Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
March marching on.
An exciting mid-week surprise episode with new music from Swans, Maria Somerville, loscil, Thalia Zedek Band, Annie A, Jairus Sharif, Flin van Hemmen, Eli Winter, and Andrew Chalk, plus a not-so-new song from Laila Sakini.
Sweet Potato in Greenpoint photo by Gabriel.
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This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.
It is tempting to view this album as Orcutt’s inversion of the softening and sweetening “jazz-strings virus,” as Carter’s analysis focuses primarily on that element (though he does also mention “the oily underbelly of the American songbook”). The reality of How To Rescue Things is a bit more complex, however, as the first third of the album sounds a hell of a lot more like Orcutt is jamming along to a pre-irony (and pre-bebop) Christmas movie from the 1930s or 1940s and none of the appropriated loops are particularly recognizable from the The Great American Songbook (though I am hardly an expert on that subject). There is definitely an inversion happening, of course, but it feels like a sincere and tender one: Orcutt is essentially taking toothlessly sentimental melodic motifs and “fixing” them with a healthy injection of soul, slicing intensity, and vibrant spontaneity. In fact, this album amusingly reminds me of Prince’s performances on Muppets Tonight: an iconic and innovative artist improbably dropped into a family-friendly and ostensibly ridiculous situation and somehow emerging looking as cool as ever. In this case, however, the Muppets are swapped out for choirs of angels and harp-wielding cherubs, but Orcutt proves to be equally game at embracing his environment in good faith and making the crazy collision of aesthetics work beautifully. Moreover, he manages to make it feel both easy and natural, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: if you are not jaded to an absolutely joyless degree, there is plenty of legitimate heartstring-tugging beauty and magic to be gleaned from a beatific celestial chorus if you know how to do it right.
This delightful end-of-year surprise is the culmination of a decade-long project in which Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin devoted themselves to building (and learning to play) their own homemade electronic instruments. In keeping with the homespun/primitive electronics nature of the project, the duo largely avoided using the internet as a resource and instead consulted books and other instrument builders for guidance and inspiration (though some exceptions were admittedly made). That purist approach extends to the recordings as well, as the duo constrained themselves to only Kinsella's voice and their self-built instruments for every song except for one very catchy exception ("For Real," which features some synth from guest Chris Livengood). Unsurprisingly, the end result of that approach is a bit of a significant stylistic detour for the band, blurring together the wonky, eclectic charm of Silver Apples with an impressionist strain of siren song psychedelia.
There is a video on Big Blood's Youtube channel of Mulkerin performing an early version of "Came To Life" that provides a lot of insight into the scope and tone of this project, as it shows him patiently manipulating a wall of lights, dials, and wires to shape the piece's insistently driving mutant motorik groove. Then, he briefly disappears from the frame and returns wearing some kind of repurposed marching band helmet fitted with dials that trigger streaking, spacey bloops as he moves around the room. The video conveys two very important things: 1) technology-wise, the duo's self-built instruments have probably shot them back in time to the late '60s, and 2) there was definitely an element of kitschy fun to the project.
The penultimate editions in Die Stadt’s Organum Electronics/David Jackman Subscription Series (with subscriptions still available, including a bonus disc) both draw from similar sonic elements as the previous releases have, which makes sense given this series of albums are all part of a singular work. Even working with a limited palette of sounds, Jackman rearranges and reconstructs them in a multitude of ways, covering everything from gentle tonal passages to jarring noise.
Flames of Fire, which consists of a single 47-minute piece titled "Flames of Fire & Stars of Lighte the Sun Ariseth" opens with a metallic hum that vaguely resembles the vibrations of a sitar elongated and sustained into infinity. Unlike the work he has done as Organum Electronics in this series, the sense is clearly organic. He retains some electronic elements of course. A serpentine slithering tone that consistently flows—swelling and drifting into the lower end of the frequency spectrum—gives this piece a different feel than the ones that preceded it. The focus shifts to the tones, and he brings in the vibrating gong sounds that have featured in most of his recent work. Comparably though, the structure is a bit more static, and the changes are slower, although a bit of a noisy undercurrent appears towards the final quarter of the disc.
A bit less than a year since his last album, This is Broken, Matt Weston presents a double album in his idiosyncratic style that draws from a seemingly infinite number of styles and genres. He still solidifies it into a coherent whole, however. Communism has Appeared on the Scene draws heavily from geographic spaces and their effects on sound, most apparent through his greater implementation of field recording elements. With that said, it is another excellent, hyper-kinetic outburst of sounds that are at times confusing and disorienting but always make sense in the end.
The passing of cars and a steady beep appear early on the album in "Isolate Maul Kill," giving some sense of a geographic reference point that is supplemented with rhythmic digital glitches. Weston takes the music in darker directions at times, with cinematic outbursts cutting through aggressively, before eventually reforming into an almost brass or horn type timbre. Overall, the structurally is nicely erratic—jerking between digital noises and shrill tones—all the while featuring a deep, hollow undercurrent below. The short "Burials to Understanding" follows, where he blends high speed chase music fragments with digital glitching, metal clattering, and unfurling magnetic tape, ending in a mass of multi-layered wobbling tones.
For over three decades, the Red Hot Organization has been raising money and awareness for AIDS and public health, launching with Red Hot + Blue: a tribute to Cole Porter through fashion, art, and a compilation album of 20 acts. Since then, the organization has continued to issue numerous collections with albums dedicated to dance music, country music, "alt-rock," hip-hop/rap, electronic, jazz, Latin, and Brazilian, with tributes to Gershwin, Bach, Fela Kuti, Duke Ellington, and Arthur Russell. Over the last year the library grew to include four releases of music in tribute to Sun Ra. TRAИƧA, the latest, is a sweeping, kaleidoscopic celebration of trans identity and creativity. It is a six-LP boxed set with 46 tracks across a wide array of genres. The album champions trans rights while showcasing a staggering range of artistic collaboration. Featuring artists like Alan Sparhawk (Low), ANOHNI, Mary Lattimore, and Niecy Blues, the project highlights the profound contributions of independent label talent alongside some mainstream heavy hitters such as Sade, Jeff Tweedy, Andre 3000, and Sam Smith, while delivering a heartfelt statement of inclusion and community.
Musically, the album traverses a broad spectrum. Personal favorites include Rachika Nayar's haunting ambient reimagining of "Song to the Siren," where ethereal tones and heavy reverb transform the classic into a transcendent experience. Sharon Van Etten and Ezra Furman's rendition of Sinéad O'Connor's "Feel So Different" is equally arresting, their gut-wrenching performance imbued with the weight of the original and an urgency all their own. By contrast, Soft Ronin's "Rumblin'" offers a buoyant, pop-infused moment of joy, providing a welcome counterpoint to the album's introspective tones.
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.
