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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
Spoiler alert, but our favourite reissue of 2023 is a thing of absolute beauty: Dorothy Carter’s 1978 masterpiece Waillee Waillee. In her review of the record for tQ, Jude Rogers homed in on its central instrument, the dulcimer, trying to get to grips with just what it is that makes it so resonant, that evokes such a deeply spiritual response in the listener in so many different contexts. In the introduction to last year’s reissues chart I wrote about how the divisions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ music are ceasing to mean that much to me, and over 2023 that sense has only increased. I wonder if it’s the way in which so much of the music you’ll find compiled below, like Carter’s, seems to tap into something deeper than nostalgia, anniversaries, box sets and so on. That sheer, stark feeling that the best music can inspire.
The music that I’ve enjoyed the most this year is the music that evokes that primal ‘something’. There’s a theory I’ve long enjoyed that human speech first evolved as an imitation of birdsong, so perhaps that’s why Mappa’s superb compilation Synthetic Bird Music (also high in our chart) resonates so deeply. As Daryl Worthington’s piece on both that record and Kate Carr’s fantastical A Field Guide To Phantasmic Birds points out, it’s music that evokes a relationship between art and nature that has likely existed as long as art itself, whether that’s via compositions by Handel or Vivaldi, or the presence of animal sounds on ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’, one of the oldest documented English folk songs, or what must have existed in the still-older songs now lost.
The latest revival of Arthur Russell’s work, relatively under appreciated in his lifetime, Picture Of Bunny Rabbit, has been widely acclaimed, and his increasing influence over artists today has been written about ad nauseum. I wonder, though, if that influence is not due to any kind of pining for Russell’s own era, but rather a pining to reach the same sense of timelessness that he was able to. Most of this compilation of previously unreleased pieces was recorded in New York in the late 1980s, but it sounds nothing like New York and nothing like the 1980s. Eerie, ethereal and disconnected from base reality, Russell’s music sounds like something unknowable, something sublime.
There are, of course, releases in the chart below that are tied specifically to certain times and places. Yet for me such records still live and breathe just as much today. I have no direct experience of, for instance, the Peruvian disco pop explosion of the 1970s and 80s collected on Buh Records’ Viva El Sabado, or the proto-electronic music made by students at India’s National Institute Of Design in Ahmedabad from 1969 to 1972, newly released as The NID Tapes, but I enjoy those records not just as time capsules or historical artefacts. I feel their rawness and their power – not just the songs these people made but in the energy they evoke. This is energy that feels real to me at the end of 2023, and is a source of nourishment as we at tQ begin to prepare for next year.
As Luke Turner mentioned in his introduction to our albums of the year chart earlier last week, it was the overwhelming response to our Hail Mary call for more subscribers in the spring, as finances became so precarious that they threatened to end the site for good, which means we can enter 2024 at all. Having weathered the storm for now, however, we’re still in need of more signups as we look to the site’s future. If you’re able to subscribe, please consider doing so here. 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. To say we’re grateful for your support is a dramatic understatement. Patrick Clarke
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.
For all their combined ability to make music of, at times, extreme heaviness, Justin ‘JK Flesh’ Broadrick and Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin never do so at the expense of dynamic richness and tonal variation. This is none more clear than on their 1995 collaboration Re-Entry, released under the Techno Animal moniker, and brushed up for reissue this year. The project name and mid-90s origin might evoke some squat crusty gurning through his own dank locks, but this journey through fourth world atmospheres and an evolution of post punk dub is warm, rich and psychedelic.
98.
Various ArtistsAnima POP: Music From Estonian Animations 1965-1986Raadio Kohlia
In almost every country behind the Iron Curtain, distinguished musicians from the avant garde and academic music world had a chance to present a “second face” as a mainstream composer. Usually, they also wrote music for TV, radio, movies and animations in styles that were entirely different. For almost two decades from the mid-60s onwards, the Estonian Tallinnfilm animation studios brought together composers born in the 1940s and 1950s. Chamber music was interspersed with huge orchestrations, pop art merged with pop music, and solo showpieces intertwined with the catchy sound of synthesisers or Rhodes. Among the recordings documented on Anima POP are the funky themes of Olav Ehala, phenomenal work by ensemble Apelsin, the prog rock of the Rein Rannap Band, and catchy hooks by the well-known Arvo Pärt. They all showed how fresh and original music for children’s fairy tales could be, giving them an extra dimension.
Glass World, originally released in 1970, is an essential album in Annea Lockwood’s catalogue. She set out to create micro-compositions – short sound events that were compositions in and of themselves, and contained enough nuance and detail to draw a listener into their dynamics. With the enthusiastic support of a glass manufacturer, she experimented with different types of glass – from large panes strung up in a performance hall, micro glass, a bottle tree, bulbs, ribbed glass and more. This year’s Room40 reissue was essential schooling in sound and listening.
Poet and performance artist Ellen Zweig originally recorded these strange, lapidary cuts back in the late 70s and early 80s, at a time when she was embedded in a thriving Bay Area scene alongside artists Jim Pomeroy and Eleanor Antin, composers Charles Amirkhanian and Paul DeMarinis, experimental film-maker Al Wong, and writer Kathy Acker. Re-approaching them in the 2020s with co-producers Dylan Henner and David Weinstein, they become hypnotic, mildly hallucinogenic forays into a neon-lit night time world. But it’s Zweig’s charged and highly musical use of language that sets these tracks apart.
It’s pretty cool that a label from Melbourne, by the name of Sorcerer, took it upon itself to compile everything recorded by Dawson, a Glaswegian band who operated in a niche of great energy and invention in the early 90s. They’ve done so using the reliable ‘compact disc’ format and are selling it for about £15, though this will no doubt disappoint those out there who wanted it as a vinyl box set for six times that price. As it is, here’s about two-and-a-half impeccably uneven and borderline overwhelming hours of open-eared leftist post-hardcore surrealism.
The duo of Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux have rummaged around in their archives to bring us this album of demos, live recordings – including one at Cafe OTO – soundtracks and more. The idea of a compilation cobbled together from mothballed tracks perfectly suits the faded, sepia-toned beauty of the pair’s delightful vignettes, which combine the sounds of the ondes Martenot, harmonium and various “machines”.
Pieced together from a selection of 7-inch singles and three albums, Selected Songs 1997-2003 provides a snapshot of the dreampop of Melbourne trio Hydroplane, whose past work as the Cat’s Miaow was previously highlighted in another compilation put out in 2022 by World Of Echo. Drawing on folk ballads, tender psychedelia and drum machine-aided indie bangers, the enduring material featured across this latest compilation is brought together by the gorgeous, delicate vocal talents of the group’s Kerrie Bolton.
Clocking in at 40 minutes, Ricardo Villalobos’ remix of Ela Minus & DJ Python’s collaborative cut ‘Abril Lluvias Mil’ is his longest reworking to date. A winding journey through feverish, bleepy synths and Villalobos’ distinctive percussive tweaks, it’s also one of his best outings on record for years. Comparatively short at 13 minutes long, his remix of ‘Kiss U’, which completes the record, carries the minimal hallmarks of his best dance floor material for labels such as Perlon and Playhouse.
90.
Various ArtistsPrends Le Temps D’Écouter: Tape Music, Sound Experiments And Free Folk Songs By Children From Freinet Classes 1962-1982Born Bad
This is not the first compilation to feature music performed by school children but unlike, say, the Langley Schools Music Project, the tracks on Prends Le Temps D’Écouter are original compositions, the work of kids in rural French schools who were being taught according to the principles of the Mouvement de l’École Moderne instigated by Célestin Freinet and his wife Élise. The work collected here ranges from cheerful chanson and weepy folk ballads to wonderfully creepy, freeform experimentation and wild vocal treatments.
Castra, the American label behind this compilation, says it’s taken “years” to find the musicians on it, with a view to licensing their songs. Not a huge surprise, given YU Wave comprises ten acts from 1980s Yugoslavia on a broadly synth pop/ electro/ cold wave tip: quite a few were pretty obscure in their own day and opportunities for such bands to be heard outside the Iron Curtain were inevitably scarce. Here and now, though, is austere jewellery from – especially – Psihokratija, Romantične Boje and Trio AGe.
The latest in Black Editions’ series of previously unreleased recordings by the late, great Milford Graves takes us back to the first quarter of 1976 for a series of wild and restless jam sessions with tenor sax players Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover (the former also playing flute on one track, the latter also credited with percussion, klaxon and “vaccine”). The recordings are raw and unvarnished, dominated by Graves’ tumbling, clattering kit. But the playing is just thrilling. A real treat.
Supposedly captured on a single microphone during a residency at New York’s Village Gate in 1961, this mammoth live set is a relatively lo-fi affair (although still much clearer than, say, your average harsh noise or black metal tape), which has the unexpected bonus of bringing Elvin Jones’ drums right to the front of the mix; in fact, he probably deserves an equal billing alongside John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy given the percussive masterclass he lays down here.
86.
Blue DolphinRobert’s LafitteCleta Patra / Present Medium
Robert’s Lafitte compiles all 25 minutes of music Blue Dolphin recorded in the one year they existed (2016). Its tonal shifts and overall production aesthetic is legitimately bizarre, many songs riddled with wow and flutter or background noise leaching into a song like battery acid. The band rock out and come on like a Meat Puppets live bootleg circa 1983 on the countrif(r)ied ‘Licking & Kissing’ and ‘Cowboy In The Sky’, while early Rough Trade impulsiveness and crude playground-chant punk defines ‘Ida’ and ‘Buying Time’. ‘Virginal Mystery’, one of four songs the group didn’t get round to releasing until now, would’ve graced a thousand unplayed crush mixtapes three decades ago, with its needling Sterling Morrison guitar and Thinking Fellers Union wrong-twang.
Brazilian percussionist, vocalist and berimbau player Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known as Naná Vasconcelos, was noted for collaborations with the likes of Pat Metheny, Don Cherry, Jan Garbarek and Milton Nascimento, as well as his many solo albums. This acoustic session with two members of Clube da Esquina, from 1975, likely didn’t receive the attention it deserved at the time – a situation this reissue, from Berlin’s Altercat Records, should hopefully rectify. Enigmatic but highly accessible and frequently stunningly beautiful, this is a release that lovers of Brazilian music need to seek out. Vasconcelos’ berimbau-playing sets this apart from other acoustic guitar-based music, referencing, of course, the incredibly skilful and acrobatic Brazilian martial art, capoeira.
Launch300 marks Rocket Recordings’ 300th release, featuring eight potent, previously unreleased mind-benders, while celebrating the label’s silver jubilee, the most important milestone thus far. Having spent 25 years crystallising and setting the course for the next 25, Rocket is eternally darting forward in the unmovable essence. The compilation is exemplary of the label retaining deep core stability values, while simultaneously defying convention.
83.
Various ArtistsHappy Land (A Compendium Of Electronic Music From The British Isles 1992-1996)Above Board Projects
The music on Happy Land isn’t obviously futuristic as such – not in the way that, say, drum & bass was around the time of much of the material here’s original release. But it does sound surprisingly fresh now, for all its muddiness and stoned murk. It’s not just through the continuing careers of Aphex Twin, Matthew Herbert and Plaid that it moved forwards: the LSD-soaked, Megadog / Megatripolis zone in which a lot of this music existed helped nurture the likes of Orbital, Underworld and Leftfield. The eerie psychogeographic echoes of Old Weird Britishness merging into dub basslines would resound through the works of Andrew Weatherall right to the end. And the dreamy free party house groove which Herbert and Max Brennan channel would beget talents like Atjazz, Charles Webster and Phil Asher, whose beats and textures have had global influence – even, incredibly, on the South African house music that is currently revolutionising global club sounds.
This year saw two reissues by Tolerance out on Japanese reissues label Mesh Key (who were also responsible for re-releasing material by The Jacks and Aunt Sally). Tolerance was the project of Junko Tange, and both albums were originally issued on the legendary Vanity Records. This album is dreamy and earwormy, with bedroom industrial and lonesome post-punk textures. It’s an altogether unmissable instant in the infinite sprawl of early 80s post-punk.
The greatest psych-rock band of all time in session for the greatest radio DJ of all time? What’s not to love? Those BBC engineers did a top-notch job of recording the mighty Bardo Pond, in 2001 and 2004, doing fine justice to the group’s heavy, gloopy, floaty, crunchy, fucked-up sound.
Noise rockers love REM. Butthole Surfers moved to Winterville, Georgia just to be near them. Despite the bootleggy nature of the recording, Harvey Milk’s live recital of the band’s entire Reckoning album is fondly faithful to its source. At one point someone can even be heard accusing the band of lip-syncing. Michael Stipe was in the audience that night in 1993 and he was said to be delighted.
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