedly put the brakes on for a while, but this year it feels as if things are moving forward again, with places like the aforementioned Jewellers, The Victory in Hereford, Yeovil Art Space, Eastville Project Space, Glastonbury’s King Arthur, Nottingham’s JT Soar, Rhyader’s The Lost ARC, Preston’s The Ferret, Birkenhead’s Future Yard, and The Ramsgate Music Hall all going strong, while the Sowerby Bridge Puzzle Hall Inn has joined our old favourites of the Trans-Pennine Underground – Hebden’s The Trades Club, Todmorden’s The Golden Lion, The White Hotel and the various haunts of Fat Out in Salford. That’s not to say the cities are failing – against it all, Industrial Coast have been using all sorts of venues across Middlesbrough, there’s the Quarry in Liverpool, Newcastle’s The Lubber Fiend, plus Walthamstow Trades Hall: are all providing a haven for the unusual. Of course, this isn’t just about buildings, but the people who are investing their time, energy and hard-earned coin to make this work, a disparate and devoted community of the sonically adventurous.
On a wider level, I feel this is further evidence that the fragmentation that has been the defining aspect of our culture over the 15 years since tQ was founded continues apace. Indeed, intelligence reaches us that end-of-year album charts in other publications have been far less predictable than usual, with no consensus and a bewildering array of records in contention. We are happy to see our comrades joining us in chaos and disorder. Contacts over there in the mainstream of the music industry tell us that the days of hoping for the next Ed Sheeran or Adele are over, and that working hard in a niche and labels persevering with artists across a few albums is starting to bring reward. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this continues to evolve in coming years.
Back to 2023, and for me it has been a tough and strange year to get deep into albums. What with a toddler rampaging around, serious illness in my immediate family and extreme financial stress, my relationship with music has shifted. I can barely get to gigs now, and I’ve found myself less immersed in records unless they’ve had an intense personal emotional heft, such as PJ Harvey‘s I Inside The Old Year Dying or The Inward Circles‘ Before We Lie Down In Darknesse. What has kept me going, though, is the excitement that all those people putting on gigs and festivals around the country clearly share – that the thrill of hearing umpteen new releases every month never fades. I always told myself that if I became jaded I would stop writing about music. Whatever else is going on in my life, I’m happy to say this enthusiasm shows no sign of flagging, which is why this 15th year of The Quietus’ operation is going to be far from its last, even though it nearly was.
As many of you will be aware, back in April, we had to fire distress rockets to say that tQ was in rough waters financially and ask our readers to help us out by becoming subscribers. All of us were bowled over when the response broke all our targets and put the site on a secure footing for the rest of the year. Of course, we still need more subscribers to help us thrive rather than merely survive, so if you’ve ever previously thought of signing up, now’s the time to do so – remember the Low Culture tier gets exclusive essays, podcasts, playlists and newsletters every month, while the Sound & Vision top tier also includes exclusive music. Indeed, if you sign up as a Low Culture or Sound & Vision subscriber today, you can instantly get stuck in to over nine hours of music in our albums of the year chart playlists, available here. If you can afford it, we’d be very grateful for your support, as would all the artists on our chart – if you’re into what you’re hearing below, please do consider buying the releases from our pals at Norman Records.
We love our subscribers, and we love hearing from them. At Teeth Of The Sea’s recent album launch gig at Walthamstow Trades Hall, one of the venues that’s increasingly supporting music from our realm, a handsome fellow came up to me and said, “You don’t know me but I’m a Quietus subscriber and I just wanted to thank you for saving me from being a desiccated husk of a man.” It’s one of the nicest things anyone has said to me all year, so thank you, dear subscriber, whoever you were, and the same to all of you out there who have kept us keeping on through difficult times. The Quietus – moisturiser of the wheels of culture. We’ll take that.
Luke Turner
This chart was voted for by core tQ staff, columnists and writers. It was compiled by John Doran, and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede.
Call SuperEulo CrampsCan You Feel The Sun
There’s always been something very personal, introspective and intimate, almost in a singer-songwriter way, about Call Super’s albums, be it due to the airy nature and intricately minimalistic arrangements of their productions, the inclusion of their father’s clarinet-playing, or the use of their own poetry. With Eulo Cramps, they delve even deeper into the alleys of their mind. An effervescent dialogue between ambient tones, leftfield house beats, pop flirtations, contemporary jazz techniques, spoken word excursions and experimental music trends, it might just be the producer’s most compelling artistic achievement to date.
Niecy BluesExit SimulationKranky
The debut full-length release from South Carolina’s Niecy Blues, born Janise Robinson, draws elements of gospel, R&B, ambient and trip hop into its smoky expanse across 13 spellbinding tracks. Robinson’s time spent growing up in a deeply religious Oklahoma household – they say their “first experience with ambient music was church” via “slow songs of worship” – runs right through the record, from the sample of devotional church performance that rounds out the hazy trip hop cut ‘U Care’ to the gospel-jazz climax that comes on like a warm hug in ‘Soma’, which was the product of Robinson inviting various friends (including KeiyaA, drummer William Alexander and flautist Aisha Mars) to a studio session armed with whatever they felt they wanted and needed. Across Exit Simulation, gospel music finds natural bedfellows with experimental music in its various non-conservative strands (industrial clangs and drones on ‘Lament’, a stumbling drum machine on ‘The Architect’), and the combination – all tied together by Robinson’s frequently restrained but always captivating vocals – is sublime.
Oozing WoundWe Cater To CowardsThrill Jockey
If this is the end of the road for Oozing Wound, then that is an enormous shame, particularly because We Cater To Cowards is another triumph as well as an Olive Oyl-legged step forward. For starters, the influence of the mighty and massively underrated band TAD is heftier than ever. Also with a waft of The Jesus Lizard to its sinister swing and feedback-ridden noise-rockiness, ‘Total Existence Failure’ provides further evidence that this lot are fully aware there are plenty of rival varieties of music that can often outstrip the heaviness of heavy metal.
Anohni and the JohnsonsMy Back Was A Bridge For You To CrossSecretly Canadian
Prefacing My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, ANOHNI stated that she wanted these songs to “be useful, to help others move with dignity and resilience through these conversations we are now facing.” Certainly, she has delivered a body of work where she has given herself the space to be resilient, vulnerable and inspiring. This crystallises atop the languid guitar melody of closing track ‘You Be Free’, where ANOHNI describes dancing in “violent times” and the difficulty of living day-to-day. She continues, “Done my work / My back was broke,” before urging the listener to be free, “be free for me.” It’s one of the more sparse and simple compositions on the album, yet its message triumphs.
John ZornHomenaje A Remedios VaroTzadik
One of 14 releases in 2023 from surely the most prolific composer of his generation, John Zorn’s tribute to the great Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo is the fourth release from his Incerto group. Over the course of nine tracks, Julian Lage (guitar), Brian Marsella (piano), Jorge Roeder (bass) and Ches Smith (drums) construct a beguiling and beautiful soundscape of accessible tunes suffused with a chimerical sense of the mysterious that serves its subject well. Opener ‘Blue Equinox’, one of several album standouts, rolls in slowly initially, the interplay between Lage’s magnificent, classical-inflected guitar and Marsella’s jazzy piano becoming a little more frenetic as the track progresses, yet without ever losing its sunny and melodic disposition. This is a gorgeous release, simultaneously familiar and strange, like finding oneself on an elaborate and ornate cruise ship in a dream with the band playing the finest cocktail jazz to ever grace the seas.
RezzettMeant Like ThisThe Trilogy Tapes
Rezzett’s uncanny timbres haunt me on an unconscious level, evoking a sense of a future of infinite possibilities, the Black Secret Technology type of futurism. In the same breath, an aura of Fisherian lost futures informs Meant Like This, making it a succession of elusive autobiographical flashbacks and flashforwards. Tracks like ‘Hevvy’ and ‘The Defiance’ pass you by like ghostly apparitions of early UK house and Detroit techno, sonic palimpsests built on the foundations that are slowly disintegrating into nothingness. The spectral monochrome aura of atmospheric jungle tunes like ‘Vivz Portal’, meanwhile, function as gateways to nostalgic musings on half-forgotten lovers.
The Stargazer’s AssistantFire WorshipperHouse Of Mythology
The Stargazer’s Assistant have been circulating since the late 00s and thread the needle, both in membership and music, between the crypto-industrial immensity of Coil and the brutal prog enormity of Guapo. Fire Worshipper‘s ten tracks are variously bite-sized but never more intense than 14-minute centrepiece ‘Shalman’. File the record away under real gone occult folkscapes for torchlit cave rituals from three cats who all profess to have the middle initial J.
Dodo Resurrection IIA Treatise On Ceremonial MagicShack In The Barley Productions
Four wordless wigouts, each between eight and ten minutes long, offer an eye-of-providence triangulation between vintage Afrofunk, Canterbury scene turtleneck rock and Atomic Rooster-type moustache thud on A Treatise On Ceremonial Magic. When the percussion is at its least ‘rock’, as per that first part of the equation, the album is maybe at its zenith – skip to about 1:40 of the severely-titled ‘Rosicrucian Grimoires (Paris, 1620)’ for that – but I love the squeaky-clean keys (Mellotron?) on ‘Nostradamus’ Requiem’ and the doomy Crimson vibe that emerges in ‘A Burial Of Dodo Bones’.
MaxoEven God Has A Sense Of HumorDef Jam
Described by Maxo as an assembly of “feelings that I need to leave behind,” Even God Has A Sense Of Humor is, in-between flashes of jokey wordplay, imbued with the Los Angeles rapper’s characteristically heart-on-the-sleeve reflections on anxiety, trauma and racial injustice. Signs of a growing sense of worldliness as he approaches his thirties, though, run right through the record, from the talk of “redefining my meaning” on the reflective second verse of ‘Nuri’ to the self-confrontational bars found on ‘Face Of Stone’, which sees Maxo call himself out over his own emotional coldness. It’s all brought together wonderfully by a carefully cultivated collection of beats that flits between sample-based drum machine loops and live, jazz-inflected instrumentation, with production by beatmakers lastnamedavid and Graymatter flowing effortlessly into the arrangements of drummer Karriem Riggins and jazz multi-instrumentalist Melanie Charles, among others.
MxLxSaintThe state51 Conspiracy
It’s safe to say that at this stage in his career Matt Loveridge is a bit of a cult hero. He has released a staggering amount of music since the mid-2000s under the monikers MXLX, Fairhorns, Knife Liibrary, Gnar Hest, WON’T and Team Brick. On the surface, Saint, his 63rd record, might seem like a step back, but under the surface lurks something as complex and mind-melting as anything else he’s released to date.
DeVon Russell Gray / Nathan Hanson / Davu SeruWe SickInnova
‘Letters’ opens We Sick with a series of Nathan Hanson’s hesitant phrases, clicks and short breaths circling around Davu Seru’s echoing cymbal hits. Soon, a sustained, wailing saxophone tone rises from these fragments, creating a space for DeVon Russell Gray to unfurl a disjointed piano walk, while their exchange evolves into a nervous thriller and heated argument, mimicking the slowly sinking realisation of a grim situation. Through the years, the inherent revolutionary energy of free jazz was often pacified, riding along the usual narrative of leaving politics out of music. While not as literal as the art of some of their contemporaries – Matana Roberts reads out the names of Black people murdered by police during their concerts – Gray, Hanson and Seru channel the same sensation of revolt and fire through each of their musical expressions.
Moussa TchingouTamiditineSahel Sounds
Moussa Tchingou is a 29-year-old guitarist from Niger, one of the most in-demand musicians for celebrations in Agadez and influenced by Bollywood music. On the original Music From Saharan Cellphones compilation – a release that essentially cracked open and built an American and European audience for a whole region’s music – the standout track was Mdou Mcotar’s ‘Tahoultine’. It was already massive in the mp3 sharing scene around Niger, but it had a totally different energy to his raucous debut Afelan. Tchingou picks up where ‘Tahoultine’ left off, continuing a lineage of Tuareg electric guitar, propulsive percussion and autotuned vocals that bring a distinctive shimmer to Tchingou’s style of desert blues. The four tracks have a torque-like perpetual motion; they move steadily towards a destination you never want to reach and, with those gossamer refractions in the voice and electronics it is sited in, the distorted air between horizon and sky.
AnjimileThe King4AD
At the outset of Anjimile’s first full-length album since signing to 4AD, we are treated to dense and mobile vocal harmonies sat within a warm hiss. Indeed, almost violent saturation is something of a bedrock for the album. All things seem pushed towards a threshold of harmonic distortion that reeks of simmering anger and threat. This suits Anjimile’s voice extremely well. I could listen to this rich singing indefinitely. Musically, they draw from some interesting places, notably importing the pattern-based composition that Philip Glass and the like borrowed from the African continent. It produces a glorious mix of American folk and diasporic investigation, which connect seamlessly to Anjimile’s Malawian heritage.
GodfleshPurgeAvalanche
After 2017’s psychedelic and abstract Post Self found industrial metal pioneers Godflesh looking to the future, Purge instead looks back to the band’s past – it’s probably no coincidence that there’s only a letter’s difference between this and 1992’s Pure, as both draw heavily from the robust boom-bap rhythms of hip hop whilst creating a gloomy, riff-centric mood, especially on opener ‘Nero’ or the aggressively repetitious sampling of ‘Army Of Non’. This is no mere throwback, however, as there’s a darkness to Purge that is entirely its own; there’s something suffocatingly seductive about this record’s atmosphere, with hypnotic cuts like ‘Lazarus Leper’ and the absolutely seething ‘Land Lord’ slowly coiling themselves around you like the snake on the album sleeve, closing in ever tighter until there’s no room to breathe.
KasaiJ/P/NChinabot
Recorded alongside the twin pressures of raising a child and running a farm, on J/P/N, KASAI, AKA Daisuke Iijima, merges footwork and juke with minyo – a form of traditional Japanese folk singing which spread through the country, evolving into different forms as it landed in different regions. The result is something far more integrated than simply sticking some samples on a groove. Footwork’s presence in these nine tracks isn’t so much sheer velocity as how KASAI expands a beat, his compositions rolling out in shape-shifting lattices of rhythmic and tonal colour. It’s a joyous tape, Iijima’s soaring vocal melodies weaving through pounding drums and a vibrant palette of synthetic and acoustic instrumentation. Wrong-footing shifts in rhythm or flashes of tender triumph in the vocals keep this music in a state of constant flux without dropping for a second the pulse and rich melodicism that makes it so compelling.
Spirit PossessionOf The Sign…Profound Lore
Peer through the cathedral of reverb and multitudinous taps of delay and it becomes clear Portland’s Spirit Possession are both a thrilling proposition – skipping deftly between Celtic Frost-like passages of avant thrash, Goblin-indebted giallo prog, hellish South Of Heaven bombast, and a clear love for Bathory – and great fun. Drummer A. Spungin spices up the stew with a battery of homemade synths which briefly summons the spirit of Deathprod – it would be cool to see her steer them on a short detour through lesser travelled roads of Krautrock-leaning ambient like Blood Incantation did recently. Guitarist S. Peacock, meanwhile, clearly has more riff ideas than he knows what to do with, which, let’s face it, is a fine problem to have.
Stephen O’MalleySept duos pour guitare acoustique & piano préparéShelter Press
This collaborative record from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras is entirely acoustic and contains duets performed on prepared piano and guitar, but listening to it feels close to sitting in the resonance boxes of these instruments. While O’Malley is commonly associated with the dense, bass-heavy drones of Sunn O))), here he swaps that sound for a steel string just-intoned acoustic guitar. He plays sparingly, and you can hear the strings resonate with a short, dry sound, stretched out in time, metallically fading into silence. Pateras, on the other hand, plays the prepared piano, treating it primarily as a percussion instrument, occasionally making it sound like a selection of gongs. Subtle strokes, interventions and preparations build this music’s complex, appealing structure. Both instruments generate minimalist sounds in a suspended mood, a calm dialogue – single gestures are reduced, and the lack of reverberation builds a study in patience with a maximally sacred spirit.
Zhao Cong55355Aloe
Beijing-based Zhao Cong makes something moving from the typically ignorable on 55355, herding the noisy excesses of the quotidian into delicate soundscapes. She mics up everyday objects to create gentle assemblages of buzzes, hums, whirs and clicks; the four pieces collected on this tape cut from sessions without any overdubbing. What’s most remarkable about Cong’s work is that a collection of sounds which could be maddening becomes serene and soothing. The way she selects, controls and sculpts makes you want to dive in and explore each texture intimately. She shows that what might be irritating background noise can be immensely fascinating if it’s shifted to the foreground.
Yossari BabyInferiority ComplexAlphaville
Inferiority Complex has been made with the dance floor firmly in mind, beats to the fore. The title track is an electropop highlight, while ‘The Wheel’ quite possibly wants to spin you round like Dead Or Alive in their hi-NRG pomp. For all that, there are more reflective moments too, notably as the album plays out with gentler electronica on the delightfully po-faced ‘Je Suis Mort’. On the contrary, by turns funny, angry and arch, Yossari Baby sound vibrantly alive.
