bandcamp: album of the day 2025

评语：By Brad Sanders · November 26, 2025 There are turns of phrase on BANG, the stunning debut album by Scottish singer and songwriter Iona Zajac, that might send you scrambling for the replay button. That puts Zajac in the company of people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, songwriters who released poetry books without anyone batting an eye. For now, Zajac is probably best known for interpreting the songs of others—she’s joined The Pogues on tour, where her take on “I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” gives Cait O’Riordan’s a run for its money—but that should change once BANG finds its audience. Take “End of the Year,” a decade-spanning, coming-of-age tale with an imagistic sweep you can practically feel on your skin: the grass in summer, shoplifted bags of crisps, a girl sick off beer, “a bird that had a heart attack.” Zajac can’t stop the relentless march of time, and all that nostalgia eventually curdles as she learns to accept that. The final verse is the clincher: “26-year-old muse, reaching up to the ceiling/ I’m not her, I’m not you/ I’m not past, but I’m going.” The lilting “Chicken Supermarket,” cobbled together from half-remembered dreams, is a surreal joy, while “Murder Mystery” turns that same surrealism on its head by saturating it with dread and implied violence. “The wild is wilder than ever,” Zajac sings just before the latter tune erupts in a brief guitar solo—and, well, isn’t it? Zajac’s greatest muse is womanhood, a subject she explores through the lens of sex. The rollicking title track is a rebuke to slut-shaming, and an affirmation of what Maude Lebowski once called the “natural, zesty enterprise”: “I’ll bang the head off you/ Just to beat the blues.” Elsewhere, the story is less rosy. “Bowls,” “Dilute,” and “Anton” form a loose trilogy about consent and violation, as Zajac brilliantly reframes personal history as universally shared experience, trauma’s unwanted yet powerful sorority. “Did she want you?/ I don’t think that’s it/ Ask her, ask us all,” she pleads on “Bowls,” her voice rising in an almost ritualistic cadence. It’s a spine-tingling moment, one of several on BANG. The music that’s tasked with carrying Zajac’s lyrics is pliable but always persuasive. Much of BANG could be considered folk music, but it’s with the same generous interpretation that once marked the Pogues in that way. In truth, the music is whatever Zajac needs it to be for a given song. “Bang” and “Murder Mystery” are slinking, mid-tempo indie-rockers, while “Bowls” and “Anton” both make their way from frosty minimalism to last-act paroxysms of cathartic, nearly formless noise. Anxious, finger-picked guitar tends to underpin even the gentlest songs, and when Zajac reaches for the grandiose gesture, as she does on the album-closing “Loving Is Rough,” she has the gravitas to pull it off. Her voice, it’s worth noting, is at the center of every song here, and she’s nearly as gifted as a singer as she is as a lyricist—part PJ Harvey, part Sibylle Baier, with a steely, nearly affectless resolve. In short, Zajac has got the juice, and BANG marks a serious arrival.

评语：By Ted Davis · November 25, 2025 From her dragon-themed album storylines to the elven costumes she wears, MJ Noble leans hard into fantasy, writing songs centered on flute, jungle percussion, and vocals that occasionally recall Björk. On Songs From My Castle Tower, the L.A. musician born Minni Jo rockets into hyperspace, offsetting tense breakbeats with climactic melodies. It seems beamed from a mystic far-off realm, where centaurs graze in purple mist. The album’s 70 minutes are alternately restless and crystalline, with Noble’s voice dovetailing over skittering grooves and choppy low-end. On “All Urs,” lush woodwinds puncture taut rhythms, and on “Pay The Price,” dubstep bass supports a spunky verse from California’s Chemistry MC: “Revenge swimming through my blood/ There ain’t no coming back/Sickened from the poison we sipping/ Tryna keep this love intact,” he raps. The pitched-up hi-hats and echoing hand drums on “Marigolds” propel a hook about empowerment that lingers long after the cosmos go dark, with Noble proclaiming in the song’s smooth chorus. “I will be loved/ If the sun grows cold/ I will be blooming/ Like marigolds.” Noble has an eclectic background, impacting her theatrical brand. She was raised by a jazz pianist father and grew up dancing. A former metalhead, she has played in whimsical bands at masquerade balls, and taught herself Ableton in order to stand out in a musical landscape dominated by men. As a television actress, she has appeared in NCIS, Parks and Recreation, and Lucifer. “I don’t really ever sound like anyone,” she said. “I want someone to hear a track and say, ‘That’s MJ Noble.’” Songs From My Castle Tower achieves her aim a hundredfold.

评语：By Jinhyung Kim · November 24, 2025 In just under a decade, أحمد [Ahmed] has built a formidable discography on a modest mission: to reimagine bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s pioneering fusions of New York jazz with music from across the Arabic-speaking world. This premise fails to capture the radical force of what the band has accomplished. Listening to an Abdul-Malik recording before an [Ahmed] rendition of the same composition feels like witnessing an explosion: The melodic and modal material of the original is broken up into an inventory of motifs that are then iterated upon in a far more frenetic and open jazz idiom than that pursued in Abdul-Malik’s own work. In form, [Ahmed]’s music owes its core to a free jazz tradition inherited from Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler and developed thereafter in a transatlantic context as free improvisation, a scene best documented by the FMP/Free Music Production label. The band’s working method reflects this as well. Up until now, all their releases have been live recordings of sets played with no rehearsal prior to the members’ arrival at the venue. What sets their approach apart from most free jazz and improv is a rhythmic propulsion defined by relentless barreling forward, and tight, interlocking repetitions—a foundation that reinforces rather than diminishes the music’s chaotic intensity. Pat Thomas attacks the piano in percussive tone clusters while drummer Antonin Gerbal and bassist Joel Grip always anchor the madness in some kind of groove, no matter how wild things get. Even Seymour Wright stubbornly insists on keeping time by way of staccato blares and squeals on his saxophone. [Sama’a] (Audition), despite being captured in the studio, lacks none of the strengths of [Ahmed]’s work to date. It does not signal a fundamental change in method; these are single takes from a single recording session, and the album includes two compositions that have been part of the band’s constantly reworked repertoire for years now. There are, however, subtle but important differences. The pieces on [Sama’a] are of condensed duration, running 15 to 20 minutes as opposed to the 40 to 50 minutes of [Ahmed]’s live sets; their development of motifs is more proportional and concentrated, without having lost any improvised spontaneity. It’s the fruit of years of experience leading to confident familiarity with the material—something that enables the band to move both faster and with more breathing room than ever before. This is nowhere more evident than on “Farah ‘Alaiyna [Joy Upon Us],” which, when compared to the take from 2019’s Super Majnoon, flies and dances wherever the latter charged and stomped. If [Sama’a], as the tracklist suggests, is a reenvisioning of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s first of six studio albums, we can expect much more from [Ahmed] to come.

评语：By Erick Bradshaw · November 21, 2025 On house anthems over the years, countless divas have solicited, “Can you take me higher?” but only one electronic producer dares to ask, “Will you let me take you lower?” No one gets down quite like Kevin Martin. The producer eats bass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then unleashes it in the wee hours to knock you out cold or revive your lust for life. Finding his sea legs in the crusty early ‘90s London noise rock scene, Martin formed the underground supergroup God and kicked up a serious racket before turning towards electronic music with ICE and Techno Animal, his collaborations with Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick. Martin has been rattling floorboards and helping tenants break leases ever since. Over the years, The Bug has become Martin’s main vehicle, supplemented by King Midas Sound, with Roger Robinson and Kiki Hitomi, and Zonal, his most recent team-up with Broadrick. Since 2019, Martin has issued a series of recordings under his full Christian name that explore isolationism, a dark ambient style that he helped define with the Ambient 4 collection that he compiled back in 1994. 2023’s Black applied this spare and desolate genre to reinterpretations of Amy Winehouse’s catalog. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, Ghost Dubs is producer Michael Fiedler’s newest alter ego which debuted with 2024’s critical favorite Damaged, released by Martin’s label Pressure. With Implosion, Martin makes the critical decision of sequencing The Bug and Ghost Dubs as alternating tracks instead of dividing them by side. The pair complement each other well, both placing their faith in bass as the focus, but to slightly different ends. Compared to Machines, The Bug’s mega-sized collection of industrial menace, Martin’s tracks on Implosion are a little closer to traditional dub, but just barely. Check your teeth before playing “Believers (Imperial Gardens, Camberwell)” because the bass tones will expose any loose fillings, the same goes for paintings on the wall. On “Dread (The End, London),” the bass is like a pillow put over your face by a sleep paralysis demon. “Spectres (Plastic People, Shoreditch)” covers an entire spectrum of bass frequencies with rainstick sonics dampening the edges. In contrast, Ghost Dubs’s contributions to Implosion are less industrial in approach, but still kept heavy and insulated with an electric blanket of bass and fizzy textures that sound like they’re coming from a synth on the fritz. The bass on the Basic Channel-style dub techno of “In The Zone” is resonant but sprightly, linking it to the Caribbean as well as the North Sea. “Hope” is soaked in paradoxical reverb, simultaneously warm spring and glassine surface. “Dub Remote” is so casually charming and groovy it’s like being sent to a spa for a mini-vacation from this dread-infused album. “Down” combines all of the preceding into a mix that could have come from the desk of Adrian Sherwood himself. The hazy, static-riddled “Midnight” is like Ghost Dubs’s tribute to Pole, Stefan Betke’s pioneering ambient dub project. Perhaps not coincidentally, Betke, an engineer and master cutter of some distinction, mastered Implosion. And so, from this trio of bass addicts the eternal question comes: How low can you go?

评语：By Joseph Francis · November 20, 2025 DJ Lag may be known worldwide as the “King of Gqom,” but let it be known that he’s a magnanimous and humble ruler. Don’t forget: This is the same artist who quickly forgave his fellow South African producers when they made a quick buck off his work while he was out taking gqom global. And over the course of his last two mixtapes, DJ Lag has shown he’s constantly open to folding fresh ideas into his winning formula. On “Keep Going” from his debut LP, Meeting With the King, he pulled gqom’s tempo down from its usual mid-120s BPM into amapiano’s more seductive 110 BPM range; he toyed with trap on “Kwenzakalan” off his second record THE REBELLION. And he continues to explore new influences on his latest album Southside Mixtape; a hint of baile funk is in the light percussion of “The Beast” and Natasha MD’s silky refrain on “Shona Malanga” is strikingly soulful. But really, it’s DJ Lag’s quirky sound design more than his style-juggling that make his latest outing so enjoyable. In DJ Lag’s hands, gqom’s low and heady plod is like the cool kid in school whose presence gives even their most awkward friends some swagger. “WTF”’s winding saw synths would be kitsch had gqom’s deep drums not pushed them back during the song’s climax. Subdued, their jaggedness hits a curious middle ground between scatty and sexy. There’s something similarly odd about “Detroit Rave”’s 8-bit and slightly pitch-wobbled horns. They wouldn’t sound out of place on Bowser’s Castle from Mario Kart 64, and here their short blasts bring buoyancy to the colossal kick drums that trudge beside them. “Yey’Wena”’s undulating synths are as uncanny as those in the Delia Derbyshire-sampled tune “Not Stochastic.” The lurking presence of these peculiar (and slightly creepy) sounds bless DJ Lag’s gqom with something more subtle for listeners to get into well after the 808s and log drums have rifled in. Proof that the king is, indeed, all about grandeur.

评语：By George Grella · November 19, 2025 Collecting performances from jazz pianist Jessica Williams,, this archival compilation is one of the most remarkable finds in jazz in many years. To say Williams was a terrific jazz player would be an understatement: A multi-time Grammy nominee with over 80 albums to her name, as well as a leading interpreter of Thelonious Monk, she served as the house pianist at the Keystone Korner club in San Francisco and collaborated with Philly Joe Jones and Charlie Rouse. Yet despite these accomplishments, Williams never attained widespread public recognition. Inspired by Monk’s angular, percussive logic and scintillating, dissonant playing style, and the pioneering experiments of John Cage, on these previously unreleased tracks, she expanded the sonic possibilities of the piano by placing objects like screws and erasers between its strings before sitting down to play—and did she ever play. Williams, a transgender woman, was the kind of pianist who possessed the rare ability to play clearly and powerfully, no matter the speed or density, thanks to her marvelous legato touch; she adapted her technique and lyricism in response to the new sounds she heard. Of all the original prepared piano music released over the past eight decades (an admittedly small pool, but still enough to establish a precedent), few compositions present as beautifully played, as pianistically, as hers. Compared to standard jazz, these tracks are far less focused on harmonies, as she thins the textures to let the new timbres shine through and resonate. And her original musical ideas make exceptional use of what this “new” instrument can do, not just the inherent gamelan sound you can hear in “Half Circle,” but how it can take simple melodies and make them extraordinary, like “Odun-de.” This is still fundamentally a jazz piano album, and Williams’s playing is top shelf. Listen to how she caresses the blues line and lays out the sensuous pace of the title track, the ideas based on both Keith Jarrett and Chopin in “The Spider,” a track that starts with solemnity, grows more active, and eventually collapses into a maelstrom of incredible, acoustic noise. Through the whole album, Williams experiments with the possibilities of the prepared piano while also focusing first on making communicative music; it’s not about just discovering things and leaving them at that, but seeing them as material to make new things in old ways. What we’re left with isn’t just a holy grail for jazz heads; it’s a shining paragon of modernism.

评语：By Jon Dale · November 18, 2025 Paul Kidney’s long been a curious presence in the Australian underground. I’ve always been fond of his way of moving: colorful, high contrast, excessive without indulgence. He’s one of those characters who’s always sitting somewhere near the periphery, but with enough smarts to make his presence felt when needed. I first encountered him when reading about the group he was part of across the first half of the ’90s, the all-channels-open, mutant rock/noise/funk group Kiss My Poodles Donkey, whose two records are essential to anyone getting to grips with the antic, carnivalesque underbelly of Australian music. More recently, Kidney’s headed up his own improvised psych rock gang, the Paul Kidney Experience. Extant since 2009, they’ve explored terrain that was perfectly framed by the title of their first release: Flower Punk. Their shifting membership and open-arms aesthetic has served them well across the past 16-or-so years; it’s no surprise to see them shacking up with other collectives as distinct as the free rock/noise crew that circle around the Breakdance The Dawn label, and Japanese shape-shifters Acid Mothers Temple, with whom the Experience have released a split album. That relationship with the Japanese psychedelic underground’s been particularly productive for Kidney—hence the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, whose first album does well to capture the errant spirit of these four idiosyncratic individuals. Of course, it helps when you can call on musicians of the caliber, and with the history, of Mitsuru Tabata (Acid Mothers Temple, Boredoms, Green Flames, 20 Guilders, etc.) and Masami Kawaguchi (New Rock Syndicate, Keiji Haino & The Hardy Rocks, Usurabi, Miminokoto, Broomdusters, etc.) They’re both players who can take the temperature of a room in split seconds and play perfectly in response; they’re also both improvisers who respond well to Kidney’s provocations, supported ably by the rhythms of Don Drum. Kidney’s guttural vocals—groans, grunts, sighs, vocal emanations that are like an avant-punk reading of the kinds of ‘obliteration of the word’ undertaken by sound poetry—twine the instruments here, while Tabata’s bass and Kawaguchi’s guitar are in surrealist consort even as they meander in different directions. It can take a few minutes for things to come together; the opening “Frozen Leopard” drifts indecisively for close to three minutes before spinning on a dime with a final flourish. It’s the longer pieces that tell us more about what the Japanese Experience is capable of, from the unpredictable terrain of “Gargoyle’s Tempest,” locking into a blissed-out, Ash Ra Tempel-esque dream at its midpoint, to the San Fran ballroom jam that lands, unexpectedly, a few minutes into “Mushroom Glory.” In fact, that seems a pretty good way to map out the world inhabited by Paul Kidney Japanese Experience: renegade SF ’60s acid rock, picked up by blissed-out German kosmische, threaded through the Japanese psychedelic underground, landing with a decisive thud in fried suburban Melbourne. Call it the psychedelic travelogue.

评语：By Matt Watton · November 17, 2025 In the novel Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler wrote of Montreal that “its salvation [is] the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers.” The city exudes a self-assured, continental coolness, and its relative affordability makes it admirably hospitable to its artists. But Richler is right that this coolness takes effort; it’s an act of devotion rather than a natural endowment to the Québécois. Hélène Barbier is one such devoted mover and shaker. Relocating to Montreal from France some 10-plus years ago, she’s put in the work: first with the lo-fi punk outfit Moss Lime and then as co-founder of label/zine/all-around scene-saver Celluloid Lunch, alongside her equally industrious husband Joe Chamandy of Theee Retail Simps and Feeling Figures (he also plays guitar in her band). Panorama, Barbier’s third album under her own name, radiates a nonchalant magnetism. Barbier makes no wave-tinged art pop, haphazard, enigmatic earworms that charm through restraint. Panorama’s nine songs are tastefully minimalist, buoyed not by big chords but by meandering twin guitar lines, reticent drum shuffles, and an infectious, unhurried bass thump. There are starts and stops, the grooves not quite spastic, but that definitely taking some getting used to. Barbier helms her band as bassist, and her squiggly basslines glue the tunes together, making off-kilter rhythms groovy (“Kindness in a Cup”); containing chaos with dance-y, warm low-end (“Marcel”); and filling sparse space with catchy upbeats (“Dans l’os”). Yet minimal song writing doesn’t preclude rich production, and Panorama is full of sly sonic textures: a slew of unique guitar tones (think Tom Verlaine meets John McGeoch), lush violin and Mellotron, and even a few barks from her dog, Toody. As a singer, Barbier’s lightly layered voice cultivates a kind of slacker yé-yé delivery as it switches between English and French. Her heavily accented English has a distinctive lilt, and she leans into the natural musicality of her displaced emphases, her uplifted vowels (“Milque/ toast”), and the occasional misheard idiom. The French is mysterious for the monolingual listener, but her intonations feel personal and playful, and her lyrical rhythms are teasing and telling (“Plastique Couch”). As refined, curious art pop, Panorama captures how well-practiced songcraft is often lazily chalked up to effortless cool.

评语：By Jennifer Kelly · November 14, 2025 David Morris of Red River Dialect has always been able to find the spiritual in ordinary objects. It’s a reflection, perhaps, of his training as a Buddhist monk—a habit of contemplation and co-existence with all the inhabitants of the world around him. On Basic Country Mustard, his most successful songs focus not on nature’s myriad wonders, but on what makes us human. Consider, for instance, the title track, an extended meditation on the most plebian of condiments. Against a jangling guitar, a bouncy drum beat, and scattered piano chords, Morris observes the simplicity—just two ingredients: seeds and liquid—and the infinite variations of mustard. “The Ancient Chinese back in 1000 B.C./ The Romans and Japanese/ They all liked country mustard, with grapes and seaweed, all kinds of recipes/ But on this they were agreed/ The liquid must be golden,” he sings. Mustard is universal, then, and the act of grinding the seeds to release their flavor becomes a stand-in for human struggle. “If you want to break the hold of your daydreams and nostalgia/ Stop pushing down/ Your edges and your crown and your special kind of frown/ Get your mortar, get your pestle, grind them and see what you’re really meant to be/ Something shockingly spicy,” Morris sings, nailing the pivot from specific detail to metaphor. That’s the trickiest, cleverest song on the disc. Others are more direct but just as effective. “Again, Again,” for instance, distills nostalgia for childhood and early family life into a glimpse of a single afternoon. Morris remembers his sister, Jane, as a toddler, careening through the woods on the edge of the family property, her father in pursuit, the girl repeating, “Again, again,” in glee. It’s a lovely phrase, familiar to parents of small children, capturing both the unmediated pleasure of the moment and the certainty that this joy can be repeated, over and over, indefinitely. But Morris gives it an elegiac shadow, using the same words to remember people and places and things that are gone forever, that no “Again, again” will be able to bring back again. Morris is a master at celebrating the moment and mourning its passing all at the same time. The songs are, as always, beautifully realized, whether in the delicate, harp-glittering spareness of opener “The Restlessness” or the driving, organ-wailing overload of the rocking “Torrey Canyon, Lyonesse.” Morris works with mostly the same crew, notably Simon Drinkwater on harp and guitars and Edd Sanders on fiddle and pipes but adds the Italian experimental folk artist Laura Loriga for soft, caressing background vocals. A pair of bonus digital tracks supplements the basic package, one an all-hands country-folk rave-up called “Hole in My Donut,” the other, “Burn the Clutch,” a bleak, humorous ballad about using ChatGPT to write a song about loneliness. Together, the two extra cuts sum up the problem of our alienated world and suggest a remedy: grinding up our pain until the flavor comes out in art and music and community.

评语：By Matthew Blackwell · November 13, 2025 Sister Irene O’Connor didn’t want her convent to know what she was up to. She had moved from Australia to Singapore in the 1950s to work with children, buying a guitar to play them her original songs. In 1965, a parent of one of the children invited her to record at a radio station and soon she had a recording contract with Philips. O’Connor released several EPs and a compilation in the late ‘60s, but to keep her burgeoning recording career a secret, she used the pseudonym Myriam Frances. “Nuns didn’t do that kind of thing,” she later explained. In Singapore, O’Connor met Sister Marimil Lobregat, an audio technician interested in early electronic instruments. They ran into one another by chance a decade later in Sydney and decided to work together, recording Fire of God’s Love, a wild mix of keyboards, drum machines, and religious imagery, in 1973. Lobregat’s presence distinguishes this album from O’Connor’s work as Myriam Frances; whether or not she was aware of the psychedelic tendencies prevalent in rock music at the time, Lobregat infused these sessions with spacey reverb that gives them a dreamy, mystical atmosphere. “Fire (Luke 12:49)” could be described as righteous in two ways, with lyrics about God’s love that are suitable for mass and an electric organ that could fit on a Silver Apples record. O’Connor’s ethereal soprano seems to hover over the bouncing synth line like a particularly groovy guardian angel. This is no mere novelty record, though, and O’Connor’s songwriting shines even without the retro electronics. “Christ Our King (Col. 1:13)” needs nothing more than a piano to carry her “hallelujah”‘s. Like any great pop song, its effectiveness derives from its big, dramatic melody; it just so happens that this one is about Jesus. O’Connor started her musical career by writing songs for children, and that impulse is still apparent here. “Nature Is A Song” is a simple lullaby for acoustic guitar about the divine presence in forests, meadows, and beaches, and its cheery chorus could easily lead to a kindergarten sing-along. Meanwhile, the synth-driven “Teenager’s Chorus” is full of advice to adolescents navigating newfound freedoms. As with Jonathan Richman’s songs, however, this seeming naïvety is actually earnest wisdom, simply stripped of all guile. Fire of God’s Love has long been sought after by collectors and wondered at by fans of the strange and obscure. The circumstances of its production—two nuns separated from pop culture yet channeling the progressive trends of their time—are impossible to replicate, making it an object of perpetual fascination. The album is less ahead of its time than from another timeline altogether, where topics like mercy, grace, and God’s love entered the rock ‘n’ roll lexicon through an unlikely duo of pop visionaries.

评语：By Dash Lewis · November 12, 2025 Belgian producer Shungu’s beats have a gentle magnetic pull. The formula seems simple: Glowing analog warmth, rhythms that feel just slightly off, unobtrusive drums that accent more than insist. He has an uncanny ability to find loops that feel like peering around a corner to get a better look; melodic phrases resolve but stay kinetic, each repetition somehow both familiar and brand new. Press play on any Shungu collection and you can feel the air get a little thicker, your lids a little heavier, and your mind a little clearer. The music is psychedelic, but just so, perfuming the room like a stick of slowly burning incense. Shungu’s production has appeared on projects from fellow travelers like Fly Anakin, YUNGMORPHEUS, Pink Siifu, and MIKE, rappers with seemingly unlimited weed budgets and endless pages of stream-of-consciousness rhymes. He knows what to bring to their world, and has quietly helped shape their scene of introspective, indica-scented hip-hop. Faith In The Unknown, his new solo album, firmly establishes him as a linchpin of that scene, recruiting a bevy of familiar names to help execute on his vision. It showcases his skills as a capital-P producer, a purveyor of vibe, skillfully guiding the listener through rolling peaks and valleys like an experienced trip sitter. Producer-led albums can sometimes feel disjointed—wishlist-collaboration mixtapes without much connective tissue. Shungu avoids that trap partially by working with artists who are already in his circle, but also by centering texture and timbre as his guiding light. He has a keen understanding of who to place on what beat, which, despite the number of guests, gives Faith In The Unknown a natural, cohesive feeling. Navy Blue’s tenor fits perfectly between the deep, gooey bassline and feather-light keys, and his light-footed flow plays against the fluttering guitar and Rhodes samples. Over the loping organ and metronomic hi-hats of “Thin Line,” Chester Watson spins a beautiful web of multisyllabic rhymes and hallucinatory imagery without raising his voice above a just-woke-up murmur. “Did You Hear the News” is a gorgeous highlight: As Shungu’s drums gently churn beneath a sweeping lounge jazz phrase, Ruqqiyah drapes her golden harmonies over top like a silk sheet. Each song seems to melt into the next like the paraffin blobs inside a lava lamp. It’s not a record full of singles—you could listen to any of these tracks without context and they’d sound great. But their cumulative effect is so hypnotic that you’ll find yourself seeking out a favorite only to end up letting the entire album run. In between tracks, snippets of a pastor’s sermon encourage being present, asserting that one must maintain a sense of wonder about existence at all costs. In that way, Faith In The Unknown’s blissful mid-tempo grooves and swooning melodies act as a guided meditation of sorts, a challenge to unclench your jaw and let your mind drift for 40 minutes. If you rush through it, you’ll miss all the best parts.

评语：By Will Ainsley · November 11, 2025 Here comes SML’s How You Been: a Howl’s Moving Castle of motor and mechanism, wood and brass, tottering over the horizon. The L.A. quartet have before made music that possesses a searching, investigative spirit, but it has never been quite as in motion as this. How You Been is the band’s second album and it sees them spiraling out of the parameters marked “jazz” into electronica, ambient, and beyond. SML are clearly not content to be just another jazz band. Which other quartets put bit-crushed electronics and cold wave-y drum machines front and center in their tunes? You can hear them almost physically resisting sonic tropes. Trumpets are fed through scuzzy distortion units, while the drum grooves are, more often than not, armored with shards of digital flotsam and jetsam. “Chicago Three” (a real album highlight) is carried along by one meticulous shaker pattern that supports the slabs of white noise and twittering loops. In fact, the only consistent anchor to the jazz world in this entire album is Anna Butterss’ irrepressibly boing-y basslines. (If this album is Howl’s Moving Castle, then Butterss’ bass is Calcifer, its impish combustion engine). The most ready comparison to this strange, strange music comes not from jazz fusion but the likes of Four Tet or Vanishing Twin, who mesh organic and electronic elements into something that’s not quite either. How You Been was, like SML’s debut record Small Medium Large, built from a series of live performances, and it is this which gives the album its particular texture. The electronics seem welded onto the instrumentation, the drum machines and keyboards bolted and creaking. Note the significance of how “Composed, compiled, edited, and overdubbed by SML” is included in the liner notes. This is music where process matters as much as inspiration, manufacture as much as imagination. It’s important to note that SML still use jazz—its improvisation, its musicality—as a jumping-off point. They can do marauding skronk with the best of them (just listen to “Taking out the Trash” and “Daves”). However, what the post-production work has done is to concentrate the jazzier moments when they finally do hit. The most pristine example of this dialogue between old and new is on the title track, where a delightfully out of place, U2-esque guitar line rings out over a bustling groove that crackles with spasmodic saxophone. The result is something euphoric, something that would be as at home at a rave as it would be a smoky jazz club. Fist pump or chin stroke: take your pick. It is tracks like How You Been that make SML utterly thrilling to hear. Long may they continue.

评语：By Dean Van Nguyen · November 10, 2025 The countries of Southeast Africa are often underrepresented in the reissues capturing the music history of the continent. These nations are no less steeped in tradition or ingenuity than lands further north with more celebrated scenes, such as Nigeria and Ghana. And so the latest release by German label Analog Africa, Chigiyo Music Kings 1987–1998 fills a pretty big void. Because you cannot overestimate the Zig-Zag Band’s influence on chigiyo, a style of music named after a traditional dance from the Chimanimani district of east Zimbabwe, close to the Mozambique border. The group pioneered a mutation of reggae that blended local influences, such as muchongoyo dance, katekwe music, horn play, mbira instruments replicated on electric guitar, and the yodeling vocal tradition of the Shona people. Their early years were marked with several name changes and regular line-up shuffles: Gilbert Zvamaida, a guitarist said to be the sole surviving founding member of the band, likes to claim their true origins were as early as 1976, when he started messing around at home with a handmade banjo; but players like second guitarist Steve Lunga, keyboard player George Paradzai, and bassist Fabian Chikamba soon became key members, too. The group honed their craft on-stage, as their own entity and, later, as back-up to the great Oliver Mtukudzi, before becoming prolific studio loiterers in the late 1980s and ‘90s under the name the Zig-Zag Band. Chigiyo Music Kings 1987–1998, a double LP compilation, offers an ideal starting point into this era and the chigiyo sound they were striving to perfect. The set opens with a bit of a feint: the sound of a spaced-out synth riff. This cosmic electro motif continues to underpin “Ndzirombi” as the song breaks out into a mid-tempo reggae bop with gentle guitar licks and a screeching brass riff. “Ndzirombi” sets the compilation pace and vibe, but it’s also an early sign that much of the production here will be recognizable to Western ears as quintessentially 1980s: “Gomo Ramasare” features a deep, penetrating kick drum, a signature of the decade’s power ballads. More prominent, though, is that Caribbean lilt: “Tsvarakadenga” includes some jaunty organ chords and exuberant harmonies. Epitomizing the band’s playful nature, there’s even some gruff, vocal cord-straining singing halfway through that could almost be said to predict the rapping of Busta Rhymes. If the arrangements capture the feel of an idyllic evening-by-the-beachside scene, the vocals double down: Hear the cheery, quavering call and response harmonies on “Ndarimano.” What more could you want to combat the incoming winter?

评语：By George Grella · November 07, 2025 The Tao Te Ching tells us that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It starts from a central point, and can go anywhere. And that’s the feeling when you press play on yaz lancaster’s new album, AFTER. The thing about journeys is that there’s no requirement they follow a straight line; they aren’t sequential, nor do they even hold to the same destination throughout. Music works that way too, and lancaster puts so many steps into AFTER—some small, some sublime leaps, many unexpected. All of this is held together by their musical personality, their sense of sound and the logic of memories made along the way. So this is an experimental electronic album that springs off lancaster’s violin strings with “Phosphenes.” But then it’s a reminiscence, maybe? But not lancaster’s; instead it’s a young man trying to recover a relationship that seems to have been squandered. And then it’s an ambient album, and then there’s the loping contemporary soul jam of “Signs.” But, wait, now some rich, layered violin minimalism… And it all works, it all makes sense. Lancaster is the central point, this journey is their journey, each moment comes from and is about their experiences. This is music, so it’s not about getting from here to there, it’s about getting from the past into the present and future. The first kind of thing is a shift in space, the second is an accumulation of ideas, possibilities, each making the next possible. Recorded at their residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, lancaster handles the bulk of the duties with seamless contributions from clarinetist Tyler Neidermayer, the rapping of See The Lieutenant, guest vocalists, and others. But it’s lancaster singing, “I don’t know you anymore” on “IDKU,” with some Diamanda Galás-esque screaming in the background, which morphs into the crackling, grinding noise of “Limerence”—that with the helping hands of Dreamcrusher and KING VISION ULTRA (the album is a kind of all-star set for contemporary New York City sound artists working in liminal musical spaces). Those two tracks are maybe the heart of this journey, which comes from a place of stillness and moves through some marvelous hazy soundscapes, like “last weekend, with u” (with a haunting bit of “These Foolish Things” in the background), music that will conjure many memories and moods. To return to the Tao, the journey is one of lessons, mistakes and achievements, from innocence to wisdom, and really from peace to peace. Lancaster gets us there, as long as we take in the whole. Because the only way to get from NOW to AFTER is through.

评语：By Marshall Gu · November 06, 2025 There’s a well-known line, originating with Brian Eno, that although the first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one formed a band. Ghana-born musician Ata Kak, real name Yaw Atta-Owusu, allegedly only sold three copies of his debut album Obaa Sima in 1994; not everyone who bought it formed a band, but one person who did buy it from a roadside vendor while visiting Ghana started a blog in 2006. That blog became big enough to turn into one of the most beloved labels for African music of all time: Awesome Tapes From Africa. When his music career failed to take flight, Ata Kak was ready to quit. He was living in Toronto, just north of its notorious Jane and Finch area, with his wife Mary and their children—but his wife was being deported back to Ghana, so he followed her home. When Brian Shimkovitz, founder of Awesome Tapes From Africa, covered Obaa Sima in the blog’s inaugural post, it helped unearth this fascinating album and give it a new life. Obaa Sima is now revered as one of the earliest and best albums in the genre of hiplife–a fusion of hip-hop and highlife, a form of Ghanaian pop music characterized by its layering of Western instruments like horns and guitars. Kak’s story is unfortunately common among African musicians: Hailu Mergia became a cab driver until reissues of his records sparked a demand for his return to music; similarly, Orchestra Baobab disbanded for over a decade until reissues of their music brought them international acclaim. The term “world music” is painfully generic and altogether detestable—and yet, it fits for Ata Kak. In 1985, he left Ghana due to its political and economic strife for Germany, where he joined a reggae band as a drummer despite having zero experience with percussion. Later, when he moved to Toronto, he was exposed to North American pop music. His version of hiplife, which predates the formalization of the genre by a few years, is a fascinating blend of all of the influences he picked up along the way, including the highlife music he was exposed to while growing up in Ghana. Batakari is his second album, arriving three decades after his first, and all of those elements that made Obaa Sima unique are back on full display. Ata Kak’s vocals are high-pitched, and he scats and flows in a giddy, breathless manner that makes his music feel childlike, irrepressible, and even absurdist. His voice sounds remarkably untouched by age; the only difference is the polish. There’s a newfound professionalism in the production which is made clear as the synths of opener “Batakari” swirl to life, providing a widescreen background for his long-awaited return. Though his infectious vocals take center stage through his commanding microphone presence, Ata Kak also has an ear for tune, as heard in the loops that he layers throughout these songs. Halfway through “DJ,” he adds a calypso-flavored melody that slots right into the insistent rhythm; “Medoba” demonstrates his love for Ghana through its bright, almost shimmering guitar bed. Female backing vocals add an additional pop element to most of these songs, especially the ones on “Osoowa” where they shout his name as he raps what sounds like “rub-a-dub” over and over. It is astonishing that Ata Kak made Obaa Sima at all, considering he found time to create it while taking care of his three children and working as a cook in a condiments factory outside the city. Though his newest album is brief–only 6 tracks running shy of 27 minutes–that it exists at all, 31 quiet years since his debut, Batakari is nothing short of yet another miracle.

评语：By Sims Hardin · November 05, 2025 1980s Indiana-based indie rockers The Burning Limos’ name instantly conjures up the image of gauche vehicle up in flames on the side of the road or crashed into the side of a building. Whether this is intended as a metaphorical middle finger to the elites or just a pledge of allegiance to bedlam, nobody knows—but regardless of the angle, music on the band’s new retrospective, 31 Days of Burning Limos, does their incendiary moniker justice. The career-spanning compilation, which was put together by founding members George Harris, Mark Searles, and Tim Burns, collects a month’s worth of previously unreleased tracks from across their decade-long career, plus change; it all adds up to a definitive chronicle of an often overlooked, but nonetheless crucial, part of the ’80s rock ‘n’ roll zeitgeist. The record’s 35 tracks are propulsive and detailed, erupting with memorable hooks. Take the opening track, “What Do You Need?,” a jangly, near-cow-punk tune that charms casual fans and old heads in equal measure, nodding to the The Replacements as well as niche bands The Necessaries. The song offers tasteful space between the chiming and vibrant dueling guitars, with each guitarist’s part moving around the other and eventually tangling together in a twangy symphony during the chorus. “Rearview,” a galloping monster by contrast, brings The Gun Club and Meat Puppets to mind, while “Bowling in Ocala” is a stompy, mid-tempo, no-frills tune with a huge power pop-esque chorus hook. While these three songs are quite different from each other, they are glued together by the powerful songwriting, Elvis Costello-y charming vocals, and the band’s tangible natural chemistry. The rest of the record follows suit, leaving us with a comprehensive archive of some of the brightest, sturdiest guitar music of the ’80s, a blaze of glory frozen in time.

评语：By Maria Barrios · November 04, 2025 Born and raised in Valldemossa, a picturesque village on the island of Majorca, singer Júlia Colom grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Spanish folk music. The first song she learned, at age six, was The Song of the Sibyl, a medieval chant performed on Christmas Eve. Passed down orally through generations of Majorcans, The Song of the Sybil is long and ornate—a melismatic tune with lyrics that foretell the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression on Colom. This musical memory sparked Colom’s passion for singing. Curiosity soon became vocation, and at 18, Colom left Majorca for Barcelona, where she earned a degree in music and expanded her practice into composition and contemporary music. Still deeply connected to her Majorcan heritage, she dedicated herself to exploring and developing her talent for tonadas—a cappella folk songs sung by peasants and farmers that accompanied rural life. This work informed her remarkable 2023 debut, Miramar. Slow, earthy, and reverent, the tonadas in Miramar became, in Colom’s hands, unearthed gemstones—songs that sounded unlike anything else emerging from the island. Rooted in her mother tongue, Catalan, and featuring lyrics that explored romance and envy, Miramar was praised for its modern reinterpretation of Mediterranean music. Leaning into avant-pop, with electronic flourishes and playful guitar arrangements echoing traditional rhythms like jotas and boleros majorquin, Miramar stood out amongst a growing number of artists seeking to both elevate and honor Catalonian pop. On her latest record, Paradís, Colom continues this cross-genre approach, adding lutes, synthesizers, and guest vocals that shift from otherworldly harmonies (“Ja saps on m’amag”) to bouncy pop verses (“Transformacions”). Trading tonadas for an original repertoire that, to those new to Majorcan music, might pass as bubbly, R&B-infused electronic pop, Colom delivers a stunning listen. Refining the style she crafted in Miramar, she offers her own vision of Majorca, a paradise quietly split between breathtaking beauty and the looming threat of cultural erosion. Colom’s gift for metaphor (“Necessit”), along with poetry that moves from longing to existential unrest (“T’he cercat”), is heightened by her ethereal vocal style. Poignant, bittersweet performances like the album’s closer, “Més avail,” coexist with uptempo, radiant tracks like “Gelosies,” revealing an artist who, like the Sybils before her, is fully capable of upholding the artistic tradition she inherited and continues to carry forward.

评语：By April Clare Welsh · November 03, 2025 Every day is Halloween for Ship Sket. InitiatriX, the debut LP from the Dorset-born, Manchester-based producer (real name JoshGriffiths), weds freaky sampled dialogue to the kind of strings that almost always point towards impending doom. In other words, InitiatriX will leave you scrambling around for the light switch. At times, the album’s tendencies toward horror feel explicit. Eerie, detuned piano segues into an ice storm of sub-zero grime on “Audition for the Part of the Killer,” making good on the theatrical shock value promised by the title. Things get even scarier on “Supermodel Mansion,” summoning a Southern Gothic scene that’s all shrieking crows and fire-and-brimstone ranting. On the bitcrushed “Desire 4 Stealth,” a demonic cackle emerges in the track’s final moments that lingers long after the credits have stopped rolling. Elsewhere, it’s the album’s digital debris that provides the scares. “I likehappyaccidents messingaroundandresampling, and kind of seeing how far Icanpush stuff beforeit disintegrates infront ofme,” Griffiths writes in the album notes. Accordingly, InitiatriX strips dubstep, grime, drill, and rap back to their bare bones, rolling through 8-bit pings, hi-hat rolls, and grime-coded bass that serve as a conduit for Griffiths’s frightful mutations. There’s blood-splattered braindance galore–a maelstrom of digital tricks–and oozing body horror gloop on “Dysentery,” cut up and distorted to oblivion. Well-placed strings heighten the album’s cinematic edge at every turn. We step into a phantom theater on “Casting Call” (featuring S280F); “Mimikyu” shreds nerves, Hitchcock style; “Futaro” goes full nails-on-chalkboard. You get the sense that InitiatriX is a form of ordered chaos: Whether plunging fearlessly into a dungeon of industrial noise (“Vendetta’s Theme” featuring Charlie Osborne) or using drill beats to uncompromising effect, Griffiths approaches production with both abandon and precision, building a Frankenstein-like monster that walks the line between anarchy and purpose.

评语：By Dylan Green · October 31, 2025 Woe be to the listener who would try to put Chino Amobi in a box. Press play on any of the Richmond, Virginia-raised musician and producer’s music, and you’ll hear a mélange of sound stretching across time, space, and genre. Michael Jackson-style adlibs shriek across thumping 808s and synth patterns; gothic piano scales twinkle under swelling digital orchestration that eventually gives way to music sounding like Whole Lotta Red-era Playboi Carti reimagined by Tron Legacy-era Daft Punk. Unmoored from genre conventions and any particular region—a first-generation Nigerian-American, Amobi grew up feeling separated from both cultures—his ambitious blends are both grand and intimate, collages of sound that match the liberatory futurism of his work as a painter. His debut album, 2017’s PARADISO, pulses with the heartbeats of hip-hop, ambient, trance, West African drumming, even doom metal, with spoken-word poems of resistance bubbling beneath the surface. If PARADISO was an introduction to this frenetic world, then Eroica II: Christian Nihilism, Amobi’s second album and first for the Jordanian label Drowned By Locals, is a step into deeper thematic waters. True to the existentialism of its title, Eroica II’s battles and ruminations are interior. Sometimes, this manifests plainly, as it does on the vocal refrain that is stretched, distorted, and molded across early standout “Hand of God”: “I’ve waited all my life for you/ I need your touch to pull me through.” It transforms the experience of surrendering to faith into one as expansive as the EDM drop that occurs around the song’s hook. Still, Eroica II has a murkier, less cacophonous atmosphere than its predecessor, the arrangements constantly ceding space for Amobi as if to help him find spiritual clarity. ”I Love Beauty, I Am a Nihilist, But I Love Beauty” and “I Wouldn’t Be Alive Without You,” minimalist trip-hop head-nodders, cast Palestinian resistance and travel as confirmation of God’s love; “777” and “222” extrapolate so-called “angel numbers”—spiritually powerful figures consisting of repeating digits—onto trilling, dark dirges with elements of drone and drill, respectively. Even at its darkest, the morose minimalism of the music is frequently cut with bouts of revelation or humor from Amobi: “Hate it when a ni**a owes me money / If you don’t pay me, you’re gonna feel God’s wrath,” he deadpans on “222,” followed by admonishments of Balenciaga and fans of the meme rapper 2hollis. If Amobi’s quest for enlightenment suggests an unwavering path, the musical results—his commitment to blurring the lines stylistically and dynamically—are unpredictable, sometimes disorientingly so; it’s easy to get lost in the digital maelstrom of “Gallerina,” only for the hazy guitars of finale “Legend” to induce sonic whiplash. Eroica II thrives in that middle ground—the one between hope and despair, salvation and damnation, laughing and crying.

评语：By Stuart Berman · October 30, 2025 In Ally Pankiw’s recent documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, we’re reminded that Sarah McLachlan’s all-women tour once found itself in the crosshairs of televangelist Jerry Falwell, who condemned Lilith’s proto-feminist folkloric inspiration—and, by extension, the festival’s pro-choice/queer-positive mandate—as a paragon of demonic depravity. If the charges seemed absurd at the time, they’re absolutely hilarious when contrasted with the archival footage featured in Pankiw’s doc, which highlights such ungodly pagan rituals as backstage-hootenanny sing-alongs to “Big Yellow Taxi” and Erykah Badu performing while cuddling her baby. But around the same time that McLachlan’s tour launched in Washington State in the summer of ‘97, the legend of Lilith was manifesting in dramatically different form thousands of miles away in the sewers of Lower Manhattan—and this one actually embodied the feral degeneracy of Falwell’s worst nightmares. “Lilith” is the opening track on the Spells’s one and only album, The Night Have Eyes, and it uncorks a witch’s brew of Bo Diddley voodoo, “Psychotic Reaction” breakdowns, and possessed PJ Harvey hysterics that would require a tanker of holy water to extinguish. Alas, the Spells’s “Lilith” was hardly a Lilith Fair-level cause célèbre back in the day—and that’s not just because seedy New York City garage punk had negligible market value in a pre-Meet Me in the Bathroom era. True to the occult connotations of the band’s name, the story of the Spells’s debut album feels a bit like the plot to a paranormal mystery thriller, involving a sudden disappearance and that mythical lost artifact left behind in its wake. The eerie aura is complemented by the fact that, in photos, singer/guitarist Nicole Barrick, bassist/vocalist Marisa Pool, and drummer Leni Zumas flash dead-eyed stares that resemble those two girls from The Shining had they lived long enough to go through a Lydia Lunch phase. Originally formed as the Red Scare in Providence circa 1993 before a mid-decade move to Austin, the Spells eventually settled in New York, where they were embraced by a mod/goth hybrid micro-scene led by artists like Jonathan Fire*Eater (whose drummer, Matt Barrick, also happened to be Nicole’s brother) and a young Nick Zinner (who would camp out at their shows with his camera in tow). But after recording The Night Have Eyes with Pavement/Jon Spencer associate Greg Talenfeld, the Spells broke up before their album was sent off to the pressing plant. (“A couple of us had some bad habits that got worse, and we had to stop playing,” they would later explain.) Given that the band’s history predates the widespread availability of internet documentation, the Spells and their shelved debut may as well have never existed. Fittingly, the one YouTube performance clip I discovered has the shaky lo-fi handicam quality of a found-footage horror flick, with the band appearing mostly as silhouettes that resemble wraiths from a Ring movie. Now, 28 years after it was left for dead, The Night Has Eyes has risen from the grave—on Halloween, natch—for its first proper physical release. (The fact that it’s being issued through a publishing house—Portland’s Garganta Press—makes a lot more sense when you consider that Zumas has since become an award-winning author, and Garaganta was founded by her husband, Luca Dipierro.) From a purely historical perspective, The Night Has Eyes serves as the missing link between two eras of subterranean New York noise: the Blues Explosion/Boss Hog school of ‘90s scuzz-rock and the post-Y2K uprising headed up by Zinner’s nascent band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (His photographs of The Spells grace this reissue.) But The Night Has Eyes is no mere retro curio: It’s a record that feels like it was summoned by black-magic ceremony, teeming with the primal lust and supernatural violence that animates rock ‘n’ roll at its most deviant and dangerous. The Night Has Eyes was a quick ‘n’ dirty live-of-the-floor affair, built upon a basic foundation of jabbing switchblade riffs, spine-cracking backbeats, and—on a handful of tracks—the foggy-boneyard keyboards of Jonathan Fire*Eater’s Walter Martin (who later joined two of his bandmates in The Walkmen). However, those minimalist methods belie The Spells’s flair for structural intricacy and emotional intensity. On the title track, the band come on like Sleater-Kinney’s evil East Coast cousins, with Barrick and Pool’s voices overlapping in combative Corin-vs-Carrie-style, albeit to far more unnerving effect. (I’ll see your “I wanna be your Joey Ramone” and raise you a “I’ll carve your name on my chest.”) And while the eight-minute “If the World Should End Tonight” is the sort of extended locomotive rave-up that makes you wish you could travel back to 1997 to see The Spells wipe the floor at Brownies, The Night Has Eyes also offers tantalizing glimpses of where the band could’ve headed had they stuck it out: With its sinister slowcore creep, ASMR spoken-word storytelling, and chilling cello squeals (courtesy of future Gang Gang Dance member Josh Deutsch), the closing “Yumiko” imagines what Slint would’ve sounded like had they bothered to answer PJ Harvey’s audition request. Tellingly, the song’s motormouthed mutterings cohere into a messianic mission statement (“I must walk on water alone”) that affirms this reissue’s raison d’etre: the Spells are not some bygone band frozen in time, but, rather, eternal restless spirits who’ve been rudely awakened to haunt us in the here and now.

评语：By Peter Margasak · October 29, 2025 When Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven released his album In the Moment a decade ago few could have foreseen its prescience, not just as a grand statement representing the aesthetic tendencies of International Anthem, the influential label that released it, but as a sonic blueprint for the leader. That album was famously culled from 48 hours of recordings made during a weekly residency at a club in Chicago in 2013, with the drummer subsequently building compositions in the studio from groove-oriented live improvisations played by an ever-changing cast of local heavies, including guitarist Jeff Parker, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and bassist Junius Paul, all of whom remain frequent collaborators. Although McCraven’s last studio album—the orchestrally sumptuous, soul-streaked In These Times—featured a more conventional compositional approach, the drummer and producer has earned fame and acclaim through that earlier modus operandi, a practice employed on these four crackling EPs, which double as a vivid illustration and history of that strain of musical thinking. Each EP captures a different assemblage of musicians—whether one-time meetings or ongoing combinations, such as the ongoing partnership of McCraven with Chicago cornetist Ben LaMar Gay and London tuba player Theon Cross captured on three sessions between 2017–2025 on Techno Logic. And while the leader’s post-production ability imparts a certain sonic consistency, each volume reflects the distinct peculiarities each line-up brings to the project. Techno Logic is obviously a brass-driven affair, as Cross’s fat low-end provides a rubbery, floor-shaking foundation and hefty rhythmic reinforcement, clearing a broad path for the avuncular charisma of Gay who toggles between nasal vocal chants and tart, piercing cornet solos. On “Gnu Blue” he functions like a shaman, casting wordless spells, while on “Boom Bapped” he imagines Louis Armstrong sitting in on a D’Angelo track. It’s hard to know where the live recording ends and McCraven’s studio wizardry begins, but that seamlessness remains his secret weapon in light of his very crystal clear beatmaking chops. PopUp Shop features the earliest source material, played in Los Angeles in 2015, with the drummer opening the volume with the message that everything that follows is improvised, yet there’s a palpable vibe and understanding between the players—Parker, vibraphonist Justefan, and bassist Benjamin J. Shepherd—about what’s happening. The guitarist shines, but it’s the most monochromatic entry of the collection, which is less a criticism than an observation on how McCraven’s endeavor has developed over the years. By 2017, the year the music on Hidden Out! was made at the Chicago club the Hideout, McCraven was firing on all cylinders, masterfully translating his conception to the stage. Flanked by Parker and Paul—with trumpeter Hill and saxophonist Josh Johnson joining in on “Awaze,” a sleek ripper featuring a mind-melting drum solo over an irresistible Paul bassline—the band embraces the situation with quicksilver alacrity. On the opening track “Battleships,” a taut, stuttering rhythm and a single synthesizer tone hold steady across the entire five minutes giving Parker a blank canvas to unspool a typically transportive guitar solo. The piece fades out, but it feels like it could roll on for eternity. “Away” brings down the temperature, a soulful ballad awash aerated clouds of vibraphone and synthesizer, the focus on mood rather than narrative, while “Dark Parks” achieves a similar effect over a massive groove, Parker delivering a wah-wah-kissed pattern designed for the dancefloor. The final chapter of the set, The People’s Mixtape is built from material recorded at New York’s Public Records in January of 2025 with Paul, Hill, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and modular synth player Jeremiah Chiu. The percussive breakdown that opens “Choo Choo” reveals an exciting new wrinkle in the McCraven method, a polyrhythmic Afro-Caribbean electro-funk fantasia somewhere between Kraftwerk and the Jimmy Castor Bunch. It leads directly into “The Beat Up,” a fierce funk jam graced with a plush, full-bodied trumpet solo from Hill that simultaneously brings silkiness and brings extra propulsion until a harmonizer effect transforms the track into a night drive soundtrack. The music captures a concrete elevation of McCraven’s practice. Spontaneous music-making still lies at the root of what he does, but he and his collaborators have never been more in sync, so the overdubs he adds later and the ensuing post-production is more seamless and sophisticated than ever. On its face this stuff might seem like a stop-gap release until a new studio album surfaces, but in reality this might be the most impressive display of McCraven’s soundworld yet.

评语：By Dean Van Nguyen · October 28, 2025 Many important West African musicians built productive careers in 1970s Britain, and the local stars were eager to incorporate their scintillating sounds into their own music. Originally from Ijebu Ode, Nigeria, percussionist Gasper Lawal spent much of the early part of the decade moving through the happening London scene as a session and gig musician for the likes of Joan Armatrading, Graham Bell, Stephen Stills—and even Barbara Streisand. There were stints in various groups too, including the Ginger Baker-led Air Force. But Lawal soon resolved to work on his own music, and his debut album, Ajomasé, first released in 1980 and now newly reissued by Strut, is a fascinating and surprising record with unusual eclectic flourishes throughout. “I wanted to do something very different to the accepted Nigerian styles like juju, highlife, or Afrobeat,” says Lawal in new liner notes. Sessions began in 1976 in the studio of the legendary composer Vangelis, who loved Lawal’s demos so much that he offered him favorable terms on recording time. Lawal later set up at Surrey Sound Studios, where he had to work around the schedule of a rising pop group called The Police, then recording their debut album Outlandos d’Amour. That meant that a lot of Ajomasé was cut late at night. Striving for perfection, it took Lawal four years to complete the project. While not epic in length, it’s rich and densely woven music, featuring some of the accomplished West African musicians knocking around London at the time, including Ray Otu Allen on saxophone and the great Joni Haastrup of the band Monomono playing various instruments. Right from the mid-tempo groove of opener “Jeka José,” the sophistication of the arrangements is apparent: Splashes of piano, horns, guitar, hand drums, backing vocal harmonies, and Lawal’s own singing, often loose and informal, but capable of great depth and verve. British studio recordings of African musicians of the era could often feel a little sterile when compared to the awesome raw power of what was happening in the recording studios of Lagos. Fortunately, Ajomasé never feels overly slick or inauthentic: “Awon-Ojise-Oluwa” includes triumphant horns and heavy bassline that nods to the era’s Afrobeat. Still, this is an album that relies more on deft touches than strength. “Kita Kita” (which Strut first reissued 24 years ago on their excellent Nigeria 70 compilation series) features sunny highlife rhythms but throws in some clipped echoing vocal patterns perhaps inspired by dub music, and hits of psych guitar. And it’s very easy to draw a line from the spectral feeling of the drums on “Oro-Moro” and the kind of bespoke percussion Fiona Apple so effectively favored years later. Lawal ended up releasing Ajomasé on his own label after underproductive meetings with an A&R man who admitted he didn’t know where to pigeonhole the album. It’s a testament to the musician’s taste, palette, and craft.

评语：By Christian Askin · October 27, 2025 The latest album from London-raised, Berlin-based artist Perera Elsewhere delivers tracks that force us to confront the lack of imagination in our own dreams. That’s not surprising given the breadth of her career. Whether working with “The Godmother of German Punk” Nina Hagen; importing the sounds of grime and drum & bass into techno-saturated Berlin; or via DJ sets including 3Phaz, KMRU, and Eddington Again, Sasha’s work is reliably genre-agnostic. With Just Wanna Live Some, that spirit is on full display. Start with the features: There’s Ivory Coast’s Rap Ivoire badass Andy S, who reached out to Perera after hearing one of her tracks in Perera’s Boiler Room set. The double singles “Time Will Tell” and “Fuck Le System” are wickedly weird, dabbling in psychedelic grime and industrial rap. Then there’s the late-night Autobahn vibes on “Visions,” a collaboration with Neven, fellow producer and VST designer whose earned shoutouts from Arca and Brian Eno. Perhaps the most far-reaching is “Fountain” with Congolese-Angolan musician Batila and Senegalese singer Yaadikone who accompany Perera’s trumpet playing. Congolese doom folk? You could go down the tracklist and have a field day coining fun little microgenres for each lick: deconstructed grindcore; grime-y art-pop; neon footwork. The themes are no less divergent: The world is ending, so live for today; nihilism vs. hedonism; sexy and suicidal; emo but fun. “On the course for collision, find the source, to make me feel alright” Perera sings on “Visions.” Though, for all the doomsday chic, Perera has a cheeky side. The name Perera Elsewhere is partially a funny wink to Italian or French accents that pronounce each word the same (pe-re-ra els-we-ra); Perera herself bears multiple names, a diverse heritage, and knows the expat condition; constantly reaching for meaning within life’s strange intersections. This is the same person that used the sound of a flushing toilet on an album, sampled by her all-female class of aspiring music producers. More than anything, the album reminds me of normcore progenitor K-Hole’s quote on post-internet society: “Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.” Just Wanna Live Some is an argument that the more kaleidoscopic our imagination, the better we can find meaning. We build a community out of the flash and awe of wayward sounds that includes traditional folk artists from Senegal and heady producers from Manchester. Hence Perera’s peacock getup on the cover, a display adapted over millennia designed to attract. If Perera is “Elsewhere,” “there” is the spirit of creative freedom, existential singing, and the smooth sounds of a trumpet, arpeggiated or not. As Perera sings on “Dream Like That,” “If life is a map where’s the X and that? The X don’t exist when you dream like that.”

评语：By Megan Iacobini de Fazio · October 24, 2025 Across the world, cassette tapes have often carried far more than music, serving as tools of defiance, memory, and belonging. In Somalia and Somaliland, songs recorded on battered tapes crossed seas and borders, keeping scattered communities connected through poetry and melody. In Palestine, revolutionary anthems slipped through checkpoints and broadcast the sound of resistance where radio could not reach. In Afghanistan, banned voices lived on in bootleg cassettes passed hand to hand, their melodies vehemently resisting the silence imposed upon them. In Iran, too, the cassette has been used as both a weapon and a refuge: First used by Khomeini to spread his revolutionary sermons, it was reclaimed by Iranian pop artists fighting to preserve the sound of a lost homeland in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The IR nearly ended Iran’s golden age of pop, which flourished from the 1920s to the late 1970s, yet many of its stars had already settled in Los Angeles, performing for a diaspora eager to stay connected. That’s where Tehrangeles Vice (Iranian Diaspora Pop 1983–1993), released by the Los Angeles label Discotchari, picks up the story. The compilation captures a decade when exile gave birth to reinvention, where ancient Persian modes mingled with experimental electronic textures, disco grooves, and heavy guitars. Through 12 songs—and an incredibly rich accompanying booklet by scholar Farzaneh Hemmasi, author of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music—it traces the studios, producers, and musicians who kept Iranian pop alive in California. Here, Iranian sound transformed, meshing with L.A.’s own thriving scene. While the pre-revolutionary era is often romanticized as the pinnacle of Iranian pop, Tehrangeles Vice shifts the focus to the hybrid, diasporic sound that took shape in exile. The “Tehrangeles” scene was sometimes dismissed as flashy or shallow by people in Iran, but this carefully curated set of deep cuts shows that beyond the cheap nightclub hits was a parallel wave of innovation, emotion, and technical skill. Much of that creativity can be traced to composer and arranger Manouchehr Cheshmazar, a pre-revolution heavyweight who wrote or produced six tracks on the compilation, ranging from the disco-driven drama of Shahrokh’s “Man Va Tou,” to the sweeping synths and lovesick melody of Farzin’s “Eshgheh Man,” and the shimmering, and the bright instrumental intro on Fataneh’s “Mola Mamad Jan.” Cheshmazar’s touch is also felt in more subtle, introspective moments, such as in Sattar’s “Khaak” (“[Home] Land”) with its dark synth textures and steady pacing evoking a sense of exile and quiet mourning: “We never got used to the pain of exile/ Oh, what things I have lost/ Their pain always remains in my heart,” he sings. The included translations reveal that many of the lyrics, while framed as love songs, carry deeper currents of longing, transforming romance into reflections on exile and the loss of homeland. The compilation also reflects the rich mosaic of Los Angeles’s Iranian diaspora, where Armenian, Jewish, Assyrian, and Persian communities intersected. A central figure in this scene was Iranian-Armenian Vartan Avanessian, whose career bridges pre-revolutionary Tehran, where his label Avang helped define 1970s Iranian pop, and Southern California, where he and partner Djahangir Tabariaei founded Taraneh Enterprises, the label that released every track on Tehrangeles Vice. Their work embodies the openness and experimentation that defined the Tehrangeles sound, moving from glittering disco beats and lush synth lines to introspective ballads and experimental instrumentals. Taken together, these tracks demonstrate how pop and dance music became instruments of defiance, offering expatriate communities a bold, danceable space in which to imagine home.

评语：By Lewis Gordon · October 23, 2025 The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work—but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW—until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that doesn’t mean it lacks humanity. As per the album title, the record comprises eight largely automated compositions powered by the componium, a self-composing musical instrument invented in the 19th century that, like so many contraptions of its time, inevitably fell into obscurity. Cross-wiring this seemingly obsolete technology to present-day software—randomized notes to modulated tempos—Doran doesn’t just revive the simulated music of ages past, but re-contextualizes. For all the artificiality involved in the record’s creation, its tracks often sound gorgeously organic. The bass clarinets of “Air” are deep and full-bodied, melodious trumpet skirting above the woodwind as the composition slowly picks up momentum and complexity. “Kite” provides a mournful end to the album as the Balinese tingklik pitter-patters atop contrapuntal strings. Like Doran’s past work, the mood skews elegant, albeit slightly less futuristic than Visible Cloaks. Despite the rambunctious, computer-assisted dynamism exhibited track-to-track, Doran’s primary mode is one of meditative stillness, his panoramic washes of sound evoking deep serenity on tracks like “Efflorescence,” which features stunning bowed harpsichord. Discussing automation in 2025, one’s mind naturally drifts towards AI. However, Doran’s process doesn’t involve a diffusion model of the kind employed by AI music software Suno, the company behind miserably generic “artists” like The Velvet Sundown and Xania Monet. Where that music is a creative death spiral devoid of all ambiguity and intrigue, 8 Automated Works, by contrast, offers both elements in abundance, sonically as well as conceptually: a bright spot in the uncanny valley, where artist and automaton can co-exist, even thrive.