Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
We enter September with a full episode of new and newly collected/compiled tunes.
New music from Diamanda Galás, The Tear Garden, Volcano The Bear, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Dylan Henner, Weirs, Gary Wilson, Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok, Roméo Poirier, and Andrew Chalk, plus some not quite new music from JG Thirlwell, Ø (Mika Vainio), Laetitia Sonami, and Seefeel.
Thank you to Johnny for the picture in Canada of caribou frolicking in front of the sign for caribou.
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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.
When I first learned about this release, I was stoked that Madeleine Johnston had enlisted Matt Jencik as a collaborator for the latest Midwife album, as I am a big fan of his 2019 album Dream Character. As it turns out, however, the actual situation was the reverse of that, as Jencik had decided to step outside his ambient drone comfort zone six years ago to record an album of vocal pieces centered around the theme of mortality. Things did not work out quite as planned, however, as Jencik first embarked upon this project with an entirely different collaborator. It feels like destiny that he ultimately wound up working with Johnston instead, however, as the two have a wonderfully complementary yin/yang relationship both stylistically (close mic’d basement 4-track intimacy vs. elegantly sculpted hiss and distortion) and philosophically (Jencik feels a desperate desire to hold onto everyone he loves, while Johnston sees the spectre of death as an “incentive to live more keenly and dearly”).
On its face, Never Die seems to sound a hell of a lot like a Midwife album with some synths added, as Johnston handles the lead vocals much of the time and the music can reasonably be described as either "shoegaze-damaged minimalism" or "minimalism-damaged shoegaze." In fact, it almost seems like it could organically be the next stage of evolution from 2024’s hyper-distilled No Depression In Heaven, as the opening “Delete Key” is built from little more than grayscale synth drones, a single sustained guitar note, and Johnston’s sibilant hymn-like vocals. Once I settled into the album, however, I soon began to see the various ways in which Jencik’s vision diverged from Midwife (the lyrics being the most striking difference, as Johnston’s own songs tend to center around mantric repetition of a single phrase or two). I later learned that Jencik wrote all of the melodies and lyrics himself and that the album’s more “Midwife“ aspects are largely because Johnston’s non-vocal contributions primarily involved layering and production touches.
This latest release from the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel is billed as a “compressed fast-forward of Matmos’ career with a sonic parade of the metallic objects from their lives,” as they attempted to mimic the psychological phenomenon of “life review” that people experience during near-death experiences, but quixotically decided to do it exclusively through metallic sound sources. Naturally, that constraint resulted in quite an eclectic and interesting instrumental palette that ranges from “pots and pans from each member’s childhood” to metal reels used in the recording of iconic early musique concrète pieces at Paris's INA/GRM. Notably, however, this album is a bit less uncompromisingly purist than I expected, as the late Susan Alcorn contributed pedal steel to a couple of pieces (still technically metal though).
The album opens with one of its strongest pieces, as a gong-like crash kicks off a ritualistic percussion workout that sounds like the gamelan-inspired intro to a wild avant-metal album (albeit one that prominently features spaghetti bowls and cheese graters). Notably, it is also the first of two pieces featuring guest percussionist Thor Harris, so the metallic rhythm is an impressively intricate and virtuosic one, yet it is actually a creaky door that ultimately steals the show. Fittingly, the piece is entitled “Norway Doorway,” but I never would have guessed the source of the wild free-jazz sax wails otherwise. Harris returns once more for the following “Rust Belt,” which initially sounds like a free drummer going nuts in a well-stocked kitchen, but gradually blossoms into a sexy mutant disco groove enhanced with a host of spacy dub touches.
On her first vinyl LP release, multidisciplinary artist Susana López presents four compositions that blend synths, field recordings, and other sounds treated into pure abstraction. Layered and processed, they are reassembled into compositions that are quite beautiful yet have an alien quality to them that makes them all the more engaging.
Expansive synth tones and what resembles grinding field recordings lead off on "Mundus Imaginalis." Although what seems identifiable would be characterized as either electronic or mechanical, the feeling is an organic one. As she layers in buzzing and subtle, gurgling like noises, the piece becomes a slow, glacial paced one that has incredible depth to it. Comparably, "Materia Vibrante" continues that open, drifting in space feeling, but the overall piece is more defined by tonality as opposed to texture. There is a sense of wide open spaces that are filled with lush and complex melodies.
This debut release from young Cambridge, Massachusetts-based composer Gabriel Brady was apparently recorded in his dorm room with little more than a bouzouki, a violin, and a “compact modular synth setup,” but it often sounds like it could have been the work of a veteran and visionary tape loop artist. As far as I know, there were no actual tape loops involved in these recordings, but Brady ingeniously achieved a similar effect by feeding his acoustic instruments into his synth, which acted as a "sound chamber for further manipulation (loops, effects, textures).”
I have heard it said before that some artists release their greatest work while unsuccessfully trying to mimic their influences, then lose that precarious magic when they finally get it right. Hopefully, that fate never befalls Brady, but it is worth noting that his primary inspirations are French New Wave film scores and early Impressionist composers like Satie and Debussy. More specifically, Brady set out to chase the “sense of yearning” conjured by Jean Constantin’s 400 Blows score. In that regard, Brady succeeds most beautifully on the back-to-back highlights “Ordinary” and “Land and Sea.”
