Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
Surprise Tuesday Episode.
New stuff and new reissues galore in an extended episode.
New tunes from Joseph Allred, Shonen Knife, Sault, David Thrussell & Die Teufelsmaschine, Chris Brokaw, The NRG, Sharpie Smile, Moin, Jules Reidy and Sam Dunscombe, Sandwell District, Gryphon Rue, Glare, and Anthony Pateras, plus music from the vaults by Creeping Pink, Monolake, and Merzbow.
Cat in the cabinet photo by Gabe.
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This aptly named second album from Loraine James’ more ambient/impressionistic side is a bit warmer and less beat-driven than its predecessor, resembling an unearthed classic from the late ‘90s/early 2000s golden age of glitch-worshipping innovators like Oval and Jim O’Rourke and their more melody-centered peers like Telefon Tel Aviv. Fittingly, Josh Eustis was again involved on the mastering end, but there are also some interesting ironies as well, as these pieces are all named after rather chilly temperatures and James’ throwback to the early days of the laptop IDM era is actually deliberately hardware-focused.
More specifically, James tried to limit her gear to synths and pedals and kept overdubbing to a minimum. That spontaneous, in-the-moment approach composition, coupled with a fondness for using recorded sounds and voices from her surroundings, imbue the album with an endearing and tenderly diaristic feel. Some of the found sounds give these pieces an evocative sense of place, suggesting the echoing interior of a train station or the shouts of an epic snowball fight unfolding just outside James’ studio, but there are also some fun curveballs thrown into the mix, like the trippy collision of buzzes, James’ own pitch-shifted voice, and a stammering acoustic guitar motif at the end of “12°C” or the wonky, chopped-up arcade sounds in “15°C.”
Unexpectedly, my favorite piece is the brief interlude “23°C (Intermittent Sunshine),” which is an absolutely sublime bliss-fest of gorgeously smeary overlapping melodies, but “18°C” is yet another improbably beautiful stunner that recalls the best bits of Oval’s lush, dreamily skipping chords and loscil’s blearily hazy dubscapes. That said, the real magic of this album transcends easily graspable elements like songcraft, cool arrangements, or well-chosen influences, as the most transfixing moments tend to be crafted from billowing, dreamlike chords so achingly beautiful that I want to live inside them forever.
This sixth album from Chicago’s finest Factory Records-inspired post-punk trio features a significantly altered line-up, as founding member Jonathan van Herik is back in the fold once again (replacing long-time bassist Alianna Kalaba). On paper, that means that FACS now shares exactly the same line-up as the late, great Disappears, but with a bit of a fresh twist, as van Herik has now switched to guitar and frontman Brian Case has switched to bass. Notably, Wish Defense was also Steve Albini’s engineering swan song, which is fitting given that this album absolutely rules.
The same could be said of several other FACS/Disappears releases, of course, but the new guitar/bass configuration brings more melodic bass-driven riffage than previous albums and van Herik’s arty, minimalist guitarwork is every bit as inspired as Case’s own. The result is an album that seems to seamlessly blend the sexed-up deadpan cool of prime Girls Against Boys with the taut muscularity of Fugazi’s rhythm section and the seasick, tremolo-warped guitars of My Bloody Valentine. Choice influences aside, however, FACS embrace an aggressively, pared-to-the-bone style of minimalism that is uniquely their own, which gives van Herik’s alternately smeared, chiming, creaking, percussive, and slashing guitar sounds plenty of room to breathe.
For me, “Sometimes Only” captures the trio at the peak of their powers, as the dragging throb of Case’s thick, distorted bass buzz provides a perfect counterweight for a couple of forays into proggier/spacier terrain, but the title piece’s explosive chorus makes it a lock for the album’s strongest single. While not every piece hits the mark quite as convincingly as those two, the entire album is packed with passages in which every single member of the band is doing something so extremely cool that it makes FACS seem like the best goddamn rock band on the planet regardless of whether or not they actually manage to stick the landing.
In 40 years of creating music, Edward Ka-Spel and Legendary Pink Dots have rarely sounded so perfectly in tune with the world they’ve long warned us about. So Lonely in Heaven isn’t just another album; it feels like an artifact for our time, a mirror held up to the fragile, dystopian reality we’ve stumbled into. The Dots’ vision—once surreal, exaggerated, otherworldly—now feels disturbingly prescient. What was once a world imagined through their “Terminal Kaleidoscope” has merged with the one we live in. Maybe it was always this bad, and Ka-Spel has been trying to show us all along.
This is a heavy album—not just in tone, but in its emotional resonance. The question of whether we missed the point of life on Earth looms large. Did we abandon the imperfect connections that give us meaning to chase a perfect yet sterile paradise? The machine that Ka-Spel describes in the Bandcamp notes embodies this disconnection. It knows us, replicates us, promises perfection, but leaves us hollow and alone. In So Lonely in Heaven, Ka-Spel’s lyrics and the band’s haunting arrangements explore the cracks in that illusion, asking whether we need life’s imperfections—its traumas, its fragility—to truly live.
On A Clearing, Berlin based Sarah Saviet (violin), and Joseph Houston (piano) superbly exemplify how much can be done artistically with very little. Consisting of five pieces of widely varying duration and, as best as I can tell, one take recordings without processing or further treatment, there is a multitude of sounds and textures to be had, emanating from just two instruments.
Both Saviet and Houston, at times, take somewhat unconventional approaches to their instruments, but it is rarely unclear who is making what sounds. The instruments are sonically naked at the opening of "Lines, Spaces," with an intentionally erratic stop/start structure that drew my focus immediately. Utilizing the gaps, and then shifting into a playful call and response segment, the evolving dynamics also make clear the depth and quality of the recording and mastering. As the piece concludes, it shifts into more muted, idiosyncratic performances and closing on elongated tones and notes from both.
Expanding upon the themes of place and space that has shaped his recent solo works, Mark Solotroff's latest record unsurprisingly features heavy use of his trademark analog synths. What changes, however, is the actual inclusion of sonic spaces: environmental recordings captured from his current hometown of Chicago, as well as travels in Milan and Venice. The intersection of these spatial recordings and electronic instrumentation gives In Search of Total Placelessness a different feel than his other recent works but sits beautifully alongside them.
Rather than specifically focusing on a sense of space, In Search of… features a shift to emphasizing movement and transition, creating a sense of space but one that is short lived, transitioning to a new one rapidly. Balancing short segments (30 seconds to one minute) with longer pieces, with each fading in and out, Solotroff captures that sense of spatial and temporal transition perfectly, with some lingering longer than others, but theme of movement is overt, while still sounding like a coherent album.
This second album from this enigmatic Noa Kurzweil project marks a somewhat surprising detour from Voice Actor's sprawling and eclectic debut Sent From My Telephone, as Kurzweil's previous creative foil (ana reme's Levi Lanser) has been replaced by Welsh producer Ol Bryan. The result is a considerably leaner, more stylistically focused, and more experimentally minded release that inventively and sensuously blends deconstructed dub-techno, sound art, and ASMR. Notably, the familiar seductive purr of Kurzweil's voice is also regularly chopped up, processed, decontextualized, and looped into rhythmic elements, melodic hooks, or textural layers.
That's a boldly counterintuitive stylistic choice akin to Scanner's shift away from intercepted phone conversations, as Kurzweil's bewitching voice and charmingly diaristic (and oft-surreal) monologues previously seemed like the project's very essence. I certainly miss those elements a bit, as well as Voice Actor's tendency to regularly blindside me with curveballs like unsettling samples of 9/11 radio chatter and nods to '60s French pop, but Lust (1) is nevertheless an extremely cool & absorbing headphone album in its own right. The closing "Barbara" is probably the zenith, as Kurzweil languorously muses about Barbara Walters' condescending treatment of Dolly Parton before the piece unexpectedly blossoms into a killer outsider/futuristic R&B motif of digitized loops and soul diva samples. The ghostly & seductive "Look Nice" offers still more pop-adjacent bliss, while "Fields" feels like the warmly beautiful dreams of an android with a soul.
Like its predecessor, Lust (1) can occasionally come across as a bit sketchlike, but there is considerably more depth hidden beneath the surface this time around, as beauty and magic are almost always lurking in both the vividly realized details and the hallucinatory ways that Kurzweil's voice subtly transforms and moves through space.
This third album from the duo of James Schimpl and Ellis Swan features some of their most sublime work to date, as it feels like the soundtrack to a desolate & dreamlike roadtrip across an America where it is eternally 3am. Stylistically, it sounds like Dead Bandit have distilled the best bits of cinematic post-rock, noir jazz, dub, shoegaze, and surf guitar into an elegantly bleary and oft-gorgeous series of late-night mood pieces. In keeping with that theme, the album’s arc mirrors that of an overnight drive, as the vibe gradually moves from haunted and impressionistic evocations of lonely highways and lurid neon lights towards the faint light of a bruised & beautiful sunrise.
Characteristically, I tend to find the darker pieces more alluring, but even the lesser pieces meander along in a pleasant fashion before unleashing some kind of wonderfully hallucinatory guitar trick or other inspired motif (i.e. the wounded, blearily howling solo in “Up To Your Waist” or the heaving & shuddering flanged ambiance of “Amer Picon”). The strongest piece is arguably “Glass,” as its slow, sensuous bass throb and vibrato-soaked guitar make it a lock as my go-to choice if I ever find myself DJing a strip club in Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, the bass-driven “Pink” features both a killer hollow-sounding guitar motif and a propulsive groove that feels like a depressive take on “Billie Jean.” On the more ambient side, the rippling, feedback-soaked dreamscape of “Milk” is yet another sublime stunner. If the album has a weakness, it is only that it sometimes feels more like a collection of great moments than a collection of great songs, but it is damn near impossible to imagine any room for improvement when Dead Bandit strike a perfect balance of dubby, bass-heavy grooves and shoegaze-damaged guitar wizardry.
Newly remastered and reissued (first time on vinyl), Monolake’s third album was largely a Robert Henke solo album, as co-founder Gerhard Behles had recently left the fold to focus on more software-related concerns. Notably, Behles & Henke were two-thirds of the team that created Ableton Live, which first became commercially available the same year that Gravity was released (2001). Given that Monolake’s debut Hongkong had already been an instant dub-techno classic on the iconic Chain Reaction label (metal box and all), Henke was essentially living at the cutting edge of both technology & electronic music at this stage of his career. Appropriately, he managed to effortlessly transcend most of the tropes of his dub-techno peers with this release, expertly steering the project into something that managed to be playful, exacting, futuristic, and deeply evocative all at once.
Field/Imbalance
Notably, Henke’s studio at this time was on the 9th floor of a building overlooking Berlin, which definitely seems to have inspired the “rainswept city at night” impressionism, though Gravity’s sense of voyeuristic detachment feels more akin to a lonely train ride home at 3am through a shifting landscape of blurred neon lights and darkly looming buildings. Hallucinatory nocturnal vibes aside, Henke is a goddamn sorcerer at sound design and production, so the wonderfully vivid and vibrant sounds and textures here enhance his insomniac vision beautifully.
The heart of the album is unquestionably the murderers’ row of “Ice,” “Frost, and “Static.” In “Ice,” Henke sensuously combines uneasy ambient drift, panning whispered voices, the stilted funkiness of an Afrobeat lick, and a wonderfully hissing, popping, and rolling beat to evoke the sensation of a dreamlike night drive through an empty city. “Static,” on the other hand, is a bit closer to classic Chain Reaction terrain, but Henke enhances the formula with a muscular, lurching beat and dynamically varying chord washes that feel like slow-motion waves crashing on a rocky shore. That said, “Frost” is the album’s clear masterpiece for me, as Henke unleashes a rolling and propulsive industrial rhythm that mesmerizingly bounces, tumbles, rolls, and pans around spatially in a bleary haze of eerie ambiance. This album is pure headphone nirvana.
This compilation is mostly one for serious Tim Hecker heads and completists only, as it collects an array of unreleased pieces and alternate versions from his recent soundtrack work for television and film (La Tour, Luzifer, The North Water, and Brandon Cronenberg's killer Infinity Pool). Since Infinity Pool already got its own album, it only appears here for a sibilant and synthy extended variation of “Joyride,” but Shards also packs a couple of solidly upper-tier pieces unavailable elsewhere and an array of intriguingly uncharacteristic stylistic elements.
“Morning (Piano Version)” covers a bit of both, as a somberly jazzy piano and double-bass motif gets viscerally ravaged by anguished drones and an ugly buzzing undercurrent. The closing “Sunset Key Melt” is the album’s high point though, as its tumbling, ghostly music box-like melody sounds like a party line séance between the flickering mirage of a delicate Andrew Chalk piece and a gnawing swell of roiling distortion.
This first Thrill Jockey opus from Berlin's resident shapeshifting guitar visionary is a mindblowing creative leap forward, as otherworldly tunings, American Primitive-style steel-string guitar, autotuned pop, futuristic psychedelia, field recordings, and spasmodic electronics all collide in a one-of-a-kind headphone album supernova. While Reidy’s more vocal- and pop-minded impulses have previously surfaced fleetingly on World in World and elsewhere, melodic vocal hooks are the beating heart of Ghost/Spirit in an unpredictably kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing whole.
Normally, the artificiality of autotuned vocals rubs me the wrong way, but the digital soul of these fractal reveries is perfectly counterbalanced by the alien harmonies and twanging, cathartic physicality of Reidy’s guitar playing. In fact, I am reminded of how Joanna Newsom’s masterpiece Ys was radically transformed by Van Dyke Park’s bold orchestral arrangements, but Reidy is improbably behind every side of the wild stylistic clashes here (albeit with some help from cellist Judith Hamann, Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, and others). When everything comes together just right, as it does on pieces like “Satellite” and “Maybe,” it feels like Reidy’s dissolving and dreamlike postmodern blues are an indestructible island of zen within a delirious mindfuck of unpredictably collapsing and accelerating electronics and convulsive broken beats.
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.
