Thomas Blake

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.

Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne’s ‘after a pause’ is 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.

Lately, the influence of traditional music, always there somewhere in the background, has made itself more apparent in the music of BIG|BRAVE, and A Chaos Of Flowers continues this trend – a visceral, moving, complex and gloriously heavy piece of work.

Oren Ambarchi is once again joined by the rhythm section of Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin for Ghosted II: an enriching, multi-layered and almost indecently accomplished album.    

Kiran Leonard’s ‘Real Home’ is spiky, literate and humane, and although it navigates some extraordinarily varied terrain, it never strays too far from its theme or from its ultimately melodic musical core. Real Home is an object lesson in combining experimental substance with accessible style.