tQ’s Reissues Etc. of the Year 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)

Underwater Moonlight was the second of only two proper Soft Boys LPs from their original run, and was recorded for £600, every farthing of which was impressively stretched and exploited. It has a certain rough, blunt, rehearsal-studio feel, but it’s neither amateurish nor lo-fi. This is just one reason why it now sounds so good. Had it been slicker, it might have lost its essential eeriness. Robyn Hitchcock’s timing was also perfectly wrong. By then, punk’s blast-on-a-budget was fading and British music was entering an era of popular, experimental modernism and high style, neither of which was his forte, or even vaguely of interest to him.

The third album from New Jersey’s The Feelies is a more pop-attuned recording than their frenetic debut or their pastoral-tinged follow up, which was produced by R.E.M’s Peter Buck. It is also, like all of their releases, an absolutely classic collection of instantly memorable tunes, clearly influenced by The Velvet Underground, but with a sunnier sensibility entirely their own. ‘Deep Fascination’ is a subtly persuasive, lovely earworm, ‘The Undertow’ a fast-flowing river of percussion and e-bowed guitar. Album highlight ‘Away’, the video for which was shot by director Jonathan Demme, who also included a cameo of the band in his 1987 film, Something Wild, is a masterpiece of hyperactive, joyous emotional energy.

From the late 60s right up to the 90s, Joseph Kamaru was one of the biggest artists in Kenya; a friend to presidents, with some 2000 songs and half a million in record sales to his name. Eight years after his death, a compilation of some of his best work has been carefully assembled by his grandson, the Berlin-based sound artist and electronic music composer KMRU. It’s a compilation that runs quite the gamut, from the rubbery funk-pop of opening tracks ‘Kenya Kũrũngara’ and ‘Ke Wapendane’ (both from 1977), to the late 60s mũthũngũci shuffle of ‘Njohi Ndĩrĩ Mwarĩmũ’, to later echo-drenched and drum machine-led songs like ‘Ikĩhanda Mũnyugĩ’ and ‘Chunga Rũrĩmĩ’. It’s quite the mixture, then, but an infectious listen from start to finish nonetheless.

Willem Nyland trained as a chemist, then got turned on to Gurdjieff, becoming one of his key students and going on to co-found The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. He set up a community around a barn in Warwick, New York, where he held Friday night music nights, playing ‘improvised’ piano on a specially tuned baby grand. He released 16 private press albums of his recordings, and this is just one of them, chosen for reissue simply because it is the one he recommended to the photographer Anselm Adams. Some of the pieces are heavy-handed with a brutish elegance, while others enact a tumbling dance across the keys. It doesn’t feel like someone playing joyously and freely for pure pleasure, nor is it restrained or indeed cathartic. It is an idiosyncratic sort of automatic playing, drawing on familiar progressions, chords and muscle memory. It sometimes feels like playing to exorcise a day at work; an exercise in shedding something without beginning from scratch. Nyland apparently said this music wasn’t meant to be ‘liked’ but taken in and digested, as a sort of relaxation, which is how I encountered it before reading that instruction.

What is most interesting about this compilation of soundtrack music are the tangents: the musical routes taken by the composers; the groups they connected with or came from, and the lineage of the imported gamelan and other traditional instruments featured. There is a particularly strong link to butoh via the legendary Sankai Juku troupe, whose epic performances in white body paint involve eggs, strikingly minimal costumes, and entire sets flooded with water or filled with sand. Percussionist Yas-Kaz composed for them, and Yoshiro Yoshikawa came out of that group into music, too. He became obsessed with electronic instruments and ended up riding the wave of fourth world music that had begun with Brian Eno and Jon Hassell‘s eponymous album, and became a genre unto itself. Yas-Kaz’s ‘Hei (Theme of Shikoni)’, here is a standout, led by a shawm over multitracked hand drums, made for one of the Peacock King anime TV series and its heavily psychedelic Buddhist iconography. Yoshikawa also has two of the strongest tracks on the comp in ‘Tassili N’Ajjer’, which includes tabla, a bendy string line over pleasingly warped synth stabs, and ‘Fiesta Del Fuego’. Both are a glossy take on fourth world, composed for an NHK nature show called The Miracle Planet. ‘Fiesta del Fuego’ uses the familiar sound of the Kecak or Ramayana monkey chant (which also appears in Akira), which, while now considered an important Balinese art form, has it roots entangled in mainstream Western culture. 

Five years before the formation of The Jesus Lizard, vocalist David Yow and bass player David Wm. Sims played together in post-hardcore/noise rock outfit Scratch Acid. More akin to the likes of Flipper and The Birthday Party than the slightly more linear noise rock of The Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid’s unpretentious and powerful live shows earned them recognition as peers of the likes of The Butthole Surfers and Big Black, but brought little financial reward before they disbanded in 1987. Hopefully this deluxe box set, which includes LPs and a 7-inch, along with a 24-page booklet of liner notes and photographs, will go some way to readdressing this injustice. Certainly, tracks like ‘El Espectro’, ‘Cannibal’, ‘Crazy Dan’ and ‘Eyeball’ are deserving of much wider appreciation.

The Sacrificial Code is a big room version of Kali Malone’s 2018 album Organ Dirges 2016-2017, and, in sections, it really pulses with morose energy, containing occasional ‘beats’ created by two similar notes played together. Apparently these pieces are all “governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code” but that code isn’t documented publicly anywhere so I can’t tell you what it is or if it would make any difference to your listening experience. My favourite parts of records like this are always the accidental bits – someone drops something or kicks over a beer bottle, or else a door slams. In Malone’s ‘Glory Canon III (live in Hagakyrka)’, doors click open (or is it papers falling on marble floors?), and all of a sudden, you are not alone.

Ten years later, Sufjan Stevens returns to Carrie & Lowell, his sweet-sounding quest that took him into the depths of what he recently called his “misery, depression, dread and grief”. In it, Stevens’ tender-sad fingerpicking – belying the calloused morbidity of lyrics like “we’re all gonna die” on the spectral ‘Fourth Of July’ – sit, newly packaged, alongside pared down demos of ‘Mystery Of Love’ (with its semi-whispered “oh woe-oh-woah is me” and delicately-plucked strings), ‘Should Have Known Better’ (now almost translucent in its woodwind-chirruping simplicity) and ‘The Only Thing’ (“everything I feel returns to you somehow,” he trembles as precariously as a tiny bird). In addition, we also get soaring outtakes of ‘Wallowa Lake Monster’ and ‘Fourth Of July’ – both spiritually grandiose in scale; the latter, a near-fourteen-minute winged-flight of ecstatic pain that levitates through the rafters of a lost, sacred space.

The story behind Madvillainy’s leaked demo tape has almost become as infamous as the finished record itself – after all, it “wasn’t even tweaked and it leaked into cyberspace,” as DOOM would later boast on ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. Stones Throw finally deigned to give it a proper vinyl release this year, making a vital piece of hip hop history more accessible, and giving a fascinating peak into the creative process behind one of the genre’s most iconic records. There’s a real thrill in hearing these raw, rough drafts of such classic tracks, often featuring different or extended samples (check out the significantly longer break in ‘Money Folder’ after DOOM says “he flipped it like Madlib did an old jazz standard,” for example). It’s DOOM himself who sounds the most different though, spitting alternate bars in tracks like ‘Fancy Clown’ and generally adopting a more aggressive, high-energy flow compared to the more subdued, mellow confidence he exuded on the final product. 

Although they were founded four years ago, deranged Venezuelan electronic supergroup Weed420 didn’t meet in person until this year. Operating out of a Discord sever, they make frenetic and baleful IDM that never has less than seven things going on at once. Samples from the Latin club music diaspora brawl with hardstyle drums and blown-out bass; field recordings and soft synths shudder in the peripherals of the mix. Debuted on an NTS show from Naguanagua in Venezeula, the Fotos Varias mix is an unmistakable exercise in pushing the boundaries of sound and DAW in an already chaotic world. But beat through the binary code and you’ll find that the project, in all its artificial beauty, couldn’t feel more human.  

Rest Symbol originally came out in late 2023 through the An1ma label. I didn’t hear it at the time, but at some point, Brian Foote from Kranky did and hit the London trio behind the record up to put together this vinyl edition (with one extra song) on his label FO. It’s built around beautiful, incremental, medicated romance – 16rpm street soul, torch song in the rubble of a bomb site. Inasmuch as we’re talking sadgal vocals, shimmery keyboards, fluffed-stylus vinyl fuzz and breakbeats impossible to actually break to, we are also talking ‘trip hop, but really slow’, and if you swoon to Jabu, Birthmark, maybe Seefeel, or Space Afrika at times, then Rest Symbol is lying in state for you. A fair bit of side A feels like glorified sketches, though these too can open floral style – but when, on ‘Skin’, Rest Symbol’s Moreiya emerges from the shadows for a knockout lead vocal, it begins a second side that builds to the outrageously ecstatic stringed ambience of ‘Twelfth Hour’.

Throughout most of the 80s, the duo of Thierry Azam and Alain Michon were part of French art collective Lolita Danse, and this compilation brings together previously unreleased work created to soundtrack the group’s performances. The Lolita Years is post-punk music-making at its most playful and exploratory; a chaotic and colourful riot of ideas, language(s), styles – mutant jazz, industrial, sound collage, electronic primitivism – and Dadaist absurdity. 

With the benefit of hindsight, Anna & Elizabeth’s self-titled second record pre-empted the character of traditional music’s current resurgence with remarkable prescience. Like so many today, they strike that perfect balance between deep inhabitation of these 16 songs – a mixture of old-time dances, Appalachian ballads and more – and a desire to innovate and push them forwards. Proof, not that we need it, that though folk music is back in the zeitgeist, there have consistently been artists carrying the flame.

Leila was born in Iran but fled with her family to London after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and ended up quitting college in 1994 to work with Björk. It was while on tour with the Icelandic musician that she met Richard D. James and Grant Wilson Claridge who both agreed that their label Rephlex should put out her solo material, and she released her debut album Like Weather with them in 1998. This biographical fact has often seen her lumped in with IDM – already a vaporous and unhelpful category – but the evidence that her sumptuous second album, this time released on XL, begs to differ some 25 years later. Another category she shrugs off easily is that of trip hop with a collection of submerged torch songs, jittery exotica and heavily sedated R&B which rubs shoulders with minimalism, collagism and ambient, not to mention ‘A Reasoning’ which heavily samples German surrealist Max Ernst, a nod to the pop music of her youth with ‘Gushgoog’ and a squelchy acid cover of ‘Mein Herr’ from Cabaret. All in all a lot less easy to categorise than anyone let on a quarter of a century ago.

Kiran Leonard has been operating inside and outside of Britain’s folk and alternative rock scenes for over a decade. However, with 2021’s <i>Trespass On Foot</i> and 2024’s <i>Real Home</i> he really came into his own, crystallising a vision that melded delicate, unravelling avant-folk with tilted, fragmentary rock splinters. <i>Small Brown Bed/With You Waltz</i> is an incendiary live collection featuring the best songs from these albums, played by a dynamite live band featuring members of caroline and Shovel Dance Collective. The swirling version of ‘What Dust Is’ recalls Hood in its rustic grandiosity, whilst closer ‘Sights Past’ showcases the group’s extravagant post-rock chops at their best. It’s a great entry point into one of Britain’s most underrated and prolific artists, and in almost two hours, Leonard’s world flies by so quickly.

The musical influences and origins of Champion Versions, The Beta Band’s debut EP and one of the three releases that make up this collection, are hidden on the sleeve as well as the music therein. Dub was a guide – the sense of space and atmosphere, the forefront rhythm section, the experimentalism – with the EP taking its name and design from King Tubby (Presents The Roots Of Dub). This influence tended to hail from the sunnier, more buoyant and playful side of dub compared to the more claustrophobic strains that were influencing trip hop at the time, for example. There were mod influences from Steve Mason’s scooter days, a self-taught punk daring, and a sense of outsider or art school adventurism in their style, with the sleeve illustration based on the found art of a packet of fireworks. Hand-made collage ran through much of their work to come (they would simultaneously publish their own Flower Press zine series), but also reflected their combinations of contradictory styles of music.

Recorded in the titular season by four pre-teen girls in the California suburbs, Summer 2000 is a snapshot of millennial girlhood more authentic and strange than the recycled tropes of Y2K trends. ‘Idiotic’ is like an outsider art take on ‘Overload’ by Sugababes, while ‘Promises’ is reminiscent of Young Marble Giants’ minimalism, and ‘Conversation’ imagines adult relationship problems from the precocious perspective of a child. 25 years later, there’s more to come – now adults, the group are back together in the wake of this reissue.