Rum Music: The Best of 2025 Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan

My biggest regret this year is not getting to go deep on this when writing about Hildegard von Bingen for the Guardian. Was able to rectify that with a full interview with Heinali and Andriana. In interview the project hit me bodily, Saienko’s traditional Ukrainian singing delivering von Bingen’s prayers in full voice, the low end on the modular an anchor and a reminder of what’s at stake here. It contains loss, fear, but it plants its feet, holds ground, has something to say of humanity in 2025.  

I loved 2022’s Traditional Music Of South London, but I think I love Altruism more. ‘New Chest’ is one of the year’s best bangers in its pumpy torque, but the interludes among the crack and snap of drum machines and Cornish’s bright, brash vocal delivery sometimes contain a beautiful experimentalism (something like singing in the rain, glottal oddities and gurgling). This album has a bit of everything from the palette of his back catalogue, he told me: “Big pop songs, really short etudes, brief spoken word and sung bits.” It’s not like anything else around (except TMOSL). Here’s hoping the two-header turns into a triptych. 

There is absolute perfection in the tooth and drone of the strings on Melopea, moving in tandem with Cuni’s vocals. This piece is built from Cuni singing with recordings made for her by violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker after Cuni and her partner Werner Durand played around with superimposing Cuni onto their Eliane Radigue ‘Occam’ piece. I said in a previous column that it was stunning, a hybrid of deep traditional vocal technique and the precision of microtones and partials in two of the finest strings players around. Unmissable.  

Formed behind the wall in Hungary in 1980 and hence not able to release anything back then, I fell head over heels for the two Trabant albums this year. It’s full of promise and invention, ambition that exists in samples of orchestras, worked around by elevating fairly minimal means into lucid bedroom pop songs that lean loose and with post-punk downer energy and a monochrome romance. I still can’t get enough. Band member (and Béla Tarr composer) Mihály Víg is playing London in early 2026. Don’t sleep etc. 

A late entry to the list, and someone I’ve been keeping tabs on since I saw her support Jon Collin in London a while back. It’s no secret that I love a big gassy instrument, and the accordion gets bonus points for its experimental lineage with our holy mother Pauline Oliveros. Added to which, I don’t get a lot of solo experimental accordion dropping into my inbox. Heavy multiphonics, a dirgey melancholia, subtle use of field recordings and incidental electronics. 

This fell through the gaps between Rum Music delivery times, but I played it on Late Junction back in September, and it has been on my floor stack since it arrived. Orcutt had a good year, if you’re a fan you have to check Cyrus Pireh’s Thank You, Guitar. It’s all gnarls and whorls and earworms, his tone is killer, the recordings are sometimes blown-out bad recordings and sometimes decent, all fidelities jimmying up together, perfectly capped with a locked groove on the LP. 

Recommended to me by Richard Dawson when we recorded a special Late Junction with him up in the North East, I’m afraid I snagged the last LP available. Thorn Wych makes her own instruments from boughs and branches, they have this animal snarl on the timbre’s edge, makes the whole thing feel wild in its sound not just its aesthetic. Her singing is – I think – in a made-up language, not the one I know from the Lancashire where she lives. I herald it as signalling the welcome awakening of a much weirder lineage of out-folk artists. 

Buying CD-Rs is back, baby! I had a really good time digging around the Tall Grass catalogue this year on a mini dive looking for any Ché-SHIZU I might have missed. Tall Grass is run by Yonju Miyaoka, who plays in this version of the group. (I also liked the Sayozoku albums on the label, super-naive, halting playing that’ll break your heart). This live Ché-SHIZU record grew on me lots though (I can’t reliably tell you why this is going as Kansai Ché-SHIZU, except something to do with the line-up that doesn’t scan easily). It came out two days after it was recorded, and is a particularly wonky take on some of their tracks. They warm up as the show goes on, Chie Mukai’s er-hu delivering a halting, lament-like riff in the final perfect-imperfect track.   

Some lesser-known (in these parts at least) Americana finger-picking that renders big vistas and train hopping; dirty boots and a log cabin somewhere, leans into a particular vintage but is not inauthentic for it. A Weissenborn lap steel guitar and pieces played on 12-string, fuzz boxes and tape hiss from impromptu recordings on what I hope is a 4-track tape player, plus a cover of Loren Conners’ ‘A Moment At The Door’. I think it will disappear, and it should not be forgotten. I went back to it for the EOY review, and was snagged once again.  

My favourite set at the World of Echo one dayer at my local recently. Split Apex is Finnish guitarist Jussi Palmusaari with Mosquitoes vocalist Peter Blundell on bass along with his distinctive spoken word. Palmusaari’s guitar work is crisp and strange, there’s so much space, and live there was so much control in the sound. He plays it like it’s a sculpture, moving, bending, pulling out the tones. Peter’s muttered and looping lyric patterns smudge and bend meaning. Pleased to hear just before I file, that there’s a new album just coming out on Ever/Never.