39.
Revolver transcends boomer nostalgia because the rush of joyous, creative energy that surges through even it’s darkest moments still sounds like tomorrow; ageless, deathless. Because it’s still an escape route from pop and rock’s orthodoxies, hatched while the latter was still forming. Because it dreams of a world where ‘everyone of us has all we need’, Revolver remains a radical masterpiece of ‘smoking hot newness’.The BeatlesRevolver: Special EditionApple
38.
Originally released as Ferkat Al Ard’s debut in 1978, Oghneya is more than just a mashup of Arabic and Brazilian music – melodies and rhythms from each duck and weave around each other like butterflies. It all stems from a meeting in 1974 between one young Lebanese musician, Issam Hajali, and a trio of Brazilians who were playing in a number of bands across the city, Alex, Pelé, and Rose. Alex, a guitarist, would have a profound influence on Hajali, who told Gabrielle Messeder in her essential essay on Lebanese-Brazilian music Brazilian Encounters: Beirut’s “Golden Age,” Ziad Rahbani And Lebanese Bossa Nova: “The first time I looked to his fingers, it was, unusual positions, you know? I won’t forget in my life. [laughing] The G, it’s not a G, it’s G with […] fucked up with something!” It would have a huge impact on his own playing.Ferkat al ArdOghneyaHabibi Funk
37.
Switch off all communication devices, treat yourself to a couple of hours with central heating turned on, or a cheeky extra log on the fire, lie down on the couch, and slip into an extended reverie courtesy of Brazilian cosmic polymath Hermeto Pascoal and pals, O Grupo, at a Rio de Janeiro planetarium in 1981. This ‘coming out’ party of psychedelic electric samba, fire-hearted jazz funk and avant Brazilian fusion is the joyful sound of musicians finally getting to play live to an audience after months of locked down practice.Hermeto PascoalPlanetário Da GáveaFar Out
36.
Built from an ad hoc, accidental encounter with a lost love-story, Nate Scheible’s Fairfax attains the weight of tragedy, of an epic, and remains a testament to the human spirit that’s impossible to resist, an album that crafts a story bereft of sentiment but a story that’s overflowing with heart and hope. A story that is so needed right now, a story that arms the soul. An essential, miraculous release.Nate ScheibleFarifaxWarm Winters Ltd.
35.
This 5xCD/LP box set celebrates the 100th anniversary of the visionary architect-turned-composer Iannis Xenakis, with newly mixed and mastered tracks. A complete collection of Xenakis’ electroacoustic works, it includes the ground-breaking ‘Polytopes Persepolis’ and ‘Polytopes de Cluny’. Heavy-hitters ‘Mycenae-Alpha’ and ‘Voyage Absolu Des Unari Vers Andromède’ are stunning examples of Xenakis’ genre-bending playfulness with synthesis, noise and spatialism.Iannis XenakisElectroacoustic Works (1922-2001)Karlrecords
34.
In the early ’90s, Derek Bailey would sit at home in Hackney, London and practice guitar by playing along to pirate jungle stations. He found the pace of much free jazz at the time lugubrious, so the 150 BPM – then brand new – pulse of drum & bass was ideal for exciting solo sessions. Most of the tracks on this compilation were home dubbed on shonky equipment and posted out to pals, with the two ‘Lower Clapton Nocturne’ tracks eventually finding their way onto a David Toop compilation, Guitars On Mars, in 1997. The idea of Bailey’s wild improv meeting jungle breaks was eventually formalised with the release of the disappointing (if still ear-boggling) Guitar, Drums & Bass EP with DJ Ninj, where the pair all but fail to connect. The real excitement generated by this idea can still be felt in these scrappy, lo-fi home recordings, however.Derek BaileyDomestic Junglescatter
33.
Take stock of Baxter Dury’s career as a musician two decades in, as this immensely enjoyable collection invites you to do, and what’s striking is just how unique his music sounds. Not only has he achieved that rare thing among popstar progeny and stepped far out from his father’s shadow, but he’s stepped away from all of his contemporaries too. There is no one else who makes music with the same dark wit, the same self-skewering masculinity, and the same wonky emotive punch that Dury does.Baxter DuryMr. Maserati: The Best Of Baxter Dury 2001-2021Heavenly
32.
Heavenly Remixes 3 & 4 charts Andrew Weatherall’s long bounteous relationship with the Heavenly label. The DJ had many projects, collaborations and alter-egos, but there is a real sense that this music comes from the source, a wellspring that expanded into a vast fertile delta of music as his career went on. The earliest mixes are really early; the Sly & Lovechild track, for instance, was on the very first Heavenly release in 1990. As such, they bear unmistakable fingerprints of that time. The noble sentiment of the opening track (with the lyrics “All I want the world to see, togetherness and unity”) nevertheless underlines the wisdom of Weatherall’s observation that “Ecstasy is a great drug but it’s also very dangerous because you find yourself on the dance floor, punching the air to ‘Lady In Red’ by Chris de Burgh.”Various ArtistsHeavenly Remixes 3 & 4 (Andrew Weatherall Volume 1 & 2)Heavenly
31.
Tracks like ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’ might have been commercial successes, but the repetitions have their roots in the avant-garde. ‘It Doesn’t Matter’, for instance, is audaciously mechanical to the point where that phrase, repeated over and over, changes its meaning as it is duplicated within the mind of the listener. Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier were manipulating voice loops in the mid-to-late-’60s to create similar disorientation. On the demo, now available with this 25th anniversary edition, that simple phrase is brought to the fore and is more incessant than on the album version, creating a trance-like sensation that’s at times easy to zone out from, but can become jarring once you notice it again. An added dimension – or even the joke – is the subversion of the meaning of the phrase (as in, if ‘it doesn’t matter’, then why do you keep saying it?) At times it sounds like a malfunctioning Kraftwerk stuck in an eternal dystopian loop, and it’s a shame that that uncompromising approach wasn’t maintained on the final version, because it would have created a fascinating divisiveness. It should be mentioned too that some of the other demos available with the 25th anniversary edition add a raw sonic frisson to the tracks, the dirty rendition of ‘Elektrobank’, in particular, making the extras well worth checking out.Chemical BrothersDig Your Own HoleEMI
30.
From making music down in the Kassetten Kombinat Studion basement, where he came into contact with his first four-track recorder, Alexander Hacke’s career has always been leftfield and intriguing outside of his day job as bassist in Einstürzende Neubauten. He’s scored a number of lauded motion pictures, collaborated with everyone from Crime and The City Solution to David Yow from the Jesus Lizard, put out a German country album in the mid-’90s and, as a teenage runaway in the early ’80s, recorded with his first girlfriend, Christiane Vera Felscherinow, notorious author of the autobiographical Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.BORSIGWERKEThe Complete Recordings Of Alexander Von BorsigMauerstadtmusik
29.
Ainu are a historically marginalised indigenous group from areas around the Sea of Okhotsk such as Hokkaido in Japan. OKI only discovered he was Ainu aged 18, as his mother had hidden his biological father’s identity from him. He was a big fan of reggae at the time, and so applied reggae’s Babylon promise to his own hidden Ainu heritage, and went looking for his roots in Hokkaido, eventually picking up the tonkori, an Ainu five stringed harp. This is a collection of his tracks pulled from the ’90s and ’00s, which includes the notable presence of Ainu musician Umeko Ando. This should-be-legendary singer and tonkori player, for me, has the same spirit as Elizabeth Cotten. Although obviously from a very different tradition, she has an instantly recognisable timbre and cadence to her singing style that marks her out a mile, with overlaid trilling ornamentations. OKI’s thing is not to make traditional Ainu music but to mix it with other elements.OkiTonkori In The MoonlightMais Um Discos
28.
Recorded in September 2021, at the debut edition of London day festival Waterworks, but only shared online in September of this year, this two-hour recording is a neat summation of why Batu is one of the UK’s most in-demand DJs right now. Gliding through a first hour of high-energy juke, footwork, Baile funk and even a soca-adjacent tune about coronavirus, it’s a dizzying journey that I can assure you was a lot of fun to dance to amid the first summer back from extended COVID-19 lockdowns. As the tempo slows via a beatless palate cleanser courtesy of Lyra Pramuk at the recording’s midpoint, the set is complete with a gloriously fun run-through of various strains of Latin club music, industrial and UK techno, and speed garage, complete with copious amounts of mixer cuts and a few cheeky reloads.BatuLive At Waterworks Festival 2021N/A
27.
Síntomas De Techno: Ondas Electrónicas Subterráneas Desde Perú (1985-1991), curated and compiled by Buh Records founder Luis Alvarado, brings together tracks from underground electronic groups and solo artists operating in Lima in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It ranges from melodic, if minimal, electro pop to more abstract industrial territory. Through it, we get a Casio keyboard-powered document of the time and place which widens the narrative of electronic music beyond North America and Western Europe. It doesn’t tell us what it was like to live in Peru in the ’80s and ’90s, but does give us a lens into a vibrant, fertile time of exploration, where artists seized newly available technology and tested the limits of what they could say with it. Grabbing opportunities to innovate in even the most challenging of contexts.Various ArtistsSíntomas De Techno: Ondas Electrónicas Subterráneas Desde Perú (1985-1991)Buh
26.
Over the course of five decades, Diamanda Galás has charted a remarkable course through culture with a single-mindedness that few artists possess. Artist, activist, musician, singer, interpreter, and inhabitor of the great songbook of the world, her work has always sided with the downtrodden. This is perhaps best seen in her celebrated Masque Of The Red Death trilogy, which kicked off with 1986’s The Divine Punishment and confronted the AIDS epidemic. Across the three records, Galás put herself forward as the underground tribune of the oppressed.Diamanda GalasThe Divine Punishment (2022 Remaster)Intravenal Sound Operations
25.
Frost And Fire‘s tracklisting begins in January with ‘Here We Come A-Wassailing’, a song found by the Roud Index of folk songs to have more than 127 “instances” around the UK. A.L Lloyd adds in the liner notes that this tune has similar versions “scattered across Europe as far as the Balkans,” reminding the casual fan that traditional songs are not fixed, but like rocks in the sea, in motion across continents, battered and borne to new places, slowly being reshaped, yet surviving. Many of these songs come with earthy lyrics. In their version, The Watersons call for bud and blossom to “bloom and bear,” not so that people may not starve, but “so we may have plenty of cider all next year.”The WatersonsFrost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical SongsTopic
24.
There’s a sticky sense of fun and daring here that later Ride releases, with all their art and sense of scale, don’t possess. ‘Chelsea Girl’ charges out of the blocks like a foal let out in a field on a spring day. Throughout, the track feels like it can’t keep up with itself, and the lyrics betray a similarly feckless, teenage impatience: “You must have something / what it is I just don’t know.” What does it mean? (What does it matter?) Following the predictable but fabulously cocky guitar squall to end the track, we get ‘Drive Blind’, which is still a monster and one of their best; the ice-cold riff sitting uncomfortably atop a glutinous guitar growl and an insistent, fill-heavy rhythm. ‘Drive Blind’ really does sound like a souped-up Ford Escort charging round dark country lanes in search of a party with the passengers holding their arse cheeks tight in fear.Ride4 EPsWichita
23.
Voïvod are perhaps the key missing piece of the jigsaw in the already scant discourse surrounding heavy metal as a vital modernist (rather than just progressive) artform in the 1980s, and this knockout box set captures them in full take-off, groundbreaking mode. Starting with their ragged and adrenalised second LP (here on fetching red and black splatter vinyl) Rrröööaaarrr, the story of these Canadian pioneers really gets going with the follow-up Killing Technology, where prog structures and non-standard chord patterns (not to mention vocoders) are forced onto the thrash template. As good as these LPs are, it’s on Dimension Hatröss where the last of the juvenilia (screeching vocals, gnarly lyrics, crazy drum fills) is ditched in favour of an exquisitely realised whole of future metal which, in 2022, sounds better than ever. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight you can start tracing all sorts of notional links to names such as Jesus Lizard, The Locust, Cardiacs, NOMEANSNO, John Zorn, Rites Of Spring, Part Chimp and Pink Floyd, as well as contemporaries such as Celtic Frost. And none of this is altered one iota by the inclusion of the Motörhead-style cover of the Batman theme.VovodForgotten In SpaceNoise
22.
Born in Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in the 1920s, Branko Mataja spent World War II in Germany and moved to the United States after, where he repaired guitars until he constructed his own. In the 1970s and 1980s, he recorded two albums of songs-lament for his homeland, and Over Fields And Mountains consists of tracks selected from these two albums. This is a melancholic study of the electric guitar in the spirit of spaghetti westerns with a slightly psychedelic tinge. He uses pick-ups, spinning a melodic wail like Omar Khorshid, but also Robert Fripp-like effects superimposed on the instrument. The album is lyrical and subtle, and it still sounds current now.Branko MatajaOver Fields And MountainsNumero Group
21.
No disrespect to Wax Trax’s brilliant Love’s Secret Domain reissue at all as it’s a very well-executed reissue of a cornerstone Coil album, but, for us at tQ towers at least, the real revelation from planet Coil this year was this late period obscurity, reissued by Dais. First released in 2000, it stands in contrast to much of the band’s other material of that time, centring around raw drones and ragged filter sweeps blasted from Thighpaulsandra’s Serge modular – tracks like ‘Beige’ could easily pass for Pan Sonic or KTL – with hollow-boned Louisiana jazz rhythms from Peter Christopherson and heavily processed Jhon Balance intonations placing it in an altogether darker space somewhere between Time Machines and Musick To Play In The Dark. Closer ‘Tunnel Of Goats’, which is as long as Slayer’s Reign In Blood, is like Shit And Shine in their lysergic sludge pomp and may cause permanent confusion to your brain’s default mode network. You have our full warning.CoilConstant Shallowness Leads To EvilDais
20.
Recorded at two high-profile concerts given on July 25th and 27th 1970 at the Fondation Maeght, a prestigious cultural institution in southern France, the music contained on the multi-disc set Revelations represents the crowning triumph of saxophonist Albert Ayler’s career as a live performer. Playing in a specially constructed geodesic dome (a year ahead of Don Cherry’s famous residency in a similar structure at Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art), Ayler captivates over a thousand French youngsters, for whom he embodies a kind of shamanic sorcerer. The audience roar their approval of every tune. Familiar themes from Ayler’s canon are welcomed like greatest hits with delirious enthusiasm. Encores are demanded with boisterous clapping and stamping.Albert AylerRevelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght RecordingsINA / Elemental
