Wow—more blurbs, so soon? I must have been having a real good time in August! In all seriousness: found enough good stuff from this year to recommend in the last few weeks that it made sense to write about a good chunk of it. Below are twelve blurbs; the first half has mostly June and July releases (but also a couple of Q1s), while the latter half does actually cover stuff that came out in the past month.
Kroppskännedom - Kroppskännedom (morctapes, Feb 12)
A delectably light-handed analog/drone rock project based out of Malmö, Sweden whose vibe is indissociable from that of the Gothenburg underground. Alternately foreboding and comforting.
The Great Learning Orchestra - Selected Recordings from Grapefruit (Karlrecords, Mar 21)
Ono's performance scores, like those of her Fluxus peers, are recipes for ritual action and imagination. They display minimal concern for whether the instructions they prescribe might leave some kind of aural trace, or even be broadly realizable. Some of Ono's Grapefruit scores, however, readily lend themselves to a free-improvisational reading, and even mesh well with a more Cagean modus operandi that remains grounded in a concert setting or recording environment. The pieces that the Great Learning Orchestra chose to record for this release work remarkably well toward a cohesive presentation: in the manner of Cage or Oliveros, the ear is opened up to a wide range of aleatoric and environmental sounds and is encouraged to unify them under an equanimous attention that regards them all as always already natural. As I would for any kind of notated music, I recommend reading the score for each piece as you listen. Also, if you want a feel for the difference between Fluxus scores and other post-classical open/instructional scores, I'd recommend comparing scores from A Something Else Reader (Dick Higgins, ed.) to scores from Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, respectively.
Jean-Marie Mercimek - Dans le camion de Marguerite Duras (Aguirre, Jun 6)
Jean-Marie Mercimek's first LP in 5 years is just as airy and idiosyncratic as their last (2020's La Flourenn en Mars—would recommend reading this interview from around that time if you find this music at all compelling). It's synth-driven, collagistic pop that's both understated and lush, yielding a carefully curated spectrum of soft sound-colors where each element feels bespoke in its motivic and timbral specificity. There is something to be said for the reference to chanson in the liners: you'd be hard-pressed to find a likeness in terms of structure or sonic palette. But there is a certain reserve, a withholding of affect, that it's hard not to associate with the oldies of French pop music.
Raphael Rogiński & Ružičnjak Tajni - Bura (Instant Classic, Jun 27)
Ostensibly an album of spins on Polish and Serbian traditional music, Bura possesses a clarity of composition whose derivation from a kind of contemporary chamber music I can intuit while finding difficult to pin down. It reminds me a lot of Okkyung Lee's Yeo-Neun, actually, even though the source idioms are completely different. The process of distillation and recombination from the traditional sources is handled with a sensitivity and care that's evident in the steady pace and spaciousness of these songs: they're tuneful without being cloying, faithful to the vocal stylings and harmonic world of the source material without reifying them or grafting them onto a too self-consciously "experimental" structure. It's restrained and sedate, but also earthy and moving.
FN YOUNG B - Bitch I'm Fn (No Varsity, Jul 21)
Thanks again to gage/dub and his "ohio nexus" discord server for helping me keep up with Buckeye hip hop—and to Noah there for releasing (and putting me on to) this record. Bitch I'm Fn is probably my favorite rap project out of Ohio from this year. FN's toplines are suffused with a melodism and earnestness that characterizes (Midwest) emo trap; what's rather winsome about his flow is a plasticity that lets him lurch between caterwauling exaggeration and AutoCrooned authenticity without missing a beat. This feels post-Carti in a more robust way than those who, while aping the "baby" or "rage" voice, fail to realize that Carti's shape-shifting vocal versatility is his greatest asset. I could imagine "No Conscience," in particular, slotting snugly somewhere on the tracklist for MUSIC—as one of the stronger tracks, too. In turn, "Rawr Xd!" sounds like a Die Lit-era deep cut that's both more low-key and more jittery + off-kilter—a major score in my book. "Second Shift" and "Everything & More" strike me as the tracks whose beats best fall in line with Midwest hip hop idioms, with the former oozing '00s mixtape revivalism and the latter possessing a strutting yet conversational flow that still marks Midwest trap regionally. The songs that hooked me the hardest, though, are the ones that wear their heart on their sleeves: "Dnp" is a subtle earworm whose every step lilts with an audible sigh; "Feral" is more openly melancholic, at points breaking its plaintive veneer with high-pitched wails that deliver a wonderfully delicious sting of melodic pathos. The tail-end of the record aims to bring this melancholy home: the reverb-washed, alt-rock-adjacent balladry of "Intoxicate My Brain" and the impossibly earnest guitar/voice-only "Freefall" stick the landing with unexpected conviction. I really don't know anything about Dayton's hip hop scene or community, but you obviously don't get a release like this out of thin air—Bitch I'm Fn is proof enough that real shit's going down there.
Max Syedtollan - Prynhawn Da! (bison, Jul 25)
The king of irreverent chamber prog is back with what might be his most straight-faced album to date—and maybe my favorite one since 2021's Four Assignments, his first. Disposables and The Tank didn't leave much of an impression on me; their linkages of speech and sound weren't as compelling to me as Four Assignments's interweaving of tightly plotted narration and musical structure, which served as the foundation for both the joyous momentum and the comic timing that made that record so strong. Prynhawn Da! features no sung or spoken text by Syedtollan, which immediately sets it apart from his previous work. But it brings back both the sense of a firm compositional throughline and a wonderfully peculiar comic energy. The music is a dense bundle of quotations, both in its content (so many hummables from the past two centuries of mega-popular music) and in its form, which the liners attribute to a kind of Welsh carnival music. The liners also note that Syedtollan wrote this music as part of a larger project by artist Lewis Prosser, which did actually take the form of a carnival procession and featured a "nonsense script" written by Prosser. I can only imagine what that would've been like. But I think it's safe to say that Prynhawn Da! doesn't make it too difficult for the listener to imagine; I suppose this approximates what Bakhtin heard in his head while writing his Rabelais book.
Christian Love Forum - The Greatest Hits (Heat Crimes, Aug 14)
This 8-cassette/12-hour hypnagogic jam album? Goes hard—was surprised by the ease and absence of fatigue with which it accompanied me from morning commute to evening leisure. Heat Crimes has been one of my favorite labels to follow over the past couple of years; just about every release they've put out has struck me as something whose ideal home was on their roster. This is especially the case for Greatest Hits: CLF's pared down approach to Mediterranean pop motifs makes use of sound material that's evocative of neofolk, near-east funk, and Badalamenti scores all at the same time; groove and cinematic ambience go hand in hand toward immersion, and that quality of immersion is afforded a remarkable depth by the duration(s) of the record. Despite being several times as long as CLF's other releases, I found Greatest Hits the most effortless to listen through, and I'm glad Heat Crimes has no qualms about giving it the space to articulate itself without reservation.
Duncan Harrison - There Is No Fire in the Lake (adhuman, Aug 14)
Harrison's adhuman label has been a consistent purveyor of shit-fi noise, concrète, and sound poetry over the past few years. Favorites include Josh Peterson's Collected Voice, Text and Tape Works, which compiles over two hours of the artist's evocatively macabre oeuvre, akin to radio dramoletts from the twilight zone; as well as Thomas DeAngelo's Voiceprints & Aircuts, which sounds like an album Henri Chopin would've made if he had grown up in the Midwest noise scene (heads will spot the cover art's reference). This release of Harrison's own is a standout from the latest adhuman batch; its mouth sound shenanigans and wry, thickly accented monologues traipse amid soundscapes whose muffled ambient noise, analog protrusions, and thick coatings of neutral frequency (alongside the occasional more musical passage) invite comparison to Graham Lambkin's work. It's subtly transportive and moving music for getting in touch with the baroque pleasures of the murky and dour.
Zhao Cong - blow,blow,blow,blow,blow (Oigovisiones, Aug 14)
I've been aware of Zhao Cong for some time due to her partnership (both personal and collaborative) with Zhu Wenbo (who runs the label Zoomin' Night) and her presence in Beijing's experimental music scene; this is easily my favorite album of hers to date. blow5 is the result of a more focused conceptual frame than that of her previous work, in which she engaged with found object recording and improvisation: balloons are the primary sound-making devices here, and in the liner notes, she explicitly expresses her desire to "emplear menos materiales, trabajar con más limitaciones y también con mayor concentración" [use fewer materials, work with more limitations, and with greater concentration]. I'm also tickled because whenever I come across balloons in experimental music, I can't help but think of Balloon & Needle—anchor for the Korean EAI scene for decades and historically one of the most important labels in Korean experimental music; their v/a comp Music Made with Balloon and/or Needle contains exactly what it says on the tin and feels summative of the label's ethos.
Zhao Cong exploits the expressive capacities of the balloon—the mid-range hiss of leaking air, the expansion and contact tension of taut rubber, etc.—in just as compelling a manner. There's an inherent (or at least deeply enculturated) suspense in these sounds: in the imagination, a balloon lies on a teleological line between flaccid deflation and the dreadful POP; every time we hear a balloon grow or shrink, or every time we hear it come into protrusive contact with other objects, it's hard not to project these sounds toward or away from a possible implosive extremity, or to measure them in relation to that extremity, which always announces itself as a surprise. An album like Davide Tidoni's Touch of the Pops (released, unsurprisingly, by Balloon & Needle) makes this suspense its explicit and wholly committed premise. blow5, by contrast, is a little more subtle about it, while retaining a good deal of the rigor. I can't tell you whether or not there are any big pops in it (why ruin the fun? find out for yourself!) but I can tell you that Zhao is more interested in the possibility of sitting with these sounds, of de-teleologizing them and embracing their tension as a listening space for its own sake, even as that tension can't itself be erased from the experience.
Jo Christman & Mia Windsor - Burning Dust (Liquid Library, Aug 15)
One of the most satisfying drone albums I've heard this year; the organicity of its ebb and flow is transfixing from start to finish. Both Christman's electronics and Windsor's organ can scale between a gurgle/diaphanous layer on one end to a maelstrom/oceanic depth on the other, and they take turns being the ground to the other's movement that keep the whole thing constantly churning—even if you're too caught up in the action to notice.
Universal Cell Unlock - Fugitive Numbers (Psychic Sounds, Aug 15)
UCF's last album, Quasimodo the Street Sweeper, was one of my favorite sound art records of 2024; Christopher Forgues articulates his resonant ensemble of found objects with a deliberacy and precision that reminds me a bit of Rie Nakajima's clean and focused approach to object-sound, or maybe Takahiro Kawaguchi's live constructions (speaking of which—see the blurb below). Fugitive Numbers is actually a reissue of his first album under the UCU moniker (as far as I'm aware) in 2017; it works in an idiom quite different from Quasimodo's, centering around loop-/beat-driven propulsion and an inventory of electronic/synthetic sounds and samples, rather than object-oriented or electroacoustic material. But the same sculptural attention to a dimensional depth and clarity of sound is audible here, yielding the same sorts of gratifications; it recalls some of the best Music from Memory releases that way.
Makoto Oshiro + Takahiro Kawaguchi - Lemures Loci (Basic Function, Aug 25)
Oshiro and Kawaguchi are established collaborators; most of their documented work together is taken from live performances—just look up their names in a YouTube search for a guaranteed good time (here's a personal favorite). Their ingenuity for setting up and tinkering live with DIY sound machines, as well as their playfully mischievous (yet not exactly pranksterish) approach to found object sound art, makes their music a consistent joy to engage with—the (onkyo) dream of the '90s/'00s lives on in them. The two sides of Lemures Loci embody both the craft and the attitude that lies at the heart of this music: on the A side, an improvised yet carefully considered bricolage that posits organic affinities between the acoustic and the synthetic and is confident in the material's ability to emergently produce a dramatic arc, without recourse to an overdetermining structural conceit; on the B side, a commitment to a very simple and open course of action (in separate locations, start field recording at the exact same time) that relies solely on the pair's respective ears and psychogeographical intuitions to produce a compelling result—which it absolutely does. This is as good as this shit gets.
As always, thanks for reading! It’s the end of the summer, but not the end of the struggle.