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

The film gets under the skin for a number of reasons – a superlative cast, the director’s eye for narrative and scenic detail, the atmosphere of the Devon coast, a tightly structured and cleverly suggestive script, and a neat twist – but a large part of it is down to the understatement with which the film is handled. Even the Odyssean theme of Sirens, hinted at by the blocking of ears with wax, has a moth-like touch. Its peacefulness becomes eerie and amplifies almost any sound into a distressing intrusion or warning, even a door closing, laughter, church bells or a bird chirping. Never have the sounds of a cricket match felt so menacing. Silence itself is turned into pressure, mounting until the long-awaited shout of the title (a necessary reversal of the then-fashionable ‘it’s good to get it all out’ primal scream therapy of Janov), which somehow still catches one unprepared. A lot of this tension is down to the sound design, with the washes, noises, ambiences and builds of Hines’ soundtrack (plus music by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford of Genesis) becoming indistinguishable from sounds like howling wind in sand dunes onscreen.

Growling, time stretched samples dissolve into snippets of conversation picked up by room mics at this year’s Acid Horse festival – “Come on you psychedelic hooligans!” – as the vibe stays just on the right side of the Technicolour fun in the sun / catastrophic void decay divide, before the heavenly plucked AT bass and bone melting lysergic synths kick in. The main stretch of this one-hour long set – although, can that figure really be correct, it feels more like a temporal pool of amber resin into which the listener falls and is provided vantage to watch the seasons changing – plumbs the interplanetary depths of Tangerine Dream’s Zeit and Vangelis’ Albedo 0.39, before resolving with some maximally dubbed out Universal Indicator-style assault acid.  

Those seeking an easy introduction to the emergent scene of exciting young British folk musicians could do a lot worse than this compilation of work by members of Les Caravanes, a “travelling folk club” of ever shifting makeup. They take their name from the legendary Soho venue Les Cousins that was central to the 1960s scene and aim, as they put it, “to carry on [its] legacy”, and are composed of members who mostly met through a present-day club, Broadside Hacks, that I genuinely believe will one day be looked back upon with equal reverence. This compilation is acoustic guitar-heavy in its opening third, featuring (among others) a dazzling turn from central figure Sam Grassie on ‘Kishor’s’, and further evidence (following our conversation on the topic for last Autumn’s Radical Traditional) that Daisy Rickman’s voice is almost as well-suited to Nick Drake songs as Drake himself. The album broadens in scope as it progresses, however, encompassing the acrobatic harp-and-vocals brilliance of Polish-born Aga Ujma on ‘Na Polu Sosna Stojala’, unaccompanied turns from Shovel Dance’s Mataio Austin Dean on a rugged ‘John Barleycorn’ and Lileth Chinn on a tender ‘Mountain Streams’, a clàrsach and flute duet from Anna McLuckie and Gail Tasker on ‘Sleeping Tune’, Goblin Band’s Sonny Brazil on accordion for ‘Sherborne Waltz’, a delightful closing collective rendition of Wizz Jones’ ‘When I Leave Berlin’ (particularly poignant given Jones’ death last month) and more. 

It’s fitting that Boris’s most immediate record is just as slippery as the band’s work at large. Pink, despite the mammoth riffs and sludge, always carried a multiplicity—the CD tracklist keeping its foot on the gas, the original vinyl sequencing emphasizing patience in noise and drone passages. Aptly, the Japanese trio keeps Pink a diffusing prism in these latest reissues—neither edition adopts the same track order for the album proper, while the 6xLP’s outtakes and live recordings capture the era’s full spectrum of ferocity and tranquility. As always, Pink remains a record impossible to fully pin down, even as it brutalizes at full speed ahead.

There’s no better album opener than the hyper-bpm sonic boom boom boom of ‘Je Mitsiko Ro Mokotse’ (which translates to ‘Those who talk dirty behind your back tire themselves out for nothing’). Wow, that guitar! A king-size Catherine wheel on putt-putt-puttering drums with vocals that ride the lightning into the red. It’s sung by Mamehey and written by one of the vocalists, Bodida, one of the most popular tsapiky singers to have ever done it. Tsapiky is a form from Southwestern Madagascar, played at mandriampototse ceremonial parties that take place to mark various rites of passage, and Bodida’s track was a massive hit in this scene in 2022. Drick’s ‘Dance Of The Rich’ has a similarly screwface pace: high energy in low fidelity from a strapped together soundsystem, where other tracks include Songada’s acoustic track on breathy flutes and jangling drums and the high, clear a capella duo of Meny and Ando singing a song called ‘Don’t Be Surprised’. 

Robert Morgan’s 2024 indie horror STOPMOTION concerns an animator driven mad as the boundaries between her life and a new film project gradually break down into gory chaos, a film where slow-building tension is punctuated by big shocks of pure terror. Part of its success is thanks to Lola De La Mata’s soundtrack, where untethered voices, grinding strings, deconstructed keys and creaks of wood build a thick and cloying unease, through which shrill shrieks of scraped metal cut like white hot knives. Having explored fundamental questions about hearing and human biology with deep intellectual rigour on her last record Oceans On Azimuth, this soundtrack proves that De La Mata’s work is more than just academic pursuit – her work on STOPMOTION manages to innovative while hitting every beat needed from a classic horror score.

Her real genius – on all levels – comes in ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, a deeply eerie version of the Nativity story in which Joseph, “an old man”, marries Mary, “the Queen of Galilee”. Collins wrote the lucid lamenting melody for words that had existed since the Feast of Corpus Christi in the early 15th century. She first performed the song live on Lomax’s 1957 Christmas Day BBC radio special (released by Rounder Records in 2000 and available on streaming services). She acts as its omniscient narrator, telling us of Mary asking Joseph to pick her cherries, before he accuses her of infidelity. Her unborn baby then speaks, commanding the cherry trees to bend down to her. Mary’s character fizzes and flashes in Collins’ vocals. A sacred woman spectacularly rises in sound.

In truth, the songs on Berserker are melodically the strongest since The Pleasure Principle, even if conceptually everything is clearly a lot more nebulous. The cover art signals rebirth, though before he can shape the narrative he appears to have been struck down with a dose of nihilism, becoming bereft of the energy needed to join the dots. Numan is suddenly weighed down by the futility of it all on tracks like ‘My Dying Machine’ where – giving himself the opportunity to speak truth to power – he asks, despairingly: “Why give orders? And why make speeches? Give me a reason to die.” On ‘This Is New Love’ – a title which suggests we might be in for something more upbeat – he sounds positively desolate: “Cold fascination / With dead sound / Oh God let me sleep”. 

This album is constructed for the never ending narcotic session. The Steve Reich via Hawkwind out-of-phase looping of “time becomes a loop” in the intro got a bit tired from – lol – repetition at the time, but listened to afresh now has regained its function as an “OK, here we go!” ritual, as has the “crackly stuck vinyl record suddenly cutting into four dimensional techno” start of ‘Planet Of The Shapes’ that follows. That tune is probably the most Megadog track on here, with its sitar loops, snippets of flute and dubby chug – but it also remains resolutely a Proper Banger, with its intersecting riffs, its gung ho pitching up and down of chords (an orchestral string swoop?) on a sampler, and its one-note bassline, as rooted in the 90/91 birth of hardcore as they are in any kind of hippie-dippie mentality.

So often tribute albums like this – a handful of different artists offering covers and remixes from a single artist’s discography – end up a well-intentioned muddle. By their very nature, there’s rarely much coherence. String Of Hearts offers precisely the opposite, a compilation of songs that each tap into the same deep energy, albeit through individual lenses. Whether Loraine James’ amplification of ‘Dream Symbol’’s woozy intensity via her remix, the slow gothic sprawl that Sharon Van Etten brings to ‘Poison’, the gorgeous drone of organ and guitar that underpins Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley’s version of ‘Siren Song’, or the balance of gloom and tenderness that Coby Sey strikes on ‘Mentions’, there’s a deep brooding intensity that runs through the entirety of the record. It could be down to some fundamental energy at the core of HTRK’s songwriting that flows through even a cover version, the result of razor-sharp curation of the album’s line-up, or simply a serendipitous occasion of ten artists all bringing their A game at once. It’s likely to be a bit of all three, but whatever the reason, this is so good a tribute album that it stands up as brilliant in its own right.  

Recorded over three sessions in 1971, 1976 and 1981 – First Blues is by nature a scrappy and fragmented thing. It veers wildly from rollicking folk rock to a wacky calypso takedown of the CIA’s role in the Southeast Asian drug trade during the Cold War, to ballads and improvisations and (this is Ginsberg after all) a level of sexual explicitness that still carries some transgressive power after all these years. It’d be a stretch to call the beat poet a natural frontman – musicians including Bob Dylan and Arthur Russell do a lot of the heavy lifting – and yet there’s a warts-and-all maximalism to the record as a whole, a gleeful boundlessness to his writing, that makes it immensely engaging.

DD records was a 1980s Japanese post punk tape label. Most of said tape releases are now unobtanium of the highest order, although much of it has appeared on Bandcamp lately. Phantom Limb also released a collection of music by the label’s Koshiro Yoshimatsu last year called Fossil Cocoon, and are now following it up with this very welcome compilation. Nobody knows where label head Kamada Tadashi is now, and the assumption is he doesn’t want to be found, having ditched the music at some point and got on with his life, presumably getting a ‘real’ job. If you want to find out not very much more, there’s a really good feature on DD Records’ output here. I ended up getting stuck on a murky album called In The Fish which I can highly recommend. That artist doesn’t feature on here, but that’s no problem, there’s plenty to be getting into. The big ‘pop’ tune is called ‘Egg’ from the excellently named Young Hormones, which is giving me big Non Band energy, and there’s a clutch of low budget monochrome experiments and clatterings of the type usually plastered with the insufficiently specific post punk label, and which makes comps like the Home-Made Music For Home-Made People series sound really together. I like these odd experiments and the industrial roughness a lot, and I’d be lying if I said the mystery didn’t appeal. 

There are those to whom Autechre seem a daunting prospect. The austere sleeves, the impenetrable track titles, the tales of intense two-hour sets played with the audience plunged into pitch darkness. Some of their recorded output might not help: 2016’s elseq 1–5 has a running time of nearly five hours, and its successor, NTS Sessions,clocks in at a neat eight. For those who have wavered, then, this reissue of 2008’s Quaristice should be a welcome opportunity. Quaristice shows the duo as miniaturists rather than maximalists. Each of its twenty (relatively) short tracks feels like a single tessera of a mosaic which, once completed, shows the full range of the Autechre soundworld. From the brief jewel of ‘SonDEremawe’ (one minute twenty-one seconds) to the comparatively epic ‘Outh9X’ (a whole seven minutes and fourteen seconds), this feels like Autechre’s collection of short stories, rather than one of their epic novels. 

This expanded edition of Springsteen’s singular 1982 release included a white whale for fans: the fabled ‘Electric Nebraska’, full band versions of The Boss’s most beguiling, desolate songs. The original direct-to-tape recording remains definitive, but it’s thrilling to finally hear what could have been.

The EP didn’t sell well at the time – there were, after all, a lot of people doing things that sounded a bit like Aphex Twin and even with these energy levels it was hard to stand out – causing a period of reflection from which Jenkinson bounced back as Squarepusher and never looked back. But with the distance of time and the benefit of that crunchy remaster, it’s possible to hear just how much furious desire to wreck heads was present from the start, and how rooted in the hardcore raving of nights like Lost and Final Frontier, his practice was from the very start. That hardcore energy is unmistakeable, transcends his immediate influences, and explains why his later work has a sound that reverberates now not only with experimental music nerds but with those holding the incandescent torch from neo rave DJs like Sherelle to the Japanese rhythm game scene of artists like Camellia which creates some of the most crazed music on the planet today. Plus, influence and comparison completely aside, a gutsy enough DJ could still cause havoc with any of these tracks. 

Taking in everything from a sprawling and warm rendition of ‘Love’, a 90s ballad by the Kazakhstani rock group Roksonaki which Mamer would have heard over the radio as a boy, to an ancient piece said to have been composed on the sıbızğı flute by the mythological Turkic hero Korkut Ata – presented here as a minimalist epic – to an elegant composition by the early 20th century master of the dombra, as well as original works, Awlakta could easily be viewed as a ‘back to the roots’ performance. And yet, it still feels in line with Mamer’s wider experimental practise. His sparkling, shimmering guitar-playing turns his old source material into something properly transcendent, in the same way Robbie Basho’s did with American Primitive, or Carlos Paredes’ with Portuguese Fado. At least that’s true for five of the six tracks. For the closer, ‘Jupiter Project’, as if to make a point, we hear Mamer suddenly grab an unused guitar pickup and press it to his throat, his howls twisted through guitar pedals to make a sound that’s half air-raid siren, half late 60s electronic noise experiment. Here, the veil is lifted to reveal the dark, psychedelic monster that lay beneath all along.

A 90-minute epic, this is a record of such depth that any analysis I might offer within the scope of this column – particularly as an outsider – would only scratch the surface. I would, however, like to point out just how utterly brilliant it all sounds – the wheezing of an opening bus door and drums that click like an indicator mingle with languid drifts of brass on opener ‘Cáin Chairr’, before the pace picks up with a magical pump of rhythm – as if our vehicle has suddenly shapeshifted into a magical vessel that’s hurtling toward another dimension. Moving through celestial abstraction, pulsating kosmische grooves and moments of eerie dissociation, their music transforms Connemara into a hallucinatory parallel version of itself, in which we see passengers like ‘fear liatroime’ (Leitrim man), ‘dhuine siúl sa hi-vis’ (‘yer man walking in the hi-vis’) and ‘yung fella’ appear and disappear like phantoms.

A slow air is a form of Irish traditional music where a solo instrumentalist plays with no strict metre or structure, with an open-ended melody that often derives from that of a sung song – frequently in the sean-nós style. A Collection of Slow Airs By Some Very Fine Fiddlers, as the title suggests, presents 10 superb examples of the form. Some, like Tola Custy’s shapeshifting ‘A Leap Year Like No Other’, are self-penned. Others pay tribute to particular musicians who inspired them directly, such as Sinéad Kennedy’s beautifully sparse ‘Táimse im’ chodhladh’, the air to an anti-imperialist song which she learnt from her teacher as a teenager, but whose lyrics would only later find their resonance. Others still place their recordings in wider historical contexts; Ultan O’Brien’s ‘Seán Ó Duibhir A’ Ghleanna’ is an ode to Mrs Galvin, a player and folk song carrier who provided a crucial link between the remnants of pre-Famine material that preceded her, and the 20th century players who were to follow. Where jigs and reels are envisaged for dancing, airs are for listening and contemplation – often to deeply emotional effect, and so it is that this record reveals the most when treated to close listening. 

Aside from The Squirrely Years even existing in the first place, another of its surprising aspects is that these new versions are so faithful to the blueprints. They have not been fed through the blender of Psalm 69 and blasted back into the world as blisteringly busy Burroughsian metal. Thankfully, nor do they sound as cackhanded as all those 80s cover songs by nu metal bands and Marilyn Manson that dominated rock club nights in the early 2000s (and still do, I’m told), like a sewage flood welcomed into an uninsured kitchen. Early Ministry’s poppiness, once part of Jourgensen’s shame regarding these pieces, has been retained unashamedly. They are heavier, yes, but in a fairly subtle fashion which in some cases will have you reaching for the originals to pinpoint the differences. Ministry have aimed for an “arena rock” vibe and something truer to Jourgensen’s vision prior to Arista’s alleged meddling.