Gazelle Twin feat. Maxine PeakeWe Wax. We Shall Not WaneAnti-Ghost Moon Ray
I met Gazelle Twin’s We Wax. We Shall Not Wane in the last room of Somerset House’s 2022 Horror Show exhibition, and the pained moans lured me in with a dream-like dread, perfectly positioned at the end like the final scene of a horror film. You meet it exhausted, and you should be. The entire exhibition was building to this climax: a full, loud, bursting release, a total cathartic wall of sound, wet screams and frantic monologue by Maxine Peake that urgently tell you the truth that “the ditch is made, and our nails the spade”. Gazelle Twin is a master of combining myth and fiction with much harsher reality and for it to hit where it hurts.
David RosenboomFuture TravelBlack Truffle
Future Travel feels like a hallucination, like some twentieth-century sci-fi author’s dream of what pop music would sound like in the future. Recorded at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studio in San Francisco, released by Detroit’s Street Records (otherwise responsible for the sole album by the rather funky AOR boogie band Doug Brown & The Ones), and created almost entirely using Donald Buchla’s then-brand new hybrid analogue-digital keyboard synthesizer, the Touché, few records have ever sounded more 1981 than this, but at the same time few records have ever sounded more out of time and unlocatably weird and futuristic.
Sonic YouthWalls Have EarsGoofin’
1985 was a pivotal year for Sonic Youth. They released Bad Moon Rising, their first in a series of breakthrough records, and people really began to take notice of their unusually tuned live prowess. Featuring songs from a UK tour, this live album was originally released without the band’s permission and this year earned its first official release. Its sound is imperfect but, like all the best bootlegs, it’s still a goose-pimpling experience.
Michele BokanowskiCirqueKythibong
Bokanowski isn’t as well-known (yet) as her friend Éliane Radigue but this haunting mid-90s concrète work, reissued by French label Kythibong, will hopefully bolster her reputation. Based largely on recordings that Bokanowski made by surreptitiously recording numerous circus performances in the late 80s and early 90s, it captures both the levity and the darkness within the circus tent, from a solitary galloping horse to laughter that is by turns joyful and disturbing.
Zbigniew PreisnerEffroyables Jardins OSTA Colourful Storm
Zbigniew Preisner’s soundtrack to Jean Becker’s French drama film Effroyables Jardins has largely remained unheard and under-appreciated since the movie was given a limited release in 2003, and so many thanks have to go to Moopie’s ever-brilliant A Colourful Storm label for bringing it to the wider attention it deserves with this reissue. Played on organ and synth, the melodies of the central theme, which is also presented in a number of alternative forms mostly played on piano, have a charmingly earworm-like quality, while he makes use of a full orchestra to bring his work to its fullest potential elsewhere across the score. Providing a perfect foil for the drama of Becker’s movie, Effroyables Jardins is a deeply engrossing listen from start to finish.
Gastr del SolWe Have Dozens Of Titles Box SetDrag City
As we plummet deeper into the 21st century the music from our time here that ultimately stands up could well prove to be the music created by the outsiders. The music of our time that stands up could well be the music made by the groups that never, in the traditional sense, ‘got massive’. We may find the music made by groups that ‘got massive’ disappears as quickly as it appeared. We may find the music that lasts into the future didn’t smash us in the face with billboard ads and radio playlists when it was released. It could be music like Gastr del Sol’s. It could be the music made by the outsiders.
Brown WimpennyBrown Wimpenny Live DemosSelf-Released
A few months ago, I had a joyous all-dayer at the MOTH Club in Hackney, courtesy of the Broadside Hacks collective of forward-thinking young folk musicians. Amid a stacked bill, Manchester collective Brown Wimpenny were among those that stood out the most – and not just because their sprawling membership created a ludicrous scene as they tried to cram themselves onto what is a fairly small stage. A set of energy, eccentricity, communion and joy, it’s pleasing to see those same qualities captured in this set of one-take live demos released for free via Bandcamp.
Fred FrithGuitar Solos/FiftyWeek-End
This Fred Frith release might be a lesson in how to do a reissue, but better. It’s a double album of Frith’s influential and acclaimed Guitar Solos. from 1974, and an album called Fifty, marking 50 years since the solos. I heard he plays the same Gibson on both. The former was recorded by David Vorhaus of White Noise and voted album of the year by NME back in the 70s. Now, in the world of underground music Guitar Solos looms large – there is much to be heard in it that came later, and while Frith says he doesn’t feel he is or was like Derek Bailey, it’s impossible not to hear that soundworld in here. It is music that embraces texture and resonance; insistent repetitions and noise, and the sounds that make me go fizzy: those bendy metallic notes pulled from the guitar like magician’s handkerchiefs. The lyrical lament that opens ‘No Birds’, and the crowd-of-sparrows-at-the-delay that closes it is burned into my synapses, and I greet it as an old friend. On Fifty, Frith has – joyfully – not softened, nor suffered calcification, and the playing is as energetically nimble as ever.
Various ArtistsDiagonal
Oscar Powell and Jaime Williams mark the thirteenth birthday of the Diagonal label with a lush compilation accompanied by a book of texts from the likes of Sarah Lucas, Jonnine Standish of HTRK and The Quietus’ Jennifer Lucy Allan. What has always set Diagonal apart from more dour echelons of the harsh music / art world crossover was the sense that this is music you can actually move and have a bit of a laugh to, something that comes across throughout, from the anxious fizz and frankly rude squelchy sounds of Viviankrist’s ‘Creatures’ to Powell and Wolfgang Tillmans’ chopped-up synth pop and Dale Cornish’s sprightly oom-pah of ‘Back In The Room’.
Nicola PiovaniFlavia The Heretic OSTDeath Waltz
In the 1990s, Piovani would win an Oscar for his rather saccharine score for Life is Beautiful. But back in the mid-70s, he was still doing mad stuff like Le Ormeand this, a rather lurid nunsploitation picture with a soundtrack far more beautiful than it frankly has any right to be. For fans of Italian soundtracks of the era, this has pretty much everything: finger-picked guitar, wistful flute lines, wordless murmured vocals, and a dose or two of madness. A fine addition to Death Waltz’s ongoing dive through the archives.
Various ArtistsEven The Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996Light In The Attic
This compilation casts a broad net – it has to, to encompass the decades that saw the Soviet Russian regime crumble and Ukraine gain its independence. Even The Forest Hums runs in chronological order, From Kobza’s “trad walz inflected” ‘Bunny’, released in 1971, to Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s wonderfully melodramatic chanson, ‘Beatrice’, from 1996. Along the way we get gems like The Hostilnia’s marvellously doleful rap, ‘Sick Song’, from 1992 and work by the remarkable Svitlana Okhrimenko from Sugar White Death. There are a lot of specific Ukrainian elements in the music: the collective Yarn use traditional Ukrainian cymbals in their track, ‘Viella’, for instance. At the end of the booklet accompanying the release, there is a dedication to Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko, whose house-museum was almost destroyed by a Russian missile in 2022. We know where we are in the world.
Various Artists29 Speedway: UltraBody29 Speedway
The tracklist for this compilation from New York-based label 29 Speedway is a roll call of some of the best producers currently working within the fields of ambient and experimental music, bringing together tracks by Jake Muir, Flora Yin-Wong, Maxwell Sterling and James K, among others. The latter’s closer, ‘Sketch 4’, is a charming, gentle slice of acoustic guitar music that is at the more accessible end of proceedings, while Pent & Dylan Kerr’s ‘Incoherences’ melds swampy, hyper-detailed sound design with curiously gibberish vocals. Elsewhere, Kamran Sadeghi’s ‘Formula Fiction’ channels the head-scrambling beat chaos of modern-era Autechre and Nexcyia & mu tate turn in one of the release’s most straight-forward moments in the gossamer melodies and rumbling basslines of ‘Sans Titre’.
Various ArtistsSoundsystems At Notting Hill Carnival, 1984-1988Death Is Not The End
“Now I’m gonna tell you some English history! When Christmas come, we eat turkey! 1944, we defeat Germany!” 40 years later, and General T is on the mic at the 1984 Notting Hill Carnival, positively swelling with British pride as he rides the dubs atop the Jamdown Rockers sound system. And 40 years after that, London archive label Death Is Not The End have stuck it on a belter live tape with a self-explanatory title, Soundsystems At Notting Hill Carnival, 1984-1988. Nearly an hour of decently preserved recordings of the decade’s premier UK sounds – also including Saxon, Java Nuclear Power and Volcano Express – it captures a fertile, transitional time in the culture where digital dancehall and hip hop were exerting their influence on this music (and Notting Hill Carnival more broadly). Indeed, we hear a sizeable excerpt of Java Nuclear from 1986 which is basically a bunch of rappers with occasional recourse to toasting; on the other hand, they got Cutty Ranks as a special guest the following year, one of a new wave of hypeworthy DJs bubbling up.
CanLive In Paris 1973Mute
Whilst Can’s 1973 set at L’Olympia in Paris had been spoken of in hushed tones by bootleggers for decades, it wasn’t until this year that it finally saw an official remaster through Mute and Spoon Records. Captured shortly after the release of Ege Bamyasi, the band were truly firing on all cylinders at this point, stretching classics like ‘Spoon’ and ‘Vitamin C’ into vast, tantric funk workouts as heavy, mesmerising grooves flow as smoothly and cleanly as liquid. Not only a testament to the band’s extraordinary powers as an improvisational unit, it also serves as a fitting tribute to late frontman Damo Suzuki, who passed away just two weeks before the album’s official release. His hyperactive yet genuinely hypnotic vocals here feel like another instrument in the best possible way, neither hogging the limelight nor just lurking in the background, instead perfectly matching the energy and intensity of the set’s psychedelic peaks as the band appear to warp time and space around themselves.
Brian EnoEno OSTOpal Music Ltd.
Seeing generative film Eno in the flesh at the Barbican earlier this year was a remarkable experience – built from hundreds of hours of archive footage and interview material, an algorithm ensured that the version of Brian Eno’s career we saw will never be repeated. This soundtrack comes rather more fixed in time, but is no less rewarding. Eno has always been able to do the sentimental and romantic without it being twee, and opening song (oh what a joy it is to hear Eno sing) ‘All I Remember’ is deeply affecting. There are hits in here – ‘Sky Saw’, ‘Third Uncle’, David Byrne and Cluster collaborations – along with ‘Cmon’, written with Fred again.. as a reminder that Eno’s influence remains potent today.
Sussan Deyhim & Richard HorowitzThe Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985-1990Freedom To Spend
RVNG Intl. sub-label Freedom To Spend digs out a raft of unheard music made by New York City composer Richard Horowitz in collaboration with Iranian-American vocalist Sussan Deyhim on this vital anthology of the duo’s earliest work together. Bringing together sultry mellow pop cuts like ‘Craving Your Embrace’ and ‘A Calling / Navai’ and more outlandish tracks in ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’ and ‘Invisible Road’, it’s hard to understand why this material has gone unheard until now. All hail Freedom To Spend for finally bringing it to our ears all these years later!
Nick Granata / Dawn TerryBetwixt & Between 10Betwixt & Between Tapes
Betwixt & Between is Jacken Elswyth’s tape label, and the first side of this split comes from her Shovel Dance Collective bandmate Nick Granata. ‘My Chainmaker Lad’ and ‘Nailer’s Song’ are arrangements for traditional songs associated with the trades of chain and nail making, while ‘The Lord’s Nailmaker’ is an original composition. They’re songs of strife and striving. The tape’s reverse contains a single composition, ‘I Still Love You And I Always Will’, by Dawn Terry. With held accordion notes and wordless vocals, she erects a flickering monolith, an eternal return of keening distress and yearning whose spell is only broken when she whispers the title unaccompanied. Whether work or love, Terry and Granata show that more than stories, songs can embody ways of experiencing the world whose resonances are timeless.
Charli xcxBrat And It’s Completely Different But It’s Also BratAtlantic
Desperate marketing goons asking whether or not things were Brat became teeth-grindingly embarrassing to all concerned and a cultural low-point of 2024, but even that nonsense couldn’t detract from the album that started it all. Charli xcx herself reclaimed that discourse in any case with the release of this souped-up version of Brat featuring remixed versions of the original record, and appearances from the likes of Robyn, Yung Lean, Ariana Grande, Jon Hopkins, Caroline Polachek, Lorde, A.G. Cook and Julian Casablancas. Oh well, you can’t have everything. The remix CD proved just how rich and versatile the raw material on the main event was, shifting from ultra-modern London weeper ‘Everything Is Romantic’, with Polachek, to gnarly 90s fairground wurlitzer ripper in the Shygirl-featuring rework of ‘365’. Some tracks are even improved – the version of ‘Apple’, featuring The Japanese House, is made more understated and smooth, the emotion heightened. And then of course there’s standalone single and Billie Eilish collaboration ‘Guess’, my personal track of the year that takes me back to 2001-era electroclash via 20 Fingers’ size queen anthem ‘Short Dick Man’ right to the present, where it’s a satisfying waistband crack of raunch amidst so much modern pop earnestness. Brat, both as born and this reworked version, is a gauntlet thrown down to the rest of the mainstream.
La Monte Young / Marian ZazeelaDream House 78’17”Superior Viaduct
La Monte Young has always been notoriously cagey about letting the public hear any of the vast archive of tapes he has stashed away from the 60s and 70s – much to the chagrin of former collaborators like Tony Conrad. So it came as something of a surprise when, in the middle of 2021, he suddenly made himself a Bandcamp page. Since then, more and more stuff has started trickling out, both on Young’s own Just Dreams imprint and Tashi Wada’s Saltern label. Now we have this on Superior Viaduct, which consists of two long-form drone tracks. Side one, a comparatively brief glimpse of the epic The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys, features the quavering voices of Young and Marian Zazeela doing their best to transmit what they learnt from years of study with Pandit Pran Nath. Side two is just sine waves (with instructions to roll off the treble on your amp because there’s nothing there above 202.5 Hertz). If ever you need something to transition between your Terry Riley minimalism records and your hi-fi frequency response test discs, this is absolutely the one to reach for.
Sheida Gharachedaghi & Mohammad Reza AslaniChess Of The WindMississippi
Composed by Sheida Gharachehdaghi, this score fits perfectly into the dark, mysterious, and poetic ethos of the film Chess Of The Wind. The sounds used in the movie, as heard in the record, play an important role in emphasising the gothic ethos of the film. The shadows are heard in the sounds and voices with invisible sources, such as the coughs and laughter of a supposedly dead character apparently coming from nowhere. Other musical elements fill the silence in the eeriest way, such as the sounds made by the main character’s wooden wheelchair, or the ticking sound of the clock and the clinks of the metal flail which, in a murder scene, are dissolved into the music.
