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Experimental songforms, percussion, breakbeats, prepared piano, sound-art…
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Not Drowning, Waving – Amaravot [Not Drowning, Waving Bandcamp]
We’re starting with an Australian band who were really decades ahead of the ball with ambient pop, melding field recordings and live tapes with creative studio techniques, acoustic instrumentation, effects and electronics. Because of David Bridie‘s soft voice and slice-of-life lyrics, I feel Not Drowning, Waving were seen as less revolutionary than they really were – and yet when David released solo albums that emphasised songwriting over sonic creativity, the music media predictably celebrated his “maturity” and suchlike nonsense. I love David’s solo work, and the often-twee but always lovely work of the post-NDW acoustic ensemble My Friend The Chocolate Cake, but Not Drowning, Waving nevertheless hold a special significance. For many, their career higlight was the groundbreaking album Tabaran, much of which was recorded with musicians in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea including the remarkable vocalist Telek (now Sir George Telek MBE!). Their travels to PNG triggered the band’s strong sense of social justice, and they became tireless promoters of West Papuan independence. The song “Blackwater“, about the brutal suppression of independence for West Papua, is haunting and still as relevant today.
Fast forward to now, and David Bridie & George Telek have been friends for more than half their lives. A concert performing Tabaran was put together early last year, celebrating 50 years of Papua New Guinean independence, and the band (including Telek) enjoyed being together so much that they created a whole album’s worth of new material. My dirty secret is that, despite the stunning highlights like “Blackwater”, I always preferred the albums before (Cold and the Crackle and Claim) and after it (Circus) in their catalogue because I wasn’t so into the Papuan stringband music. However, whether I’ve mellowed over the years (lol, lmao) or whatever it is, this new album feels wonderful from start to finish, and Telek is an integral member. What an achivement! I have no idea how it sounds to those who didn’t, to some extent, experience the band while they previously existed, but I hope they have an enduring legacy.
On Diamond – It’s Me Calling [Eastmint Records/Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne’s On Diamond are the perfect example of indie pop done experimental. Frontwoman Lisa Salvo writes beautiful, touching songs that have slippery chord changes and deeply unusual arrangements created together by the band. Previous members, often involved in the more experimental end of Naarm’s music scene include the brilliant drummer/composer Maria Moles, drummer Joe Talia (who recorded & mixed the album), and guitarist/vocalist Hannah Cameron (who contributes backing vocals along with Aarti Jadu and others). Along with Salvo’s vocals, Jules Pascoe on bass, Myka Wallace on drums and Scott McConnachie on synths and those frequently demented guitar solos, the band itself now features the glittering harp of Genevieve Fry and the percussion of Australian legend Duré Dara, born in Malaysia to an Indian background, a celebrated restaurateur with Order of Austrlaia Medal as well as jazz musician and improvisor. That’s a loaded band, put in service of Salvo’s aforementioned songs, which take strange, sidelong looks at matters of grief, longing and the passing of time. In a better world we’d be hearing these songs on rotation all day, but you – yes you – have the power to fix that, in the palm of your hand.
gushes – Game One [PTP/Switch Hit Records/Bandcamp]
gushes – CUT [PTP/Switch Hit Records/Bandcamp]
Trust PTP (aka Protect The Peace, fka Purple Tape Pedigree) to release one of the most bizarre & brilliant albums of the year (in conjunction with artist collective Switch Hit Records). Jennae Santos’ gushes presents an unrestrained amalgam of prog metal, psych rock, jazz & classical and electronic experimentation. But there’s more than just this: the album begins with voices talking in Tagalog, and influences from Indigenous Filipinx psychology and combat swirl around with land-sea ecologies, plant medicine and queer politics of decolonization… Delicious Collision is a fully-through-composed experimental rock opera, appropriately given Santos’ background (on top of everything else) in theatre, site-specific performance & dance.
Agriculture – The Reply [The Flenser/Bandcamp]
With The Flenser you know you’re going to expect dark, probably metal-adjacent music, and you know it’ll probably diverge from typical genre norms. Ecstatic black metal band Agriculture do indeed employ black metal’s tremolo guitars and blast beats to reach for altered states, but then the thunder gives way to a different kind of ecstasy at times – gorgeous harmonies and clean guitar? The last track on the album somehow combines it all together – blissful chugging blackgaze, and a fragile interlude of just voice and guitar. Channeling Zen Buddhism and social collapse alongside queer history & survival, The Spiritual Sound is easily among the albums of the year.
sunn O))) – Raise the Chalice [Sub Pop/Bandcamp]
So yeah, the southern lords of drone metal, sunn O))), have signed to Sub Pop, the little label that could. That’s the Sub Pop that was the centre of the Seattle sound, from Mudhoney & early Soundgarden to Nirvana – in fact Nevermind‘s profits, after their contract was bought out by Geffen, were what brought them back from early ’90s financial difficulties, and their (excellent) debut Bleach, which remained a Sub Pop release, was enough to keep the label chugging along for ages. The label pretty quickly expanded out of Seattle/grunge into all sorts of other areas, as diverse as Fleet Foxes, The Postal Service, and the greatest, Clipping. Still, the stentorian, rumbling noise of sunn O))) is an interesting step sideways, hopefully a great move for both parties. Their first EP for Sub Pop follows a 7″ (yes, two tracks under 6 minutes each!) back in 2023 for the Sub Pop Singles Club, but one side of this 12″ is the 14-minute “Eternity’s Pillars”, while the flip has 2 tracks each around 8 minutes – still pretty contained. The band for these tracks is the back-to-basics core duo of Greg “The Lord” Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, and the crushingly slow unison guitar/bass is by and large the totality of the sound, but I do love the disconcerting high-pitched flicker that rises through the last part of “Raise the Chalice”.
Susannah Stark – Minor Gestures [Night School Records/Bandcamp/STROOM.tv/Bandcamp]
When Utility Fog started back in 2003, folktronica was a genre of which I was very fond – but it was already pretty hazy as to what it was. Slightly glitchy hip-hop sampling acoustic instruments like Four Tet was what I thought, I guess, although when Tunng came on the scene literally later that year, it held a lot of similarity without quite being the same. And meanwhile The Books were doing studio-mediated music with acoustic instruments that somehow was something else entirely, despite arguably fitting the mould. So I love that in the years since, there have been untold different approaches to “folk” + “electronics”. On her new album Minor Gestures, Scottish musician Susannah Stark takes her Gaelic (Gàidhlig) folk music in experimental directions, which might involve drone passages on harmonium or modular synth, interpolated field recordings, or sample-based programming. The production touches only serve to heighten the sense of an arcane, otherworldly setting, as if being performed just out of sight or transmitted from a past-future. It’s quite a remarkable album.
Haykal, Julmud, Acamol | هيكل، جلمود، أكامول – A’saab أعصاب [Bilna’es/Bandcamp]
Cross-media artistic duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Ramme formed the record label & publishing platform Bilna’es along with producer Muqata’a as a space for artistic expression & criticism in Palestine & beyond. Along with the amazing productions of Muqata’a, a highlight was the 2022 solo album from Julmud, Tuqoos | طُقُوس. Now Julmud teams up with label founder Abbas, the latter under the name Acamol (Arabic for Panadol/paracetamol), along with Palestinian rapper Haykal on a new album Kam Min Janneh | كم من جنّة (How Many Heavens). The beats, produced by Julmud & Acamol separately & together, present a glitched version hip-hop drawn from the music & percussion of the MENA region, while Julmud & Haykal swap verses evoking the life of dispossession under occupation, colonization & genocide. It bears mentioning that while the killing continues in Gaza despite the so-called ceasefire, settlers continue to violently disrupt the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank with impunity – destroying property, beating and killing people and blocking access to their own land. In that context, this is a powerful work of resistance and solidarity (and some injections of humour). As I’m writing this late, you can read Emad Al Hatu’s excellent article on fbi.radio, as this was made album of the week at the beginning of November.
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi – Zendegi [Latency/Bandcamp]
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi – Silent [Latency/Bandcamp]
French label Latency have no interest in following any kind of expectations – they’ll flip from chamber jazz to minimal techno to post-classical to percussive bass. In 2019 they released the album Ritme Jaavdanegi by Berlin-based, Iran-born percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, and now Mortazavi is back on Latency with his new album Nexus. The previous album showcased Mortazavi’s incredibly detailed and complex rhythms on traditional Persian instruments – the tombak and daf. On Nexus, Mortazavi’s playing is just as accomplished, but he extends the percussion with electronic effects and his own voice. The music is full of an otherworldly sensation, of suspension in time and place. There’s an incredible 25-minute remix by Ricardo Villalobos of the track “Swamp” from this album, coming out on December 5th – don’t miss it!
IKI – Regenerate [IKI Bandcamp]
IKI – Dance [IKI Bandcamp]
It’s a sure bet that anything involving Danish singer Randi Pontoppidan is going to be something unique, challenging and beautiful. While she hasn’t been a member of Scandinavian vocal ensemble IKI since the beginning, she’s a perfect fit for IKI’s improvisational, electronically-mediated style. Pontoppidan joined Danish, Norwegian & Finnish singers Anna Mose, Guro Tveitnes, Johanna Sulkunen and Kamilla Kovacs four or five years ago, and BODY is their most intimate album. It can sound extremely electronic at times, but even at their most sharply edited & granulated, every sound comes from the voices of the five women. The recorded works reflect the group’s interest in how life extends past the body, and explores how the women become one organism when performing together.
georg-i & Older Brother – To Be A Man [GRACE/Bandcamp]
Portugal-based MC Darius Rodrigues aka Older Brother has been working with London producer George Harris aka georg-i for ages. Now the duo have finally come out with the Warm Skin EP on Berlin-based DJ Katiusha‘s label GRACE. And these four tracks of trip-hop-inflected bass music do walk with grace, holding Older Brother’s lyrics about the state of the world, and – on this closing track – seeking a new, post-patriarchy definition of maleness.
Sun People – Herbie’s Delay [All Things Records]
Austrian producer Sun People has released some creative and hard-hitting jungle & drum’n’bass that hybridizes with footwork and techno. His All Things Records provides an avenue for music of all kinds, so his new LP Look Within isn’t tied to any tempo – faster or slower than 160bpm, with a few beautifully-produced beatless tracks too. But as with “Herbie’s Delay”, there’s still some creative, syncopated jungle/d’n’b to be found too.
Hyperfocus – Sentinel [Machinist Music/Bandcamp]
For his fifth release (in two years!) on Canadian drum’n’bass master John Rolodex‘s Machinist Music label, Hyperfocus brings beats precision-tooled in the Machinist Music labs with evocative atmospheres and restless basslines. This is where the jungle revival bleeds back into the d’n’b mainstream, and I’m here for it.
San – In Plain Sight [Rua Sound/Bandcamp]
Appearing for a third time on Dublin jungle/bass label Rua Sound is Bristol’s San, a slightly mysterious individual who is apparently a techno producer working under a separate alias. This is dark stuff for haunting rave dancefloors and lying on your back with headphones on. Constantly changing cut-up breakbeats, deadly deep subs and spooky atmos, taking the cyberpunk ethos of mid-’90s drum’n’bass and applying it to contemporary jungle.
POL100 – TRIBE [early reflex/Bandcamp]
Turin’s early reflex label brings as usual cutting-edge experimental bass & club music as part of their Eyes series of two-track EPs. Here’s Italian producer POL100 mutating jungle and techno into strange new shapes – it’s half drumfunk and half electro maybe? Well worth your time.
Hello Psychaleppo – Al Wa6an | الوطن [Fake Lines/Bandcamp]
Joy Moughanni – I Can’t Seem to Find it At Home | مش عم لاقيه بالبيت [Fake Lines/Bandcamp]
The first release from non-profit label Fake Lines has launched itself with a mega compilation – 36 tracks over 3 vinyl LPs – called Fake Lines: Sono Levant. It’s packed to the brim with excellent music, gregarious with genre – it may lean towards electronic music but there’s folk, hip-hop and rock of a sort. There’s an emphasis on Levant artists, but the tracklist also reaches further afield to other MENA countries and more. Montreal-based Syrian DJ Hello Psychaleppo contributes some stuttering samples and bass heft, while Lebanese producer Joy Moughanni combines jagged almost-rhythms and sound design to impressive effect.
Lone – Ascension.png [Greco-Roman/Bandcamp]
I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with Lone‘s music, but new single “Ascension.png” combines chromed cyberpunk and fuzzy vaporwave with jungle and rave bliss, and that makes a winner.
Kelly Moran – Chrysalis [Warp/Bandcamp]
A year and a half after releasing her last album, Moves in the Field, Kelly Moran returns to her more familiar territory of chiming prepared piano and electronics, with an album that’s complementary to last year’s. For Moves in the Field, Moran took her piano compositions and programmed them into a Disklavier, a physical piano that can be played via digital programming. So Moran was able to perform alongside her digital copy, with dazzling patterns climbing up and down the keyboard. On Don’t Trust Mirrors, the sound is more uncanny – synths and prepared piano melting into each other – but the performances are more clearly human. And those familiar with the previous album will hear echoes of those pieces throughout.
Quartz Sand – Chemical Sedimentary (excerpt 2) [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
I was lucky to get to see Kate Carr & Cath Roberts playing together at a gallery in Hoxton, London back in May. Carr is an Australian sound-artist who runs the impeccable Flaming Pines label and is one of our finest proponents of field recording, as well as music made from non-musical objects; Roberts is an improviser and composer who has been working with the Lyra-8 synthesizer, an “organismic” synthesizer, whose 8 voices interact in non-linear ways along with some effects. The duo’s name, “Quartz Sand”, suggests minerals and inorganic matter (quartz is silicon dioxide, perhaps the most basic inorganic molecule), and the idea of the album’s title, Stratigraphy, is to imply a vertical structure – rather than a typical horizontal time-based structure – as primary. But don’t be fooled: these two near-half-hour pieces aren’t static at all. It’s just that the action happens often between the crinkly, whistly high frequencies and the gurgling, grinding bottom end. It’s like listening to a cross-section of the earth’s crust – in a good way.
Lea Bertucci – Two Way Mirror [Cibachrome Editions]
It should be well-known and universally acknowledged now that Lea Bertucci is one of the best sound-artist/composers of the last decade and a half. Whether site-specific works exploring & exploiting – for instance – the resonance of a hollow bridge in Köln (2020’s Acoustic Shadows), myriad works live-processing her own saxophone and other instruments, or her work with reel-to-reel tape machines, she’s a master of her craft. Recent times have seen a number of incredible collaborations from Bertucci: in 2022, she operated tapes & electronics around Robbie Lee‘s baroque & medieval instruments on Winds Bells Falls, while on Murmurations, her tapes were as prominent, but she also brought various wind instruments and her voice to the table, next to Ben Vida‘s synths & voice; and on her tectonic collaboration in 2023 with Brisbane’s own Lawrence English, cello, viola and lap steel guitar emerge as well. Earlier this year Lawrence’s ROOM40 released an astounding work of Bertucci together with another masterful sound-artist, Olivia Block. So needless to say her new album The Oracle is a tour de force, engaging her many instruments, field recordings and, importantly, her own voice, all filtered through tape manipulation and digital processing. Only on the last track are percussionists from the Wesleyan University Taiko Ensemble enlisted for a booming – yet obscured – finale. Of course, it’s not just technially interesting or impressive (although it is those things) – it’s also music that will draw you in and move you, despite the vocals being twisted into non-textual shapes. It’ll easily be high on my albums of the year list for 2025.
Alexandra Spence – Magenta (with Delphine Dora) [Students of Decay/Bandcamp]
Back to Sydney to finish, Alexandra Spence is another brilliant sound-artist who works with field recordings and found objects to tell a story about place and memory. Her last two albums (from 2022) arose from a fascination with oceans and waterways; the scope is wider here, from mountains to backyards, but the ecological and geological also interact here with the personal. As well as recordings of places and non-musical objects, Spence (a clarinettist) here uses sounds from Serge Modular synths and a custom-built lyre, and on tonight’s track, Spence also brings in the voice and instrumentation of French composer & musician Delphine Dora.
Listen again — ~222MB
