Various ArtistsGhana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980-93Soundway
While typically brilliant, Ghana Special 2 is unusual for a Soundway African music compilation in that most of the music contained on it wasn’t actually made in the country name-checked by the title. After earlier anthologies focused on Ghanaian innovations and developments in rock, highlife and funk, this essential release looks in part to the diasporic Ghanaian communities to be found in Germany during the 80s and early 90s. The amazingly titled subgenre of burger highlife – from the German for citizen, rather than the tasty, corner-free tablet of food – is a delicious revitalisation of an entire sound, a document of a well-established West African form synthesising seamlessly with disco, boogie and new wave.
Bill CallahanResuscitate!Drag City
Bill Callahan’s last solo studio album YTILAER didn’t ‘click’ for me until I saw it live – a mesmeric performance at the Roundhouse that drew out the most psychedelic aspects of his work, plunging deeper and deeper into the well until the room seemed to swirl in sublime technicolour. Watching Jim White’s gently rolling drums anchoring Dustin Laurenzi’s floaty saxophone, hearing Callahan and Matt Kinsey’s guitars stretching and sprawling, it was as if I was at a gig up in the Northern Lights. This recording from a show on the same tour, in Chicago, proves that even more extraordinarily, it was a feat the band were able to repeat night after night.
Throbbing GristleTG BerlinMute
TG Berlin is a fine document of how brilliant the second incarnation gigs were for Throbbing Gristle, and a tantalising peak into what could have been for X-TG (would they ever record the wonderful live track ‘Springbankistan’, for instance?). Is this a release that is going to win over a fresh audience? Probably not, even if it wasn’t a deluxe multi-format boxset. Yet, in a way, it’s good to know Throbbing Gristle are just as wonderfully indigestible as ever. TG Berlin? Throbbing Gristle And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Throbbing Gristle.
Susumu YokotaAcid Mt. FujiSublime
The late Susumu Yokota built worlds within worlds. Intensely prolific, he released some thirty albums in the space of two decades, roaming from glistening ambient to levitating techno via mesmerising sample collages. Sometimes his music dialogued with traditional Japanese music, sometimes it was otherworldly, sometimes it seemed to grow from a hermetically sealed inner place. Often it was all three at once. However 1994’s Acid Mt. Fuji is an anomaly. One which communes with Detroit techno and acid house but imagines luminous machine music born in a pre-industrial, forested realm rather than an industrial heartland.
Various ArtistsTránsitos Sónicos: Música electrónica y para cinta de compositores peruanos (1964-1984)Buh
This compilation collects pieces by Peruvian artists working in the overlapping fields of electronic, concrète and acousmatic sound, in a context where radical ideas about sound were circulating as much as sounds themselves. Most of these recordings remained in a rarely heard state, the majority never released on record prior to being collected here. As was the case across the globe, this music was being made without a clear outlet within the traditional structure of the recorded music industry.
R.N.A. OrganismR.N.A.O. Meets P.O.P.O.Mesh-Key
There is something endearingly uncouth and unselfconscious in the clunkiness of this album that makes it really fucking cool. It is brilliantly odd and lumpen, quite a contrast to the chiselled cheekbones and tweed tailoring Sato wears in the Bandcamp profile photo. I love the distant wailing in ‘Nativity’, which has a similar energy to my neighbour who has no idea the walls are so thin, and who sings with an unencumbered tuneless gusto. ‘Yes, Every Africa Must Be Free Eternally’ is a nod to early Jamaican dub, with the melodica sitting over chunky rhythms. Despite the many comparisons and connections available – to a certain type of post punk; to private press experiments with tapes and crunchy drum machines; to dub and to Vanity Records – it walks with its own gait entirely, neither one thing nor the other but its own complete self nonetheless.
SquarepusherUltravisitor (20th Anniversary Edition)Warp
A work that emerged in a time where people were more likely to listen to albums in their entirety, 20 years later Ultravisitor demands that you continue that tradition. Ambiguity can fill many with dread, but this seems to be a touchstone for Tom Jenkinson – the sense that ambiguity must be lived with. With his expansive musical vision, he takes us to provocative territory, leaving us with a question mark rather than a full stop. Ultravisitor is an immensely thrilling, technically exciting, wildly emotional and challenging record. An unknowable piece of work, perhaps, but undoubtedly a classic.
Dennis BovellSufferer SoundsDisciples
A pioneer of dub music and progenitor of lovers rock, Dennis Bovell dips into his endless record archive to produce Sufferer Sounds, a compilation of tracks from his esteemed catalogue created between 1976 and 1980. A vocational love for his craft has compelled him to unearth deep cuts and lesser-known versions of his soul-stirring discography. It’s a compilation that deserves to be booming from a sound system to gain true appreciation of the reverb, echo and especially the rhythm section on each of the 15 tracks, and it’s a testament to the legacy of Black British music that has evolved to what it is today.
Diamanda GalasIn ConcertIntravenal Sound Operations
When I interviewed Diamanda for The Quietus earlier this year, I put it to her that there wasn’t much of a delineation between her ‘live’ and ‘studio’ albums. She replied in typically forthright tones: “I’m very glad to hear that because there was one person who was saying, ‘Oh my God, another live album’ and started to complain about all the songs I hadn’t recorded yet. Why don’t I send you all the songs I’ve performed and I haven’t recorded? How about that? You can be more depressed, you know? It’s just like, fuck off, you imbecile.” If said imbecile didn’t bother listening to Diamanda Galás’ In Concert then, well, more imbecile him, for this is another incredible summoning and channelling of songs ancient and modern of suffering, persecution, love and loss, bringing the world (Anatolian Greece, American soul, free jazz, Mexico) together under the powerful sun and moon, and ineffable weather of her extraordinary voice.
Various ArtistsAyo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk From The South China Sea (1974–88)Soundway
Compiled by DJ and Soundway Records manager Alice Whittington, aka Norsicaa, Ayo Ke Disco is a snapshot of disco, funk and soul-inflected pop from the clubs of Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines in the 1970s and 80s. The ten tracks hand-selected by Norsicaa draw on her Malaysian heritage and advocacy for music from this underreported time and place, when traditional music-making met Western styles and electronic instrumentation.
LankumLive In DublinRough Trade
Lankum are not one of those bands whose live magic is lost in the studio. They have always sounded massive in both. The exceptions are the dual instrumentals of ‘Fugue’ and ‘Bear Creek’, which catch the spirit of the sesh, an experience that can only be conveyed live. Alongside the inclusion of ‘The Rocky Road To Dublin’, the chief attraction of Live In Dublin is as a summation of what they’ve achieved, especially after False Lankum broke through. Where they go next is open but their ability to create material that sounds like centuries-old standards, to find the fire inside songs that long felt spent, to sculpt environments of sound so it feels you are inside a film, and the recognition that everyday stories are deserving of such treatment (the generational betrayal of ‘The Young People’ for instance, facing precarity, hopelessness and stolen futures) bodes well, both together and in their side projects.
Various ArtistsKampire Presents: A Dancefloor In NdolaStrut
The breadth of styles covered on A Dancefloor In Ndola is impressive and this is a useful prism through which to view the DJ practice of Kampire herself. Here, though, the context is different. Born to Ugandan parents, and currently based in capital city Kampala, by now Kampire Bahana has arguably become the main pipeline via which Western ears are introduced to the music coming out of Uganda and Zambia over any other contemporary artist from the region. She tends to favour bass-heavy, club-ready tracks, whether that’s gqom, genge, or the kind of bold Afro-futurism Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes – her allies – is renowned for. The compilation emphasises the need to acknowledge and learn origin stories to gain a deeper understanding of how music works both locally and globally in the present. Far from just another spectacularly re-playable adventure from Kampire, this is the most convincing evidence to date that she’s an excellent musicologist and historian, not just an exceptional DJ.
Aphex TwinSelected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)Warp
Richard D James has talked many times of happy memories larking about in relatively remote Cornish locations, sometimes high, in Cornish locations such as the old Cligga Head Wolframite Mine and Explosives Factory; the Methodist grass amphitheatre, the Gwennap Pit; the sand dunes at Gwithian where his social group threw rave parties, and it is in these places that the veil is thinnest. There’s an understandable sense of dread grandeur then in the music that makes up Selected Ambient Works Volume II. ‘Hankie’ [#4] resonates with the rapture of vertigo, a conduit to the 16,000 cubic mile, fist-like Cornubian batholith of granite below ground, with only five violent plutonic fingers bursting through to the surface, between Dartmoor and the Isles of Scilly. ‘Parallel Stripes’ [#14] reaches down further again, sensing just a thin scud of dirt separating humanity from roiling magma below. ‘White Blur 1’ [#12] is the geological alchemy of metamorphism; metal and mineral rich water, superheated and forced violently along underground dykes and cracks, cooling to form rich lodes and deposits. ‘Tassels’ [#23] suggests the potential cellular violence wrought by radon, an odourless, colourless radioactive gas produced by the decay of uranium and thorium found naturally in granite. And yet the Cornubian landmass can seem quiet and static. Like a power station might.
The Lijadu SistersHorizon UnlimitedNumero Group
Over five albums released between 1969 and 1979, The Lijadu Sisters wrote and recorded songs that bravely spoke to the political corruption in Nigeria, dealt with women’s rights at a time and place when this was a controversial subject, and touched deftly on the personal and political field of relationships. Their musical palette was expansive, utilising Afrobeat, disco, reggae, soul, funk, and psychedelic rock, over which the sisters sang together in Yoruba, Igbo or English, always in close harmony or in unison. It was only after Yeye Taiwo, one-half of the duo, was able to gain control of their recordings in 2021 that a plan could be put in place to reassert their legacy. Working with Numero Group, their entire back catalogue is being reissued, starting with their final album, 1979’s Horizon Unlimited. It is a record that best demonstrates the sisters’ unique vision and their crossover appeal in the West, smoothly incorporating buoyant funk rhythms with the rubbery beat of the traditional talking drum and the sisters’ bright harmonies, heard on songs like the joyously addictive ‘Come On Home’.
The FallThe Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country On The Click)Cherry Red
The Real New Fall LP still sounds like it did back when it was originally released – fierce, snappy, without comparison. It has barely dated. In recent years, there has been a much-needed reappraisal of the dynamics within the band, with former members finally getting the chance to say their piece. However, this reissue is evidence that Smith’s creative instincts were often right. No doubt some The Fall heads will moan that this material has been released before. The Interim disc came out as a compilation in November 2004, the singles and B-sides are already out there, it’s not hard to find the ‘original’ album, The Peel Sessions are already on the Peel Sessions box set, and so on. Yet under the stated aim of providing a comprehensive, deep exploration of this period of the band, to have it all in one place and with such excellent accompanying input from those involved is valuable to a completist and new supporter alike.
Aphrodite’s Child666Vertigo / Mercury
There’s no point in asking me to give a balanced view of this infernally great 1974 Greek “prog” album given that it contains the greatest rock song ever recorded. But come for the original loud quiet loud eschatological masterpiece ‘The Four Horsemen’ and stay for the double concept album that shows Demis Rousssos and Vangelis Papathanassiou at the height of their powers. This pair – with the insane, Dave Gilmour-standard guitar of Silver Koulouris and Loukas Sideras’ incredible drum work – delivered an album so astounding that rock music should really have had a few years off afterwards and basked in the reflected glory. Combine the vaulting ambition of Magma, the cosmic depth of Gong, the brute force of The Who, the melodic knack of the Beatles and what do you get? An album you need to own, that’s what.
Rəhman MəmmədliAzerbaijani Gitara Volume 2Bongo Joe
Məmmədli puts his spin on the sound of the Azerbaijani guitar by combining it with the traditional folk music of the country. He experiments with modifications to the instrument, adding frets to facilitate playing in traditional modes. Born in 1961, he grew up surrounded by the region’s music. As a child, he played the garmoshka, a Russian button accordion, but it wasn’t until the guitar – which he taught himself to play in the mid-1970s – became his main instrument that he could tackle a whole spectrum of melodies, and he soon found himself in the Karabakh Ensemble.
Dorothy CarterTroubadourDrag City
On the conceptual and cultural fringes of folk as it existed in 1976, when American musician Dorothy Carter recorded this album, Troubadour also crosses over into realms of early music and what would in due course become known as new age. She plays the hammered dulcimer and psaltery, with ability honed by decades of practice; the songs are standards, but an eclectic set. Carter’s version of Appalachian number ‘Shirt Of Lace’ was covered wonderfully by Alison Cotton not long ago.
Emahoy Tsege Mariam GebruSouvenirsMississippi
Souvenirs is a collection of songs of loss, mourning and exile. Recorded between 1977 and 1985, these compositions differ from anything previously released by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. You can hear the birds outside the window as she performs; it is intimate, you feel as if you are sitting beside her. Written and recorded while still living at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, she sings not just generally with nostalgia but also specifically reflects on the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia, sparked after several years of drought and an outdated socio-economic structure, which was followed by the Derg military coup and the Red Terror in Ethiopia.
BroadcastSpell Blanket (Collected Demos 2006-2009)Warp
There’s a strange kind of emotional whiplash attached to Spell Blanket, the first of two demo albums that mark “a closing of the door” on Broadcast. On the one hand there’s a real sense of surprise and joy in hearing this music – the first significant amount of “new” material from the band in over a decade. On the other, it’s also a sorrowful reminder that this band, largely a cult concern at the time but now rightfully celebrated, still had so much to offer and an overabundance of ideas.
Spell Blanket isn’t the record that you’d give to new listeners but, for devotees, it’s a cathartic way to put a cap on the band even if it’s not quite the final release – a companion album of older demos, Distant Call, followed later in the year. Still, there’s also a degree of melancholy here. The band’s later works hit around the same time that hauntology was starting to become a thing that people were talking seriously about and Broadcast tapped into that same current, while never quite going down the purely retro “Who remembers lard and space hoppers?” route of some of the latter-day “h-word” artists. For all their mustier reference points, Broadcast were always a band who engaged with the present as well as the past, with Tender Buttons (itself a collection of tracks originally intended as demos to be filled out later) still hitting that sweet spot between retro-futuristic and actually-futuristic. There’s a sad irony, then, that Spell Blanket itself now feels a little like an artefact from a lost future or a dispatch from a parallel world.
The Quietus Reissues Etc. Of The Year 2024
- Broadcast – Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006 – 2009
- Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru – Souvenirs
- Dorothy Carter – Troubadour
- Rəhman Məmmədli – Azerbaijani Gitara Volume 2
- Aphrodite’s Child – 666
- The Fall – The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country on the Click)
- The Lijadu Sisters – Horizon Unlimited
- Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)
- Various Artists – Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor In Ndola
- Lankum – Live In Dublin
- Various Artists – Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk From The South China Sea (1974-88)
- Diamanda Galás – In Concert
- Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds
- Squarepusher – Ultravisitor (20th Anniversary Edition)
- R.N.A. Organism – R.N.A.O Meets P.O.P.O
- Various – Tránsitos Sónicos: Música electrónica y para cinta de compositores peruanos (1964-1984)
- Susumu Yokota – Acid Mt. Fuji
- Throbbing Gristle – TG Berlin Box Set
- Bill Callahan – Resuscitate!
- Various Artists – Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980-93
- Objekt – WHOLE 2024
- Nico – Desertshore
- McCoy Tyner And Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live At Slugs
- John Cale – Ship Of Fools: The Island Albums
- Richter Band – Smetana
- Richard Teitelbaum – Asparagus
- Mixmaster Morris, Jonah Sharp & Haruomi Hosono – Quiet Logic
- M. L. Deathman – Acid Horse 23
- Laibach – Opus Dei
- Various Artists – Funk.BR São Paulo
- CCL – A Night In The Skull Discotheque
- Shovel Dance Collective – Offcuts And Oddities Vol. 2
- Imperial Valley – I-IV
- Robbie Basho – Snow Beneath The Belly Of A White Swan : The Lost Live Recordings
- Various Artists – Flux Gourmet OST
- Paraorchestra ft Brett Anderson & Charles Hazlewood – Death Songbook
- Norman McLaren – Rythmetic: The Compositions of Norman McLaren
- DJ Znobia – Inventor Vol 2
- Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
- Various Artists – Lost Paradise: Blissed Out Breakbeat Hardcore 1991-94
- Sheida Gharachedaghi & Mohammad Reza Aslani – Chess Of The Wind
- La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela – Dream House 78’17”
- Charli XCX – Brat And It’s Completely Different But It’s Also Brat
- Nick Granata / Dawn Terry – Betwixt & Between 10
- Susan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz – The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985-1990
- Brian Eno – Eno OST
- Can – Live In Paris 1973
- Various Artists – Soundsystems at Notting Hill Carnival 1984-1988
- Various Artists – 29 Speedway: UltraBody
- Various Artists – Even The Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996
- Nicola Piovani – Flavia The Heretic OST
- Various Artists – 13
- Fred Frith – Guitar Solos/Fifty
- Brown Wimpenny – Brown Wimpenny Live Demos
- Gastr Del Sol – We Have Dozens of Titles Box Set
- Zbigniew Preisner – Effroyables Jardins OST
- Michèle Bokanowski – Cirque
- Sonic Youth – Walls Have Ears
- David Rosenboom – Future Travel
- Gazelle Twin feat. Maxine Peake – We Wax. We Shall Not Wane
- Astrid Sonne – Great Doubt EDITS
- Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Hall Concert (Live)
- Regal86 – Recognise
- DJ Mehdi – Espion Le EP
- The Shadow Ring – The Shadow Ring (1992-2002)
- Emma Ruth Rundle – Some Heavy Demos
- Ween – Chocolate And Cheese
- Aerial M – The Peel Sessions
- Catherine Christer Hennix – Further Selections From The Electric Harpsichord
- Various Artists – Kiosque d’Orphée: Une épopée de l’autoproduction en France
- Various Artists – Ulyap Songs: Beyond Circassian Traditions
- Dagar Brothers – Berlin 1964: The Lost Studio Recording
- Tomo Akikawabaya – The Castle II
- Robert Cahen – La nef des fous
- Kobruvīrs – Budas piens
- Bardo Pond – Melt Away
- CHBB – CHBB
- White Noise – An Electric Storm
- Michel Moulinié – Chrysalide
- Bernard Parmegiani & François Bayle – Divine Comédie
- Winter – Live In Brooklyn NY
- Various Artists – Down To The Sea & Back: Volume Tres
- The American Analog Set – New Drifters
- Various Artists – A Tribute to Les Cousins: Soho’s Legendary Folk and Blues Club
- Galaxie 500 – Uncollected Noise New York ‘88-‘90
- Various Artists – no pare, sigue sigue 2
- Lawrence English – A Colour For Autumn
- Various Artists – Club Moss
- Acrelid – Illegal Rave Tapes Selektion: 1999-2012
- ZAÄAR – Musique Cryptique (Live In Liège)
- Paul McCartney & Wings – One Hand Clapping
- J Spaceman & John Coxon – Music For William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton
- Jam City – Jam City Presents EFM (Deluxe Edition)
- Pixies – Pixies At The BBC
- Maruja – The Vault
- Les Rallizes Dénudés – 屋根裏 YaneUra Oct. ’80
- Firefriend – Rcknrll
- Acidfuck – Lovemuscle Baby
- Rollets – Rollets
- Colin Newman – Bastard
