Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
No surprises this October
Twelve delicious morsels for your musical digestion. This week we've got new tunes from Glyders, Sharon Van Etten, Carla dal Forno, Lauten der Seele, echospace, Sloan, Ayu Okakita, Anthony Moore with AKA and Friends, and Miki Berenyi Trio, plus some music from the vaults by Laika, Brigitte Fontaine, and K. Frimpong and His Cubano Fiestas,.
Thanks to Gabe for the hot air balloon pic taken in Lempster, New Hampshire
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This is the first solo album that I have heard from this Berlin-based composer, but I have previously enjoyed his collaborations with Tongue Depressor and Jules Reidy. Notably, the latter (2024’s I Went to the Dance) was a continuation of the “avant-hillbilly” era that first began to take shape with 2022’s Old-Time Music and now returns in spectacular fashion with Broadsides. While Olencki’s primary inspiration remains firmly rooted in the rural American South and Appalachian folk music traditions, these latest pieces present that vision in more of an intense and complexly layered sound collage experience that lands somewhere between a maximalist Chris Watson and a killer Daniel Bachman/Francisco Lopez mash-up. It also happens to be one of the most mesmerizing and immersive headphone albums of the year.
This album can arguably be described as an abstract and impressionistic diary of Olencki’s 2023 trip across the American South, as it was lovingly assembled from field recordings taken along the way (rivers, crickets, trains, etc.) and deconstructed bluegrass and country standards. Notably, the South is a place of deep personal meaning for Olencki, as they grew up in South Carolina and now live in a dramatically different culture half a world away. In keeping with the “deeply personal” theme, Broadsides’ structure is also inventively informed by their family’s generational passion for quilting, as Olencki notes that ““Quilting, like music, is a practice of embedding knowledge and remembrance into the very core of the thing you are making.” In the case of Broadsides, that means that these complexly woven collages pull in all kinds of childhood memories, cherished places, and familiar old songs from the past, as well as plenty of new sounds and impressions from the road trip experienced as an expat reshaped by life in a German city.
This is not my first exposure to this shapeshifting project from Brooklyn-based film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli, but it may as well be, as this inspired outsider pop album bears little resemblance to the understated ambiance of 2022’s imagine naked! or its more noise-damaged and hip-hop-inspired predecessors. OHYUNG envisioned the album’s overarching theme as “my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives,” but the stylistic direction is also steered quite a bit by her deep fondness for inventively repurposing “generic string loops” found in online sample packs, which instills many of these songs with a sense of wide-eyed classic pop wonder. Curiously unmentioned, however, is an equal fondness for big, stomping drum machine beats that sound lovingly inspired by Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” era. That alone is a winning combination, but OHYUNG further ices that cake with quite a few great hooks as well.
The piece that best exemplifies OHYUNG’s newly revealed pop genius is “i swear that i could die rn,” which combines a muscular drum machine stomp with a cool seesawing synth motif and a bittersweetly beautiful vocal melody. Despite its ostensibly dark title, it is a wonderfully poignant and sweet pop song, which makes sense as the piece was inspired by warm memories of past raves and the “feeling that I could die at this moment and be happy.” I was also delighted by the recurring inscrutable vocal sample and the seamless way that the choruses become warmer and more harmonically rich whenever they come around.
I was a big fan of the 2021 debut from this duo of drummers Lee Buford (The Body) and Zac Jones (Braveyoung/MSC), but that definitely did not stop me from being a bit blindsided by this wilder and more eclectic follow up. In fact, Jones himself aptly describes God’s World as ”maybe the craziest record I’ve ever worked on” and further notes that the duo set out to record music that “people could play at parties.” Notably, that party rockin’ mindset did not steer the duo away from their earlier Godflesh-adjacent post-industrial heaviness all that much, but those sludgier, more industrial sounds now coexist with a more playful and vivid array of other influences ranging from jungle to gamelan to hip-hop to rocksteady. While I have historically been frequently annoyed by artists who make aggressive genre-slicing a central feature of their art, Manslaughter 777 masterfully make that approach feel like a refreshing delight, as this album feels like a dangerously out-of-control party train from start to finish.
The album opens in appropriately killer fashion with “I Do Not Believe in Art,” which quickly locks into an insistent kick drum throb with a cool acid bass line and a ghostly vocal hook. It is great while it lasts, but it soon transforms into an equally cool breakbeat surprise with a chopped soul diva hook and stuttering rap fragments. Things only get more wild and festive from there, as the following “Power In the Blood” sounds like it could be an unhinged Meat Beat Manifesto remix of a Snap! or C&C Music Factory hit (aside from the blown-out sludgy outro featuring an amusing Xanadu-style double clap). Next, “Child Of” evokes straight-up ‘90s R&B aside from a digitally mangled melodic hook that sounds like it could have been plucked from an early Severed Heads album, while “Luv” is a left-field reimagining of Dennis Brown’s “Money In My Pocket” that unexpectedly blossoms into a noisy crescendo of smoldering noise wreckage, deep bass, and skittering drums. The first side of the album then concludes with a piece that sounds like a roiling industrial deconstruction of an angelic New Age vocal album.
I was admittedly a bit blindsided by Dalt's seemingly effortless transformation into an outsider pop chanteuse on 2022's excellent ¡Ay! album and I am amusingly blindsided yet again with this follow up, as she has somehow become even better at balancing her great hooks and sensuous vocals with her wilder, more experimental leanings. In fact, this is unquestionably her finest batch of songs yet, but that achievement is further enhanced by the efforts of some extremely talented and well-chosen collaborators. Notably, Juana Molina, Nick Leon, and Amor Muere's Camille Mandoki all make guest appearances on individual pieces, but it is returning percussionist Alex Lazaro and co-producer David Sylvian who nearly steal the show, as both help elevate Dalt's bold and singular vision into something truly revelatory with their contributions. This is Dalt's strongest album by a goddamn landslide.
The album opens with the killer lead single "cosa rara (strange thing)," which provides quite a representative overview of nearly everything that I love about this album (albeit with one small caveat). Like many pieces on the album, it is built from little more than a simmering percussion groove, a bass line, Dalt's charismatic and seductive vocal performance, and a host of cool psychedelic and dub-inspired effects. The minimal arrangements suit these songs extremely well, as Dalt's voice is more than enough to carry these pieces melodically and the pared-to-the-bone palette of just drums and voice leaves plenty of open space for Dalt and her collaborators to go wild in the periphery with guitar feedback, saxophone squonks, and trippy electronic flourishes. Aside from that, there is also a clapping breakdown (I'm a sucker for a good handclap rhythm) and a great dubby outro featuring a mesmerizing spoken word performance from Sylvian. While literally every individual element is great, "casa rara" narrowly misses being my favorite song on the album solely because it self-destructs right before Sylvian comes in, which gives it the feel of two excellent pieces mashed together rather than one perfectly crafted masterpiece.
This reliably fascinating trio is back with a third installment in their excellent Ghosted series. The label describes this one as “a little looser and wilder than before,” which is probably an accurate assessment, but the increased wildness is mostly relegated to Ambarchi’s forays into his table of electronics and effects pedals rather than any kind of larger penchant for volcanic crescendos. To my ears, this album actually feels a bit more subdued and jazz/fusion-inspired than the previous installments, but it also sometimes feels like an album-length expansion of Ghosted II’s strongest piece (“tre”). Given the latter, I would have expected to love this album much more than I do, but it feels like a bit of a mixed bag instead. That said, Ambarchi still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, so the lesser pieces are interesting enough to (mostly) hold my attention in the long stretch between the album’s two killer highlights.
The album opens with the first of its two stellar highlights, “Yek,” which is centered around an endlessly repeating upright bass lick, a wonderfully simmering drum workout, and a circular harmonic motif from Ambarchi that unpredictably throws in new notes and fitfully blossoms into longer tendrils of melody. While all three musicians are always doing something extremely cool at all times, I was initially a bit underwhelmed, as the trio seemed to be treading water rather than evolving the piece into something more, but then a gong crashed and Ambarchi unexpectedly launched into a chiming arpeggio motif that felt like a vivid splash of harmonic color (and the bass line even changed slightly too!). That transformation proves to be just an interlude, however, as the band soon tightens up again and reverts back to the original harmonic motif. The rest of the piece then becomes a back-and-forth between those two themes that extends almost all the way to the end. Not ALL the way though, as the final appearance of the harmonic motif begins to distend and greedily accumulate additional layers until the final moments sound like I am being serenaded by a legion of celestial harp-wielding cherubs, which was one hell of a cool twist that I did not see coming.
This latest opus from Berlin’s Thomas Ankersmit continues his work with the Serge Modular synthesizer, which is just fine by me, as his last two Serge albums were pure headphone nirvana. Notably, both of those albums were homages of a sort (to Dick Raaijmakers and Maryanne Amacher), but The Dip is simply Thomas Ankersmit being Thomas Ankersmit, which is a significantly different vision. Naturally, many of the familiar sounds of the Serge are back, but the focus has shifted away from spatial movements a bit and more towards “introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements.” The result is still an immersive and deeply evocative sound world, but it is a bit less alien this time around and even features a lengthy passage of absolutely sublime beauty.
The album is composed of two pieces, each of which fills an entire side of the vinyl release. The first piece, “17:54,” opens with a deep bass rumble that slowly fades in with an accompaniment of various chirps, beeps, whines, and short-wave radio interference sounds. That is not particularly compelling or unique modular synth territory at first, but as everything starts coming together, it sounds like some kind of Morse code message of beeps is coming in right before the short-wave radio becomes possessed by more demonic sounds and a dense miasma of feedback, crackle, and insectoid chattering. Then things start to get quite a bit more interesting, as the sounds suddenly become less spasmodic and the piece unexpectedly opens up into an eerie interlude of feedback-like drones.
With a handful of cassettes and CDr EPs released so far, Australian composer Felicity Mangan's first full-length vinyl LP presents a further refinement of her compositional style, blending natural recordings with electronic instrumentation to excellent effect. While on paper her approach may seem rather conventional for the genre, the final product is something much more distinct, engaging, and adventurous.
While the album itself is titled String Figures, Mangan only employs instruments via sampled cello by Moritz Draheim on two pieces. "Cello Figures" is initially a pairing of nature recordings and lush, electronic tones that at times resemble a didgeridoo. As she paints thick, dense layers of sound, the lush cello slips through, beautifully balancing tones and frequencies before a gentle drift away. Fitting the title, the cello on "Invisible Strings" is less overt, blended into elongated tones with consistently shifting dynamics. There is a light, suspended feel to the piece that drifts away delicately. This sense of space is also prevalent on "String Thing," a rich, synth heavy piece that builds in nuance complexity, but retains a pleasant sense of depth.
Trilium opens like morning fog on a mirror lake: suspended, infinite, a shimmer of stillness and motion all at once. The album doesn’t start so much as it unfolds, each track bleeding seamlessly into the next, a gentle hypnotism that bypasses the ears and burrows straight into the brainstem. It’s a fluid dream of a record, and for a week now, it’s been my only one.
What stuns me most is how Trillium revives the soul of shoegaze without embalming it in nostalgia. Yes, echoes of Just for a Day and early Verve ripple through, and yes, there's a Spiritualized haze in the spaces between. But Chatham Rise doesn’t mimic. They remember and honor. Their sound is waterlogged but never bloated, submerged like memory rather than drowning. The opener, "Here She Comes,") makes its case with immediacy, not volume. "Souls" and "Soon" arrive later like heartbeats you’d forgotten were yours. Even when they swell, there’s restraint — the mix never screams. It seduces.
Compared to some of his recent works, Serenade is more of a collection of miniatures from Sheffield. A single LP of 12 pieces, it is a departure from the 20+ minute works on Don't Ever Let Me Know, or Moments Lost. He leverages this shorter duration effectively, however. Instead of creating monolithic pieces that slowly evolve, he processes and shapes commercial recordings in a multitude of different ways that can differ from song to song, allowing for a wider variety of tones and textures throughout.
Much of Colin Andrew Sheffield's work has been centered on the treatment and manipulation of existing music, sometimes thematically linked, such as jazz on Images, or location-based sounds of Don't Ever Let Me Know, and other times from a variety of sources. Perhaps more so than on his other works, the musical elements shine through here frequently. Never fully revealing their sources, or even genres of origin, Sheffield’s slight lifting of the proverbial blinds is to excellent effect.
This is the debut full-length from the duo of Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, who previously collaborated on a single back in 2021. Notably, I am a big fan of Nayar’s early guitar-centric releases (Our Hands Across The Dusk and Fragments), but she lost me a bit with the “maximalist synths, sub-bass, and Amen breaks” of her 2022 breakout album Heaven Come Crashing (I am definitely in the minority on that one). Consequently, I had some legitimate trepidation about where Nayar would head next. This is my first encounter with Nina Keith, however, and it definitely will not be my last. All bets are off when these two team up.
Notably, being a self-taught neoclassical composer who dropped out of high school while wrestling with Tourette’s syndrome is probably the least interesting aspect of Keith’s life, as her debut album MARANSATI 19111 explored a “personal history marked by community tragedy and paranormal incidents.” Much of that personal history remains an enigma, but EMDR therapy and the unsolved “Boy in the Box” murder both loom quite large in it. I also learned that she has (or had) a Buddhist app on her phone set to remind her several times a day that she is inevitably going to die. Given all of that, I could not have begun to guess what a shared vision between these two artists might sound like, but Disinblud eliminates the need for speculation, as this album is a deliriously shapeshifting and kaleidoscopic pop music fever dream.
This is the debut release from the Norwegian duo of Espen Friberg and Jenny Berger Myhre. The pair previously worked together during the recording of Friberg’s solo debut Sun Soon (Hubro, 2022), as Berger Myhre helped out with production and arrangements. During those sessions, the pair discovered that they shared a “playful, intentionally naive approach towards making art” and Flutter Ridder was born.
Notably, that willfully naive approach mirrors that of some of Sweden’s more compelling underground luminaries (Enhet För Fri Musik, Blod, Arv & Miljö), but Flutter Ridder are quite different stylistically from their more noise-adjacent neighbors. Part of that divergence is certainly due to the duo’s unusual instrumentation (Friberg plays a Serge modular synth, Berger Myhre plays a pipe organ), but their approach to composition is quite unique as well. In fact, the album was deliberately recorded in an ancient wooden church to make the most of the duo's love of natural acoustic reverb and their belief that air and electricity share a common flow. In short, Flutter Ridder embrace an unhurried and unprocessed rustic simplicity, but find some room in their hearts for a modular synth as well.
