Lost & Found: The Best Overlooked Albums Of 2023

A roundup of excellent 2023 releases that slipped under the radar

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!

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.”