The catalog of India’s aptly-named, decade-old Transcending Obscurity Records, packs an ambitiously-wide geographical variety. Bands with recent and upcoming releases on the label hail from Australia, Portugal, Paraguay, and many more locales, trading in styles ranging from crushing doom to frantic death metal. Label head Kunal Choksi’s own love for intense metal has driven him to curate this globe-spanning catalog. 

“The process of discovering raw talent and working hard for them and seeing our efforts bearing fruit on a larger scale is gratifying,” he explains. “There is a sense of fulfillment every now and then, and that keeps us going.”

Choksi built Transcending Obscurity Records after working for more than a decade as a music writer, which he explains helped shape the label’s mission. Like most independent labels operating today, it’s a social-media-driven ecosystem, a thriving one at that; Choski’s Facebook inbox is always glutted with artist submissions, so he spends a lot of his time sifting for hidden gold. “We cover music of all styles, and I guess that’s where our approach stems from,” he says. “We deliberately do not want to focus on a subgenre of metal because there’s so much good stuff out there that needs to be tapped and this is an extension of our intention to do so.”

The label reaches into more and less established genre and geographical scenes alike, with fresh tracks from the global extreme metal underground for a diverse array of listeners. Transcending Obscurity features the Dutch death-doom band Officium Triste, who’ve been releasing music since the ‘90s; the label’s French death metal band Nox Irae’s forthcoming debut features musicians from the ’90s French death metal group Catacomb. For the black metal fans, there are bands like Croatia’s Bednja, whose debut full-length worth of their hardcore-infused take on the style also comes out this fall. The befouled list only goes on from there: crusty death from Chicago outfit Bones, pummeling sludge from the U.K.’s Warcrab, and even raga-inflected black metal from Germany’s Temple Koludra—all housed on the same label.

Considering the operational challenges associated with this mostly one-man operation—not to mention its geographical distance from the world’s most established metal scenes—one could argue that Choksi’s running Transcending Obscurity, quite literally, from the front lines of global DIY. “We’re experimenting every single day to improve upon our quality, be it the kind of printing to the kind of paper we use,” he explains, noting that opportunities in India are limited. To counter this trend, Choksi recently even crowdfunded in-house merch printing, sharing that they’ve “invested a ton in getting the right machinery and support to make this all efficient, and it’s exciting and heartening at the same time.” 

Choksi has a deeply rooted personal stake in the process. “I’ve been through countless tragedies, [from] the loss of my entire family, to illnesses such as cancer and heart failure—my father, mother, and even my only sibling—to the extent of me living all alone and still depending on this music, from when it was a hobby to what’s become a living,” he explains. “I’ve suffered losses in my old family business, leading to its shutdown, too. Suffice to say, it’s unthinkable to live without music being a major part of my life.”

Capturing the power of still-ongoing technological innovation, the whole operation has a chance to thrive, thanks to its diverse bands and the many fans from around the world who listen, although some have challenged Choksi’s ability to manage a globally-recognized metal institution from a nation that’s not commonly associated with the style. “I hope more of them become less prejudiced or reluctant when it comes to our label, even though it’s based in India, because we’ve taken steps to ensure that the experience will be a better one than you’d think,” Choksi shares. “It’s starting to reach a point where people are willing to ignore our country of origin and focus on the music we put out and high quality products that we offer. To that extent, indeed, it’s becoming all about the music. More and more bands from different countries and continents are becoming comfortable getting signed to us, because they know we will treat them with the same amount of respect as we would a band from our local scene.”

-Caleb R. Newton

As we near winter in the Northern Hemisphere and clubbing season comes into full effect, we’ve been treated to a barrage of high quality dance music to help keep us moving during the colder months. Here are 10 crucial dance releases from September and October that remain committed to the scene’s favorite format: The 12” dance single.

View the Best 12”s on Bandcamp Archives

Tom Blip & Swordman Kitala
“Kitala Beat”

Blip Discs return with more Ugandan fire, following last year’s release from the traditional percussion and vocal troupe Mubashira Mataali Group. A result of the same trip that introduced label head Tom Blip to Mubashira Mataali, Ugandan MC Swordman Kitala and Blip’s joint effort is a masterclass in cross-cultural club escapades. Swordman Kitala delivers a fierce vocal performance, with lyrics that skip between Luganda and English, as Tom Blip lays down perfectly programmed snare rolls and powerfully quivering bass hits. The B-side features a “Funky Mix” of the original, partially channelling the spirit of UK Funky pioneer Apple while solidly maintaining the Blip sound that has come to be ever so recognizable over the last few years.

Mor Elian
Radical Spectacular

Mor Elian delivers once again with her second release on Fever FM, the imprint she runs alongside Rhyw. The three-track EP cleverly uses sound to create a variety of textures, achieving the hypnotic synthetic atmospheres for which Mor Elian has become well known The EP begins with “Radical Spectacular,” its chiming and echoing opening eventually breaking down into glistening arpeggios and carefully placed percussion. “Wave of Alienation” is full of dark, blunt kicks that punch through metallic chimes and cackling vocal samples. Needlepoint jabs and a fluttering synth lay above dissected breaks in “Farewell to the Snare,” falling deeper into the rhythm before the track’s mesmerizing synths chime their way back into the mix.

Romaal Kultan
Off Grid

Romaal Kultan drops a uniquely varied debut release with this fantastic four-tracker on YAM Records. Off Grid jumps from the low-slung groove of opening track “Isit” to the driving, uptempo rhythms of  “New Levels”; on the B-side, Kultan tastefully unleashes a flurry of breaks across “High & Mighty” and “Turnin’.” The whole EP is packed full of daring musicality, but it never gets lost in itself or loses sight of the dancefloor. “High & Mighty” is a prime example, with its finely chopped breaks and distorted, acid-tinged bass line, creating a rock solid bed over which Romaal Kultan lays lush pads, delicate digi-flute fills, and intermittent stabs of spliced vocal samples.

Roza Terenzi
Metal Glo EP

Klasse Wrecks and Pelvis join forces to release the latest 12” from fast rising Australian producer Roza Terenzi. The aptly titled “Metal Glo” is centred around what sounds like a demented, digitized percussion part being played on rusty construction scaffolding; it’s accompanied by a formidable electro beat and unhinged synth bleeps. “All Starz” is a four-to-the-floor driven stomper, complete with irresistibly skippy snares and synth bleeps, the frenetic nature of which is tastefully contrasted by some beautifully calming pads. Luca Lozano, Mr. Ho, Morgan Wright and RP are enlisted for tag team remix duties on the title track, delivering their own twisted takes on the original while staying true to its bizarre, metallic nature.

Desert Sound Colony
The Cartographer EP

Following popular releases on Nick Hoppner’s Touch From A Distance and Futureboogie earlier this year, Desert Sound Colony delivers what are possibly his most pronounced and individual productions to date as the inaugural release on Scenic Route. The Cartographer EP is as sonically striking as it is functional. The title track oozes sleaze, steadily building to an overpowering cacophony before stripping it all back again for the final hurdle. “Gypsy Moth,” with Guava, is sure to be the club favorite, led by gritty and highly syncopated drums, melting agogo bells, and an undoubtedly British two-note bassline. DSC leaves things on an ominous note with “Budapest,” where an unsettling arp and pads combo sits atop jilted percussion, while an unintelligibly deep voice intermittently chimes in to make the track all the more unnerving. 

Gamma Intel
“Automatic Illusion”

After his debut on the label with Drama in Decay, Gamma Intel returns to Brokntoys with another slamming four-track EP. The Rotterdam-based producer delivers a wide array of sounds that join the dots between EBM, breakbeat, electro, and acid. “Automatic Illusion” is built on a pulsating, ominous bass beat which, combined with its crispy snares, create a dark EBM sound. Spacious and slow, the breaks and acidic melodies on “No Way Out” weave in and out, creating an eerie and vacant sound. Acid lines rise and fall between vocals in “Bad Intel,” which peak before dropping down into stabs and snare rolls. The last track echoes the sentiments of its predecessors, rolling acid and breaks into a new-beat electro sound that consistently delivers on the dancefloor.

Esnard Boisdur
“Mizik Bel”

A number of years ago, Africaine 808’s DJ Nomad received a CD-R of previously unreleased material from Antillean Gwo Ka star Esnard Boisdur. One of the standout tracks was “Mizik Bel”, which quickly went on to become a favorite at the Tropical Discoteque parties where Nomad is a resident. The original track, “Mizik Bel,” is a glorious slice of Caribbean choral funk, and it’s easy to see why it quickly became such a hit with dancers and fans of the lesser-known strands of Caribbean music. It took three years for Favourite Recordings to track down the original ADAT tapes so that Nomad and his production partner Dirk Leyers could give the track the remix treatment it deserves. The duo tastefully embellish the original, adding a touch of Kraut synth and some extra percussion, reworking the arrangement while managing to maintain the magic of Boisdur’s performance.

R. Campana & D. Reggi
“Sequence Unity”

Melbourne label A Colourful Storm reissue a classic from the golden era of electro. The three tracks on Sequence Unity are compiled from two different releases from Groove Pressure and First Cut Records, originally released in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Spaced out and stripped back, the 12” merges breaks, electro, and tech-house from the heyday of Europe’s underground dance scene. The euphoric peaks and troughs on “Sequence Unity” are combined with vocoder robotics to create gliding melodies, perfect for the early morning dance floors. The second track, “Le Preset Du Hasard” begins with bluntly clipped glitches and twangs that evolve into spaced-out, dreamy lead lines. “Electro Voice” is centred around a pounding 808 tech-house beat that’s topped with crackling droid vocals, by far the darkest of the three cuts.

Ground
“Follow Me”

The second single from Ground’s latest album Sunizm is a beautifully lilting bit of uplifting, nonchalant dance music. The track effortlessly unfolds, utilizing a diverse palette of organic and synthesized sounds with soothing semi-coherent vocals, evoking the feeling of emerging from a winter slumber into cool spring morning air. Jay Glass Dubs steps up on remix duties, using the track’s original elements to create a somewhat darker affair, with a wall of stuttering percussion steadily building until the vocals are introduced, dispelling the darkness, allowing the light of the original to shine through. It’s hard to imagine how “Ozone House” didn’t make it onto the full album, landing somewhere between Midori Takada’s MKWAJU Ensemble and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The marching handclaps, swirling idiophone, and squelchy bass leads to one of the most glorious vocal arrangements committed to tape this year. It’s guaranteed to make audiences move and get misty-eyed in equal measure, if played in the right setting.

Pye Corner Audio
Dark Phase EP

Pye Corner Audio returns to Madrid-based label Analogical Force following his Hollow Earth LP from earlier this year. The Dark Phase EP consists of four menacing electro cuts packed with sinister, acerbic synths and bone crushing drum machine workouts—a perfect soundtrack for our quasi-dystopian times. “Storm Cloud” introduces the listener to the world of Dark Phase, an unnerving lead line sets the scene before a powerful, stripped-back beat and busy acid bassline take the reins, steadily building to a frenetic climax. Despite its merciless nature, “Storm Cloud” is just an appetizer, as “Solar Waves” and “Darktro” descend further into the electro abyss, with dangerously corrosive basslines and punishing drum programming. Closing out the EP is “Explorer” which, while continuing the devastatingly dark theme, offers a glimpse of hope with its lofty chords and hypnotic, sky gazing melodies suggesting a possible escape to a planet less doomed than our own.

-Sean Keating

Photography by Ryo Mitamura

Will Oldham is starting to regret using half a dozen band names. During his ‘90s beginnings on Drag City, the cult-favorite singer-songwriter released records as Palace Music, Palace Brothers, Palace Songs and more—all to encourage buyers to focus on the music rather than the messenger. But when Oldham’s hardcore fans began to take notice, his strategy backfired.

“The intention was to say, ‘Don’t pay attention to the band. Just pay attention to the record,’” he says. “But it became an issue over the first five or six years. Unfortunately, people began to think there was more to it, which was pretty darn frustrating. I thought it would be best to discard that altogether.”

In 1999, in the interest of having “the audience and performer… having a relationship that is valid and unbreakable,” Oldham concocted a final pseudonym: Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and released the masterpiece I See a Darkness that year. He’s stuck with the name ever since, releasing a steady stream of gems like 2001’s Ease Down the Road, 2006’s The Letting Go, and 2008’s Lie Down in the Light. After almost a decade focusing on cover albums and rerecordings of older songs, on November 15th, Oldham releases his first album of Bonnie “Prince” Billy originals in eight years, I Made a Place.

Anyone can find Oldham’s songs easy to love due to their wisdom and humanity, but all of his personas make getting into him as an outsider a slight ordeal. An auteur type with a background in filmmaking rather than music, he has a history of approaching albums as completely distinct projects, not as the fruitage of a single creator. Once, Oldham even experimented with having no band name; much like a movie, 1996’s Arise Therefore (although often credited to Palace Music) simply features credits on the packaging.

Maybe it’s best to follow Oldham’s advice: ignore the band names altogether. From 1994’s stark Days in the Wake to the chilling I See a Darkness to 2009’s country-leaning Beware, his body of work rivals any American songwriter’s from the last 100 years—no matter what moniker he’s working with. Still, to make sense of Oldham’s complicated discography, here’s a rundown of the best records from each of his nom de plumes to hear on Bandcamp.

(Note: Due to their releases being reissued under the name Will Oldham, the band names “Palace Songs” and “Palace” have been omitted from this list.)

Palace Brothers

Essential album: Days In The Wake (1994)

“It seemed funny, or weighted, to have the title be Palace Brothers,” Oldham says in the 2012 book Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “when it’s a solitary voice for the most part.” Besides his brother Ned whooping in the background of “Come a Little Dog,” Days in the Wake is all Oldham—10 acoustic guitar songs sung from the brink. From the shattered opener “You Will Miss Me When I Burn” to the heartsick “I Send My Love to You” to the bittersweet parting ballad “I Am a Cinematographer,” the album hasn’t lost an inch of its power in 25 years. To any heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriters wanting to up their game: memorize Days in the Wake upside-down and backward.

Going deeper: There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You (1993)

Oldham’s first album sounds divorced from time, a mix of basement indie rock and primitive blues in the vein of Charley Patton or Washington Phillips (it features a cover of Phillips’s “I Had a Good Mother and Father.”) No track competes with nearly anything on Days in the Wake, but on the whole, There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You is a promisingly weird debut, sounding like a moonshine-fueled amateur campfire jam that somebody happened to record. The best song is “(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit,” a Tom Waits-style preacher vignette featuring a grand total of one chord: D.

Palace Music

Essential album: Viva Last Blues (1995)

Recorded dry as a bone by Steve Albini, Viva Last Blues is one of the most nauseous-sounding rock ‘n roll albums ever made. Oldham’s five-piece band plays strangely; “More Brother Rides” swings like a rusty gate, “Tonight’s Decision (And Hereafter)” hovers in a vacuum, and “Work Hard / Play Hard” both rocks out and feels inert. Over the ballsy, roughshod jams, Oldham sounds feral, untrained, warbling about laying in the snow and having sex with death. Every song is uniformly excellent, striking from unexpected angles; “New Partner,” the album’s big ballad and Oldham’s calling card, starts as a love song before revealing itself to be a guilt song. And like the rest of Viva Last Blues, it sounds like nothing else.

Going deeper: Arise Therefore (1996)

Nominally a Palace Music album but featuring no band name, Arise Therefore continues Oldham’s streak with Albini and opts for creepy minimalism. Drummer Jason Loewenstein, who played swingingly on Viva Last Blues, is (sadly) absent, replaced by a Mayatone drum machine that thinly clicks through each song. Arise Therefore is a harder pill to swallow than Viva Last Blues—it doesn’t exactly rock—but if you want to go even weirder than that one, this ponderous, alien vibe might do it for you. (The song with an unprintable title is one of Oldham’s most gorgeous ballads.)

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Essential album: I See a Darkness (1999)

The first Bonnie “Prince” Billy album isn’t just an evolutionary step from Palace: it’s arguably the best album Oldham ever made. With all due respect to Warren Zevon’s 2001 see-ya-later album My Ride’s Here, I See a Darkness may be the blackest, funniest, most compelling album ever written about death. The title track, a prayer to a struggling friend, is the most resonant of the bunch—even Johnny Cash covered it—but each song, in its own way, is perfect. The ballad “A Minor Place” gently probes the idea of limbo, “Another Day Full of Dread” exposes fear as valueless, and “Death to Everyone” is a sex dirge that acknowledges the reality of all of us, one day, becoming topsoil. By the time the brief, celestial closer “Raining in Darling” rings out into silence, I See a Darkness’s spell has been cast.

Going deeper: Beware (2009)

Full of sawing fiddle, whooping pedal steel and rejoicing singers, Beware is Oldham’s materialist yawp, an album about human bodies and the here and now. “You can have that heaven here and not wait for up above,” he sings on “You Can’t Hurt Me Now.” “Love on your body and you’ll be bathed in light,” he insists on “Without Work, You Have Nothing” (which was included on the original pressing of the LP). Elsewhere, Oldham writhes in a “pit of bodies,” bemoans his kissing ability and pokes fun at his jiggly tummy. He’d gone country before on albums like 2004’s Sings Greatest Palace Music, but this is his best in that lane; the barnyard backing is perfect for these odes to being a human animal, and loving every second of it.

Even deeper: The Letting Go (2006)

Praised upon its release but rarely evoked in Oldham conversations these days, The Letting Go deserves a seat at the table. Delicate and diaphanous, with guest vocalist Dawn McCarthy giving every line a vapor trail, it’s Oldham’s most feminine album, as well as one of his very best. The only problem is that it could use a trim; cut the vibe killers “Cold & Wet” and “The Seedling,” and you’re left with perfection—if only to get to the breathtaking closer “I Called You Back” quicker. Flaws aside, The Letting Go is the stuff of long drives and frozen-over landscapes; played in the right setting and emotional state, its lovers’ whispers can lay you flat.

Original collaborations

Essential album: Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Matt Sweeney, Superwolf (2005)

Oldham can be stunning alone, but he’s often benefited from a strong foil, like Emmett Kelly (A.K.A The Cairo Gang), McCarthy, or Angel Olsen, in the mix. Superwolf, his collaborative album with Matt Sweeney, is his best team-up (although 2006’s The Brave and the Bold, featuring Tortoise, comes close.) Sweeney, who wrote the music and plays immersive electric guitar throughout, possesses a voice just as craggy and odd as Oldham’s, and on “My Home is the Sea,” “What Are You?” and “I Gave You,” they croon together like mournful giants.

Going deeper: Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the Cairo Gang, The Wonder Show of the World (2010)

Gorgeously recorded, The Wonder Show of the World is one of Oldham’s least demanding and easiest to like albums. Instead of almost stealing the show like McCarthy or Sweeney, Kelly lends a facilitative hand, adding guitar layers and tasteful harmonies to this easy chair of an album. “Troublesome Houses,” “Teach Me To Bear You” and “Go, Folks, Go” won’t transform you like Days in the Wake or I See a Darkness, but they’re not supposed to; this is music for tooling around on Saturday afternoon.

Cover albums

Essential album: Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie “Prince” Billy, What the Brothers Sang (2013)

On What the Brothers Sang, Oldham does what Bob Dylan did on Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate—he covers a (largely) covers artist. While those albums explored the Great American Songbook through the lens of Frank Sinatra, What the Brothers Sang is just that—songs that were sung by the Everly Brothers. Dawn McCarthy is back as his duet singer, and the pair sounds spirited tackling songs written by Kris Kristofferson (“Breakdown”), John Denver (“Poems, Prayers and Promises”) and the band’s Don Everly (“My Little Yellow Bird” and others). “Getting my doctorate was making the Everlys record,” Oldham says, likening his music career to education. “I can make records with songs that modernity can’t destroy.” By bringing these 20th-century classics into the 21st, Oldham places himself firmly in the lineage of American song—where he belongs, no matter what name you call him.

-Morgan Enos

In the winter of 2010, Jeff Bratton took a sabbatical from his corporate job in Los Angeles and flew to Sweden. There, he met the owners of his favorite record label—a small indie named Service, whose roster included Jens Lekman, The Embassy and The Tough Alliance—and asked if he could help out. “I didn’t have any experience, and there wasn’t a whole lot of money to go around, but I just wanted to be involved,” Bratton says. A month later, he returned to Los Angeles with his own personal Service email address. But more importantly, he’d lit the fuse for a career in the music business. 

Cascine was born a short time later, when Service rejected an EP pitched by the Finnish alt-pop duo Shine 2009. Bratton was the only one on staff at Service who fell head over heels for it. “Service ended up passing and I thought they were nuts for doing that,” he says. “So I wrote to the guys who ran Service and I said, let me release this one myself. I want to start an imprint of Service, a little pop label that I’m going to call Cascine.” Instead, Cascine became a stand-alone indie, and on September 1, 2010 Shine 2009’s Associate’s EP was its first release. 

A decade later, that same glacial, wind-swept pop music that Bratton first heard in Sweden has become synonymous with Cascine. The label’s catalog is pegged directly to Bratton’s own taste; whether it’s Chad Valley’s chillwave masterpiece Equatorial Ultravox (2011), Cuushe’s airy dreamscape opus Night Lines (2015), or Sui Zhen’s Bandcamp-certified experimental pop album Losing, Linda, every release has a familiar rendering of synthesized sounds.

Here are seven essential alternative pop releases lifted from Cascine’s extensive catalog.

Shine 2009
Realism

It’s hard to understate the importance of Shine 2009 on shaping Cacine’s sound. Their Associates EP was the label’s first release, and Realism was Cascine’s first full-length. They were the band that provided the spark for the label—without them, there may never have been a Cascine. They also allowed Bratton to become immediately relevant in Scandinavia, where all his favorite labels were based. 

From the pastel pencil shavings on the album’s cover through to the groovy alt-pop rhythms of opener “Graduation,” the disco-tinted single “So Free (feat. Paula Abdul),” and the breezy downtempo swagger of “New Rues,” Realism perfectly anchors the Cascine catalog. Bratton describes itas “the clearest articulation of Cascine’s sonic and visual point of view.”  

Chad Valley
Young Hunger

Chad Valley’s debut EP arrived on the fringes of chillwave; a nostalgic, lo-fi, electronic genre that has been called “the first great genre of the internet era.” But by 2012 the Oxford, UK-based artist was more interested in making big pop arrangements that could blow the speakers out. Cascine has been a willing partner from the very beginning — all of Chad Valley’s music has been released through the label, starting with his debut EP in 2010 and continuing most recently with his 2018 album Imaginary Music. 

Young Hunger, Valley’s first full-length, landed just as alternative pop music was taking center stage — M83 and EMA had released huge records the year before and indie music fans had an appetite for synthesizers. The thing that set Valley’s album apart was his ability to rally so many talented collaborators. Twin Shadow appeared on opener “I Owe You This,” Glasser gave her gorgeous voice to “Fall 4 U,” and El Perro Del Mar added vocals to mid-tempo tearjerker “Evening Surrender.” 

Yumi Zouma
EP I

Bratton’s love affair with Yumi Zouma began after he heard the band’s first single, the funky doe-eyed pop hit “A Long Walk Home For Parted Lovers.” In a statement that mimics Bratton’s own assessment of it, the influential Texas music blog Gorilla Vs Bear described it as “timeless, hopelessly romantic dream-pop.” Despite it being the only song the New Zealand group had finished at the time, Bratton signed them to Cascine and agreed to release their debut EP. Signing Yumi Zoumaalso began a new chapter for Cascine — they arrived as music distribution was becoming more fragmented, split between CD sales and online streaming services. EP I had a commercial pop aesthetic that helped Cascine navigate the changing tide.

Korallreven
Second Comin’

If The Radio Dept. is the poster child of Swedish pop, Korallreven is the half-cousin that lived abroad in the Balearic Islands. Keyboardist Daniel Tjäder was a member of both groups, but Korallreven — his collaboration with Marcus Joons — is perhaps the clearest manifestation of his intentions to explore techo, Tropicália and dancehall. Cascine released the duo’s sophomore album Second Comin’, which was layered with booming bass lines, tropical dance beats and 80s-inspired arpeggios. It had a shagginess that felt like late-night rave music, but also an innocent quality that informed future Cascine releases by Maria Usbeck, Daniel T and Roland Tings.

Mt. Si
Limits EP

Some of the best records in the Cascine catalog are the result of Bratton acting on impulse. Upon hearing Mt. Si for the first time he emailed the band only to discover it was a trio that included Jesse Kivel from Kisses, whom he’d worked with before. Released in 2016, Mt. Si’s Limits EP became the first Cascine release that sounded like it was imported from Scandinavia, despite being made right here in America. Opener “Oh” has the same whimsical, wind-swept quality that made Shine 2009’s Nordic pop so enticing to Bratton in the very beginning. “True” mimics some of Korallreven’s signature drum beats, “Either / Or” places singer Sarah Chernoff’s gorgeous voice inside a stunning cascade of synthesized sounds, and “Baby You’re The Best” has the bounce of an Italo disco track. 

Maria Usbeck
Amparo 

Bratton’s declaration that “this album came out of nowhere and became an instant classic for us” says a lot about the quality of Maria’s Usbeck’s solo debut. The Ecuadorian musician has been a part of the Cascine family since 2010, having fronted the Brooklyn new wave band Selebrities, who released an EP and two albums with the label. Still, Amparo was a revelation that somehow matched Cascine’s electronic music, while also being about as far away from it as one could get. The record was written and recorded over three years as Usbeck traveled the world, and it’s entirely in Spanish. Field recordings of birds, beaches and jungles that she captured throughout that journey are mixed with instruments like the marimba, quena flute, timbales, tumbas, bongos and shakers, making Amparo a meandering electronic masterpiece. 

Matt Kivel
last night in america

Matt Kivel’s last night in america has many familiar qualities that make it a Cascine record , yet the ambient folk-pop record still somehow feels out of place. Musically, it’s like a beautiful broken spoke in Cascine’s wheel. The underlying textures have the same meditative quality that permeates through much of the label’s catalog. “tyrus” and “the tower” contain a familiar, introspective wistfulness that recalls Mount Eerie’s version of Americana, which comes from the Fjords rather than the dust bowl (Kivel recorded last night in america in Austin, Texas). “two braids,” at the midpoint of the album, sounds like a slowed-down version of an LCD Soundsystem song. 

-Nick Fulton

Producer Teebs—born Mtendere Mandowa—has been both a cult figure in the L.A. beat scene since his 2010 Brainfeeder debut, Ardour. Two albums followed—2011’s Collections and 2014’s E S T A R A—but he’s remained relatively quiet since. His new album, Anicca, marks an end to that period of dormancy, and arrives propelled by a formidable roster of collaborators: Sudan Archives, Panda Bear, Anna Wise, Pink Siifu, and more. 

The album is designed to work as a cohesive whole, with instrumental tracks giving way to vocal-driven numbers. That pattern is established immediately: the soaring, album-opening instrumental “Atoms Song” gives way to “Black Dove,” where agile vocal work from Sudan Archives provide warmth against rippling synths and bass-heavy rhythms. “Shells” slows things down, laying jazzy keys over a shuffling beat. The pastoral “Prayers II” is a slow burn, Teebs continually adding layers, offsetting the murmuring percussion with lush strings and synths. Then, there’s the hypnotic Pink Siifu feature “Daughter Callin’,” a cut steeped in Dilla-influenced hip-hop, a showcase for Teebs’s range. More than anything, Anicca proves Teebs’s time away hasn’t dulled his abilities. With its gentle oceans of electronics and lithe, soulful melodies, the album is a formidable reminder of why people were excited about him in the first place.

-Tara Mahadevan

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.

Jamael Dean
Black Space Tapes

Los Angeles musician Jamael Dean is only 21 years old, but he’s already racked up an impressive roster of collaborations. When he was just 17, he was a member of Kamasi Washington’s live band, a role he also filled for Thundercat and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. On Black Space Tapes, his debut for Stones Throw, he steps out on his own, creating a dizzying, kaleidoscopic record that has much in common with drone and ambient as it does with jazz and R&B. Witness the dizzying opener “Akamara,” where Dean and his band kick up a dust cloud of cymbal washes, darting flutes, and spiraling piano, making for a song that hovers rather than lunges. They change course entirely on “Adawa,” a ruminative jazz piece sewn up by a tense violin glissando and strolling piano. On “Olokun,” the album changes shape yet again—a dusky number squarely in line with the L.A. beat scene, the song is almost blotted out by a deliberately overdriven bass drum, and spliced into ribbons by sword-like horn lines. Black Space Tapes is the work of someone with vision—an artist who’s already considering where music should go next.

-J. Edward Keyes

God Alone
God Alone

Self-inflicted Tide pod poisonings, Widespread Juul epidemics, potentially life-threatening viral TikTok “challenges,” social media bullying, imminent political, economic, and environmental collapse: Generation Z scares me sometimes, and not just because they make my entitled, lazy-ass millennial self feel ancient. Who I’m not concerned for are the teenaged members of God Alone, a new Irish metal band boasting a sick combination of mathy, Fugazi-indebted prog-punk, atmospheric black metal, and experimental post-rock, all with a Celtic lilt. Having beaten over 200 local acts to win Ireland’s Mammothfest Best Band fest, and with their first overseas tour under their belt, the foursome stand as one of the most precocious, promising heavy acts heard in the area as of late. This week’s eponymous LP only confirms that further, with four songs that menace as well as mesmerize—paralyzed by existential anxiety, and yet defiantly playful in practice, as evinced by the quirky album opener “Feeling on Tic.” Ok boomer(s); I think y’all can rest a little easier tonight.

-Zoe Camp

Greet Death
New Hell

Two years after winning over grunge-heads with their sweet-and-somber debut Dixieland, Flint, Michigan trio Greet Death return this week with New Hell, their second LP and first release for Deathwish, the beloved heavy-music label co-headed by Converge frontman Jacob Bannon. The track listing scans as a scorched-earth litany from a supremely pissed-off ex (“Do You Feel Nothing,” “Let It Die,” and “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done,”) but the music’s as inviting as ever, blanketing the rancorous themes in hazy guitars, swelling choruses, and angelic vocals. Arranged thusly, the 10-minute title track, a rugged behemoth teetering on the verge of collapse—feels like a beautifully-unsettling dream, or at the very least, a graceful nightmare. Highly recommended for fans of Nothing, No Joy, and Quicksand.

-Zoe Camp

Les Chants Du Hasard
Livre Second

Imagine you’re going to the symphony. The work being performed—by a massive philharmonic orchestra—is dark, doomy, and foreboding. (I don’t know enough about classical music to make the right reference here. Just imagine something scary.) The work will be performed with a vocalist. You get to the theater, settle into your seat, and the orchestra begins playing the first movement. The vocalist steps to the mic, opens his mouth…and unleashes a fetid, demonic, black-metal roar. That’s the experience of listening to Les Chants Du Hasard’s Livre Second, the latest confounding release from the consistently astonishing Italian label I, Voidhanger. Since their inception, the label has built their name on ruthlessly subverting metal tropes, and with Livre Second, they’ve topped themselves yet again. Theoretically this could be called “symphonic metal,” except “symphonic metal” is an actual genre, and this sounds nothing like it—there aren’t even guitars on this record. Instead, it’s 10 fully orchestrated pieces, all of which sound like an army on horseback storming the gates of hell, topped with the vocal style from A Blaze in the Northern Sky. In other words: it’s sick as hell. It takes a lot for me to say this, but the truth is I don’t think I’ve ever heard another record that sounds like this one—a crash-course of two diametrically opposed musical worlds, meeting at the lake of fire’s rim.

-J. Edward Keyes

Moor Mother
Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

When we interviewed Camae Ayewa, A.K.A. Moor Mother, about her latest album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, she was clear as day about her purpose and methodology: building a sonic history of America—built on the removal of native people and the enslaved labor of Black people—that stands counter to its founding mythology as the “land of the free.” In doing so, she connects the past not just to the present but to the future. Though her work is, as always, bracing and confrontational, it is also shot through with hope; I was reminded, listening to it this week, of how during therapeutic practice, when one opens up old wounds, it may hurt more temporarily, but this is done in the service of healing. One cannot heal if one keeps hiding, shoving things down. 

Loops and samples of archival recordings are used throughout, the voices of the Black American past speaking and singing with Ayewa. Every artistic decision she makes here is vivid and meaningful. On “Passage of Time,” she brings in her family’s history as enslaved people directly; one of the core repeated lyrics (“It’s so soft”)  contrasts the softness of cotton with the cruelty shown to the people who picked it, over a strong rhythm clearly referential to West African folk music. On “LA92,” Ayewa’s distorted voice and spine-prickling electronics call up the grief and pain that led to the LA riots, referencing Rodney King and the murder of Latasha Harlins. On “Black Flight,” an anxious ode to both the power of escape and Afrofuturistic innovation, Ayewa builds a constant sense of urgency, but also space for musician/poet Saul Williams, whose voice dissolves back into the music as he finishes his piece, to speak beautifully on the connections between the modern-day prison system and American slavery and the power of breaking the bars. (If white flight is motivated by hate and fear, a negative, Black flight is motivated by hope and survival, a positive.) With each new work, Ayewa’s vision becomes sharper, her voice stronger, her imprint on this world more powerful. That sure sounds like the healing process to me.

-Jes Skolnik

Leif Vollebekk
New Ways

“There are two kinds of people, the mad and the blue,” sings Montreal indie-artist Leif Vollebekk on “The Way You Feel.” The song opens and sets the tone for Vollebekk’s fourth album, New Ways. Vollebekk signature is creating melancholy, yet delightful R&B-tinged folk songs and New Ways does not waver from this standard. “Change, what it does to me, bottomless as the sea,” sings Vollebekk on the catchy and aptly named “Change”. Single “Transatlantic Flight,” melds Vollebekk’s illustrative lyrics with a steady, heavy-hearted keyboard melody and the head-nod inducing “Blood Brother” highlights his smouldering voice with elevating guitar strums and drum beats. Vollebekk leaves listeners with the folk love song “Apalachee Plain,” that ends the album on a hopeful note.

-Diamond Sharp

Back Catalog

Yazmin Lacey
When The Sun Dips 90 Degrees

Yazin Lacey makes slow, sultry music. The British soul singer’s 2018 album, When The Sun Dips 90 Degrees, is a formidable entry point to her sound. Lacey has said that she didn’t intend on becoming a professional singer which is hard to believe once one hears the way she marries jazz, R&B, and funk to create a singular sound on her five-song EP. The neo-soul melody of opener, “90 Degrees” brings to mind Erykah Badu and Lacey’s sensuous voice shines as she sings, “I have no money in my pocket.” Lacey’s understated and compelling songwriting stands out on the experimental jazz track “Burn & Rise” where she sings “There is a time I know, where we will burn and rise,” over a steady piano melody. When The Sun Dips 90 Degrees is a slow burn that is well worth the wait.

-Diamond Sharp

The Philadelphia band Brain Candle bill their doomy, dismal strain of sludge metal on their Bandcamp page as  “ultrasonic aural ecstasy.” Considering how they’re working from a framework that’s traditionally functioned as a vehicle for the exact opposite—a slow drip of sonic suffering—one could argue that such a distinction is self-conflicting, misleading, even; bowel-shaking, drop-tuned breakdowns aren’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. Or perhaps we’ve been under-estimating misery’s malleability the whole time. Released in 2017, Brain Candle’s Ocean of Storms LP is a wondrous anomaly, a readily-accessible, impeccably-produced, riff-filled respite from sludge and doom’s languishing, low-and-slow universe. 

“Ocean of Storms,” as the title suggests, takes many of its musical and thematic cues from the sea; in lieu of an aqueous overarching narrative à la Mastodon’s Leviathan, the band leaven abyssal imagery with primordial grooves that bubble and boil incessantly, submerged riffs smoldering like deep-sea vents from down below. Of course, like all terrestrial organisms, the members of Brain Candle need to come up for air every now and again, even more so on the songs extending past the five-minute mark. Such unpredictable bouts of ascension, like the rapid-fire solo that bursts through the froth midway on trippy highlight “Fractal Eyes,” testify to the band’s greatest strengths: for a bunch of doom-mongerers, Brain Candle are just stoked to be alive, screaming in ecstasy.

-Zoe Camp

This month’s exciting group of soul artists bravely sing about heartbreak, self-love, and mental health. 

Anais Chantal
Birdie

Anais Chantal has a breathtaking voice—rich and sophisticated, with both a jazz-informed diction and world-weary wisdom. Her three-song EP Birdie, is a musical snapshot of her experience as a person living with mental illness. Her vulnerability is made clear on the visceral “Lithium,” which is about the medication’s effect on her brain. The three tracks on Birdie prove Chantal to be as commanding a songwriter and storyteller as she is a singer. 

Ruben Young
Dream State 

Ruben Young’s debut album Dream State is a thrilling combination of vulnerability and heartbreak. His distinctive rasp is the focal point—but instead of filling his songs with predictable bravado and “I can do you right” lyrics, Young opts to bring the idea of the “gentleman” back to R&B and soul. You can hear it in the unguarded opener “Vienna,” as well as the sexy “Rachel Green,” which features Oddfuture’s Hodgybeats, and the seductive “Colors.” On Dream State, Young offers a combination of candid emotion and seductive, playful sensuality.

Sydney Ranee
Drop My Guard 

Sydney Ranee’s EP Drop My Guard, is about heartbreak—an album that takes the listener on a journey of bad boys, good loving, and big regrets. On the album-opening “Warn Me,” Ranee meets her heartbreaker; standout track “LA Boys” is about the devastating aftermath. Just as impressive is the way she effortlessly slips from the R&B and soul of those tracks to the guitar-and-synth pop of “Drink With You” and the funky swagger of “Drop My Guard.” For all of its stylistic switch-ups, Ranee never sounds like she’s trying to do too much; instead, it’s that versatility that makes Drop My Guard a thrilling listen.

Upper Reality
Best of Upper Reality

Los Angeles native Upper Reality is a musical free spirit who makes striking—and unpredictable—psychedelic soul. Album-opener “Slowly,” begins with a light reggae grove that slips into seductive electronic soul. “My Language” is peppered with ad-lib lyrics that illustrate her assertion that the people she meets “don’t speak her language.” There is a chill, ethereal quality to Upper Reality’s songs, particularly on the fluttery, multi-vocal “Call You Back,” and the psychedelic and synthy “Breezy Summer Sunshine.” But on “Your Way (Black Woman),” she’s less ethereal and more direct, singing, “They want us a symbols but they don’t value our truths/ they want us to sing but they don’t want to listen.” 

MADDEE
Red Mind 

Red Mind is the debut EP from Maddee, a new voice who has already worked with notable Toronto jazz and soul artists like Charlotte Day Wilson and BadbadNotgood. Co-produced by Madee, Red Mind is a contemplative body of work. Standout tracks include the melancholy “Dry” where she sets her melancholy alto against weeping trumpets and lurching drums, and “Birds,” a haunting song featuring distant sirens and halting vocals. “Keep your nose to the wind/let the birds sing,” she advises on that song. Maddee’s debut album is a good introduction to a budding artist.  

K. Raydio
5:55

Singer and rapper Kay Raydio’s compelling year-long musical concludes with her fifth and final 2019 release, 5-55. The songs strike a balance between the deeply personal and the universally relatable. Gospel meets hip-hop on “Choirgirl,” as Raydio tells the story of a choirgirl outsiders misjudge as being passive; in reality, she’s far from it—she’s a young woman who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, or apologize for her stealth ambition. “I was just a choir girl,” she sings, “but I was never quiet.” And while Raydio’s music has always felt autobiographical, on “Mediocre,” she cuts herself a break, acknowledging her imperfections, but knowing that what she has is more than enough. “Sick of all the trouble/ Sick of beating myself up,” she sings over a tough, pulsing beat. And on the sensuous “Silk Pillowcase,” she forgives herself, offering a fitting, peaceful end to K. Raydio’s year-long musical exploration. 

“Himalayan Tea”, the lush, ambient roller from Munich-based artist Panic Girl, opens the door to a world where the ordinary meets the ethereal. The effect is something like magical realism: On “Morning Coffee in Tokyo,” snippets of urban ambience—like the sound of a train in motion, laughter, coughing, and the clinking of dishes—blend with hypnotic percussion and fairytale synths; the faint chatter murmuring in the background of “Moonbase” ground its cosmic arpeggios in earthy tones.

Some of this duality can be chalked up to Panic Girl’s background: she was classically trained in piano, guitar, and voice before she turned her attention to electronic music. The album’s artwork—a photograph of a Eurorack synth surrounded by an assortment of candles and plants—offers another combination of organic and synthetic. Panic Girl’s music is homey and comforting, from the wind that blows gently through “Windwalker” to the candy-coated vocals that wrap themselves around the Morcheeba-esque title track. As its title implies, Cake on Jupiter is a journey through the cosmos that keeps one eye trained on earth.

-April Clare Welsh

Deathconsciousness, the 2008 debut from Connecticut duo Have A Nice Life, is the last album you’d expect to go viral: 85 minutes of eclectic lo-fi home recordings from central Connecticut, somewhere between between post-punk, dark ambient, and darker folk, all inspired by and emulating the deepest pits of depression. But somewhere between Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga’s initial self-release and its seven-and-counting vinyl reissues, Deathconsciousness attracted a fervent audience in various online music communities. 4chan’s /mu/ board—that small, impassioned, and notoriously picky bunch who helped signal-boost Death Grips and Car Seat Headrest into the public consciousness—rated it #10 on their essentials list. /r/indieheads, which boasts a userbase over 800 times that size, awarded it a 9.02/10 score in a community poll. (Naturally, Have A Nice Life have their own subreddit as well.) “No one would know who we were if it wasn’t for the internet,” says Berrett. “It’s an intensely gratifying thing, because neither Tim or I thought anybody would listen to it, and we really emptied a lot of ourselves into that record.”

Even so, Barrett sees something inherently broken in the very web-based communities that put his band on the map. “One of the things about the online universe—which is where Have a Nice Life is a band essentially—is it’s very easy to turn very resentful,” he says. “The internet is like, a resentment factory. It’s very easy to get sucked into it, and I worry about that. Those are very powerful systems operating on a brain that still fuckin’ thinks, ‘I need to pick up a banana in the woods because I might starve to death.’ It weirds me out, and I think that stuff comes out in the music more often than not.”

With all that misery in mind, Have a Nice Life’s first album in five-and-a-half years, Sea of Worry, is very much on-brand: “Lyrically, all of the songs are anxiety-driven, in one way or another,” Barrett says. The eponymous lead single had some fans predicting that the album would be focused on climate change, but Barrett’s on-record malaise straddles, as he says, “That inward and outward-facing sense of, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s just hard to be alive right now.’”

“I had the idea that when I was an adult I would figure out a lot of personality flaws and issues that I’ve had my whole life,” Barrett says of those inward-facing anxieties. “And as you become an adult and come into yourself, you get a lot of those things, you just realize that you’re always this way— it kind of is who you are.” As he puts it on the song “Lords of Tresserhorn,” “I can stay up late whenever I want… but other than that, it’s nothing like I thought/ I guess I thought I’d know what I’m doing by now… but I know nothing.” 

That particular song was inspired by Barrett’s kids, who he says still view staying up late as “this magical thing,” but several Sea of Worry tracks date back to the days before Barrett had children. “Trespassers W” and “Destinos,” in particular, are around a decade old, but their despair, confusion, and rage are a snug fit within the context of the new album. “Almost always for me, the themes for the records emerge after they’re recorded,” says Barrett. “I write a bunch of songs, and I write what feels right for the song, and when you put them all together and step back from it, then you see like, ‘Oh, that’s what all these songs are about.’”

Perhaps the most noticeable change on Sea of Worry is the presence of other musicians; the entire A-side forsakes Barrett and Macuga’s homespun approach in favor of a full-band sound. Up to this point, Have a Nice Life have operated almost exclusively as a duo (save for a few 2010 live appearances). After being invited to perform Deathconsciousness in its entirety at the Dutch metal festival Roadburn this year, they decided it was time for a change—so they assembled a full band, and hit the road for a North American tour. “Some of the Sea of Worry songs made their way into our 2019 shows, so we thought the new album should include those collaborators,” says Macuga. “It’s part of our identity at the moment, and that should be honored.”

The album’s most arresting moment comes on the aforementioned “Destinos,” another old cut that never found a proper home on previous Have a Nice Life albums. Listening, it’s easy to understand why: “Destinos” clocks in at 13 arduous minutes, the first five minutes of which are taken up by a disturbing audio clip of a fundamentalist Christian speaker ranting about the mathematical certainty of hell, a nightmare logic which leaves us terminably fucked. Barrett doesn’t remember exactly how he came across the snippet (“I was literally probably Googling for like, ‘Evil mp3 clip’”), but in retrospect, he considers it a facsimile of sorts, both for the album and life as a whole: “To me now when I listen to it, that’s what the whole world feels like.”

Certainly, Have a Nice Life have trafficked in despair for as long as some of their listeners have been alive. (In fact, Barrett says he recently chatted with a young fan who got into the band through his father, who’d played him Deathconsciousness frequently growing up). Taking Barrett’s word and viewing the whole world as a fire-and-brimstone screed may be a tough sell for the more optimistic among us—but hear him out. 

“It feels like everyone has this system that they operate in, where your immediate actions make a lot of sense, but the underlying ethical framework of what everybody ends up doing is just completely fucked,” he says, explaining how this priest, or theologian, or whoever he is can sound so gleeful about eternal damnation. “So you end up with people doing incredibly terrible things and feeling completely good about it.”

Those closed-loop systems and communities that Barrett’s describing have only grown more prevalent in recent years, as the right has radicalized and—as Barrett sings on “Sea of Worry”—“co-opted nihilism.” It feels like the rest of the world has finally caught up with the decade-old anxiety found on “Destinos,” and maybe that’s why, despite its age, it’s such a fitting capstone on Sea of Worry. “Part of that’s probably just being a person,” says Barrett of his persistent sense of alienation, “but it feels way more intense now.”

-Patrick Lyons

Photography by Moshe Brakha

Who the hell was Peter Ivers? There are a lot of answers to that question: ’60s avant-garde bandleader, ’70s “pop” singer/songwriter, ’80s New Wave firebrand, film composer, Harvard-certified genius, underground TV personality, punk provocateur—the list goes on and on. Anyone who hung out with David Lynch, John Belushi, Jello Biafra, Ron Howard, Van Dyke Parks, Devo, and Harold Ramis is bound to flummox even the most astute biographer.

As Josh Frank, author of 2008 Ivers bio In Heaven Everything Is Fine, put it, “The world is not full of people that think like Peter Ivers.” And a new collection of mostly unreleased Ivers material, Becoming Peter Ivers, fully bears out that idea.

More than three-and-a-half decades after Ivers’ still-unsolved murder turned his story into a sort of rock ‘n’ roll Black Dahlia case, the irrepressible L.A. maverick’s music remains relatively unknown. Most people who are aware of Ivers know him for one of two things: the song he wrote and sang for David Lynch’s quintessential midnight movie Eraserhead, and his high-powered hosting of early-’80s cable music showcase New Wave Theatre. But those are just two threads in a complex tangle.

Ivers grew up in Brookline, MA and attended Harvard University in the second half of the ’60s. A research study at the school revealed he had a genius-level IQ, but—much to his money-minded father’s chagrin—Ivers was mostly interested in music, banging around Boston, playing with rock bands and jamming with touring bluesmen, reportedly even earning the admiration of Muddy Waters. In 1969, two years after he graduated, Ivers met Lucy Fisher, who would be his romantic partner for much of his life. That same year, Ivers finagled a deal with Epic Records to release his first album, Knight of the Blue Communion, with lyrics by Mayer and vocals by Sri Lankan jazz singer Yolande Bavan.

Even in the acid cloud of the late ‘60s, Blue Communion was like nothing else. Its wild collision of free jazz, blues, post-psychedelic rock, and sheer, unalloyed strangeness would have been ahead of its time—if anything remotely like it ever followed. Unsurprisingly, this shockingly visionary work didn’t exactly endear Ivers to Epic’s accounting department. His 1970 single for the label was a funky cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar,” with vocals by another Eastern singer, Bombay-born Asha Puthli. But the flip side, “Clarence O’Day,” was closer to Captain Beefheart; when he offered the label an album’s worth of that, an impatient Epic hustled Ivers to the door.

He moved to L.A. in 1971, where Fisher joined him after a few years. At first he lived in the Tropicana, a notoriously sleazy West Hollywood rock ‘n’ roll hotel now famous for hosting the likes of Jim Morrison and Tom Waits. He worked on film scores at the American Film Institute, where he befriended a simpatico eccentric artist—a young, aspiring director named David Lynch.

Lynch was in the early stages of creating Eraserhead, and he asked Ivers to provide music and vocals for the now-famous scene where the ghostly Lady in the Radiator sings a song called “In Heaven.” It was a busy time for Ivers. He’d made the acquaintance of another eccentric auteur: songwriter/producer Van Dyke Parks, best known as Brian Wilson’s lyricist for the notoriously troubled Beach Boys album Smile. Impressed by Ivers’ writing, Parks brought him to Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros, which netted him a record deal and an advance in excess of $100,000. By this time, Ivers and Lucy had settled in a house in Laurel Canyon that became a sort of 24/7 salon, with associates of Ivers constantly coming and going. “He and Lucy together were this sort of magical couple,” remembers Steven Martin, who would become Ivers’ close friend and manager. Soon, a thriving artistic scene would develop around Ivers and Fisher’s house.

Terminal Love, released in 1974, introduced the world to Ivers the singer/songwriter. The album was no wistful collection of gently introspective ballads: Its songs sport unorthodox structures, shifting tempos and time signatures, and arch, witty lyrics referencing everything from Freud, Adler, and Reich (“Holding the Cobra”) to time and space travel (“Alpha Centauri”) and physical entropy (the title track).

But the album’s most idiosyncratic element of all was Ivers’ voice. High and reedy enough to make Neil Young sound like Johnny Cash, it has more in common with future innovators like Television’s Tom Verlaine or The Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano than any of Ivers’ contemporaries.

Sure enough, Terminal Love died on the vine, but it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros expecting anything else. “I do think major labels were taking more risks at that time,” says Becoming Peter Ivers producer Matt Werth. “I don’t think they would have invested so heavily in the record to have it flop. Unless they were thinking, ‘This is, like, a shot at Bowie.’ There aren’t any other benchmarks of weirdness I can imagine them holding Peter up to.”

Around this time, Fisher’s career began taking off with a job at United Artists, and Ivers was increasingly immersed in the Hollywood film-biz milieu. Between his girlfriend’s connections and the ascendance of Ivers’ old Harvard friends like National Lampoon creator Doug Kenney, Ivers would begin crossing paths with high-powered Hollywood stars like John Belushi and director Harold Ramis.

Seemingly undaunted by the failure of Terminal Love, Ivers brought a second batch of tunes to Warner Bros, which were released on a self-titled album in 1976. As an apparent sop to the label, he sanded some of the rough edges off the music and production. But his lyrics and singing were as proudly radio-unready as ever, if not more so. “I think there was an attempt at one point for Warner Bros to polish him up, to make it slicker,” recalls Martin. “I always liked the rawest stuff.”

Around this time, Ivers’ urge to provoke came to the fore. He’d always been given to button-pushing behavior, like randomly disrobing in public, briefly eschewing the use of utensils for any meal, or engaging in onstage outrageousness. “An agent provocateur? Absolutely,” confirms Martin. “In the best way. In a funny way, not in a picking-a-fight way. ” One of the most notorious examples is his opening slot for Fleetwood Mac at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheatre in 1976, in support of his new album, for which he took to the stage clad only in a diaper. That sort of move might have endeared him to punk/new wave audiences a few years later, but under the circumstances, they were not warmly received. “I think Peter wanted to shock people and be outrageous,” says Martin, “which I always found weird, because he was so musically skilled it seemed like he didn’t have to.”

After his second record for Warner Bros flopped, Ivers created the score for the road comedy Grand Theft Auto, Ron Howard’s 1977 directorial debut. That same year, Eraserhead—which had spent a grueling five years in production—was finally released, and Ivers’ eerie song brought simpatico spirits like Devo into his orbit. (The song soon became a staple of Devo’s live shows.) In the ensuing decades, “In Heaven” would be recorded by countless artists, including the Pixies, Bauhaus, Tuxedomoon, Miranda Sex Garden, Modest Mouse, and Jay Reatard.

By 1978, Lucy Fisher had become VP of Production at 20^th Century Fox. Ivers remained as much of a creative whirlwind as ever, writing songs and screenplays, and making a series of short music films that presaged the coming of music video. But while his pals were becoming famous and his girlfriend was finding success in the film industry, Ivers was struggling. “These are some highly respected people that really respect him,” says Steven Martin. “I think it was probably tough for him not to have more success.” Josh Frank agrees. “He had to have that in his mind when he was hanging out with Doug Kenney and Lucy and David Lynch and Devo.”

The dynamic between Ivers and Fisher has often been painted as a sort of Peter Pan/Wendy scenario, with Fisher enabling her boyfriend to remain the eternal sprite. But as Fisher became increasingly interested in grown-up ideas like marriage and kids, she realized those things didn’t seem to figure in The Ivers Plan, a manifesto he wrote in the late ’80s. In 1980, Lucy moved out—though they would never officially break up, and an entirely different energy entered his life in the form of David Jove. The Canadian filmmaker, musician, and sometime drug dealer had briefly lived in England, where he was an LSD merchant called Acid King Dave who aided the authorities in the notorious 1967 Redlands drug bust of The Rolling Stones in exchange for legal leniency.

Jove had dreamed up a low-budget TV show for local UHF station KSCI that he dubbed New Wave Theatre, intended to tap the rich loam of L.A.’s punk and new wave underground. Ivers agreed to host the show, donning outrageous duds (spangled jackets, bug-eyed glasses, glittering feather boas) and delivering equally outrageous rants written by Jove and music journalist Ed Ochs. Ad hoc production values and a punk aesthetic gave the show a sharp, disorienting feel that complemented the music. “It was all late-night crazy business,” recalls Ochs. “I’d pull the copy out of my typewriter and hand it to Peter as he jumped in front of the camera and read what was just written minutes earlier.”

Between Ivers’ larger-than-life appeal and the excitement of the music, New Wave Theatre took off. A few months after its January 1981 premiere, it went national, picked up by the USA cable network. Energized, Ivers wrote two musicals: Nirvana Cuba and the Vitamin Pink Fantasy Revue, the latter of which was co-produced by Harold Ramis, and which had a pair of sold-out preview performances at Hollywood’s Club Lingerie in 1982. He also experienced some overdue commercial success: Ivers had met songwriter Franne Golde in 1981, and the two began a writing partnership, penning straightforward pop songs for other artists. June Pointer of The Pointer Sisters cut their song “Little Boy Sweet,” which eventually landed on the soundtrack of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Marty Balin of Jefferson Starship recorded “All We Really Need,” and Diana Ross’s recording of “Let’s Go Up” hit the lower rungs of the pop and R&B charts.

At the same time, Ivers fled the pastoral Laurel Canyon for a loft space in gritty downtown L.A. He seemed to be turning some kind of corner, leaving a little bit of Peter Pan behind and finding ways to ride his art to a more “grown-up” lifestyle. He sold a treatment for a fantasy screenplay called City of Tomorrow to Warner Bros, and in late 1982, he landed a songwriting contract with ATV music publishers, earning him a steady income. By 1983, Ivers decided he’d had enough of New Wave Theatre. “Peter tired of the role,” says Ed Ochs, “gave it everything he had, and was ready to pack it in and move on.”

Then, shockingly, on March 1, 1983, Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his bed. The murder investigation was shambolic at best — police failed to cordon off the scene, enabling people to come in and out and even remove items from the premises.

Theories ran rampant, with New Wavers and Hollywood hotshots each blaming the other faction. “Both groups had their own crazy stories about the other group,” says Josh Frank. For a brief time Harold Ramis was under suspicion, due to allegations of an affair between his wife and Ivers. David Jove, who was by all accounts a loose cannon, was also on the suspect list, especially after Fisher hired a private eye to pick up where the shoddy police investigation left off. Jove passed away in 2004. Ivers’ murder remains unsolved.

After Ivers’ death, Lucy Fisher established a home for his considerable archives at Harvard, and established a scholarship there called the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Program. Several collections of Ivers’ work have been released over the years, including the 1985 compilation Nirvana Peter and 2008’s The Untold Stories. Now Becoming Peter Ivers extends the legacy. The collection is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a close-up view of Ivers’ creative process, containing demos for much of his Warner Bros material, as well as “In Heaven” and material from Nirvana Cuba. The sparseness of many of the tracks—some featuring just vocals, keyboard, and maybe a primitive drum machine—gives everything a sense of intimacy, while the gritty, full-band demo of “Alpha Centauri” has an even more off-kilter edge than the studio version. On some tracks it seems possible to detect Ivers’ influences —Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon on the gentle “Take Your Chances With Me,” Marc Bolan on the lusty-but-otherworldly

“He didn’t sound like anyone else,” says Martin, “and it took the rest of the world this long to catch up with it.” That style was realized through Ivers’ jacked-up work ethic, keen intelligence, natural talent, and fearless adventurousness.

“He was the kind of guy that didn’t not walk through an open door just because it wasn’t the open door he was looking for,” suggests Josh Frank. “He was like, ‘Oh cool, man, there’s an open door. I’m gonna see what’s in here.'”

-Jim Allen

How do feminist performers grapple with the male gaze? For Toronto pop duo Ice Cream, the answer is to stare right back at it. Band members Amanda Crist and Carlyn Bezic have been toeing the line of surveyor and surveyed since their first release, 2016’s Love, Ice Cream, eight minimal tracks that fused synth-heavy electronic pop with post-punk. On their new album, Fed Up, the two face off against male entitlement, the dehumanization inherent to capitalism, and other societal ills.

“For me, what I’m singing about on Fed Up is definitely just wanting to break free of whatever mold has been placed on top of us,” Crist says. “It’s unnatural to me. It’s like a deep frustration that sometimes takes over.”

The debut single, “Peanut Butter,” was inspired by an odious customer Bezic served while bartending—a man who clearly felt it was his right to treat service workers poorly. “You built this and whatever it is, it isn’t for us,” Bezic sings over a dancey, electronic beat. The political bent and gritty, homemade-sounding beat are reminiscent of Le Tigre’s best work. The accompanying video features Crist and Bezic clad in all pink, performing in front of a glittery gold backdrop.

Though the tracks on this album are more polished and layered than on their previous recordings, they still have the DIY feel of people making music with whatever equipment they have on hand. To that end, Crist still plays the same Moog Rogue she bought in high school.

“It’s funny because often when people ask us what kind of music we make, like in our minds we make pop music,” Crist says. “I think on our first album, that was what we were trying to accomplish. But because we were not as good as our instruments, or were working with whatever equipment we had, it obviously came out sounding much weirder than that. I think as we progress and continue to write and get to know our instruments better and new ways of making music, we will keep going more towards pop music.”

“Modern Life,” a slower, jazzy number with backing saxophone and smooth R&B vocals, is certainly a more pop-leaning offering, and “Dove’s Cry” is one of the strongest tracks, a tender song about the limited nature of salvation through shopping and beauty treatments. The video, directed and edited by Bezic, is a brilliant rendition of the song’s mood and message. In one shot, Bezic sings, “They say you can’t find self-love through self-loathing/ But a quick fix will do me just fine,” over a shot of the bandmates carrying armloads of shopping bags. Self-pampering scenes recur throughout: the two in full makeup, wearing bathrobes, slathering themselves in oil or lathering on soap with heart-shaped sponges. It’s campy and glamorous. It sounds sexy, but the two are deadpan; they touch themselves with the clinical demeanor of a spa technician.

Ice Cream are well aware of the double-edged sword of being women in a public-facing medium, of not wanting to be objectified while, at least in some ways, making yourself into an object. “If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms?,” the writer Jia Tolentino asks in Trick Mirror, in an essay on the insidious ways society still pressures women to conform to a certain aesthetic—naturally beautiful, thin but toned, and in the latest athleisure wear. It’s a sentiment Ice Cream seems to share. Their image appears highly calculated, from their glossy promotional shots to the artsy, it-girl outfits they wear in their videos.

“We do like to play with the gaze—the male gaze—on stage and within our visuals, and how you can control that and also not have any control over it,” Crist says.

It’s as if the two are daring the public to find them sexy, by packaging their conventional good looks in a cold, unemotional way. On Fed Up’s album cover, two feminine hands are joined as if arm wrestling; one sports long red talons. The art critic John Berger wrote that a woman is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. For Ice Cream, that image is of a woman furious about the conditions she’s been forced into, and who is hell-bent on expressing it with clear control.

-Kerry Cardoza

Hearing the deep gospel arcana gathered on No Other Love feels a little like receiving a transmission from a distant star. But the raw humanity in every second of this lovingly curated compilation is still vital.

Compilation producer Ramona Stout was a professional crate-digger in Chicago when she uncovered the mega-rare ’60s and ’70s Midwestern gospel singles collected here, and her expertise shows. Mostly self-released micro-pressings, these aren’t the kind of records you can just grab from eBay or Discogs—you’ve got to get your hands dirty. And if you want to gather information about them you’ve got to do some serious detective work—which Stout also did.

For the most part, this isn’t clap-shout, good-time gospel. There’s an almost grim determination that comes through on many of the tracks—the kind that comes from inner-city African-American communities dealing with the struggles of daily life. After all, what’s gospel music about, if not transcending earthly adversity by keeping a divine purpose in mind? Rev. H.H. Harrington’s “Black Pride,” which sounds as much like a DIY post-punk obscurity as a gospel tune, goes so far as to detail the social issues of the place and time; those tribulations are the subtext throughout the record.

The minor-key modes of many tunes add an almost ominous quality, whether it’s the Wondering Gails’ “The Number,” with its haunted organ and New Orleans funeral-stroll pace; The Georgia Brooks Singers’ stark, stern warning to sinners on “You Can’t Make It;” or the downright creepy vibe of Joanne & Sonny’s venture into the great beyond on “Journey.”

Sometimes, the feel is straight-up funky (The Messiahs of Glory’s title track, for example), but frequently it’s lo-fi and ultra-minimal. Christopher King did a magical job remastering these tunes from the original 45s, making beyond-rough source material eminently listenable without sacrificing its unvarnished appeal. And when those testifying voices cry out, baked in half-century-old reverb, that gloriously ghostly quality becomes all the more palpable.

-Jim Allen

In a year in which I’ve repeatedly said, “This is one of the very best things to be released in 2019,” I keep finding new reasons to say it yet again. And as a testament to the enduring strength of the current generation of jazz musicians, two of this month’s featured artists (Yazz Ahmed and Jaimie Branch) were responsible for the two best albums of 2017, and Chris Lightcap released the best album of 2015. And that’s not even diving into the impact Matana Roberts, Matt Ulery, Tomeka Reid and the Bad Plus have had on the shape of jazz today. What I’m getting at here is that: Yes, 2019 is truly a special year in new releases, but the musicians who are cementing that designation have been putting their stamp on the scene for years now.

View the Best Jazz on Bandcamp Archives.

Yazz Ahmed
Polyhymnia

Yazz Ahmed made a statement with 2017’s La Saboteuse, an album that was as much a declaration of vision as it was an encapsulation of the influences that gave it shape.The trumpeter synthesized London’s modern jazz, Bahrain folk music, ambient drones, psychedelic rock and indie pop into something as warmly embraceable as it was beguiling and thought-provoking. Her newest builds on that foundation, using a thematic framework of women who exemplify the qualities of courage and strength essential to navigating a patriarchal society. And, much like its 2017 predecessor, Ahmed has created an album that is a standout listening experience, casting enchanting melodies and harmonic surges as thrilling as they are lovely.

Jaimie Branch
Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise

The trumpet of Jaimie Branch has a presence that commands the room. Her vision is no less riveting. There’s an argument to be made that Branch’s 2017 debut Fly or Die was the album of the year. It was an electro-acoustic recording that lived at the polar extremes of digital and organic sounds, and vacillated between pure aggression and raw melodicism. Her newest, Fly or Die, is no less riveting. It occupies the same general territory as the original installment, but displays an expansive use of textures and diversity. Spoken word, chamber, rock, Latin music influences, and bouquets of percussion become the focal points, dictating events as willfully as Branch’s typical punches-in-bunches style. Branch’s debut made a formidable impact—which makes the achievement of her sophomore release that much more impressive. Every bit of this music is outstanding.

Max Andrzejewski’s Hütte
Hütte & Guests Play the Music of Robert Wyatt

Some artists just can’t do anything normally. It’s as if it isn’t even a conscious choice, but some sort of biological imperative. Max Andrzejewski is one of those artists. He’s been responsible for creative phenomena like his Hütte ensemble, which morphs from a melodically spasmodic quartet into a choir for a sonic celebration of food. To say nothing of his dizzying transitions between free jazz collabs with Charles Gayle, synth-rock duo Pranke, and folk singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni. His latest, a take on the Robert Wyatt songbook, is arguably his most thoroughly conceived project to date. It’s also one of the very best things to come out this year.

Carmen Sandim
Play-Doh

Pianist Carmen Sandim’s melodies hold the door wide open to the rest of the song. It frames each piece with a thematic device that contextualizes notes in real time. The Brazilian native and Denver resident has a quiet source of quality modern jazz recordings, delightful in their tunefulness, and thrilling for their volatility in the face of those melodies. This is arguably her best to date. Winter is on the way, and Play-Doh is a dose of springtime to see you through the colder months.

Matt Ulery
Delicate Charms

As a composer, one of Matt Ulery’s strengths is his talent for balancing a huge sound with an exquisite melodicism. In this way, he reveals an irresistible vulnerability in every show of strength. It’s why his big band and orchestral works have a clear intimacy, and his smaller ensemble pieces seem to roar up to the heavens. His latest falls more into the latter category. Working with familiar collaborators like pianist Rob Clearfield, drummer Quin Kirchner, violinist Zach Brock, and alto saxophonist Greg Ward, the bassist expands upon the inspirations and imagery of past works while nurturing something that sounds quite new.

Matana Roberts
Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis

Where Matana Roberts’ previous manifestations of her “panoramic sounds quilting” projects were a fascinating display of impressionism, her fourth installment in the Coin Coin series has a narrative clarity that is nothing short of stunning. The composer’s talent for nurturing the interplay between history and myth has resulted in one of the albums of the year.

Tomeka Reid Quartet
Old New

There’s nothing happenstance about the title of Tomeka Reid’s latest. There’s a kind of chronological elasticity that is pretty damn compelling. These are modern players with forward-thinking attitudes. Guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara are responsible for some of the more experimental works on the modern scene. But the foundations of blues and jazz and folk bleed through the music, giving it a strong sense of something traditional and familiar.

Chris Lightcap
SuperBigmouth

What’s most appealing about the music of Chris Lightcap is the way he gives the jagged and rough post-bop form of expression an anthemic quality. Whether it’s washes of harmonic warmth, strategic melodic timing, or the way he instills an ephemeral presence on structured cadences, it all makes the music both intricate and intimate. On the bassist’s new release, he brings together his Bigmouth and Superette ensembles, and the best each group has to offer individually snaps into place as a collective.

Kris Davis
Diatom Ribbons

At this point, just scoop up anything Kris Davis releases. The pianist is in one of those creative fugues where experimentalism becomes commonplace, and the conventional becomes transcendent. The latest gem (in a string of recent gems) was born through collaborations on a Geri Allen tribute project, which informed the album’s arresting mix of influences and perspectives. Terri Lyne Carrington, Esperanza Spalding, Marc Ribot, JD Allen, Nels Cline, Val Jeanty, Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith comprise the all-star line-up drawn into Davis’s creative orbit, and they have a presence that measures as planetary.

Miles Okazaki
The Sky Below

This is the music of scattered marbles, where the intersections of motion are just as responsible for an enchantment as the kaleidoscopic bursts of color. This is also the music of myth, on which Miles Okazaki applys real symbolism to a fictional narrative. It’s a convergence of sources of fascination on the latest from the guitarist, which was never in short supply previously. Okazaki’s collaboration with pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Anthony Tidd and drummer Sean Rickman continues to be a wellspring of creativity.

Kenny Warren
Laila and Smitty III

It’s as much about the inspiration as the execution on Kenny Warren’s Laila & Smitty project. It’s as an excellent example of what folk jazz has become in the modern era, but its impact comes from the unguarded and vulnerable liner notes that describe the motivation for the project. The first release in the series documented the end of his long-term relationship, and juxtaposed it with the idealized marriage of his aunt Laila and uncle Smitty, drawing parallels between the concurrence of their passing and the death of his own relationship. It infused powerful music with a poignancy that was impossible to ignore. But there was hope, too, in the development from the first chapter to the second and, now, part three, and the way the theme of rebuilding and starting over is captured by his life, and the music representing it. Warren puts himself out there.

The Bad Plus
Activate Infinity

The trio’s addition of Orrin Evans has led to an emergence in fluidity The Bad Plus never quite managed before. Perhaps it has something to do with the pianist’s ability to voice the blues effortlessly, and perhaps it’s also the result of Evans syncing up perfectly with the talkative, rhythmic quality of bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King. Whatever the cause, these simple, yet poignant tunes reflect a new phase in the trio’s creative trajectory, and their second recording together is a signpost that things are falling right into place.

Evgeny Sivtsov
Zoo

While Evgeny Sivtsov reveals all kinds of idiosyncracies in his lyrical style, its ultimate form is blending the breezy lightheartedness of Sonny Clark and the crisp harmonics of Fred Hersch. This trio work from pianist Sivtsov, bassist Dan Chmielinski, and drummer Shawn Baltazor is the kind of straight-ahead gem that reminds us of the roots of jazz in a year when the typical blossom is strange and new. This album is released on Rainy Day Records from Saint Petersburg, Russia… yet one more reminder that jazz is everywhere.

Go: Organic Orchestra & Brooklyn Raga Massive
Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas

Adam Rudolph has spent decades exploring the interstices of jazz and diverse folk musics from around the world. That he would collaborate with Brooklyn Raga Massive is about as logical a decision as it gets. The ensemble has taken a similar approach to that of Rudolph’s by exploring the connection points between Indian classical and music such as the spiritual jazz of Alice and John Coltrane, and the minimalism of Terry Riley’s “In C.”  Their two orchestras amount to something of a supergroup- an assessment of the resulting music as much the esteem of the participating musicians.

-Dave Sumner

“I have music in my head twenty-four seven,” Madison McFerrin says with a chuckle. “I’m trying to figure out how to turn it off sometimes.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the singer-songwriter is in her Brooklyn home busily multi-tasking. She’s about to head out for a mid-afternoon performance at Carnegie Hall for a youth program. Hours later, she’ll be on a flight to Europe for a jam-packed mini tour. But now, she’s wrapping a gift for her mother’s birthday while discussing her stunning new EP, You & I.  

You & I is the follow-up to McFerrin’s 2016 debut Finding Foundations: Vol I and its 2018 remix, Finding Foundations: Vol II. In a world where more is better—more guests, more songwriters, more production—Vol. I stood out. Here was McFerrin, just a woman and her breathtaking voice, singing acapella. Famous fan, Questlove, called it “soulacapella.”

“It’s funny, before he even said that, we had been referring to it as ‘acapella soul,’” she says. “He took the initiative to combine the two words.” And while making an acapella soul—or “soulcapella”—record feels like a conscious decision to subvert the crammed-to-the-gills sound of contemporary R&B, the reality was quite the opposite. “The acapella thing is totally by accident,” she explains. “I wrote the first [version] of ‘You & I’ and released the acapella tunes as a placeholder to get my name out there. It took off more than I was anticipating.” 

“The acapella thing” soon found favor with fans hungry for a bare, imitate take on R&B. “People are really into me just doing the acapella thing,” McFerrin thought, “why don’t I just go down that path while all of these other things get sorted out?” Unsurprisingly, that path came with some resistance.  “I go to these [venues] and they’d hear that I’m singing acapella and they either don’t want to book me, or they don’t know [or] understand what [acapella] means. They think I need to be in a jazz lounge with people sitting down.”

Swimming against the tide is something of a McFerrin family tradition. At the height of the New Wave ‘80s, Madison’s Grammy-winning father Bobby McFerrin released a string of albums with songs built on jazz, global rhythms, and his classically trained voice. Her grandfather, Robert McFerrin, was the first African American man to perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. And her grandmother, Sara McFerrin, is a classically trained vocalist who toured as a background singer for Sam Cooke. 

“My biggest concern was [not] living up to that name,” Mc Ferrin says. “Even today, there are times when I think, ‘Oh, it would be so much easier if I had a persona to compartmentalize. But I love my name. And, I’ll be honest, it helps open doors. People take me a little more seriously, and it gives me a level of respect because people understand that I come from a family that has a legacy.”

Coming from a family of musicians has proven beneficial in other ways, too: Madison’s older brother Taylor McFerrin, with whom she collaborated on the Netflix series Carole & Tuesday, produced four of You & I’s six tracks. But it took some time. While Finding Foundations stuck to Madison’s acapella roots, You & I sets her voice against pillowy electronic arrangements. For that, she needed to wait for Taylor to finish his own album first. Taylor would send Madison beats, and she’d select the ones that spoke to her, sequencing them to create a flow. Then, she started writing.

And while it boasts lusher arrangements, You & I is still in line with her earlier work, keeping McFerrin’s sophisticated vocals and tales of the heart front and center. On “Unwise,” about ghosting, she sings, “She said that you’d deceive me/ To trust you was unwise,” with the kind of candidness that makes it sound as if the loss is happening in real time. The neo-soul number “Try” treats mistakes as opportunities to develop resilience, something McFerrin learned firsthand when she received backlash for her rendition of the National Anthem at one of HIllary Clinton’s 2016 campaign rallies. 

McFerrin conveys each of these experiences with nuance and direct language, and makes each of them feel universal. And she hopes her intimate sound, in all its shades of honesty and vulnerability reaches and impacts listeners. “All my stuff that I write is very personal,” she says. “But I know that other people have these same experiences. My experiences are not isolated.” And if that means the subjects of her tracks recognize themselves in the story, so be it. “If they do, they do, if they don’t, they don’t. I’m not concerned about,” she concludes with a laugh.

-Chaka V. Grier

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was created with the goal of restoring Earth’s agriculture in the case of a catastrophic, global event. As of November 2015, they had 867,801 seed samples. It’s housed in Longyearbyen, the Northernmost town on Earth, nestled 600 miles south of the North Pole on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago. It’s also where electroacoustic, experimental musicians Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer—who previously collaborated as Stray Dogs—made field recordings for the first album, Carbon. It’s impossible to separate the reality of climate change from Carbon, but rather than wallow in the descent, or offer gaudy slogans, Ecker & Meulyzer explore the implications of the crisis sonically.

Despite its brooding mood, Carbon is kinetic; there are plenty of exhilarating moments—not all of its songs echo the frozen crackles of opener “Enclosure.” Some, like the seven-and-a-half-minute triumph “Commons” are filled with pummelling, sublime percussion, foregrounded with meandering electronic melodies. Others, like “Metabolic Rift” combine field recordings of icy wind, wolf howls, and electronic instrumentation, and move from rhythmic dance rhythms to naturalist soundscape. The album ends with the evocative “Carbon Cycles,” a 10-minute composition that begins with the “Exposure”’s familiar crackles, then gradually transforms into an orchestra of thwacks, shimmers, and beats. The slow disintegration in the opening moments echoes our present age; the chaos that closes the song is a harbinger of things to come.

-Jordan Reyes

On March 2 of this year, a man named David Burney logged into Facebook and posted the following:

“My friend Chris Orrick died this week. I don’t know what to say. He had his demons. Don’t we all? But Chris didn’t have much control over his […] Once, he made me so mad I nearly had a brain aneurysm. Though he desperately wanted people in his life, he spent a lot of time alone. He just didn’t know how to do it. And he couldn’t figure it out.”

Fans of underground hip-hop are right to be confused. The obituary isn’t about Chris Orrick the Detroit rapper—it’s about Chris Orrick, a cryptozoologist who lived in Raleigh, North Caroline. Orrick the rapper became aware of his namesake in May, when a friend sent him a link to the article. He read the tributes to other Orrick with an eerie feeling of disorientation. Not only did other Orrick share his name, but he also seemed to share a lot of the same experiences: mental illness, depression, isolation. “If you pull quotes from certain parts of the obituary, it felt like it would be things people might have said about me if I had died,” Orrick said.

That ghostly doppelganger haunted Orrick. He’d been working on a new album with his longtime friend and Mello Music labelmate Andy Catlin—aka The Lasso. The two had been talking about trying to create a heavier, more industrial sound for the new songs, but things didn’t click into place until Orrick suggested doing a kind of tribute to the other Orrick, building on his fascination with cryptozoology—the quasi-scientific study of mythic and extinct creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, dodos, and Tasmanian devils.

As Orrick explains it the record, I Read That I Was Dead, was designed to “delve into a world of monsters that either live in society, or inside your own head.” The topics range from mass shootings (“No Place is Safe”) to immigration (“Strangers”) to demons that are more nebulous and psychological (“Gin Soaked Boy”; “Dizzy Spells”). On tracks like the feral “Wendigo,” the rich are compared to a mythological man-eating monster: You never feel full/ Never know content/ When your insides feel like cold cement/ When the day comes time that they rip you to shreds/ You’ll wish you were dead.”

Catlin also took the album’s theme to heart, using it to guide his production choices. A friend loaned him a 20-volume set of cryptozoological lore, which he pored over obsessively as he began sculpting the album’s beats. “I didn’t really read it as much as I was inspired by the photos,” he said. “People haven’t necessarily seen these animals, so they’re drawing from their mind. The illustrations are very human and homemade—almost like a weird form of self-expression. And these pen and pencil paper drawings of monsters inspired that grainy, ethereal feel that comes out in the album.”

While Orrick’s previous records were mostly sample-based, Catlin’s approach to production relies more on dense instrumentation—see his work with Lando Chill, or his recent solo album The Sound of Lasso. As a result, the songs on Dead have a distinctly heavy, almost alien sound.  On “Look Alive” the beat staggers and drags as if concussed. The bass stumbles and spins on the funky “People,” a rumination on human monsters. On the title track, which cxloses the album, Catlin buries a brittle, crackling beat beneath ghostly ambient washes as Orrick raps, “A stranger stalks me at my every step/ Occupies the spaces in my mind and takes whatever’s left/…I read that I was dead/ Memories come running and the dread of the unsaid.”

In the end, I Read That I Was Dead uses its monster metaphor as a way to discuss humanity’s vulnerability and duality. Orrick inhabits the body of his doppleganger, using it as a way to both confront his own demons, and consider those that prey on all of us. It’s a reminder that the self is shapeless and elusive—even in death.

-Noah Berlatsky

Gagaku is the oldest vein of classical music in Japan. With an arsenal of droning mouth organs (shō), harrumphing drums (Tsuri-daiko), and reverberating lute (biwa), it’s an instantly recognizable sound. Recognized as an Important Intangible Cultural Property (otherwise known as a National Treasure) in Japan, gagaku has droned through the ages since the sixth century. With its humming tones and timbres seemingly plucked from some enchanted ether, the ambiguity of gagaku ascends the style to near-holiness, music for a ceremony that has yet to find an altar in this world. While gagaku’s foothold in modern music has grown more tenuous with time, it’s quietly endured through global cultural preservation and has been revitalized by modern experimentalists.

Built on intonations at odds with the Western chromatic scale; and conceived with instruments unfamiliar to many, gagaku still has the power to communicate across time and space. These contemporary musicians draw strongly on the traditions of gagaku in their individual work, eager to build a bridge across the void separating what was from what could be.

Desuka
Desuka first EP

Using violin, voice, shō, and an arsenal of other instruments, Tokyo-based noise mangler Desuka combines the kineticism of noise with the arpeggiating twinkle of gagaku, oftentimes to unnerving results. The Japanese experimentalist’s debut EP is more of an auditory exorcism, less a cruise across plains sonic bliss. Setting the pentatonics of gagaku with throaty gnarls and gut-deep retching, Desuka swiftly eviscerates any hope of spiritual relief, instead conjuring thick tension. 

Banishing instruments to the tumult of the background at some turns, swinging in and out like a pendulum (“Collapsing silence”) at others, the EP’s four tracks reflect a shared principle: these are the sounds of a far-off world, lost to all but Desuka himself.

Dotson
Tomes

Matthew Dotson’s Tomes compiles a mad dash across genre and time, chronicled on three previously-released EPs released from 2012-2015: Excavation, Revolution/Circumvention, and Sublimation. Beginning with “Excavation – Side A,” warbling lute ebbs and flows across choppy waters, only to buckle beneath chock-a-block static. From that moment onward, peace proves hard to come by; fluttering strings careen into 10-ton drum beats that pan across the mix feverishly.  While the soothing quality of gagaku only reveals itself in ephemeral flashes throughout Tomes, Dotson’s glimmers of restraint introduce a squirming specificity in the final white-knuckled minute of “Sublimation – Side B.”

Tim Hecker
Anoyo /Konoyo

Light cannot exist without darkness, just as these two albums cannot exist without their twin tethers. Hecker has built a career on toking tones and sieving them through his jagged, post-modernist lens, most triumphantly with the chopped-and-screwed choral arrangements of 2013’sVirgins. The Anoyo / Konoyo pursuit is no different: this time, Hecker tinkers and toils with sound sketches etched by the Tokyo Gakuso. 

Hecker’s primeval-meets-pioneering approach flourishes as he tangles plucky lutes with bowed cello; piano keys square off with the intoxicating drone of the shō, vibrating through beats and bodies. These albums, created to reckon with death and all that may (or may not) come after, erect an uncharted world touched by neither hands nor hate. After all, the producer’s work is an exercise in translation, echoing the ancients with his own tongue.

Kaoru Inoue
Etenraku

Lifting its name from an ancient gagaku composition (translation: “Music of Heaven”), Kaoru Inoue’s Etenraku EP melds the temple floor and the DJ booth, weaving canyon-deep beats and flickering tone floors with the chimes and percussion of its namesake. 

Kaoru, a producer who helms Tokyo-based label Seeds And Ground, subverts gagaku’s history as the score for the lives of aristocracy, instead offering a work intended for the agonized and the ecstatic, the starry-eyed and foul-mouthed. Even the title track’s Quantonic Remix, which infuses techno-timed percussion and fizzling funk bass into the original mix’s heavy gagaku lean, Inoue bows to the glory of the past, and the echoes of its progenitors.

Gabriel Saloman
Movement Building Vol. 2

Commissioned by the Canadian dance company 605 Collective to create experimental riffs on dance-based music, Saloman’s 3-part Movement Building Series sputters and stalls with hot-blooded vitality. Built on the breakneck beats characteristic of taiko drums, Saloman recreates the sounds of gagaku with a spartan setup of guitar, cymbals, and snare. 

The aptly-titled track “Gagaku” unfolds with glossy swaths of woodwinds, ultimately broken by the pistol-pop of snare. Halfway through the track’s 11-minute runtime, seared strings and bruised reeds weave thick like chainlink, building a perimeter dense enough to keep listeners at bay, but porous enough to tease what lies just beyond reach.

Synkro
Gagaku

Known for crafting synth-powered soundscapes better suited for brooding than dancing, Manchester drum ‘n bass titan Synkro is hot-blooded on this three-track EP. From the silvery ‘80s stain of “Cloud Musik” to the tranquil sprawl of “Gagaku,” Synkro’s sonic seance beckons the ancient voices of gagaku into his backlit universe. Incorporating tinny trap bleats into atmospheric swaths siphoned from Japanese mouth organs, Sykro’s creation is painterly, albeit taut — as if Van Gogh was working with one arm tied behind his back, a knife held to his throat.

-Shannon Nico Shreibak

Inset image – Jamila Woods

Closed Sessions is the brainchild of DJ and blogger Alex “RTC” Fruchter and sound engineer Michael Kolar. The pair started the label and management company in response to the lack of structure in Chicago’s music industry. Since its inception in 2009, they’ve worked with both rap heavyweights and emerging talent, including Curren$y, Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs, Jamila Woods, Jack Larsen, and Femdot. 

“Labels [were] coming in and taking Chicago hip-hop and then trying to sell it back to us, or define what it is. I wasn’t with that anymore,” says Fruchter. To “stop the drain of people leaving,” the duo decided to “create something cool.” He adds, “We [wanted to] have more meaningful relationships for the community here, and build resources.”

Kolar and Fruchter were already working in Chicago’s largely DIY industry long before they started the label: Kolar was running his studio, Soundscape, and Fruchter was DJing and writing. As the story goes, they met by chance in a green room in 2008—shortly after Fruchter came on as editor of the storied Chicago blog Ruby Hornet—and from there, decided to collaborate.

The name “Closed Sessions” is derived from their musical project of the same name, which had two parts: first, they invited a rapper to Soundscape to record a song; then, they documented that artist’s visit to Chicago. The project prompted them to release a series of compilation albums, which consisted of those one-off songs: Closed Sessions Vol. 1, Closed Sessions ATX, and Closed Sessions Vol. 2.

The decision to become a full-fledged label came in 2012, as they were working closely with producer Thelonious Martin, and helping Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper finish their breakthrough mixtapes, Innanetape and Acid Rap. “We were thinking, ‘How many more compilations can we do?’ It had run its course” Fruchter says. “We thought, ‘You have an idea and you get to a certain goal and the world’s going to change and someone’s gonna hand you money.’ We did that and it was cool, but nothing really changed.”

The first project they released was rapper Gzus Piece’s 2012 EP Fuck Y’all, which was followed by rapper ShowYouSuck’s EP Dude Bro in 2013. Then, around 2015, they arrived at what Fruchter calls the “square era”: they signed and began managing musician Kweku Collins, and producers Boathouse and OddCouple. Woods, Femdot, and rapper WebsterX also came on for single record distribution deals in the ensuing years.

Now, Closed Sessions’ roster of artists has shifted slightly. They still work with Woods and Boathouse, but they’ve added up-and-coming rapper Ajani Jones and singer Jack Larsen to the catalog. They made their 10th year a big one, too, rebooting their party series Digital Freshness, relaunching Ruby Hornet, and working on Closed Sessions Vol. 3 Here are five key albums from their catalog.

Jack Larsen
Mildew

Jack Larsen is a former student of Alex Fruchter’s from Columbia College. At that time, Larsen was pursuing a traditional path: attending college in hopes of landing a job. He wasn’t planning on becoming a musician. But when Fruchter heard Larsen’s demos, he persuaded the singer to keep making music.

Larsen released his debut Push-Ups via Closed Sessions in 2018. He followed that project with his melodic psych-pop album, Mildew, which he wrote, produced, and recorded on his own. Recorded at some of his lowest points, the album is inspired by an ongoing illness Larsen suffered in early 2019, and the depression that followed. Standouts include “I Became My Brother,” an ethereal number in which Larsen ruminates on the decisions he’s made and the weed he’s smoked; and “Vanity,” a straightforward treatise his mindset during the making of the album. 

Jamila Woods
LEGACY! LEGACY!

Jamila Woods initially signed with Closed Sessions in early 2016, prior to releasing her powerful debut album Heavn. She then signed to the Bloomington, Indiana-based label Jagjaguwar in 2017; now, the two labels work together in a partnership to support the singer. Woods released her follow-up album LEGACY! LEGACY! in May 2019, another potent missive on identity, womanhood, lineage, and strength. The project is influenced and titled by names of artists of color across various disciplines, such as writer and poet Nikki Giovanni, visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and musician Muddy Waters.

On the album’s second track, “Zora,” Woods rejects the notion of assimilation. Galvanized by Zora Neale Hurston, the song is warm and luminous, Woods’ voice operating in a bold midpoint between singing and spoken word. The last album cut, “Betty (for Boogie),” reprises the album’s opening song, “Betty.” That version is a nod to Chicago house music, and is dedicated to Chicago choreographer Boogie—who taught Woods about the intricacies of house. 

Femdot
Delacreme 2

Femdot is a hidden gem—but it’s not for lack of output: between 2013 and 2017, the rapper released seven projects. Then in 2018, he dropped his debut album Delacreme 2 on Closed Sessions. The intro to album standout “Exit (The Bounce),” buzzes and reverberates, as Femdot debates whether he should have chosen a career in science instead of music. Though he’s second-guessing himself, you’d never know; Fem’s delivery is clear and calm. “0’something” feels like he’s rapping from inside a plume of smoke. The song is vaporous, his enunciation blurred as talks about trying to roll up. He flows with agility throughout, sounding like an old friend who’s come by to kick back and trade stories.

Kweku Collins
Nat Love

One of the label’s emerging talents, Kweku Collins is equally gifted at singing, rapping, and producing. In 2015, he released his debut EP, Say It Here, While It’s Safe. The following year, he released his debut album Nat Love, an 11-track project that teeters between hip-hop and neo-soul. On “Stupid Rose,” a sticky flip of D’Angelo’s 2000 song “One Mo’ Gin”—Collins exhibits a patience and certainty that downplays the love he felt for a girl. Another standout is the melancholy and soft-spoken “Ghost,” a track as eerie as the title suggests, where Collins leans into loss, his sing-rapping shrouded in cavernous echo.

Various Artists
Closed Sessions Vol. 2

Fruchter considers Closed Sessions Vol. 2 to be the label’s strongest compilation—the moment when everything became serious for them. The 15-track album includes features by Action Bronson, Raekwon, Freddie Gibbs, Sir Michael Rocks, Rockie Fresh, and more.

Standout songs include “Something New,” featuring Freddie Gibbs and YP. Gibbs grew up nearby in Gary, Indiana, and has become a staple of the city’s hip-hop scene. His flow is sharp, and he raps with precision. The Chicago rapper YP keeps up as the two wax poetic on a host of topics. CyHi The Prynce’s “Good For Me” is another highlight. Signed to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label, CyHi gives listeners a soulful, candid description of his adolescence in Stone Mountain, Georgia over a stirring bassline.

-Tara Mahadevan

On Songs From the Shore, Afuma—the duo of guitarists Taketo Shimada and Stefan Tcherepnin—explore both death and the afterlife. That weighty subject matter is echoed by the sound of musicians’ lap steel and baritone guitars, Tcherepnin’s Sonica analog oscillator synth, and David Silver’s somber drumming. The result is an album that is appropriately mournful, offering reminders of life’s fragility. The ten-minute “Death of a Seagull” opens with plaintive swirls of synth and guitar before soaring off into psychedelia, as Tcherepnin sings of coasting beyond the clouds on “wings of desire.” The  slow, undulating synths on “Existential Blowfish” communicate the sinking feeling of defeat and surrender. 

The album’s opening and closing tracks establish its emotional arc. The 15-minute “Assisted Suicide” is serene in its contemplation of exhausted faith, and the feeling life has run its natural course. “The world will miss you / But it’s time to go,” sings Tcherepnin calmly. The sentiment is countered by album closer “Suicide Alley,” where a riotous explosion of drums and Shimada’s cackling shehnai riffs end the album on a note of defiance. It feels like a metaphor for embracing the chaos and complexity of human existence, for as long as you possibly can.

-Phillip Mlynar