Thomas Blake

A kind of alternative history of Gastr Del Sol, whose massive importance to the musical landscape of the last thirty years has been massive, a release as exceptional as ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’ should be met with excitement and the highest praise.

A concept album about the physical and spiritual aspects of birth and parenthood, Carlos Niño & Friends’ “Placenta” is a work of warmth, humanity, and unruly anarchic joy, with Niño acting as a catalyst through which the swell of creativity can be filtered and condensed.

Laura J Martin’s 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.

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.