39.
For many years, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s unbeatable classic ambient works from the 1980s only shifted hands for hundreds of pounds on the resale market, his discography the benefactor of renewed interest in a number of past Japanese ambient producers over the last decade. Two years ago, some of those works – namely Pier & Loft and Music For Nine Postcards – finally began to make their way to fans at a far more affordable price thanks to very necessary reissues. This year, another of his discography highlights, Green, finally got the same treatment, courtesy of Light In The Attic. It couldn’t have been more welcome, featuring a number of this writer’s most-loved Yoshimura pieces in ‘Feel’ and ‘Sheep’.Hiroshi YoshimuraGreenLight In The Attic
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While the five compositions on Gateway Summer Sound are mostly abstract, they evoke vivid imagery. ‘Episode’, for example, might be the soundtrack for a deranged version of Beauty And The Beast, as noises like those of candelabras, teapots, stoves, and pendulum clocks ssscrape, sssqueak, and wwwoosh embraced by a disintegrated harpsichord. Then everything’s turned on its head again. The deep, incisive title track and the nomen est omen ‘Gong Song’ embrace a sci-fi foley approach to concoct music that hints at what a heavily deconstructed, occasionally progressive collaboration between Delia Derbyshire and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters might sound if performed by monkeys, motors, and field recordings from other dimensions. Ultimately, this bewildering and daring attitude makes Gateway Summer Sound an absolutely vital record.Ann McmillanGateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal And Other SoundsFolkways
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Kemistry StormDJ-Kicks!K7
Kemistry & Storm’s entry to the DJ-Kicks compilation series, originally released in 1999 just three months before Kemistry’s death in a freak accident, is the sound of one of drum & bass’ greatest DJ duos at their peak. The only D&B mix in the series to date, it was recorded live on vinyl in just two takes and roars into action with intent, as ‘Trauma’, the Dom & Roland-produced opener, soon rolls into the menacing swagger of John B’s ‘OIÉ’. From there, the duo tear through an almost unrelentingly dark run of tunes (the appearance of Sci-Clone’s ‘Everywhere I Go (Remix)’ at the 25-minute mark is a perfectly timed spot of brightness) from some of D&B’s biggest and best: Goldie, Dillinja, J Majik, and Digital & Spirit all feature.
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Vinny MoonshineLive At WaxwingMetaphysical Powers
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Noa Records is a label that focuses on alternative music from Pasifika and indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, or Aotearoa, and whose most recent record, Keep Your Distance!, is essential. Recorded over 10 days by a huge cast of musicians and poets during the country’s coronavirus lockdown, it is a meditative, hypnotic and profound collection bestowed with a gentle-yet-potent power.Virtual Shadow EnsembleKeep Your Distance!Noa
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Various ArtistsAlterityHoundstooth
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UPRIZE! is a striking and unflinching film about the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa, a youth protest against racist education systems that left up to 700 children dead. The film’s emotional power is elevated by a remarkable and bold soundtrack released earlier this year as the second LP by SPAZA, which is not so much a band as a series of recordings organised by the label Mushroom Hour Half Hour. They’re named after South African spaza shops, or tuck shops, informal convenience stores run from people’s homes, garages, shacks and shipping containers that sell miscellaneous household goods. Predominantly centred in Black townships, where paths to formal business ownership are limited, the word has become synonymous with entrepreneurial spirit. Just as each spaza shop is completely different from another, so too are all of SPAZA’s performances, entirely improvised by a constantly shifting line-up.SpazaUPRIZE! (Music From The Original Motion Picture)Mushroom Hour Half-Hour
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CoilNTS In FocusNot On Label
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There are a few names on this stellar compilation from Dutch DJ Interstellar Funk (AKA Olf Van Elden) that will be familiar to most tQ regular readers: a throbbing chunk of ’90s Chris & Cosey; a particularly dirty slice of early Human League; some pounding gothy bum dungeon synths from cult Amsterdam group Clan Of Zymox. But it’s the lesser-known cuts that prove to be the real delight here: the flickering horrorcore of Psychick Youth affiliates Zahgurim; the broken machine funk of Mallorcan Sociedades En Tetra Brik; the dentist drill square wave party of Im Namen Des Volkes. This is filthy, sinister music for filthy, sinister people, the perfect soundtrack for wrapping yourself in clingfilm and getting sweaty under a concrete ceiling.Various ArtistsInterstellar Funk Presents Artificial Dancers: Waves Of SynthRush Hour
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Various ArtistsWorldWideWindowEnisslab
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There is something extra special about Hex; maybe if it’s a stretch for you to outright say, hand on heart, that it’s The Fall’s best album, that shouldn’t stop you from recognising that it’s maybe the first among several equals. As I said, when I was reviewing the excellent Sanctuary reissue in 2009: “Even if it’s a fools’ errand trying to decide which is the greatest LP out of The Fall’s huge back catalogue of albums, many fanatics of the group will tell you that the worst thing you can say about Hex is that it’s their equal best at very least.” It was this sentiment that eventually led to my most sophisticated attempt to answer to that most vexatious Fall-related question, what is their best album? And my answer was that at any one time I would always profess to have three LPs in pole position: the current release, whatever it was I was listening to in the car and Hex. There is a sadness to this equation of course now and my answer is merely the CD I listen to in the car and Hex.The FallHex Enduction HourCherry Red
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Albert AylerNew GrassThird Man
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The Tears Of Technology is a compilation that celebrates early 1980s synthpop. The standout track is by folk-punk pioneer Patrik Fitzgerald. In 1982, Fitzgerald ditched his guitar for a synth and released this track ‘Personal Loss’ on his Gifts And Telegrams album. Here, Fitzgerald delivers the same level of social commentary with the usual biting lyrics, but it feels more direct than his better-known folk-punk work. ‘Personal Loss’, and the album, shows the synth is something more than just a box of noises and rhythms. With the right operator it became something that could deliver tender motifs and catchy melodies as the guitar was before it.Various ArtistsBob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present The Tears Of TechnologyAce
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AstaronAstaronSealed
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When overwhelmed by the various horrors of 2020, there is no album I have turned to for solace more than this unfathomably gorgeous collection of songs by Beverly-Glenn Copeland. It represents a long, long overdue overview of a rich and varied career, one that has gone criminally unrecognised until his recent ‘rediscovery’. It’s the tracks from his pioneering 1986 LP Keyboard Fantasies that stand out the most, ‘Ever New’ and ‘Sunset Village’, twin pillars of absolutely overwhelming tenderness and beauty.BeverlyGlenn CopelandTransmissions: The Music Of Beverly-Glenn CopelandTransgressive
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SVBKVLT was unstoppable in 2020, thanks to EPs from roster members such as Seven Orbits, Nahash, Osheyack, and Gooooose (teaming up with DJ Scotch Egg on record for the first time), as well as an album by Hyph11E, that all sounded like nearly nothing else out there. The Shanghai label rounded off the year with the compilation Cache 02, the successor to 2019’s Cache. Its 14 tracks are a nifty introduction to the label if you’re not yet familiar. 33EMYBW’s ‘Coupling’ revolves around frantic, skitterish drums, while you could imagine hearing Swimful’s ‘Muckle’ on an old Sidewinder tape, complete with an MC spitting over it. ‘Alternet’ from NET GALA pairs SVBKVLT’s deconstructed take on club music with trance, and Gabber Modus Operandi are on fine frenzied form on ‘Pedas’. Long may SVBKVLT continue to bless us with its barmy take on club music.Various ArtistsCache 02SVBKVLT
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Like his creative colleague Michael Rother – who also often deliberately evoked the landscape of Saxony in his work – Roedelius is happy to endow the music with broad enough shoulders to carry the listener to wherever they want to travel. Many of these pieces do seem to flow like water, particularly memorable is the way the melody line seems to meander on the familiar-sounding piece, ‘Skizze 4 Von By This River’, or how the well-named ‘Springende Inspiration’ continually switches key. And ‘Rokkokko (Nicht Verwendetes Stück)’ could be an impression of the wide blue sky shimmering above the Saxon countryside. The music on the record also reminds me of the beautifully droll pieces that accompanied the first of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat series. More post-classical music set in, and redolent of, German countryside.RoedeliusTape Essence Archive 1973 – 1978Bureau B
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EdikanfoThe Pace SettersGlitterbeat
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If I have one problem with this amazing Soul Jazz series, it’s that, strictly speaking, these albums tend to be anthologies of kosmiche or rockin’ krautrock tracks as much as elektronische; drawing mainly from the work of bands at the Nurse With Wound List end of the German rock scene of the ’70s. Which isn’t even a problem at all when the curatorship on offer is as good as this. As per usual, Soul Jazz are egalitarian crate diggers and they mix the obscure with the well-loved, the genre typical sounds with the synapse scrambling, so Harmonia, Can and Amon Düül II nestle up to Emak, Dzyan and Virus. There are a lot revelations here including the ‘fake-sheikh’ arabesque of ‘Patella Black’ by Alex (whose drummer has clearly been listening to Jaki Liebezeit and taking notes) and the pleasingly zonked ‘Nearby Shiras’ by Kalacakra.Various ArtistsDeutsche Elektronische Musik 4: Experimental German Rock And Electronic Music 1971 – 1983Soul Jazz
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