Interim Report 2025
A selection of best albums released during the first half of the year
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.