Quietus Reissues Etc. Of The Year 2022 (In Association With Norman Records)

19.

Cosey Fanni TuttiDelia Derbyshire: The Myths And The Legendary Tapes

On the soundtrack to Caroline Catz’s film of the same name, Cosey Fanni Tutti offers up a haunting suite of sinuous electronic tones that seem to drift in and out of the fabric of the real, like so many half-remembered fragments of a dream. Its release came during a year in which the artist also released a book, Re-Sisters, devoted to identifying and exploring the parallels between the lives and work of Delia Derbyshire, 14th century writer and mystic Margery Kempe, and Cosey herself.

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18.

Celtic FrostDanse MacabreBMG

BMG’s lovingly curated and luxurious Celtic Frost box set, Danse Macabre, is rammed to its massive metal gills – seven gorgeous sounding remastered LPs/EPs on fancy schmancy vinyl, one 7-inch, one cassette [Grave Hill Bunker Rehearsals], a 40-page hardback 12-inchx12-inch book with lots of cool photos and a short oral history of Celtic Frost Mark I, a “Necromaniac Union” enamel badge, a large two-sided poster, a snazzy Heptagram figurine USB stick with everything on MP3 plus extra tracks and a patch for your battle jacket – gives you pretty much everything the band produced during their mercurial 1984 to 1987 age of innovation.

John Doran

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17.

Sonic YouthIn/Out/InThree Lobed

Curated by the ever-reliable Three Lobed Recordings, the material on In/Out/In is not what could strictly be called “previously unreleased.” That said, there will be plenty of listeners out there who don’t already own it, or at least not all of it, and certainly not in a physical format. ‘In & Out’ and ‘Out & In’ were first disinterred in 2011, as part of Three Lobed’s limited boxed set, Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them, alongside offerings from Sun City Girls, Steve Gunn, Mouthus, Comets On Fire, D. Charles Speer, Wooden Wand, Eternal Tapestry, and Bardo Pond. As can be gauged from that kind of company, neither Sonic Youth track sounded very much like, “Dirty Boots, Baby, Dirty Boots.”

JR Moores

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16.

Manic Street PreachersKnow Your EnemyColumbia

Know Your Enemy‘s songs are like the dispersed objects of the jaded angel, all of them characterful individually but, taken as a whole, they amount not to an answer but a puzzle – cryptic, frustrating, enticing. One way to try and solve a puzzle is to rearrange the pieces and the perspective. Over 20 years after the album’s original release, the band have decided to do just that. Rather than whittle it down and find the great lost album hiding within the Sandinista!-esque splurge, the band have added tracks, largely from B-sides, with commendable belligerence. They do, however, attempt to make sense of what was previously chaotic, separating the songs into one relatively gentle and plaintive record, Door To The River, and the much heavier Solidarity. More than the rewriting of history it seems at first, there is a welcome sense in this reissue of a band trying to work out what the fuck they thought they were doing.

Darran Anderson

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15.

William DoyleSlowly Arranged 2016-2019Tough Love

This expansive box set from William Doyle is an exercise in perspective. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a project gathered and made over some three years, throughout the course of listening to this mammoth collection one senses Doyle’s changing focus in each project’s wax and wane. Comprising three separate exercises – Dream Derealised, Lightnesses and Near Future Residences – the music is, to boil it down to its thinnest broth, ambient music, but viewed variously through different lenses. Towering, impenetrable walls of shimmering synth pads bookend crackling noise carpets, weirdo vocal processing experiments poke through scattered, abstract musique concrète, and skeletal sketches contrast dense, compacted soundscapes.

Will Ainsley

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14.

Various ArtistsSaturno 2000: La Rebejada De Los Sonideros 1962-1983Analog Africa

This compilation from the ever-reliable Analog Africa is a total delight, exploring the work of Mexican sound system operators, known as sonideros, who slowed down the beat of cumbia to create something new called ‘rebajada’ (which is Spanish for ‘to reduce or lower’). The playfulness and breadth within those confines is joyous. The springy and infectious electronics of Junior Y Su Equipo border at times on chiptune. Manzanita’s vocals on ‘La Cuenta Sinverguenza’ are frankly gorgeous. ‘La Danza Del Mono’ is irresistibly psychedelic, and ‘Capricho Egipico’ is an engrossingly wonky cod-Middle Eastern groove. The title track is a sublime cut of weaving big band brilliance.

Patrick Clarke

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13.

Various ArtistsThorn ValleyWorld Of Echo

The artists on Thorn Valley are nodes in a loose net of taste. There’s no obvious aesthetic to bind them, a difficulty overcome through sensitive sequencing. The first few songs share a quotidian charm, ‘Droste”s sleepy synths prodding like pangs of optimism beneath the surface of a seasonal affective hump. On ‘Deep River’, Dutch duo Goldblum overlay a yawning loop with half-vocals and breakbeats which have run in the wash. Along with the following TRjj track, it’s apiece with the impish experimental pop spirit of Arthur Russell (from whom World Of Echo takes its name) and more recently of the vaporous Blunt/Copeland dynasty.

Alec Holt

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12.

Gazelle TwinThe Entire CityAnti-Ghost Moon Ray

Inspired by a Max Ernst painting of the same title, there’s a seriousness and serenity to The Entire City that’s less evident on later releases. Composed before Gazelle Twin found her “inner rage,” the record is utterly ethereal, containing panning synth-scapes and piercing, reverb-laden vocals. There’s a transcendental simplicity to songs like ‘I Am Shell I Am Bon’, where each roving chord carries impossibly heavy gravitas or the sinisterly stark acapella of ‘Bell Tower’.

Hannah Pezzack

Alice ColtranePtah, The El DaoudVerve

There’s little doubt that Ptah, The El Daoud – Alice Coltrane’s modal, post bop, spiritual jazz LP named for an Egyptian god and originally released in 1970 – is an essential album. And I don’t mean essential in the sense of the word which is sprayed about indiscriminately by some online music stores, indie record shops, specialist magazines and reissue labels, who arguably use it as bait to middle-aged record collectors who are now so deep into a warren of interconnected rabbit holes they’ll never find their way out to sunlight ever again, but in the sense that every home should own a copy. While it may not be as immediately aurally imprinting and spiritually mesmerising as the follow up LP Journey In Satchidananda, this is where you hear Coltrane at the height of her powers as a composer/band leader, knocking out joyful tunes, laying down great keys and wild harp, and coaxing amazing performances from Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson like it’s no big deal; the record’s sheer ease being one of a multitude of virtues. How Third Man managed to mess up the sleeve repro so badly is anyone’s guess and it’s in this chart solely on the basis of its sorely needed and brilliantly executed remaster from tape.

John Doran

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10.

Eiko IshibashiDrive My Car OSTNewhere Music

Highways are a never-ending cycle of cars whirring by, driving back and forth on an endless loop. Japanese multi-instrumentalist and composer Eiko Ishibashi’s score for Drive My Car, an adaptation of acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Men Without Women’, illuminates this cycle through rich melodies that patiently return and change over time. Film, television and theatre scoring have long been parts of Ishibashi’s practice, coexisting with her solo work that’s often improvisatory and electronics-based. She brings those experiences to Drive My Car, letting car door slams seep into heart-wrenching strings and eerie electronics. The score draws on a range of sounds, colouring recurring motifs with a blend of smooth, jazzy instrumentals, place-setting found sounds, romantic strings, and lush electronics.

The album’s tracks cycle through different versions of ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘We’ll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights’, finding strength in subtle changes of tiny details. The first time we hear the sweeping melody of ‘Drive My Car’, made of swingy rhythms and an ascending melody, the feeling is that of childlike wonder. But upon a later return with ‘Drive My Car (The truth, no matter what it is, isn’t that frightening)’, after poignant ups and downs and stirring strings have coloured the once-optimistic soundtrack, there’s a greater sense of knowing. This time, the piano is laid bare, rolling chords with deeper emphasis and melancholy. In these simple yet profound transformations, Ishibashi creates a narrative within the theme and variations, tracing a musical path that stands on its own.

Vanessa Ague

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Alvin CurranDrumming Up TroubleBlack Truffle

Alvin Curran is known for many things, but block rockin’ beats generally isn’t one of them. In his roughly six decades in creative music, he has been party to a wealth of heady improv, exploratory synth work, dense collage, and more besides, but Bohannon he ain’t. Drumming Up Trouble won’t help Curran find purchase in any corner of the dance music world. But as the title implies, it is his first album-length foray into the drum (both acoustic and machine-oriented) as primary vector. It’s a wild ride, sometimes chaotic to the point of being comical, sometimes patient, and still other times veering somewhat close to a mutant form of body music.

The pieces on Drumming Up Trouble could be said to be among Curran’s more accessible works. However, its perversion of the comforting heartbeat, the familiar and the known, marks it as something more brambly upon closer inspection. Either way, being largely uncharacteristic of Curran’s approach, Drumming Up Trouble would be a weird place to start for the unfamiliar. For initiates to his varied and extensive catalogue, however, it makes for a fascinating detour.

Dustin Krcatovich

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Eris DrewBoiler Room x Dekmantel Festival 2022N/A

Perhaps my enjoyment of this mix since it was first made available online has been heavily influenced by actually being there among the throng of jubilant dancers absolutely going for it at the Boiler Room stage during this year’s Dekmantel festival as Eris Drew played. It’s also a perfect one-hour summary, though, of just why she is widely viewed as one of the world’s best and most respected DJs, especially when it comes to piecing together technically flawless and high-energy all-vinyl sets.

Throwing down a selection of raucously fun house music – from forgotten Midwest rave oldies to fresh sounds from the UK underground – this Boiler Room set is an impeccable display of track selection and DJ skill that leaves plenty room for Eris’ signature energy-building scratching and chops of old FX records. Run through moments like the drop of Lemon 8’s 1996 hard house smasher ‘The Bells Of Revolution’ at the eight-minute mark; the stream-rolling transition into Kama Sutra’s 1995 banger ‘Kamasutra Express’ (complete with added train FX) at the 35-minute point; and the cut into Smokey Bubblin’ B’s delightfully bouncy ‘Poison’ 10 minutes later, and try not to get completely sucked into Eris’ intoxicatingly joyous sound world.

Christian Eede

Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation Of RastafariGrounationSoul Jazz

A sense of history is crucial to Grounation, but this album remains – particularly in this gratifyingly deluxe new incarnation – thrillingly on the edge of positing a future as well. Its vividness is still down to its collective will to find a new way to be Jamaican, not just recovering lost connections but forging new ones too. It’s vital I think, in any appraisal of Grounation to see it not as some kind of instinctive outpouring of a unified Jamaican culture, but rather to relish it as a record of just what a syncretic, non-coherent space cutting-edge Caribbean culture was at the time, fired by US Black Power and the Black arts movement, as much as dreams and idealisations of a shared African cultural memory.

Because of Count Ossie’s links with the history of Jamaican music, and because of Rastafarianism’s increasing importance to Jamaican music and politics after independence in 1962, Grounation could be seen as an ‘authentic’ statement of spirituality, an expression of Jamaican ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘roots’ (insert meaningless chimerical term of your own choice). I would argue, however, that it moves us precisely because of its confection, its inauthenticity, its act of imagination applied to colonial and post-colonial history rather than just its pure expression and reflection of the rage and resistance inherent in Jamaican thought at the time. Grounation‘s roots are in that most postmodern of faiths – Rastafarianism ¬¬ – which from its prophetic birth pangs in the proselytisation of Marcus Garvey is a definitively collaged faith – built from a blend of non-Christian pan-African separatist ideals, ancient Gnosticism, 20th century socialist politics and post-modern cultural curiosity.

Richard Foster

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Max TundraMastered By Guy At The ExchangeDomino

Had you purchased Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be at the time of its release in 2000, you likely had a set of assumptions about its creator based on the limited information available – the aesthetics of electronic music at the time, the sounds on the record and the moody, abstract artwork it was contained in. What listeners to Mastered By Guy At The Exchange in 2002 did not expect, what perhaps took them by surprise, was the geeky, white-boy vocal that opened the album. Punters were expecting Squarepusher, and were greeted with a sweet, clarion vocal and nursery rhyme melody that sounded, well, like something off a Belle And Sebastian record. Ben Jacobs, AKA Max Tundra, had outed himself for what he was – a friendly, T-shirt wearing geek with a penchant for ending DJ sets with an eight minute version of ‘Goodbye, Farewell’ from The Sound Of Music – and this would cast him in a genre of one. Electronic audiences could not fully embrace him, whilst an indie landscape at its most conservative – giddy over New York garage rock revivalists – simply ignored him. Entry into the actually existing pop world was a non-starter.

"The first time round I wanted to invent eleven new types of music," outlined Jacobs at the time, "this time round I decided to alter twelve existing types of music." What this achieves is an album where Jacobs applies his maximalist Amiga methodology to pop, R&B, soul, power pop and prog, creating an entirely singular record in the process.

Fergal Kinney

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EdanBeauty And The BeatLewis

Inspiration was never an issue for Edan, but fruition took its time. His debut, Primitive Plus, seems to belong to a past life. We get dick jokes aplenty, flatulent outbursts, and a whole lot of rapping about rapping. “Never say a rhyme that’s less than hooping,” he spat on ‘One Man Arsenal’, “intelligent all the girls I’m scooping.” By his own admission a juvenile record. 2005’s Beauty And The Beat is something else entirely, a true ‘what if?’ album – what if Prince Paul was hauled up in the lab with The Radiophonic Workshop? The album is a prismatic treasure trove, 34 minutes of carnivorous pillaging that sets him apart from psych rock revivalists; the paisley-clad obsessives on the hunt for that white whale vintage fuzz tone.

Beauty And The Beat made a small dent in the UK independent and R&B charts. It has been 17 years since its release. Edan is yet to release another solo album. He has, however, toured the world extensively with the great Paten Locke – who sadly passed away in 2019. These were joyous shows, full of goofy oddball eccentricity; ’60s wigs, kazoos, acoustic guitars, and even a theremin. He dropped the 2009 mixtape Echo Party, made beats for Your Old Droog, and, in 2018, dropped the collaborative mini album Humble Pi with Homeboy Sandman. But no. A full-length follow up we have not seen. The greedy part of me wants more. Much, much more. But there we are. Edan seems content, and we do have as close to a perfect record as you could want.

Eden Tizard

Various ArtistsElsewhere XVIIIRocket Recordings

It has been impossibly difficult, ever since Jon Hassell introduced ideas around ‘Fourth World’ music, to encounter sounds from ‘elsewhere’ without the condescension of Western (European or American) thinking about ‘that’ music. Musicians from outside of the traditional loci of Western sound are seemingly cast as being unable to do anything but opaquely ‘reflect’ their background and roots. I would argue, in 2022, that it’s precisely not those people rooted in a static or steady tradition tied to place who we should be listening to – rather it’s those liminal artists existing between worlds, both geographic and temporal, who are most closely mapping out our current confusions and desires.

As curator of this compilation, DJ soFa’s intent may have been to forge connections, but what I find utterly compelling about Elsewhere XVIII is how, as a travelogue, it’s scattered, diffuse, gloriously confusing. If there is connection here, it’s connecting with those disconnected, both from us and each other. In our broken world, nothing could feel more right, nothing could be less ‘healing’ and more miraculously eye-opening. Elsewhere VXIII is a wonder, not a comfort, properly unsettling to your established musical consciousness, as close as you might get in 2022 to overthrowing those categories of cultural othering that are so difficult to step out of in the West.

Neil Kulkarni

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BroadcastMaida Vale SessionsWarp

These recordings for radio allow us to hear the music organically and without embellishment. On Maida Vale Sessions, Trish Keenan’s oblique storytelling becomes crystal clear. Not that her narratives were occulted on record but here they truly flourish in the light. Keenan’s affinity for Gertrude Stein goes beyond just the title of ‘Tender Buttons’. Stein’s abstract stream of consciousness apparently informed Trish Keenan’s own writing, from its fractured nature to the shattered syntax. She was interested in the dissociative power of automatic writing, the sense that it created a second identity. “Suddenly you’re not yourself, as though you’ve created another you, “she said in a The Wire interview in October 2009.

As well as alternate versions of many revered Broadcast songs, Maida Vale Sessions also contains rarities such as the funereal ‘Forget Every Time’ (which was only ever captured for posterity in the 1996 session included here) and a typically glitchy, overtly cool cover of Nico’s ‘Sixty Forty’. Elsewhere, the subtle tweaks on live incarnations of much loved songs like ‘Come On Let’s Go’, ‘The Book Lovers’ and ‘Echoes Answer’ genuinely elicit the feeling of hearing these esoteric treasures for the first time all over again.

Hayley Scott

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Laddio Bolocko’97-’99Castle Face

Formed by guitarist Drew St. Ivany, bass player Ben Armstrong and drummer Blake Fleming, and later joined by Marcus DeGrazia on horns, Laddio Bolocko spent much of their existence, from 1996 to 2000, in near hermetic isolation in their rehearsal space in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, and later in an abandoned ski lodge in Elka Park in the Catskills. St. Ivany and Armstrong (who would later form Psychic Paramount) met Fleming when their band Chalk 22 supported his math/jazz rock outfit Dazzling Killmen. Fleming, who founded Dazzling Killmen at the age of 15, played on early The Mars Volta demos and later formed Electric Turn To Me. Laddio Bolocko, however, represented a pinnacle of achievement for all musicians involved, as well as being that rare thing from a critic’s perspective – a band that could be most easily described as sounding like Can and This Heat who made music that was actually deserving of such an epithet.

One of the minds blown by Laddio Bolocko’s intense live show was John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees and boss of the label behind this reissue of their work, Castle Face Records. Dwyer caught the band after the booker at the Bottom Of The Hill venue in San Francisco called him to suggest he attend their gig that night, because the previous night they had been ‘so mesmerising, so strong" that they had offered them the next night also. Dwyer wrote: "I had my ass and ears handed to me that evening… I remember a sax as big as me, drums that were physically hanging on by a thread, and twin electric strings that reeled sinister sprites over my head in outwardly circular patterns. Aggressive, far-out fractals burned in my brain. I had never seen anything like this band, and never have again."

Sean Kitching

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Valentina GoncharovaOceanHidden Harmony

This monumental recording, created behind the Iron Curtain in the perestroika era, combines minimalism, drone music and improvisation based on electrified violins and amplified household objects, showcasing a Ukrainian violinist’s extraordinary creativity. There are moments where Valentina Goncharova shows her improvisational skills. Take ‘Wind And Stream’ – the ephemeral, least electronic piece on the record – which relies on the spontaneous energy of the violin. In ‘Sirens’, you can hear shreds of vocals recorded directly via the pickups of the instrument, without a microphone. The same is true for the monumental closing piece ‘Ohm’. Their heavily fuzzy sound recalls the sound of a flute.

Ocean sometimes reminds me of the philosophy of Pauline Oliveros or Eliane Radigue, not only because of the title. The music refers to nature; it can be treated as a description of the process of transformation of the world – from primitive forms to the beginnings of culture, the formation of complex relationships or complementary opposites (embody the primary principles of Yin and Yang in the punctual and subtle ‘Golden Ball’ to the drone monumental ‘Sirens’).

Jakub Knera