Records Of The Year 2023

As ever, presented alphabetically. This is not sports.

I was brutal, honest. Lots and lots of records have grabbed me this year but these are the ones that stayed and became part of my regular listening.

Best wishes for a peaceful 2024 to anyone reading this x

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Deena Abdelwahed Jbal Rrsas ج​ب​ل ا​ل​ر​ص​ا​ص (InFiné éditions)

Perfect driving music for those who wish to make their grey commute lit with something tough, something with a different light, something that suits the rain and those dreams of a distant sun. A magical meld of electonics that swings across an axis connecting the European, Arabic, African & Indian, bass heavy and rhythmically often a tutorial in new steps you’ve not danced before. Rhythmically utterly fascinating. It’s a record that seems to create an identity for itself as it occurs, and (Tunisian DJ) Deena’s playfulness with sonic geography carves out that identity until it’s a clear new voice. Superb record this.

Aesop Rock Integrated Tech Solutions (Rhymesayers)

Just utterly dazzling - I absolutely love how Rock has peppered this record with what he does best, using the syntax of the times to lambast these times, or at least to uncover the weird querulous ways the fiction of the present might fall apart. Tightrope-walking a unique line between the pleasures of 80s analogue funk, 90s boombap and 20s digi-decay, the past and future and our weird present hovering between the two absolutely confronted, summated, even celebrated. Oh and the track about meeting Mr T in a restaurant (“100 Feet Tall”) has to be heard to be believed. LOVE this record.

Anadol Hatiralar (Pingipung Reissue)

What makes this so much more absorbing than so many others’ pootling around on vintage tech? Partly I think it’s down to the fact this never feels like a deliberate magic-ing up of the past - rather it feels like Atila has chosen this series of sounds precisely because of how it LIMITS possibilities away from sheer indulgence and always back towards pop, pop as a way of listening and creating. It’s delicious but disciplined, hugely suggestive but as specific as you like in terms of its coordinates in time and space. If you get nothing else from my rapture I only hope my love of Anadol’s music doesn’t put you off - please please listen. If you’ve ears, you’ll be lost and drowning and blissed out forever.

Umeko Ando Upopo Sanke (Pingipung)

Pop with hooks, that makes me grin, and laugh sometimes, but that absolutely works on me with the radiance and light and ecstacy of pure pop. No one is gonna put this on a pop playlist but it should be. It’s an absolute JOY.

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. 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. 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.

Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila Baba Soirée (Pingipung)

Pierre Bastien is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with a background in French literature who has spent decades in the world of experimental sound with his self-built ‘mechanical orchestra’ Mecanium, a combination of traditional instruments and machines that play them, including sporadic audio-visual releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex imprint. Here, Banabila samples Bastien’s recordings - particularly his ‘prepared cornet’ playing, but also dulcimers, percussion and self-created sonic oddities - and weaves together the Macanium’s sounds into a ‘sonic tapestry’ that’s at turns querulous, surreal, dadaist and revelatory. As ever from Pingipung, essential.

B. Cool-Aid Leather Blvd. (Lex)

Pink Siifu is surely one of most compellingly wayward presences in US hip hop and r’n’b of the last few years. On ‘Leather Blvd’ where he comes together with producer Ahwlee and a welter of friends from across hip hop’s cutting edge but perhaps the collaborative aspects of this record make it his most instantaneously accessible and variegated yet. There’s a tangible sense in which his friends enable him to finally stop being so damn impressive, and start just fluidly exploring the music he loves. As a listener it feels like ‘Leather Blvd.’ is  the most relaxed and suggestive he’s ever sounded . . . the variety of vocals means conceptually we end up getting picture of ‘Leather Blvd.’ as a place where hustlers, lovers, preachers and vagrants can drop by and drop gems and vanish into the ether of sound that hangs over the whole album. A trip in all senses.

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.

Bile Sister Living On The Edge (We Are Time)

Like Kilynn Lunsford’s similarly mind-melting masterpiece ‘Custodian Of Human Succession’ there’s a commitment to using what you have to create both beauty and revenge and far from the ‘extremity’ and ‘challenge’ so much electronic avant-garde music posits ‘Living On The Edge’ emerges as the only sane retaliation to these end times of decay and entropy. Energy is an anger. Underdog music and if you’re an underdog too, you need to hear it.

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.

Cultura Tres Camino De Brujos (Bloodblast)

Oh HELL yes - South American metal/hardcore band transplanted to Amsterdam give us a gnarly, unruly beast of a record as touched by grunge and post-hardcore and those early mayhem-heavy Meshuggah releases as it is by Sepultura and Sarcofago’s blitzed spirit. This band can play at full-tilt lunatic pace - check the stunning thrash-storm of opener ‘The World & Its Lies’ - but are perhaps at their most murderously effective when slowing things into an almost-doom sense of sludginess on tracks like the amazing ‘The Land’ and ‘Proxy War’. Crank it and spank it.

Dadá Joãozinho tds bem Global (Innovative Leisure)

Can’t actually count the ways I love this cos this isn’t just musical galaxies being traversed but sonic multiverses - everything from psyche to tropicalia to dub to hip hop to noise to samba - this is simultaneously a total fantasy of the connections any music fan would WISH had been made, but also works as way way more than mere record-collection pop. Delicious.

Decisive Pink  Ticket To Fame (Fire) 

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 - 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 Kate NV and Angel 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.

Delia Derbyshire  Inventions for Radio - 1964-1965 (Silva Screen)

As ever, Derbyshire’s vision is overwhelming at times, overwhelming precisely because it’s unpushy, subcutaneous, emotional, dream-like. It’s really quite impossible to conceive of how this music was created in 1964 when it sounds so astonishingly modern. Throughout it’s the way she evanesces her own presence and always treats the voices she weaves her sounds around with respect that really shines through. One of the true titans of modern sound creating some of her finest work. An act of sonic recovery approximately a billion times better than a ‘new’ Beatles song.

Fantastic Twins Two Is Not A Number (House Of Slessor)

One of 2023’s most startling, deeply rewarding, yet instantly addictive transmissions. There’s a deeply lysergic - almost scary - feel to this music that utterly immerses you every step of the way because you never feel pushed or bullied by an ego . . . an astonishingly apposite album for our times and for all times, a record that takes all the binaries we’ve been tutored in our whole lives - others and ourselves, creation and destruction, death and life - and suggests a complexity of mutual dependence and simultaneity that’s utterly mindblowing. Let ‘Two Is Not A Number’ under your skin. Without judgement. Without a final word. 

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. 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.

Katie Gately Fawn/Brute (Houndstooth)

US experimental producer Gately’s previous record - 2020’s hugely moving ‘Loom’ - showed that she was capable of crafting beguiling other-worldly music from very worldly sources and experience. That record was created and composed after her mother’s death, and touched deep into themes of loss, grief and goodbyes. This new record explores birth and adolescence, as seen through the prism of the birth of Gately’s first daughter - the dualism of the title reflecting its move from childhood into Gately’s teenage angst, the continuity of that life reflected in the heartbeat pace that sets in from the off and never stops, as well as the short sharp single-word song titles. Like birth and life however, this album emerges as too tangled to be pulled into a simplistic linear narrative; throughout,  innocence and trauma co-mingle both lyrically and sonically in an album as complex and irresistible as birth and life itself. Superb. 

Goat Medecine (Rocket)

I expect I’m meant to be hearing nods to Arbete & Fridi, Charlie & Esdor and Träd, Gräs & Stenar in these Swedish genii’s fifth album proper but truth be told - a minute into opener ‘Impermanence & Death’ I was most reminded of mid-period Sabbath, that ‘Sabotage/Technical Ecstasy/Never Say Die’ period where desperation made a great band even more interesting. The difference being that Goat don’t sound desperate, they sound delighted to be sticking their tongues into the gamey, funky, folky, proggy deliciousness of that era. As you should have come to expect from Goat (and Rocket) the grooves, textures, feel and playing here are immaculately realised but the unique way this band puts together what they can do makes it, as ever, way more than just retro-psyche. Perhaps their best, most fully realised record yet. 

Juni Habel Carvings (Basin Rock)

Often on ‘Carvings’ you feel like you’ve stumbled across some strange radio broadcast from between destinations on your AM dial, an abandoned numbers station in which a new, perhaps ancient, voice has come a-haunting. A billion lightyears from anything that could be summoned at an open-mic night. Unless that mic was sensitive to the background radiation of the universe.. And like much music made in lockdown it feels like a reach for something as a reminder of hope, a reminder that ‘life can be so good’ even if from the vantage point of a soul batting away daily torment. ‘Carvings’ is truly an album to get lost in, to let in to your place and space and let it entirely suffuse you with Habel’s vision.

Laurel Halo Atlas (Awe)

THIS is the first Halo LP that has really got me right in the solar plexus, right in the lungs, right in the head. By right in the lungs I mean this creates an ambience, an atmosphere you can literally inhale, breathe in, get heady on like you’re in the flower-room with Huysmans. Those elements that could be tactile (the piano, guitars) are always fuzzed and diffused into a blur, like you’ve lost your glasses for good and you’re looking at sound without squinting, happy that the edges are bleeding into each other cos the sound is just so damn sensual, feline, like a map of your subconscious breaking the surface and submerging itself again.

Kristin Hersh Clear Pond Road (Fire)

The most perfectly pitched solo album from Hersh yet. There’s that implacable concision in the storytelling, that delight in both twists and repetition in excelsis, moments between dream and clarity (‘Dandelion’, ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre’), a stunning blending in of effects and strings  (the astonishing ‘Constance Street’), granite heaviness  (‘Ms Haha’) and the voice is right in your ear, charged, cracked, direct even when it seems to step through a mirror. She’s done it again, but as ever, different.

Hulubalang Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (Drowned By Locals)

One half of the Indonesian electronic duo Gabbar Modus Operandi (check their ‘Puxxximaxxx’ and ‘Hoxxxya’ albums on Yes No Wave and SVBKVLK respectively) , Aditya Surya Taruna (aka Kasimyn) here drops his new solo project after extensive work with Bjork and it’s a head-rattling doozie. This record is tormented by that buried memory, takes Indonesian rhythms and spaces and puts them into a grinder of electronic sound, frequently touched by gamelan, often balefully bleak in its harsh sonics, always a compelling ‘Heart Of Darkness’-style journey without condescencion, and with a truly pitiless eye.

Honeydrip Psychotropical (Banoffee Pies Records)

Canadian-Bhajan DJ & Producer Honeydrip has gathered an all-star cast of vocalists including King Shadrock and Shanique Marie for her debut LP and it’s a delight throughout. I’m reminded of Suzi Analogue’s sense of fusion and finesse and ‘Hardcore Continuum’ (replete with a stunning vocal from Shadrock) seems to blend Crystl-style beat manipulation with the kind of lunging low-end you’ve not heard since Zinc’s ‘Supersharpshooter’. Play loud.

Paweł Kulczy​ń​ski Biosignatures (Pointless Geometry)

Based on field recordings collected along the banks of the river Wisla in Warsaw, including the utilisation of electromagnetic and seismographic sensors and hydrophones, this fab record from musician and sound artist Kulcynski is like Xenakis without the heaviness, without the hurt, without the noise. That might seem like noise neutered - it isn’t, rather, like Lucie Pavlova’s recent records, this serves as a wonderfully aquatic space to inhabit for the landlocked and concrete-bound. Enthralling, fascinating, amazingly executed.

Lil’ Yachty Let’s Start Here (Quality Control Music)

In 2023 I certainly didn’t expect to feel once again like I felt when I first heard I dunno ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ or ‘Isn’t Anything’ or ‘Music Has A Right To Children’ or ‘Aquemini’. But that’s how I feel listening to ‘Let’s Start Here’. Nothing so easily dismissable as ‘pivotal’ or ‘future classic’. Rather, like those records, one of those albums that will suffer in future under the soubriquet ‘influential’ but whose true influence won’t be musical, but spiritual. In terms of making you feel holy hell, pop just ISN’T DONE yet. Absolutely miraculous and pop’s first masterpiece of 2023. All hail.

Little Simz No Thank You (Forever Living Originals)

We have become used as listeners to releases being carefully planned around a promotional cycle - what was so startling about Little Simz’ ‘No Thank You’ LP this year was that it came out with no fanfare, with scant regard for appropriate timing, and seemingly because its creator felt it was crucial to get her ideas out there before moving on. Inflo - whose Sault project has created some of the most astonishing UK music of recent years - and Simz have grown together and the results on ‘No Thank You’ are astonishingly fluid, powerfully concise, richly suggestive. “Fuck rules and everything that’s traditional”  is one of the first lines you hear and it summates this masterpiece perfectly. One of 2024’s key stories is going to be seeing what Simz and Inflo do next. 

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. 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. Essential.

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 - 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.   

Modern Nature No Fixed Point In Space (Bella Union)

Recorded live and directly to tape, using the score only as a leap-off point, everything here is balanced in a way known to collectivist jazz but unknown to egotist pop and it makes for something refreshingly human, engagingly communal and ultimately convivial. Among the collaborators is Julie Driscoll, her first appearance on a recording for several years. Natural magic.

PLF ParziFoooooooooooL (Ventil)

PLF are instrument maker/producer Peter Kutin, ‘sonic nomad’ vocalist Freya Edmondes aka Elvin Brandhi and drummer/producer Lukas König, who formed the trio after a spontaneous meeting at a show they were all performing solo. Their debut ‘DemoEP’ for Opal Tapes came out of a single day-long improv session and was one of 2022’s finest bolts of fury - here they’ve given themselves more time to confront each other, more time to come together and the results are even better. Compelling music fit for a broken age.

Pozi Smiling Pools (Prah)

Pozi’s lovely wonky melodic kind of avant-pop, grabbed me within ten seconds of me first playing their new album. And I keep coming back because their sherbert is so toothsome, their contact-hit so delicious but crucially because I trust them implicitly and immediately. They’re not in the business of fucking around or tricking. It’s the purest, least-deceitful thing I’ve heard from an indie band in 2022.This record really must not disappear through the cracks of 2023 because single-handedly almost, Pozi give you back a weird faith that weird pop is still being made in weird old England by weirdos for weirdos like you. Very very much digging this.

Margo Price Strays (Margo Price/Lorna Vista)

Written in 2021 during a mushroom fuelled trip to South Carolina, completed in the ‘hallucinatory hills’ around LA, at times this sounds like Modern Lovers, at times like a great lost Stevie Nicks set with the heartbreaking plangency of a John Prine or Iris DeMent record, at times bizarrely close to Meg Remy’s US Girls (the wonderful ‘Radio’ ft. Sharon Von Etten). Eventually though it all starts sounding unique, all starts sounding like Margo Price music. A fascinating, constantly moving - in all senses - record, this.

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

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. 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.

The Serfs Half Eaten By Dogs (Trouble In Mind)

Cincinnati’s The Serfs play a fab kind of post-punk that edges into electro pop but has enough garage-rock sparkiness to never sound too immaculate- every single track here explores another area of that intersection between electronics and rock in a fascinating way, whether it’s the Suicide-pulse of ‘Cheap Chrome’ or the ‘Alien Soundtracks’ vibe of ‘Club Deuce’. Ace.

Sextile  Push (Sacred Bones) 

One of the most instantly addictive things I’ve heard all year. As soon as ‘Contortion’ comes thumping out at you with a stereo–strafing precision you haven’t heard since Front 242’s ‘First In First Out’ you realise you’re in the presence not just of people dabbling with punktronica, but people who have clearly been immersed in both the most electronic side of post-punk production (Suicide & Chrome) and crucially - dancing their whole life to late 80s, and early 90s techno, jungle, drum and bass. Night time highs and morning come-downs, the tension of the street and the release of the dancefloor, and further, offer moving apertures into the balance of personas in the band, and the tightrope of isolation and togetherness each member of the trio finds. The best party you’ve been thrown out of all year.

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

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 - the sheer PLEASURE these grooves and sounds conjure obliterates your prevarication. This is a swamp to get stuck into boots first. Once you turn your smart-arsedness off and simply sink into this record it's a richly rewarding delight.

Sonido Verde De Moyobamba Limited Dance Edition Nr. 17 (Analog Africa)

Fab, psychedelic Cumbia straight out the Peruvian jungle from a band formed in 1980 by guitar prodigy Leonardo Vela Rodriguez. Love the almost-Ventures-like surf geetar, trippy-as-fuck organ and the sheer unbridled danceable FUN of the rhythms here - this is music lit up with jungle colour and busy with jungle life to the point where the fuzzy psyche-ness of it all makes you suspect you’ve accidentally licked a toad you shouldn’t have. The band recorded five obscure-as-fuck albums for Discos Universal between 81 and 87 and godbless those miracle workers at Analog Africa for collating the best of them here. Superb.

Space Afrika & Rainy Miller A Grisaille Wedding (Fixed Abode)

‘Multi-hyphenate creatives’, ‘a penchant for curation’ - phrases I barely understand but that are guaranteed to put my back up pepper the bumf about this release so I swatted it away and listened without prejudice and I’m glad I did because as an exercise in sound design and collaboration ‘A Grisaille Wedding’ is exquisite. Don’t believe the hype, just believe this music.

Speaker Music Techxodus (Planet Mu)

As a sonic statement the record swims in the same oceanic spaces as the furthest out Arthur Russell, Miles, A.R.Kane, Underground Resistance. As a listening experience it’s unlike anything else I’ve heard this year - you’re caught in this weird place somewhere between the Outkast of ‘Aquemini’ and the Dedekind Cut of ‘Tahoe’, with the sense of intergalactic escape and ascension that is almost overwhelming.

Vivian Stanshall  Rawlinson’s End (Madfish Music)

Fans who treasure the original 1978 LP Sir Henry At Rawlinsons End (and the unforgettable cinematic version starring Trevor Howard) will be delighted to hear all the extra subsequent Rawlinson material here, collated by Michael Livesy from Stanshall’s own recordings and the three lost Peel Sessions from the late eighties and early 90s. Livesy has edited these together with the original LP to provide the deepest journey into Rawlinson yet, completing the narrative arc of Stanshall’s vision, and fully fleshing out characters like faithful retainer Old Scrotum and Mrs E - this is as close as British pop culture ever got to the Falstaffian vision of Shakespeare.

 Unkle G An Honest Meal (Equiknoxx Music)

Unkle G is Equiknoxx’s Gavsborg’s MC alias, and this hugely engaging debut full-length explores his experiences in studios, lyrically laced with the rarely-considered perspective of a producer in the vocal-led Jamaican music industry. It’s by turns hilarious, mordant yet poignant and musically it’s a fascinating lattice of lush pristine bass and backdrops over minimal heavily d’n’b influenced beats

US Girls Bless This Mess (4.A.D)

‘Bodies, births, death, machines?’ asks Meg Remy as the album fades with her breaking the fourth wall and seemingly talking directly to us, pointing at us with repeated imprecations ‘You? You? and you and you’. We’re all included in this masterpiece. End times music that feels like an immensely fresh new START. Essential.

Artists  0 (Biswa Bangla Noise)

BBN are a label from West Bengal and O comprises experimental and avant-garde music from 9 practised and novice artists based in the state. This hugely engaging comp often feels like it could only come from Bengal, but also that the artists aren’t hobbled or hidebound by orientalist conventions or strictures, that they are continually pushing against and interrogating exactly what ‘Bengal’ means. It’s utterly free music that still expresses a real sense of place, and isolation within that place. Highly recommended.

Various Artists Disruptive Frequencies (Nonclassical)

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.

Various Artists Echolocation: Resonate From Here (Brawl) 

A kind of call-and-response album - Laura 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. Far too much here to detail in precis - dive in and let this inhabit your home.

Various Artists If There Is A Hell Below (Numero Group)

If There Is A Hell Below takes that Curtis Mayfield line as a spur to unearth some of the most hellacious, weirdest, smokiest thunks-of-funk, all awash with wah and fuzz and the kind of depressive downeredness somewhere between Zamrock’s heaviest moments and Funkadelic if Hendrix had lived and got on board alongside Eddie Hazel. It’s a Luciferian mindbomb . . . every track here is a morbid, murky education in just how far out the funk got back then. Wonderfully addictive, bleakly redemptive, this is an essential collection.

Various Artists The NID Tapes Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 (State51) 

The NID studio was founded in 1969 when New York composer David Tudor set up a Moog Modular system and tape machine at the NID and what we hear on this compilation are excerpts from twenty-seven reels of archive tape spanning the three years of the studio’s operational history. Post-colonial and post-modern, these tracks from composers including I.S Mathur, S.C Sharma and Atul Desaiare form both neophyte explorations of a new sonic space for Indian music, but also fascinatingly seem to bridge that place where Western minimalism and electronic composition meet Indian classical ideas of the interpenetrative sonic life. An absolute goldmine and a righteous rewriting and recovery of a great lost chapter in electronic music’s history.

Jim Wallis In Huge Gesturing Loops (Tip Top Recordings)

An inarguably gorgeous delight of a record, a sound to get lost in, a sound that repairs broken synapses not through connection but through a meeting of your brokenness with its own spaces and brokenness. Think Stars Of The Lid and Labradford at their warmest, also think about the pellucid meanderings of ‘Paris Texas’ and the glimmering aquatic wonder of Hugo Largo. To be drowned in.

Billy Woods & Kenny Segal Maps (Backwoodz Studioz)

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. 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. 

Yo La Tengo This Stupid World (Matador) 

YLT are on fire here and now, reassuringly within that soundworld you’re familiar with but - perhaps because the album is self-produced - sounding more live, and freer, and looser and more magnificent than ever . . . . ravishing pop by a band who’ve clearly lost none of their miraculous touch with their sources, a band who incredibly seem to have an entirely new lease of life.