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This ‘Editor’s Year in Review’ features the albums I revisited the most in 2024. The net has been cast wide on this longer-than-usual list to reflect the breadth of music we’ve covered (in reviews, articles, and playlists), including folk, jazz, experimental, avant-garde, and field recordings. Take some time to explore and listen; this isn’t one to rush through.

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Albums of the Year (2024)

Natalia Beylis – Lost – For Annie

Natalia Beylis is an artist uncommonly in tune with the physicality of her surroundings – that much is obvious from the intimate and sympathetic qualities of her recordings. She is also, however, extremely attuned to the politics and history of these landscapes and aware of the need to both celebrate and nurture the unique parts of our culture. Lost – For Annie contains pertinent examples of all of these qualities. Sound art is – perhaps by its nature – a cerebral practice, but in Beylis’ hands, it can also be emotional and bodily, entertaining and educational. 

Laura Jane Wilkie – Vent

Vent screams confidence from start to finish. Helped by a solid idea and a clear passion for the songs studied, Laura’s arrangements are intricate and happy to shift multiple times during songs, altering the mood and emotion of the music, while adding depth and creating many points of interest. The playing is also pretty damn great throughout, with each musician bringing character to the tunes, resulting in a sound that is far more than the sum of its parts. Check this album out; the amount of surprises and delights throughout its nine tracks and thirty-six minutes will demand many listens, each bringing something new.

Buck Curran – One Evening and Other Folk Songs

One Evening and Other Folk Songs is an album of elements in more ways than one: it is elemental in the sense that it has a gloriously untamed quality, where vigorous rhythms play out against melodies that are sometimes so delicate that they might have been woven by spiders. And the lyrics too speak of cold winds and rain and thunder and the search for sunlight. But it is also an album that relies on distinct elements to create its unique whole. These are elements that work together in unexpected ways: the primitive drumming, the quiet, unpretentious sophistication of the songwriting, the surprising soulfulness of the vocals. They come together potently on the alternate take of Black is the Colour, where the bluesy, soulful folk takes on a more sinuous form. Curran is able to turn a well-known folk standard into a journey through a beautiful, treacherous landscape. His talent is an alchemical one: seemingly quotidian musical ingredients are turned into rare metals in his hands, and with this eclectic but hugely talented band, the results are doubly impressive.

Swimming Bell – Charlie

While some of the colours of the California countryside provide a musical context, producer and engineer Oli Deakin playing guitar and bass, Morgan Karabel on drums, Kyle Resnik’s horns and Tim Kelly’s pedal steel spend a lot of time adding shades not necessarily found in the 80s west-coast songbook. Making these songs swing a little differently by using hues just outside the norm serves Schottland and her songs well.

Taking a deliberately alternative musical path, singing and playing with colours not often found in the scheme, Charlie establishes its own parameters, helping Swimming Bell transcend simple labels to create a sound all its own.

Jake Xerxes Fussell – When I’m Called

What a lovely recording this is. Not a note is wasted across the set, and even the occasional flourishes of strings and brass are added with such a considered touch that they embellish without bringing unnecessary weight to the songs. Jake’s voice is also at its most quietly expressive, giving subtle emotion to the words (the gorgeous Gone to Hilo is a good example of this). Let this one bed in after a few listens and allow its delicate layers to slowly emerge; you’ll feel grateful for such beautifully performed and arranged music.

Ezra Feinberg – Soft Power

This featured on a number of our playlists, Soft Power was New York guitarist and composer Ezra Feinberg‘s third album on which she was joined by Mary Lattimore, David Moore (also featured below) and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. The Tonal Union label described it as being defined by its abundance of melodies, repeating figures and ecstatic improvisations, Soft Power exudes an enlightened and transformative spirit to empower the listener. I also loved the cover artwork featuring the photography of Marc Alcock, taken from the book and series California Topiary (which also features on follow-up remixes).

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – The Way Out of Easy

Perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that the whole thing was recorded live at LA’s fabled and now-defunct ETA in one night in January 2023. The quartet had held down a regular residency there, and it shows in the closeness and apparent ease of these improvisations. Engineer Bryce Gonzales has quite the reputation in the LA scene, and he captures the sound of the ETA IVtet using a mixer that was custom-made especially for the group and the venue. The attention to detail is evident – the sound is extraordinary: warm and clear and precise, which is exactly what you need when you’ve got four of America’s most potent musicians all performing at the top of their game. Another win for the ever-reliable Chicago label International Anthem, The Way Out of Easy might just be the best jazz album of 2024.

Steve Gunn & David Moore – Live in London

As Glenn Kimpton orginally said of their Reflections Vol 1. Let the Moon Be A Planet: “…its natural idiosyncrasies and fine nuances invite and reward deep listening—a quietly rich, contemplative and satisfying experience.” Recorded by Billy Steiger and mixed by Nick Principe, this live Cafe OTO performance followed in 2024.

“Using pieces that appeared on their collaboration album Let the Moon Be a Planet as loose armatures throughout their live set, Gunn and Moore expand and contract a sense of tension within the meditative calm of five new compositions, appearing in real time from rippling interplay between piano and guitar and between, and from a place of joy and camaraderie.”

Emma Gatrill – Come Swim

Throughout the eleven tracks of Come Swim, Gatrill creates a unique musical alchemy. By turning the writing process on its head, she gains the freedom to reinvent her music. Adonis Blue illustrates how the harp becomes more of a rhythmic choice than the lead instrument. The pulse of the harp on Cloudburst, along with the beats and massed voices builds and changes, yet at its heart is her voice.

As brave and bold as it is challenging and chilled out, Come Swim illustrates music that is simultaneously inside and outside the tradition. With this album, Emma Gatrill has established herself as one of the most inventive women in music today.

Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance – Jinxed by Being

Each of Jinxed by Beings‘ seven tracks is a kind of shared journey, a moving conversation between two hugely original musical voices. The language they use is constantly shifting, resulting in an album that is as uneasy as it is beautiful, teetering at times on the stark edges between genres that shouldn’t work together but somehow do. Collaborations of this quality are vanishingly rare: we can only hope this isn’t the last we hear from Chasny and Shackleton as a duo.

Alexis Chartrand & Cédric Dind-Lavoie – Au Chemin 4

Au Chemin 4 saw Montreal fiddler Alexis Chartrand, a well-known player on the Quebec traditional music scene, join forces with multi-instrumentalist Cédric Dind-Lavoie. While based upon Québécois and Acadian traditional melodies and featuring just baroque violin and upright piano, the playing is delicately nuanced and manages to sound both contemporary and traditional at once.

Leyla McCalla – Sun Without The Heat

…Leyla rings the musical changes once more on the final track, I Want to Believe, opening the song with piano. Situated within the blues mould, the introduction of her dolorous, resonant cello and spelling-binding vocals are recorded with crystal clear clarity. It is a sublime song that would not have been out of place sung at marches during the 1960s Civil Rights era.

Sun Without The Heat is a consummate, original album that is Janus-like in its ability to communicate both sorrow and joy. Its shifting moods, musical styles, and influences make for a beautifully varied and rewarding listen.

Kate Carr – Midsummer, London

There is something undeniably musical about Carr’s [field] recordings, and that is because there is something musical about the way humans live their lives amongst buildings and pigeons and mass rapid transit systems. She observes pulses and rhythms which otherwise go unnoticed: the fluvial gulping of the Thames, the polyrhythmic interactions of commuters’ footsteps, the industrial ambience of roadworks. Whereas on Paris Winter/Spring, she wove threads of traditionally melodic music – some gentle acoustic guitar, for instance – into the field recordings, here she is content to let the streets do the talking, and the urban landscape proves that it is perfectly capable of constructing its own melodies. 

Niamh Bury – Yellow Roses

Just like the candle that illuminates the aged ornamental ephemera on the front cover, Yellow Roses is an elemental source that beguiles and enchants in equal measure. It is a record that can lead the charge for the Irish Folk scene at a time when the competition is fierce. This is no small accolade, for sure, but with an album this strong, it is an almost unavoidable statement.

Mohammad Syfkhan – I Am Kurdish

Ireland’s Nyahh Records, founded by Willie Stewart, has one of the most eclectic and unexpected roster of artists to come out of Ireland, or anywhere else, in recent years. Stewart’s choice of artists has resulted in a lovingly curated label that offers a treasure trove of sounds that challenge and reward. One such gem was an album from Kurdish/Syrian Singer and Bouzouki player Mohammad Syfkhan. I Am Kurdish caught the attention of many, on which he was supported by Eimear Reidy on Cello and Cathal Roche on Saxophone for three album tracks.

In 2023, he opened for Lankum at the Cork Opera House and received massive applause from the packed-out room.

Jenny Sturgeon – paths.made.walking

Jenny Sturgeon has a history of augmenting her original songs with experimental recording techniques and using music to react to nature, literature and visual art. Her second solo album, 2020’s The Living Mountain, was a sonic companion piece to Nan Shepherd’s pioneering work of nature writing and saw her construct a suite of songs around a single continuous field recording made in the Cairngorms. On paths.made.walking, her first solo record since The Living Mountain, she leans more heavily into concept and experimentation, and, in particular, the use of field recording. Each track is a kind of diary entry, a snapshot of a place through its variety of sounds. Here, she dispenses entirely with the idea of song, allowing the landscape to speak of and for itself.

More than anything, paths.made.walking is a chronicle of sound, and as such, it is a folk-art treatise on the state of the Scottish rural nation. And, encouragingly, it is full of hope: a reminder that there are still places where, even amid the constant harangue of midges, the chortling of game birds or the anxious bleating of sheep, a kind of escape is still possible, and a connection with the natural world is still something worth seeking. 

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru – Souvenirs

Despite becoming one of God’s earthbound followers, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru had a most material upbringing. Later, her sacred lifestyle and love for secular music often brought her very being into conflict. Souvenirs is a lost and found recording of Emahoy’s earliest known songs, recorded into a boombox at home in Addis Ababa. This was long before she gained a cult following when her piano solos were released in the Ethiopiques series by French producer Francis Falceto.

Souvenirs is an amazing hoard of personal, spiritual and national yearnings. Emahoy (mostly) shunned the idea of worldly fame. She once asked God that her name be written on heaven, not on earth. After her death in March 2023, she has that name fondly printed across both realms.

Dorothy Carter – Troubadour

A distinct otherworldliness seems to be the natural by-product of the strident, ringing quality possessed by certain stringed instruments, notably the psaltery and the dulcimer. It’s a quality that is present from the first notes of Troubadour, Dorothy Carter’s 1976 debut album, and it’s something that was recognised a couple of decades later by the progenitors of the burgeoning New Weird America scene.

It makes perfect sense then that Carter’s debut has now been released by Drag City, home of Joanna Newsom and any number of outsider geniuses. Troubadour feels different to Waillee Waillee. For all the wild abandon of its songs, there was something curated, self-contained, symmetrical about Waillee Waillee, as if by that point, Carter had taught herself something of the received wisdom of how to construct an album. Troubadour, by contrast, is Carter in the raw. She had already been playing music for decades, but this was the first time she had chosen to record anything professionally, so it’s understandable that this album feels jam-packed with ideas. As a pure outpouring of creativity, it is comparable in some ways to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.

Tony Conrad & Jennifer Walshe – In the Merry Month of May 

The thrilling, crazed high point of the album is Day of the Fair, which takes a melody with the simplicity of a music hall number or a nursery rhyme and turns it, with the help of Conrad’s crashing keys, into an antic postmodern singalong. If Beckett and Brecht had collaborated on a libretto for a Gilbert and Sullivan-style operetta, the result might have been something like this. It is both uncompromisingly avant-garde and, at some bizarre level, incredibly catchy. But any turn toward conventional song is reversed with the industrial grumble of closer People Need to Know, where Walshe’s multitracked voice occupies a kind of liminal space between the song and the void, always in danger of slipping over the edge. Convention has never been a preoccupation of either Walshe or Conrad, and In the Merry Month of May is unusual even by the standards of contemporary experimental music. It works as a showcase for two genuine greats improvising with fearless abandon; it works as a swansong for the much-missed Conrad; and it works as a testament to the power of collaboration.

Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements – Rain on the Road

 Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements signed to Thrill Jockey as a duo in 2024. Their debut album, Rain on the Road, was recorded in McClements’ apartment during a rainy December in LA and is described as finding an equilibrium between two usually disparate states of being for musicians: life on the road and life in the studio. Lattimore explains: “I can hear both the road-selves and the home-selves in these recordings, the two sides that don’t always get to meet.” McClements elaborates: “the rain both invokes serenity, as in the perfect peaceful drizzle at the mountain cabin, but can also be ominous… like when you are running late for a show, driving through a thunderstorm.” Mary Lattimore describes it simply as “letting melodies unspool with your close friend, no rush, nowhere to really be.”

Brigid Mae Power – Songs for You

Neil Young’s Mellow My Mind might be the best of all. Here, Power has achieved the trick of making me think again about a song I thought I knew inside-out: I always saw Mellow My Mind as a largely innocuous track on Tonight’s The Night, an album which has never quite got to me in the way it gets to most Young fans. Hearing Power’s version, though, has made me think again. Her voice has a unique way of highlighting a melody, and here it grapples with Young’s downbeat, burned-out original and comes up with something jewel-like and light-dappled. It’s one of many brilliant moments on a record that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.

Magic Tuber Stringband – Needlefall

Sometimes, a piece will evolve in parts, like Twelfth House, which clanks to life, skips around jauntily for a while, then folds in on itself, becoming introspective and playful again by turns. This inherent gift for timing and progression can make a four-minute tune sound like a miniature folk opera. At points, melodies drawn from existing tradition will merge with passages of improvisation, and for a spell, you can almost experience the growth and change of folk music in real-time. It’s an exhilarating experience. Equally thrilling is the haunting musical saw that runs through the closing piece, Piney Woods Burn. Droney atmospherics mingle with strings and reeds as the album comes to a conclusion that is almost multisensory in its keen evocation of place and mood. It all adds up to an intense musical experience, one that is not without its surprises but which, nevertheless, is exceptionally rewarding.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter – Hear The Children Sing & The Evidence

The concept behind the album came from Nathan Salsburg, who discovered that playing the Baltimore punk/post-hardcore band’s “The Evidence” over and over on guitar worked quite nicely as a lullaby for his infant daughter; he invited Will Oldham and Tyler Trotter to attempt turning it into an album. The results are quite enchanting and beautiful.

Jim White and Marisa Anderson – Swallowtail

…Peregrine feels like the key track. Running at over ten minutes, this one has plenty of time to establish itself and does so with sparse playing, Anderson picking lines at leisure, creating cyclical clusters of mesmerising notes that White’s drums dance around in places, step away from in others and then return to with more fire. The freedom the duo have is best demonstrated here, with each seemingly comfortable to play in their own way, while knowing the other is sympathetic to the music and will adjust to fit. It’s a song that encapsulates everything I love about improvised instrumental music and it defines an album of quiet assurance and power.

Joshua Massad & Dylan Aycock – Two Improvisations

It is absolutely fascinating music that is as mercurial as it is rhythmic and steady. Imagine Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s A Meeting by the River with the experimental knob turned right up and you’ll get close. Spellbinding.

Kevin Fowley – À Feu Doux

A deep sense of nostalgia pours from this EP, influenced by Fowley’s Franco-Irish roots. Based in Dublin, while growing up, he split his time between living in France and Ireland. He listened to French lullabies sung by his mother in one room while his father would be playing Donegal tunes on the fiddle in another.

On À Feu Doux, Fowley presents four songs – French lullabies and traditional folk songs dating as far back as the 14th century. These songs were sung to Fowley and his siblings when they were children. A few years ago, Fowley’s grandparents made a book for his nieces, a collection of 122 French songs and nursery rhymes. Soon enough, Fowley found himself reconnecting with those songs that soundtracked his childhood and began shaping them into the foundations of À Feu Doux that highlights the dreamy, late-night hypnotic associations with lullaby music. In Bob Fish’s words, “Understanding the power of music, these sounds are perhaps the most evocative and revolutionary music you will hear all year. These are lullabies for the child residing inside each adult.”

Awen Ensemble – Cadair Idris

In folklore, anyone spending a night on Cadair Idris mountain will wake up either a poet or a mad person. Actually, the same has been said of anyone following jazz as a vocation. Thus, the Leeds-based septet Awen Ensemble chose to combine both prospects for their debut outing. The album tracks a woman who roughs it overnight on Cadair Idris seeking personal growth. Awen Ensemble’s vibe throughout is one of quiet apprehension…less of jazz’s surging urban energy, more of a flower-powered rusticity.

Cadair Idris presents proof that not only wooden instruments conjure a response to wilderness lands or scenic rivers. Woven from modern jazz repertoires with a mythic folk essence, this is an audacious and promising debut.

Trust Fund – Has It Been A While?

Has It Been A While? drifts by, a thirty-five-minute reverie, gauzy and dreamy and illuminated from within. But for all its apparent wispiness, Jones’ intelligence and depth of thought anchor it to some very real concerns. He manages to combine an almost Proustian preoccupation with memory and the intangibility of the past with the admirably Spinozan notion that we should value our lives as they are lived. And that’s an important lesson for all of us because, well, who knows when we might get another Trust Fund album?  

Setting at Eulogy

at Eulogy is organic drone folk alternative experimental trio Setting’s third release (their first being last year’s studio album Shone a Rainbow Light On) and second live drop, a follow-up to last winter’s at Black Mountain College Museum. This set was also recorded in Asheville, North Carolina, but at the tail end of a tour that ran along both the east and west coasts of the States. According to the press release, the band returned ‘sun-baked and wind-worn’ to Asheville, and the resulting performance feels very different to Black Mountain.

It’s a hell of a journey; just approach with caution; you could find yourself getting lost in the Setting’s strange, mesmerising and quite beautiful soundscape.

Liam Grant, Grayson McGuire, Devon Flaherty – Grant / McGuire / Flaherty

If you’re after a sharp and tight set of traditional Old-time songs played with plenty of vim and a hefty dose of talent, then look no further than Grant / McGuire / Flaherty, a fun slice of Appalachian magic. Liam Grant is a Maine native guitarist in the mold of the late Jack Rose (in fact, the Weissenborn on here may be Jack’s; Liam borrowed it for a time from Glenn Jones). Both Grayson McGuire (here playing fiddle, but also an ace banjoist) and Devon Flaherty (banjo, guitar) hail from North Carolina, where Liam used to dwell, and this is their first recording, cut straight to cassette tape with no overdubs.

…you’ll find yourself re-spinning this one time and again, bewitched by its down-to-earth charm and infectious character. 

Nev Clay – So Little Happened for So Long

If Nev was simply a charming performer and a gifted lyricist, it would be enough. He could sing his songs to the accompaniment of an old Casio keyboard, shaping melodies around the pre-programmed demonstration tunes, and it would be enough. But – and I can’t believe I’ve written this much without mentioning it yet – Nev is also a brilliant multi-instrumentalist, and his virtuosity is all over this record. I’ve seen impressive players before, and so have you, and let’s be honest: they’re usually wankers, substituting years of practising in the full-length mirror for any sense of original musicality or soul. Nev Clay could out-shred the best of them, but his intricate picking, unusual chord voicing, and gift for counter-melody always supports and never distracts from the essential excellence of the songs themselves. Likewise, the album’s production choices are inventive and occasionally surprising, but ultimately honest, emphasising the humanness of the very talented humans that put it all together.

If I say anything else about how good this record is, you might not believe me, so I’ll stop. But if all this sounds like hyperbole, that’s only because you haven’t heard Nev Clay yet.

So Little Happened for So Long is my record of the year, and the remainder of 2024 is irrelevant. 

Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine – Outliers

The fact that Outliers was conceived and recorded entirely online, without the use of a physical studio, might make you think that it is likely to sound scratchy or thrown together, but in fact, the opposite is true. The novel way of recording seems to have focussed both artists, and the attention to detail on this album is remarkable. It has also resulted in an incredible clarity of sound, where both participants’ contributions are clearly defined and yet entirely in accord. Sturgeon and Hewerdine’s collaboration may have been remote, but it feels astonishingly close. Exceptional.

Msaki x Tubatsi – Synthetic Hearts Part II

The deployment of Petit’s cello, both plucked and bowed, creates a wealth of sounds from dark to breezy, as heard on Off the Ground, which, along with synths, delivers splashes of colour, filling the song with hope, a quality that Msaki and Tubatsi playoff with vocals and harmonies that stand out against the sparse instrumentation which also reinforces dialogues, a musical equivalent of shadows and light.

Magic occurs somewhere between the cello of Clément Petit and the vocals of Msaki and Tubatsi. Synthetic Hearts Part II is one of those rare times when the second helping is even better than the first. Collaborations like this happen very rarely. Savour it.

Beings – There is a Garden

The best collaborations often sound like happy accidents. This is certainly the case with Beings, four musicians who essentially found each other in the right place at the right time. Saxophonist, pianist and occasional vocalist Zoh Amba has released a solo album and appeared in a handful of collaborations but is already being talked about in the same breath as some of free jazz’s greatest-ever practitioners. Guitarist Steve Gunn has worked with Kurt Vile and Mary Lattimore and takes his influences from sources as diverse as La Monte Young and American primitivism. Veteran double bass legend Shazad Ismaily has names like Yoko Ono, Tom Waits, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Laurie Anderson on his CV, and Dirty Three drummer Jim White is one of the most in-demand musicians on the circuit. It should come as no surprise that There Is A Garden is a great piece of work. As it turns out, it’s better than that: the way these four work together is insanely good, creating something accessible and musically breathtaking from the language of experimental jazz and apparently having a great time while doing so.

This is blistering, beautiful free jazz with an uncommonly sunny and accommodating outlook.

Christy Moore – A Terrible Beauty

A Terrible Beauty, his first album for the revitalised Claddagh label, is at least as good as anything he’s done before. …Fortunately for us, Christy Moore’s songs, albums, and gigs keep coming; on ‘A Terrible Beauty’, the tenderness, empathy, solidarity, and absence of pretension never waver – long may it continue.

Tor Invocation Band – Medicine

Tor Invocation Band is the loose experimental collective led by Yorkshire-based illustrator, composer and drone aficionado Jake Blanchard. The lineup is ever-changing, but previous releases have featured the talents of Chris Hladowski, Sophie Cooper and Natalia Beylis: names that are a seal of quality but also give you some idea as to the uncompromising and avant-garde nature of what you are about to listen to.

It’s very rare indeed that four tracks cover such wild and varied terrain, moving with confidence through the apparently borderless realms of traditional folk, ambient, heavy psych, noise and free jazz. But under Blanchard’s guiding hand the whole thing hangs together admirably, proof that the most uncompromising music can also be an absolute pleasure to listen to.

Masayoshi Fujita – Migratory

The tension between agitation and stillness is at the centre of Masayoshi Fujita’s work. The vibraphonist and marimba player’s 2021 album, Bird Ambience, recognised the paradoxical state of the natural world: its calming, meditative qualities and its propensity for violence and movement. Fujita improvised with highly controlled passages to create a music that approached the world from two different angles simultaneously. On Migratory, he explores these ideas further, and on a more personal level.

…the entire album seems to exist elementally rather than as the product of a craft or an industry. It is the opposite of vulgar, whatever that might be, utterly light, itself a part of the landscape.   

Junkboy – Littoral States

Brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb, who perform together as Junkboy, have long been preoccupied with edges and fringes, the musical spaces where one state slips unnoticed into another. They have skirted the boundaries of folk, ambient, dream pop, post-rock and Ghost Box-style hauntology in varying degrees and, in recent years, have alchemised this tendency into something that is more definitively tied up with landscapes and the feelings they evoke. Littoral States is their most place-centred album yet, and paradoxically their most ambiguous, dealing simultaneously with the Sussex coast and with universal feelings of grief and renewal. 

Junkboy make melodic, intelligent, haunting music that slips in and out of genres but always stays true to the overarching theme of places and how human emotions interact with those places. Littoral States is an engulfing and satisfying half-hour.

Marry Waterson & Adrian Crowley – Cuckoo Storm

They have always been a collaborative family, the Waterson’s, fitting for they are pretty much royalty in folk music circles, and ‘the people’s music’ does not shut the door to participation. Marry Waterson in particular seems to thrive on a creative cohort to inspire, indeed some of my favourite music of hers was produced alongside David A Jaycock. This one, however, has the immediacy to outshine all that has come before. ‘Cuckoo Storm’ is a record in which she has found a musical partner in Adrian Crowley, who is not only in tune with her spirit but vocally too, his matured baritone a sumptuous counterpoint to Marry’s angelic otherworldliness. At times, they almost stray into Nancy and Lee territory, minus the tongue-in-cheek goofiness admittedly, showcasing a compatibility that could expand from here. This is an album untethered by the weight of history and tradition. Cuckoo Storm is a deep dive into the farthest reaches of their minds and souls – songs are formed from scraps of old lyric ideas; melodies are attached to independently written words as if one were waiting to find the other, and the whole process does appear to have pushed each participant on to reaching hard for their best possible work.

Lankum – Live in Dublin

It’s all quite Brechtian – from the disappearance of performers onstage to the foregrounding of instruments, the traditional reels and audience participation. With its very clear sense of time and logical progression, the sound descends into a session, along with its deeper and more pressing elements – people, communities, our cultural and historical underpinnings.

And, like the Palestinian flag that flew so persistently above the crowd at Kilmainham, Lankum’s music is vital. The album is nothing if not heartfelt: a true record of a band at the peak of their powers.

Karl Blau – Vultures of Love

The received wisdom on Karl Blau is that he operates along the same lines as hyper-literate, folky singer-songwriters like former bandmate Phil Elverum or Bill Callahan: a conduit of tall tales, dusty country-tinged narratives and subtle heartbreak. And while there is some truth in that – witness the Smoggy stylings of Pasadena for exhibit one – there’s also something else going on amongst the widescreen landscapes and clever lyrical turns of Vultures of Love, something altogether more strange.

No two tracks are the same here. Most aren’t even remotely alike. But the aura that hangs around the album is consistent, and that’s a feat that can only be pulled off by a consummate artist, in full control of his craft despite the apparent looseness of it all. Vultures of Love is an album that deserves to be listened to all the way through: when taken together, the hectic elements that make up each individual song coalesce into something whole (and strangely wholesome), and that’s a beautiful thing to experience.

Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – The Closest Thing to Silence

Ariel Kalma has been recording ambient music for so long that there wasn’t even a category for what he was doing when he started. While Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer haven’t been recording their experimental music anywhere near that long, they managed to catch the ear of Kalma. What began as a set of 20 minutes of music (four pieces) for BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction program led to The Closest Thing to Silence.

Rather than being some staid work of artists of different generations, Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer fearlessly connect and collaborate; The Closest Thing to Silence is a remarkably coherent album that offers exciting new narratives.

Lemoncello – Lemoncello

‘Lemoncello’ is one of those records that has a binding sound all the way whilst boasting an incredible range of tones, moods, and textures within each individual song. The sonic glue I refer to is a sort of ethereal, harmonious, ever-shifting sheen of a topcoat gliding across a tense, grinding underbelly of distortion and vibration. It is a juxtaposition that works so well, such as on the semi-spoken verses of Harsh Truths, for example, delivered over waves of contorted cellos, evoking a sense of the unvarnished and direct communication referred to in the song’s title.

…Lemoncello are really going places musically, and this is one journey we should all hitch a ride on.

Marina Allen – Eight Pointed Star

Sometimes, amidst the kaleidoscopic pleasures of new music in all its various and often esoteric forms, it can be easy to forget the apparently simple pleasure of an album of very good songs by a talented singer songwriter. Luckily, we have a few artists – Adrianne Lenker and Julie Byrne spring to mind – who can claim to combine a gift for songcraft with something approaching lyrical genius. With her second album, Eight Pointed Star, Marina Allen adds herself with a quiet kind of confidence to that rarefied group.

…If there is a tension here between pop music structures and unconventional lyrics, there is perhaps another, more important (though related) tension, one which Allen recognises: that between clarity and abstraction, between saying clearly what you want to say and saying it how you want to say it. On Eight Pointed Star, she has struck the perfect balance, fabricating a beautifully coherent but mysterious collection of songs that exist on the blurred edges of folk, country and pop. 

Jim White – All Hits: Memories

In the words of Bill Callahan in this long overdue solo album from Australian drummer Jim White: “it can be a vibration sent through a prehistoric breath… the dead, wet leaves you walked through on the way to the first day of school. These are the memories of the drums on this record. Infinite and personal.“

“This is a record of thoughts, memories, surgery. A deft surgical operation you may not even realize is happening as it’s happening but you’re back on your feet when it’s over. Memories refreshed.“

Johnny Coley – Mister Sweet Whisper

On Mister Sweet Whisper, Coley teams up once again with the band Worst Spills, stalwarts of the Sweet Wreath label, and together they set about creating six long-form avant-beat lyrical improvisations set to shimmering, Lynchian lounge-folk.

Johnny Coley is a genuine poet, someone with things to say that haven’t been said before. With Mister Sweet Whisper, he has created a document of a crazy, frayed civilization and has made it sound beautiful.

Meril Wubslin – Faire Ça

Meril Wubslin‘s last album, Alors Quoi, was described as a lingering mesmeric sound that creeps into your psyche and nestles there, snug with its low-key groove. For their fourth album, Faire Ça, the trio, who are based between Belgium and Switzerland, ventured into unfamiliar territory, with music described as having the intimacy of blues and folk, the experimentation of post-rock and 1960s minimalism, and the heady production values of dub and hip-hop.

Featuring Christian Garcia-Gaucher (vocals, guitar and synths), Valérie Niederoest (vocals and guitar) and David Costenaro (drums), they made it clear that the evolution of their sound is a key part of who they are.

Joan Shelley – Mood Ring

Mood Ring is Shelley’s first batch of songs since 2022’s The Spur and bookends a period of immense personal change: the birth of her daughter, and moving from the place where she was raised in rural Kentucky. She finished mixing these songs at Louisville studio End of an Ear with the U-Haul parked and waiting, and listened to the mixes on the drive to her new home. It features contributions from Nathan Salsburg, James Elkington, Julia Purcell and Lou Krippenstappel. As always, Shelley’s music is both intimate and beautiful.

Not A Flower on Dogwood Flats: The Music of Jack Bunch & Laurel County

Another great release from Dolceola Recordings – Not A Flower On The Dogwood Flats is not only a fitting tribute to Jack Bunch and the enduring music of his Uncle Henry that he has so lovingly preserved, but it also serves to bring to a wider audience the raw, authentic sounds that have, for generations, reverberated around the Laurel County hills. As Jack’s bandmate of latter years, Garrett Hedrick, attests, “This album embodies everything Jack lived for – to tell stories and play traditional Kentucky music for those who wanted to listen.”

Mike Gangloff & C Joynes – Tom Winter, Tom Spring

The mini-album, Tom Winter, Tom Spring, a limited edition 10” lathe press vinyl, is certainly one to snap up… The record features the talents of two quiet stalwarts on the US and UK instrumental music scenes, American fiddle player Mike Gangloff and British fingerstyle guitar ace C Joynes, two players who have given a huge amount to the genre over the years. Cut midway through a tour, the music is fluid and confident, and they manage to balance dense intensity with lighter foot-tappers and spacious abstracts. It’s quite a thing.

Frankie Archer  – Pressure and Persuasion

In follow up to last year’s EP ‘Never So Red’, Northumbrian electro-folk musician and producer Frankie Archer continued her trend of transcending expectations with her new EP ‘Pressure and Persuasion’. In her on words: “Sonically Pressure and Persuasion is really broad, ranging from feminist trad-pop to doom-folk to treacle-bop. Each song is built around the bare bones of the traditional words and/or melody, with the core of each story influencing how the track ended up sounding…”

Toby Hay & Aidan Thorne – after a pause

Good Morning, the opening track on after a pause, starts with a quiet drone of bass and an unfurling of guitar notes. There is an implication of newness and growth; the guitar seems to give itself repeatedly like a bank of flowers opening one after the other. It’s a deftly rendered mood piece and more than just a scene setter: Toby Hay’s guitar seems to be sowing melodic seeds which will germinate throughout the rest of the album, and Aidan Thorne’s bass creates a solid, earthy framework on which those melodies can flourish.

…What is even more impressive is the improvisational rapport they developed in such a short space of time and how they managed to translate that into music of sharply-defined brilliance, shot through with the light of the Welsh countryside and brimming with consideration both for the spirit of collaboration and for the natural world. after a pause is the work of two consummate musicians who aren’t afraid to push themselves and each other in new directions.

Anna Tivel – Living Thing

Living Thing, Anna Tivel’s eighth album, was recorded against a pandemic backdrop. Featuring just her guitar and violin with long-time collaborator and producer Shane Leonard on everything else, the songs look to explore and understand the seismic shift in everything that had been taken for granted. 

Understandably, Anna Tivel describes ‘Living Thing’ as her most melodic album – the rhythms riding waves of anxiety, resilience and hope, surfed with her soft, whispering and intimate vocals and washing up on a shore that ultimately looks out to the light on the horizon rather than the darkness behind.

Kathryn Williams & Withered Hand – Willson Williams

Kathryn Williams and Withered Hand’s Dan Willson are, on the evidence of this debut album-length collaboration, a partnership with potential longevity. The thing that strikes me from the off with Willson Williams is that you can hear how much they love working together. Where some pairings try to stitch together the stylings of each performer, retaining the identifiable qualities of each, Kathryn and Dan buy into the duo aesthetic wholesale. They tend to sing together if they are not seamlessly exchanging lines, and, by their own admission, it is hard to distinguish which writer is primarily responsible for any given moment. The whole experience is an uplifting one; even when the texture of a song feels more sombre, the sense is that the unity in the shared endeavour is pulling them through. Again, this is something the pair readily acknowledge, likening their creative processes to a late-night putting the world to rights session at a kitchen table over a bottle of wine.

…One might be tempted to conclude they are bringing out the best in each other, for in among the melancholy that both typically lean into, there is a feeling of dual purpose and fun resonating through all these tracks. Yes!

Richard Thompson – Ship to Shore

As with the majority of his 21^st century albums of new material, it is the electric Richard Thompson stepping forward on Ship to Shore, accompanied by the core of his red-hot live band. Before it’s release he announced “I’m not intending to hang up my plectrum anytime soon, if I don’t write, if I don’t perform, I get frustrated and I feel like I’m not being the human being I should be”. That is a good shout, for Ship To Shore is not the sound of an artist in any sort of decline, quite the opposite; the Richard Thompson of 2024 is a singer-songwriter enjoying the most vital of late golden periods, producing work to stand favourably alongside any from his previous fifty years.

Jessica Ackerley – All Of the Colours Are Singing

Unashamedly avant-garde in her practice, the New York-based guitarist Jessica Ackerley leans heavily on jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition, and her music is sometimes deliberately challenging or cerebral. But hers is not a closed world: albums like 2019’s A New Kind of Water and 2021’s Morning/mourning borrowed heavily from the aesthetic of ambient music, while elsewhere, she has embraced the harsher charms of post-rock and noise rock. All of these influences are apparent on All Of the Colours Are Singing, which is perhaps her most well-balanced album to date, as well as her most uncompromising.

…the whole album, despite its many stylistic shifts and variations, feels like a single complete journey. That’s an impressive achievement given the comparatively minimal ingredients Ackerley chooses to work with, and it shows just how deep her talent as a musician, a composer and an improviser runs.

Jennifer Castle – Camelot

The role of Camelot on Jennifer Castle’s seventh album goes slightly beyond an extended metaphor. It is an entire structure, a porous one that allows everything to permeate its skin, and in doing so, it becomes a kind of magical framework capable of supporting a wide range of ideas. Castle’s primary theme is middle age and the changes that occur in individuals at certain periods in their lives. These changes create tensions, and Camelot is the space where these tensions get to play out against each other: a kind of jousting match with religion and mystic thought on one side and secular, pragmatic humanism on the other. That’s not to say that these songs couldn’t stand by themselves if they wanted to – Castle is a talented and experienced songwriter with an impressive back catalogue – but the idea of Camelot as a psychic space gives the album a sense of multi-dimensionality, which allows for layered readings and repeated listenings.

Andy Skellam – Brighten up the Place

Bristol-based Andy Skellam’s Brighten up the Place, is a stripped-back affair with songs (several recorded in his loft studio in the wee hours while everyone slept) addressing themes of loss, eco-anxiety, romantic escapism and a new father, sleep-deprived parenthood captured in his hushed baritone.

A languid folksy affair variously featuring contributions from such fellow Bristolians as Portishead bassist Jim Barr, keyboard player Alice Lacey, cellist Beth Porter, Jamie Whitby Coles of ‘This is The Kit’ on drums and vocalist  Rachael Dadd…A bountiful offering of well-crafted, warmly sung, surreally poetic and calming pastoral folk. His music deserves a far broader fan base

Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra

The Kronos Quartet are currently celebrating an awe-inspiring 50^th anniversary as a functioning, creative ground and genre-breaking musical entity. In their time, they have collaborated alongside the farthest reaches of the music world, redefining the parameters of what a classical string quartet can be in work incorporating jazz, folk, punk, industrial, minimalism, avant-garde and pop classicism. …that they should be helming this, the latest in a series of albums that celebrates and explores the far-out music of Sun Ra, is a marriage that fits like an astronaut and a space suit. …to execute this excursion with the required panache, the Kronos Quartet have enlisted a crew of similarly visionary space cadets from the worlds of jazz, experimental, improvisational and other fields of contemporary composition; this lift-off is going to be explosive.

Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto are transporter beamed into the equation for Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye, a finale in which this kaleidoscopic trips every beat, echo, horn burst and orchestral flourish return for a final, jubilant bow before re-ascending back into the darkness, heading for the great unknown. How in-sync this all is with the spirit of Sun Ra, for all that wrong-foots the listener or initially confounds comes together like a finely crafted dovetail joint with deep infiltered immersion. That is when the real rewards woven into this audio cocktail reveal themselves; just let the music wrap itself around you, then lay back and wait for lift off; what bliss.

J.R. Bohannon & Dave Shuford – Reclined in the Haze

This is a peach of a record from two hard-working veterans who seem to fly just under the radar. Brooklyn-based J.R. Bohannon has been more interested in the pedal steel recently, but both his Recôncavo EP and Dusk LP are excellent releases and show plenty of his prowess as an adept fingerstyle guitarist and experimenter. Dave Shuford, AKA D. Charles Speer, is a founding member of No Neck Blues Band and is very handy with a range of instruments (check out his solo version of Markos’s Cave from the D. Charles Speer album Arghiledes on the Thrill Jockey site). Suffice it to say then that this duo set promises plenty of flexing and a hefty range of styles and techniques…

Reclined in the Haze is a cracker, a daring set that manages to balance Eastern musical influences with country licks and experimental improvisation. I already love this and it’s one I’ll revisit for the foreseeable.

Rosali – Bite Down

Bite Down is the undeniable statement of someone finding a world that both frustrates and fascinates, yet Rosali takes both in her stride, savouring the good and bad, devouring the obstacles along the way. The American author and poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox said, “There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.” That sentiment underpins Bite Down, an album born of determination and perseverance. In Rosali’s own empowering words, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, everything has a price — energetically speaking — we are responsible for each other and for all living things.”

This is one to savour…

Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey – Beehive Cathedral

For their debut album, Beehive Cathedral, Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, and Cleek Schrey installed themselves and their various instruments in a cabin in Tennessee and spent time exploring, in depth, some of the Old-time fiddle and banjo tunes and Appalachian music they have gathered collectively.

Billy in the Lowground is just delightful; a reel originating from Ireland or Scotland in the eighteenth century, this version backs up a joyous fiddle refrain with organ drones and some low-key banjo playing. The musicianship is key here because nothing is overplayed; each musician locks into their part, and each component lends itself to the tune. It is a detail that can be applied to the performances on Beehive Cathedral as a whole; beautiful music played by cracking musicians who love the tunes and are set on making them as strong and dynamic as possible while maintaining the spirit and the magic that has kept them alive for so long.

Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings – Parlour Ballads

Parlour music’s place in the folk tradition has never been thoroughly examined or even recognised by the folk music cognoscenti. Jon Boden’s aim with his new album, Parlour Ballads, is to rectify that. His choices don’t shy away from the sentimentality of the genre, but they do attempt to examine the places where parlour music rubbed up closest to traditional folk balladry, and this technique gives the songs a freshness that washes away any sense of the cloying or the overtly mannered.

It shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history and acknowledges the changes that all songs – whether part of an established folk tradition or not – have to go through if they are to survive. But more than that, it is a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.

Henry Parker & David Ian Roberts – Chasing Light

There is something beautifully pure about a duo instrumental acoustic guitar album, and Chasing Light by two of our most dynamic advocates of the acoustic is a splendid example of the wonderful magic that can be created by two intuitive musicians operating their beloved string boxes. Henry Parker and David Ian Roberts are both accomplished players with their own established body of work, so it’s no surprise that this eleven-song set is a high-quality recording, bringing to mind releases by Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay, plus Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker and, of course, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, whose Bert and John album is often considered the benchmark of acoustic guitar duo albums.

…a rich, fulfilling work by two players operating at a very high level and seemingly enjoying every moment.

Avalanche Kaito – Talitakum

Avalanche Kaito describe their sound as avant-rock, but that does no justice at all to the thrilling breadth of sonic invention that they embrace on their second album, Talitakum. 

Talitakum is Exhibit A in the case against organising your record collection by genre. Avalanche Kaito have no interest in categorisation: they allow their flurry of ideas to build up into an ever-changing welter of sound. Their music is like sped-up geological movement, defined by a detailed and often aggressive maximalism, and its international spirit is composed of recognisable local ingredients. Throughout, the fragments pull together in tight cores, resulting in an album that is gripping, uncompromising and constantly engaging.  

SML – Small Medium Large

The frankly awesome Chicago label International Anthem has given us some of the best releases of the last three years, spreading the word of spiritual jazz, ambient, new age, devotional and otherwise experimental music far and wide. One of their most successful artists is Jeff Parker, whose albums Suite for Max Brown (2020) and Forfolks (2021) are already well on their way to classic status. Two years ago, Parker released a record called Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a full-band slice of long-form, freely improvised ambient jazz split into four sections. It was recorded live at ETA, a now-defunct LA venue, with a band that included bassist Anna Butterss and alto sax player Josh Johnson. Before ETA closed its doors in 2023, Butterss and Johnson hooked up with synth player Jeremiah Chiu, percussionist Booker Stardrum and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann to form the quintet SML. The live shows they played were recorded, dismantled and reassembled to create a single album of exploratory kosmische jazz.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Small Medium Large is that every track has its own very distinct personality, despite the fact that they are all chiselled out of the same single stratum of sonic bedrock. 

There is…a pointed and sincere unity to SML’s playing that can only be a result of the intimate and improvisational manner in which the music was conceived. Even at its most jazzy and complex moments, SML is bright, airy and never willfully obtuse.

Cassie Kinoshi’s seed. – gratitude

The word ‘jazz’ offers such a false coherence that many music fans miss out on its union with the divine. Yet few genres can match its power to cut through social and linguistic divides. Kinoshi’s latest project, her first for International Anthem, was recorded live at London’s Southbank in March 2023. With around sixteen players involved, the tracks feel largely pre-composed. A focus on tight arrangements, however, doesn’t mean gratitude would swing more if improvised, or that it lacks for rhythmic freedom or shapely solos.

It’s been suggested that calling jazz musicians ‘composers’ is redundant and imposes a certain hierarchy. Yet writing music of this album’s calibre is both a challenge and a privilege. Likewise, listening to it requires some investment of both mind and spirit. Made from the raw materials of Kinoshi’s life, gratitude overflows with harmony and clarity.

David Murphy – Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar

What a great idea this is. For his debut album, Irish-based multi-instrumentalist David Murphy has reimagined old Irish harp tunes and arranged them for pedal steel, with accompaniments from a host of musicians and instruments. On songs like the lovely traditional waltz Cití na g Cumann, the moist, dreamlike sound of the pedal steel is joined by reverb hit bowed strings by Laura McFadden and Steve Wickham, plus plucked harp by Alannah Thornburgh and subtle piano from Rory McCarthy, giving the sweet melody layers and textures that never threaten to detract from the spirit of the tune.

The whole thing is beautifully judged, elegant and unpretentious. As an album, this feels less like a debut and more like the confident effort you’d expect from a well-established artist. An extraordinarily great album.

Tucker Zimmerman – Dance of Love

There have been tentative returns to the recording studio in recent years, cementing Tucker Zimmerman’s status as an outsider artist who only works on his own terms. But then a serendipitous twist: Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker heard Tucker Zimmerman’s songs in a tattoo parlour. She tracked him down, and they ended up in a studio together: the eighty-three-year-old songwriter, his wife Marie-Claire, and perhaps the most critically acclaimed indie band of the twenty-first century. The result is Dance of Love, an album that feels like it could turn out to be Tucker Zimmerman’s Basement Tapes. It has that rich combination of intimacy and musical verve that made Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You one of the best albums of recent years. 

It’s not often that someone makes their best album almost sixty years into their recording career, but then again, Tucker Zimmerman is no ordinary recording artist. Where many would have used those years to attempt to emulate former glories or improve upon recent successes, Zimmerman fills his songs with the sense of starting anew. Everything about Dance of Love is fresh and spontaneous, music made on its own terms but with a spirit of collaborative generosity.   

Dean McPhee – Astral Gold

Dean McPhee’s music defies easy categorisation. A quick search on the internet yields vague and sometimes contradictory results: he’s a guitarist, a composer, a songwriter with a sound that is based in folk music, or ambient, or post-rock. It’s the sort of thing that means that after a couple of decades, he’s still a well-kept secret.

McPhee’s soundworld is eerie and beautiful. His insistence that those two poles can exist together is most evident on his fifth album, Astral Gold. The elements that make it instantly recognisable as a Dean McPhee album are all there. Initially clean guitar lines flooded with reverb: check. Long, cosmically-inclined instrumentals: check. Looping, loping bass: check. Subtle but strange electronic tinkering: check. But here, everything seems slightly more condensed than before.

In many ways, it’s a cerebral trip for sure, but every minute of Astral Gold is brimming with what can only be described as soul.

Kathryn Tickell – Return to Kielderside

Return to Kielderside is, among other things, a document of what has happened between that first Kathryn Tickell release and the present day: the numerous solo albums, the OBE, the honorary degrees, the collaborations with Sting, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Alan Parsons. It is also a catalogue of minuscule changes, all of which, when taken together, represent an artist who is the same but subtly different. It’s like a long-exposure photograph of an important and highly impressive career in constant evolution.

Eric Chenaux Trio – Delights of My Life

Eric Chenaux has always had at least one foot in the world of jazz, and by framing his new album, Delights Of My Life, as the work of a trio, he appears to be moving closer to conventional notions of that genre. But, as is often the case with this most uncategorisable of musicians, all is not quite what it seems. For a start, your common and garden jazz trio wouldn’t usually consist of guitar, Wurlitzer (Ryan Driver) and electronic percussion (Philippe Melanson). And few jazz artists are as willing to subsume elements of folk, soul and even a kind of off-centre sophisticated pop into their practice.

Eric Chenaux has an overwhelming back catalogue of solo and collaborative work going back to the early 1990s, and all of it is worth dipping into. But on his last two or three solo records, he hit upon a strange and beautiful alchemy that is quite unlike anything else in popular music (or in jazz, for that matter). Delights of My Life is a continuation of that magic formula but with a more collaborative focus. Chenaux’s spellbinding run of form shows no signs of stopping.

Nathan Bowles Trio – Are Possible

When we spoke with the Nathan Bowles Trio, featuring Nathan, Rex McMurray and Casey Toll, about Are Possible (read the interview here), their first full album as a trio, they suggested a key moment in their coming together was the song The Road Reversed from Nathan’s 2018 album Plainly Mistaken, a set that sees half of the songs played as this trio set up. The deep groove of The Road Reversed is all over this record, but this one sees writing credits split between the band, a detail that is present in the sound.

Are Possible benefits from repeated listens to unearth its intricate melodic details, phrases, time signatures and rhythmic shifts. There are numerous examples of this throughout, but the final song, Aims, is quietly epic, blending acoustic drone sounds and hand drums with a wistful, meandering banjo line and spare bass notes. It is a beautifully spacious, subtly dramatic, delicately performed way to end an outstanding slow burner of an album. 

Kate Young – Umbelliferæ

Scottish singer Kate Young has made a name for herself on the live music circuit with a compelling mixture of a densely compositional musical style and an approach to songwriting that draws on both traditional and experimental methods. With those disparate elements finally coming together in the recording studio, with Umbelliferæ, Young has created an album that bridges the gaps between chamber folk, pop, world music and contemporary composition.

At the album’s physical and emotional heart is the eleven-minute Remember the Land, another song which could easily garner comparison with Joanna Newsom, not just for its length but for the apparent ease with which it bears its own weight of complexity, and the way it revels in its suite-like structure without ever feeling constricted by it. It’s the most ambitious piece on an album full of ambition, but Young never lets that ambition blind her to the importance of her message or the sheer delight of her songcraft. Umbelliferæ is the work of years: a wise, joyous epic.

Carlos Niño & Friends – Placenta

Even on a label as freethinking and freewheeling as Chicago-based International Anthem, Carlos Niño is something of an outlier. While his stablemates have ridden the recent wave of free jazz, righteous funk and ambient experimentalism, Niño has taken a different route, one that is harder to define. Calling him an outsider musician is the easy option, but that doesn’t quite cover all the bases. For one thing, that term implies a certain propensity for working alone that doesn’t fit with Niño’s method: he is an inveterate collaborator, and Placenta is his fourth album in as many years to be credited to ‘Carlos Niño & Friends’. 

…despite the massed and varied ranks of collaborators, the whole album has a decidedly natural flow to it. Niño has somehow managed to capture the way in which the natural process of human reproduction, childbirth and becoming a parent can apparently make time speed up or slow down. This strange feeling – time suspended, time rushing by – permeates the entirety of Placenta. Niño’s musical contributions – his chimes, bells, cymbals, gongs and shakers – provide a consistent backdrop, but equally importantly, he acts as a facilitator or catalyst or lightning rod through which the swell of creativity can be filtered and condensed. The result is a work of warmth and humanity and unruly, anarchic joy.

Malin Lewis – Halocline

After reading that West Coast of Scotland native Malin Lewis was entranced by the sound of Scottish pipes from a young age and began co-building avant-garde wooden Lindsay System Chanter smallpipes by age fifteen, it was not a surprise to discover that their debut album, Halocline, is a highly creative and singular forty minutes of music.

As Malin states in the notes, “from childhood, I envisioned sounds that conveyed the joy, intrigue and queerness of the world.” It is clear from listening to this deeply rewarding and joyous set of songs that Malin is determined to express themselves through their music and allow others to join their journey. The whole album listens beautifully and is quite unique in its character and emotion, but it’s also a very confidently played and produced record that is clever in its approach and balanced in its execution. In short, it’s quite exceptional.

Martin Simpson – Skydancers

Martin Simpson really does not let the grass grow under his feet. Skydancers is his twenty-fourth album and his twelfth for Topic Records and comes swiftly on the heels of last year’s collaborative effort with Thomm Jutz, Nothing but Green Willow. This new ten-strong set of original songs combined with traditionals is built around the title track, a piece commissioned by Chris Packham for Hen Harrier Day.

The playing throughout is faultless, but what impresses most is the restraint. No notes are wasted here; all decisions to enhance the song with instrumental flourishes land. This is an excellent record from a master of his craft.

Jon McKiel – Hex

Jon McKiel’s Hex isn’t a shrieking witch’s curse or a bloodstained satanic ritual. He draws on a subtler and perhaps older power, like something reawakened when a shaft of sunlight falls on a dusty box in an attic. The songs on this album are the contents of that box: shadows and echoes, big ideas and claustrophobic moods. On the title track, McKiel rustles up a kind of frazzled, trippy country pop and sings about dark matter, new visions, and raw mineral ecstasy: the lyrics, subdued and gnomic, give as much credence to feeling as to meaning.

McKiel absorbs and repurposes a whole host of genres, taking influence from Brazilian and African music as well as soul, psych, folk, and country, but the overall sound – a trippy, fuzzy-edged pop – is strangely consistent. Some of the credit here must go to long-term collaborator Jay Crocker (alias JOYFULTALK), who appears on every song and lends a hand with production. But the true magic of Hex lies beyond the limited purview of critical language. These songs seem to come from the realm of dreams, their edges softened by sleep but their message sharp and bright.

Bill MacKay – Locust Land

Chicago mainstay Bill MacKay has a real knack for balancing his records’ sound with vocal songs, fairly weird instrumental soundscapes and guitar workouts, all of which he is more than adept at. Locust Land, his third solo outing for Drag City, is his most diverse yet, but also his most harmonious and satisfying, which is high praise, considering the quality of Esker and Fountain Fire. It feels like this one has been painstakingly put together, with every detail pored over, from the tight run time of a fraction under half an hour to the ratio of woozy versus uplifting music.

Locust Land is a bold and adventurous record that has plenty of character and is accessible enough to spin multiple times—another splendid effort from an excellent musician.

Sam Carter – Silver Horizon

The electric guitar is at the core of Silver Horizon, but the sound is mostly clean, sharp and minimalist, bringing to mind bands like Low. In many ways, this feels like a significant step forward for Sam; Silver Horizon is a finely balanced album that demonstrates dynamic and intuitive music, and it sounds like nothing he has made before, but also a perfect fit for these songs. It is a grown-up set put to music that is as subtle as it is adventurous and finely nuanced. An excellent album of songs and performances, Silver Horizon is a career-high for Sam.

Chris Cohen – Paint a Room

Cohen’s solo albums, of which Paint a Room is the fourth, each seem to exist in their own present, a place where time is slightly slower, where influences and experiences are insinuated rather than brashly presented. The songs on Paint a Room are what we talk about when we talk about timelessness. Opener Damage sits somewhere between nostalgic 1970s soft rock and artsy, experimental pop. It’s full of quirky, soft-focus horns (a Jeff Parker arrangement) and comforting melodicism, but all the while it exists against a lyrical backdrop of state violence and political unease. 

Paint a Room is an absolute joy, but it’s the uncanny kind of joy, the kind which can challenge you and perhaps make you see the world in a different way.

Ben Nicholls – Duets

As it says on the box, for ‘Duets’, the in-demand double bass player Ben Nicholls gathered together a glittering array of guests to add vocals to a collection of primarily traditional numbers. As such, Nadine Shah is first up to bat with a brooding bass, sparse, droning jazz and blues arrangement of The Cuckoo, which, with its sinister ambience, sounds like no other interpretation before it. Equally experimental with its instrumentation and arrangement, Tim Eriksen, no stranger to reconfigurations of traditional folk, takes on Corydon, a transformational five-minute version of Charles Wesley’s A Funeral Hymn For A Believer that opens with disorienting sound effects and wordless vocals before the lurching bass saws into sight with Eriksen on bowed and stick banjo and guitar feedback.

With his bass as the constant in all its different textures, while his contributors add their own shadings, this is a highly immersive and, at times, illuminative listening experience……a great album from a musician whose talents clearly go way beyond that of the sought-after sideman.

BIG|BRAVE – A Chaos of Flowers

In the ten years since their debut, Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE have released seven albums, eight if you include 2021’s stoner-folk collaboration with The Body. It seems like an obscenely prolific turnover for a band concerned with slow growth, whose songs often feel monumental or glacial. But BIG|BRAVE aren’t your average purveyors of slow-cooker ambience. 

Listening to A Chaos Of Flowers for the first time is like stumbling across an artefact and not being sure if it’s from the past or the future or even if it was created by human hand or by some occult design. But the more attention you give it, the more human elements start to emerge. Wattie’s songwriting, for example, is heavily inspired by her reading of various female poets, and this deep understanding of the link between creativity and womanhood comes across more with every listen. It is just one of many layers that make A Chaos Of Flowers such a visceral, moving, complex and gloriously heavy piece of work.

Myriam Gendron – Mayday

Myriam Gendron’s music is not easy to write about. She doesn’t rely on fireworks. Her singing and guitar playing is entirely devoid of gimmick. There are no cheap tricks, no bones thrown to the too-casual listener, but neither does she draw you in with difficulty or with discordance. Her third album, Mayday, doesn’t seek to create a single, definitive mood, or peddle a unifying theme. And yet moods and themes, difficulties and discordances, do emerge. She trades in subtleties: the nuanced play between traditional music and original songwriting, the differences and similarities between the French and English languages, the lightness of touch that illuminates – softly and from the inside – songs about grief or joy.

It pays to think about everything that has gone before because Mayday is an album that, for all its lightness, demands time and benefits from deep listening. Myriam Gendron’s art, for all its surface simplicity, harbours a wealth of emotional and aesthetic complexities which, when taken together, form a wholly unique sound. Mayday is the most moving and persuasive example of that sound to date.

Jake Blanchard – Fermentation

Hip joint discomfort can be a real pain in the ass. Quite literally. Just ask West Yorkshire artist/musician Jake Blanchard, who’s suffered in this regard for ages. It hasn’t stopped him from creating, but his latest outing, Fermentation, rather reflects his ongoing malaise. Despite the album’s devotional vibe, it’s more evocative of twilight and midnight than yogic sunrises.

Melodies like these might be a gift of the composer, but they’re also a gift from nature. Despite his personal struggles, Blanchard has made a union with the divine here, or music for those who don’t accept silence as the ultimate spiritual answer. It’s an album with the whomp of Elkhorn and the godliness of Tuluum Shimmering. Think of sound waves being dosed out to herbal plants. Think also Pat Metheney, Alice Coltrane, Shakti with John McLaughlin, Mind Over Mirrors and Banco De Gaia. Fermentation says much about the human condition and the strangeness flowing from within or without us. Close your eyes and drown in its wyrd bliss.

Angeline Morrison – OPHELIA

Formerly a Bandcamp download-only, OPHELIA was remastered for general release for Autumn Equinox. There are certain kinds of music, certain moods provoked by particular sequences or combinations of sounds, that can swallow up whole afternoons. There are albums that can apparently stop or speed up time, that exist in the hinterlands between dream and wakefulness. Albums that seem to create their own miniature weather systems. OPHELIA is one such album. It conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music and holds your hand like a ghostly child to lead you through that landscape.

Robbie Basho – Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings

It’s somewhat a consensus that the magic of late guitar genius Robbie Basho’s music was best felt in concert. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us will not have experienced this virtuosic musician’s art first-hand due to him being still relatively unpopular up until he died back in 1986, but Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings, a five-disc bumper live package and companion piece to 2020’s Song of the Avatars, is a hell of an alternative.

Wow, what a release this is; if you are a music lover and want a serious treat this festive period and beyond, Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan should be high on the list. The liner notes are extensive and contain some wonderful photographs, plus an essay by Robbie Dawson. The material to be discovered across all five discs totals several hours of music from a true original, an underrated giant of the guitar. Magic.

Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Kingdom Of Discipline

For anyone already aboard the Sun Ra mothership, this latest release from the man and his Arkestra on the Dead Currencies label is going to fast become a key missing piece to the overall puzzle as well as a favoured edition from the catalogue. This is a collection of unreleased material that spans twenty years, the earliest being a 1971 blues riff all the way to a 1990 solo piano piece recorded just three years before Sun Ra’s death. As with so much of his work however, the pieces are completely untethered by time or era, and as you would expect from an artist whose legend has it around 1936/7 was “transported to a planet he identified as Saturn and told he would speak through music and the world would listen”, there is a cosmic wondrousness knitting these sounds and vibrations together. The music on this collection has an otherworldliness for sure, but the reason I believe it could become a go-to post in the Arkestra catalogue is an underlying accessibility to the music. Yes, there is a bold, DIY vision at its core, but every piece offers a sense of dramatic melodic adventure with an ear for mood and dynamics too, not to mention a hard-earned eloquence to some of the musicianship, especially the piano and keyboard work.

The Complete Friends of Old-Time Music Concert

This previously unheard concert recording made in April 1965 in New York is an astonishing record of the music of the inimitable Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, legendary country blues singer and guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi cane fife player Ed Young. Its significance is also due to the connection between the Georgia Sea Island Singers and the Civil Rights Movement, in which they were active participants, and to their enduring influence on folk music today.

Listening to this powerful and vital well-preserved record of exceptional performances at a critical moment in American musical and political history feels almost like being there.

Ana Lua Caiano – Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado

Only one song on Ana Lua Caiano’s debut album, Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado, lasts for more than three minutes, and yet each individual piece feels less like a pop song and more like a technically complex and emotionally charged exercise in musical bricolage. Caiano reaches back into Portuguese folk music and sideways into avant-garde composition but claws her influences back into a dense, bright centre: the star in her musical galaxy is her unerring sense of melody, which means that every track transcends the merely interesting and becomes genuinely invigorating and soulful.

The unbridled creativity on show throughout the entirety of Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado looks set to be Ana Lua Caiano’s calling card, but despite all the rapid-fire changes of pace, all the sonic volte-faces and surprising tricks of production, there always exists a core of melody that references Portugal’s musical heritage and anchors these experiments in the world of popular song. It’s a heady combination, and it makes for a remarkably assured and highly individual debut.

Georgia Ruth – Cool Head

Since winning the Welsh Music Prize for her 2013 debut, Week of Pines, Georgia Ruth‘s albums have come at regular but leisurely intervals. Fossil Scale was released in 2016, followed by 2020’s Mai, her first album for Cardiff-based indie Bubblewrap Collective. From the start, she has cultivated a marriage of delicate folk-pop melodies with classic singer-songwriter appeal. Over the course of the decade, she has added further elements to her sound, with each subsequent release delving further into psychedelia, weird folk, synth-pop, lo-fi aesthetics and the Welsh language. Cool Head, her second album for Bubblewrap, is defined by the combination of subtle experimentation, highly accessible melodies and clever, heartfelt lyrics that have always been her forte. 

An awful lot has happened in Georgia Ruth’s personal life and in the world at large since her debut eleven years ago, but what hasn’t changed is her enviable gift for creating gorgeous, open-hearted folk songs full of intelligence, invention and emotional weight. Cool Head is an album with the feel of an instant classic about it, and is her strongest offering yet.

The Rheingans Sisters – Start Close In

…it’s not too far-fetched to suggest that The Rheingans Sisters were at the forefront of the recent upsurge in experimental, drone-led folk music espoused by the likes of Lankum and Burd Ellen. And on their new album, Start Close In, they embrace those urges more readily than ever. That mood of joyous experimentation suits Rowan and Anna Rheingans down to the ground: their songs are steeped in the traditions of European folk dance but equally inspired by the avant-garde leanings of John Cale and twentieth-century minimalism.

Start Close In is a political album, both in terms of the direct messages of its songs and in the fact that its traditional tunes are inclusive and global by nature. The music is excellent in its own right, of course, but it also seems to suggest that we should look to the future without forgetting the lessons of the past. It is fitting, then, that the final track is in itself a lesson from the past. Purcell’s comes from Henry Purcell and from a manuscript published in 1699. It is a sedate piece, ushering the album out in its own unhurried time. It almost seems to want to invite you back in for another listen, and it’s an invitation that you will find yourself accepting again and again because this is an endlessly fascinating, multi-faceted album. The Rheingans Sisters are approaching perfection from unusual angles, and they’re getting closer with every attempt.

Seckou Keita – Homeland (Chapter 1)

Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita has long been a killer collaborator, not least working with Welsh harpist Catrin Finch on three sublime albums, as well as a host of musicians on The Lost Words: Spell Songs and his Pan-African Projects, a venture that led directly to this album. Unsurprisingly, Homeland is peppered with guest artists, and the whole thing is a beautiful, buoyant celebration of life and place that was recorded in the UK, Germany, Belgium and Senegal and contains vocals in English, French, Mandinka and Wolof. The very spirit and scope on display epitomises Seckou’s approach to music as an art form with its arms thrown wide, inviting everybody to connect with it.

It’s clear from this first chapter of Homeland that Seckou Keita is here to take us on a musical journey; peppered with guest artists, the whole thing is a beautiful, buoyant celebration of life and place. Music this joyous and full of pathos is irresistible.

M G Boulter – Days of Shaking

Days of Shaking is a bold and mystical set, a record that manages to weld M G Boulter’s suburban, day-to-day life writing with some far-out outer space thinking that gives this song collection many chewy moments; anyone hoping to easily digest each track should think again, a lot is going on here. These songs are interconnected, weaved together by memory and folklore, friendly ghosts, imagined voices in the air and recollections of childhood UFO sightings; it is all about the mysteries of the unexplained and the natural world, meditating on how we make connections in our everyday lives in order to feel some purpose, a path or an enlightenment, whether real, imagined or simply hoped for.

…a record that takes a deep dive into the darkest corners and the toughest dreams and nightmares that visit in those nocturnal hours. It is a journey that displays stunning levels of conceptual actualisation and a satisfying record to be experienced as a whole, where both the collective mood and thoughts make connections and wrap around the entire excursion with consummate ease. M G Boulter has aimed high with this one and taken time to create a full-length work that demands, as well as rewards, deep immersion.

Six Organs of Admittance – Time is Glass

Returning to his home in Humboldt County, wedged between the Pacific and the mountains, Ben Chasny has embedded himself in a slower, more meditative way of life, creating music at his own pace and largely without distraction.

There is no such thing as ‘just another Six Organs Of Admittance album’. Ben Chasny’s career is one of constant progression (albeit a very cyclical progression, always aware of the growing importance of its own history, but wearing that importance lightly), and by the time we get to the sweetly psychedelic closing track, New Year’s Song, it’s clear that Time Is Glass is another perfectly shaped and uniquely coloured piece in the vast jigsaw puzzle of the Six Organs of Admittance back catalogue. The one apparently simple thing that has always made Chasny stand out from the crowd is his ability to create cerebral music that’s brimful of soul, and this album is a perfect example of that winning combination.

Black Decelerant – Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant

Black Decelerant – a duo consisting of producers Khari Lucas, aka Contour, and Omari Jazz – make a kind of music that they describe as improvisational jazz but which, in reality, ranges over a lot more ground than that tag implies.

Theoretical in its conception and yet broadly humanist in its appeal, Black Decelerant’s Reflections Vol. 2 serves as a timely reminder that music of resistance doesn’t have to be overly simple or one-dimensional. This is art as nuanced argument, challenging and often beautiful. It exists in multiple ways at once: in the image of its creators as a kind of obelisk marking the point at which art can diverge from capitalism, but also beyond the narrative of its making as a stunning, serene musical document that grows and evolves with each listen and according to the mood of each listener.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

Any album that approaches traditional music in an experimental way will be seen to be posing a question, and that question is, more often than not: What is folk music? Uniquely, the Shovel Dance Collective seem to have moved beyond the realm of boundary and definition into an inclusive, free-flowing, collaborational space where anything is permissible and where the meaning of a word or a phrase matters less than the creative processes that occur when two or six or nine people get together for the purpose of sharing ideas. For them, the question is not: What is folk music? but: How can we make it better?

A kind of avant-folk supergroup, but without any of the hubris that term implies, the Shovel Dance Collective are at the forefront of a new wave of traditional music, one which looks to the future and the past simultaneously. With their collaborational and often improvisational methods, they are changing the way folk music is created, putting an emphasis on its otherness, its queerness, its capacity for contemporary political comment and most importantly, its inclusivity. And what’s more, they are doing it with breathtaking, potent tunes.

Charlie Parr – Little Sun

…all Charlie’s albums, to this point, have been recorded live, often as one or first-take efforts with any minor errors or imperfections left in. But things have changed; ‘Little Sun’ is to be the first Parr album where the hand of a producer, Tucker Martine, is clearly in evidence and the first record in which the artist has explored the process with overdub touches and a more rounded, expansive band sound. As great as the ramshackle approach undoubtedly was, the end product does rather suggest this is a very welcome evolution.

Fans of Charlie Parr will hold this one up with the best of his catalogue, but with the attention-grabbing, easy-on-the-ear production of ‘Little Sun,’ there is a strong possibility for new converts to land at his door too. Anyone with an ear for singer-songwriters of an independent grain with a facility for turning their preoccupations into instantly classic-sounding songs will find much to love and admire in the music of Charlie Parr, and there might be no better place to start than right here.

Luke De-Sciscio – Theo

Using just a guitar, his voice, and one piano overdub, he paints a portrait attempting to explain what it means to be alive and responsible for the life of a child. While such an album could fall into over-sentimentality, De-Sciscio’s mastery of the guitar and the elegance of his pen leads the proceedings into a world of wonder, trying to make sense of moments that have irrevocably transformed his life.

Over the course of 11 songs, Luke De-Sciscio tackles the reality of parenthood in a remarkable collection of songs that distils the hopes and fears for an unknown future, what it means to be a father and what it means to be alive in the 21st century.

Rachel Newton – Sealladh

Machrihanish Bay is a wide, sweeping tract of sand just north of the Mull of Kintyre. It’s a remote place, the haunt of seabirds and the occasional intrepid tourist, a place where the importance of human history seems to recede and the present looms long and large. I went there twice, thirty years ago, when I was eleven, but hearing Rachel Newton’s Machrihanish Bay, a standout track from her new album Sealladh, opened up a wellspring of memories. Of course, it takes more than a field recording of some birds and the splash of some waves to accurately convey the feel of a particular place, but Newton manages with the most minimal, gentle of ingredients – delicate harp and a soft background cello hum – to build a perfectly evocative soundworld.

Harvest Moon, lit by the glow of nostalgia without being overly sentimental, is the album’s parting gift. It highlights Newton’s gift for subsuming visual reference points within a musical purview, coming up with melodies that are disarming, deceptively simple and utterly beautiful.

Elijah McLaughlin & Caleb Willitz – Morning Improvisations / Evening Abstractions

Wow, Morning Improvisations / Evening Abstractions, the debut collaboration from Chicago-based guitarist Elijah McLaughlin and fellow Chicagoan, recording engineer, producer and sound artist Caleb Willitz, is so packed full of creative ideas and endeavour that it defies you to switch off from it for a moment. 

This is some record; for experimental and improv fans, as well as jazz fiends, there is so much to enjoy, because every musician contributing is highly skilled and clearly more than up to the challenging task of creating intelligent improvised music. But the album goes further than that and delivers a listening experience that is also simply pleasurable without picking it apart. It is an ace, energising recording that has something for everyone.

The Memory Band – Never the Same Way Twice/A Common Treasury

Never the Same Way Twice from Stephen Cracknell’s The Memory Band, marked the twentieth anniversary of their debut EP. Cracknell’s curation of these previously unreleased recordings presents a tantalising glimpse of two decades of hauntological and heartfelt collective excursions across time and the ancient and magical British landscape—it’s an irresistible journey.

The second volume of unreleased material from across The Memory Band’s archives, A Common Treasury, drops on the winter solstice (21st December), a review is to follow shortly but it felt only right that we include both here. Cracknell tells us that while Never The Same Way Twice was an edited journey threading back to our earliest origins employing field recordings and spoken word elements, A Common Treasury is more reflective of the song-based side of our repertoire and leans towards material of a more recent vintage (it’s also their first cassette release).

Cerys Hafana – The Bitter

Welsh composer and multi-instrumentalist Cerys Hafana made a lasting impression with her 2022 album Edyf – creating a sound that is simultaneously ancient in feel yet intriguingly modern with a vital 21st-century edginess. Her video for traditional Child murder ballad Child Owlet premiered on KLOF and demonstrated what she could acheive when restricted to “instruments and sounds I could find in my bedroom or on my laptop”. The remainder of this EP was no less tantalizing, and a clear demonstration of how Hafana is constantly inventing and pushing boundaries in her unique interpretations.

Elkhorn & Mike Gangloff – Shackamaxon Concert

This dropped in February 2024 – recorded live in 2022 by East-Coast psychedelic combo Elkhorn and Pelt’s Mike Gangloff, laying down two epic raga-like performances captured on a collaborative tour. A track featured in one of our early KLOF mixtapes of the year where we embraced the longform greateness of these two.

Chris Corsano – The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away])

Chris Corsano has been spoiling us. There barely seems to be a month that goes by without a new release featuring the New York-based drummer’s extensive talents. The list of people he has collaborated with is mind-boggling…Corsano is also a highly skilled composer and improviser in his own right, and some of his most impressive music can be found on the six solo albums he has released since 2006’s The Young Cricketer. The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) is a solo record in every sense: Corsano plays every instrument and is responsible for the mixing and the record’s cover art.

The overall sound of The Key tends toward a hard-edged, rocky sub-species of post-punk, but in Corsano’s hands, everything is up for grabs, and those genres become mutable and malleable. This is an album of freewheeling creative fervour, indebted to the worlds of free improv and jazz. Not a moment of it is anything less than engaging, and it is frequently astonishing.

David Grubb – Circadia

David Grubb has created a wealth of music transcending traditional labels. While he’s called his music “post-folk,” that hardly scratches the surface of what emerges on Circadia. David Grubb finds musical challenges in unusual places, and on Circadia, he wordlessly depicts our dreamworlds, shining a light on a time when who we are and what we know mysteriously stirs the mind while the body rests.

Laura J Martin – Prepared

Liverpool songwriter Laura J Martin’s Prepared is heavily influenced by Maggi’s Flute, one of Joanna Brouk’s most beautiful, nuanced pieces. Rather than impacting on the album in a concrete way, this influence takes shape in the mood of Prepared’s overall soundworld, in its subtleties and looseness and the way it plays with time. The title track begins with a shimmering drone but soon reconfigures itself with a simple piano figure and some expansive, 80s-inspired synthesised drums. Martin’s vocals are sweet and slightly detached, and the piece sits somewhere between Brouk and the ludic pastoralia of Virginia Astley’s Hope In A Darkened Heart (and, by association, the dreamy electronics of Astley’s producer Ryuichi Sakamoto).

Prepared is her strongest, strangest and most distinctive work yet, and proof that after an eight-year break, good things come to those who wait.

Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman – Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On

Although on the face of it, Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On is a head-on collision between Andrew Wasylyk’s downbeat neoclassical folktronica and Tommy Perman’s post-club, percussion-heavy ambient constructions, under the surface there is the faint but delicious hint of the golden age of avant-garde music.

Wasylyk and Perman have both been stalwarts of the Scottish music scene for a while now and given their shared interests and their history of working together on other projects, it seems surprising that this is their first full-length collaboration as a duo. But given how effectively Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On combines warmth of spirit with a genuine flair for exploratory sounds, it would be no surprise at all – and an absolute joy – to see them continuing their work as a duo.

Trá Pháidín – An 424

This was among my most played albums of 2024. There is a sense of journey here, and, for want of a less wishy-washy phrase, a sense of oneness with the natural world. Unsurprising really, because the album is in part a reaction to the pioneering psychogeographical work of author, artist and cartographer Tim Robinson, who famously wandered the shores of Connemara, creating a hyper-detailed visual and written record of the area as he went. Using Robinson’s working practice as a kind of guide, Trá Pháidín travel South Connemara’s 424 bus route, creating a musical map that incorporates elements of Irish traditional music, earthy psych, ambient, kraut, free jazz, post rock, field recording and just about anything else you care to mention.

For a nine-piece collective with such a wide range of influences, Trá Pháidín make an impressively unified sound. Of course, different styles slither in and out of each piece, but it all serves the same sonic endpoint. The experimental end of Irish music is having a real moment: acts like Lankum, ØXN, Landless and John Francis Flynn are all experiencing critical acclaim and commercial success. The common denominator in those acts is the production work of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, and his involvement is invariably a mark of quality. His work with Trá Pháidín is another winner: An 424 is a brilliantly diverse and highly original record, introducing elements of topography and sociology into a kind of DIY avant-garde folk music with results that are always entertaining and never stuffy or overly academic.

D.C Cross – Glookies Guit

From the first bar, there is no mistaking Cross’s impeccably picked notes, making complex patterns sound simple and fluid, but the pacing here is deliberately slower, and the minor key lines give the music that hint of melancholy he refers to in the notes.

D.C Cross is a musician who seems to want to give us more than a set of instrumental songs. As with the humorous studies that make up Hot-wire the Lay-low and Wizrad, Glookies Guit encourages deciphering of song titles, as well as deep listening to nuanced playing, interspersed field recordings and ambient tracks. It makes for a rich listen to music with depth and character. As I mentioned above, Glookies is a more serious and no-frills record in the structure of the guitar playing, with Cross happy to allow the beauty of the tunes to shine. The result is undoubtedly his most accomplished work to date: a memorable acoustic guitar album.

Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle

Weaver’s new album evokes spectacular imagery and distils the artists’ vision in its purest form, elevating her inimitable sound and poetic vision to new heights. Recapturing the melancholy of her early work whilst propelling it forward, she sketches scenes as we watch new colours, shapes and languages emerge and fill the frame. Love In Constant Spectacle is Weaver’s first album since 2021’s unanimously lauded ‘Flock’ and sees her take measured steps towards a vivid, dreamlike record, that offers resolve in the face of life’s inevitability.

Josienne Clarke – Parenthesis, I

The songs are delicate on the surface, but there is deception in that first-take impression, as Josienne’s performances and writing possess a deep intensity. I do find some artists in this grain of personal, semi-confessional music almost too oppressively sincere and stiflingly polite, but this does not apply to Josienne; for the last five years, there has been a real bite and punch to her music, and she backs her fighting talk up with gorgeous bittersweet tunes.

Naima Bock – Below a Massive Dark Land

For her second album, Below a Massive Dark Land, her songwriting talent and her willingness to experiment with unconventional musical forms haven’t dimmed. If anything, Below a Massive Dark Land features an even wider range of styles and influences than its predecessor. She also decided to do all of her own arrangements, a leap into the dark, which was apparently aided by learning to play the violin. The result is an idiosyncratic, confident-sounding approach to music-making that seems to laugh in the face of the very notion of genre. 

…wonder appears to be a common reaction to Bock’s music. That’s because of the risks she takes: the songs on Below a Massive Dark Land play with the idea of structure in such an original way that they end up sounding like everything and nothing else on Earth. It’s an album full of antic juxtapositions and barely recognisable shapes, but it deals with serious themes, and it confirms Naima Bock as a major songwriter.

Ava Mendoza – The Circular Train

Ava Mendoza is a virtuosic electric guitar player out of Brooklyn, best known for her work as part of the Bill Orcutt Quartet and experimental rock trio Unnatural Ways, but also for playing with big hitters like Nels Cline, Fred Frith and Carla Bozulich, among others. It’s hard to pin down Ava’s style, seemingly because she is adept in so many areas of guitar playing, as it becomes clear when you listen to The Circular Train, her second solo LP of charged avant garde rock, blues and jazz music. It’s no frills, no pretensions and totally ace.

Jack Cheshire – Interloper

Jack Cheshire transportive sixth album, ‘INTERLOPER’, explores themes of escapism and dissociation amid societal decay – conjuring multi-layered, mesmeric psych pop with cinematic flourishes, hypnotic rhythms and hallucinatory imagery to dazzling effect. 

Milkweed – Folklore 1979

Folklore 1979, like their previous two releases, uses written source material, serendipitously obtained, as a kind of rough ore from which they extract lyrics. These are then turned into short songs that draw on Appalachian and British folk, experimental electronics and a kind of warped plunderphonic hip-hop aesthetic to create something that sounds, quite simply, like nothing else in the world. In this case, the source text is a 1979 academic journal published by The Folklore Society. The words, whittled down to nine semi-distinct songs over eleven minutes, include a spoken recording called The Legend of the Pacing White Mustang, which discusses the strange evolutionary fate of North America’s wild horses.

It’s one of the most invigorating and interesting releases of recent years. The duo, with their insistence on the temporary nature of their work and the denial of authorship, would no doubt balk at the term masterpiece, but for as long as Folklore 1979 exists in the world, it will have to contend with such labels.

Daisy Rickman – Howl

Daisy Rickman is a painter as well as a musician, and it shows: her music is uniquely visual, and each song on her new album Howl seems to invent new and dreamlike colours. She is clearly indebted to the strange light of Cornwall’s ancient landscapes, and these songs seem to reflect or refract that light into sparkling, lapidary patterns or hazy vistas. In an alternative reality where Nico teamed up with the Incredible String Band instead of the Velvet Underground, we might have had something that approaches the anxious bliss and incantatory majesty of Howl, but as it is, there is very little in the history of popular music to prepare us for these ten utterly beguiling compositions.

Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II

Everything here is improvised, and like much improvised music, it embodies an apparent paradox: on the one hand, the relationship between the musicians is deep enough for them to create art out of a place of profound relaxation, but then again, there is always tension, or at least its implication, when a group attempts to make music without preparation or without formal constraint. Ambarchi’s trio seem happy to explore this paradoxical realm, and they do so from a different angle on each composition.

…it’s an enriching, multi-layered and almost indecently accomplished album.   

Olivia Chaney – Circus of Desire

There is an alluring, timeless quality to everything Olivia Chaney does. The formula is relatively simple: folk-adjacent piano or guitar balladry, occasionally topped off with a nod to the psychedelia Chaney embraced earlier in her career. But the devil is in the detail, or, more pertinently, the delivery. Chaney’s most outwardly noticeable attribute is her voice – redolent of the very best folk singers of the past, but clipped by something bordering on the classical – but it’s the way she puts that voice to use that really impresses on her third studio album Circus of Desire. A combination of restraint and abandon characterises these songs. Restraint implies a kind of tension, and it is the controlled release of this tension that makes Chaney’s singing – and her arrangements – so admirable.

…She even finds space for a cover of Dory Previn’s Lady With the Braid, perfectly capturing the combination of endearing looseness and specific detail of the original while peppering it with atmospheric piano. These surprising moments are the icing on the cake of an album of great maturity, crystalline beauty and sometimes painful self-knowledge, one that marks Olivia Chaney out as one of our finest singers and one of our most valuable and accomplished songwriters.   

Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange?

Even experimental music has its conventions. Within the genre’s sphere, there are poles of minimalism, microtonality, noise, ambience, deconstructed clatter and pillowy hypnagogics, all of which have their adherents and all of which have been fertile breeding grounds for any number of beautiful or groundbreaking works of art. Tashi Wada has always been slightly different. His music takes aim at a point just beyond a recognised convention or cluster of conventions. His drones are more than drones: they squirm and pulse, modulate and stridulate. His melodies are open to the influence of chamber music and pop but always seem to dodge their final destination and end up somewhere far more interesting. His loops are broken in unexpected places.

That the New York-born, LA-based Tashi Wada should take a playful, fluid approach to his practice should come as no surprise: his father, Yoshi Wada was a leading figure in Fluxus, the movement of avant-garde pranksters that grew up around the loosely affiliated ideas of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, La Monte Young, Marcel Duchamp and George Brecht, while his mother is the visual artist and gallery owner Marilyn Bogerd. The music on What Is Not Strange? was conceived and composed in the wake of his father’s death and the birth of his daughter in 2021, and these events influence the mood, and most likely the literal content, of the album.

With What Is Not Strange? Tashi Wada has announced himself as a truly distinctive voice, capable of creating experimental music on the most human level.

Oisín Leech – Cold Sea

On Cold Sea, along with guitarist-producer Steve Gunn, Oisín Leech also invited Bob Dylan’s bassist Tony Garnier and the likes of Dónal Lunny (bouzouki) and Róisin McGrory (strings) on board. Not that the outcome sounds like a full-on band, for the musicians add subtly to Leech’s acoustic material. What’s left is an album of rapt meditations on life and love, set against the wild Irish landscape. These are songs that flow placidly, broodingly, leaving the listener awed into silence.

Leech’s vision of Ireland as a place to heal and transform makes Cold Sea a sanctuary well worth visiting. Just don’t expect the Donegal weather to welcome you so warmly.

SAICOBAB – NRTYA

SAICOBAB’s contorted ragas are, in reality, unerringly tight and played with real passion and melodic aplomb. Of course, it helps when your band is a four-headed beast birthed from the fertile soup of Japan’s underground music scene. SAICOBAB’s vocalist is YoshimiO, best known for her work in avant-rock icons OOIOO and Boredoms. She is joined by sitar master and instrument maker Yoshida Daikiti, who has previously worked with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke. Percussion is provided by Japanese experimental multi-instrumentalist Motoyuki “Hama” Hamamoto and Boredoms drummer Yojiro “YO2RO” Tatekawa.

These songs are labyrinths, confounding but highly decorative, a surprise around every corner. Importantly, the decoration is integral to the structure. The intricacy of the sitar on Death Nap The Dance, for example, is not merely cosmetic. Its form is its function, and that function is, among other things, the quickfire transmission of ideas. The impish, fluid closing track, Dancing Fish In The Rain, builds into something resembling a resounding chorus, perhaps the greatest surprise of all on an album that makes a glorious spectacle of the unexpected.

Moris Tepper – Building A Nest

Moris Tepper is a man with talent to burn and tales to tell. A songwriter and visual artist, he is probably best known as a guitarist; he started playing with Captain Beefheart in the 1970s, also serving with Tom Waits, Frank Black, Robyn Hitchcock and PJ Harvey.

Fourteen years have passed since the release of his last album, but rather than questioning what took so long, one needs to revel in the variety of musicianship on display across Building A Nest. Over the course of 21 songs, the album twists and turns on a dime, going from heartfelt to heartbroken, mixing intimate folk ballads with cigar-box blues, and stylistically covering everything from bawdy to Beatlesque. It covers more ground than many artists do in a lifetime… it marks a welcome return from a man who has been away from the scene for far too long.

Isik Kural – Moon in Gemini

Isik Kural’s music draws up interesting and unexpected boundaries. On one hand, it is comforting, at times almost soporific, but on another, it feeds off the exhilaration of the uncanny, airbrushing one genre or style over another or mixing two that normally wouldn’t want to be mixed. Part of this willingness to try out unlikely combinations might come from Kural’s peripatetic past – Turkish by birth, he studied music in Miami and Helsinki and is now based in Glasgow – and part of it almost certainly comes from his wide-ranging tastes, not only in music but also in literature and art.

It’s evidently too simple to apply a single label to the whole of Moon in Gemini, and it’s also insufficient to tie it to a single mood or feeling. At times, it is pensive or meditative, but that doesn’t fit consistently: there are too many ideas flying around for that to be the case, too much invention. Quietly and with a distinct emphasis on care, Isik Kural has made one of the year’s most varied and rewarding albums.

Kaia Kater – Strange Medicine

It says something about the multilayered qualities of Canadian songwriter Kaia Kater’s fourth album, Strange Medicine, that it’s hard to know where to start when writing about it. You could start with the soulful singing or the effortless combination of the political and the personal in the lyrics. Or you could start with the music, the elements of sweet, soulful pop, Appalachian folk, psychedelia. But the whole record has such an organic, complete feel to it that it deserves to be written about with, for want of a better term, holistic focus. Strange Medicine thrives on difference and synthesis.

It is her strongest, most diverse and most complete album to date, an angry, hopeful triumph from an utterly distinctive songwriter.

Stick in the Wheel – A Thousand Pokes

Stick in the Wheel’s Ian Carter and Nicola Kearey do folk music a little bit differently to anyone else. Where in the past, there have been arguments about the relative merits of conserving folk traditions and modernising the genre, the duo go several steps beyond that debate. They recognise that the act of making folk music has ethical and political connotations and that collecting and conserving songs often reinforces stereotypes and strengthens unequal social structures. As a result, their music has always tilted at a forceful, thrilling kind of modernism, something rooted in their own London locality but whose message is entirely universal. Their songs ring with the joy of specificity and detail, the ferocious joy of marginalised voices making themselves heard, the angry joy of people reclaiming their heritage.

A Thousand Pokes is the most potent expression of that anger and joy yet. 

James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg – All Gist

These ten songs were cut during two three-day sessions in Chicago, and the feeling from the finished article is of a pain-free process, with the playing across the board being deceptively relaxed and unassuming. But, of course, there is plenty of chops and prowess hidden beneath the surface.

Both James and Nathan are known for putting out intelligent, thought-provoking music, and All Gist is the finest example of their skills as a duo so far—a wonderfully soothing recording of top-level musicianship.

Dana Gavanski – Late Slap

Gavanski’s Late Slap, bursts with risky moments. There are songs here – and plenty of them – that are unlike anything else in her back catalogue. It’s not so much a change in style but an urge to push every song a little further in its natural direction of travel: things seem both more polished and closer to some unknown edge. 

There is a surprise around every one of Late Slap’s many corners, from the driving art-rock of Dark Side to the playful, Eastern-influenced melodies that balance out the soul-searching lyrics of Reiteration. These surprises are born from risk, and when an artist foregrounds their risk-taking this way, it really has to come off. In Gavanski’s case, it does so spectacularly. Late Slap is a detailed and accomplished work with a fleshy and often complex sound which never gets in the way of the inherently airy melodicism.

Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton – Anna Bhàn

Rachel Newton and Mairearad Green are both well-known and highly respected members of the Scottish folk music scene and have moved in similar circles for the last decade or so, both creating distinctive and often boundary-pushing folk music which often touches on their shared Gaelic heritage. The fact that they are also cousins made it all the more likely that they would, at some point, come together to make an album as a duo. But the familial bond which underpins Anna Bhàn is more than just a partnership of convenience: the album is dedicated to (and, in part, based on the life of) their shared great-great-grandmother. Anna lived on the highland peninsula of Coigach at a time when the landscape and people’s relationship to it was changing at an unprecedented rate. This was particularly true of Scotland, where the Highland Clearances forced many rural working people – mainly tenant farmers and their families – away from their land in the name of agricultural improvement.

Anna Bhàn’s is not about nostalgia, it’s more than just a simple document of a time long gone. It is history in the very living sense of the word, ripe and ardent, and not afraid to look forward.   

Adam Ross – Littoral Zone

Littoral Zone’s attention to sonic detail is partly enabled by producer and instrumentalist Andrew Wasylyk, who adds a unique depth of sound to any recording he’s involved in. Ross composed Littoral Zone on piano, and Wasylyk creates a subtly experimental musical bedrock, indebted to folktronica and trip-hop, which gives spaces for melancholic keys and then dampened bursts of brass to speak their minds. But if the sound is partly down to Wasylyk, the lyrics are all Ross’s work, and this is where he really excels.

Littoral Zone feels like a landmark album in Adam Ross’s career, a kind of synthesis of the most impressive elements of his full band and solo work up until this point. Those in the know have long been aware of his immense gifts as a songwriter; in a fair world, this literate, funny, humane album would cement his status as a national treasure.

Andrew Tuttle, Michael Chapman – Another Tide, Another Fish

Back in 2015, Michael Chapman released Fish (reviewed here by Nick Dellar), a record of guitar instrumentals that he intended to revisit with Another Fish, a project that was sadly unfinished when he died in 2021. Since then, Michael’s widow Andru has discovered the wonderful music of Australian banjoist and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Tuttle, particularly his 2022 Fleeting Adventure album, one of my very favourites. The pair met in Brisbane to discuss a fascinating project, something of an abstract covers album, where Andrew reinterprets Michael’s Another Fish tunes and puts them alongside the original compositions. And thus we have Another Tide, Another Fish.

Another Tide is an intelligent, intuitive album that demonstrates the inquisitive nature of this highly creative musician while retaining the spirit of the late great Michael Chapman’s previously unreleased album. And Another Fish, although considered unfinished, feels complete and shows Michael’s subtle psychedelic music at its best.

The Decemberists – As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is absolutely a record packed with highlights. I have enjoyed several listens now and feel safe in my assertion that there is not a weak song on this album; the bar is set extremely high. William Fitzwilliam is a chewy country ballad…The Black Maria and Long White Veil are the centrepieces to the record’s heaviest moments…All I Want Is You is a gentle and beautiful ode with a simple, universal sentiment, whilst America Made Me feels like a timely fist-pumping jingoist anthem ripe for misinterpretation in such a crazy political era within the US. So much ground is covered here, making it a wise move that each of the four vinyl record sides has a distinct theme and tonal feel. They really have captured everything that was always wonderful about the Decemberists on this release, and just maybe, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again might, over time, endure as the go-to album for a fully loaded taste of their essence.

Niamh Regan – Come As You Are

Come As You Are, Niamh Regan’s second album, is a timely stand against the unprofitable conditions for musicians in Ireland today. It is a wholehearted appeal to everyone – listeners, officials, friends, lovers, and the public at large – to wake up and support her and others on their journey. At the same time, her sound marks an important shift from 2020’s Hemet, as it shifts from pared-down indie folk to post-garage and, in the case of one song, minimal house.

Deft, bare, and quietly portentous, Come As You Are is a brutally authentic work from a songwriter of the highest order.

The playing throughout is faultless, but what impresses most is the restraint. No notes are wasted here; all decisions to enhance the song with instrumental flourishes land. This is an excellent record from a master of his craft.

Bonny Light Horseman – Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free

For Bonny Light Horseman, Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free is a real exemplar of creative spontaneity – and it’s also the case that the band have avoided the curse of many double albums, which often manage to outstay their welcome. While the impromptu nature of the recording sessions means the eighteen tracks on this record are somewhat sprawling in nature, there’s still no real diminution in the standard of the compositions throughout – clocking in at just over 60 minutes. 

This album eclipses the already high standard of their previous two albums and demonstrates the value of genuine improvisation in popular music and the unique natural chemistry at the heart of Bonny Light Horseman.

Jacken Elswyth – At Fargrounds

It doesn’t really matter whether Jacken Elswyth is a folk musician delving into contemporary techniques or an experimental improviser reaching back to traditional forms. Perhaps she is both, or neither, and the important thing is the music which she has shown can exist simultaneously in the past and in the future through the physical and symbolic body of the banjo. At Fargrounds is one of those albums that stops you in your tracks not once but twice: firstly, with the sheer excellence of Elswyth’s playing and then, if you dig a little deeper, with the breadth of its implications. This is instrumental music that has a lot to say, and it says it with verve, lightness and great skill.

Landless – L​ú​ireach

At the heart of Landless’s immense appeal is their talent as vocalists and harmonists. They have an uncanny ability for making a combination of two or more voices sound unearthly or joyous or resolved or sad, and the result is an album of apparent simplicity which in fact has countless different sides to it. Lúireach is a reliquary of rich, dramatic tales and a celebration of resolutely feminist togetherness, and it is yet another triumph for the fantastically productive Irish folk scene.

Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin – Symbiont

‘Symbiont’ is presented as an album with two distinct acts, playing out as a dialogue between the ancient and the anterior. We are thrown knee-deep into the rolling waves of an audio representation of a world submitting to the reality of rising tides and unparalleled droughts as the wider populace go about their daily lives shrugging in indifference. It gets right to where the fight is right now, battling the avalanche of climate deniers as they come tumbling down the stairs hell-bent on halting humanity’s battle for survival. On this, Jake and Mali comment, “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperilling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky. The music of ‘Symbiont’ is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”

This is a daring album in which the apparently incompatible make for perfect bedfellows. Blount’s background in pioneering Black folk music interpretation and Afrofuturism inspire and are inspired by the free jazz experimentalism from which Obomsawin has risen. You cannot really nail down exactly what this magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion really is, let alone where it came from and how it works so wonderfully well. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth itself when you come to think of it.

Shane Parish – Repertoire

Repertoire, a hot release from Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label, sees guitar intellectual Shane Parish flex across fourteen cover songs arranged for acoustic guitar inside a tidy thirty-two minutes, a detail very much in keeping with Bill’s own music, which never outstays its welcome. Here, he goes it alone, and the resulting set is quietly satisfying and the playing subtly virtuosic.

Single-handedly he tackles Journey in Satchidananda, one of Alice Coltrane’s masterpieces, a spellbinding piece of music for harp, soprano saxophone, bass and percussion. Folly, you might think, but this little gem manages to both pay tribute to and encapsulate the magic of the piece inside a fraction of the original’s run time. What Shane does here is give the listener the essential bones of the piece while maintaining its magic. It works beautifully alongside the original, encouraging the listener to seek it out, as I would encourage anybody to check out this excellent collection of beautifully performed songs.

John Patrick Elliott – My Role in the Show

John Patrick Elliott is a songwriter whose band, The Little Unsaid, make some of the most soul-searching, brutally self-aware music around, so perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a shock to discover that his first solo album, My Role in the Show, is profoundly, intensely personal. Elliott’s great strength as a songwriter – or one of his great strengths, as he has many – is his ability to examine open psychological wounds with precision, clarity and honesty, and in a solo setting, these examinations are brought into even sharper focus.

He is an expert when it comes to…making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career. 

AJ Woods – Hawk Is Listenin’

With a voice that echoes the spirit of Neil Young and a profound connection to the desert southwest of New Mexico, AJ Woods brings a personal touch to his music. Hawk is Listenin’ is a diverse collection of songs that reflect his deep understanding of the region. It’s not about a single sound but a rich tapestry of musical forms that he has mastered, from acoustic and electric guitars to bass and harmonica. His collaborations with friends from bands like the Sir Douglas Quintet, Beirut, Neutral Milk Hotel, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw add depth and soul to his music.

Hawk is Listenin’ explores the haunted moments of those who have lived in this part of the world. More than a lesson in another way of life, it looks inside the soul, pouring out the music that infects its inhabitants.

Jerron Paxton – Things Done Changed

…fatalism is shot through, as everything is on this raw and wonderful record, with a fire in its belly and grit between its teeth. In so many ways, past sounds have never sounded so thoroughly born of the present. Jerron Paxton is undoubtedly in a league of his own with this; Things Done Changed is a finely crafted album for today made oh so skilfully with the tools of yesterday.

Bill Callahan – Resuscitate!

Bill Callahan is one of those serious songwriters. Sure, he tells jokes, and his songs often rely on what you might call comic timing. But his songwriting has a Message and a Truth. It’s Big, and it’s Clever. He’s Leonard Cohen with Paul Auster’s self-knowing postmodernism and Johnny Cash’s charred heart. If you look back over his (frankly astonishing) recording history, you can trace, through his lyrical preoccupations, something like a conventional career trajectory. But what we sometimes forget about Callahan is the music. In recent years, he has surrounded himself with some of the best musicians on the avant-garde and experimental folk scenes, and the results of these collaborations are often best appreciated in a live setting.

…it’s hard to walk away from this album without a smile on your face. Exploratory and constantly changing, Resuscitate! is serious music that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Julian Taylor – Pathways

2020’s The Ridge earned Julian Taylor a Juno award as Solo Artist of the Year, and 2022’s Beyond The Reservoir gained him a second nomination and three for this year’s Canadian Folk Music Awards; now, with Pathways, Julian Taylor ranks alongside fellow Canadian folk music luminaries Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell. If this is about letting go of burdens, long may he lay down his weary tune.

Gastr del Sol – We Have Dozens of Titles

Listening back to Camoufleur, Gastr Del Sol’s fifth and final studio album, the most striking thing is how fresh it still sounds a quarter of a century later. The range of ideas on show is almost obscene, and the way it incorporates elements of post rock, chamber pop, glitchy electronica and folk is impressively prescient. But really, what else would you expect from David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke, two of the biggest hitters in Chicago’s fertile end-of-the-century music scene? Camoufleur’s lead track, The Seasons Reverse, is also the first song on We Have Dozens of Titles, a kind of alternative history of Gastr Del Sol, consisting of vastly changed-up live performances and hard-to-find studio gems taken from EPs, singles and compilations.

Gastr Del Sol’s importance to the musical landscape of the last thirty years has been absolutely massive, so it’s right that any new release should be met with excitement. When it’s this good it should also be met with the highest of praise.

New Starts – More Break-Up Songs

With his new project – a poppy, rocky four-piece – Darren Hayman seems to have gone back to basics, by which I mean back to the blueprint that made the first two Hefner albums so damn loveable. For one thing, they’re called New Starts – no messing around there – and their first album together is a collection of songs about the end of a relationship. It’s too easy to say that More Break-Up Songs is The Fidelity Wars 2.0, because New Starts and Hefner are very different bands, and because a fifty-something Hayman approaches the subject of heartbreak differently to his twenty-something self.

…For all the characteristic cleverness here, what strikes you is a kind of quiet determination. Remember when that horrible Keep Calm and Carry On slogan was everywhere? Well, if we’d all had Darren Hayman’s lyrics printed on our egg cups and baby-grows, we might all be a bit better off now.

Itasca – Imitation of War

…Proceedings close with Olympia standing at the shore, and once more, we are left with the stretched and tangled incertitude of Cohen’s music, a smoky melange of thoughts, images, wisdom and wonder pulled from the past to speak to us today. It is a record that sounds both rooted in history yet alive and breathing as it responds and feels a way through the present-day traumas that engulf us. Ultimately, the move that Itasca executes best is the way her music can stimulate thoughts, moods and feelings without any desire to land on resolutions; everything is about the moment, then you move onto the next. Imitation of War is an album overflowing in wonderous moments.

Laraaji, Agnes Martian, Music for Connection, Hair and Space Museum – Coincidence

The album Coincidence came about when four distinct musical entities managed – more by luck than judgment – to share some recording time together. The original plan was for free-improv ambient experimentalists Music For Connection to join forces with out-there space-jazzers Agnes Martian at Beauty Supply Arts, a community space and recording studio in Oakland. As is often the case in this kind of place, other musicians started to drop in. Laraaji, whose work skirts the jazzier edges of new age and sacred music, sat in on piano and vocal duties, while the duo Hair and Space Museum (Emily Pothast and David Golightly) provided more vocals, synths and various studio effects.

It’s a record bursting with the joy of spontaneous creativity. Its long, improvised pieces never fall into a rut, and every minute of this album is delightfully different from the last. It is both an uncompromising demonstration of free and experimental spiritual jazz and a document attesting to the power of collaboration.

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Gabriel Birnbaum seems to have mastered the art of writing songs with a deceptive simplicity on Patron Saint of Tireless Losers. Hiding somewhere behind the curtain are lyrics that have been poked and prodded until they have met their current form, teaming with music that defies categorization and don’t conform; bits and pieces of lyrics and dreams spill out of them, dodging and weaving any attempt to be pigeonholed.

Serious Sam Barrett – A Drop of the Morning Dew

The title of Serious Sam Barrett‘s new live album ‘A Drop of the Morning Dew‘ was taken from the advice of a regular at the Bacca Pipes folk club in Keighley, Yorkshire, where the album was recorded. One of the regulars told Barrett that the secret to keep looking young was to rub morning dew on your face. The album celebrates Barrett’s 20 years plying his trade with live renditions of 11 originals from his repertoire, two from his out-of-print debut,  and seven traditionals, all featuring just his voice and 12-string guitar. …the rousing applause at the end is ample evidence of how much the audience enjoyed his music. If you’ve not seen him play live, A Drop of the Morning Dew will most certainly persuade you that you should.

Dave Malkin & Louis Campbell – Bird on a Briar

Bird on a Briar is a six-song set focusing on the role of the six-string guitar in English traditional music, which in this case means two British made flat top acoustics (one by Fylde in Cumbria, the other by Atkin in Kent) operating alone, with no overdubs or gimmicks, just two plectrums. Of course, with this level of simplicity, the music needs to stand up, which is never going to be a problem for two musicians with the breadth of knowledge of traditional music as these two. 

This EP is a joy, and at eighteen minutes long, you’ll find yourself keeping it on repeat and quietly gorging on its beautifully nuanced, balanced playing, full of respect for the music and quiet confidence in its execution. 

Kevin Coleman – Imaginary Conversations

It may contain only three tracks, but Imaginary Conversations is one of the most varied albums of the year so far, moving in all sorts of unexpected directions and full of satisfying shifts and conclusions. If Coleman is interested in opening up new pathways for guitar music, he is certainly going about it the right way. This is a sweeping and stunningly accomplished album, brimming with ideas, and it offers a glimpse into multiple potential futures for American folk music.

The Holy Grail: Bill Callahan​’​s “Smog” Dec. 10, 2001 Peel Session

How could we resists…In the words of Drag City, The Holy Grail is the mythical relic from that very Peel Session, with Callahan & band (Jessica Billey, Mike Saenz and Jim White) covering Stevie Nicks, Lou Reed and Smog with grey, ashen resolve and tour-torn flexibility — amassing a bruised, plaintive essence of humanity with their efforts.

Ross Ainslie – Pool

As that first track shows, Ainslie is capable of bringing hugely varied influences together in a single place, and to achieve that variety he has enlisted the help of seventeen other musicians, including the Sanctuary Band, an eight-strong collectives which has provided the core sound to all three albums of the trilogy (Pool, 2017’s Sanctuary and 2020’s Vana). The true genius of Pool lies in how it reconciles its stylistically varied individual tracks with an overall mood that remains consistent – and consistently engaging – over its whole run time. Ainslie’s goal is to make the listener actually listen. It’s harder than it might seem, but he has pulled it off with panache, originality and an often breathtaking range of musical invention. 

Iona Lane – Bring The Tide In

Bring The Tide In is an EP follow-up to Iona Lane‘s debut album, Hallival, one of KLOF Mag’s top albums of 2022. Iona is joined by Malin Lewis on fiddle and synth, Euan Burton on double bass and Lucy Farrell on backing vocals. It finds the Glasgow-based singer in a reflective mood with the EP’s landscape-themed imagery inspired by places with personal resonances.

Bring The Tide In is a rather lovely ebb-and-flow quartet of poignancy-tinged songs that serve as a reminder of Iona Lane’s luminescent talent and is hopefully an early signpost of a new album in the not-too-distant future.

The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers

With Midwinter Swimmers, The Innocence Mission continue the trend of creating albums of sparkling clarity and coherent vision. The quality is always unfalteringly high throughout, and the tonal and thematic shifts provide enough progression to make every new album essential. This is no exception.

Goblin Band – Come Slack Your Horse!

Come Slack Your Horse! is a true landmark release from Goblin Band. Both timeless and equally refreshing in their approach to folk music, their approach and delivery draws stong (and by its nature political) lines from the past to todays contemporary society. Like other like-minded groups such as Craven, their approach to performance and connecting with their audience has more in common with the open inclusivity of underground DIY scene.

Lee Baggett – Waves for a Begull

Aptly described by Bob Fish as an antidote for these times, this was another gem from the Perpetual Doom label, who described it as a guitar-fueled journey packed with fuzzy riffs and jams thicker than coastal fog…It’s as if the guitars drift through a dream, the drums pulse in the background, and Lee’s voice recalls the peace of a long, winding vacation spent with nothing but a radio and a notebook. The album feels like opening a door to an alternate seaside town where the salt hangs in the air, the fog rolls in heavy, and time stretches slow. A perfect find for collectors, wanderers, and anyone tuned to the textures of the unknown.

Best Cassette Release Series of 2024

Folklore Tapes: Ceremonial Counties Series

Since issue V, Thomas Blake has been reviewing each release in Ceremonia Counties series from Folklore Tapes. Each release represents the folk customs of two different English counties, and, as Thomas Blake said in his recent Top 10 – The joy in the series comes in how differently the artists interpret the brief. The results are consistently interesting and always experimental. They have the feel of important archival documents, but are often visceral and wild and playful. The promise of more means that next year is already shaping up well.

That’s it folks.