It's that time of year, where we disregard everybody else's choices and vote for what we, the readers, staff, and contributors feel are the best of the year!
Nomination round will be open through the end of 2024.
(Yes, we wait until everything's been released before we start voting.)
Voting will commence January 1st and run for two weeks.
Thanks for your continued support, readership, feedback, and contributions.
It's an all new winter warmer with sixteen golden greats!
New and new-ish seasonal tunes from The Legendary Pink Dots, Isan, Mark Van Hoen, Freezepop, Blake Hornsby, Pye Corner Audio, Fairewell, Bill Orcutt, and SPC ECO, plus classics by jesu, Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, James White, Pizzicato Five, Lovesliescrushing, Current 93, and Butcher Claus.
Jon's son's cozy kitten pic by Jon.
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Cate Brooks’ Prismatics exists like a perfect anomaly: a portal to the golden age of kosmische music, crafted with such precision it begs disbelief that it emerged in 2024. The album pulses with Berlin School psychedelia, yet feels utterly alive, tethered neither to strict homage nor modern artifice. When my husband asked, “What year did this come out?” I couldn’t blame him for his suspicion—Brooks nails not just the mood but the tactile essence of the era. Analog synths hum and ripple like forgotten transmissions from the ‘70s, while sequencers unfurl intricate patterns that seem to loop endlessly into space.
It all begins with "Blue Chip Fever," a bold opening that sets the pace. The track immediately places us within the folds of Brooks’ sonic universe—mechanical yet melodic, nostalgic but still invigorating. The standout, however, arrives with "Technology Suite," a ten-minute journey of pristine sequencing and lush tonal shifts. Its kinetic pace and steady rhythms feel almost meditative, yet its forward momentum evokes movement—this is music that could propel a run, each beat syncing with the cadence of feet hitting the pavement. Like the best of Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk, Brooks infuses energy with focus, offering listeners a state of momentum and calm.
One thing that I particularly love about Christian Fennesz is that he only seems to surface with a new solo album when he has undergone some sort of significant creative breakthrough and has a fresh new vision to share. In recent years, those masterworks have settled into a reliable rhythm of roughly one every five years and Mosaic is the latest installment in that incredible run. Notably, Fennesz did not have clear vision when he began work on these pieces, but instead devoted himself to assembling the album piece by piece every single day until "the full picture" was revealed and the vision felt complete. Interestingly, the album is described as an echo of Venice in which the passing time has made "the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme," but it feels more like a descendant of Endless Summer to me. In this instance, however, the shimmering, sun-dappled beauty of the beach feels like a bleary and elusive memory of a past summer fitfully darkened by glimpses of a weightier melancholy. That said, the beach vibes prove to be impressively tenacious, so Mosaic feels more like the bittersweet final days of a summer on the seaside than it does a rueful reflection on happier past days.
I consider myself to be a somewhat devoted fan of Christian Fennesz's work, but I confess that I initially found myself a bit underwhelmed by the three pieces that were released in advance of this album, as they all felt more pleasant than revelatory at first listen. Once the full album was released, however, I threw on some headphones to immerse myself more fully in Mosaic and hoped that the expected sublime majesty would hit me eventually. Happily, the revelations started almost immediately and the biggest one was this: casual listening only reveals vibes and melodies, but the true beauty of this album lies far more in how it sounds (and how it flows) than it does in the actual chords and melodies being played. For example, listening to album highlight "Love and the Framed Insects" feels akin to gazing up at the passing clouds while floating on my back in the warm waters near a tropical beach, but the lapping waves keep submerging my ears to warp the sounds of summer bliss into something hallucinatory, unfamiliar, and sometimes otherworldly.
I never know quite what to expect when a new release from the Mouse on Mars camp surfaces, but their unwavering commitment to both derangement and bold artistic choices has certainly kept me curious enough to remain a fan despite the occasional frustrating or disappointing misfire along the way. This one (very much not a misfire) is both an archival release and an unofficial score to Werner Herzog’s unconventional 1971 mirage documentary Fata Morgana. The film itself has a notoriously rocky history, as Herzog and his crew were imprisoned and beaten in Cameroon in the wake of a coup (and Herzog himself almost died) and the finished film was apparently greeted with hostility "almost everywhere." Fortunately, It eventually gained a following who appreciated its more psychedelic elements and Mouse on Mars chose to perform a live score in real-time for it at a 2007 Italian film festival. Fittingly, it turned out that the film festival had not actually been able to clear the rights, so this endearingly wild vision has been tragically languishing in the vaults until now. While I am not normally a fan of soundtracks and scores decontextualized from their visual accompaniment, Herzog Sessions is a rare exception and easily features some of Mouse on Mars’ most fun and exciting work.
Notably, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma genuinely believed that the rights to the film were cleared for their 2007 performance, but they cheekily performed it a second time in 2009 despite knowing that they did not have Herzog’s clearance. I mention that primarily because this album feels too perfect to be culled from a single live real-time performance with an arsenal of guitar, percussion, electronics, mouth harp, pedals, software, tapes, and samplers, but it seems considerably more plausible knowing that the project lived on for another two years. Interestingly, Earth also performed an unofficial score to the same film in 2013, though I imagine it was very different from this one (and a much more intuitive fit for a film set in the Sahara as well). I also imagine that Earth’s score was much easier to describe, as breaking down the gleeful madness of Mouse on Mars’ vision here is quite a tall order indeed. For the sake of simplicity, however, I’ll say that Herzog Sessions has two sides: "sustained plunges into unhinged electronic mindfuckery" and "sustained plunges into unhinged electronic mindfuckery with a killer groove." Unsurprisingly, I generally prefer the pieces that fall into the latter category (particularly “ozgreH”), but the opening 15-minute epic “oergHz” makes a very strong case for the former (all song titles are anagrams of “Herzog,” by the way).
A Rift in the Horizon’s Wall features Paris based composer and current INA-GRM director François Bonnet (as Kassel Jaeger) creating a single work (split across two sides of vinyl) within in a very specific, contextual framework. Recorded at Epsilon Spires, a former Baptist church turned cultural space/venue in Brattleboro, Vermont, and using the church’s 1903 pipe organ as the foundational instrument, Bonnet adds other instrumentation in addition to utilizing the natural acoustics of the space in which it was recorded. The final product is a sweeping, heavily varied piece that conveys the history from which it was created, and also Bonnet’s compositional touch in a colossal, expansive work.
His use of the historic pipe organ as the fundamental point in which ARITHW is mostly built upon evident from the onset of the album, via a droning tone that sprawls out immediately. The overall sound is weighty, shifting into extremely dense low frequency passages with hushed, additional sounds subtly woven in. His use of space is not only part of the recording process, but in composition as well, as he opens the mix up frequently to shift the focus to expansive, understated layers of sound. At times the mix becomes intentionally murky and captures a full spectrum of sound, but the sound of a massive pipe organ is mostly obvious throughout, albeit with occasional, subtle treatments.
Not far-removed time wise from his double bill of Don’t Ever Let Me Know and Images from last year, Colin Andrew Sheffield has created a succinct, 20-ish minute work in 2024 (in addition to a collaborative tape with Andrew Anderson). It shares qualities with his two 2023 records but is clearly a stand-alone project. Constructed from a similar approach to those previous works—namely utilizing commercially available soundtrack recordings—Moments Lost, itself a soundtrack to a short film by Sheffield of recycled footage, taps into that same sense of familiar and mystery, with passages of what may or may not be cinematic drama peeking through.
From the onset of the single piece on this CD, Sheffield’s aptitude in creating dynamic, ever shifting layers of sound that teeter between music and pure sound is immediately apparent. Noisy, sputtering delays and panning sections are paired with expansive, glistening layers of tonal beauty. As the piece goes on, some almost piano-like melodies float to the surface of crackling textures. As with his other works, it is ambiguous as to whether or not this is a more obvious bleed through of his source material, or if it is actually something else entirely that he has reshaped.
This album has been a long time coming, as Blackshaw has mostly been on an extended hiatus from performing and recording since 2016, as the eternal instability and financial stresses of life as a musician nudged him towards a life in the food scene instead. Eventually, however, his creative urges began stirring once more and he announced his return to music in 2019, but his plans took some serious hits from the pandemic, the deaths of a close friend and a beloved dog, and a broken shoulder along the way. Thankfully, he persevered regardless and Unraveling In Your Hands marks the first new James Blackshaw album since 2015’s Summoning Suns and it is a damn good one too. In fact, Blackshaw almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all, as these three pieces are as compositionally ambitious, virtuosic, and deliciously compelling as ever. While the centerpiece here is ostensibly the nearly 27-minute tour de force of the title piece, it is actually a shorter collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson that steals the show for me.
In darkly amusing fashion, Blackshaw notes that the title piece was literally written “as a kind of endurance test,” as he pushed himself to his physical limit in the wake of his shoulder injury, as it temporarily seemed possible that he would never be able to play guitar again. I would not necessarily describe it as an endurance test on the listening end, but it does remind me a bit of the 1948 film The Red Shoes in which a ballerina acquires a cursed pair of shoes that enable her to dance brilliantly but also supernaturally force her to dance herself to death. As far as I know, Blackshaw himself is still alive and well, but “Unraveling In Your Hands” blows right past simply weaving a few gorgeous passages together and unfolds as an endlessly rippling and shapeshifting beast that simultaneously feels both freeform and incredibly intricate and complex. Impressively, Blackshaw recorded the whole thing in a single unedited take, which is presumably why it feels so vibrant and spontaneous. He mentions that some “flubs and hesitations” unavoidably crept into the piece, but I’ll be damned if I can find any significant missteps and probably wouldn't have cared much if I did. The overall effect is akin to Blackshaw having a guitar showdown with the devil at the proverbial crossroads, but continuing to play like a man possessed for another twenty minutes after resoundingly clowning his infernal adversary.
This latest album from Rafael Anton Irisarri was partially inspired by an overheard malaprop in Italy years ago in which someone at a restaurant mistranslated The American Dream as “The American Myth.” That unintentionally damning phrase naturally resonated with Irisarri, who hails from Puerto Rico, and it came back to him in 2020 when he was researching brutalist architecture and Potemkin villages (a portable façade built to create the illusion of a real town). It is not terribly hard to see how Potemkin villages are a perfect readymade metaphor for the illusory promises of The American Dream, of course, but making an anticolonial power ambient album that channels that revelation in an interesting and unique way is quite a bit harder. Irisarri ingeniously solved that problem by mirroring the “cyclical nature of our tumultuous political history” with roiling storms of distortion and hiss, which he envisions as a series of tempests and receding tides that leave behind only “dust, delusion, and memory.” Some pieces admittedly pull off that trick better than others, but the best moments beautifully evoke something akin to a glimpses of a flickering mirage through a raging sandstorm.
The opening “Broken Intensification” provides a fairly representative introduction to Irisarri’s FAÇADISMS vision, as it rolls in as a steadily intensifying roar of bass rumble and hazy guitar noise that feels like it is fading in and out of focus. I imagine it sounds a lot like listening to an ambient album from the window seat of an ascending rocket, as the extreme volume of the fiery liftoff would unavoidably overpower every other sound. The piece does not evolve much beyond that, which I initially found frustrating, as there is no shortage of greyscale ambient albums in the world and they are generally not my favorite thing. That said, that aesthetic makes perfect sense thematically, as the American empire is itself an all-consuming destructive roar that is ultimately hollow, so I guess Irisarri nailed that bit rather admirably. Once I grasped that, the album made a lot more sense to me, as I stopped looking for moments of submerged beauty and started focusing on the obliterating elemental power of Irisarri’s noise storms and it definitely seems like that is where he focused most of his attention. Consequently, the ideal way to experience this album is to crank it up loud or throw on some headphones and feel the full visceral power of Irisarri’s seething hurricanes of hiss and distortion.
I’ve been enjoying the musical union of Zachary (Magpie) Corsa and Denny Wilkerson Corsa since they first surfaced as Lost Trail during the height of the DIY tape label golden age that blossomed around 2010, but the couple’s vision unexpectedly ascended to a even higher plane when they moved to Memphis, TN and reinvented themselves as Nonconnah. Since then, their run of releases has been quite incredible, as I’ve been properly blown away by at least one Nonconnah album every year since 2021. This latest one (their first for the recently resurrected Absolutely Kosher label) happily keeps most of the familiar Nonconnah themes intact (plenty of guests, complexly layered shoegaze-inspired soundscapes, an “anything goes” approach to weaving together disparate passages and motifs, meaningful use of spoken word samples, etc.), but it is also marks a significant departure in other ways. Given that, it took me a bit longer to warm to this one than previous instant classics like Don't Go Down To Lonesome Holler & Songs For And About Ghosts, but I got there eventually and now find this album to be one of the more fascinating releases in the couple’s lengthy discography.
The album fittingly opens with a child cheerfully recounting an angelic visitation in which they were informed that their entire whole family is going to heaven very soon, which cues up a characteristically roiling sea of guitar noise and twinkling synths. That is, of course, textbook Nonconnah territory and few artists can match their skill at crafting texturally rich “wall of sound” dronefests of celestial bliss. Unsurprisingly, such churning oceans of guitar noise nirvana (along with twinkling synths) are the most prominent recurring theme throughout Nonconnah vs. the Spring of Deception, but the album has an unusual structure in which the “songs” are somewhat brief and tend to cycle through multiple motifs within just a three- or four-minute span. That approach is most prominent in “We Were Free Here Once But No Longer,” as it ecstatically opens with a rush of overlapping melodies spiraling endlessly heavenward in a swirl of whooshing and warping psychedelia before the bottom drops out to reveal a surreal interlude of detuned mindfuckery and classical guitar runs before dissolving into a blearily hallucinatory outro of warbling distressed tape dreaminess.
This is Kevin Martin’s first solo instrumental release as The Bug, which is a bit surprising given that he has been devoted to dread-soaked industrial dub mutations for roughly three decades now. These particular dread-soaked mutations were originally released as a series of five EPs of self-described “floor weapons” on Martin’s own Pressure label. I cannot argue with the “floor weapons” claim, as Machine is essentially an unbroken run of slow-motion bangers and seismic bass throbs, but the unifying aesthetic of those bangers is the more interesting bit, as Martin envisioned a new strain of “ice cold and dystopian” futuristic dub. That may seem like an eyebrow-raising claim, given that Martin is no stranger at all to futuristic/dystopian/mechanized menace, but I was legitimately caught off guard by how much the absence of any recognizably human element would transform my listening experience in both obvious and less obvious ways.
The twelve pieces collected on Machine are presented in chronological order based upon their original release date, but the album only includes roughly half of the complete “Machine” series. That, of course, means that Martin’s curatorial vision played a significant role in shaping the album’s trajectory. As the album unfolds, however, I can easily hear how Martin’s overarching vision evolved and expanded with each new installment, though it is still reasonable to describe Machine as “variations on a theme” with the theme being pummeling slow-motion machine rhythms, sludgy and seismic deep bass, a healthy dose of snarling and smoldering noise, and absolutely nothing else except the occasional wobbly and reverberating chord.
Allegedly recorded back in 2003, then resurrected and reworked last year for the 30th anniversary of Libythth,Uvwxyz is a strange record from an even stranger project. With a heavy misuse of sampled instruments and random sounds, what could be pure chaos somehow is anything but. Libythth somehow solidifies sputtering samples and found clips into memorable songs and miraculously congeal the most random of sounds into something catchy and memorable.
"Blixa" is a great piece to dissect: Libythth takes what sounds like a microsample of voice and a rigid drum machine and mixes in siren bursts with cut up weather forecasts. Wobbly guitar gives a melodic anchor that everything is built on top of, before at the end going full techno throb in structure. Structurally techno, yes, but sonically it is anything but. "Festa" is another, somewhat explainable one: Libythth blends chiming guitars into janky breakbeats, then introduces some pseudo-metal guitar riffs transition into a calypso-influenced beat and overall murky mix.
This second full-length from composer Joy Guidry came as quite a revelation, as I was definitely not expecting to have my head blown off by a gospel-inspired jazz album by a bassoonist this year (or really any year, if I am being honest). There were some subtle clues beforehand, however, as Guidry got serious about practicing radical acceptance in the wake of the Radical Acceptance album and decided to celebrate the power of community in a big way with its follow up. As alluded to by the title, religion is a big part of that community, as Guidry grew up deeply immersed in gospel during her childhood in Texas, but Joy also found a welcoming place in other communities as a trans avant-garde jazz artist and Amen captures the ecstatic nexus where all of the important people and influences in Guidry's life collide. To paraphrase an old saying, it takes a village to make an album this wonderful and joyous, but a talented ensemble needs a band leader with a bold vision in order to reach its full potential and that is a role in which Guidry truly excels. Of course, there are also some lovely solo bassoon pieces throughout the album, but they are unavoidably eclipsed by the deliriously rapturous highs of killer ensemble pieces like "Angels" and "Members Don't Get Weary."
This album is accurately described as "a major step up" in Guidry's "ability to fully realize and embody a sound and concept." That evolution is most striking with the "rousing, rafter-splitting spiritual jazz and gospel" side of Joy's artistry, but those seismic gospel supernovas are interspersed with pieces in a more "ambient" vein, which gives the album an unusual yet surprisingly effective dynamic trajectory. In keeping with the theme of "effective dynamic trajectory," the album's first few pieces are devoted to more quiet and meditative solo performances. I am quite fond of the second piece in particular ("It's Okay To Let Me Go"), as its smeared and bleary textures weave a sublime and gently hallucinatory strain of ambient best described as a tropical space jazz reverie. That reverie comes to an explosive end, however, as Guidry samples a fiery speech from Pastor E. Dewey Smith before plunging into the first of the album's wild centerpieces, "Members Don't Get Weary," which feels more like an ecstatic eruption of elemental force than it does a song. I believe Jillian Grace handles the lead vocals and she gamely belts out the repurposed spiritual like her fucking life depends on it over a roiling backdrop that resembles a New Orleans-style big band trying their hand at volcanic free jazz. While I am extremely hesitant to compare anyone to Nina Simone, I will say that if I had attended a Simone gig and it concluded with anything like "Members Don't Get Weary," I would have staggered out of the venue feeling like I had just experienced the greatest performance of my life. Admittedly, that hypothetical outcome probably would have happened even without anything like "Members Don't Get Weary" happening, but that does not make it any less of a Simone-worthy supernova.
There is not much that could reasonably follow such a piece, so Guidry wisely cools things down with another shimmering and tranquil dreamscape ("Day By Day") before unleashing the next bombshell tour de force. At first, "Angels" is a wonderfully swinging and soulful call-and-response a capella piece, but it then unexpectedly transforms into a bluesy twist on Bill Evans-style piano jazz before the vocalists make a rousing return for a final act that feels like some kind of rapturous jazz parade. I did not think anything could top the white-hot intensity of "Members Don't Get Weary," but "Angels" impressively manages that improbable feat by adding a strong groove and one hell of a hook to the mix. If this is what marching to heaven would be like, I may need to strongly reconsider my faithlessness.
Notably, the album ends with a piece named "Revelations 7:16-17," which provides thematically appropriate symmetry with the opening "Psalm 138:7." As Pastor Dewey presciently noted elsewhere on the album, we pick and choose the scriptures we want to use and I am personally choosing to believe that the album opens with a nod to community ("though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life") and ends with an announcement that I have just finished listening to quite an incredible and life-affirming album ("never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst"). In my case, my hunger and thirst were satiated almost entirely by "Members Don't Get Weary" and "Angels," but fans of ECM-style jazz will likely find this album to be an even more substantial feast than I did.
