39.
ABADIR’s practice on Mutate resembles the style of fellow Palestinian producer and rapper Julmud, who on this year’s album Tuquoos employs a wide range of styles and samples from the West Bank. Mutate is, in comparison, closer to experimental club music and stands as evidence of ABADIR’s emancipation and self-confidence. The record presents an urgently danceable appeal that any remaining barriers in communication and understanding within club scenes must be torn down.ABADIRMutateSVBKVLT
38.
At first glance, Sonancy is an album that couldn’t be made by anybody but Loop. Fuzz guitars? Check! Repetition? Step right this way, sir! A subtle garnish of ambient sounds to stretch out the sound and experience? Ambassador, you are really spoiling us! But hold it right there because dig that little bit deeper and that’s where you’ll find the real truffles: what we’re talking about here is precision. With less decay and bleed coming from the guitars, Sonancy benefits from a greater degree of separation in its instrumentation. Consequently, every track gets to breathe. There’s little stifling claustrophobia at play here and, much like the psychedelic experience, the music reaches and stretches out for a greater truth and space.LoopSonancyReactor
37.
The Portrait You Painted Of Me more than meets the exceptionally high standards Alison Cotton has set for herself. Her work can be compared to conceptual art, consisting of pieces that seem complete in themselves but acquire a whole new meaning when their purpose is explained. If this makes her music sound dry, it is anything but. She expresses visceral emotions through her viola, which cries in sympathy, whispers secrets, and groans in pain. Her voice has epic qualities, rising to fill a vast soundscape on ‘The Last Wooden Ship’ and closing in with the walls on ‘The Tunnel Underground Seemed Neverending’.Alison CottonThe Portrait You Painted Of MeRocket Recordings
36.
The latest jerk in Shit And Shine’s, uh, eccentric aesthetic trajectory is pretty accurately charted by the geographic markers dotted over their last two LPs. If 2020’s Malibu Liquor Store was a trip way out West which left the mind puddling drip by drip under the intolerable Cali sunshine like the ice bucket at some hooting backwater cookout, Phase Corrected opener ‘North Atlantic’ barrels in with slamming waves of heavily distorted bass which would topple an oil rig. Vacation over. Now back with long-term partners in piss-wringing label Riot Season, Phase Corrected might just top their previous release for the imprint – the pathologically unfriendly Goat Yelling Like A Man – in the meanness stakes.Shit And ShinePhase CorrectedRiot Season
35.
The eight tunes of Intimate Publics throb and tremble like overloaded white goods. Right from the start of the album, the martial, malevolent ‘Edging’ has Venetian Snares-y metallic trills that seem to rattle their cages, a squeaky vocal line processed into puny rage, and a juddering, 3D bass quake that’s just there. Likewise, the strange (and wonderful) staccato flow in ‘Thrall’ seems boxed in by the nervy, syncopated kick and hi-hat combo, and airless vocal treatments. Indeed, among all the churn and burn, some moments of beauty can happen almost accidentally; you admire the mechanical seethe in the way you admire the brushed chrome of a brand-new skyscraper.OsheyackIntimate PublicsSVBKVLT
34.
On her latest two-part piece, Kali Malone jettisons “the king of instruments” for a new “electroacoustic ensemble,” which features various orchestral instruments (trombone, bass clarinet), the quaint “drone box” boîte à bourdon, and the iconic vintage synth ARP 2500. The composition was originally commissioned by GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) to be played on the gargantuan Acousmonioum loudspeaker system. I can only imagine how intense and all-absorbing the multichannel premiere of this piece was. Taking from the heritage of American minimalism and the French 20th century avant-garde, despite its monolithic soundwaves (like the most powerful sun rays piercing your body at noon at the height of summer) and apparently static nature, Living Torch is Malone’s most dynamic and eventful work so far.Kali MaloneLiving TorchPortraits GRM
33.
At times, Ghosts evokes Bill Callahan in the mist, or Low. It has the sort of mid-Atlantic, lo-fi presence of the great Duke Garwood too, before finally reaching these shores with folk guitar reminiscent of Bert Jansch. On ‘I Think, I Think’, the accelerating reel and squirling brass suggests Haress are fellow travellers of One More Grain, whose Beans On Toast With Pythagoras is another highlight of 2022. ‘Time To Drink’ begins just on the right side of dirge, like a slowed-down funeral march played on hurdy-gurdys, before the reflective guitar starts pattering over the top, like raindrops dislodging dust. It’s a fitting image given that Ghosts was recorded in a disused water mill. This blissed-out psychedelia is not quite pastoral – there’s nothing twee about these unwinding grooves – yet evokes water and wood, light and shadow, a place of forgotten labour and the absent human form with a beguiling grace.HaressGhostsWrong Speed
32.
Steve ‘Snooker’ Davis, Kavus Torabi and Michael York return with their finest work yet on International Treasure, a blissed-out and escapist nine-track excursion that, despite this being a second album, seems to glow with a feeling of naive joy in experimentation. It’s a wholesome cleansing of the third eye by psychedelia’s oddest supergroup.The Utopia StrongInternational TreasureRocket Recordings
31.
Shovel Dance Collective are proof that tradition and progression need not be in conflict with each other. Their material is sourced from the folk canon, however the way they approach it is entirely unique, embracing experimental improvisation and drone, as well as a radically inclusive political edge, to situate these old songs in a unique – and often deeply emotive – context. The first album proper from the London folk outfit is their boldest step yet, a series of four medleys. Working around a theme of water, they eschew the pastoral tweeness that dogs a lot of folk music. Instead, on the seas and rivers they find hard-edged tales of hard industry, oppression and exploitation, of fear and death, of love and longing and liberation. A thing of rare emotional power.Shovel Dance CollectiveThe Water Is The Shovel Of The ShoreDouble Dare
30.
Two Sisters ​​is 90 minutes of serene chamber drone bookended by the pitched percussive tolling of the University of Michigan’s fifty-three bell carillon, the third heaviest in the world. Through grainy, muscular and textured pieces, cleaved from violin, viola, cello, and an array of organs, brass, and flutes, Sarah Davachi burrows into mournful sounds that are held for so long that they move right through you, sinking into your body by way of flapping eardrums and emanating out through your cells, capillaries, and veins. It’s a molecular transformation. One that could deftly change the feeling of a room via a single resonating note.Sarah DavachiTwo SistersLate Music
29.
On Sarahsson’s debut album, The Horgenaith, the beautiful and grotesque are constant companions. Opening track ‘Ancient Dildo Intro’ sends the listener hurtling through lurching, cavernous industrial (as if travelling through the bowels of an enormous cyborg) before breaking, with a series of sucking sounds, into a gorgeous piano prelude accompanied by tweeting songbirds. The album is gleefully volatile in approaching its weighty themes: bodily transformation, femininity’s cultural proximity to nature, and Sarahsson’s own experiences as a non-binary transfemme.SarahssonThe HorgenaithIllegal Data
28.
Fans of Senyawa will find plenty to admire in Nze Nze’s work. While the former thrust Indonesian folklore into a fearsome, post-industrial setting, the French three-piece take the warrior songs of the Fang, a Bantu people based in Central Africa, weld them to thunderous beats and drown them in echo. French vocalist Mathieu Ruben N’Dongo, whose father comes from the region (and who also records as Coldgeist and Sacred Lodge) has teamed up with the two members of duo UVB-76 (Gaëtan Bizien and Tioma Tchoulanov). They share a common attraction to the places where post-punk, industrial, dub and ritual rhythms meet, and Adzi Akal (‘eat the metal’) is the thrilling outcome.Nze NzeAdzi AkalTeenage Menopause
27.
Oren Ambarchi’s guitar-playing is on wonderfully nuanced form here, but the rhythm section hits quantum mechanical levels of intrigue. Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin’s unique interaction is clearest on ‘III’. The album’s longest piece, it affords them the duration needed for the cumulative effect to take hold. Berthling’s bass is a knotted loop of notes, full of constantly resetting momentum. Werliin’s drums scatter and skip through the tangle, growing in intensity as they find ever more microscopic gaps to shape with rhythm.Oren AmbarchiGhostedDrag City
26.
Singapore grindcore trio Wormrot pulled out all the stops for their final record with long-standing vocalist Arif. Hiss delivers all the frantic, thrashy riffing and lightspeed blast beats we’ve come to expect from the band, but also pushes their sound into some interesting new places, be it the tribal noise of ‘Pale Moonlight’, the spacious, atmospheric grooves of ‘Sea Of Disease’ or dramatic, surprisingly emotive pieces like ‘Grieve’ and stirring closer ‘Glass Shards’, bolstered by the startling violin of guest musician Myra Choo. Hiss is Wormrot’s most imaginative, consistently surprising release yet, and one of 2022’s most unique extreme metal records.WormrotHissEarache
25.
Mary Halvorson has released a near impeccable run of albums over the past year or so: Never Is Enough with her trio Thumbscrew, Artlessly Falling with her lyric-based quintet Code Girl, Searching For The Disappearing Hour with Sylvie Courvoisier, and my personal favourite out of the bunch (along with this new release), John Zorn’s Bagatelles, Volume 1 as the Mary Halvorson Quartet. Even if Halvorson were to release no further new music, a strong case would have already been made for her being one of the most inventive and distinctive voices of her generation. With this latest set of 11 tracks, her most compelling release since 2016’s Away With You, Halvorson establishes without any doubt her position at the vanguard of jazz and modern composition. For anyone who is yet to get on board with her work, this stunning ‘post-genre’ release offers the best chance to date to start appreciating her multifarious musical activities.Mary HalvorsonAmaryllis / BelladonnaNonesuch
24.
Special Interest’s third album, Endure, presents their most inventive, playful and accomplished music to date. Commanding its expanded palette with sincerity and ambition, it serves the group’s political and personal arguments with a newfound incisiveness. Its real masterstroke, however, is that it seems to be in constant dialogue with itself, expanding upon, revising, and comparing its ideas in the pursuit of what the perfect Special Interest album might be like. The result is their best album so far.Special InterestEndureRough Trade
23.
I cannot get enough of Bill Orcutt’s playing. Such power twang! He’s really knocking it out the park the last few years. This latest one is also knocking me for six and is a killer synthesis of different Orcutts – you’ve got the Fake Estates Bill Orcutt who does things like A Mechanical Joey and Slow Troll (in a lineage that goes back to Harry Pussy’s Let’s Build A Pussy) and classic / American Bluesman Bill Orcutt, epitomised by his gnarled and triumphant ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or stinging covers of other songbook classics. The third strand is collaborations, and while the recent Corsano one was great I like him best solo, on guitar. Music For Four Guitars delivers some of the formalism of some of the Fake Estates releases in that it has an architecture ruling it, but the palette and blistering intensity is total gnarled Americana. Whether it’s one guitar or four, I reckon he’s my favourite living guitarist, no joke.Bill OrcuttMusic For Four GuitarsPalilalia
22.
As tQ’s Luke Turner previously somewhat paid heed to in a Baker’s Dozen piece, it seems inexplicable that the gatekeepers of indie ‘cool’ haven’t taken this strange group to their hearts in the same way they have a Pictish Trail, a Jane Weaver, or a Richard Dawson. Perhaps it’s because Daniel Patrick Quinn and One More Grain are just a bit too strange, a smidge too sly, just on the wrong side of experimental pop. Or perhaps because they have a LinkedIn page. Perhaps they’ll wait another seven years to release an album, or Quinn will stay in Java teaching creativity and climbing volcanoes and being, as one of his friend’s blogs so brilliantly dubbed him, an “extremely odd ball.” Whatever happens, Beans On Toast With Pythagoras will remain as a strange shining beacon in this gloomy and certain age, a will-o’-the-wisp we all might follow up marshy pathways and rocky ascents.One More GrainBeans On Toast With PythagorasSelf-Released
21.
You’d be forgiven for having never heard of EROS, but loyal readers of this site will surely recognise its constituent parts: the one and only Karl O’Connor (AKA Regis), Liam Andrews of tQ favourites MY DISCO, and legendary Einstürzende Neubauten-enabler Boris Wilsdorf. O’Connor’s last two outings as Regis, Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss and The Floor Will Rise, had a certain lightness within them, a delicacy almost. A Southern Code snuffs that out. It has a slight death rock tint, a bit of Southern gothic tinge. It’s real abattoir stuff. While not exactly hard or brutal, it feels merciless – in a way that recent Regis outings haven’t.ErosA Southern CodeDownwards
20.
Man With The Magic Soap is an oblique, even difficult record – certainly in the context of its producers and their core audience, and also the sort of music they’re plundering here, and the traditional audience for that. Jamie Roberts, best known as Blawan, and Arthur Cayzer, who goes by Pariah for his solo releases, are both pretty widely respected in the UK club music milieu. The duo’s productions and live hardware sets as Karenn have established them as European techno mainstays – not easy-option crowdpleaser stuff by any means, but replete with mighty raveable girder-whack rhythms and acid froth. Persher should by no means be viewed as Karenn under a new name. Here they are subjecting guitars and drums to heavy digital processing rather than occupying an electronics-but-analogue middle ground. That should not, however, be taken to mean a total absence of commonality with their other project in Man With The Magic Soap‘s maggoty post-genre techsludge.PersherMan With The Magic SoapThrill Jockey
