Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
Racing towards the end of the year.
Still plenty of new music to enjoy from 2025 as well as some forthcoming music in 2026.
Episode 767 features new music by Marie Davidson, Paula Kelley, Tashi Dorji, FACS, K-LONE, A Place to Bury Strangers, Ginger Beef, Ruth Mascelli & Mary Hanson Scott, Brown Angel, Le Grand Couturier, Call Super, and The Stargazer Lilies, plus less than new music from Gnonnas Pedro & His Dadjes Band and Pete Namlook & Ludwig Rehberg (as The Putney).
Collage by Martin
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I was definitely not expecting a new Tear Garden album this year, but Edward Ka-Spel and cEvin Key’s fitful four-decade collaboration has happily resurfaced once again after an eight-year hiatus. I am tempted to call Astral Elevator a return to the duo’s “classic” sound after the more eclectic and playful The Brown Acid Caveat, but the only real difference is that this latest batch of tightly edited and hook-heavy “singles” has been purged of the more groovy and disco/dance elements found in its predecessor. I suppose that makes Astral Elevator a somewhat darker release, but the world is now a darker place then it was back in 2017 and there are a handful of highlights here that certainly brighten my small part of it.
As is often the case, The Tear Garden’s usual cast of characters (Key and Ka-Spel) is expanded with some contributions from both the Legendary Pink Dots and Skinny Puppy camps this time around (including the late Dwayne Goettel). Notably, however, the duo also enlisted artist Cory Gorski to make videos for the album’s singles and he wove some very impressive surrealist magic with his vision for the lead single “A Return.” Someone should give these guys a few million dollars to make a The Wall-style animated epic.
This latest release from the New York-based composer saxophonist is a bold and deeply psychedelic departure from her usual terrain (aside from being partially recorded in a cave, of course). The first big surprise is that The Oracle is an extremely vocal-centric album to an almost a capella degree. The other major twist is that Bertucci “creatively misuses a reel-to-to-reel tape machine to live-manipulate her voice” into an unpredictably kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory swirl of bubbling, hissing, murmuring, and slurred words stripped of most context and meaning.
Bertucci envisions the album as “soothsaying for this tumultuous historical moment” in which layers of voices reveal and obscure “images of dreams, warped news headlines and mythological imagery.” While not all of that conceptual framework made the leap into a significant part of my listening experience, Bertucci certainly conjures up one hell of a sustained and deeply abstract mindfuck that feels both timeless and otherworldly.
Fed Up With Bass was somewhat conceived as a pandemic project. During lockdown, legendary improv guitarist Eugene Chadbourne was recording daily-ish solo guitar pieces and sharing them online, while encouraging other artists to utilize them in an asynchronous collaborative setting. Bassist/electronic artist Jair-Röhm Parker Wells, whom Chadbourne had worked with in person previously, was a prolific collaborator, and this sprawling album is a document of these combined performances: a mix of sounds and styles that is as dizzying as it is fascinating.
Admittedly, this is a daunting album. Clocking in at two CDs, 32 songs, and over two and a half hours in length, there is a lot here. Compounding this is the fact that the songs are crossfaded with each other, making it difficult to just listen to a few songs at a time given that it feels more like a singular performance. Even with that density of music, the duo switch things up frequently, moving from overt acoustic guitar and upright bass to layers of electronics and processed sounds, albeit with Chadbourne’s guitar distinct in the mix.
There is not a hell of a lot of background information about this latest installment of the Dots’ long-running Chemical Playschool series other than the fact that it was recorded in 2025 and will eventually have a double vinyl release. Fortunately, anyone who has been following LPD’s career for a while will know exactly what to expect: a deep and eclectic dive into free-form psychedelia, promising song fragments, and wherever the hell else the band feels like throwing into the mix.
This one is an especially solid entry to the beloved series, however, as the aforementioned song fragments are quite a strong batch. That said, they are fragments, so the primary appeal of this album lies in shapeshifting and kaleidoscopic fantasia of the overall journey. While the fleeting glimpses of great songs can be teasingly exasperating at times (as always), I love the current uncluttered aesthetic of (mostly) just surf-damaged dreampop guitars, propulsive drum machine grooves, and vocals (albeit still with plenty of trippy sounds perpetually bleeding in from the periphery, of course)
A collaboration between the duo of Ampyre and the varied membership of Death Factory, Death Pyre's Concatenation is one part of a trilogy of albums released in 2025. Sharing elements of multiple electronic styles that lean into more abrasive forms, the three pieces on this tape are wonderfully unpredictable and extremely compelling for that very reason.
As I assumed from the Death Factory half of the project's name, there is a clear vein of early industrial and noise that runs through the three pieces that make up this tape. It often resembles a deconstruction of latter day/EBM era industrial though, with erratic rhythms and sequences one would expect, but shredded, mangled, and reassembled into something else entirely.
This is the first new release from Emeralds’ former synth wizard in six years and marks a return to his DIY past with the unveiling of his new imprint Simul (much of Hauschildt’s early work was self-released on his own Gneiss Things label). Obviously, a hell of a lot has happened globally since Hauschildt last surfaced, but it seems like a hell of a lot has happened personally for him as well, as he left Chicago to live on the other side of the world in Tbilisi, Georgia.
In keeping with that theme of transformation and disorientation, the album borrows its title from a perception disorder that roughly translates as “seeing air.” It is often triggered by hallucinogen use and apparently makes it seem like the objective material world is veiled in static or television snow. That makes an appropriate title for this release, as these eight sensuous and meditative synth pieces evoke a sense of solitary grandeur and longing fitfully frayed by distortion and sizzle.
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.
