80.
As a concept album, Fawn / Brute is well-structured and consistent. As hinted by the title, the record contains two parts, one of which is lighter and more child-like, while the second part is darker and more volatile. The name of the album refers to two songs emblematic of such a juxtaposition. Visualised on the cover by images of a harlequin, the two title tracks ‘Fawn’ and ‘Brute’ ostensibly refer to different qualities of a toddler who can be angelic and charming but also capricious and loud. Similarly, the dichotomy addresses two visions of the world – that is by a child and a teenager. ‘Fawn’ is a stomper with bouncing synths and spiralling winds echoing the lighthearted music played at nursery parties or on cartoon soundtracks. It is another example of Gately’s ability to absorb the environment and transform it into an abstract and intangible form. She does it playfully. The second title track, ‘Brute’, features a roaring bassline which resulted from the artist’s experiments while producing random sounds with cardboard shoeboxes.Katie GatelyFawn / BruteHoundstooth
79.
Produced in collaboration with InFiné labelmate Basile3, among others, Al Hadr beguiles from the opening moments of ‘Ain El Fouara’; a few words in Arabic are like an incantation that peels the album open, unleashing a gale of fluttering, reversed autotuned melismata. Sabrina Bellaouel, who studied ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths, switches between English, French and Arabic and her delicately expressive vocals are re-pitched, stretched and chopped across a record that’s replete with similar moments of rapture – fittingly there’s even a track called ‘Rapture’, which matches symphonic synth swells to a scrunchy trap beat and, as with every other song, constantly folds new and gorgeous details into the mix. From the spine-tingling house of ‘Eclipse’ and hyper-R&B of ‘Legit’ to lush, hushed ballads ‘Clémence’ and the title track, and thumping, rock-y finale ‘Goodbye’ – a duet with Bonnie Banane – Al Hadr is very special indeed.Sabrina BellaouelAl HadrInFiné
78.
This pairing of two of experimental hip hop’s most larger-than-life characters is a winning formula on paper, and the duo have really brought out the best in each other here, with Danny Brown spitting some of his most histrionic, cartoonish bars over some of JPEGMAFIA’s most detailed and imaginative production to date. When the beat drops in the skronky title track, it feels like a joyously sarcastic riposte to the casually misogynist internet meme it’s named after; if any album this year embodies the idea that experimental music can be accessible, fun and danceable, it’s this one.Scaring The HoesAWAL
77.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are a band unafraid to dip into the sizeable pool of rock music tropes, crafting a scuzzy, psych-infused sound that touches upon Sabbath and Motörhead with giddy abandonment. For the most part, their latest album, Land Of Sleeper, is a simple affair – brazenly, charmingly simple – with the holy triptych of guitar, bass, and drums playing in near unison, oscillating between breakneck chugging riffs and half-speed, euphoric breakdowns. Yet beneath this well-executed sea of distortion lies perhaps a little more.Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs PigsLand Of SleeperRocket Recordings
76.
Shirley Collins’ soaring soprano always had the quality of unexpected music, like singing heard through an open window. It flew overhead: gorgeous and strange and necessarily borne away from us. To discover it on Archangel Hill, framed between recordings made over forty years later, heightens the impact. It also accentuates the new contours her voice has taken on since that time. It now sits closer to the gravelly earth and closer to our ears, more intimate-feeling.Shirley CollinsArchangel HillDomino
75.
Bulbils is one half of Hen Ogledd – Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington – formed to cope with the stresses of lockdown in 2020, their daily practice of playing and recording at home, very quickly equating to a huge body of work. These physical releases are a boon in helping listeners get to grips with an overwhelming amount of music – the pair have recorded 75 albums and EPs in the last three years and despite slowing down somewhat there’s little sense that the project will end. The vibe here is slightly different to the Krautrock/psych-leaning eternal grooves of their tape Blue Forty from two years ago, tending to be more blissed out and introspective.BulbilsMapTor Press
74.
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 their atmospheric jungle tunes like ‘Vivz Portal’, meanwhile, function as gateways to nostalgic musings on half-forgotten lovers.RezzettMeant Like ThisThe Trilogy Tapes
73.
This 105-minute double-CD live recording, performed by the seemingly uncredited Orchester des Orgien Mysterien Theaters, sounds vast and expansive: symphonic, tonally evolving organ drone, eternal music with the essence of the theatre. What’s even more remarkable is that it’s just a small part of the ‘six-day play’ conceived by Austrian performance art radical Hermann Nitsch and performed here in a castle, a few months after his death last year. What a guy, what a tribute.Hermann NitschDas Orgien Mysterien TheaterTrost
72.
Conducting such a huge band (43 members) and still playing coherently is not easy, but Mats Gustafsson, alternating between baritone saxophone and flute, works alertly. On Echoes, Fire! Orchestra’s seventh album, there is space for strings and a brass section, who, at times, wail chorally and, at other times, play in fractures, improvising parts between rhythmic patterns. There’s space for solo improvisations and a song-like element, too, thanks to the magnificent vocalist Mariam Wallentin. The vast lineup have recorded an almost two-hour epic of a record, a unique combination of trance passages, free-improv, cosmic jazz and post-punk.Fire! OrchestraEchoesRune Grammofon
71.
There’s something wonderfully lethargic about Left Hand Cuts Off The Right’s latest album, a pensive, sombre lilt that manages to eek far more emotion from the ‘free music’ toolbox than you might think possible. Seamlessly blending improvised works with composed pieces, and oscillating between them without ever changing its signature sonic palette – all zither, field recordings, and sparse percussion – Free Time/Dead Time feels both remarkably focussed and absorbingly meditative, more considered dérive than abstract meander. Rich acoustic textures merge with abstract and often subtle synthesis, a strange yet complimentary juxtaposition between the mechanistic electronics and the loose, human performance of the zither.Left Hand Cuts Off The Right Free Time/Dead TimeBrachliegen Tapes
70.
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.KasaiJ/P/NChinabot
69.
While the first five tracks of splintered guitar, cello and electronics are accompanied by field recordings on Sheng Jie’s Review, it’s hard to tell if she’s trying to keep the external world at a distance or beckon it in. Either way, sixth track ‘Nucleic Acid Test’ begins with a deluge of outside, an announcement to scan COVID-19 test QR codes. Arriving like a wash of cold water to the intimate setting Sheng Jie’s constructed so far, she quickly retreats back to the comfort of agitated guitar strings and prickly glissandos. She recorded Review at home in winter 2022, shortly before China’s zero-COVID policies came to an end. Plucks trickle and congeal, cello is bowed in rasping zig-zag patterns, synthetic pulses carry queasy unease. On ‘D A G Resonance’, drones teeter between serenity and anxiety. The liner notes refer to Review as coming from a sense of “stone cold-apathy” towards the time it was recorded. Though that sentiment imbues her songs, they’re gorgeous in a deeply unsettling way.Sheng Jie, aka gogojReviewDusty Ballz
68.
A careful, teetering balance has been achieved on Nature Morte, whereby grace and immensity of scale are underpinned by something explosive and untamed. The scratchy rattle opening, ‘the one who bornes a weary load’, for instance, initially speaks to the irritable angularity of Bastro or Shellac before moving into slow swells of sound, scattered percussion and luminescent cries that become increasingly furious and disconsolate as huge, sculpted blocks of guitar noise begin to crumble and decay. The carefully-wrangled drone of ‘my hope renders me a fool’ seems to nod toward guitarist Mat Ball’s solo LP, glowering yet somehow pretty, like thunderclouds rimmed with gold. It vanishes in a light haze of skeletal noodling from which then builds ‘the fable of subjugation’ – a track that begins like a piece from the band’s Leaving None But Small Birds collaboration with The Body, before erupting into a cathartic surge that wouldn’t sound out of place on a ’90s Neurosis album.Big BraveNature MorteThrill Jockey
67.
The music of a Lithuanian composer from 1985, made for a dance ballet, doesn’t sound like a soundtrack; Šarūnas Nakas’ avant-garde ideas are better associated with Dadaism and Merz art. ‘Lonelier Than All Of Us’ recalls the music of Lea Bertucci or Dickie Landry. Electroacoustic experiments include ‘Merz-Machine’ for 33 electronic and acoustic instruments or ‘Vox-Machine’ for 25 electronically modified voices. Lithuanians have always been good when it comes to creating the most bizarre and surreal of music.arnas NakasRamblingsMusic Information Centre Lithuania
66.
The imposter LDR – who one assumes is beholden more to her near namesake as postmodernist avatar than musician – has somewhat infuriatingly transcended the moniker by making music that is more intriguing with each release. The monster she’s created is constructively destructive, barking catharsis from the echoey dungeon, though out of the melee of noise and pain arise surprising caches of mellifluousness. Strega Beata, Latin for ‘blessed witch’, attempts to make sense of, or at least process, grief in all its various stages, both personally and in the context of the pre-apocalyptic world we’re apparently navigating. Such is the barrage Sam An has encountered in recent years, that there’s even a track called ‘Apocalypse Fatigue’, which suitably lags and is, well, apocalyptic.Lana Del RabiesStrega BeataGilgongo
65.
Having been through the ringer more than most, HMLTD have been working towards The Worm for a long time. A prog-jazz epic set either in a pseudo-feudal England that has been swallowed by an enormous, monstrous incarnation of the titular invertebrate, or within the deluded mind of frontman Henry Spychalski, depending on your interpretation, this chaotic, over-the-top sprawl of a record matches every ounce of the band’s colossal ambition.HmltdThe WormLucky Number
64.
Crimeboys are a duo comprised of US producers Pontiac Streator and Special Guest DJ, both key figures within the 3XL label axis, which has been putting out some of the best ambient-adjacent music of the last few years. Their debut, Very Dark Past, channels the spaced-out ambient of ’90s releases put out by seminal label Fax +49-69/45046, while also folding in elements of trip-hop and jungle. Warped with all manner of distortion and other effects, it’s one of 3XL’s most psychedelic releases yet and even finds space to pull in some early Burial-esque dark garage on highlight cut ‘haunted tattoo’.CrimeboysVery Dark Past3XL
63.
Based in Berlin, Yfory’s members are from Australia, Germany, Spain and Wales, and for vocalist Bryony Beynon (previously of Good Throb, Sceptres and several others) this is the first band where she sings in her birth language. Specifically, these four sharp, rattling post-punk songs dart between Welsh and English, often within the same line and with unbothered linguistic impurity. Certainly, the niceties of Welsh serve a distinct lyrical purpose. ‘Ailgylchu’, the last and shortest track on the record, is a ‘list song’ of sorts which advocates or imagines various things being burnt, melted or drowned: “llosgi … toddi … boddi.” ‘Baled Y Dolmen’, the longest, relates a road trip across Wales and mulls neolithic burial chambers: pensive and speak-singy, it reminds me a little of The Van Pelt.YforyYforyStatic Age
62.
Inferiority Complex has been made with the dancefloor 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.Yossari BabyWe Jazz Inferiority ComplexAlphaville
61.
Purge feels like something of a missing link in the Godflesh discography, elegantly bridging the gap between the suffocating density of the band’s pre-Pure material, and the bouncier, hip hop-inspired rhythms that would follow later. Whilst it may eschew some of the more experimental tendencies of 2017’s Post Self, the end result is one of the most robustly crushing records in their whole discography.GodfleshPurgeAvalanche
