The Italian Peninsula is full of cities and provinces that have contributed to the rich history of Italian jazz over the past century—from Torino, where Enrico Rava performed with Chet Baker and Bobby Jaspar, to Milan, home of famed pianist Giorgio Gaslini. Generations later, DJ Nicola Conte from Bari began blending acid jazz with African and Brazilian bossa nova influences. That history lives on in Italy’s future jazz scene, with musicians who fuse the music to a host of electronic instruments and production methods, mixing it with footwork, gqom, trap, drum ‘n’ bass, reggaeton, dub, and cumbia.

In the spring of 2019, Raffaele Costantino (aka DJ Khalab) and some friends launched Hyperjazz, an Italian record label with its sights set on capturing the “frantic and unrestrained evolution” of modern music. “At this moment in Italy, a strong conscience of our own cultural and musical roots is rising and taking shape,” says Costantino. “At the beginning, we were really few; I’m thinking about Nicola Conte, Tommaso Cappellato and others. When the [future jazz] trend exploded in the UK, the Italian scene was not completely unprepared, thanks to the assets already developed by these people.”

In November, Hyperjazz issued its latest album: Fire and Sea from Machweo, an Apulia-based ensemble with a rotating membership, founded by producer Giorgio Spedicato in 2012. “Part of the Hyperjazz catalog is dedicated to the reinterpretation of the rhythmic tradition of Southern Italy: Go Dugong’s and Machweo’s work are just the first two steps on our path to create a union between jazz and electronics,” says Costantino. 

In honor of the rising tide of new Italian sounds, here are five Bandcamp releases that showcase recent highlights from all across Italy. 

Butterflying
Tommaso Cappellato

Tommaso Cappellato is a consistent thread running through much of the new guard of Italian jazz. An active drummer and composer, Cappellato released his fifth solo album, Butterflying, in May. He appears twice more on this list, contributing percussion to Upperground Orchestra’s Euganea and alongside saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings on DJ Khalab’s Black Noise 2084. The compositions on Butterflying follow a loose, beat-tape rubric, unfolding with elegant layers and textures. Cappellato’s looped acoustic strums take center stage on “Humming Beings,” a contemplative broken beat experiment. “No Flies for a Closed Mouth” is a showcase for Cappellato’s discerning ear, as he manipulates a simple downtempo rhythm template by protracting the range of the bass and ornamenting it with reverb-soaked flute and synth. Throughout, Butterflying has the masterful delicacy that’s steadily becoming Cappellato’s signature.

Euganea
Upperground Orchestra

This Venice-based free jazz quartet’s latest is a brilliant session from their Musica Veneta residency in June 2016. Described as a “techno-jazz collective,” the group here reworks selections from the Canzoniere Popolare Veneto, a collection of traditional Venician folk recordings. On the 11-minute opening track, “Kaigo,” the group explores a host of textures, rhythms, and tones, interchanging traditional acoustic instruments with electronic treatments and samples. On “Barene,” the strings of an oud underpin the rhythm of an intensely played alto sax. Euganea is a superlative live recording, showcasing a group of collaborators dedicated to expanding their musical chops.  

Fire and Sea
Machweo

On Machweo’s Fire and Sea, bandleader Giorgio Spedicato marries ancient music with electronics and live instrumentation. A four-year research project dedicated to exploring “southern Italian rhythms and melodies and North African atmospheres,” Fire and Sea avoids samples in favor of live composition and construction. “Focara,” named after a ceremonial Italian bonfire, is complete with looping choral vocals, echoing layers of saxophone, galloping hand drums, and a fierce four-on-the-floor stomp. On “Kalimbada,” Machweo is joined by Populous as he constructs a playful, shuffling disco track out of thumb pianos and tin whistles. With its melange of traditional music and live instrumentation, Fire and Sea lives at the outer limits of modern dance music

Collecting, Vol. 2
Koralle

Koralle’s (aka Lorenzo Nada) “In My Room” is a concisely packed, downpitched swing rhythm crackling with layers of texture and brushed snares, while “Night Train” slaps down a glossy R&B deep groove, recalling a smoky D’Angelo instrumental. It’s a thoroughly rewarding record that seems to imagine a whole new genre: bedroom jazz.  

Black Noise 2084
DJ Khalab

The story of Black Noise 2084 begins with a letter to DJ Khalab from the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa granting him access to the countless tomes of African field recordings held in their archives. After months of research and sampling, Khalab constructed 10 pieces that give urgent voice to the echoes of colonialism’s racial devastation on the African continent. Marrying future bass, Afrobeat, and free jazz, Black Noise 2084, is a triumph. On “Yaka Muziek,” Khalab melds jagged synths, Central African strings and a monstrous bass stomp, giving the song an orchestral quality. The rapidly rising tempos on “Bafia” and “Zaire” reveal Khalab’s interest in modern street dance forms, such as footwork and juke. Collaborating with guests like Shabaka Hutchings, Tenesha the Wordsmith, Moses Boyd, Prince Buju and fellow Italians Clap! Clap! and Tommaso Cappellato, Khalab’s work on Black Noise 2084 is marked by bold ambition and artistic vision.

-Joe Darling

Welcome to Essential Releases, our weekly roundup of the best music on Bandcamp. Each week, we’ll recommend crucial new albums that were released between last Friday and this Friday, plus pick an older LP from the stacks that you may have missed.

Jubilee
Call For Location

Jess Gentile, A.K.A. Jubilee, has put in work in her hometown, Miami, and her current home of Brooklyn; it’s the reason she’s so well-regarded as a DJ, producer, and curator (her Magic City nights/compilations are legendary for bringing talented underground club voices to the fore alongside more well-known artists). Call For Location (the name is, of course, a reference to the notation on flyers for underground parties) is her first full-length since 2016’s delightful ode to nightlife, After Hours, and it continues the refinement of her signature style—incredibly crisp dance music with plenty of space inside it, all sharp beats and rave synths that often tend toward the celestial and gauzy. made not for big festivals but for sweaty club nights in warehouses and even more unconventional spaces, clearly inflected by her hometown reverence for Miami bass and dancehall. (Her partnership with Mixpak founder Dre Skull has been incredibly fruitful.) Call For Location sounds a little bit more cosmopolitan than the clear Miami love on After Hours, but that’s to be expected; she’s spent a lot of time on the road lately, and experiences can’t help but inflect one’s music, especially if one is someone like Jubilee, with her ears constantly open. (It even gets into darker, almost industrial territory, with acidic squelches; see “Liquid Liner.”)

One of her talents is bringing accessibility together with depth; it’s easy to enjoy her work even if you don’t have much knowledge of dance music, but the more you know, the better it gets. The tracks with vocal features—Maluca on “Mami,” IQ on “Fulla Curve,” P. Money on “Shots”—especially seem designed this way. Each track is clearly built to feature that specific artist; none sound alike, like some of the indistinguishable EDM that could have literally any vocalist on it. But they’ve also got a clear throughline—you can tell it’s Jubilee’s work immediately, too—and pop appeal. Her work is technical, but it is also joyful. It’s been lovely, over the years, to watch her rise and rise and rise, coming more into her own with every release.

-Jes Skolnik

Little Scream
Speed Queen

I do not say this lightly: “Dear Leader,” the first song on the latest LP from Little Scream, recalls nothing so much as Leonard Cohen in the ‘90s. Like “Waiting for the Miracle,” the song is a five-plus-minute rumination on the hopelessness of the present day; there’s no chorus—as with “Miracle,” the closest you get are multiple appearances of the title phrase. It’s powered by the same dense layers of mournful purplish synths. But where the connection is clearest is in the lyrics and delivery: Like Cohen, Little Scream’s Laurel Sprengelmeyer is never histrionic or sloganeering in her observations—she doesn’t write highly-charged jeremiads to rile up the already-converted. Instead, she crafts lines that are measured, focused, and surgically precise—and are all the more devastating for it. “All those racists who would kill for their law and order,” she sings, quietly indignant, “can go ahead and build their walls on every single border/ build ‘em right between the hands of a mother and daughter/ you can fix that little girl up right after you’ve bought her.” And like Cohen, she knows when to deliver an acrid punchline: “But when the waters rise, it’s gonna be you, Miami.” It’s a high bar for the record’s remaining nine songs to clear, and if none of them quite manage the highly charged poetry of the opener, they still offer plenty of cold stings and graceful melodies. The title track is a muted contemplation of income inequality, one that builds to a chorus worthy of Kate Bush or vintage Sarah McLachlan; “Forces of Spring” is pensive examination of modern love, Sprengelmeyer’s voice mirrored by a lower, distorted vocal line, leading into a refrain that could have been plucked from Mirage. Sprengelmeyer was raised in the Midwest and now lives in Canada, and as such her lyrics have both the keen eye of the outside observer and the deep resonance of lived experience. It’s a record that cuts, so that those cuts may bring healing.

-J. Edward Keyes

Michele Manzo
ALL RISE

talian instrumentalist Michele Manzo’s latest album, All Rise, builds on his penchant for marrying funk and jazz with hip hop, dub, and Brazialian music. With this new album, Manzo steps into the realm of neo-soul and R&B while maintaining funk and dub as guiding lights.  All Rise opens with the upbeat titular track with couple Georgia Ann Muldrow and Dudley Perkins repeating “All rise, motherfuckers” (and seemingly incorporate some of the levity from this meme) in between lyrics about police brutality, and more. Other favorites include the skittering “Fly High,” that sounds like a throwback mid-‘90s R&B instrumental and the track “Robot Sunny Trip” which has a vintage rap beat with interspersed drum snares. The album closes with four bonus tracks which includes standout “Downtown Funk Stroll,” which sounds like, well, exactly that. All Rise does a good job of balancing pure instrumentals with songs featuring other artists that all come together to push the boundaries of funk and neo-soul.

-Diamond Sharp

Moon Bros.
The Easy Way Is Hard Enough

The past few years haven’t exactly been easy for Moon Bros. main man Matthew Schneider. He got mugged walking home from a gig in his native Chicago, incurring several blows to the head and losing his beloved electric guitar in the process; if that wasn’t enough, he was struck in a hit-and-run following his subsequent move to Los Angeles that left him with a broken leg. In spite of it all Matthew Schneider is still truckin’ — and what’s more, he considers his mugging “the best day of his life.” You see, when Schneider realized he wasn’t getting his axe back, he interpreted it as a sign that his electric days were over, and consequently, pivoted to acoustic guitar for Moon Bros.’s new LP, The Easy Way is Hard Enough. Album highlight “Footsteps” presents the band’s progressive folk-rock through an intimate, pastoral prism, a rousing campfire jam adapted for the studio: deftly-plucked 12-string melodies crackling and sputtering beneath rich swathes of pedal steel, sanded by Schneider’s gruff vocal tones. “Nasty Fresh” and “Okie” take a softer, more introspective approach with spiraling fretwork and low-end drone redolent of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, further bolstering the album’s textural appeals. You know the saying — when life hands you lemons (or beats you up, or steals your favorite guitar, or breaks your leg in an act of gross negligence)…make a great LP.

-Zoe Camp

Ness Heads
Numb

Chicago rapper Ness Heads (born Vanessa Ortiz) makes rap music that doesn’t fit neatly into categorization. On her debut EP Numb, Ortiz’s takes great care to craft a sound that melds her expertly written raps with melancholic, alternative, bedroom pop beats. Ortiz plays both the violin and the piano and that musical training background shows up on the the five tracks on Numb. On Opener, “Pull Me Up” the rapper telling a former to lover to “Pull me up to the top/Maybe I’m scared of the drop.” On the track “Lost” featuring Carolina, guitar strings play under yearning raps. Album closer “Make Me Feel” leaves listeners with “I’ve been loving me, you can’t take that away.” Numb is a good introduction to an artist that’s focused on making her own way.

-Diamond Sharp

yeule
Serotonin II

Between Anamanaguchi‘s dungeon-crawling nerd-rock and Gaijin Blues‘ Final Fantasy-esque world-building, you could say that Japanese role-playing video games—or JRPGs, as they’re commonly known—have been having a musical moment as of late, especially in underground electronic circles. (The crossover makes perfect sense, given the critical role soundtracks play in the overall experience: when you’re running around aimlessly for hours on end, slogging through quest after quest with no clear end in sight, good music is a priceless resource. London-via-Singapore singer, producer and composer yeule—so named for a Final Fantasy XIII-2 character—crafts her immaculate, ambient dream-pop according to that same philosophy, with one major caveat; the RPG being soundtracked is our chaotic present playing out right here on earth, as opposed to the fantastical saga unfolding onscreen. Standout tracks like “Pixel Affection” and “Veil of Darkness” may sound limitless and transportive, flush with tempestuous percussion and blurry synths, but yeule’s anguished lyrics lament the very sense of digital escapism on which the arrangements are predicated (“Pour my heart into simulation/ Digital in reciprocation,” she sings on the former). Shit’s grim, but then again, what else would we expect from an artist named after a doomed seer who perishes with every passing vision?

-Zoe Camp

Back Catalog

Cat Temper
Something Whiskered This Way Comes

The mid-week Halloween has created a conundrum for party-goers since time immemorial. When are you supposed to dress up? I went to a show last weekend, and half the crowd was in costume, which felt far too early. But I’m going to another one tonight, and if there are people dressed as Dracula, it’s going to feel too late. Fortunately, the Boston artist Cat Temper makes spooky music that feels right on either occasion. It’s also delivered with a fanged smile—if you haven’t guessed, Cat Temper is a feline-themed electronic project, and all of the songs on their latest album, Something Whiskered This Way Comes, wittily reflect that obsession. Sample song titles? “Master of Pawprints,” “Breakin’ the Claw,” “Don’t Fur the Reaper,” and my personal favorite, “Rock You Like a Furricane.” Cat Temper are more than just a clever gimmick, though: their songs have synthwave’s snarl and pounce down pat. “Detroit Rock Kitty,” with its bright, pogo-ing keys and four-on-the-floor rhythm, feels like it’s summoning vintage Yaz; “Tomcat Sawyer” is illuminated by spiraling electronic constellations, with a fat bass synth that line wriggles wormlike beneath the darting, high-end notes. And “Calicommando” flirts with future funk, a punchy drum pattern topped with big smears of hot-pink electronics. Where other artists in this genre can disappear down a dystopian rabbit hole, Cat Temper keeps things bright, bubbly, and endearing. Or to put it another way: it’s catnip.

-J. Edward Keyes

To anyone following the work of the DJ and producer Ultrademon, the last few years may have seemed like quiet ones. In the early part of the decade, she released a slew of albums, EPs, and DJ mixes—most notably, 2013’s Seapunk, a cult hit steeped in the Tumblr/Twitter “seapunk” aesthetic popularized by artists like Azealia Banks and Grimes. Her last full-length as Ultrademon, Durian Rider, appeared in 2015. But in truth, she never stopped recording—most of her work from the last three years has appeared under her Lily and Lilium Kobayashi monikers.

She also relocated to Kyoto. A tour of Japan back in 2012 led to another in 2016, until she eventually decided to make the country her home; she sold her possessions, booked a flight to Kyoto, and left her hometown of Chicago behind. Why and how she made this decision is unclear—she’s sparing with the details—but her affection for the country is evident in her words. “It takes a certain type of person,” she says of living in Japan, “and I don’t know if I am that person, but I think I am. I like it here. I like that [Kyoto] provides me a lot of space to do my own thing. If I wanted to go into my own world—which I’m very much in all the time—I can.”

The interior realm is important to Ultrademon, and lately, it’s manifested itself in her use of medieval, gothic imagery, worlds away from the future-facing utopian aesthetics of seapunk. “Interiority is strange,” she says. “The external informs me, but it’s a matter of denying it, mostly—a matter of looking to what you are connected to. You are the castle, so to speak. I’m not a social person. I live locked away, and like it that way.”

That Ultrademon would bring up castles is appropriate, given the way medieval terminology and themes crop across her new album, Chamber Music. There are the song titles, for one—“In The Court Of Scorn,” “Armor,” “Trans Feudal.” But that Ren-Faire feel carries over into the music, as well; consider the “Brutal”, where a rowdy beat trades blows with high-pitched, stabbing vocals and a sliding synth melody; it’s less a song than a sonic jousting match. “For one person, they might think of a Renaissance composer,” Ultrademon explains, “but for someone else, they’re going to think of an RPG video game.”

“If you’re comparing it to the [other] Ultrademon work I put out,” she continues, “[Chamber Music] is stepping away from any sort of idea of it being club music. I would say was that why it’s so personal. It covers a period and time in my life where I felt like I was in the middle of a bunch of warring factions, and it invoked this sort of feudalism. It felt like I was in the middle of the battle, and it kind of evoked this neo-gothic, Baroque landscape.”

There’s a larger meaning to the medieval metaphors as well. “I think there’s this feeling at the moment that everyone is independent of each other, extremely mobile and willing to move on at a moment’s notice,” she says. “There’s not really any sort of devotion or depth of connection. It’s feudal in the way that people hyper-fragment and overly define their identities in the context of struggle.”

Her older works were day-glo hyperactive rave patchworks, released on labels like Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records. There are a few hints of that sound on Chamber Music, but mostly, the music here is much more spacious, emotional, epic, and personal. “Far” marks the first time Ultrademon sings on one of her tracks, and its distorted, growling synths lean toward metal. Much of the album lands somewhere in the middle, with hectic percussion and glitches breaking through huge walls of noise.

While Ultrademon may choose to stay inside her castle, her work is clearly built to connect. For live performances of Chamber Music, she hints at an installation, perhaps in VR, but doesn’t want to give away any more than that. She’s emphatic that she doesn’t want to return to DJing, but refuses to rule it out either. Her next record, currently being written, will focus on live instrumentation specifically. “I’m actually moving away from using beats all together,” she clarifies later, over email. “This record is symbolic of a segue —departing from the bass & club oriented [sound] of my past.”

-Hugh Taylor

Occulting Disk is massive and tense—patiently, glacially aggressive. It’s also Deathprod composer Helge Sten’s first proper LP under that moniker in 15 years, a 10-track collection of undulating electronics clocks in at over an hour. The press release refers to the album as an anti-fascist ritual, and that seems appropriate; Will Oldham pens liner notes about how to confront hatred and fear. That ritual context is fundamental to Occulting Disk—it makes clear the album’s pregnant power, and the ensuing energy it delivers.

An “occulting disk” is a telescope piece that blocks out the visible surface of the sun in order to view its surrounding plasma. That’s not where the astronomical theme and lexicon on the album ends, though. Most song titles keep the album name and add a number at the tail end; these are generally the less-abrasive pieces, meditating on a theme, getting as close to ambient music as Occulting Disk wants to get. The tracks with deviating titles are two of the most dynamic. Penultimate track “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite,” the album’s biggest highlight, takes the listener through a caustic 12-minute odyssey of dense, abrasive synthesis—any smooth sine waves to be heard are buried fairly deep.

If “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite” is the final push, then final track “Occulting Disk 8” is the denouement, a five-minute undulating drone that crescendos gently before rolling back, allowing the listener to reflect on what’s gone before—the will and energy of ritual and creation—prior to the silence, waiting for the universe’s response.

-Jordan Reyes

Happy October! The death metal was very good this month. Five of the eight releases highlighted below fall under that broad genre umbrella, though they’re stylistically diverse in their interpretations of its tropes. They join a regal slab of classic doom, an antifascist black metal album, and a tribute to ’80s sci-fi from a survivor of the thrash revival.

View the Best Metal on Bandcamp Archives 

Gatecreeper
Deserted 

On their second LP, Arizona death metal crew Gatecreeper deliver the sound of the Sonoran Desert. The inherent brutality of that harsh, sunbaked terrain seems to manifest itself in the band’s punishing buzzsaw riffs and frontman Chase Mason’s wild-eyed howl. Gatecreeper’s approach to old-school death metal worship is pluralistic. Deserted doesn’t really sound like Obituary or Entombed or Morbid Angel or Cannibal Corpse or Amon Amarth — but it does sound like all of those things thrown in a blender set to pulverize. While the least direct of those influences in terms of sound, the most instructive might be Amon Amarth, whose M.O. has always been memorable, catchy songwriting above all. Gatecreeper have made the one OSDM record this year that you’ll be singing along to.

Orodruin
Ruins of Eternity  

Orodruin’s Epicurean Mass dropped in 2003 (three years before Warning’s landmark Watching from a Distance, and nearly a decade before Pallbearer formed, it bears mentioning) and quickly became a cult favorite among fans of traditional doom metal. The Rochester band didn’t break up, but they also didn’t make another record until now, so Ruins of Eternity bears the weight of 16 years of anticipation. They haven’t missed a beat. All their strengths are all full display here. John Gallo’s crystalline vocals remain one of the great vessels for raw emotion in heavy music (“Letter of Life’s Regret” is just absurdly gorgeous), and the band is limber enough to ride a rock n’ roll Sabbath gallop or drop into a lachrymose dirge, often within the same song. Give this one a couple of years; its cult classic status is on the way. 

Vastum
Orificial Purge  

In the blissful naiveté of 2013, Vastum introduced a lot of us to the term “incel” on their song of the same name. In 2019, police departments mobilized undercover agents to try to stop incels from opening fire in cinemas during comic book movies. Credit to Vastum for anticipating the very specific hell we live in. The San Francisco band emerged in 2013 as one of the edgier outfits in the burgeoning old-school death metal scene. Their lyrics unpacked sexual taboos with unusual seriousness, and their live set was one of the few death metal shows that felt dangerous, a seething spectacle that saw frontman Daniel Butler stalking the floor of a pitch black, fog-choked room. Since then, they’ve become one of the most reliable bands in American death metal. Orificial Purge is a fourth straight great LP in their discography, and it distills their sound to its core elements. You’ll hear the band’s signature churning, midtempo riffs, dissonant dive-bombs, and high-wire vocal interplay between Butler and Leila Abdul-Rauf. It’s not a reinvention for Vastum, but they clearly haven’t yet exhausted what’s proven over four records to be quite fertile ground.

Teitanblood
The Baneful Choir  

In the raw black/death metal—sometimes called war metal—subgenre, atmosphere is everything. Bury your guitars under layers of production muck, let your bass and drums rumble below that, wear a gas mask in your press photo, and there’s a good chance the denizens of certain message boards will embrace you. Teitanblood appeal to that crowd, for sure, but they’re one of the few raw black/death bands who weight songwriting in equal proportion to atmosphere. The Baneful Choir might be their greatest triumph yet. Throughout its 51-minute runtime, it creates an oppressive, claustrophobic world, but it populates that world with memorable riffs, stabs of expressionistic guitar that cut through the murk, and a genuinely unsettling vocal performance by Ignacio Muñoz. In a scene where it often feels like there’s nothing new under the sun, Teitanblood have crafted an unforgettable work.

Exhumed
Horror  

Matt Harvey and Ross Sewage have carved out a very specific niche with their long-running band Exhumed, and the title of their first album laid it out clearly—Gore Metal. They didn’t name it for the guy who invented the internet. Since that opening missive, they’ve become one of the most consistent bands in death metal, churning out new gore-obsessed riff fests every couple of years. Horror is their most economical release to date, as the band grinds through 15 songs in 26 minutes. Harvey and Sewage’s Jeff Walker/Bill Steer routine of traded shrieked and guttural vocals is as dialed in as it’s ever been, and with less runtime to play with, their Slayer-inspired solos sound particularly frantic and urgent.

Mortiferum
Disgorged from Psychotic Depths  

Anyone familiar with the labyrinthine lurch of Finnish death/doom (Demilich, Rippikoulu, Demigod) will find something to love on Disgorged from Psychotic Depths. Like Denver’s Spectral Voice did on their debut album two years ago, Olympia’s Mortiferum adapt the very particular Finnish sound for an American sensibility on their own first full-length release. The result is a cousin of the post-Incantation OSDM movement that isn’t afraid to get weird with the atmospherics. Some of these riffs are so dissonant they defy reason, yet they often manage to be catchy. Mark down Mortiferum as a band to watch. 

Toxic Holocaust
Primal Future: 2019  

Joel Grind is a survivor of a dubious movement that he helped usher in 15 years ago: the thrash revival. Toxic Holocaust was one of the few bands from that scene that was worth a damn, and six albums in, Grind is still finding new ways to twist hardcore-infused thrash to fit his warped vision. Primal Future: 2019 is his stab at a concept album. A riff on the now-cliched “we were supposed to have flying cars by now” lament, Grind examines 2019 as though all the technophobic fears of ’80s dystopian fiction came true. It’s a fun theme, and it seems to have reinvigorated his signature crossover anthems, making Primal Future the best Toxic Holocaust record since 2008’s all-time great An Overdose of Death.

Dawn Ray’d
Behold Sedition Plainsong  

It goes without saying that there are far too few black metal bands with clearly stated, right-thinking politics. Dawn Ray’d, an anarchist, antifascist trio from Liverpool, undoubtedly score bonus points with the lefty Metal Twitter crowd, and that’s absolutely fair enough. Do the songs back up the agitprop? It’s complicated. It feels like there’s a great record yet to come from these guys when they learn to apply their Panopticon-inspired atmospheric black metal to more complete-sounding songs. Perhaps the all-too-brief runtimes and simple structures are intentional, though. These are battle hymns, meant to be hurled at the ruling class, and those tend to benefit from brevity. As a rallying cry, Behold Sedition Plainsong is incredibly effective. I can’t wait to hear the music catch up.

-Brad Sanders

London remains an alluring proposition for young musicians, a fact that has had a ripple effect in other parts of the UK. In the south, there are no major cities within a hundred-mile radius, and the musicians who haven’t departed for the capital city are mostly congregated in Brighton. But things are different up north: cities are bunched closer together, and the cost of living is significantly cheaper—a truth which extends across the border to Scotland. That affordability, coupled with the fact that London’s cut-throat creative environs are far away, means the local scenes in the north have thrived and expanded at their own pace for years. A prime example of these bastions is Glasgow, Scotland, a longtime arts hub sustained by affordable rent and the Glasgow School of Art.

In 2019, this robust network of DIY subcultures reaches even farther. Venues like Manchester’s Partisan, Leeds’ Chunk, Sheffield’s Hatch and the Glasgow Autonomous Space (GAS) regularly host mixed bills which feature acts from the home city and further afield. Attend a show at any of these spaces, and a certain shared ethos among both performers and punters begins to emerge: a credo grounded in tolerance and shared experiences, spiked with a shared knack for uncanny experiments. The musical definition of “‘DIY” typically implies rock, and there’s no shortage of bands if you know where to look—what’s notable about the current northern U.K. crop, though, is the prominent role electronics play in their practice. Here are some of the best releases from the region’s plugged-in underground, all of which combine wild electronics with a host of other sounds.

Soft Issues
Soft Issues

Soft Issues have a claim to being the region’s premier power electronics outfit. Their eponymous debut begins with “Crawl Backwards,” a track in which the furious screeches of vocalist Chris Robinson are gradually engulfed by nails-on-a-chalkboard digital distortion. The tone set, Soft Issues subsequently slam through ten more pieces of agonized industrialism. “Bleak Magic” is similarly unsettling, entrapping the group’s hard techno leanings (explored later in the tape on “Hart Let Update”) between harsh walls of noise perforated by Robinson’s fearsome vocals. Soft Issues arrives via Opal Tapes, the prolific Tyneside imprint which, as an aside, has a strong claim to being one of the U.K.’s best tape labels right now.

Anz
Invitation 2 Dance

It’s not just live acts who are flying the DIY flag up north. Club nights including Kiss Me Again (Manchester), Season (Leeds) and Cartier 4 Everyone (Liverpool) are hosting wild parties that have inclusivity at the core. Ever present on the scene is Mancunian DJ/producer Anz. Her Invitation 2 Dance EP, released on 2 B REAL back in April, contains four future-forward DJ tools which draw upon garage-house, machine-funk and Fade To Mind-esque hybrid traxx. Galvanized by a vibrant handclap beat and insistent club-caller vocals, “Helps Your Two Hips Move,” the EP’s biggest standout, delivers some of the snappiest electro grooves of recent memory.

Algernon Cornelius
Who Knows? Maybe They Speak For You

Algernon Cornelius’s Who Knows? Maybe They Speak For You is a painterly mixtape from the Manchester-based MC/producer. Billed as his last instrumental album, Who Knows?… is largely comprised of dense and detailed MPC vignettes. Consider “Christmas Missed Us” shorthand for Cornelius’ crossover-culture approach; it flips an iconic Biggie lyric into a trunk-rattling boom-bap beat, while also wittily incorporating a sample from the beloved British sitcom Peep Show. Who Knows?… is one of those beat tapes which builds on the legacy of J Dilla and Madlib, updating their production style with psychedelic flourishes and unexpected genre asides—see the punkish “Snake In The Grass” on the latter count.

Damn Teeth
Real Men

Damn Teeth’s second LP Real Men, is a set of screeching no-wave disco malfunctions. The Glasgow group’s frenzied grooves seem ready to fall apart at any moment, yet somehow they never do—they just keep piling breathless vocals and combustible synths higher and higher. On opener “You’ll Only Make It Worse,” vocalist Paul McArthur sounds like he’s trying to run away from the track’s army of synths—and if his screaming in the song’s apocalyptic climax is anything to go by, it sounds like they caught up.

Symrun
Care Work

Formerly the principal member of slacker-rock project Exit Earth, Sheffield’s Symrun has recently pivoted to making music digitally. His debut mixtape Care Work is full of short, fractured tracks that pit sing-song flows against degraded MIDI loops. The Sadboys/Drain Gang crooners Ecco2K, Bladee and Thaiboy Digital are clear influences, but eccentric touches like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sample on “DYKWYFF” and “Betablockers’”s balance of joyous earworm melodies with bars about self-medication reflect an inventiveness that’s all Symrun’s own.

Proc Fiskal
Shleekit Doss

Shleekit Doss, the latest EP from rising star Proc Fiskal, is an impressive set of hybridized club tackle from the Edinburgh-based artist (real name Joe Powers). Taking its name from the club night that Powers ran in his home city, Shleekit Doss blends Edinburgh’s own electronic history with sounds from further afield. “Smiths Deli” demonstrates the ways Proc Fiskal is able to weave a new sound from old parts; Eskibeat tones and an IDM sensibility are instantly familiar, but Powers’ is playful in his arrangement, the track’s grime core softened up and made more limber by crisp beat programming and warm washes of keys in the higher registers.

Romeo Taylor
The Kingdom of Scotland

An idiosyncratic multimedia artist, Glaswegian Romeo Taylor has released albums ranging from hypnagogic drone to cheeky bedroom pop. “The Kingdom Of Scotland,” a single which came out in June on the Isle Of Eigg-based Lost Map Records, is surely his finest work to date. This raucous happy hardcore banger might celebrate Taylor’s love of his country, but the track’s appeal has extended far beyond Hadrian’s Wall; “The Kingdom Of Scotland” was a staple at raves this past summer. Crank it loud.

Territorial Gobbing
Capitalist Art Is Cartoons Fucking

In a scene full of unusual talents, there are perhaps none more idiosyncratic than Theo Gowans. His gigs as Territorial Gobbing certainly qualify as unique experiences; often found in outlandish costume, Gowans creates barely-controlled chaos using dollar-bin cassettes, vibrators, contact microphones placed inside his own mouth and anything/everything else. Capitalist Art Is Cartoons Fucking, Gowans’s recent full-length for Opal Tapes, is a noise-concrète record which, however disturbing, captivates and amuses on quirky tracks like garbled closer “Feeding The Hand That Feed You Hands Hands.”

-Fred Mikardo-Greaves

Since her 2012 debut, Shana Falana has been a stalwart voice of the Hudson Valley’s modern indie scene: a frequent presence at local shows, a Kingston-area DJ, and the voice of a colorful shoegaze duo, where she winds gothic tunes around her dreamy, drifting vocals.

On previous records, Falana processed, layered, and distorted her vocal tracks until they became just another plug-in in her arsenal. On Darkest Light, though, she opts for something more harrowingly direct. The results can be subtle, but they’re always surprising. She punctuates “Everyone is Gonna Be Okay,” a Ride-style rush of overdriven guitars, with a snotty, nasal kick that recalls Kathleen Hanna and Patti Smith, instantly transitioning the song from a swan dive to a crane kick. “Come On Over” charts a course directly between Echo & the Bunnymen and the Black Angels, with Falana chanting the title’s demand with equal parts lust and malice, carrying the song’s seven-plus minutes on her snarl alone.

Darkest Light particularly glows during its heaviest moments, as on the cosmically doomy title track. But it’s just as effective when Falana strips it all back. “Come and Find Me” opens with just voice and guitar, synths occasionally bleeding in around the edges. But as Falana sings about “wandering deeply,” a choir emerges from the fog, her lonely words echoed by a ghostly army of voices. Like all of Darkest Light, it is simple, direct, and startlingly effective.

-Robert Rubsam

Bandcamp’s outer limits continue to be a rewarding place for psychedelia, experimental club music, noise, vaporwave, and the wholly uncategorizable. In this volume of Acid Test, we look at electro-acoustic earworms, a playful noise album perfect for your haunted house, and a surreal audio transmission about Avatar that acts as a prologue one of the year’s strangest and best albums.

Visit the Acid Test Archives.

Eartheater
Trinity

Alexandra Drewchin’s music has shapeshifted countless times over the course of the decade. She screamed and bellowed with psychedelic noise rockers Guardian Alien, then changed course completely on her intimate and delicate albums as Eartheater for Hausu Mountain. On last year’s IRISIRI, for PAN, she signaled another change in direction, this time creeping toward club music. And yet for all that evolution, her voice has remained unmistakable—and on the remarkable new Trinity mixtape, it’s never been clearer.

Made remotely with New York friends and collaborators while recording IRISIRI in Berlin, Trinity is an even deeper dive into club music. Drewchin’s elastic voice is always at the center, with producers’ beats carefully fashioned around it. AceMo ignites the first half with the energetic one-two punch of “High Tide” and “Supersoaker,” but Trinity shifts into headier space with the pair’s angular and ethereal “Pearl Diver” and the Tony Seltzer collab “Lick My Tears.” By the time you get to the appropriately titled closer “Solid Liquid Gas,” it’s clear Drewchin can masterfully melt, freeze, or sublimate without losing any of what makes her special. At this point, it seems like she can do anything.

Sharp Veins
Gros Recurs

William Harrison King first appeared as a club music wunderkind dropping essential EPs like 2015’s Bleeds Colors and Puddles on UNO that merged club music, ambient, grime, glitch, and trap music. His work evolved even more on last year’s massive two-and-a-half hour outtakes compilation detritus preterit selections, which overflowed with club bangers and songs recalling everything from William Basinski to Xiu Xiu. King has been slow to circle back to his fiery early work, but only because he’s so methodical in exploring new forms, like this hypnotic three-track release gros recurs. Opening with a spindly, seven-minute loop that sounds like it was snipped from the ‘90s SquareSoft videogame catalog, each track stretches and bends in a way that recalls the early days of vaporwave. It ends with the sparkly groove of “Music For Jet Skis Pt. 1,” a knotty looping track that seems to squeeze out more serotonin with each of its 11 minutes. I’d be excited for Sharp Veins to make club music again—he’s really good at it—but I’m also in no rush, when his detours are as incredible as this.

Galen Tipton
fake meat

Sound artist Galen Tipton makes a marvelous and alien debut on Orange Milk with fake meat, which doubles as a showcase for many other like-minded producers. The album is rife with brilliant collaborations, including Holly Waxwing on the hyperdriven ASMR of “Orchid Mantis,” Woopheadclrms on the atmospheric “Mouthblood,” and OM co-founders Seth Graham and Giant Claw making appearances on the fractured orchestration of “Gummy” and the stunning pop centerpiece “Touch.” fake meat also has remarkable pop moments, sounds that veer closer to PC Music and Katie Dey than anything in Orange Milk’s past. But it’s just as compelling for how often it veers in the opposite direction. For every earworm like the infectious Rkss collab “Sissy” or closer “Tender,” there are electro-acoustic whirligigs “Pillow Fight” and “Horomones” with G.S. Sultan. Taken all at once, it’s a whole breakthrough for the label, courtesy of their best new artist.

Guerilla Toss
What Would The Odd Do?

Guerilla Toss returns with an EP that sounds more alive and energized than their last few full-lengths. Energy has always been essential to GToss, whose early days as a Boston staple at the start of this decade were unrivaled in intensity and rhythmic power. That excitement returns on tracks like “Moth Like Me,” one of the most thrilling rollercoasters the band has ever constructed. But what’s new is the ability to read along with Carlson’s lyrics. It’s a game-changing choice, as clever turns of phrase and surreal imagery seem to spill out of her. The short release ends with the funky, stomping closer of “Land Where Money’s Nightmare Lives,” where the helplessness and anger with a planet “melting with no audience” merges with vivid images, like sleeping in the water of a melting ice cap. The EP is powerful and cathartic, but it doesn’t sound all that different from the Guerilla Toss you may know and love.

Russian Library Records
H Series #1: Folclore Impressionista / Ondness

Despite the name, Russian Library records is actually a new label based in Lisbon, Portugal. Each of the first three releases debuted this month follows a similar format, with a pair of experimental artists taking up two sides of a 7” single. It’s a format that feels made for punk, but each installment offers an experimental synth odyssey in miniature veering from João Paulo Daniel’s kosmiche soundscapes under the names Folcore Impressionista and Aural Design to Supernova’s playful YMO-inspired “Dare” and the fractured club of Ondness’ “Volta da Ajuda.” If I have a favorite, it’s the double-dose of abstractly chirpy electro-acoustics from Demónio António and Vuduvum on volume three, but all of these bite-sized experiments are worth your time.

Bonnie Baxter
Axis

No record is more perfect record for blasting out of your haunted house than Axis, the deliriously freaky new album from Kill Alters bandleader Bonnie Baxter. Over tightly looped samples—that are as enticing as they are maddening—Baxter cackles, chatters, gags, and screams. At any given moment she might giggle like The Twilight Zone’s killer “Talky Tina” doll, deliver a death rattle straight out of The Grudge or, as on the hypnotic “Spirit Enema,” make you laugh with some surreal pitch-shifted punchline that sounds straight out of a Longmont Potion Castle prank call. The best moments come when she blends into the loops entirely, using her repeating vocalizations like collage camouflage, before striking with the next surprise. It makes for a one-mutant Monster Mash, best set to repeat, and paired with Halloween candy and nitrous.

Spencer Clark
Previsual Avatar Blue

Does an audio recording simply describing an album count in this column? In the case of synth alchemist Spencer Clark’s colossal upcoming Avatar Blue, conceived as a 134-minute score for an imaginary Avatar sequel, it not only counts—it feels absolutely necessary. From his earliest days in the duo Skaters with James Ferraro, Clark’s work has grown more obscure, ambitious, and mysterious. Every project—from a five-hour epic inspired by H.R. Giger, Hellraiser, Fantasia and the Renaissance to a bird-themed trilogy of warped exotic albums—is built around vivid stories and mythology that bring to mind a Romantic-era ballet transmitted from some alien dimension. The audio essay Previsual Avatar Blue is a rare glimpse into Clark’s writing process delivered by a computerized voice that functions as a winding tale about dreams, biology books, sci-fi novels, ocean creatures, and possessed demon masks that influenced the work, but grows into a deeper reflection on imagination, perception and, yes, Avatar. Clark’s work this decade is genius, the finest example of “world-building.” This unique process acts like a doorway into one of the most rewarding experimental catalogs on Bandcamp, and an introduction to one of the year’s best albums.

-Miles Bowe

Photos by Michal Wdowikowski

High Scores is generally a column about video game soundtracks and the artists who compose them. This month’s installment bends the rules a bit, with a duo who love video games so much that they dreamed up their own imaginary role playing game for the sole purpose of soundtracking it: Gaijin Blues. It’s the brainchild of Paweł Klimczak and Michał Szczepaniec, two Polish musicians who—after taking their own trips to Japan in 2016 and 2017—returned with bags upon bags of records, inspired to start a project of their own. 

Klimczak, a DJ and producer who often tours and records under the name Naphta, met Szczepaniec (A.K.A. PlayStation Yoga) while mixing a pop album for the latter’s old band. They became quick collaborators and friends, but it wasn’t until their respective Japan trips that they started work on Gaijin Blues. “We were sitting down and listening to the records that we brought home, and we found some amazing sounds there,” Klimczak says. “We thought about recording a special DJ set, but instead we’ve channeled those inspirations into something completely different.” 

Gaijin Blues is definitely different. Their 2017 debut EP layers sampled traditional Japanese instrumentation over hypnotic live drums and flute, using dance club beats as connective tissue. Song titles point to the duo’s unabashed love for games, especially Japanese role-playing games: “Cafe LeBlanc” references a chill spot in Persona 5; while “Guardia Castle” is so named for a dramatic Chrono Trigger locale. But with their new LP Gaijin Blues II—an album written for the imaginary game of the duo’s own invention—Klimczak and Szczepaniec dive into something that’s both more ambitious and more cohesive than their early work. These are complex, moving compositions focused on evoking a sense of grandeur. The liner notes, which walk the listener through the imagined RPG in detail—each song represents a new area or conflict, and lines like “use the drumstick sword” abound—only make the project more endearing. Bandcamp spoke to Klimczak (who is also a music and pop-culture journalist) in a series of emails.

You are two self-described nerds from Poland. Where did your obsessions with Japanese role-playing games start?

Since we were kids, we were fascinated by Japanese pop culture. Anime was first; Polish TV  was showing Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa, Sailor Moon and other basic stuff. But we had some brushes with manga as well. Then there were games: Michal through Nintendo handhelds, Pawel through Playstation and later on, Super Nintendo emulators. Our passion for JRPGs grew only stronger with modern titles like Persona 5. 

And how did you come to love Japanese music?

We’re always looking for sounds, rhythms and melodies that will broaden our musical taste and knowledge. Japanese music—not only traditional music but disco, ambient, jazz, power metal, J-pop—has this amazing quality. It has technical proficiency and detail, and is usually really powerful, emotionally. Sometimes subdued and subtle; sometimes [it’s an] all-out glorious cheese-fest. We love it all. 

You mention trips to Japan in your biographical information. What inspired those trips and what was the focus of them?

Michal was visiting Japan as a tourist, and Pawel was touring as a DJ. It’s funny, we both had the same focus when we were there: record stores and nerdy places like arcades and gaming shops. Obviously we had both wanted to go there for years, as it turned out, for the same reasons. We were both after very specific music: Michal was hunting for pop and disco, Pawel traditional and children’s music. Needless to say, some video games were brought home as well.

“Gaijin” means outsiders or non-Japanese. Do you feel like outsiders? And is there any stigma still attached to nerd/otaku culture in Poland?

A little bit, yeah. But since the nerd culture in general became mainstream, it’s much better. Even rappers are sporting anime t-shirts, jocks are running around in Star Wars merch, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering are breaking records. We were bullied for that shit in school. We’re grown men now, so nobody will beat us up for reading manga on a train. There are also a lot of people here who are really invested in Japanese culture, pop or traditional. It’s an endearing community, very diverse socially and age-wise, and their commitment is very honest and engaged. 

What are some game soundtracks that have really inspired your music, either directly or indirectly?

Classic stuff: Chrono Trigger, Secret Of Mana, Final Fantasy (especially VI-IX), the Phantasy Star series. Yasunori Mitsuda’s work is especially close to our hearts: “Wind Scene” from Chrono Trigger might be one of our all-time favorite pieces of music. When it comes to melodies, Shoji Meguro’s work on Persona 5 was very influential on our approach to composing hooks or ear-wormy bits. And nobody builds an epic-yet-transcendental feel like Keiichi Okabe (Nier: Automata). But Gaijin Blues is more about the whole atmosphere of these games, [the] emotions they evoke, not just the music. For us, they’re like [a] cozy blanket that we can wrap around ourselves. Not to mention the impressive, wholesome, tragic or ecological stories they are bringing. We hope that Final Fantasy VII remake will rehabilitate some eco-terrorism. In the face of climate catastrophe, it’s just what we need.

On your first EP, you were paying tribute to games without playing game music, per se.

Our main goal with the EP was to blur the lines between samples and live instrumentation, to present the sounds we found on the records in a different context. The music came first; the concept of channeling our nerdery came after that. It was completely opposite with the Gaijin Blues II album, though.

So the concept of creating an imaginary game soundtrack came before the music of Gaijin Blues II?

We had some musical ideas, but the story came first and organized the way we were writing and recording the tracks. Knowing precisely what kind of emotions or atmosphere we wanted to create really streamlined the process. And then the details of the story were worked on at a later stage, when we assigned characters or events to particular melodies or sounds.

Who wrote the story behind the game, and was it directly inspired by any particular RPGs?

We worked on it together. There are some borrowed elements, nods, and references. It’s better to leave the hunt to the listeners! The ecological message is there for a reason. Music might be a lighthearted affair, but our real world is screwed. Thus the bittersweet ending: the last track on the album is a victory at a high price. Some people will survive, but the world as we know it will not.

It’s clear that this sound—big and propulsive and often dance-club friendly—wasn’t just inspired by games. Who (or what) else has influenced your sound?

Mostly a variety of sounds from the U.K., from funk to dubstep. Juke/footwork was a huge influence as well. We love modern club music and its possibilities, especially when it comes to shaping huge, impactful sounds and dramatic structures. The rhythm is a crucial thing as well; we are both huge fans of interesting grooves and left-field beats.

It sounds like you worked with samples on “Bahamut.” What’s your philosophy on sampling, and where did you find the vocal sounds that come to the surface here?

We used to start with a sample and build a track around it. We were trying to add enough live instrumentation to blur the line between the sample and a new recording. “Bahamut” samples traditional music, with the drums, synths, and guitar played by us. Now, we are trying to start with our own ideas, and use samples as a crutch—but yeah, nothing beats a good dig, and finding that golden loop!

“Leaving Schwarzwelt,” is the most chaotic, and perhaps the most videogame-y track on the album. It’s a very timed-escape / boss battle sort of music. What did you do to increase the tension and chaos here?

Drumsticks on the bongos! Live drums play a huge part in Gaijin Blues’s sound: we use congo and bongo drums, floor toms, hi-hats, rides, rainsticks, chimes… we love to layer them and weave them into our tracks. This way we can get more organic feeling and a sense of progression, even in more loop-oriented songs.

If you could re-score any game from any era, what would that game be and why?

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! The existing music is perfect, that’s for sure. It builds the tension and atmosphere of the scenes. Masakazu Sugimori and Akemi Kimura did an outstanding job on that, it’s a shame that the music is not consistent throughout the whole trilogy. But modern production could pose an interesting challenge. It would be easy to overdo it, make it too epic. However, finding the right themes for the characters and dramatic scenes would be an amazing experience. Modern games apply these impressive, complex systems when it comes to triggering the music. Working on something so limiting could be very challenging and inspiring.

-Casey Jarman

Earlier this year, Billy Woods dropped one of 2019’s best albums. Then, he did it again. The first of those was Hiding Places, a collaborative LP produced entirely by Kenny Segal. It’s a beautifully haunted record, an examination of how the past never really leaves us, even when we try our best to make it disappear. But it’s also deeply funny— the first song uses Spongebob Squarepants as a central metaphor, and on “Spider Hole,” Woods wryly repeats: “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.”

The second LP was Terror Management, an album that is as deeply personal as it is deeply political—a nervous and caustic look at existence’s underbelly, the damp and dank spaces we retreat to out of necessity. But it, too, is knotted up in witty one-liners: On “Birdsong,” Woods captures the cacophony of New York public transportation, rapping, “Busta Rhymes on the A-train, countin’ down our last days/ Oh, and do you have any spare change?” Taken together, the two albums offer a distillation of Woods’ entire body of work and a summary of its major themes: reveling in the safe spaces of childhood, then flipping them to show the ways menace lurks even in the places we feel most comfortable. Both are dark, brooding records, the kind that require intense focus to unpack.

That elusiveness is a reflection of the person who made them. For one thing, Woods is notoriously private. In press photos, he obscures his face. Even his name, Billy Woods, is an alias. And while he’s always been a writer, his early work was focused on fiction and cultural criticism. But when pressed to elaborate, he declines.

What he will share is this: he was born in Washington, D.C., and moved to former Rhodesia with his family shortly after the nation secured independence from Britain and became Zimbabwe. His father had been a political activist, working on behalf of Zimbabwean independence while exiled in America. “My dad was a writer and an intellectual,” Woods says. “He wasn’t a fighter. He was raising funds and writing on behalf of the political arm of the party.” Upon the family’s return to Zimbabwe, Woods’s father held senior positions in the elected government, giving Woods a front-row seat to a country that was still in the midst of working out its future.

Woods didn’t discover rap until he moved back to the States. “It was 1989 or so, and I distinctly remember getting into Public Enemy,” he says. “I wanted this shirt. My mom said, ‘No way,’ because it had the Public Enemy logo on it. She really didn’t like the crosshairs,” he recalls with a chuckle. The group’s lyrics echoed the radical politics Woods had been surrounded by, living amidst a revolution in Zimbabwe. “It was how I grew up,” he says. “I was this rebellious, anti-authoritarian kid. I was becoming a teenager.” He didn’t begin writing his own rhymes until he moved to New York at age 19. After stints at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast (true to form, he declines to say which one) and some time at Howard University, Woods decided he needed to escape D.C., feeling that it had swallowed many of his friends, who he saw falling into bad habits. “I thought, ‘If I just sit around here depressed, hanging out with these dudes, I’m gonna be here forever,’” he explains. “You start to do more serious, adult things, and start to get into more trouble. I was determined to get away from home almost as soon as I moved back after college. New York just seemed cool. It seemed like the place to be.”

Woods had been bouncing back and forth between New York and D.C. for most of his life. It was while attending college there in 1996 that he met Vordul Mega from Cannibal Ox, who encouraged Woods to keep writing. When Woods moved back to the city permanently in 2001, Mega was well on the way to cementing his own legacy. ”I was living in Harlem, and that’s when Vordul started doing Cannibal Ox,” Woods says. “He said he was gonna do a record with El-P, which I thought was bullshit. But it happened!” Seeing the success of Def Jux, Woods began to realize there may be an audience for the type of music he wanted to make—dark, claustrophobic, challenging. He founded Backwoodz Studioz in 2003—but the early years proved difficult.

“I thought I was really gonna be out there with other emcees, and Backwoodz was a way to build off of that,” he says. “As it turned out, that wasn’t quite correct. I was behind a lot of people in my development—I was an outsider in a crowded scene, and nobody liked my shit!” Realizing the New York scene wasn’t as open and collaborative as he had hoped, Woods began to refine the mission of Backwoodz, making it a way to support both himself and the rappers he loved.

Woods’s success is the result of tireless honing and refining, sharpening and developing. Each of his albums is another step in the process. There’s certainly an argument to be made for early releases like Camouflage, with songs like “Macross Plus” that firmly plant Woods’ in New York’s early ‘00s indie scene. The strings weep, his voice is deep and gruff—it’s a snapshot of Woods before he developed his own persona. It was with 2012’s stunning History Will Absolve Me that Woods found his voice. “As far as the synthesis between being where I wanted to be with the final product, and a business model that would work for the label, History was the beginning.” The album is collaborative; Elucid and L’Wren appear throughout, and local rappers like Roc Marciano turn up to contribute verses. “The Foreigner” is Woods at his strongest, rapping, “Time waits for no man/ He ain’t believe till his ace boon took the stand/ Shook the D.A. hand, that’s that honor amongst thieves.” The internal rhyme scheme is a marvel, and Woods is able to pull it off without getting in the way of the overall narrative. Today, I Wrote Nothing, released two years later, is a fan favorite, with Woods moving into more avant-garde territory—particularly on “Zulu Tolstoy,” which is riveted to a broken beat, and “Born Yesterday,” which lands somewhere between Blue Note jazz and lounge music. Last year, under the name Armand Hammer with longtime collaborator Elucid, he released Paraffin, which stripped down and re-assembled Woods’s nightmarish version of modern-day life. The album earned them critical raves.

But all of these have been stepping stones to 2019: Hiding Places is the innocence and the terror of childhood, the escape and the loneliness in a single 12-song masterpiece. Terror Management is its parent, preoccupied with quiet traumas and existential fears. Woods views the two albums as inextricably linked. “There was a consensus forming that Hiding Places may be my best work,” he says. “I had to take that up as a challenge and approach Terror Management as such. I understood very early on that I ran the risk of people thinking, ‘Oh, he made a great album, and then threw some shit out there.’ Some people might feel that way but I really took a lot of time with this record,” he explains.

Billy Woods’ empire is slowly growing. He’s exceedingly modest, but he knows he’s found an audience willing to engage with his work on both a musical and an intellectual and musical level. But there’s still danger in leaving things open to interpretation. It’s a game Woods has spent his whole career trying to win. “People would say that Hiding Places is a critique of capitalism, which is certainly in there,” he says. “But it’s also about childhood and the past. It’s also about the title,” he explains with a hearty laugh. “Sometimes I think things are so obvious, but my work is still obfuscated. I’m trying to be more clear, without really showing it.”

-Will Schube

Photos by Isha Dipika Walia

On her debut EP XOskeleton, Jasper Lotti creates a soundtrack for the anxieties of the digital age, threading lyrics about connection and disassociation through pop melodies and rhythms that are as captivating as they are nerve-wracking. It’s a sound that Lotti has dubbed dys-pop or “dystopian pop.” But while many works about dystopia focus on totalitarian powers and cities in ruin, on XOskeleton, Lotti considers a more personal, existential type of imprisonment.

“It’s not like we walk out and see buildings set on fire and stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more of an identity-based dystopia in a society where we have multiple versions of ourselves: living in social media, living in different conversations on WhatsApp and iMessage. It’s dystopia in this confusion of, ‘What’s the real me?,’ that identity crisis of, ‘Is there a real, true version of myself?’” In her music, these questions of self and identification tiptoe along the line between intimacy and depersonalization, passion and indifference. 

Throughout XOskeleton, Lotti surrounds the easiness of her reverb-veiled lead vocals with harmonies that hover somewhere between effortless and removed. In her production, Lotti contrasts steely rhythms with hypnotic beats and catchy, poppy hooks. Cold, digital throbbing and plinking surrounds evocative lyrics in which Lotti yearns for genuine interpersonal connection. “I just want to watch you watching me, I just want to touch you touching me,” she sings on EP closer “Touch U (Find a Way Pt. 2).” On gothic dance track “Idea of Me,” she asks, “Do you love me or do you love the idea of me? You don’t know me, you don’t know the real me.” 

Lotti remembers asking questions about her “real self” from an early age. Growing up in a working-class immigrant neighborhood in White Plains, NY, she spent the majority of her formative years bouncing between different music and dance classes, including Hindustani singing, Bharatanatyam dance, and gospel choir. At the same time, she fell in love with pop music—songs like “Lucky,” the 2000 Britney Spears song that sneaks the story of an alienated and depressed pop star between upbeat hi-hats and chimes. 

Despite her lifelong love of music, when she graduated, she decided to become a doctor. It was while studying pre-med in college, repelled by the inner workings of the medical industry, that her questions of self and purpose came to a head. She decided to abandon medicine and make music full-time, teaching herself Ableton and writing and producing her own songs. 

“Music was the only consistent thing in my life,” she said. “It just kind of found me when I was in my darkest place, and I accepted that hand reaching out.” She created XOskeleton over the course of about a year, moving between Maine, where her family now lives, and Los Angeles.     

For all of its weighty, existential subject matter, XOskeleton asks its questions with a smirk, offering a darkly humorous outlook on humanity’s slow dehumanization. Standout track “Ur So Vague” has an upbeat, R&B-heavy pop melody, and its hook is so catchy it nearly obscures the song’s slightly sinister chorus: “You’re so vague/And I like that/In your head/And I like that/Can’t figure you out/and I like that.” Faced with a person that is fully disconnected, Lotti takes a different tack—flirting with them.

“I want to embrace the dystopia because there is some kind of warped beauty in it,” she says. “You can’t know yourself until you’ve lost yourself, and when you’re in this environment of confusion, there’s the potential to find the truest version of yourself because. That’s really beautiful and the most positive take on it. I think that’s what will help humanity.”

-Ann-Derrick Gaillot

At the start of the decade, Austin’s The Deer arrived after an ampersand—they were the loose accompaniment behind Grace Park, a promising folk singer with a wounded sense of wonder. In the years since, Grace Park has become Grace Rowland and folded both her name and her cotton-wrapped soprano into The Deer, a quintet that pairs fiddle and piano with sharp but understated lead guitar. Across three albums, they’ve glided between various mixtures of folk and rock, sliding up and down the continuum between Mazzy Star’s skyward wanderings and Grace Potter’s torchy soul. They’ve succeeded mostly in jam-adjacent circles, filling festival lawns with hooks rippling through a narcotic haze. 

But The Deer’s fourth album and debut for Keeled Scales, Do No Harm, feels like the bleeding edge of a breakthrough, a country-rock dream machine somewhere between a jolt and a drift. The best of these 10 songs drape tapestries that could have been lifted from Beach House’s practice space across songs that occupy a space adjacent to folky musicians like Hiss Golden Messenger. Paisley keys, scrambled electronics, and warped mandolin lines soften the edges of would-be anthems, giving off a kind of omnipresent glow. “Confetti to the Hurricane,” an electrifying ode to swallowed rage, falls in line with the arcing triumph of Big Thief, while the groaning fiddles and crackling guitars of “Stark Raven” frame the horizon’s sprawl, recalling the infinite expanses of Brightblack Morning Light. 

The Deer close Do No Harm with an extended take on “Walking in Space,” a wild tune from the ‘60s musical Hair about checking in to a more peaceful realm. When it shifts halfway from a Southern-gothic brood into a jubilant exaltation of escapism, The Deer’s own story comes into focus: a once-nebulous band that sifted through the basics to build, at last, a weird little world of their own. 

-Grayson Haver Currin

Because electronic music is often consumed in places where songs by multiple artists are blended together by a single DJ, we can sometimes forget how good those individual artists are in their own right. Every so often, an Aphex Twin or Burial will earn praise, while other artists with a similarly singular focus slip by undetected. This month’s picks spotlight artists whose work is effective in both short bursts on the dancefloor and extended listens at home. There’s a new album from London veteran Patten, on which he dives even further into a world he’s been constructing for nearly a decade. Mars89, a relative newcomer from Tokyo, has a unique, bleak take on UK bass tropes that almost feels like film noir. Teplice’s rarefied electropop may at first seem familiar, but it quickly spins a dizzying web of sound. There’s lyrical Midwest modular, Italian hyperdrive drum’n’bass, and loping Portuguese groovers: these may exist more or less within or between recognised styles—but all are worth celebrating as distinct musical personalities.

View the Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp Archives

Silvestre
Silvestre Is Boss

The relaunched SecretSundaze label is about to enter a new phase. Where previously they’ve been focused on house music, the label is now trying their hand at space-rave (see: Eliphino, who was featured in this column last month). This good natured mish-mash of low-and-slow loping grooves from London based Portuguese producer Silvestre incorporates hip hop, reggaetón, balearic, rave, and more. It kicks off with the “Ashley’s Roachclip” break, which was iconically used on the Coldcut remix of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid in Full”; from there, continues in an unpretentiously warm and funky fashion, its beats embellished with lush pads and hefty bass.

Slave to Society
Slave to Society

You can probably guess from the harsh, agit-punk-style monochrome artwork, and the label logo depicting a gun-toting, balaclava-wearing bank robber, that the music here is going to be uncompromising. This is industrial techno in excelsis: It grinds, is shrieks, it hammers, and it slams. But it’s also very funky: just take a moment, if you can handle the barrage, to appreciate the skewed placement of the hi-hats, or the way the metal-on-metal scraping recalls a samba shaker… there’s sophistication to the violence here.

Mella Dee
Techno Belters

Ryan “Mella Dee” Aitchison is rapidly rising in the global DJ league, thanks to his no-nonsense, high-energy playing, and his complete refusal of genre snobbery. (He’s also pretty tidy in the studio.) But rather than follow his preposterously big hit track “Techno Disco Tool” with something equally radio-friendly, he’s decided to go for pure groove. These four tracks are all about restraint, everything snapping tightly, like the parts are held together with elastic, each surface immaculately smooth and crisp. The weight behind each hit is deceptively powerful. These are clearly DJ tools, but the way the tiniest extra cymbal or modulation or sub can lift them makes them impressive in their own right. The lead riffs of “Silver Street” and “Stack Select” recall the mid ‘90s work of Chilean-Brit legend Cristian Vogel—which is always a good thing.

bovaflux
aux4419

Eddie “Bovaflux” Symons exists firmly within the world of “braindance”—a zone of electronica definitely adjacent, but not entirely indebted, to Aphex Twin. It’s music that balances a super-technical understanding of synthesis and production with a vital and constant love of funk and melody. Symons has been releasing since the heyday of this sound in 2001, and has remained true to it ever since. Refined and sharpened, his grooves are endlessly inventive, incorporating electro, acid, ‘80s Euro club sounds, along with house and techno. All of them are perfectly designed to tickle the sensitive corners of your synapses.

Mars89
TX-55

Tokyo producer Mars89 has built a strong connection to the UK with his first three releases on Bristol’s superb avant-dub imprint Bokeh Versions, and now this debut release for the new label from rising London DJ star Amy Becker. It’s a bold launch for her label: these two tracks are tough, bleak, and gothic. Both tracks look to London themselves, and particularly to moments in music history where genres started blurring. “TX-55” is turn of the millennium proto-grime given industrial distortion and reverb. “Successor Project,” meanwhile, looks back to a moment circa 1993 where “jungle tekno” was a thing, with rattling breaks over a heavy four-to-the-floor kick and “a London sumtin’ Rasta seen” spoken sample. Both sound like pirate radio for rusted robots.

thys
Music from Sleeping Beauty Dreams

As Noisia—the Dutch titans of stadium high-def drum’n’bass—finish a final lap around the world after announcing their split after 20 years, its three members have started moving in very different directions. The band’s sound was always predicated on the tension between EDM’s immediacy and abstract, experimental electronica, and on this project Thys—aka Thijs de Vlieger—clearly signals that he is keener on the latter sound. This soundtrack for a dance piece, the music originally played through a 32-speaker surround sound system, is all about intense synaesthetic hyper detail: crunches, rattles, breathy noises, all giving it serious bodily impact. It’s still got plenty of high drama; but the huge range of moods and textures on display here show a musician ready and eager to flex his creative muscles and expand in all directions.

Meara O’Reilly
Hockets for Two Voices

This is not “electronic” in the literal sense: it is simply two voices (or rather, two recordings of the same voice) separated spatially, singing a complex melody that harks back to the “hocking” of medieval European folk traditions. But North California artist / designer / musician Meara O’Reilly is no traditionalist—as you might guess from someone who collaborated on Björk’s Biophilia project. These five short pieces were composed using electronic tools, and they sound electronic, even though they’re technically not: their perfect geometry, along with the illusion of two voices combining to make a single melodic line, completely bamboozles the parts of your brain that tells you whether something is natural, digital, or human. This should inspire all fans of experimental and minimal music, but it also makes for a beautiful, brain-cleansing listen in its own right.

Loula Yorke
LDOLS

Loula Yorke, from Ipswich in the East of England, is one of the most interesting voices in analog electronics. Where modular synthesists can often be too prissy, Yorke takes a delightfully no-nonsense approach to her “techno meets leftism” live sound generation. These six straight-to-tape improvisations aren’t for anyone who likes their lines clean and their angles straight: the gurgling, burbling, swooping, and whomping sounds constantly spill over their prescribed edges, melting into one another. It sounds like it would be fun if played in a dirty, sweaty techno basement, but it also makes for great close listening, as those messy details gradually give up the method in their madness.

Hieroglyphic Being
Synth Expressionism​/​Rhythmic Cubism

On The Corner has quickly built up an impressive catalog of records that smash the boundaries between jazz-centric music and ravey electronics. So Chicago’s endlessly prolific and exploratory Jamal Moss—aka Hieroglyphic Being—seems like a natural fit for the imprint. Sure enough, he’s turned in some glorious work for OTC, even by his high, weird standards. The title says it all: this is not just expressionistic, instinctual, from the guts and soul, but cubist, in the sense that every rhythm feels like you’re viewing it from multiple angles. Without wanting to come off too cosmic, it feels like these tracks exist in multiple timelines at once. All regularity is smashed apart, yet somehow it grooves: if Sun Ra made techno, you could imagine it sounding like this.

LA Vampires Does Cologne
10 Outta 10

LA’s 100% Silk is a relentlessly prolific label, and this month they’ve got a prime crop: preposterously lo-fi experiments from Michigan’s Cammi, tripped-out-but-still-standing-tall small hours grooves from LA scene stalwart Vibe Repair, and this altogether shinier seven-tracker from the label’s founder and former Pocohaunted member Amanda Brown. Together with “bicoastal-tronica duo” Cologne—aka Danny Scott Lane and Vasilios Manoudakis—she’s blown away any and all lo-fi dust and murk; everything here is neon-lit, sharp-edged, and funky. Charting a line from the Paradise Garage through electroclash and on towards the deluxe festival electronica of artists like Jon Hopkins or Rival Consoles, these songs of intoxicated attraction are full of sauce and sass. Think Hercules & Love Affair and Ladytron getting into CGI sports cars and heading off to an impossibly decadent party. It’s a whole heap of fun.

Teplice
Bright Future

Berlin/London artist Matilda Jones—aka Teplice—was picked up by fellow producer E.M.M.A. for her new Pastel Prism label after Jones took part in one of her Producer Girls workshops. And rightly so: she is an incredibly distinctive new voice. This is essentially slowed-to-a-crawl electropop, with hints of New Order, Yazoo, Young Marble Giants, and other ‘80s new wave in its pensive constructions—but comparisons don’t do it justice. The deadpan vocals and creeping, echoing drum machines and acid lines are all put in service of a singular songwriting vision. Woozy frustration, dislocation, and hopelessness all feel incredibly relatable here—and all three songs worm their way into your subconscious on a single listen.

Ben Pest
Scourge

He’s been part of the Ninja-signed mutant electronic jazz band Pest (hence the nom de techno), and he’s made some fantastic vocoder-heavy electrofunk as OverworX in the last couple of years. But Ben Mallott’s real metier is in sweat-drenched, maniacally grinning techno—and that’s what we’ve got here. Whether it’s the piercing monotone rave riff of “Get the OT,” the floor-wobble bass of “G-Zus,” or the glassy slither of the lead synth in “Sliderman”, everything is focused on delirious fun. Fellow denizens of the UK’s less-salubrious basements, Jerome Hill and Michael Forshaw turn in a tense acid rinseout and a psychedelic bone-saw attack on their respective remixes.

Chaircrusher
Not This Time

Iowa City’s Kent Williams has been working as Chaircrusher in the midwest techno and hip-hop scenes for many, many years, but he’s clearly anything but jaded. His current Chaircrusher iteration is all about six-minute-plus, thoughtful modular synth jams. And whether they’re riding a hefty techno kick (“Cirrus”) or broken beats (“Grandma Moses”, “Sinjahara”), or meandering through a fog of reverb and whispering voices (as on the title track), those synths always sing—their crisp tones full of delight as they dance around and above the beats.

HLZ
Eternal

On this EP, Italian producer HLZ doesn’t have the rhythmic sophistication that has marked out many recent Metalheadz releases. His beats are constantly four-square and repetitious, recalling the mid ‘90s when key DJ Grooverider coined the term “hardstep.” But what he lacks in elaborate groove construction he makes up for in thrilling rushes of forward movement. Every one of these four tracks—from the chest-crushing bass of the title track to the chasmic “Hyperion” to the percussion of “Overdogs” and chattering arpeggios of “Hidden Memory—feel like a dancefloor gaining momentum, ready to enter hyperspace. The production is impeccable; sounds fly by you like meteors, and the louder you play it, the harder it is not be taken along for the ride.

Tracksuit Goth
Picnic

The continual growth in confidence and innovation of deep and hefty dubstep (or just “140” as it seems to be increasingly known in the UK) is not letting up. The lead track here is full of unexpected twists. Starting with a beguiling chime and church-y sense of space, it drops into a huge triplet bassline familiar from many modern dubstep sets. But shortly after that, lively percussion starts up in a different meter, as a reminder that this is dance music, not just a head-nod or lurch-to-the-bass sound. Likewise, the horror film strings of “Scum” and the rippling synth of “Picnic Rope” never quite unfold as you’d expect, while “Like the Old Days” is a spectacularly moody bit of bleepy grime.

Patten
FLEX

Listening back now to Patten’s 2011 debut album GLAQJO XAACSSO on No Pain In Pop, it’s striking how effortlessly it melts together hip aesthetics—sounds that might be described as lo-fi, post-dubstep, deconstructed club and so on—into something natural and personal. On his fourth album, the producer is somehow doing the same, but more. The deconstructions are more deconstructed (“VelvetScans” could rock the artiest of Berlin art parties), the post-dubstep is post-dubsteppier (“Memory Flood” is like Burial’s musclebound older brother; “Life2” is like Hessle Audio sniffing gasoline). But there’s more in the mix too: breakcore, trap, all kinds of rhythms. Yet as before, Patten makes them his own. The consistency of the dark and puzzling world that this record builds, even as it shifts endlessly in tempo and pattern, is remarkable.

Sleepertrain
A Gift

In just seven years, Seattle’s Hush Hush has built an impressive catalogue of  over 100 releases—all focused on gentle, close-listening music. Sometimes, that means entirely ambient or drone based; more often, the releases are full of unique takes on dreampop, electronica, and bass music. But no matter they style, there’s an impressive consistency through the catalogue—a sense of intimacy. London artist Sleepertrain builds everything from languid piano melodies to the sort of echo-drenched alt-R&B grooves that in lesser hands would feel like a nod to James Blake and Frank Ocean. Here, they sound like a distinct expression of Sleepertrain’s musical vision. Natural and digital sounds, voice and acoustic instruments are held together with spider silk and mist.

Dub Phizix
White Flag/Dragnet

In contrast to the relentless forward motion of the HLZ release, this is drum’n’bass with more complex rhythmic machinery. Here, crisp percussion somersaults over itself in larger and smaller motions through open spaces, and dry, hollow bass tones provide pillars for the percussion to bounce off. “White Flag” embellishes this with crisp, clear bleeps and gentle soul chords. And if you were worried everything was a bit too poised and controlled, “Dragnet” has what you need in its final quarter, with an unexpected eruption of the classic “Amen” break beloved of vintage jungle producers, like whirling knives emerging from the clockwork mechanisms.

-Joe Muggs

Anamanaguchi entered the cultural landscape in a neon flash. Over the course of just a few years, beginning in 2009, they released their debut album, scored Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game, launched one of the era’s most successful music-themed Kickstarters, released their monolith sophomore effort Endless Fantasy, and helped bring chiptune to a wider audience. 

In the six years since the release of Endless Fantasy, the group has continued to tour and release remixes; three years ago, they unveiled Capsule Silence XXIV, their score for an imaginary video game that came complete with a PR hoax in the form of a Twitter fight with the game’s fictitious developer. Now, the group returns with [USA], their most mature and dynamic release to date, and their first for Polyvinyl.

[USA] signals a new approach for Anamanaguchi. The album’s lows are lower, and its highs higher, thanks largely to a less aggressive approach to production. The dopamine-inducing blasts of chiptune are still there, but they occur less often, giving each song a chance to breathe, and the album’s pace is more varied throughout. Minute details buried deep in the mix reveal themselves with each new listen, making for an album that is as richly textured as it is viscerally thrilling. 

We chatted with the quartet about what they listened to in the lead up to the album’s release. 

Peter Berkman

Tyler Burns
Vulgaris

“I first heard about Tyler Burns from my high school friend Kurt Feldman, who plays in the band Ice Choir. He sent me Vulgaris because it’s almost like outsider art—and I mean that in the best way. It’s ‘80s music in a way that we’ve never heard before.

The song “Red Rope of Jericho’ is one of my favorite songs ever. Tyler has such a great voice, and he delivers these haunting melodies that get stuck in my head every morning. It’s also rare that I love lyrics, and his lyrics are as haunting as the melodies. There’s something bold about what he’s doing, especially since he’s doing it in such an understated way.”

Default Genders
main pop girl 2019

“I love everything that Jaime Brooks does, including Default Genders. There’s this amazing ability to combine what I love about the personal folk style of an act like Bright Eyes with lo-fi breaks and production on main pop girl 2019. Bright Eyes tried to make a digital sampling album with Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, but I feel like Default Genders makes the music that Conor Oberst would have if he grew up with a computer.

It’s one of the only records of 2019 that’s about 2019. There’s so much music now that wraps itself in nostalgia, but I feel like Default Genders is trying to cope with reality in a super exciting way. Plus, there’s a No Rome feature, and we love No Rome.”

Luke Silas

4mat
Modern Closure

“This record is just so good. We’ve all been fans of his for a while. What stands out to me about this one is that it’s weirder that some of his other stuff—which is a pretty impressive feat. It feels more difficult to hear what was made with a tracker and what was made with a chip, which is always fun for me as a listener. His musicianship is at one of the highest levels you can reach with the type of programming he uses.”

glass beach
the first glass beach album

“I’ve known about glass beach for a while. Their main songwriter J. [Mcclendon] hits a lot of checkboxes when it comes to what I enjoy about punk music, as well as more vulnerable songwriting. the first glass beach album is an honest record. I appreciate how it does exactly what it wants to, which adds to the earnestness of the entire package.”

Chihei Hatakeyama
Forgotten Hill

“I originally found out about this artist through a Bandcamp recommendation several years ago while I was searching for ambient records. I was blown away, because Chihei Katakeyama has been putting out a couple albums a year for a while. He was originally signed to Kranky, but I believe he runs a label now called White Paddy Mountain that releases similarly ethereal drone music. It started out with me thinking, ‘This is a good, relaxing album.’ But the more I went through the discography, I started to find that I had favorite albums of his for different things—I had a favorite record for going to the beach, or cleaning my house, or going to sleep. I think that speaks a lot to the control he has over his craft.”

James DeVito

Vinnie Neuberg
Songs for Guitar

“Vinnie is a friend of mine. He’s primarily an illustrator and comic artist. He does a lot for the New York Times now and, just like in his comics and illustrations, there’s a lot of playfulness and whimsy in his music. Each song is like an experiment with a particular genre or sound. In high school, I listened to [the band] Unicorns a lot. They were a huge early inspiration, particularly because of how fun their songs are. I hear a lot of that same fun in Vinnie’s music.”

Ary Warnaar

Six Impala
Rubber

“Rubber is an amazing album. It’s by Six Impala, a collective of six producers, and it kind of snuck out of nowhere for me. I had heard some of the producers who are in the collective during this Minecraft event we did.  Rubber does something which [USA] does for me: It’s really enjoyable to listen to as a whole package, rather than as individual songs. You get the most out of it when you sit down and listen to the whole record—which I hadn’t felt in a while before hearing this. [USA] was done by the time this came out, otherwise, it probably would have been an inspiration.”

True Blue
Edge Of

“I listen to True Blue a lot. Edge Of is an older record of hers, but I picked it because it’s a wildcard for me. I don’t even know what’s going on in that world of music—that indie or poppy world. It’s just this genre that I enjoy, but don’t know anything about. Then, when I stumbled upon this EP, I fell in love with it immediately. It’s catchy, but also goes hard in a minimal way. The under-delivery is amazing. It’s calm sounding on the surface, but it’s euphoric and intense deeper down.”

-Samuel Tornow

“I was going to all these local shows and seeing these incredible bands playing to 20-30 people,” says Sydney-based musician Lachlan R. Dale, who founded the label Art As Catharsis in 2011 to give the Australian experimental underground the wider audience it deserves. Eight years and over 120 releases later, the label continues to highlight Australia’s thriving constellation of forward-thinking bands, and Dale’s voracious appetite for new sounds has built an ever-expanding roster of artists as distinct from the norm as they are from each other.

Whether you’re looking for post-rock, metal, jazz, noise, folk, or Afghan classical-inspired fusion, there’s at least one Australian band doing a totally unique take on it, and it’s likely they’re doing it on Art As Catharsis. This variety makes browsing the label’s Bandcamp page feels almost like walking through a digital SXSW or CMJ, showcasing a country’s worth of boundary-pushing music you may never have heard otherwise.

This range can be credited to Dale, who works full-time in the NGO sector, and dedicated “10 to 20 plus hours a week” to running the label by himself until a few part-time staff members joined him two years ago. Rather than focusing on any particular genre or sound, he says, “I’m lead by music I have a connection with,” and, just as in 2011, the label’s only goal is to help that music get heard.

He admits that even he has struggled to define the identity of a label as likely to drop a jagged boulder of noise-grind as it to let loose some spacey jazz fusion, but key, Dale says, is the “element of musical catharsis“ frequently sought by adventurous musicians, regardless of genre label (thus the name).

But equally prevalent across much of Art As Catharsis’s roster is a kind of rhythmic adventurousness. It’s especially ubiquitous in the polyrhythms and shifting time signatures of a cluster of bands sometimes labeled “post-math rock,” who blend jazz, classical, prog, metal, and electronic influences into potent new instrumental forms; it’s there, too, in albums of everything from Eastern classical-inspired fusion to folk.

Lately, Art As Catharsis has been on an inspired run of instrumental music, which Dale finds can reach those abstract heights in a way that vocal music sometimes struggles to. “With a lot of music,” he says, “you’re very much focused on the vocalist, forced to interpret things in relation to what they’re saying.” Instrumental music, or at least the kind on this label, doesn’t face as much of a barrier, which gets at the philosophical heart of his mission.

“In the West,” he says, “I think we’ve really lost a lot of reasons why people create music historically: as part of religious ritual, to bind community, to access altered states of consciousness, to point to the ineffable.” Instead, “we’re stuck with a purely consumer-capitalist conception: that music is something that might accompany a TV ad for a supermarket, or a little tune to bop along to… the possibility for deeper forms of connection and expression are lost.”

“This is, I think an impoverished view of music, and I’d love for us to expand it out,” he continues, “to look at music as art, look at music as spirituality and religion, and really broaden our conception of music.”

Here are five releases on Art As Catharsis that exemplify the label’s mission to do just that. But you can tell from any of its annual samplers, you could easily find five completely different releases that do it just as well.

The Biology of Plants
Vol. 2

Born of cross-pollination between the Brisbane jazz and classical scenes, The Biology of Plants melds improv and compositional acumen into a cinematic journey of electro-acoustic instrumentals. On Vol. 2, the arpeggiated figures of bassist Helen Svoboda, synth/keyboardist Joshua Rivory, and cellist Simon Svoboda intertwine in tessellating harmonic structures over Charles Hill’s cascading vortex of drums, building a hybrid sonic architecture totally their own. “I often ask my musician friends: ‘how would you describe this album?’” says Dale, “and they’re like, ‘We don’t know!’”

Zela Margossian Quintet
Transition

Aside from the emphasis on clarinet over sax and trumpet, this acoustic, piano-led album might seem like more standard jazz. But Transition is a much of a fusion as anything else on Art As Catharsis, and its odd meters are at least as complex. The eponymous quintet is led by the Beirut-born, Sydney-based Armenian pianist Zela Margossian, who combines Armenian jazz, folk, and classical traditions; the Arabic/Lebanese folk music she grew up around, and much more into driving jazz whose world-spanning influences synthesize into something otherworldly. The band’s dynamic repetition of winding melodies and rhythms build unusual feelings of suspension, and Margossian’s versatile playing always keeps listeners guessing, channeling ‘70s-style spiritual jazz from a different set of materials than someone like Alice Coltrane.

Bonniesongs
Energetic Mind

When Dale asked his label’s current Sydney-based artists what local artists to look into next, “art folk virtuoso” Bonniesongs’s name kept coming up, ultimately landing her full-length debut on Art As Catharsis.  Bonniesongs spins polyrhythmic webs to hang intricate, sun-bleached loops of guitar, banjo, strings, and folky electronics, buoyed by floating clouds of vocals of that traverse the spectrum between Vashti Bunyan and Bjork. Equally at home accompanied by a lone guitar, or the booming drums, cello, and bowed upright bass that sweep in for dramatic heft, Energetic Mind is a singular psychedelic folk statement.

Alarmist
Sequesterer

Alarmist is one of Art As Catharsis’s growing number of non-Australian acts, released as part of a new partnership with U.K. label Small Pond. The Irish “instrumental maximalist” trio takes a palette of warm, squelchy synths, and reverb-drenched guitars that wouldn’t be out of place on a Bibio record, and send it careening through math rock’s rhythmic pinball machine. Sonic textures abound, drums skitter and bash, and Sequesterer’s tightly-wound synthesis of jazz, post-rock, and electronic music makes that clunky “post-math rock” label sounds as natural as it’s ever going to be.

Qais Essar
I Am Afghan, Afghani Is Currency Vol III – Zahir

Last year, Art As Catharsis launched a sister label, Worlds Within Worlds, which specializes in “traditional, classical and contemporary world music from across the globe,” and focuses more on Middle Eastern and Indian traditions than the Australia-focused main label. The third volume of Qais Essar’s I Am Afghan, Afghani Is Currency EP series is an ideal match, preserving traditions while moving them forward, incorporating Indian classical and American minimalist influences into the trance-inducing soundscapes of the rabab, Afghanistan’s lute-like national instrument. Essar, who composed music for 2017’s Oscar-nominated animated feature The Breadwinner, and whose more fusion-filled followup on Art As Catharsis itself, uses his musical studies and skills to forge a symbiotic connection between national traditions and an increasingly interconnected world.

Diploid
Glorify

Art As Catharsis built much of its initial footing in the metal and hardcore scenes, and those roots continue to grow. Led by guitarist Mariam Benjemaa and bassist Reece Prain’s double-bladed vocal assault, their latest album Glorify is as adept at racing through subterranean grindcore tunnels crackling with abrasive electronics, as it is overloading speakers with heavy sludge, Dan New’s drums fulfilling needs primal and technical. Chronicling “mental deterioration” and inspired by sources like Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts Of No Nation, the Melbourne trio’s album page acknowledges its recording on land stolen from the Wurundjeri people of the people of the Kulin Nation, “whose history, language, culture and art have been destroyed by the white colonisation of so-called Australia.” An Australian counterpart to progressive grinders like Cloud Rat, Diploid take on serious themes, and very much do beat you over the head with them — in a good way.

-Charlie Heller

Illustration by Noopur Choksi

The Latin American pop underground is a massive, celebratory space—a world where popular global genres like rock, folk, electropop, and reggaeton thrive, mingling with traditional music like merengue, cumbia, bossa nova, and nueva canción. Because Latin America is home to a dizzying array of cultures, its music not only contains elements from genres that come from the global North, it’s also firmly rooted in the sounds of the artists’ hometowns, and their experiences as young musicians in a region that is in perpetual motion—and perpetual turmoil.

The artists contained in this list make music that shatters the expectations and stereotypes of what Latin America sounds like today. They’re also creating intricate and beautiful narratives about love, independence, sexuality, race, spirituality, and politics that provide a window into the hearts and souls of the communities they represent. These artists, who hail from the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America, are taking their scenes by storm, and creating music that transcends geographical boundaries.

Papisa 

Brazilian artist and producer Rita Oliva has been playing music since she was young. She started on classical piano, then moved to acoustic guitar and drums. Eventually, she started to sing. After graduating university with a degree in marketing, Oliva turned her attention to music, joining the alternative rock band Cabana Café, who were a mainstay of the São Paolo music scene. When her tenure with the band ended, Oliva embarked on a spiritual and physical journey to rediscover herself and the ways in which she could use her voice to process her emotions—and help others do the same. Out of this spiritual work came her project Papisa, which roughly translates to “priestess.”

“I didn’t start with the name Papisa, but I started with the specific rituals to put these songs together, and to create an environment at home where I could be more connected with myself and with nature,” Oliva explains. “That was the concept behind it—it was pragmatic and practical; a search for spiritual meaning for my life, and also for my work. I had been working with music for a long time, and I was really looking for the purpose in that.”

Her debut album, Fenda, is a masterclass in dream pop and psychedelia. Oliva produced the record herself, and plays every instrument on each of its nine tracks. Written in the aftermath of both her grandfather’s passing and the end of a relationship, Fenda is centered on themes of death and rupture. But it’s less an album about grief, and more about finding ways to deal with natural endings. “I really would like to get people into a peaceful state of mind,” Oliva says. “If I’m able to bring some comfort to listeners, to bring some sort of connection with themselves and with the music, it would be really nice to achieve that. I want to be this little drop in an ocean of peace and calm.”

Tomasa del Real

In her short career as a reggaeton singer, Chilean tattoo artist and clothing designer Tomasa del Real has managed to collaborate with genre heavy-hitters like DJ Blass and Maicol Superstar (formerly of the Puerto Rican duo, Maicol y Manuel), and has shattered stereotypes about what women are allowed to sing about in reggaeton. Much like her predecessor, Ivy Queen, Tomasa del Real rhymes explicitly about sexual desire, love, and female empowerment.

Credited as the creator of the genre neoperreo, del Real has pioneered a sound that is as rooted in dembow—the backbone of reggaeton—as it is in Latin trap, US hip-hop, and pop. To listen to her 2019 album, TDR, is to marvel at her incredible skills as an MC, and the cool, hallucinatory rhythms instantly transport you to the bright lights of the dancefloor.

MULA 

When they began their newest project, MULA, in 2015, twin sisters Cristabel and Anabel Acevedo, along with electronic music producer Rachel Rojas, began imagining what the music of a futuristic Caribbean generation could sound like. Taking inspiration from the digital cumbia and folktronica movement in Argentina (where Rojas studied electronic music production) and trailblazers like Rita Indiana, the trio began digging into the Dominican Republic’s invaluable treasure trove of traditional music, and ended up creating dance-worthy fusions of bachata, merengue, perico ripiao, and other traditional genres, paired with drum and bass, reggaeton and dembow beats. “Music acts as a magnet that brings everyone together—the dancing, the beats and joy are very contagious,” Rojas explains. “The direction our sound is taking has a lot of that; it’s very dancefloor oriented: heavy bass, soft intricate vocals, poignant drums and our signature Caribbean flavor.”

Across two records—2015’s debut MULA, and 2017’s Aguas—the trio has not only refined their sound to crisp, body-rocking club jams, they’ve also told stories of love, lust, Caribbean nostalgia, and female empowerment that give a new and nuanced perspective of what it’s like to live and grow up in the queer community in the Domincan Republic. “More than stories, we try to show our perspective on those topics—how we perceive the world, and what happens around us,” the trio explains via email. “We believe its important to give visibility to our Black, queer, Caribbean identity. Girls like us have been given very little visibility and it’s time for change.”

A.M.I.G.A. 

Hiela Pierrez and Lila Domínguez are two of the most enigmatic figures in modern-day Uruguayan pop, equally invested in crafting an image grounded ‘00s kitsch as they are committed to exposing the dark and vacuous side of the lives that we lead over the internet. Pierrez is a makeup artist and fashion designer, and Domínguez is a renowned vaporwave artist; their band A.M.I.G.A borrows its sound and aesthetic from ‘00s Latin American internet culture, pairing it with electropop and a healthy dose of trap. Their debut album, 2018’s  a.m.i.g.a.uy, is a hallucinatory trip, the duo’s fiercely sweet voices singing about looking for love on Latin Chat (a Latin American meetup site), obsessing over their internet follower count, and bemoaning online betrayals by cyber loves. “On this first EP, we were interested in talking about the fragility and power of human interaction in the virtual era,” the duo explains in an interview with the online magazine, Piiila. “We’re also making fun of ourselves, looking back on our own dependence on social media.”

On their second album, Enemiga, the duo’s songs have a harder edge, mixing electroclash beats, trap vocals, and reggaeton drumming, to tell more tales of both girl-on-girl betrayal as well as reconciliation. The album also features guest vocals by the likes of Sara Hebe and Uruguayan producer Eros White. Both albums are bewildering listens that demand repeat plays.

Ani Cordero 

Ani Cordero is the embodiment of the warrior—a fiercely independent and political voice in the folk scene, an incredible touring drummer for bands like Os Mutantes, an intense frontwoman for Mexican rock band Pistolera, and an activist for the rights of women, immigrants, and the Puerto Rican community in the diaspora. After beginning her solo career in 2014, she’s moved from re-imagining semi-acoustic versions of Latin American nueva canción songs on her first album, Recordar to crafting unabashed anthems of resistance and social justice in her sophomore record, Querido Mundo.

Now, Cordero is shifting back to an edgier, pop-rock sound with her new album, El Machete. Inspired by the realities and struggles of a post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico and Donald Trump’s takeover of the US political system, El Machete features Cordero pairing traditional Puerto Rican genres like plena and nueva trova with lyrics calling for female empowerment, justice for the Latinx community, self care among activists, and tales from her summers spent on the island with her family. El Machete is Cordero’s most personal work to date, with the machete itself symbolizing, as she says, “independence, self-reliance, Jíbaro wisdom, and pride in being Puerto Rican.” It is her way of using her platform to help others.   

“The personal is political, so in a way, I’ve always been writing political songs,” she explains. “I’m just more dedicated to it now, because it feels like we’re in a historical moment where everyone needs to use their platform to try to counteract the oppression and injustice however they can. But also, I’m interested in giving voice to a variety of emotions with my music, because I believe that it’s healing to hear a song that represents your feelings—even if that feeling is anger sometimes.”

Tuyo

Tuyo is a revelation in Brazilian pop and R&B—a trio of musicians from Curitiba who’ve set out to create a fusion between dense guitars, lo-fi beats, synths, chopped-up vocals, and dream pop harmonies that the band calls “futuristic folk.” Formed by guitarist Jean Machado and vocalists Lilian and Layane Soares, the band has been perfecting their sound since the sisters’ days as contestants on The Voice Brasil. Their debut album, 2018’s Pra Doer, earned them well-deserved praise for their groundbreaking sound—a mixture of reverb-filled harmonies, sweet guitar melodies, hidden bossa nova, and Brazilian folk touches, with lyrics exploring heartbreak, melancholia, and the pains and pleasures of growing up.

Their 2018 debut LP, Pra Curar features similar sonic structures, and cements the trio’s reputation as some of the most poetic songwriters in the Brazilian underground. Pra Curar is, in instances, a bit brighter than its predecessor—a record that immerses listeners in the magical harmonies of the Soares sisters, while also helping, through music, mend the broken-hearted.

MIMA 

Yarimir Cabán, better known in the Puerto Rican music underground as MIMA, has been involved in music since her early years. Raised in a family of musicians, Cabán honed her chops singing in parrandas during Christmas and during performances at church with her aunts and uncles. As a student at the University of Puerto Rico during the ‘90s, she recorded a session on a four-track cassette recorder with a friend and it spread like wildfire. She was later invited to become part of the famous Puerto Rican reggae band Cultura Profética, and ended up recording at Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica.

As she tells it, she got kicked out of the band, but wasn’t ready to abandon her career. “That was the trigger for my story as a “solo artist,” she explains from her home in Puerto Rico. “My ego was hurt, so I thought: ‘If these guys can smoke all day and get paid for doing what they love, why can’t I? So revenge was part of my motivation.” After becoming a fixture in the Old San Juan live music circuit, she began slowly building her audience and playing with some of the island’s celebrated musicians. Inspired by the bossa nova greats, she began composing and writing her first pieces of music. “I started writing my own songs, borrowing a Tom Jobim chart book and learning one single song, ‘Corcovado,’” she says. “With the chords of that single song I composed my very first 10 songs which ended up being my first solo album, MIMA, in 2005.”

After the success of MIMA and her 2011 opus, El Pozo, Cabán became a mainstay in the independent music scene. With her mixture of folk, punk rock, reggae, dub, and Brazilian genres, her music touched upon subjects seldom explored in Puerto Rican music, such as sexuality, queer identities, feminism, and the politics of power. Most recently, she’s been touring with the Puerto Rican group, ÌFÉ, and returned to her reggae roots by collaborating with International Dub Ambassadors. One of the standout tracks on that collaboration, “ÑAM-ÑAM,” adapts the words of Afro-Puerto Rican poet, Luis Palés Mator. “I feel this song is a gift to my soul,” Cabán explains. “I also feel intrigued by a Puerto Rico that never had the chance to be, that of the era of Palés-Matos, which preceded the conception of our current form of government. It’s a fragment of a map; of a memory.”

Belafonte Sensacional 

Before starting his band Belafonte Sensacional, Mexico City musician Israel Ramírez didn’t think he had it in him to become a singer-songwriter. As he mentions during a short interview from his home in the Iztapalapa neighborhood, he thought all the good songs were already written, and there was nothing left to say. After finding his voice as a songwriter, and being inspired by the rich cultural fabric of Mexico City, he embarked on a journey to find a band of musicians on his same wavelength–who wanted to create genreless music rooted in a mixture between pop, rock, and traditional Mexican boleros, cumbias, and even a little bit of reggaeton. “It’s been a beautiful process of finding myself, and finding lots of others that coincide with my way of thinking, my way of life, our love for the same ideas, the same things– I’ve been very privileged,” Ramírez says. “That’s the story of Belafonte; a dude that was lonely and didn’t know what to do, and then found a new family.”

Ramírez and his band have moved seamlessly from the acoustic folk of their 2014 record, El Gazapo, to pure punk rock with their 2017 EP, Destroy, to psychedelic pop rock with their newest release, Soy Piedra, which seeks to immortalize the stories and sounds of Mexico City.

“I want to tell the story of the common man that lives in the barrio,” Ramírez explains. “How he lives, how he fails, how he gets back up—how he’s winning, even when it looks like he’s losing, and vice versa. I want to tell those stories, and I tell them with the material that I know best: myself. I’m filtering that reality through songs and words. It inspires us, and it inspires a beautiful conversation between the band members, where everybody brings their own identity to the songs.”

-Amaya Garcia

Itasca’s (born Kayla Cohen) new album Spring arrives three years after the airy folk of her third album Open to Chance. Written while Cohen was living in a century-old adobe house in New Mexico, Spring is the result of her purposeful seclusion after experiencing personal setbacks. The album’s contemplative folk tracks are built from pedal steel, thoughtful piano, and tender guitar. If her previous album was about finding wonder in nature and the people around her, on Spring, Cohen uses her raw musical materials—and the inspiration of her picturesque surroundings—to discover the truth about herself. 

The album’s stripped down production emphasizes the intimacy of the songs; Cohen turns negative experiences into meditative songs that explore the mystical elements of the natural world. On “Voice of the Beloved,” Cohen sings, “It’s so easy for a woman to make a man a home / She will open that door before she even knows,” her melancholy voice backed by delicate, knotty guitar lines. On “Blue Spring” and “A’s Lament,” she sings of personal dead-ends and relationships that wilted. Throughout the album, Cohen’s desert locale serves as a background character—informing the songs sparse feel. On Spring, Cohen takes tragedy and turns it into a musical journey to investigate her place in the world.

-Rachel Davies

Photography by Erica Snyder

When songwriter Kate Davis was still in college, she approached her parents with a decision that had been a long time in the making. “I’m getting kind of sick of this,” she told them. Davis was talking about the full-ride scholarship program she was completing at the Manhattan School of Music, studying jazz bass and gigging around New York’s genteel club circuit. She’d been a part of this world since she was young, earning prestige first as a violinist, then as an upright bassist in her native Portland, Oregon before relocating to NYC for school. But the land of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and demure cocktail dresses had grown stale for Davis. She didn’t want to just play music—she wanted to write it. Davis wasn’t sure how her folks would take the news–her parents, especially her father, had played a key role in shaping her career and inspiring her rigorous work ethic. But instead of berating her, Davis’ father, who has since passed away, handed her a legal pad. “Write 20 songs this summer,” he said. Davis rose to the challenge—but she didn’t stop at 20.

The Davis who shows up to chat at a tiny Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn seems far from the world of jazz standards and sensible heels. She wears an animal-print blazer, black bike shorts, and stacks of silver jewelry. Her once long, straight hair has been chopped to a tousled bob. It’s a transformation that feels deliberate—like adopting a new wardrobe the summer before freshman year. “If you did some digging [on me], you probably saw a pretty strange past life,” she says. Davis’ debut solo album Trophy marks a further departure from that past life. But like the prize that gives the record its name, Trophy didn’t come until Davis had cleared a series of hurdles.

For one thing, Trophy is an indie rock album, a genre Davis has courted privately for years, but only recently decided to embrace. Not long after she graduated college, Davis found herself playing in the house band for the immersive play Sleep No More, gigging around town, and occasionally making videos for the YouTube covers series Postmodern Jukebox. It was the latter that launched her into viral fame—in 2014, Davis performed an acoustic version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” on her upright instrument, and the clip racked up millions of views.

“It turned into this big thing, which was really freaky, because I didn’t think that was going to happen,” Davis says. “It instantly created this path and expectation that people had for me as a performer—which was overwhelming, because I had just gotten out of college, I had just lost my dad…I had all this stuff happen to me in a tiny little window of time.” She found herself in a suffocating contract with a record label that promised to support her as an artist, but wound up only wanting the girl from that YouTube video. “I wasn’t allowed to put anything out that wasn’t sanctioned by them. Everything was a very tedious process of approvals,” she says. Davis kept submitting songs for a period of two years—all to no avail. “During that time, I was just coming up with all of these demos and songs and moving towards where Trophy ended up being. But I was in a legal nightmare.”

Davis eventually wriggled free from her contract, and did what any self-motivated artist would do: She turned to crowdfunding. Fortunately, she had a decent number of high-profile fans, including Jeff Goldblum and Sharon Van Etten (Davis co-wrote Van Etten’s recent single “Seventeen”). But she felt the need to add a disclaimer in the footnotes of her campaign. “I know it’s going to be different from maybe what you had expected or wanted from me,” she told her fans. “But artists grow up, and I’m a lot more than just a girl who sings covers.” Davis met her goal, and made a record that reflected her vision.

That Trophy even exists is a triumph—a symbol of Davis breaking free from her former self. But it’s also a powerful album in its own right, one that examines our relationship with desire, and what we’ll do to satisfy it. “I’ve been in places in my life where I’ve had some ugly sides come out, just because I felt like I wasn’t in control, ” she says of the title track. “It’s just about doing whatever it takes to win.” At other moments, Trophy feels like wish fulfillment, whether it’s a wish for love (“Cloud”), relief from sadness (“Daisy”), or a dream of a different adolescence. On “Dirty Teenager,” Davis depicts a college experience powered by Miller Lite and deli sandwiches that feels worlds removed from the halls of an East Coast jazz conservatory. In the music video for “Cloud,” Davis pals around with a band of skateboarding teens who smoke cigarettes, snuggle in the park, and play a rock show in a Brooklyn basement. Davis’s real-life high school years involved rigorous practice on the bass (she once got tendonitis), and being shuttled to rehearsals and gigs by her parents. Similarly, the music on Trophy is a far cry from the stuffy halls of a conservatory—its songs are sparse and straightforward, marked by chugging electric guitar and modest percussion. For the most part, Davis’ band holds back, leaving space for her lightweight alto. Trophy’s only nod to her classically-trained past is a swelling string section on “I Like Myself.”

In a way, Trophy is an amalgam of all the music Davis has loved behind closed doors—groups like The Smiths and Joy Division. Her voice is subtle and smoky, but without the vintage affectation she often adopted when she was singing jazz standards. Her mother wasn’t so keen on the change. “My mom at first was like, ‘What is this? I hate this. This isn’t nice, this doesn’t make me feel good. Why do you write sad songs? Why is it so dark?’ She hated it.” What’s most palpably different about Davis these days isn’t simply the music she plays; it’s the way that she carries herself—self assured and prudent, despite the adversity she’s faced for choosing a new path. In 2012, Davis was a speaker at TEDxPortland. Her speech compared her journey as a music student to the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Watching it, she looks nervous—not believing a word of what she’s saying. The woman sitting in the Brooklyn restaurant is entirely different: Poised, and earnest, and capable of prolonged eye contact. “I used to be so ashamed of this story,” she says, referring to her transition from precocious jazz student to indie rock auteur. “I was thinking about changing my name, I was thinking about trying to find a way so I could just be reborn.” With Trophy, Kate Davis has done just that.

-Madison Bloom

“Folk opera” sounds like an oxymoron; it conjures images of a campfire song circle performed by mezzo sopranos in a lavish theatre to a black-tie audience. But the “opera” in “folk opera” just refers to the presence of a storyline, which is pretty much the only constant in the genre. Defining a folk opera only exaggerates the impossibility of defining folk music in general, which has roots in so many musical traditions, cultures, and time periods. George Gershwin defined 1935’s Porgy and Bess as a folk opera because folk music seemed most authentic to the characters. More recently, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy considered the band’s 2009 album Hazards of Love a folk opera. And Hadestown, a folk opera penned by Anais Mitchell, won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Musical.

This loose definition of the folk opera is one of the things that attracts musicians to write them. Some of the folk operas on this list are sparse affairs for minimal, acoustic instrumentation, while others are bigger productions with brass and percussion. One recurring theme among these is the definition and excavation of place. While Rachel Grimes explores Kentucky through historical records, Darren Hayman imagines being trapped in the “new towns” of 1950’s Essex. The characters in Annie Bacon’s Folk Opera are trapped in a different way when car trouble strands them in a small town, forcing interaction with locals. Strangers also connect in other works, like those desperately strewn across continents in Hum’n Bards’ Pangaea. Some selections below only have live recordings, having never seen a studio.

Rachel Grimes
The Way Forth

This is the first folk opera by composer-pianist Rachel Grimes (formerly of the band Rachel’s). Grimes took inspiration from her home state of Kentucky by looking through various historical records and wondering about the people left out. The Way Forth includes Grimes’s beautiful piano and a lush array of other instrumentation, along with harmonies and spoken word reflections from past Kentuckians.

Hum’n Bards
Pangaea: A Folk Opera

Hum’n Bards are a Philadelphia-based troupe of actors and musicians, and Pangeaea is their post-apocalyptic folk opera. The cast delivers songs from the point of view of six people trying to connect despite being scattered across continents. With acoustic guitars, piano, violin, and vocals, the songs conjure up feelings of vulnerability, isolation, and powerlessness. Even a “blooper” snippet of “Wonderwall” included midway through seems apt—“And maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me” was never more appropriate.

Ben Lear
Lillian: A Folk Opera

Lillian is the debut release by Ben Lear, an environmental activist who took initial inspiration from the “Garbage Patch” in the Pacific Ocean where trash and debris accumulate. The narrator watches his sleeping girlfriend, fearing she’ll drift away, and thinking of all he’s lost. This meditation culminates in a voyage to the Garbage Patch to reclaim what was taken. Punched up with orchestral elements, percussion, and deceptively joyful choruses, this album succeeds whether or not listeners know the story. When Lillian debuted at Le Poisson Rouge, the stage was set with a light sculpture made from 3,000 plastic bottles lit with LEDs, and the performance was accompanied by video projections. While the production is more opulent than one associates with folk music, Lear thinks of it that way because of the intimate way in which he composed the songs alone in his bedroom.

Annie Bacon
The Folk Opera

Written in 2010 by San Francisco-based singer songwriter Annie Bacon, The Folk Opera centers around a woman and her Alzheimer’s-inflicted grandmother after their car breaks down in a small town. As they ponder how to remedy the situation, they engage with a cast of small town characters, many of whom also feel waylaid. Recorded live, The Folk Opera boasts lots of harmonies, ukulele, fiddle, trumpet, and bass, for a highly variegated sound.

The Whiskey Rebellion
Wake: A Folk Opera

The Whiskey Rebellion is a theater troupe known mostly for live radio plays, but their music is equally engaging. Wake: A Folk Opera is a site-specific composition meant to be performed in homes, though the cast recorded this version in Chicago’s Logan Square. The songs tell the story of a man returning home, where a strange woman tending his mother’s plants informs him of his mother’s death. The instrumentation is sparse, mainly featuring an acoustic guitar, which helps highlight Emma Bean’s strong, clear voice.

Darren Hayman
Pram Town (A Folk Opera)

In Pram Town, Darren Hayman (of Hefner) recalls the housing developments of towns in 1950’s Essex, the quest to build ultra-modern Bauhaus homes while neglecting the soul of each community. As he remembers his own escape to London, he imagines the life of someone who wasn’t able to flee and spends his life keeping up appearances amidst constant failure. Hayman is the only vocalist here, his singing supported by horns, percussion, and acoustic guitar.

–Erin Lyndal Martin

Since its inception in 1998, the London-based group Da Lata has been built around the core of Patrick Forge and Christian Franck, two musicians who had begun playing together almost six years earlier. The group’s lineup would expand and contract with each new record, enlisting seasoned musicians from around the world to assist Forge and Franck in their enthusiastic exploration of South American musical genres. Now, 11 years later, Forge has receded into the background, leaving Franck to be the North Star on the group’s fourth record, Birds. Aside from that, though, not much has changed; the group still ably turns out songs informed by a panoply of global styles—this time, primarily samba, tropicalia, and Ethio-jazz—and they’re still bolstered by a small army of musicians, including Bembé Segué, Syren Rivers, Luiz Gabriel Lopes, Diabel Cissokho, Vanessa Freeman, and more.

The strongest moments on Birds are the ones where the group fully commits to their globetrotting impulses. Album-opener “Mentality” finds an unlikely middle ground between deep Afrofunk grooves and the kind of sunshine pop practiced by ‘60s groups like The Free Design, counterbalancing a groaning bari sax line and deep baritone vocals with eerie soprano harmonies that drift in the air above like kites. “Dakar” is a low-lit Ethio-jazz groove that floats atop a humming organ line, its snakeline melody curving and dipping. They veer hard into samba on “Memory Man,” using its sprightly rhythms to support a soulful vocal; and the title track runs furthest afield, nailing the light, airy sound of a vintage Paul McCartney ballad. What makes it all work is that Franck surrounds himself with collaborators familiar with the internal rhythms of the music he’s writing, allowing them to sell each song with conviction. The whole thing is light and summery and warm—a perfect tonic for cold winter days.

-J. Edward Keyes