FAVE RECORDS ATM

ATM, my fave records.

Athos To Know Where It’s Going (Abaju!)

“. . . a truly magical album from Cypriot brothers Antonis and Demetri Kastellani which evokes and excavates their Cypriot background, particularly their love affair with ‘Entekno song’ (art song) and its relation to soundtrack music. Of course this exploration is conducted from their homebase in the Cypriot diaspora in London and that push for a recovery of a lost identity gives this record a real plaintive push and yearning sense of redemptive light. Think Vangelis of course, think Mikis Theodarakis’ ‘Serpico’ score, think Basil Poledouris and Ennio Morricone, but crucially STOP thinking and just let this music take you on a tour lit with rosy-fingered light, rippling Cypriot instrumentation and pictures it paints in your mind of ancient villages, modern metropolitan political angst and a sky so cobalt blue it pierces the soul. The collaborators here include Peter Zummo (who worked with Arthur Russell) and there’s a similar sense of both sensuality and vaporousness to Athos’ sound, the sound alternating from minimalist fragmentary suggestions like ‘Well’ to the fully-fleshed-out sumptuous aural temporal and geographical travel of ‘Luna Park’. Music that puts you between the middle east and Europe, between the Byzantine and Ottoman, music that feels mythical yet only possible right now. Superb.” 

Big Blood First Aid Kit (Ba Da Bing)

“A family band, made up of partners Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella (from the now-defunct Cerberus Shoals), together with their 13 year old daughter Quinnisa on vocals. And my god, she’s an absolute STAR - WHAT a voice, as commanding as Stevie Nicks or Siouxsie over the gorgeous arrangements of 80s-inflected rock her ‘rents have conjured to carry  her. There’s a big big sound here but it was created at the family home, with a production which blends in failed takes with final takes until songs start speaking to themselves, always with Quinnisa’s vocals pulling you onwards. Repeated listens garner mucho hidden depths. Recommended.”

Joanna Brouk Sound Of The Sea (Numero Group) 

“Brouk was an intriguing figure, a St. Louis-born composer who came to music from the world of creative writing and poetry and who began creating music while studying under Terry Riley. As  a radio producer, she composed music for nature documentaries and self-released a number of her own compositions on cassette via her own label Hummingbird Productions before quite deliberately ending all her compositional work in 1985. ‘Sounds Of The Sea’, one of her tapes from 1981 - beautifully reissued here by Numero Group (who also collated archival recordings in the brilliant ‘Hearing Music’ set from 2016) - gained her the most recognition among ‘new age’ music circles but her work has been largely  forgotten until now. 

This is a hugely evocative album, especially for those of us far from any sea. The album starts on ‘Invocation’ - a conch-shell played into a infinite vista of sky and horizon before further tracks like ‘Atavesta’ subtly fill out the beach-wide picture with Brouk’s suggestive flute playing, seemingly hugely influenced by Indian classical flautists like Pannalal Ghosh. As this immersive, Turner-esque picture of the sea-as-natural-church unfolds we hear drones swimming up from the depths, whale-song and vocal extemporisations conjuring images of marine life, swirling echoey bird calls pulling us back to the surface. There’s a deeply charged eroticism inherent in this record - a sense of tingling bliss that takes over the body of the listener, your skin salty with spray and your soul pulled into the waves, and this plays resonantly with the mythical elements of sirens and shipwrecks Brouk brings in on the devastating ‘The Nymph Rising/Calling The Sailor’. By the album’s end, Brouk’s voice is dominant, raw and wondrous but also slow-dubbed into gorgeous dissonances and eastern harmonics. I urge you to try and forget the ‘new age’ appeal of this music and surrender to it without prejudice. It’s a hypnotic and profound gateway to a shore you won’t want to leave. “

Louise Campbell Sources (Redshift)

Love the antarctic space this takes me to. Just clarinet and electronics but so much suggestion, so much magic, get your speakers as far apart as possible for the full effect and point that prow south.

Decisive Pink  Ticket To Fame (Fire) 

“. . . a wonderful debut that mixes Deradoorian’s increasingly bewitching ambient soundscapes from her post-Dirty Projectors solo career, and NV’s ever-compelling sense of experimental pop nous. Playful is the word and not one to be used lightly - so much modern pop is at this painstaking po(i)se of trying to impress us, of ensuring that there’s no room in sound for anything that doesn’t display steely control. ‘Ticket To Fame’ is PROPERLY playful - you sense, from the moment that ‘Hafermilch Holiday’ drops gorgeous pulsing electro-pop into your day, that the duo had definite ideas about the sound they wanted, but crucially had enormous fun realising that sound, just as you’re having enormous fun listening to it. Buttons are pushed to create unforgettable melodies and rhythms - and the arrangements of amazing songs like ‘Destiny’ &  ‘Ode To Boy’ (with it’s ‘Ode To Joy’ nod) reveals real craft and guile - but they’re also pushed with a sense of genuine ‘let’s see what this does’ FUN. With these carefully positioned imperial bangers -  and the sequencing is perfect throughout - the album seduces you into the odd likes of ‘What Where’, the hilarious ‘Potato Tomato’ and the utterly sublime ‘Rodeo’; experimental, spontaneous tracks rendered more delightful by the straight-up pop that they alternate with.  And of course, by relaxing pop’s sense of auteurish control a little, ‘Ticket To Fame’ actually ends up moving you, and moving in on you, in a way that more doctrinaire pop simply doesn’t. It’s a true collaboration in which both NV and Deradoorian maintain their musical identities but balance each other’s urges with concision to the point where the record emerges as a holistic, kaleidoscopic, transmission from a duo at play with each other and with the possibilities conjured by their shared will.  A total delight.”

Divide & Dissolve  Systemic (Invada) 

“. . . .experimental doom with political purpose and a decolonising determination - even without knowing the band’s background that sense of dissident resistance and overthrow rages throughout ‘Systemic’, which though instrumental leaves you in no doubt that this is a band determined to reconnect indigenous people, and reject the deadening discourse of white supremacy. Crucially, that purpose accentuates this music’s dread beauty and power, lends it an environmentally elegiac feeling that lingers and builds. 

And ‘doom’ is perhaps a misnomer - this has nothing to do with weed or Sabbath or lassitude or paranoia or fugginess - rather there’s a lucid, almost modal clarity to opener ‘Want’ and the gorgeous intertwining horns that kick off ‘Blood Quantum’ that makes the moment the drums drop and the riffs churn in all the more impactful. Where the best doom plummets abysses that feel subterranean and other-worldly, Divide & Dissolve’s music is enacted on the surface of the earth, and internally to the body. This is music that feels like churning angst, feels as familiar and odd as the sound of your own bloodstream, feels like it’s angrily arming you for the coming endless struggle against all kinds of systemic oppression and violence. D&D are entirely unafraid of the beauty they can make on tracks like the ravishing ‘Indignation’ and ‘Kingdom Of Fear’ , even if they pitch that beauty into a baleful world of grinding despair - what ‘doom’ there is on the raging ‘Simulacra’ isn’t engaged in gleefully, rather it’s a portrayal of a pain so deep it’s tectonic. In an ‘extreme music’ world of frowny white guys with no one to moan about it’s a reminder that the blues - inherently buried in doom’s dna - can be recovered not through scales or shapes but through clear hearts and minds committed to music still being able to resist the world. In lots of ways a necessary record, in a more important way a thoroughly compelling one.” 

Josephine Foster Domestic Sphere (Fire)

“A hugely beguiling transmission, definitively a home-recording of this Tennessee-based songwriters work, with only an electric guitar providing conventional chord patterns and music, the rest of the mix a multi-tracked imaginative reconfiguration of all kinds of sounds, birdsong, buzzing insects, animals, the creaks of furniture and of course Foster’s voice, multi tracked, sped-up and slowed down and interlacing itself into all kinds of startling shapes and patterns, particularly on the hypnotic, homespun, otherworldly likes of ‘En’Tracte’ and ‘Reminiscence’.

From the moment ‘Entrance’ walks you into her domicile Foster has a wonderfully un-hierarchical attitude about both sound and her own authorship - the creaks of doors, the steady sound of your own footsteps brings us towards Foster singing over guitar that recalls Juni Habel’s miraculous ‘Carvings’ but as soon as you think you’re in a traditional place of listening she lets birdsong from a flung-open door take over. You know immediately this is NOT going to be a normal singer-songwriter’s record. You really get a sense on the astonishing ‘Pendulum’ and ‘Dawn Of Time’ that you are both a witness of this musical verite but also perhaps under Foster’s spell as little lines and details get echoed and dubbed in enfolding waves around you. It’s that mix of both exterior sonics and interior telepathy that makes ‘Domestic Sphere’ so simultaneously familiar and unsettling. In a world of singers intent on coming at you from the heart, Foster is smart enough to come at you with heart, soul, home and hearth all intact, all suffusing you with wonder. Beyond the superficial sonic intrigue of what Foster and collaborator Daniel Blumberg have crafted here, ‘Domestic Sphere’ emerges with a more resonant and deeper set of questions about what music is, and how it mingles with our living spaces and our lives. In that purely spiritual sense, ‘Domestic Sphere’ is as close to a morning raga as Western music has got in a while. 

A really quite remarkable record.”

Hunteress Destruction Horizon (Brawl)

“I love Laura Cannell’s solo work under her own name because even at her most experimental she has an ear for hooks in sound, tiny crepuscular details that can pull ambience away from mere background sound into something more like the radiant afterglow of detonated pop. Under her Hunteress alias Cannell is able to fully explore those semi-improvised songwriting impulses, couching her intriguing explorations of history, ecology and folklore in lambent textures of strung out synthpop. ‘Destruction Horizon’ (a title inspired by the burnt red clay and charcoal layers seen in the earth by which archaeologists mark Boudicca’s revolt in AD60) is her second as Hunteress and is even better than 2020’s ‘The Unshackling’. It never lets you rest - the glacial synth tones of tracks like ‘Solitary Mountains’ and ‘Boneflower’ never settle into a promontory of calm, rather the rhythms that Cannell laces through are unpredictable, at times jittery, at times strangely reminiscent of the lunges and space of great Drill. The way Cannell uses synths is also utterly discombobulating to your habits of categorisation - yes there’s a strung out ‘Last Night Of Sodom’ feel to some of the sounds here but she somehow manages, on the startling likes of the title track to also make these very-80s sounds mutate into something far more ancient, touchingly humanistic and suggestively magickal. Recommended.”

Klara Lewis + Nik Colk Void Full On

Glorious, toothsome, noisy, strange, shortsharpsweet blasts of oddness.

MC Yallah Yallah Beibe (Hakuna)

“Holy hellfire the SPEED of Yallah is astonishing. This is some of the most insanely maintained, incisively controlled spitting you’ll hear all year. Yallah was born in Kenya, raised in Uganda, has been rapping since 99, and her crush of experimental/conscious flow and hugely-accessible beats is only now creeping into mainstream Ugandan rap. This album is the follow-up to Yallah and Berlin-based producer Debmaster’s acclaimed 2019 debut “Kubali”. On this record - created after Covid kiboshed tour plans in 2020 - she hooks up with Debmaster again but also welcomes Japanese producer Scotch Rolex and Congolese club maestro Chrisman into the production fold. The result is an astonishing suite of futuristic beats that touch on trap, dancehall, techno and even industrial textures, drawn together by Yallah’s compelling, untouchable flow. A pan-African international patchwork sure, but one that feels cohesive and holistic thanks to Yallah’s stunning vocal presence. 

The opening three-fer of ‘Sikwibele’, ‘Minibela’ and ‘Tuli Mukintu’ damn near leave you breathless - Yallah has such an astonishing elasticity in her rhyming that at times you can’t tell whether her voice has been processed into the beats themselves, so precisely matched is kick and snare and syllable. The doominess and the darkness of the beats are crucial in giving Yallah’s rhymes a growing sense of fury and urgency - on the imperious, Afro-drill of ‘Sunday’ you’re reminded of the Bug at his heaviest, before the record smartly sidesteps into the startling, almost pop-hyperventilation of ‘Big Bung’. That endless variety never detracts from the finesse and fury of the flows here, and ‘Baliwa’ is one of the most astonishing hip hop tracks you’ll hear all year - part Scotch Rolex in full goth-guignol mode, part hypnotic spiral of multi-tracked cyber-rap. I hope anthems like the mighty ‘HERA’ percolate through to the west with full force because ‘Yalla Beibe’ is - until I hear different - not just African Rap record of the year but one of the global hip hop highlights of 2023 thus far. Essential.”

Megalithic Levitation  Obscure Fire (Aesthetic Death) 

Doom bands don’t ever just form like Voltron - in Megalithic Levitation’s case, they apparently ‘materialised from the eternal void and acid vapours of Chelyabinsk, Russia in April 2016 to bare their psalms into this world’. Heavy as hell and peppered with fantastically abyssal riffs, it’s got a lovely sense of seething dissatisfaction to it - the vocals are always processed and phased into a total  slurry of pitiable discontent. Crucially this is a truly psychedelic doom record, as informed by the lysergic likes of Brainfeeder as more contemporary peers - every single sound on colossi like ‘Of Eternal Doom’ is twisted into gruesomeness, to the point where you start wondering if that Meteor that hit Chelyabinsk in 2013 seeped radiation into the water supply. Superb. 

Memorials Music For Film: Tramps! & Women Against The Bomb (The state51 conspiracy)

Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire) have been making soundtrack music together for the past decade and the two soundtracks that make up ‘Music For Film’ were initiated in 2021. A mix of gorgeous psyche, drones, improvisational noise and electronic pop this album creates its own cinematic imagery in your consciousness as you listen and it’s a divinely tuneful, yet confrontational racket - crucially at no point on the squally schizophrenia of tracks like ‘Feel Of Time’ and ‘Sportswear Couture’ do you feel that the record’s waywardness and mutability feel confected or curated or anything so ghastly as ‘crafted’ - rather they feel like natural emanations from two sonic intellects at play in an enormously wide open space, emanations then concisely shorn to maximum impact. Like some wonderful crush of Spacemoth and Decisive Pink. Suggestive and compelling listening.   

Drew Mulholland Through The Glass Darkly (Castles In Space)

Doesn’t HELP of course that I recently found a copy of Nigel Kneale’s final ‘Quatermass’ novel which this dread-filled, seeping slab of darkness has been accompanying for a week now but my god I don’t want to wander in the labyrinthine dankness and darkness of Drew Mulholland’s imagination after dark, alone. It’s a shit-scary place. I knew Mulholland through his ‘Warminster UFO Club’ set, which was a chillingly atmospheric look at one of the most eerie incidents in British 20th Century weirdness. ‘Through The Glass Darkly’ seems less hinged to a particular incident and more informed by a deeply cinematic dreamscape of horror, pulling from centuries of occult suggestion and dangerous dabbling. I passed the headphones to my daughter, a big horror fan, and watched her eyes widen. She passed them back immediately. ‘Take them back. I’m sorry I heard that’. 

It’s so damn creepy. Opener ‘Has Anyone Here Seen Keeley’ manages to stay, for over nine minutes, in a place part musical, part miasmic, part almost-stochastic. I’m very much reminded of Xenakis’ most morbid visions - in the hints of organic and geologic sedimentation going on as the waves of brackish sound accrete themselves into an overwhelming sense of being buried alive. The title track starts with Borley Rectory-style rustles and Jamesian half-seen movement before nightmarish subterranean rumbles and horrific elements of pointillist detail (I swear I shrieked at the sound of a distant bell) set your heart on a tremulous tightrope of trepidation. ‘Messengers For Dee No No No’ is sound-as-scrying, pure Enochian disturbance conjured through mesmeric bell-loops and murmurs. Throughout this deeply unsettling set Mulholland shows an uncanny familiarity with the true feeling of supernatural experience that puts this set way beyond the traditional cliches of horror-music. A truly terrifying listen.

Lucie Pachova К​р​ъ​н​д​ж​и​л​и​ц​а (Skupina)

Aria Rostami Allegory (Bandcamp)

Saint Abdullah & Jason Nazary Evicted In The Morning (Disciples)

“Saint Abdullah’s remarkable ‘Mechanical Flirtations‘’ was one of my albums of the year in 2019 , and so I was keen to hear this new dialogue between the Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh and the live drums of Jason Nazary from Anteloper and Clebs. It doesn’t disappoint. What Nazary adds to SA’s sound is solidity and funkiness but he’s not such an orthodox drummer to simply lay down four-square beats to simplify their music’s impact - rather throughout the nine compelling tracks here he subtly interpenetrates and responds to SA’s sounds in a way that feels properly collaborative, simultaneous and fluid. Once the mix clicks, it feels entirely holistic.

The opening title track lets wobbly touches of trippy Robert Wyatt-esque keys ripple out over a stop-start stumble of beautifully warm beats - it’s Nazary’s addition of a heft and low-end to SA’s sound that really works and ‘Stub Of A Cucumber’ that follows keeps that early 70s art- rock/fusion feel going in the undertow (very ‘Faust Tapes’) while the brothers lay down curliques of YMO-ish synth. ‘The Azure Sky’ deeply recalls Weather Report in its shimmering sense of wonder, Nazary all ripples of cymbals and snare, SA reversing their drones into time-lapsed spongiform growth before ‘Insistently, Mystically’ plunges so perfectly into the sonic space of mid-70s Sun Ra you’re hearing an Arkestra that aren’t there. ‘Mirror Of Infinity’ sees NAPPYNAPPA deliver a compelling stream of beat poetry over heartbeat-paced clicks and glitches before ‘Divine Timing Is Intuitive’ drills deep into krautrock hypnosis. Throughout this engaging set, far from either Nazary or Abdallah compromising their work, what they’ve both found here is a collaboration intrinsic enough to make the listener stop trying to disentangle who started the dialogue first.”

Wadada Leo Smith and Orange Wave Electric Fire Illuminations (Kabell)

How do we critically excuse the dated, especially the deliberately dated? ‘Fire Illuminations’, the debut of Wadada Leo Smith’s new ensemble Orange Wave Electric is SO like Miles Davis’ circa 69-75 it’s properly uncanny. Wadada plays like Miles, piercing, minimal, melodic and with this band it’s all there, the funkiness, the heaviness, the Hendrix skronk of the guitar, the trippiness - if someone told you it was a recently uncovered annex to the ‘Cellar Door Sessions’ you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Guitarists Nels Cline, Brandon Ross give us liquid-’Merman I Should Turn To Be’ textures as well as McLaughlin-style noise, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs need no introduction and knob-twiddler Hardedge fills in these massive welters of funk with all the right wibbles and wobbles. So far so correct and yet, listening, as this album unfolds it steadily burns away your references and your resistance - the sheer PLEASURE these grooves and sounds conjure obliterates your prevarication. This is a swamp to get stuck into boots first. 

‘Ntozake’ is the opener and centre-piece, 15 minutes of hugely suggestive oceanic funk, Mauro Rofosco and Pheeroan AKlaff laying down a truly colossal groove, the band undulating and skittering around it in addictive whorls of racket before all slips into a ‘Yesternow’ peal of ambient dread.  ‘Muhammad Ali’s Spiritual Horizon’ is more ‘Bitches Brew’ than ‘Live Evil’, a rumbling, dissonant, arrhythmic smear of rippling drums and drones and plangent, strung-out horns which glide into the bass-heavy tectonics of ‘FIre Illuminations’ beautifully. The counterpart to ‘Ntozake’, the similarly 15-minute long ‘Tony Williams’ may well be the highlight here - Wadada’s searing solo horn and Hardedge’s pulsating keys ushering in an subaquatic abyssal series of unsettling surges and spills. Once you turn your smart-arsedness off and simply sink into this record it's a richly rewarding delight. Highly recommended. 

Jesse James Solomon Sunfall (Bandcamp)

Best mixtape of the summer.

Teri Gender Bender Catspeak EP (Clouds Hill)

Cracking alt-pop from outta El Paso, Texas peppered with the spirits of the Meat Puppets, the B-52s, Throwing Muses and Sasami. Teri’s steely control over all proceedings - she plays and produces everything here - is clear from the off, there’s a kind of intuitive togetherness to the playing on anthems like ‘Nicole Speaks Out’ and ‘Outsider’ that can only emerge from the hermetic solitude of the process but it’s the words and presence of Teri herself that really engages - as frontwoman of the Guadalajara-based  Le Butcherettes since 2007 she’s honed a way of putting her songs across that’s simultaneously intimate but also a performance, and those songs are moving testaments of difference and dissidence, celebrations of strength and individuality that are never cloying, always generous and giving. Big big pop fun here.

Various Artists Disruptive Frequencies (Nonclassical)

“I calculated the other day that if I totted up all the times I’d been in a room for a musical happening and I’d clocked I was the only non-white person in the room, all that clocking and realisation of my isolation would total about half an hour. That’s a lot of moments. Alot of accumulated instances, especially when bearing witness to self-avowed experimental and esoteric music, where the whiteness (and the frowniness, but that’s a separate issue) of proceedings has been so blatant and all-consuming you start wondering what’s wrong with you that plunges you into these anti-black narratives, noises and spaces. You start wondering whether you’re divorced irrevocably from your roots, whether you’re overly westernised, whether you have a place in this sound even if you’ve dedicated your listening life to not belonging to a scene or paradigm. Of course, when you do encounter BAME avant-garde experimentalism in sound - whether vintage (TrevorA.R.Kane) or current (Coby Sey, Dedekind Cut, Tegh etc)  it’s a delight to know you’re not alone, and the music is perhaps given an extra glower of resonance because of that connection. But it’s remarkable how - especially in a recorded and released sense - black and South Asian artists continue to be marginalised and underrepresented in a musical area that should precisely encourage the voices and visions of those ordinarily shut out and shut down by mainstream sonic habits and cultural forces. Of course, the experimental has its own orthodoxy, its own lattice of exclusions and powerplays. But it’s telling to me that Disruptive Frequencies, a startling new compilation of BAME experimental electronic music feels bracingly unique, like a first salvo even at this late late stage for the avant-garde. 

Disruptive Frequencies arose from Amit Dinesh Patel’s research under the aegis of the Sound/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, research which addresses ‘the lack of visibility for ‘for Black and Brown artists within the field of experimental music and sound’. Patel (who here appears himself under his pseudonym Dushume), together with five other Black and South Asian experimental and electronic artists recorded new music specifically for this compilation and the results are resistant, playful, yet seething with  dissident aggravation. Disruptive Frequencies is noisy as hell, deeply danceable, bass-heavy, placelessly mindblowing, and genuinely boundary-pushing in terms of its mix of soundscapes, turntablism, field recordings and audio collage. The opening and closing tracks here, both from the astonishing Poulomi Desai, are just about the most recognisably South Asian in root - the voices and instrumentation are Indian Classical -  but Desai plunges these rhythmic vocal and sitar traces into a foreboding, scarifying place, letting drones and details stretch themselves into absolutely heartstopping vortices of sound. On ‘The Vichitra, Queer conjurations from us’ she steps in herself to deliver a whispered manifesto/sermon about ‘poetic terrorist art’ that could be seen as a clarion call for the whole compilation. Bantu’s ‘Dark Energy Live Stream’ (here split into two tracks) sees Gary Stewart push electro presets to insane levels of subterranean intrigue, bass so heavy it almost flickers the track out of existence, the effect like walking from distance into Satan’s own dancefloor. Dushume’s tracks - the abrasive ‘Chakria’ and spectral ‘Avartan’ - if listened to loud and out of speakers, will draw concerned relatives and friends to the room, wondering if you’ve finally lost the plot, so entirely committed are they to treading that tightrope between organised chaos and pure Ramleh-style racket. Nearly all of the artists here are interdisciplinary but all of the artists crucially plunge and subsume their interests in the visual and philosophic deeply into their sounds - this never has the feel of soundtracks to installations, or augmented additions to the cinematic/documentary - rather the sounds create their own visuals across your consciousness, and in that visualisation the challenges to institutional whiteness and racist biases are clear and raging. Nikki Sheth’s gorgeously trippy manipulations of field recordings (the enchanting ‘Sandwell Valley’ and ‘Pemberton Gardens’) bring an additional environmental perspective to that resistance that sits perfectly next to Dhangsha’s dirty and dubby explorations of both his own past (Dhangsha aka Aniruddha Das was a founder member of Asian Dub Foundation) and a lost lineage of black techno and black noise. Disruptive Frequencies’ tapestry of fragments is completed by two tracks from NikNak that are perhaps the most playful here - ‘Combative Embers’ a startling stereo-strafing eruption of ultra-reverbed vocal tics, and ‘Swirls’, a humming eco-system of shuddering iridescent sonic life. Of course, this can’t be ‘complete’. Hopefully, this is just the start, the first volume of what one hopes will be an ongoing process, an ongoing fight needed not to merely reinvigorate experimental music in the UK but to give the marginalised a voice and a safe space to play in and be heard. You will not aurally witness a more surprising, engaging, mind-blowing collection of experimental music in 2023 because these are people who deserve to be heard, whose music provides blissful and bruising counterpoint to the dead-end, blanched-out, racially parochial narratives of so much experimental UK music. The start, just the start, of something tremendously special. “

Various Artists Echolocation: Resonate From Here (Brawl) 

‘Echolocation’ is a project Cannell has created in experimental collaboration with likeminds including Gazelle Twin, Kathryn Tickell, Lori Goldston, Nik Colk Void , Rakhi Singh and Kate Ellis. A kind of call-and-response album - Cannell sent six new tracks out to six musicians and basically worked on what came back -  and Cannell has stated that the need to support and express solidarity with these unique female artists was a large part of ‘Echolocation’s impetus. The results are wonderful - ‘Here & Now Part 2’ sees Ellis and Cannell weave a heart-rending suite of suspended strings into mournful shapes, Lori Goldston takes ‘Altitudes’ and peppers it with folky charm and pellucid pizzicato, Singh’s ‘Zahira’ has a stunning violin part that sounds bowed by a scimitar but there’s far too much here to detail in precis - dive in and let this inhabit your home.

Billy Woods & Kenny Segal Maps (Backwoodz Studioz)

Woods and Segal’s remarkable ‘Hiding Places’ was the greatest rap record of 2019 and anyone who heard it will have been waiting for the NYC rapper and LA producer to hook up again. Where ‘Hiding Places’ kept guest-spots to a minimum, this record sees Danny Brown, ELUCID (Armand Hammer), Shabbaka Hutchings, Quelle Chris, Aesop Rock and Sam Herry from Future Islands in on the ruckus which might make you worry about dilution and patchiness. Worry not. It's A more accessible record than ‘Hiding Places’ - that cramped sense of dreamlike monotony is gone - but it’s no less suggestive, addictive and compelling. There’s 17 tracks here, all different, and they’re kept short - the theme that emerges is travel and trajectories and a wilful avoidance of repetition or cliche and there’s a wonderfully no-fucks-given feel to the sequencing that makes it a real - as opposed to predictable - journey. 

Highlights include the slo-mo jet-lag of ‘Soft Landing’, Quelle Chris being typically engaging on the funktastic, spikey ‘Soundcheck’, the truly unsettling spaces and dubbiness of ‘Rapper Weed’ (like Miles Davis’ ‘Sivad’ rerubbed by Eno). At no point can you guess what the hell the next track is going to do but because Woods and Segal retain a steely sense of control over proceedings, even as the collaborators swim in and out, it feels like you’re slowly getting immersed into their sonic picture-painting, even if there seems an almost wilful perversity in the way the record refuses to cohere and comfort. By the time you’re through to the startling ‘Year Zero’ and ‘Hangman’ you realise that your sense of destabilised discombobulation is the entire point - and that each track presents an aural facet that your mind can reassemble and stick together as it sees fit .Very telling for me that when I played this front to back it worked as a dazzling kaleidoscope - when I stuck it on shuffle, every single different combination worked in a different way, with no weak links because the quality of each track is insanely high. There are Factorial-17 ways to listen to this and every single one of them is amazing. Underground, resistant US rap par excellence. 

Yakuza Sutra (Svart)

Chicago-based Yakuza have been silent for a decade now but ‘Sutra’ forms a welcome return for these avant-metal oddities - like Megalithic Levitation they leave nothing pure here, plunge every vortex of their sound into a grinder that spews out songs somewhere between art-rock, metal and post-hardcore. I’m reminded of those 80s bands like Metal Church, Annihilator and Voivod - too weird to be straight-up metal but too goddamned pleasurable to be fully excised from metal’s thrills and impact. Loving the dreampop-melodies of ‘Alice’, the Meshuggah-style gnarliness of ‘Burn Before Reading’ - this is a band at their best when shooting out ideas and jettisoning them with a dizzying sense of concision. Alot to digest. Alot of it is absolutely blazing. 

Peter Zummo Deep Drive 2 (Unheard Of Hope/Tin Angel) 

Zummo’s new release ‘Deep Drive 2’ references 2019’s ‘Deep Drive’ set as well as 2021’s ‘Deep Slide’ - both those records were recorded in London and were full of bustling intrigue. ‘Deep Drive 2’ saw Zummo rehearse his new band in Coventry and London, decamp to Copenhagen for recording,  and things feel altogether more convivial, measured, cool, even though the set was recorded on March 5th 2020 just prior to Europe-wide lockdowns. The bigger space of Copenhagen’s Village Studios lend previously busy pieces like the great ‘Another Way Than Expected’ a greater sense of build, dynamics and subtlety while Zummo’s trombone remains a calming central force throughout. Lovely.