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

Spread across five discs – Fundamentals, Essentials, Developments, Evolutions and Origins – the compilation features a wealth of gems from this curious floating world, and the continuing power of that wave. There are the genuinely big crossover hits: ‘Perfect ‘Exceeder)’ by Mason and Princess Superstar, ‘Day And Night’ by Kid Cudi, ‘Let’s Make Love’ by CSS. There are the electroclash mainstays: Peaches, ADULT., Fischerspooner. There are artists such as Jimi Tenor and Add (N) To X not usually included underneath the fabulous electroclash umbrella, and indeed one of the joys of this compilation is how it combines the unknown with the familiar. ‘We Are Your Friends’ by Justice and Simian – a song which, with the best will in the world, I never need to be alone with again – sounds positively fresh and coherent thanks to the clever sequencing.

I’ve been thinking about a precise point at a Goblin Band gig at Hackney’s MOTH Club for over a year now. It was when they performed ‘Willie’s Lady’, specifically a point about two thirds through where, having gradually raised in tempo and intensity over ebbs and flows of concertina, the song reached a point at which something seemed to snap, the band careening into a flurry of violin, a jangling stomp of percussion and hurried recorders, vocalist Sonny Brazil almost breathless as they tried to keep up. In a packed and sweaty crowd, there was something about the energy that made me feel euphoric to the point of transcendence, floating up towards the venue’s glittery arched ceiling. It was only at the song’s close that the scale of the cheers from a packed crowd broke the spell – and indicated that I wasn’t the only one who’d experienced the same thing.

Originally released under the group name Project Undark, Radium Girls was a trio of Japanese underground stalwart Phew, the late Dieter Moebius (of Cluster) and manga artist Erika Kobayashi. It is named and centres around a case from the early decades of the 20th century, where female factory workers contracted radiation poisoning while painting watch dials and hands with a radioactive luminous paint called Undark. They were told that this was safe, and that licking the brushes saved time compared to wiping them on a wet rag, while in other parts of the factory male workers wore protective clothing and equipment. Inspired by a film and book about the case, the women’s names in these tracks are not those who comprised the five ‘Radium Girls’ of the litigation (all of whom were dead by the 1930s) but a fictional group who are narrated by Phew, around tracks tracing other aspects of nuclear history.

This fascinating collection features recordings from rising Scottish traditional artists, all of whom have taken wildly divergent approaches. Drew Wright, under his Hoch Ma Toch alias, opens with ‘The Waters Of Kylesku’, a song that maps the journeys of travelling communities in the summer. Inspired by a beautifully sparse 1955 recording of the traveller Essie Stewart, Wright’s version – the backing crafted entirely from layers of overdubbed vocalisations, clicks and whistles – draws out a new dreamy smoothness. ‘Oidhche na’ mo chadal dhomh’ by mysterious “celtic mongrels” Mother’s Favourite Tongue pushes things even further; their version of Neil McKinnon’s poem lamenting the English oppression of Scottish language and culture is utterly brilliant. Pipes groan into life, then settle into a muddy drone. Two vocalists, their stark voices pushed to the front of the mix, trade lines as the drone grows darker and stranger by the second until it all starts to buckle under its own weight, plunging quickly down into harsh static and then back up again, the pipe recordings briefly reversed back on themselves, crunching percussion stopping and starting. It is essential listening.

Late summer 1994 raga MC General Levy made some bragadocious claims to Face magazine that, via M-Beat’s ‘Incredible’ single, he had “bigged up” jungle, taking it national, much to the chagrin of a self-appointed “Jungle Committee” who essentially blackballed the vocalist. This more than anything paved the ground for the birth of drum & bass as an imperial form; and the first person to take full advantage of this radically reconfigured terrain was Committee member Goldie himself. It’s testament to just how far ahead of the game Clifford Price was in 1995 – just how ambitious – that he managed to add so much colour, texture and depth (and prog, soul and jazz fusion) to what had previously been a relatively raw & radical hardcore form. This double LP loses none of the formal inventiveness of his earlier Ruffige Kru tracks by the introduction of liquid live bass, sophisticated guitar work and the cut crystal vocals of Diane Charlemagne. It’s as much spiritual IDM document as anything that came out that year on Warp, in the sense that it’s clearly designed to be listened to primarily while recumbent on the couch, and probably sits a lot closer to the work of Squarepusher than anyone really commented at the time. There is an insane array of producer talent here with Rob Playford, Dillinja, Marc ‘4Hero’ Mac and Photek fulfilling different roles. A quarter of a century later, Goldie’s debut album has clearly and comfortably grown into its name. 

It may have been largely forgotten over the years but Surfing On Sine Waves was Richard D. James’ first full length album for Warp, albeit under the name of Polygon Window. As with most of his albums, SOSW is actually a compilation of tracks taken from his archive except with a more exclusive temporal catchment area than Selected Ambient Works 85-92, the tracks likely having been made in his Cornish bedroom and student digs between 1989 and 1992. Interestingly, it was the second release in Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, something that very rarely gets mentioned in relation to it these days. It offers a very different prism through which to view the idea of electronic listening music or IDM. Given how banging over 50% of this record is, how functional yet thrilling, the idea of IDM at that point still seems to be very straightforward indeed: it’s techno you can listen to at home… i.e. these are techno tracks that are compiled on one LP instead of a series of 12”s that you need to keep on getting up and walking over to your deck to change. The ‘having it’ power of ‘Polygon Window’, the hard-swung cave acid of ‘Untitled’, the remorselessly funky Andrew Weatherall-favourite ‘Quoth’, the gothic new beat of ‘Supremacy II’, and the bass-heavy electro of ‘Quixote’ really overpowers anything else about this LP that’s slightly odd or off-kilter, and more evidence that at this point at least the ‘ardkore vs IDM thing was much more of a fanciful confection than anyone was letting on.

A half-hour taxi ride inland from Nice on the Côte d’Azur, in the southeast of France, brings you to La Fondation Maeght, an art gallery and museum of modern art perched on a hill overlooking the town of Saint-Paul de Vence. Its interior is spacious and cool. Outside, you can wander among the silent sentinels in the sculpture garden or get lost in a marble, bronze and concrete labyrinth designed by Joan Miró. Afterwards, you can take a pot of tea on the terrace with the warm wind rustling the trees nearby. It’s a peaceful place. But half a century ago, it resounded with some of the most challenging and progressive music being made anywhere in the world, culminating in two legendary late-night shows by Sun Ra and His Inter-Galactic Research Arkestra, now released in their entirety for the first time, as the 6-LP vinyl box-set Nuits De La Fondation Maeght.

This wasn’t a band whose musicians were stumbling over themselves, they were sharp on their own particular terms. No, it wasn’t power pop or anything and would never claim to be; their audible fondness for extremities and happy embrace of chaos as desired made that much clear. But these are songs that have, indeed, hooks, melodies, breakdowns and jams. They’re a band doing their damn thing, and at twenty one songs total they have the chance to prove that over and over again here. They can be pure ZZ Top-meets-Can charging down a freeway yelling their brains out when they want to be, they can be halfway to a friendly hoedown if you squint perhaps, and they can be halfway to Mars too. Usually simultaneously.

There are records that feel like postcards from the past, and there are records that feel like time collapsing in on itself, until it becomes alive again in the present. Alhaji K. Frimpong’s The Blue Album, recorded in 1976 with his band, the Cubano Fiestas, belongs firmly to the latter. To hear it now, almost half a century later, is to be reminded that highlife, Ghana’s musical gift to the world, was never static, never parochial, but a restless and adaptive language. The cultural timing of this reissue is perfect. In an era when young African musicians command global charts, and when crate-diggers continually unearth hidden gems for re-circulation, Blue serves as both anchor and inspiration. It reminds us that the modernity of Afrobeats is not rupture but continuity, that today’s hybrids have long genealogies.

This ‘New Music’ for five string kantele doesn’t look to totally crowbar it into a new context, but welcomes in influences from minimalism and modern composition, and engages the instrument in more expansive compositions that tumble along in clouds of plucked notes like a drift of dandelion clocks. In her notes for the CD, Hannu Saha says this record should be listened to quietly, and the lightness in the recording gives it a glistening sound, lending itself to low playback for late-night shimmer.  I kept finding myself singing along to it in wordless accompaniment. 

Russell, as well as being a producer, composer, and player of generational magnitude, is a truly wizard performer. The mystique of the incantations that he conjures up here with just voice, cello, and live effects are breathtaking, spellbinding, magickal. During ‘Tiger Stripe’, his quivering voice clashes with an alien array of stabbing, squelching sounds, each hitting like a punch to the gut, whilst the beginning of ‘Hiding Your Present From You’ sees him perform a bowed reverb-laden flourish that would make even the most seasoned metal guitarist’s shredding seem tame.

I don’t think, however, that Russell’s technical mastery is the defining attribute of this live recording. Marvelling at how many incredible stunts he was pulling at once is all very well, but to me, if that was all I had to say, it would imply a cold and mechanical appreciation of Russell’s craft – and this is the polar opposite of how I feel listening to Open Vocal Phrases…. What characterises this recording is the sheer and visceral emotion of the thing. Russell’s music contains a lot of very deep emotions, often several at once, and like no-one before or since he is the absolute master of evoking them for the listener. It is, of course, a wholly subjective view, but for me, it’s hard to recall a recording where a solo performer has made me feel quite so instantaneously or viscerally.

I finished the first part of what became the Masque Of The Read Death trilogy and brought it home. That’s when my brother was very ill. My feelings towards my brother played a huge role in the second part, which ended up being less a book of laws and more of a cry. I chose poems that are incantational, desperate cries – I’m not saying that to be dramatic. I’m saying that because that’s what they are. They’re cries from the hole. I don’t know whether at that juncture I determined there was going to be a third record, but I got the room temperature of the virus in the United States, because in London and Berlin, people would just laugh at me when I told them what I was working on. I generally didn’t discuss it because they would just laugh and laugh – these were straight musicians, it must be said. When I was in London I saw a particular emotional reaction among many people to the stigma of AIDS, to the idea of something being dangerous. I’m not complaining about it because the when you do work that you feel possessed by, you’re not losing time. If you do work that’s for somebody else and you’re mid-range about it, then it could be a waste of time. I have never felt that I had the time to waste. I, like a lot of Greeks, obsess about death every day. It’s in the genes. Death is in the genes.

Nigeria in 1976 was facing the slow unravelling of post-independence illusions, revealing a murkier, more compromised reality. For women, especially, it was a time of systematic marginalisation: sidelined in politics, silenced in public discourse, and largely invisible in the music industry. Danger, made in Lagos during this period, wasn’t interested in contributing to the official soundtrack of optimism. The Lijadu Sisters used beauty as a delivery system for harder truths, like alternative broadcasters operating outside sanctioned discourse.

Taiwo and Kehinde weren’t making ‘world music’ or any other category designed to contain them. They were cosmopolitan women who drew freely from what served their purpose: American soul refracted through Lagos acoustics, Ella Fitzgerald’s phrasing filtered through Nigerian inflection, and reggae’s political consciousness reshaped by post-independence realism. The album’s sonic DNA ripples outward – that bridge on ‘Danger’ feels uncannily close to what Althea & Donna would ride on ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ a year later. The Sisters attributed this to something “in the air” – a more generous reading than any charge of appropriation.

Kantele is a Finnish traditional instrument that is a type of zither or psaltery which is plucked, but still has a comparable texture and palette to the hammered dulcimer of Dorothy Carter, or Michael O’Shea with a lighter touch. In the Kalevala, the Finnish creation epic, it is said to have been made by Väinämöinen, the story’s hero, who fashions it from the jawbone of a giant pike, and who plays music on it that is so beautiful the goddesses draw up to listen. This is a reissue of a little-known album from 2021, which intertwines wax cylinder recordings from 1917 of a blind kantele player called Teppana Jänis, with 21st century recordings by researcher and kantele player Arja Kastinen and the late Finnish folk musician Taito Hoffrén. 

It’s done so sympathetically, where some tunes are performed in double the new over the degraded wax cylinder recordings, it is as if Kastinen and Hoffrén are undergoing an explicit act of restoration through these overlaps. The impression left is music that is still alive not preserved on wax never to be touched, but something which might change or develop. 

For me, Stars Of The Lid have always been tied to mental fatigue and brain rot, the viscous feeling after a day spent doing something simultaneously tedious and mentally exhausting – a sensation I equate with a variety of jobs in retail, stockrooms and offices. Their music feels most vital when the listener is in this state, when they have left the churn and need to take some space to hook body and self-back together. That might seem new age-y, but SOTL always sound too damaged for that categorisation to make absolute sense. The beauty comes from the reflections of inner turmoil. 

At their most elegiac, their records act as a salve, a sanctuary to suture the mind whole. But there’s also a discombobulating surreality. Music For Nitrous Oxide isn’t their most influential album. Nor does it have the majestic sense of balancing on a time dilated precipice that ripples through The Ballasted Orchestra. But it is the record where they can be heard most directly evoking the process of the brain unspooling, and all the darkness and light that might be freed.

Any old spod can call up a few musician mates and whack out a compilation album for a cause. These are generally no doubt well-intentioned rather than cynically performative, but sadly are often artistically nondescript and ephemeral. The Sky Was A Mouth Again is something different, however. Curated by Irish label Diet Of Worms as a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians and United Nations Relief And Works Agency, The Sky Was A Mouth Again has a thrillingly diverse collection of interpretations of ‘Louie Louie’, from wooziling droning (Maarja Nut), spoken word (Guests), beguiling microfunk (Richard Dawson).

Black Antlers comes with less of the mythos that attaches itself to other Coil albums. Where Time Machines, Loves Secret Domain, Horse Rotorvator and so on inspired nerdy obsessions with the eldritch mechanisms used to create them – a determined perpetual state of constant evolution and hedonistic experimentation via narcotics and pharmaceuticals, home studio tech, countercultural mining, occult practice and sundry other alternative states – Coil’s penultimate studio album superficially seems more ordinary. It is, after all, one where they embraced more conventional song structures, including the wonderful take on English folk staple ‘All The Pretty Little Horses’ and the same might have gone for their life outside music. In late-period Coil interviews John Balance and especially Peter Christopherson often stressed that they weren’t (entirely) dark magi, cracking one off into Austin Osman Spare toilet paper, but fairly ordinary domestic people. Unfortunately, not everyone wanted them to be that way, and this tension, alongside the tragic circumstances of its creation, shapes Black Antlers.

Coil historiography can often be complex and impenetrable, a confusing warren of CDRs, alternate versions, live recordings and so on, so credit to Dais for putting together thorough notes on the making of the record. Christopherson, Balance and Thighpaulsandra were joined by classically-trained percussionist Tom Edwards, hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton and Mike York (now of The Utopia Strong) on pipes. It was initially released as a work in progress in June 2004, with plans to finish the record in September. Two months later, Balance was dead. Black Antlers was eventually completed with Danny Hyde in 2006, and this is the version being reissued here.

It’s the push and pull between England and America that makes the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing version of ‘Memorabilia’, which opens the album, not just Soft Cell’s greatest individual recording, but one of the greatest in the wider history of dance music. The original had felt deeply English – more specifically northern English – in its nature. Made with the soundsystem of The Warehouse club in Leeds in mind, it has the edgy, lithe and spiky energy befitting nightlife a town where flamboyance could (and in the case of Soft Cell and their friends, often did) get you beaten on the street. Its lyrics, which Almond once described to me as “a paean to obsession and collectible trash; a serial killer collecting little bits of you ‘to show you I’ve been there,’” ­ blend the tatty delights of a short-haul package holiday, with the kind of paranoid claustrophobia they had experienced firsthand while the Yorkshire Ripper was at large. But just as this intrinsically northern band would be transformed in New York, so too does the Ecstatic Dancing version of ‘Memorabilia’ warp those English qualities through an American lens. A once-spartan beat becomes a decadent groove; new synths and trumpets whirl in and out of focus like the lights of a club to inebriated eyes; Cindy Ecstasy herself, New York’s bacchanalian spirit embodied in human form, delivers a rap that seduces the listener to follow her down the same rabbit hole as Almond and Ball. “If you don’t believe me, ask Soft Cell, because I shook them up and I gave them hell.”

‘Sex Dwarf’, meanwhile, is even more English, inspired as it was by the kind of headline that could only appear in a Fleet Street tabloid – in this case, SEX DWARF LURES 100 DISCO DOLLIES TO A LIFE OF VICE, which Almond had spied in the News Of The World. As a result, it maintains a little more of its original character on Ecstatic Dancing than ‘Memorabilia’ – still a squalid little slice of Soho sensationalism – although once again given the expanse of a 12” dance remix and the injection of New York’s frenzied energy it stretches and warps, its edges blurring. The same goes for ‘Chips On My Shoulder’. On the original the bitterness of its narrator, wallowing in “misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice” is set wryly to a straightforward party beat. On Ecstatic Dancing, the backing becomes manic – almost fraught in its energy. Now the hedonism feels not just a contrast to the despair, but a desperate attempt to outrun it.

Though The Unutterable would become a completely singular album within the Fall canon (something its Lovecraft referencing title, with two neat words running symmetrical to the group’s own band name, seems to acknowledge), it was a distinctly 2000 product. Its nightmare mood of post-millennium tension could be found that same year on Chris Morris’ disturbing Channel 4 horror-comedy Jam, or the techno-apocalypse of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, even the big budget ennui of Radiohead’s Kid A, which glumly occupied the front pages of music magazines that November. Writing in The Wire the following year, Ian Penman argued that Radiohead’s left turn was “looting other people’s transvaluations rather than clearing a stark space of its own.” The same cannot be said for The Unutterable’s oblique experiments, and today, it’s the Greater Manchester band’s sole release that sounds like a premonition of the dark electronic terrain that 2020s North West underground releases now occupy (in fact, White Hotel maverick Tom Boogizm’s NTS mix on The Fall is completely stacked with Nagle-era material).

And as the 2000s progressed, The Fall – all debts now paid – were subject to a belated and uneasy critical consensus around their past work, at the same time as their new output forged a clear third great era. But neither really allowed much accounting for The Unutterable. It was possible to watch the hour length 2004 BBC profile on the band, or read Smith’s 2009 memoir, without knowing that it had even happened. The Unutterable is a truly great Fall album: a dark forecast of the horror to come, a fascinating reflection of a band coming out of crisis, and simply one of the most vivid and exhilarating Fall products ever stocked on shelves.