Billy Woods Kenny SegalMapsBackwoodz Studioz
Although Billy Woods, with a jeremiadic boom to his tenor, has often been portrayed as an end times preacher, he sounds almost playful on Maps, making the most of the hotel life, and trading verses with Quelle Chris about the pleasures of showing up late to one’s own show. What might have in lesser hands been a self-indulgent cry-athon about having to travel for work, a hip hopera version of old hair metal tour bus videos, is instead a series of bopping meditations on ineffable destinations, as performed by a relentlessly nomadic thinker at his charismatic peak.
James HoldenImagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All PossibilitiesBorder Community
While no less worthy or beautiful in its way than James Holden’s previous records The Inheritors and The Animal Spirits, Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities is perhaps more obviously beholden to linear timelines and histories, however personal. Holden has called it both “a dream of a rave” and “a dialogue with [his] teenage self,” which I think says a lot, maybe all you need. There’s an element of nostalgia at play here, but no corresponding retrograde thinking. Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – MIDI-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.
Fever RayRadical RomanticsRabid
Mendoza Hoff RevelsEcholocationAUM Fidelity
Speaking of the intention behind his late 90s band The Monsoon Bassoon, Kavus Torabi (later of Cardiacs, Guapo, Knifeworld, The Utopia Strong and Gong) once said that they were aiming for “a union of Henry Cow and Sonic Youth.” That statement stuck in my mind, partly because it was such an obviously great idea, but also because not many bands, before or since, have successfully attempted such a melding of guitar-based power, with the swing of jazz, the detail of prog and the intricacies of chamber music. The same phrase immediately came to mind the first time I listened to Echolocation, although more specifically along the lines of Sonny Sharrock’s final album Ask The Ages colliding with Sonic Youth, or even at times jamming with the raw power of The Stooges. Music journalists, an excitable lot, are often rightly accused of the overuse of hyperbole. Sometimes, however, the hyperbole is justified.
KMRUDissolution GripOFNOT
Before I went to this year’s Présences Électroniques festival in Paris, I had never even heard of KMRU, but by the end of the weekend I was an instant convert. His piece ‘Dissolution Grip’ was my highlight of the festival, so when I found out there was a vinyl release on the way via the artist’s own OFNOT imprint, I had to get it. On record, the piece is just as warm and enveloping as it was live at Maison de la Radio, full of warm, heady swells and fizzing energies. If you were to ask me what kind of music a band of electricity pylons might come up with, were they so inclined, I might well guess something a bit like this. The flipside has ‘Till Hurricane Bisect’, a less immediately dramatic track but still as lush as all hell. It makes me feel very much like a man standing alone by the docks shortly before dawn while all around me everything is on fire. Someone should hire this guy to score a film. You could shoot a black screen for 90 minutes and win best cinematography.
Ruth AndersonTête-à-têteErgot
Tête-à-tête is a deeply intimate collection of three works by two composers, together forming the most moving tribute to a life-changing relationship I have ever encountered. It opens with ‘Resolutions’ from 1984, Ruth Anderson’s last completed electronic work before she died in 2019. It was restored by Maggi Payne, and there is a comparison to be drawn between Anderson’s play with pure waveforms here and Payne’s music on collections like Ahh-Ahh. It is a tight playing with the shape of sound. ‘Conversations’ was Anderson’s gift to Lockwood. Three days after meeting in 1973 they became “joyously entangled” but for nine months afterwards lived apart – Lockwood at Hunter College, NYC and Anderson in Hancock, New Hampshire. They called each other twice a day, and Anderson surreptitiously recorded their calls, later collaging them together with blousy bar tunes and jangling piano and giving them to Lockwood in 1974 as a private piece nobody else was meant to hear.
O Yama OGaloBison
On Galo, O Yama O, the quartet of Rie Nakajima, Keiko Yamamoto, Marie Roux and Billy Steiger, embrace an improbable array of sound sources. Whistles and whirling rubber tubes meet percussion that could have been taken from a kitchen. Through it all, violin, piano and drums effortlessly switch from stumbling to soaring. Vocals teeter between tender and rabble rousing. But this motley collection of instrumentation isn’t a gimmick. From ‘Hakushon’s stomp through to the title track’s joyful fervour, O Yama O sift compelling and remarkably catchy music from unconventional sources. Galo is an invitation to a place where tradition and convention are twisted in a manner that is warmly welcoming rather than alienating.
AlgiersShookMatador
This collective of musical and political energy simply seem to have a whole lot of fun seeing what is possible within the Algiers sonic framework. ‘Everybody Shatter’ (featuring veteran Atlanta rapper Big Rube) is whip-sharp industrial funk, while ‘A Good Man’, for instance, starts like a thrashy nephew of The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ before it falls apart under a migraine drone and sparkling synth melody. ‘I Can’t Stand It!’ begins with modernist soul, brings in grand and even slightly histrionic vocals from Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands, doomy synths, then strings, and finally breaks down into digital noise with spoken word from Jae Matthews of Boy Harsher. All that in just under three-and-a-half minutes. Strewth! I’m not sure there are many groups that could make that work, and that also goes for ‘Bite Back’, a fusion of slowed-down EBM, rap and a big old rock chorus.
Bell WitchFuture’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine GateProfound Lore
Bell Witch’s fourth full-length album, The Clandestine Gate, is the follow-up to 2017’s acclaimed 83-minute epic Mirror Reaper and the beginning of the most ambitious project the duo have embarked on yet. Not only does The Clandestine Gate equal Mirror Reaper in length, outdoing it by just a single second, but it’s also the first part of a forthcoming triptych entitled Future’s Shadow, consisting of two more lengthy pieces with the third looping back to the first, creating a musical representation of the eternal return.
Matana RobertsCoin Coin Chapter Five: In The GardenConstellation
Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin series, now in its fifth chapter, illuminates the long tail of African-American history. In the multi-disciplinary artist, composer and musician’s works, sounds and stories collapse into each other, blurring lines between past and present, genres and disciplines. Age-old folk songs transform into abstract, expressionistic melodies and stories that hail from years past feel like they could have happened yesterday. The success of the Coin Coin series has been in its ability to blend its elements, letting the fiery rise and fall of soundwaves tell a story as much as Roberts’ words. With Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden, they take on the theme of reproductive rights, chronicling the anxiety, frustration and tragedy that reverberates from an ancestor’s story into the current moment.
Enola GayCasementModern Sky
Polobi The Gwo Ka MastersAbri CycloniqueReal World
The most effective tracks on Abri Cyclonique are ‘Bouladjel’ and ‘Levé Yo Mano’. Both open with the sound of the rainforest, and the Gwo ka drums Polobi was first influenced by. Producer Doctor L’s superb arrangement is soupy and pungent, sounding as if it’s playing on a dusty turntable. The bristling sound carpet seems organic and natural. At its best, the constituent parts of Abri Cyclonique approach the loose grooves of Gil Scott Heron or African Head Charge. ‘Levé Yo Mano’ was recorded where Polobi was discovered, at Kiavué’s house. Do I detect more confidence? That muscular bleat is a smidgen more dynamic than on the other tracks recorded in a studio, those melodies launched a little higher.
Raphael RoginskiTalànInstant Classic
In an ecstatic world where music likes to overpower a wall of sound, Raphael Rogiński stands on the extreme opposite side. He has played Jewish surf rock, nigunim, Bach and Coltrane on guitar for the last two decades. Far from a noise or psychedelic rock aesthetic, he is closer to American blues tradition or Sahel Tuareg bands. He sounds raw, and sometimes his instrument reminds me of a lute. Inspired by visits to the Black Sea, Talàn is suffused with melancholy and an undercurrent of sadness. Rogiński plays only his compositions and does it with unusual patience. The music smolders and resonates for the sake of silence, whether he departs for improvisation after a previously outlined motif (‘Carpathian Transit’), weaves lyrical melodies (‘Electron’), or harnesses reverb (‘Cliffs And Sea’). He tugs at the strings and, at the same time, plays meditatively. Rogiński has this remarkable ability that the emptiness he generates with music carries an extraordinary message full of meaning.
Skull PractitionersNegative StarsIn The Red
All three members of Skull Practitioners sing but none considers himself a singer. The trio’s sound is rooted in post punk, with much of the experimental edge that the term originally inferred, before its more recent application for any guitar band from BRIT School with a shouty singer. Without sounding erratic, the band slyly weave elements of shoegaze, garage, art rock, surf rock, space rock and other texture-heavy subgenres into their radgie mélange. Perhaps this is what Gang Of Four or Fugazi might’ve sounded like, if they’d been more partial to board-upon-board of multiple guitar pedals.
Sleaford ModsUK GRIMRough Trade
Musically, UK GRIM is stark and austere and without embellishment, but combines the melodic reach of Sleaford Mods’ last album with the pulsing minimalism of the Austerity Dogs era. It angrily counters the corporate pop that forces us to be joyful, but it’s not without its own brand of optimism. Sleaford Mods paint a bleak picture of post-COVID Britain via poetic protest, but their outrage is underscored by love for the people and places around them, making it as much a celebration of individuals and idealists as it is an attack on ruling classes. UK GRIM is darker and broader than past releases, but the Mods’ usual melodic prowess is sadly lacking for the most part, allowing for more focus on the ingenuity of Williamson’s vocal tirades. In the context of now, Sleaford Mods might sound like just another angry voice – but it’s an improbably hopeful one, that tells us it’s OK to feel fucked off. Why wouldn’t you be?
XNCYRMCladdagh
Three months after Lankum strengthened their status as visionary disrupters on False Lankum, the band’s Radie Peat and the group of which she is also a member, ØXN, arrived with their take on 18th century murder ballad ‘Love Henry’ (also known by variations like ‘Henry Lee’). A devastating meld of accordion, mellotron, synths, bass, drums and vocals, its enchantment stemmed from uniting four constituent parts that are both intensely history-heeding and forward-looking. On the group’s debut full-length record, CYRM, they sublimate a deep folk vernacular via buckled ballads and dark, oil slick-heavy psychedelia that summons Richard Dawson and Sunn O))) every bit as much as it does giallo and Ghost Box.
EP64-63EP/64-63Permanent Draft
EP/64-63 is a crucial document of a luminous show from last May at New River Studios in London with a venerable all-star line-up who are all on my list of ‘who’s good now’ in experimental music. It was a first meeting between Valentina Magaletti, Dali De Saint Paul, Agathe Max, Yoshino Shigihara and Laura Phillips, and the penultimate show in Dali’s 64-show improvisational series. The combination of Magaletti’s chug and rattle slathered with Agathe’s violin as Dali’s vocals cut across the spaceways curling from Yoshino’s synths, made it one of the best shows I saw all year. Once they fell into the zone, I was fully and completely sunk for the whole journey – not one single outside thought entered my mind (which almost never happens). Relistening has confirmed it was as good as I remember: There’s a section where Magaletti gets a groove going on the toms, and in a rushing of synths De Saint Paul calls from the fog, then Max’s violin breaks out, soaring like searchlights in the night. It crushed me then and it crushes me now.
BabauFlatland Explorations Vol. 2Sucata Tapes
Flatland Explorations Vol.2 is a peculiar beast. Dewy soundscapes and heavily manipulated vocal utterances mix through rhythms that feel equally informed by video games and non-European music traditions. It resonates with Jon Hassell’s concept of amalgamating music from cultures outside the global north with electronic production as a way of firing the imagination, but there’s a significant nuance with Babau. They don’t seem interested in sampling and tracing from source so much as the diverse sonic imprint global connectivity has downloaded into our minds through soundtracks and YouTube videos. They play with the already corrupted, a fourth world music picked up through the interface.
KelelaRavenWarp
Recorded over a fortnight-long period in Berlin, Raven is rich with invention, a deeply immersive experience that skips between 2-step UK garage, jungle, breakbeats and more; ultimately paying tribute to dance music’s Black, queer roots. Across the record, Kelela transports her enticing part-electronic, part-R&B sound to new spaces, opening with the glittering, reverb-drenched pads and soaring vocals of lead single ‘Washed Away’ and moving through a number of dance floor-indebted cuts, such as the mellow, dancehall-tinged rhythms of ‘On The Run’ and breakbeat-fuelled ‘Happy Ending’. Combining dense, synth-filled R&B melodies and the funky components of tech-tinged, breaks-heavy dance beats, the connecting thread that binds Raven is the visceral feeling of a night out, expressed beautifully through the glossy, soaring soprano vocals that have become Kelela’s hallmark.
Nuovo TestamentoLove LinesDiscoteca Italia
Love Lines spans eight songs of absolutely nailed-on mid-80s electronic dance-pop, folding in elements of Italo disco and hi-NRG with the influence of Madonna. Crowned by the vocals of Chelsey Crowley, Nuovo Testamento recorded the album between Italy and the USA. That the group’s three members did this in-between playing in various, extremely different-sounding punk and hardcore groups is remarkable, though only as relevant as you desire it to be.
