I published the first Weekly Report in August 2025, intending to make it a regular feature. Inevitably, the second edition never happened. So, this time around, no promises, but I’ll do my best to stick to some semblance of a routine. Below you’ll find a selection of recently released records that I believe deserve love. The tagline for this week’s picks? “Music to listen to while waiting for the world to end” seems appropriate.

Elsewhere: For some of my other recent writing, head over to PopMatters to check out the best metal albums of March 2026, support independent journalism by picking up a copy of the latest issue of The Wire or read my thoughts on new albums by Phew & Danielle de Picciotto and Okkyung Lee over at The Quietus.

Closed City - Closed City (Watch That Ends The Night)

The intent behind this collaboration between Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay was to transfer into music the sensation of “isolation, routine, and secrecy” associated with Soviet-era closed cities – settlements isolated from the outside world and erased from maps. Shaped by the central theme, their medium became an austere blend of drone and doom metal elements arranged in symphonic structures that move at a glacial pace, from sections in which grave trombones tower over tremolo-picked riffs to palisades of crackling dark ambient. The imagined city that rises in the midst of this soundscape is both harrowing and beautiful – a shadow to vanish into.

Cruel Force - Haneda (Shadow Kingdom)

The absurd levels of energy and relentless tempo of Cruel Force’s Haneda will make you twitch live wire-style while giggling with delight like an idiot. The German metallers have stacked a tidy discography since forming in 2010. Still, their signature combination of speed and heavy elements in the Sodom/Kreator/Desaster tradition with a bit of black metal’s forward momentum has never sounded quite so raucous and vibrant. Slaughter’s seemingly endless arsenal of buzzsaw-like riffs is the star of the show here, but, crucially, the guitarist’s acrobatics are woven around incredibly dynamic rhythmic patterns provided by bassist Spider and drummer GG Alex, then topped off by Carnivore’s classic Teutonic thrash metal grunt. Talk about feeling strapped to a rollercoaster: brakes broken, sparks flying, and tracks about to run out.

Matilde Meireles - Four Tales (Crónica)

The trickling, bubbling, and gurgling movements of water bodies have been a recurring motif for as long as ambient music and field recordings have existed. Yet, UK-based Portuguese artist Matilde Meireles has a gift for reshaping the known into the unexpected. Based on DRIFT, a site-specific floating pavilion created as part of the Belfast 2024 cultural programme, Four Tales showcases Meireles’s brilliant sense of sonic architecture. Field recordings ripple gently over abstract electronics, like a shallow stream over rocks. The patter of rain and the droning nocturnal calls of nearby wildlife emerge into urban traffic. The flow sounds so pristine, so untamed that it suggests an absence of anthropogenic influence, highlighting the disquieting nature of the live performance and improvisation on percussion (Michael Speers, Conor McAuley) and tromba marina (Paul Stapleton) that haunt the album’s closing section.

Adam O’Farrill - ELEPHANT (Out Of Your Head)

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s excellent 2015 exploration of Charlie Parker’s musical DNA, Bird Calls, owes part of its success to Adam O’Farrill. At the time, O’Farrill was still a fairly low-profile 20-year-old trumpeter, but his high-energy, kinetic playing and grunting tone went toe-to-toe with Mahanthappa’s soaring saxophone. In the past ten years, O’Farrill has been primarily active through his Stranger Days quartet, while continuing with a string of key sideman appearances with Hiromi Uehara’s Sonicwonder, Anna Webber Large Ensemble, and Mary Halvorson’s various groups, to name just a few. Nonetheless, ELEPHANT feels like a significant step forward, even in an already accomplished career.

Here, O’Farrill sheds the post-bop safety net for a sound that is both more vulnerable and more volatile. His clarion attack remains the focal point of the music, but it’s now frequently refracted through electronic smears. Alongside a telepathic rhythm section comprising bassist Walter Stinson, drummer Russell Holzman and pianist Yvonne Rogers, O’Farrill braids unapologetic tunefulness with stuttering, glitch-adjacent grooves, gently deconstructing Ryuichi Sakamoto at one moment only to unleash wild, interval-leaping solos in the next. Unshackled and sophisticated, abstract and fiercely grooving, this is simply one of the best jazz albums of the year.

Praed - Al Wahem الوهم (Annihaya)

Although on Al Wahem (The Illusion), Beiruti Raed Yassin and Paed Conca scale down the previous project Praed Orchestra! to a duo format, they lose none of the profound, sensory-stripping impression of their amalgam of electronics, Egyptian shaabi, jazz, and psychedelia. If anything, this more compact format imbues the music with an unexpected sense of propulsion and dynamism as a swaying motorik starts pushing along melodic loops and synth stabs into delirious cuts. The whole work is so coherent and functions so well that it feels a sin to pick it apart. Still, the aura of highlights like “Assarab” makes them impossible to ignore. Here, Conca’s clarinet licks snake between Pascal Semerdjian and Ayman Zebdawi’s driving drum fills, while a thick, dense electronic fabric descends upon them, evoking the particular sensation of bliss and musical ecstasy usually associated with the likes of Kampala, Uganda’s Nihiloxica.

Serpente - Visita do Fogo (Souk)

Through his projects Serpente and Ondness, Portugal’s Bruno Silva makes some of the headiest and strangest electronic music around. With one foot on the dancefloor, where anything from minimal techno to batida and beyond is fair game, and the other immersed deep in experimentalism, Silva often reaches for atonal frictions, then tethers them to a syncopated, oscillating gait. Although Visita do Fogo is presented as the project “stepping back into the heat of his beat-driven origins”, don’t expect easy listening. Skeletal textures collapse onto one another with hammering force, only for their interference to give way to new patterns. Meanwhile, percussive arrangements demonstrate Silva’s signature eclecticism in using screwy beats, elastic polyrhythms, and uncanny textures for purposeful world-building, crafting a strange but irresistible microcosm.

As announced in my half-year review, I’m finally kicking off Weekly Report, a (hopefully) regular feature of new and notable albums focused on stuff that’s likely to fly below the radar elsewhere. The first, fashionably late batch of recommendations covers releases from the past two weeks. The selection leans towards the abstract and the heavy (in all senses), but I promise there will be plenty of lighter music in upcoming editions!

For more recommendations, go over to PopMatters, where Spyros and I picked July’s best metal releases. And if that’s still not enough, for the new issue of The Wire I wrote about Cabaret Voltaire’s influence in 1980s Yugoslavia, penned the Avant Rock column (feat. stunning new albums by Giant Claw and Marissa Nadler), and reviewed albums by Merzbow, Bruch, Phew/Erika Kobayashi/Moebius, and Flower Travellin’ Band. Buy a magazine!

On to the music!

Olli Aarni - Dimension Scrolling (Mondoj)

Dreamy, vaporous post-post-internet miniatures fashioned out of spoken word (narrated by Mia Tarkela) and luminous, fragmented pop elements. Like Dialect’s Atlas Of Green, Finnish musician Olli Aarni’s Dimension Scrolling suggests a sort of music archaeology from the distant future, an attempt to retrieve past ephemera to create a better, idealistic tomorrow.

Madeleine Cocolas - Syndesis (Room40)

Whereas Madeleine Cocolas’s previous two albums, Bodies and Spectral, explored the world without in the present, Syndesis sees the Australian composer reaching within and into her past. Using field recordings from a visit to her ancestral home in Greece, Cocolas augments her usually disquieting ambient expressions with deceptively warm sounds, the comforting buzz of cicadas heard on a warm summer day drifting amidst a swell of windswept, glazed textures. Her memories and the sentiments they elicit take form as Cocolas navigates through them, until the images become almost palpable, ready for us to jump in.

Concepción Huerta & Jiyoung Wi - Concepción Huerta & Jiyoung Wi (Aurora Central)

Hague-based artists Concepción Huerta and Jiyoung Wi join forces on a decidedly abstract collaboration, but one whose sonic complexities possess a stable inner rhythm, a sort of purposeful blueprint for its progressions to trace. Following the music’s breadcrumbs – unaccountable sounds of live and recorded provenance, prickly strings swimming in electronic reverberations – then becomes akin to deciphering a puzzle, feeling around every twist and turn in the search for the centre of the maze. What awaits there remains unclear, but the journey sure is thrilling.

Sunik Kim - Formenverwandler (Feedback Moves)

Los Angeles-based musician and writer Sunik Kim operates on the bleeding edge of sound and music, often dismantling the boundary between what is and what could be. In this latest work, Kim digs deep into her knowledge of American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow, extrapolating the concept of the tempo canon into cascading electronic shapes that appear at once known and unknowable. Studiously researched and conceptualised, it’s the sheer aural brunt of the music that leaves the longest-lasting impression.

Malthusian - The Summoning Bell (Relapse)

Death metal should, by definition, be gnarly and harrowing and soul-crushing, with emotional dangers lurking beneath the riff-laden surface. Yet, even in this context, Dublin’s Malthusian appear to have a particular knack for imbuing their music with a heightened sense of discomfort, black metal edges and hints of dissonance elevating what is already an excellent death metal basis into a jagged, chaotic whirlwind of tremolos, blast beats, and growls. This sensation of standing, frozen, in the middle of a collapsing tower feels particularly vivid when experienced live, but the group’s sophomore LP, The Summoning Bell, is as good an approximation as any to enjoy at home. Eyes closed. Sweaty hands gripping armrests.

No plan survives first contact with a busy schedule. While the ideas I had in mind for this newsletter when I launched it in early 2024 largely fell victim to a severe lack of time, I’m keen to soft-reboot and give it another go, albeit in a slightly different format.

From now on, I’d like to drop Research Music in your inbox each Friday, featuring write-ups on the best albums from that particular week. There is a cornucopia of excellent music that comes across my desk that I can’t cover in full at my usual outlets and for which I’ll try to provide space here instead.

And what better way to get started than by sharing some of my favourite albums from the first half of the year. The focus is on lower-profile releases that I expect won’t appear on too many other similar lists. For a broader overview, I recommend The Quietus’s comprehensive Albums of the Year So Far 2025 listicle, which features some of my more widely hyped favourites like Lyra Pramuk, aya, Los Thuthanaka, billy woods, Eiko Ishibashi, and Neptunian Maximalism.

On to the list!

7038634357 - Waterfall Horizon (Blank Forms)

Neo Gibson is a master at crafting sublimely simple yet emotionally overwhelming music that flows from a sparse palette of textures with an almost preternatural elegance. Their 7038634357 project has been exploring the space around this axis of ambient expression for the past decade, and Waterfall Horizon is, at least outwardly, the pop branch of the journey. But, as on their other albums, the song-oriented framing is phase-shifted into an elusive and ethereal dimension. Here, Gibson’s close-miked singsong sounds like voice messages sent in the middle of the night to a number that’s no longer in use, while the arpeggio of a synthetic organ ushers us into hypnagogia.

Laura Agnusdei - Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica (Maple Death)

Fragments of contemporary jazz, Fourth World music, noise, and drone stitched together into a narrative-driven, poignant fabric by the Bologna-based saxophonist and electroacoustic composer. Never before has our slowly unfolding climate apocalypse had a soundtrack so achingly gorgeous.

Adam Badí Donoval - a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided (Mappa)

The word liminal tends to be thrown around haphazardly when discussing ambient music, yet the latest album by Bratislava-based musician and Warm Winters Ltd. label head Adam Badí Donoval feels synonymous with it. Ghostly sonic manifestations stuck between moments in time and space, half-remembered melodies interrupted before catharsis, and rusting synthetic riffs are left to slowly disintegrate under the pressure of an endless cycle. The constant static drizzle evoke a longing for the past, but the harrowing memories that emerge from the music suggest a negation of nostalgia instead.

Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das - SSAC42 (Infinite Machine)

Reviewed in The Wire #497:

Each new album by prolific Kolkata musician Nilotpal Das seems engineered to wiggle out of any drawer you might try to shove his music in. The producer’s debut for Mexico City’s mutant electronics label Infinite Machine takes us back to his club beginnings – but with a thrilling twist. As a DJ in the mid-2010s, Das mixed EDM, trap, house and future bass, before becoming interested in Tim Hecker-esque ambient. Today, he explores the labyrinthine rhythms and pulses of IDM and breakcore. SSAC42 pulls from all periods of his creative path to construct fractured rhythmic shapes that shift and slide, showered with glitched out acid raindrops like Aphex Twin going b2b with Skrillex or Ryoji Ikeda embracing jungle.

Peter Brötzmann / John Edwards / Steve Noble / Jason Adasiewicz - The Quartet (OTOROKU)

Reviewed for The Quietus:

The Quartet with double bassist John Edwards, drummer Steve Noble, and vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz was recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in February 2023, just a few months before Peter Brötzmann’s passing. While the four musicians hadn’t played together since the mid 2010s, they appear in telepathic sync, as if they had been rehearsing together throughout all those years. Their chemistry is especially impressive during transitions, switching between uncompromising intensity and bouncing grooves, using atmospheric, lowercase improvisations and the odd solo to launch into the sort of collective skronk that brings to memory the frenzy of Brötzmann’s large, eight and ten piece ensembles.

Cocojoey - STARS (Hausu Mountain)

Chicago-based electronic musician Joey Meland aka Cocojoey’s STARS is both the perfect encapsulation of the Tim and Eric mind blown GIF and the most Hausu Mountain album ever in how radically adventurous and unconcerned it is with conventions and rules. Similar to Keith Rankin’s Giant Claw and the various projects of Angel Marcloid – who also mastered the album – the music balances on a fine edge between semiotic blitz and saturation, yet Meland’s compositional touch is sublime, switching between modes at just the right time, tempering industrial onslaughts with thick, syrupy arpeggios and videogame-like vocal melodies and cadences, like those on “TIME TO GO!” that will probably stay stuck in my head forever. Hyperpop makes way for ambient tropes only to get absolutely obliterated by a stab of cybergrind. Clouds of glossy, bubblegum-flavoured fusion transform into dense showers of extreme metal. A euphoria-inducing rush of endorphins settles into a real downer. Come for the blistering, joyous music, stay for the fragile post-internet existentialism hidden within.

Content Provider - Endless Summer (Drowned By Locals / Bokeh Versions)

Reviewed in The Wire #497:

With the Brat fad relegated to an awkward memory and the most obnoxious season approaching fast again, it seems the right time for Dali de Saint Paul to imagine a different kind of summer. Endless Summer can often be as gnarly as our present situation, but with an affirming heart that rejects saccharine impulses in favour of genuine connection. As the cheeky name of the project suggests, de Saint Paul acts mainly as a producer and not a performer here – though the line is thin – providing ten cuts of wobbly beats, serrated textures and noisy rap to accompany her thoughts on loneliness in gentrified cities, love in the age of techno dystopianism and everything in between.

Dormant Ordeal - Tooth And Nail (Willowtip)

Reviewed in April’s MetalMatters:

There is a moment on “Halo of Bones” from Dormant Ordeal’s Tooth And Nail that perfectly encapsulates what the Polish death metallers are all about. Here, a torrent of riffs growls, swirls, and swells. Beneath their serrated surface, the repeating, circular dance of black metal bursts makes incandescent textures flow over tremolo-picked melodies. Blast beats bubble up and vanish as the kick drum’s relentless rhythm is accentuated by a screaming guitar lead. Then, it all explodes. As if through a stroke of alchemy, in a flash, the pent-up energy erupts into brutal death metal—dense and frenzied expressions of the most extreme sonic intensity.

Elka Bong - Alpha Bete (Bandcamp)

To paraphrase Hellraiser, Elka Bong (Al Margolis and Walter Wright) and David Menestres provide an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible. This is noise noise, oblique sounds unsure of their own existence coalescing into emergent structures, reconfiguring each time you try and listen to them. Fleeting and bewildering and awesome.

DJ Elmoe - Battle Zone (Planet Mu)

Juddery and fragmented footwork but with an irresistible, idiosyncratic sense of melody woven through its many slo-moed ethereal samples, unexpected rhythmic detours, and disintegrating jazz and soul loops. Like Traxman’s similarly excellent Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 3, this is ostensibly a compilation of DJ Elmoe’s pieces from as far back as 2014, but one that feels assembled with care into a cohesive unit.

Ash Fure - Animal (Smalltown Supersound)

Reviewed for The Quietus:

Using an oversized polycarbonate sheet and her own presence as a speaker cabinet, US experimental musician and composer Ash Fure sculpts, refracts, and directs the acoustic pressure of upturned 12” subwoofer cones. The results are mesmerising. Globs of billowing, pulsating low frequencies saturate the soundscape, then, through painstaking manipulation, subside into clouds of abstract, staticky techno ambient à la Actress.

Nina Garcia - Bye Bye Bird (Ideologic Organ)

Elusively spectral, shimmering guitar drone from the Parisian guitarist, made with the help of an electromagnetic pickup that creates a trail of undulating sonic shadows behind each riff. Raw and noisy, yet so immediately beautiful.

Hieroglyphic Being - Dance Music 4 Bad People (Smalltown Supersound)

Reviewed in The Wire #495:

Dance Music 4 Bad People features some of Jamal Moss’s headiest and most luscious productions, which conjure imagery of bodies glistening with sweat while moving in unison within the dusty confines of some basement club. A grimy texture devised to rattle PA cabinets sets the tone throughout, while each track fills this evocative mise en scène with raving house and techno mutations. It all feels like a companion to 2022’s Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost – a carnal, messy and equally brilliant counterpoint to those earlier expressions of ecstatic love.

Zoë Mc Pherson - Upside Down (SFX)

Reviewed in The Wire #494:

And “Is This Real?”. Well, if there ever was a song to represent the vertiginous feeling of losing touch with reality, this is it. Born from revolving, sirening synth lines and an intrusive vamp, it soon grows into a bottomless texture. Zooming effects crush through it like stones through glass with nary a proper beat in sight, only a few elusive echoes. There’s no lifeline to hold on to, no melody to follow, as a rain of acid drops comes down mercilessly. And yet, Upside Down is ultimately an uplifting album, one that refuses to remain complacent and chooses optimism of the will, even if poisoned by a hint of doubt.

Mess Esque - Jay Marie, Comfort Me (Drag City)

Reviewed in The Wire #495:

Dirty Three’s Mick Turner and McKisko’s Helen Franzmann continue their long distance collaboration, layering close-miked, silky vocals over lush rock instrumentation in a blend of dream pop and reflective psychedelia. While members of their live band and colleagues like Jim White contribute instrumental flair, the album retains the intimate, endearingly lo-fi bedroom aura of a heartfelt dialogue between friends, their words carried by wistful singsong, rolling organ melodies and the encouraging crunch of guitar chords.

Fred Moten & Brandon López - Revision (TAO Forms)

Reviewed for The Quietus:

Fred Moten’s work alongside bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerard Cleaver, above all, proved to be a revelatory experience. Now, Revision abbreviates the trio into a duo with López. Although the reduced ensemble might suggest a more hushed or timid outing at first glance, if anything, the opposite is true. From start to finish, the record finds the duo engaged in an absolutely emphatic, relentless dialogue. Moten’s poems pulsate in the rhythm of López’s tight plucks and vamps, then force them to dissipate into screeching bowed lines. Simultaneously, the music keeps alive the spirit of collaboration and intellectual fervour that evolved through their previous collaborations.

Jake Muir - Campana Sonans (enmossed)

US sound artist Jake Muir’s latest album is an immersive sonic exploration of church bells and bell-ringing, focusing equally on the characteristics of the sounds and the techniques involved in creating them, and using subtle manipulations to provide deeper contextualisation within contemporary cityscapes. While the album’s two side-long pieces feature church bells heard in several parts of Berlin as well as St. Oswald in Oswestry, St. Bartholomew's, Edgbaston, and Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, their reverberations feel almost universal, as if the bells themselves had the power to reconfigure the world around them.

Nekrodeus - Ruaß (FDA)

Reviewed in May’s MetalMatters:

It’s a rare pleasure these days to discover new music via a concert experience first, and even rarer for the band to then live up to the energy and sparkling tension of their shows on record. The third full-length by death metal group Nekrodeus accomplishes just that. I write death metal, but the Graz-based outfit veers far beyond the basics of the genre, encasing their riffs in crust and hardcore, propelling their songs at black metal speeds, and submerging everything in the abyssal tunings of doom metal and sludge.

Alberto Novello & Rob Mazurek - Sun Eaters (Hive Mind)

Italian multimedia artist and synthesist Alberto Novello’s album with Chicago trumpeter Rob Mazurek is one of those rare cases when time constraints lead to wonderfully spontaneous results brimming with mindful energy. Recorded over a single afternoon at DobiaLab near Trieste in the north of Italy, with no time to prepare or overthink things, the improvisational flow and ephemeral structures erected between the two players on Sun Eaters feel almost like the result of telepathic communication. The dance of Mazurek’s psychedelically filtered trumpet licks and harmonies along Novello’s rhythmic backbone of modular synth riffs is particularly mesmerising, akin to watching a hazed sun rise behind a mountain range on an alien planet.

Han-earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas - Juno 3: Proxemics (Buster And Friends)

Reviewed for The Quietus:

Just as we mediate social distances in daily life, the group’s aesthetic emerges from similar negotiations, individual voices exploring and battling for space, then rippling over each other in constructive interference. Rather than falling into the comfortable flow and subsequent rut of a typical free improvisation session, the trio operate in visceral, full attack noise mode. Their instruments shape jagged, spastic figures, then let them clash and fuse with each other, resulting in a sound that is akin to a freer version of Ryoji Ikeda’s glitched-out minimalism or John Wiese’s electroacoustic drones.

Shane Parish - Solo At Cafe OTO (Red Eft)

Recorded at London’s Cafe Oto while on tour with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet in November 2023, this solo set sees US guitarist Shane Parish digging deep into a repertoire of folk music, performing a ballad by Kentucky musician John Jacob Niles, two songs by English singers Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs, and one of Angelo Badalamenti’s signature Twin Peaks tracks. Parish’s transcriptions of these songs are deft, simultaneously true to the source material and made to sound like a natural fit for his playing style. Although the pieces are atmospheric to begin with, Parish expands their overcast mood even further, imbuing them with a sense of rhythmical and textural looseness, alternately articulating chords with softness and emphatic crunch, sustaining tones as if winding them up then letting them reverberate at will. I’m partial to the rendition of Badalamenti’s “Sycamore Tree”, which somehow sounds even darker and more unhinged than the original, but this is an exquisite collection all around.

Vesna Pisarović - Poravna (PDV)

Croatian pop-turned-jazz singer Vesna Pisarović reimagines the wistful overtones of Bosnian Sevdah folk songs – their repetitive, sustained variant called poravna, to be exact – within a framework of patient, avant-tinged contemporary jazz, the sort that her sidemen, guitarist Noël Akchoté, trumpeter Axel Dörner, percussionist Tony Buck, and contrabassist Greg Cohen, came to symbolise in their respective careers.

Retromorphosis - Psalmus Mortis (Season Of Mist)

Reviewed in February’s MetalMatters:

At times, the technical death metal of Psalmus Mortis draws a strong influence from grindcore and doom, integrating these styles into the complex tempo changes, rhythms, and riffs throughout the songs. At others, it reaches for synthesizers and electronic effects, introducing atmospheric elements to unexpected sections, ranging from the symphonic (“Machine”) to dungeon synth (“Obscure Exordium”) and even experimental flourishes reminiscent of Canadian avant metallers Unexpect (“The Tree”).

Maja Rivić - Drugo Sunce (Menart)

Although she has been a notable presence in Croatia’s contemporary jazz and creative music scene for at least half a decade, primarily through the global jazz project Mimika Orchestra, Drugo Sunce (Second Sun) is the solo debut by singer and composer Maja Rivić. Eschewing the pitfalls of overly safe and by-the-numbers songs, Rivić uses her terrific singing technique, compositional skills, and reliable sidemen – saxophonist Mak Murtić, pianist Hrvoje Galler, double bassist Hrvoje Kralj, and drummer Borko Rupena – to bend the formula of vocal jazz, peppering explicitly lovely melodies with intricate rhythmical and harmonical ornamentation. The innate angular inflection of the Croatian language and choice of abstract, unusually chained lyrics help in this regard, giving the eight pieces a sense of delightful unpredictability and dynamism.

Stephen Roddy - Corpus/Mimesis (Fiadh)

Electroacoustic drones, waves of noise, and psychogeographical soundscapes orbit around French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's spoken word narration of his 58 (+1) indices on the body, sublimating into an amalgam that is grandiose and voluminous yet never overbearing. The album also serves as a handy gateway into Irish composer Stephen Roddy’s back catalogue of disparate works, which includes everything from sonification and experimental metal to a dizzyingly intense ambient tribute to David Bowie.

Lorenzo Senni - Canone Infinito Xtended (Warp)

Seven variations on the “Canone Infinito” piece from Senni’s 2020 album Scacco Matto, each of them progressively building from barebones but big sounding minimalism to an intricate tension between layers of simple synth sounds. Don’t let the Xtended appendix fool you; this is a new and utterly original work.

The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters - The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

With Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Mariam Rezaei on turntables, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet, electronics, and voice, and Lukas Koenig on drums, amplified cymbal, and bass synth, I feel confident in calling The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters – named after one of Francisco Goya’s sketch series – a true supergroup in the sphere of wilder and noisier free jazz and improv. The quartet’s debut sparks and frizzles and thrashes with abandon as one would expect from the peeps involved and their no-overdubs recording approach, but there’s an inner logic and organisation to their bursts of cacophony, a pointed intent which occasionally builds up to a groove or melody only for it to be pulled out from under our feet as swiftly as it was laid down. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the group giggle with pleasure in these moments.

Hüma Utku - Dracones (Editions Mego)

Abstract electronics, windswept ambient, and drone shapes pressed into technoid club architectures by the Istanbul sound artist Hüma Utku. This is properly intense and jagged stuff, reminiscent of Richie Culver's recent Quiet Husband outing but with a looser internal philosophy.

Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, Hahn Rowe - Second (Balmat)

Founded by music journalist and musician Albert Salinas in 2021, the Balmat imprint has been dedicated to unearthing some of the more delicate and unabashedly lush actualisations of outré musics and deep listening experiences. Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, and Hahn Rowe’s Second departs from this blueprint by veering closer to rock, with strongly accentuated rhythms and a motorik engine behind each of its cuts. Yet, while the centre holds firm, the ripples that the music sends through the aether are as heady and enveloping as we’ve come to expect from Balmat releases. Gamelan-like percussive sequences, grumbling guitar riffs, and the reverberations of staccato violin bows and synth chords diffuse into gossamer meditations, held together through some meticulous, unspoken ritual.

XT + Anne Gillis - AnimauX veGeTal (Infant Tree)

Immense free improv set from XT (saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Paul Abbott) with French musician and performance artist Anne Gillis, part of a collaboration that began in 2018. The trio’s second release finds them exploring the confines of improvisation – and musical articulation in general – by layering abstraction upon abstraction until the assemblage of analogue wheezing, crinkling, scraping, stabbing, and equally ambiguous electronic effects begins shaping an even more confounding whole.

Today more than ever, the music world seems to be plagued by a severe case of FOMO. Even its off-the-grid, experimental nooks are not immune as a constant stream of new music renders any song or record older than a few weeks obsolete. The rhythm of releases and coverage is unstoppable and must be obeyed, lest you fall behind. One of Research Music's raisons d'etre is thus the desire to push back against this narrative, giving space to exceptional music regardless of when it was created. And what better place to start than with an album on sound artist Kate Carr’s label Flaming Pines released ages ago, in November 2023. 

While the gamut of music carried by the London based imprint is wide and varied, from raw field recordings to synthetic ambient explorations, there is a sense of slow drift and permanence suffusing all their releases, a timelessness embodied in expressions such as the sounds of the city that hold together Liz Helman’s The Colour Of Water.

The recordings of common metropolitan noises – hurried chatter, confused animal calls, revving motors, and other mundane minutiae – that the multi-disciplinary artist made during her walks through London are utterly dynamic yet entirely unchanging and familiar, as if you could venture down those same paths and capture those same sonic objects today and tomorrow as you did yesterday.

Similar to a recent Instagram reel that marvelled at the “sickest noise set” that a pair of generators were producing at Atlanta’s Grant Park, Helman has a keen ear for discovering engaging threads in an urban tapestry of sounds we usually tend to take for granted and filter out. Each of the seven cuts on her album uses field recordings as stems, then grows them into something alien, something more, by manipulating them with an arsenal of simple but compelling electronic effects.

On the desolate “Where The Circle Meets The Square”, the ubiquitous shapes of urban background hum become saturated, voluminous drones. “Those Forming Another” and “Footprints + Feathers” turn the repeating, restless rise and fall of machinery and footsteps into pockets of hypnotic polyrhythms. Meanwhile, a corner preacher’s fervent proclamations serve as the basis for the harrowing, martial industrial evoking effigies of “Urban Messiah (Time Has Told)”. In moments like these, the record offers a transporting but also transformative experience, inviting us to revisit and rethink the sounds of our surroundings. There might still be magic hiding out there.

Since this is the first issue of Research Music, let me introduce myself. I am Antonio, a music writer from Croatia and a regular contributor to The Wire, The Quietus, and PopMatters. You might have also stumbled upon my writings at Tiny Mix Tapes, Bandcamp Daily, VAN Magazine, Kulturpunkt, Potlista, and other publications in the past. You can read more about me and Research Music here.

As I was gearing up for the launch of this newsletter, I figured that the best way of getting things going would be with a list of albums I’ve loved in 2023 but that went largely unnoticed in various official and unofficial lists.

The selection presented in this roundup should give you a good idea of the general direction of the newsletter, which will feature weird music of all colours, from mind-crushing black metal and harsh noise to the most delicate field recordings and electro-acoustic expressions.

I hope you enjoy and, of course, subscribe!

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Note: Although the embedded links for the featured music are mostly from Bandcamp because it’s still the best way to support artists directly, I also want to acknowledge the union-busting practices and tone-deafness of their new owners. To quote a PR email I received recently: “Support artists. Burn the industry to the ground.”

Adjunct Ensemble - Sovereign Bodies / Ritual Taxonomy (Diatribe)

Jamie Thompson’s Adjunct Ensemble released one of the most ambitious albums of the year, fusing an unlikely collection of contemporary styles with challenging subjects. From my review in The Wire #471:

Rather than relying on collective performance, Thompson employs distinct approaches, from improvisation and electroacoustic composition to electronic production, with parts of his ensemble, creating layers and samples to be later pieced together. Soprano arias and spoken word are accompanied by subtle electronic flourishes, only to be disintegrated by turntable scratches, while raucous jazz freakouts turn into caustic textures. Ultimately, the album is a radical expression of empathy, as stunning as its themes are crushing.

Among The Rocks And Roots - Pariah (Cacophonous Revival)

Abdul-Hakim Bilal and Samuel Goff build upon 2015’s Samudra Garba Pathe and 2018’s Raga to complete a trilogy of outstanding extreme music that manages to meld the ruthless emotions of metal and hardcore and the unfettered spirit of free improvisation. From my The Quietus review:

Pariah is a sprawling affair that still maintains a compelling power of affect amid its face-off with addiction, systemic oppression, and injustice. With a 90-minute run spread over four cuts, the music ebbs and flows between rough hardcore aggression and moments of rapture. Its heaviness resonates with the psyche, establishing a feedback loop where each scream, bout of distortion, downtuned guitar grunt, and drum pattern tugs at something deep in the soul.

Asystole - Siren To Blight (I, Voidhanger)

The roster of Italian outlet I, Voidhanger seems to hit harder with each passing year, showcasing ever more avant and deranged forms of extreme metal. The razor-sharp, labyrinthine debut by US death metal quartet Asystole stood out even in the company of the label’s high profile releases. As I wrote for MetalMatters:

Compressed in less than half an hour, the seven tracks circle, tumble, and twitch, moving from the jazzy inflection of “Song of Subservient Bliss” – complete with moments worthy of their producer Colin Marston’s discography – to the bumbling, boa constrictor flow of the Suffocation-evoking killer “Sophist Paralysis” and the Wormedesque brutal slam and groove of “Spirit Mother”.

Gerald Cleaver, Brandon Lopez, Hprizm - In The Wilderness (Positive Elevation)

Along with Brandon Lopez’s vilevilevilevilevilevilevilevile, this was one of the more ingenious albums in the nebulously defined category of free jazz and improvisation. A live concert played in a fairly standard drums/bass/electronics format, but then rejigged into an abstract electronic suite. From my review for The Quietus:

With “T Top” things get seriously dark and intense. Cleaver’s kick drums begin to sound like a submerged TR-808, while various noises of unknown provenance – some of them resembling a whooping crowd – flow in reverse and skitter around the central axis. “Hopoff” turns the screw of a tight, increasingly tense atmosphere. Although short, the simplicity of these cuts is deceptive, as just beneath the surface, their flesh shifts and rearranges itself continually.

Dominic Coles - Alphabets (Tripticks Tapes)

An ingenious, often playful deconstruction and reconstruction of alphabets, a tearing down of discursive walls, accompanied by an equally intriguing set of recondite musical cues. From my review in The Wire #474:

Alphabets opener “alphabet 1: p-u-s-h” uses half of its 50 minute run for didactic purposes, conditioning the listener through a repeating sequence of sentence fragments and abstract digital beeps and bloops with the idea of creating an association between the words and noises. Then, it puts its freshly synthesised vocabulary to use, alternating Joseph Kreitem’s surreal, jumbled narrations with carefully placed sounds that interrupt and connect his utterances. “They take turns pushing me to the ground”, we hear, as the pauses and inflection shift from instance to instance, dictating an intoxicating rhythm.

Mike Cooper - Black Flamingo (Room 40)

In a prolific career marked by unusual musical explorations, Black Flamingo – Mike Cooper’s long-distance Covid-19 project with guests such as Elliott Sharp, Jon Raskin, and Geoff Hawkins – still comes on top of the idiosyncratic pile. Ostensibly rooted in free jazz and free improvisation, a number of other contrasting styles make an appearance. The album switches gears from track to track, yet somehow still connects into a cohesive whole. Electro-acoustic ambient morphs into diffuse Tropicália then takes off towards heady electronics in what feels a natural, obvious progression. Post-everything, indeed.

Dani Dobkin & Matt Sargent - Bend (Waveform Alphabet)

2023 was the first full year in existence for Waveform Alphabet, double bassist David Menestres’s label devoted to truly exciting intersections of free jazz, improvisation, and other contemporary sorts of experimental music. While it’s difficult to pick a favourite among the excellent five records the outlet released during the year, guitarist Matt Sargent and synthesist Dani Dobkin’s Bend stands out thanks to its almost hypnotic pull. Riffs altered through computer programming intertwine with swirling, glitching electronics and stretch into a strangely emotional, gossamer-like tapestry of sounds, from barely audible phrases to saturating swells of noise. It all sounds almost like an American primitive guitar record retrieved from far in the future.

Daryl Groetsch - Frozen Waste / Gardens In Glass (Independent)

Frozen Waste and Gardens In Glass see Daryl Groetsch taking a rest from his dynamic, intense work as Pulse Emitter to craft two of the year’s most beautiful examples of pristine ambient. From my review for The Quietus:

While both albums play with a consciously constrained version of ambient that leans heavily into common tropes, each entertains a contrasting aesthetic strain. With its suggestive forest in a bottle cover and track titles – “Tropical Plant Sedation”, “Lily Pad Daydreaming”, “Rain Atrium” – Gardens In Glass evokes that early, blissfully naive, new age-phase of the genre. Meanwhile, nomen est omen in the case of Frozen Waste. The album’s five cuts extinguish any and all traces of the welcoming light that bathed Gardens and replace it with an oppressive darkness.

Joshua Hill and Micaela Tobin - Tent Music (Whited Sepulchre)

Many have tried and failed to conjuter the sort of psychedelic journey of self-discovery that can be found on Tent Music. Dreamt up in a tent planted in an Arizonan backyard, the music is imbued with a tender cosmic soul. From my interview and review in The Wire #475:

The smoke and heat from summer wildfires, the suffocating effects of the pandemic and the concern for Hill’s father afflicted with dementia are vividly evoked. Whether through spontaneous composition, free improvisation or psychography, these sentiments manifest in a variety of forms, growing with overwhelming gravitas, from fragments of contemporary composition to psychedelic rock jams.

Historically Fucked - The Mule Peasants Revolt Of 12,067 (Upset! The Rhythm)

A contemporary take on the classic, late 1960s to early 1970s improv group format (think AMM) and the infamous NYC creative scene of the same era, with a bit of Rock in Opposition’s facetiousness mixed in for maximum effect. The result is unhinged music that borders on performance and theatre. From my MetalMatters blurb:

There are moments in which the confluence of screamed glossolalia and roaring guitars resembles something from John Zorn’s Naked City oeuvre. In others, the quartet coalesces towards a more progressive vision, not unlike the freewheeling avant-rock of Richard Pinhas’s Heldon. Their impact is both cerebral and visceral, but above all magnificently fun.

Pauline Hogstrand - Áhkká (Warm Winters Ltd.)

A glimpse towards the darker, droning and disquieting side of ambient from the Swedish composer and violist. Music that seems to channel the cold indifference of nature and the struggle of finding our place in it. Some words I wrote about it for Ivna Franic’s Forkert:

Although press materials for the album frame the two 20-minute long pieces “Herein” and “Magnitude” as symbolising ascent and descent, respectively, the sensation across both cuts remains singular, representative of a unity of emotions – exuberance and despair, pleasure and pain, life and death – existing all at once, in contrasts between breathless clunks and textures that buzz like an insect swarm gone mad.

King Vision Ultra - SHOOK WORLD (PTP)

Having lived with KVU’s SHOOK WORLD for a while, it still manages to surprise me, unfolding new narratives and perspectives with each listen. While Algiers’ excellent Shook rightfully collected accolades, this album made from Shook stems and contributions from the PTP family branched off into its own, fascinating world. From The Wire #470:

Pressing play on Shook World is like stepping into a psychogeography of New York stretched between the past, present and future. There is something decidedly concrète in Geng’s world building. Field recordings and sound bites capture subtle but distinctive urban ambience, then intertwine with fragments of textural noise, boom bap samples, spoken word raps and affecting saxophone licks. The music not only sounds, but feels like New York – a document of its streets, grit and chaos as they once were and as they are today, beyond the gentrified and sanitised projections of elites.

Lenhart Tapes - Dens (Glitterbeat)

Ace tape-manipulator Vladimir Lenhart’s new album is his most accomplished work yet. Dens is another showcase of Lenhart’s skill with cassette decks and Walkmans, but also an expression of his digging breadth of musical knowledge and an acute compositional penchant that enables him to elegantly fuse everything from free jazz to drone and noise with Eastern European folk music. The resulting tracks are nothing short of stunning, his heady instrumental backdrops flowing around, cradling, and permeating the mesmerising singing of Tijana Stanković, Zoja Borovčanin, and Svetlana Spajić.

Memnon Sa - Offworld Radiation Therapy (Shadow World)

Misha Hering’s Memnon Sa project is no stranger to peculiar fusions of psychedelia, krautrock, electronics, jazz, and ambient. Still, none of his previous three records were quite as carefully articulated and complete as Offworld Radiation Therapy. Here, Hering builds his very own cosmos, voluminous and awe-inspiring, filled with sustained atmospheres reminiscent of the most tense of Vangelis and Hans Zimmer scores. These mutate towards doom metal of cosmic scale in one moment before veering towards labyrinthine progressive and jazz rock in the next. The album feels like floating through the Oort Cloud, fingers combing through space dust, destination unknown.

Refree - el espacio entre (Tak:Til)

The second solo album by Barcelona based guitarist and producer Raül Refree is a collage of cinematic sounds that draw in equal measure from Iberian folk, madrigals, contemporary (post-)classical, and amorphous ambient. The resulting music feels fragile, akin to the words of a solitary voice lost between AM radio frequencies. This is delicate, quietly stirring music that invites to be absorbed in a hypnagogic state and enjoyed almost subconsciously rather than analysed and dissected.

Roj osa - Azbestni krovovi (Kopaton)

Brothers Alen and Nenad Sinkauz have been a major driving force behind the Croatian experimental and avant music scene for the past two decades, whether composing film scores, heading the Audioart festival in Pula, or acting through their various projects such as the visually augmented, speculatively futuristic post-rock outfit Day of the Year.

The new project Roj osa with drummer Marco Quarantotto trades their sense of breathless vastness and grandiose scope for a more intimate and mood based approach, filled with transmogrified, elongated guitar riffs, sparse percussion, and electronic effigies that grumble through the dark. As a result, Azbestni krovovi (Asbestos Roofs) is one of the brothers’ most accomplished works so far, alternately evoking the echoes of a crumbling industrialist society and gesturing towards a future that will rise in its place.

Serpente - Cornos (Sucata Tapes)

Under the monikers Ondness and Serpente, Portuguese producer Bruno Silva creates some of the most beguiling yet offbeat abstract electronic music. While his pieces that collage disjointed, collapsed rhythms, pitch-shifted synths, pads, and textural effects may appear scattershot at first glance, closer listening reveals the astute paths and structures that these disparate sounds follow.

Among his projects, Serpente is foremost rhythm and percussion oriented, and Cornos is no exception. Across five lengthy tracks, Silva unleashes barrage upon barrage of unnerving patterns, where fractured Cumbia-like beats make way for surgically precise techno pulses. ‘Barrage’ is to be understood loosely here. Silva indeed piles rhythms upon each other, but instead of leaning into forceful, dance-inducing inclinations, they unfold organically, like a wistful, regret-filled nocturnal stumble through the narrow streets of some old Mediterranean city. Intoxicating stuff.

Shmu - DiiNO POWER: Plastiq Island (Orange Milk)

Simply put, this is Tiny Mix Tapes (RIP ❤️) music. 1970s fusion brought into the early to mid 2010s, made to absorb a bunch of styles as if rolling a katamari through Soulseek, and then finally propelled into the future. Amongst the fluid constellation of artists working in this field, Sam Chown’s DiiNO POWER is one of those that truly puts the ‘avant’ in avant-garde, surpassing the usual post-internet aesthetics and reaching the next level. The peak of gamification of music and sonification of games.

Starving Weirdos - Atheistsaregods (Discrepant)

Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay return after more than a decade with an album of industrialised electronics that feels just as strange and triumphant as their earlier works. For The Wire #477 I wrote:

While most tracks feature some sort of beat, whether strongly delineated or stifled, their main appeal lies in vestiges of nocturnal, spectral noises that stage an ominous atmosphere akin to Coil’s most haunting pieces. Vague sounds shuffle through the stereo field, their sparse, repetitive arrangements triggering an ASMR-like sensation.

Max Syedtollan - Disposables (33-33)

Fever dream logic as a composition technique from the Glasgow-based composer-decomposer. Mad and maddening. Irresistible. Pop? Contemporary classical? Plunderphonics? Who the fuck knows. Some words I tried to write about it at The Quietus:

The album gives off a claustrophobic, ominous impression from its first to its last second. “The Creaks, The Creaks” is the perfect appetiser with slo-mo surge of hiss, nondescript modulations, tinnitus-like frequency sweeps, and the annoying noise of people chattering in a neighbouring room. If Kali Malone’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy captures the blues of confined routines, then here we have rote’s manic side in full effect, manifested as an atmosphere of incipient madness and desire to gnaw at one’s own mind and body.

Zohra - Murder in the Temple (American Dreams)

Azar Swan’s Zohra Atash delivers what is one of the heaviest albums of the year. Murder In The Temple hits so absurdly hard that it almost makes you laugh from the shock. Beyond these initial reactions and the stupendously overpowering mixture of industrial, electronic dance music variants, goth sonics, and too cool for school vibes, the album carries within itself the echo of a profound heartbreak, a feeling of fragility and revolt embedded in songs about “drones, religion, human frailty, love, hate, and getting free at any cost.”