Thomas Blake

Kaia Kater is not only a great musician but also a subtle and searching songwriter. Strange Medicine is her most diverse and complete album to date…a hopeful triumph from an utterly distinctive songwriter.

On Hex, Jon McKiel absorbs and repurposes a whole host of genres, but the overall sound – a trippy, fuzzy-edged pop – is strangely consistent, while the songs come from the realm of dreams, their edges softened by sleep but their message sharp and bright.

Convention has never been a preoccupation of either Jennifer Walshe or Tony 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.

Quintela is the debut album of Galician piper, teacher, composer and improviser Carme López. Building a nuanced world from minimal organic ingredients, it exists within and beyond the Galician piping tradition – reimagined through contemporary, avant-garde and feminist lenses.

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.

Billed as an auditory journey into tinnitus, Lola de la Mata’s ‘Oceans on Azimuth’ is a unique and challenging piece of art. While never an easy listen, it somehow manages to become welcoming and even comforting.

Avalanche Kaito’s music is like sped-up geological movement, defined by a detailed and often aggressive maximalism. Throughout Talitakum, the fragments pull together in tight cores, resulting in a gripping, uncompromising and constantly engaging album.

Arianne Churchman and Benedict Drew’s May is a hypnotically good album. It is a long, involving listen, panoramic in scope but thematically focussed, and it manages to be both celebratory and strange, a nod to our folkloric past and a mesmerising hymn to the present.

While Kevin Coleman’s Imaginary Conversations may contain only three tracks, it is one of the most varied albums of the year so far. It’s a sweeping and stunningly accomplished album, brimming with ideas, and offers a glimpse into multiple potential futures for American folk music.

Nick Granata and Dawn Terry are the latest artists to feature on Jacken Elswyth’s The Betwixt & Between series. The series has thrown up a wide array of vital, surprising new folk music, and the latest release is one of its best yet.

The one apparently simple thing that has always made Six Organs of Admittance stand out from the crowd is his ability to create cerebral music that’s brimful of soul, and ‘Time is Glass’ is a perfect example of that winning combination.

Northwest & Nebulous is the most layered, complex thing Luce Mawdsley have created to date. It provides an almost utopian glimpse of a particular corner of England, but more importantly, it shows a way of getting there by embracing queerness and unique personal expression.