Bobby Bununggur is a Yolngu Songman from Ramingining in northeast Arnhem Land, the ‘Top End’ of Australia. Yolngu are one of the largest Indigenous groups in Australia, and their home in Arnhem Land is almost untouched—one of the last strongholds of traditional Aboriginal culture on the continent. In the mid ‘90s, Bunungguur joined two of his fellow Yolngu Songmen, to record and release a reimagining of the songs of his community. Working with Peter Mumme, an ambient producer living in Darwin, the trio created Waak Waak ga Min Min, an album that opened a window into the richness and beauty of Aboriginal tradition.

For Indigenous Australians, the world’s longest continuous cultural tradition, music and society are heavily intertwined. All knowledge—including detailed information about the climate, specific social mores, and the spirituality of Australia’s First Peoples—exist as oral memories. In many regions, these memories have been meticulously kept and passed down over the last 80,000 years from generation to generation via song, dance, art, and stories. Physical markers play a large part in memory preservation, with particular landmarks along a route or track prompting additional details of a story. Aboriginal elders move along navigational tracks singing and recalling information. These tracks are known as ‘Songlines.’ While a significant number of Songlines and other traditions have been damaged or destroyed by colonial acts of dispossession, the remaining knowledge systems preserve the essence and purpose of the stories, if not in full.

Some Songlines can traverse the entire width of the Australian continent, acting like a map. In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin explains, “The melodic contour of a song describes the nature of the land over which that song passes.” These songlines describe the creation of the continent by ancestral beings, whose descendants—the current indigenous population—bear responsibility for reiterating, recreating, and disseminating the stories to a younger generation.

“We can pass songlines and stories onto the young generation, and they can keep it in a book, CD, whatever,” says Bobby Bununggurr, via transcripted conversation with Peter Mumme, from his home in Ramingining. “When they hear it, they’re all going to join in…black and white. Bring together Western culture music and traditional culture both ways.”

Balancing traditional and Western cultures is a delicate process for indigenous Australian musicians, since commercial and cultural values are often in opposition to one another. Dr G  Yunupingu, a blind singer from Elcho Island in the far north of Australia, was an ideal example of this dichotomy. As the most commercially successful Indigenous Australian musician, Dr Yunupingu (also referred to as Gurumul before his death) was praised for the way he balanced two worlds, achieving widespread acclaim for his talents as a multi-instrumentalist and for the purity of his soaring but gentle tenor voice. His sales figures reflected that adoration—his 2008 debut album sold more than three million copies in Australia. However, a documentary released just a few days after his death in 2017 provided a fascinating glimpse into the last-minute cancellation of a lucrative tour of the US. Dr Yunupingu had decided to stay at home to learn the traditional stories of his ancestors in Elcho Island—stories that his community expected him to care for.

To the younger generation of Indigenous musicians traversing the industry, this balance between culture and commerce has long been troubling. “I feel like we have forgotten what the music really is, being so industrialized, commercialized, and over-consumed,” says James Albert, a producer, MC, and vocalist from the Larrakia Nation, Traditional Owners of the Darwin area of Australia’s Northern Territory. “Somewhere along the line, I feel we may have lost sight of [music’s] true power and essence.”

In 2019, there’s no shortage of talented Indigenous musicians passing down the knowledge and language of their ancestors through music. In addition to Waak Waak Djungi, who integrate traditional music with contemporary electronic sounds, there are Indigenous artists working in genres including reggae, punk rock, gospel blues, and hip-hop. Artists such as DRMNGNOW (“Dreaming Now”), Yothu Yindi (Gurrumul’s former band), Emily Wurramurra, Jimblah, and many more, have all joined First Sounds to call for the long overdue nurturing, growth, and celebration of their music by the broader Australian public.

In Jimblah’s own words, “Music is our connection to land, time and space. It’s our way of telling stories and speaking where words fail us. It’s our way of celebrating our culture and who we are […] Bringing more ideals and values into the music space, with First Nations voices, will be such a groundbreaking thing—and I’m talking globally.”

For a population whose voice was stolen (literally), and whose identity is in serious threat (98% of Aboriginal music tradition has been lost as a result of colonization), there has never been a more important time to celebrate the music. Here’s a list of eight outstanding artists who are keeping culture and songlines strong through their art.

Gurrumul

(Yolngu, North Eastern Arnhem Land)

Dr G Yunupingu was a multi-instrumentalist from north eastern Arnhem Land who was born blind and learned to play the guitar left-handed-upside-down. He achieved success in several bands throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s before branching out as a solo artist in 2008. He released three albums on the label Skinnyfish Music, and become the highest-selling Indigenous artist in Australian history. His final release, Djarimirri was his departing gift to the world, completed just weeks before his death. It features Yolngu chants (“I am a rainbow child with a rainbow”), some of which are 4000 years old, set against an orchestral background that is at times as deeply minimal as Phillip Glass.

Waak Waak Djungi

(Yolngu, North Eastern Arnhem Land)

Waak Waak Djungi’s little-known LP from the mid ‘90s pairs three Yolngu Songmen with Victorian composer Peter Mumme on a collaboration that features acid grooves as timeless as the Yolngu stories they accompany. Reissued in 2018 by Efficient Space, Mumme’s vast and expansive instrumentation evokes winding rivers and endless horizons, both mystical and magical. The Yolngu Songmen (Bobby Bununggurr, Jimmy Djamunba, and Peter Milaynga) share ancestral stories of ceremony, community, and earthly pleasures. In conjunction with its third vinyl pressing, a 20-minute documentary of Waak Waak Djungi’s 1998 Japanese tour has recently been shared by the label. The documentary shows the songmen excitedly walking the streets of Tokyo and performing ceremonial song and dance for their Japanese counterparts.

Kardajala Kirridarra

(Marlinja and Kulumindini, Northern Territory)

Kardajala Kirridarra (which translates to “Sandhill Women” in Mudburra) is an all-female group from Marlinja and Kulumindini in Australia’s Northern Territory. Descendents of bush women, the family members (two sisters and their niece) team up with Melbourne-based electronic producer Beatrice ‘Nalyiri’ Lewis for this collaborative effort, designed to “empower Aboriginal women through music.” Lush, downtempo arrangements that recall Bjork and Ibeyi provide the foundation for stories about young girls coming of age, the wisdom of elders (particularly grandmothers), and young indigenous women grappling with traditional versus modern value-systems. “Ancient time in a new paradigm / The sand shifts as two worlds collide.”

Emily Wurramara

(Warnindhilyagwa, Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory)

Emily Wurramara is a 23-year-old singer and songwriter from Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory. Her debut album, Milyakburra, sung in both English and her traditional language Anindilyakwa, is a document of Wurramara’s personal history, celebrating family, culture, and country. Album standout “Ngarrikwujeyinama” is hauntingly beautiful: A tremolo effect on the electric keys lays beneath a captivating vocal hook written in response to the destruction of the seabed and cultural Songlines in her homeland. “We all belong to this land,” Wurramara sings. “We all belong to this sea / My heart is hurting / This is my home / This land is bleeding.”

Frank Yamma

(Pitjantjatjara, Central Australia)

Frank Yamma is a Pitjantjatjara man with a rich, soulful voice that channels the sun-baked lands of his home community. Hailing from Docker River, a remote town in the Western Desert of Central Australia, Yamma’s guitar-led folk songs tell deeply personal stories of his life, culture, and identity. “I’m a Pitjantjatjara man, and that is a big part of my music,” he says. “It’s in my language, it’s in my songs, it’s in everything I write.” Pitjantjatjara is just one of five languages Yamma speaks, but across his two most recent albums—Countryman and Uncle on Wantok Music—it is the most prominent. “It’s important to sing in my language,” he says. “It’s important that it doesn’t disappear.”

DRMNGNOW

(Yorta-Yorta, Victoria)

DRMNGNOW is Neil Morris, an emerging hip-hop artist who logged a handful of well-received singles over the last two years. Ancestors, We See You, Indigenous Land, and Australia Does Not Exist each powerfully describe the injustices facing First Nations people in Australia (a name he does not accept). Strong themes of identity, integrity, and connection to country guide his work, which he ensures will always uphold the standards of his elders—“The great warriors that have come before me in my line as a Yorta Yorta person.” Morris delicately walks the line between hope and resistance in his music, which is underlined by sparse, melancholic arrangements. “It is about Indigenous survival,” he says. “The beauty of that, the strength of that, the pain of that, the joy of that, and the challenge of that.”

Lonely Boys

(Ngukurr, South Arnhem Land)

Lonely Boys are a bush-punk band from Ngukurr, a remote Arnhem Land community South East of Darwin. The band rarely rehearse and don’t read music, yet their brand of hard rock is tight, brash and energetic. Despite not owning any instruments (they were stolen from the local community center in 2017), each band member displays an almost virtuosic skill on their respective instrument. Lonely Boys have experienced highs and lows over the past years—opening for Queens of the Stone Age in 2016 (and achieving viral fame for not knowing who they were) before losing a band member in a car crash shortly after. Their songs are about connection to their ancestors, their motherland, and hunting traditions.

Olive Knight

(Walmatjarri)

Olive Knight, aka Kankawa Nagarra, is a 73-year-old Walmatjarri and Bunuba woman who was born in the Great Sandy Desert, and has a penchant for gospel blues. At the age of 50, Olive became transfixed by American Blues musicians like Muddy Waters, BB King, and Buddy Holly. The repetitive nature of the Blues reminded her of sounds she had been exposed to growing up, such as the nullanulla (hunting sticks), which are used to mark time in ancient ceremonies. Olive channels the sounds of the Deep South to tell stories of her homeland and her people in the Australian Kimberleys, touching upon issues from hunting goannas on ancestral country to fracking in the Kimberleys. In the 1960s, Olive helped to develop the Walmatjarri dictionary in an effort to officially preserve her language.

-Jared Proudfoot

Photos by Sam Lee

Talking to pianist, producer, and rapper Jamael Dean is like talking to a wise elder. It’s a cold, rainy Sunday, and the 21-year-old is in his apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, breaking down the components of Yoruba culture. “It’s the spirit of nothing that expanded the universe into what it is now, but it’s almost like an unfathomable wisdom as well,” he says of Akamara, which, in Yoruba cosmology is the source of all existence. It’s also the basis of “Akamara,” the sprawling opening track on Black Space Tapes, Dean’s recently released debut album. It’s a slow-churning, polyrhythmic blend of spiritual jazz, full of sporadic drum fills, meditative chants, and dark piano chords. “I just wanted the band to have complete freedom to move in and out of things—almost like a standard jazz song, where you play the head-in solos or you head out. I still wanted to make it about the tradition,” he says.

A mix of jazz, vocal and instrumental hip-hop, and neo-soul, Black Space Tapes crams a host of genres into a single, 38-minute set without ever losing focus. Occasionally, those sounds arise within the frame of one song: “Emi” begins with Dean rapping, then glides into a brief breakdown of saxophone, acoustic drums, and piano, setting up an outro of Cali-centric electronica. Dean says the idea is to show how all forms of life and music originated in Africa. On a more personal level, it highlights the music that shaped his upbringing—from his time as a child playing piano in Bakersfield, California, to a young man now studying jazz at The New School in Manhattan. Dean was given his first keyboard as a Christmas present when he was eight years old. Dean’s parents were giving him early encouragement to be a great musician—like his grandfather, Donald, a noted jazz drummer best known for his work with pianist Les McCann in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He’d practice piano three hours a day during the school year, and six or more per day in the summer months, while all of his friends were outside enjoying the warm weather. “My dad used to be like, ‘Well, while they’re out there doing that, you’re here working on this, and it’s probably gonna pay off for you in the long run,’” Dean recalls. “He’s like, ‘There’s gonna be tons of times for you to have fun with your friends,’ which in a way made me cherish it more. It wasn’t something that happened so regularly.” 

Dean has always been an old soul who idolized his grandfather and admired the camaraderie he shared with his band. “I would spend time with them at gigs and stuff,” he says. “That’s what made me want to play jazz. Because watching him interact with his buddies—that was something I could see for myself.” Dean moved to L.A. from Bakersfield when he was 14 and attended an arts high school, where he met peers who liked the same kind of music. He soon started making jazz-inflected beats in his spare time. From there, he formed a band called Jamael Dean & the Afronauts, and started performing around the city. A year later, Dean caught the attention of jazz superstar Kamasi Washington, and appeared on the song “Tiffakonkae,” from 2018’s Heaven and Earth. Then he went on the road with bassist Thundercat as part of his trio. 

Composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson first played with Dean six years ago as a member of Nedra Wheeler’s band. Soon after, Ferguson started calling the pianist to work on music and perform with him on the road, and the two formed a creative connection. “I took him to South Africa last year and we played at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, and that was such a huge honor,” Ferguson recalls. The city was in the midst of a severe drought: “We started to play the concert, and then it started to rain. And as our set intensified, the rain intensified. When we finished our set, it stopped raining and they started calling me (in Afrikaans) The Bringer of Rain—they said, ‘Don’t stop playing.’” That was Dean’s first trip to the continent. He remembers being nervous about going there because, as an American, he didn’t know how he’d be accepted. But once he got to Cape Town, he says it felt like home. Perhaps on purpose, Dean’s music has become metaphysical—like he’s fully tapped into his heritage. “He’s really evolved a lot more,” says Ferguson, who appears on Black Space Tapes. “He kind of goes to another zone. He’s aware of what’s going on around him harmonically, but he’s completely going spiritual with it, and he’s leaving traditional harmony and going to this place where it’s almost like he’s dialoguing with some other spirit.” 

Carlos Niño gave Jamael’s band their first residency at his club, The Del Monte Speakeasy in Venice, Ca., in 2016. Niño, a celebrated bandleader and producer in his own right, became an immediate fan the minute he heard Dean play. “He’s a piano prodigy,” Niño says. “He can not only play, but he’s also an incredible composer. When I think about Jamael, I think about the lineage of musicians I love, and how early in their lives they started really going for it. And he’s just one of them. He’s completely in it.” Niño co-produced, compiled, and sequenced Black Space Tapes, which he says is just a small sampling of Dean’s vast artistry. “He could’ve easily come out the gate with a triple album of music. This almost reads like a short LP, but it’s really an introduction. This is a variety of what this guy does.” If nothing else, Dean hopes the album nudges listeners to absorb Yoruba culture. “Just to research it and find out what it means for themselves,” he says. “That’s what I hope will happen with the music, too. I want them to hear how it applies to their life. Maybe it’s through a feeling they get when someone plays a certain way, but I want them to remember that and figure out why.”

-Marcus J. Moore

Satón

Screamo, emo’s slightly more ferocious outgrowth, might not be quite as big as it was around the turn of the millennium, but the subgenre still thrives in the underground; young artists still find power in its mathy arrangements and throat-destroying scream-a-longs. As it turns out, some of the most exciting bands playing this type of music at the moment come from Latin America and/or feature predominantly Latinx members.

These groups, hailing from countries like Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and even the U.S., share the strong work ethic and DIY principles that helped older generations of bands establish a distinct circuit for themselves. Throughout the mid ‘00s, many different post-hardcore and screamo scenes operated in the Americas, with bands releasing records on small labels as well as split releases, and in some cases, occasionally touring Europe and the U.S. These included bands such as Arse Moreira, Te Lloraría Un Puto Río, Non Plus Ultra, and Zarathustra Has Been Killed In The ‘70s from Mexico; Asamblea Internacional del Fuego. Amber, Teoría De Un Sueño Muerto, and Leidan from Chile; Árboles En Llamas, Arde Hollywood, Agitamares, and Los Años Mueren from Argentina; and Angkor Wat y Fútbol Peruano 97 from Perú.

After this relative heyday, some of the bands above have broken up, with members moving on to post-rock, powerviolence, and even indie folk—see Apocalipsis, Richard Harrison, and Garcya. However —as documented by outlets such as the blog El Basurero Del Emo— these scenes never really disappeared, “There have always been bands playing this kind of music,” says Joliette’s Azael González, who also played in Te Lloraría Un Puto Río, among other projects. “And it’s always been a global thing, all connected throughout the world. There has been a resurgence of this kind of music in the U.S. and Europe as well; there are more bands involved in the scene right now.”

Indeed, a new generation of bands making discordant music have emerged in many Latin American countries and communities, keeping the tradition alive. González thinks this new renaissance is due to the younger generation being more open-minded about genre and subgenre conventions. “I don’t think many bands today are screamo, per se. I think they take elements from that sound and mutate it into something else,” he says. “I also think that the perspective younger people are bringing into the music is very healthy. It’s like everything that you get passionate about: you find something that moves you and you surround yourself to it, even if you don’t know why it speaks to you.”

By adding musical elements from other genres and keeping things raging with heart and guts, this new generation of bands is capturing the imagination of an ever-expanding public. Here are ten groups worth checking out.

Zeta

Although they call Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela their hometown, Zeta’s closest thing to a place to call their own is the road: they’re almost always on tour. Founded in 2003, the quartet makes spiky, passionate post-hardcore—think At the Drive-In meets Saetia—with the occasional non-standard element to keep things interesting. (Most notably, they incorporate Afro-Caribbean percussion.) Their willingness to experiment—and to play anywhere—has helped them land some notable gigs, like Gainesville, FL’s Fest. For those intimidated by their large recording output, their latest, Mochima (2019), is a further refinement of their sound, making it a great place to start.

Vientre

One of the signature aspects of this Cali, Colombia outfit is their use of melodic guitar lines against vocals that oscillate between all-out screaming and vaguely alternative rock-inspired singing; in fact, it’s not unusual for the guitars to go without distortion for many of the tracks. This doesn’t mean they’re not full of fire, though. They work at a prodigious pace—they’ve put out two full-lengths in the past two years, 2017’s Las Huellas Que Dejamos and 2018’s Semillas (a new EP, Fronteras, is expected to drop before 2019 is over). Their dedication to uniting scenes can be seen through their constant networking and touring, which has resulted in trips to Mexico and the U.S.

Nossara

This five-piece San José, Costa Rica band describes their sound as melodic hardcore, a term that has been associated with everything from Adolescents to Comeback Kid, something that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Having said that, for Nossara, it means bridging the gap between the more commercial sounds of post-hardcore and the harsher side of emo, as heard on 2017’s Pacífico (2017) and 2019’s Sobre La Brevedad de La Vida. They also incorporate the united-we-scream attitude of classic hardcore, placing them in the same neighborhood as bands like Blacklisted.

Joliette

Since 2011, this quartet from Puebla, Mexico has refused to stop even for a second to take a break, a quality that carries through in their music. With a few transcontinental tours under their belt, Joliette has spent their time in Puebla in the studio, resulting in albums, EPs, and splits with the likes of Frameworks, Life In Vacuum, and LYED. Their latest full-length album, 2019’s Luz Devora, finds them at their most artistically ambitious, featuring to-the-point tracks like “Vacío” and “Pudre Infante” as well as longer, more atmospheric fare like “Defenestra.” Through and through, Joliette have kept their music complicated and heavy without going sacrificing gut-churning intensity, and there are no signs they’re stopping any time soon.

Quiet Fear

This L.A. quartet wear their roots on their sleeves and their lyrics; they sing entirely in Spanish, to particularly intense results on records like 2016’s Delirio, 2018’s Melodías A La Luna Muerta, and 2017’s split EP with Joliette side project Aves. Their screamy brand of hardcore uses clean guitars to sharp effect, and their jazzy arrangements up the jitter factor considerably. There’s a definite influence from the noisier corners of the Dischord Records discography—and they’ve got some of the finest screams in the business, something that has helped Quiet Fear land a spot at this year’s Fest.

Anhedonia

Perhaps there’s something in Cali, Colombia’s water. Like scenemates Vientre, Anhedonia’s music have a hint of ‘90s alt-melodicism. And there’s also real underlying sense of drama in Anhedonia’s music, something borrowed from the early ‘00s screamo scene. Their lone release so far, 2018’s Estar Rotos Nos Hace Indestructibles, features guitars that switch from melodic lines to power chords in an almost unpredictable fashion, lending the whole thing an epic feel. It’s just a matter of time until this young band ventures outside their scene and embarks on an international tour of their own.

AMBR

For contemporary artists practicing screamo, elements of math rock are useful tools used to make the music more exciting. Of all the bands on this list, Mexico City’s AMBR is probably the one that is closest to crossing over to this subgenre. There’s plenty of high-speed virtuosic runs in most of their music, making everything sound more nervous and exhilarating. Yet they are definitely a screamo band—their remarkable use of vocals, ranging from raw to melodic, makes their album Rompes/Quemas, as well as their EP Hey Joi, some of the catchiest, most challenging music to hit the worldwide screamo scene.

Finlandia/Singapur

Although this Quito, Ecuador trio is immediately recognizable as a screamo band, there’s plenty here to indicate they’re intent on expanding that sound. Their guitar work is some of the busiest and most inventive in the game, while their song structures are everything but common yet completely mesmerizing. Founded in 2014, this trio has done a little touring over the years but have not dropped a proper release so far—Facebook updates from 2018 suggest they are working on an LP. For a taste of their magic, check out Singles and 19 Junio 1955, and don’t miss out on their split with Quito post-rockers Escape From The Machinery.

El Incendio Más Largo Del Mundo

Hailing from Medellín, Colombia, El Incendio Más Largo Del Mundo are one of the most extreme bands currently operating in the screamo business. While their songs don’t qualify as skramz or emoviolence in the fast-and-loose sense, it’s extreme in a very specific and satisfactory way: vocalist Angelo Franco has a wide ranging arsenal of voices, from throat-shredding wails to harsher guttural cries and black metal-like screeches. The band’s music mutates seamlessly throughout—from thrashy riffs to math rock-like fragmented time signature to melodic motives—resulting in music that keeps listeners constantly hooked, and always guessing. Their 2018 debut album, Condenadxs, is a highlight of the recent wave of Latinx emotional hardcore.

Satón

Probably the newest band on this list, this trio from Mexico State know how to keep a listener waiting in suspense until their songs explode into shouts and distortion, a trick borrowed from ’90s underground heroes like Still-Life and Policy of 3. Tapping into post-rock as well as classic screamo, Satón demonstrate their use of dynamics and patience can pay off big time—just listen to their debut album Lleno de Hienas . From the desperate cry of (internal) war on “Transitorio” to the tension-filled slow burner “IV,” the range and inventiveness displayed here is second to none.

-Marcos Hassan

–

Today, Bandcamp is thrilled to announce the arrival of the full catalog of art-pop iconoclast Peter Gabriel, beginning with his 1977 solo debut.

Gabriel built a career on fusing high aesthetics with pure pop sensibilities, writing songs that didn’t slot easily into any one genre, but which netted consistent critical and commercial success. His groundbreaking video for “Sledgehammer”—a fixture on MTV during the channel’s early days—is the perfect summary of Gabriel’s m.o.: it was artistically forward-thinking, using cutting-edge technology to realize a decidedly surrealist vision. But it was also playful and joyous, offsetting Lynchian images of an ice-sculpture Gabriel in a lake of fire with scenes of him riding a chalk-drawn roller coaster, or dancing in a kitchen next to a pink TV. The song’s jubilant horn charts became a part of the pop culture DNA the minute they first exploded from the speakers.

But Gabriel’s quieter moments are just as indelible: “In Your Eyes” famously scored a pivotal scene in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 breakthrough Say Anything… His haunting duet with Kate Bush, “Don’t Give Up,” remains as gentle and moving now as when it was first released. And while “Steam” is the best-known song from 1992’s beautifully understated US, there’s an argument to be made that its true centerpiece is the hushed duet with Sinead O’Connor “Blood of Eden,” a rumination on human relationships set against the backdrop of the Biblical story of the fall of humankind. On 2013’s Scratch My Back project, Gabriel covered songs by artists including The Magnetic Fields, Paul Simon, and Arcade Fire, and they in turn covered classics from Gabriel’s catalog. Several classic works, including So and US, are also available on vinyl and CD. Over 40 years since his first solo LP, Gabriel’s work remains as timeless as ever.

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.

Chaia
Phase One

The New Orleans bred R&B singer’s debut album, Phase One, is musical a one-two punch. There’s not much about the burgeoning artist on the web—for now. She’s a recent graduate from Loyola University New Orleans where she studied popular and commercial music and grew up in various church choirs. In her linear notes, Chaia notes that she’s influenced by the rich gospel and jazz history of her native city and that comes through on Phase One. On single “Control,” Chaia richly sings about a fast-paced love that is about to reach its peak. Her voice has a velvety depth that pairs nicely with the track’s piano melody. The ‘90s R&B-inspired “Give U Up” sounds like a blast from the past as she smoothly sings about a reticent lover over a paired down synthy-electro beat. The final song, “Up and Down,” closes the EP on a hopeful note with a vibrating, sensual R&B melody. Phase One is a good entry to point to a new artist. 

-Diamond Sharp

Elkka
Every Body Is Welcome EP

This has been a banner year for club music that celebrates the communal experience of queer nightlife, and Every Body is Welcome, the latest EP from London DJ, producer, and label boss Elkka, is a fine addition to that category. This is warm music that adds a pastoral, natural inflection to house—Elkka is far from the first person to do this, but these are limber, nimble tracks that sound delightfully fresh. (Perhaps due to her musical origins as a singer-songwriter, she’s also excellent at building a narrative across a track.) The opening title track is bright and sweet, with an intro sample that makes its intentions clear without hitting listeners over the head, and “Compromise… For What?” spins a bongo break and what sounds like a light wood flute melody up into a sparkling track that underscores its premise—the joy of making what you want to make on your own terms. Feel-good music doesn’t have to lack heft.

-Jes Skolnik

Amerigo Gazaway & Xiomara
1990

A few months ago, when Diamond pitched the idea for a “Neo-New Jack Swing” list in one of our editorial meetings, my response was, “For the love of God, yes.” There is no single genre I have been dying to make a comeback more than New Jack Swing, that perfect mid ’90s combo of pop, hip-hop, R&B and funk. And while the world still awaits that renaissance on a grand scale, we at least have 1990 by Amerigo Gazaway & Xiomara to hold us over. Gazaway has built a reputation on making mash-up albums that pair the work of people like Marvin Gaye with Yasiin Bey (to use one of the more successful examples of his style), and he brings that same music historian’s ear to this project. Just listen to the opening moments of “Westside Swing”: hi-hat? Check! Synth-orchestra hit? Check! Deep-voiced narrator describing the sound of the song you’re about to hear? Check! The hook sounds like it comes from best song Bell Biv Devoe never wrote, and the whole thing is so euphoric it pulls you into the album immediately. From there, it’s all gold: “No Pressure” is a TLC-style, R&B-by-way-of-hip-hop number; “That Old Alarm” is smoky and mysterious and bears a passing resemblance to the Mariah Carey deep cut “The Roof”; and “Bounce” does exactly that, riding the same kind of stutter-step beat that powered Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” What’s more, it makes a case for the fact that some 30 years later, music that sounds like this can still lift spirits and move bodies.

-J. Edward Keyes

Giant Swan
Giant Swan

Robin Stewart and Harry Wright describe their Giant Swan project as “a mucky brain” and an empowering movement wrapped up into one, with a stated end goal of tolerance, inclusion, self-sufficiency—”oh, and also weed and beats.” For an idea of how this chaotic co-existence translates into real life, consider the following bits of audience feedback from the Bristol techno duo’s recent show at Berlin’s Tresor club, as reported by a recent Resident Advisor profile: one attendee complained that the overpowered bass frequencies sounded off, while another had such a good time that they actually had a threesome during the set, right there on the dance floor. Drawing inspiration from punk and hardcore as well as drone and techno, Giant Swan’s eponymous debut takes the concept of PLUR—shorthand for “peace, love, unity, respect,” aka the raver’s credo—and pushes it to the extreme, with big, fat bass grooves and chopped-up samples both irresistible and unsettling. For all the hedonism powering their songs, the duo stay remarkably self-disciplined, endowing songs like “Pan Head” and “YFPHNT” with just the amount of structure necessary to make Giant Swan’s mucky-brained bacchanal navigable to newcomers. Sounds like my kind of party — and hopefully yours, too.

-Zoe Camp

Jon Mueller
Codex Intueri

If rhythm is a dancer, than experimental percussionist Jon Mueller is Fred Astaire. On his new album Codex Intueri, the Wisconsin musician (who’s sat behind the kit for bands like Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Volcano Choir, and others) elevates the backbeat from a supportive structure to a singular center-stage presence, a melodic vehicle capable of standing on own. After laying down various beats on drums, gongs, and other percussive instruments, Mueller passed off the recordings to guitarist, producer, and frequent collaborator James Plotkin (also of O.L.D. and Phantomsmasher), for arranging and mixing; the modular synths he adds to these tracks—most of which extend well past the 10-minute mark—buttress the melodies further, but never distract from the main event, which soothes and stuns at every turn. Give the drummer some…he deserves it.

-Zoe Camp

Emily Jane White
Immanent Fire

The gripping new record from Emily Jane White has a dual narrative. One one level, it’s about living on an Earth that is crawling its way toward being uninhabitable, thanks to decades of carelessness and apathy by its inhabitants. (Carelessness and apathy that continues to this day, by the way.) But the album isn’t simply a broadside—the other half is the way it considers that topic, through the eyes and internal lives of people living here. Take the swaying, goth-sea-shanty “Drowned.” As a string section saws mournfully behind her White, in her hushed alto, sings about diving into dark waters, and she could either be talking about the blackness inside herself, or the blackness of polluted rivers, or both. On the gorgeous and imposing “Light,” which treads a middle ground between darkambient and pagan folk, she sings of ringing church bells that signal either the end of a protagonist’s life, or the end of the world. The music throughout is bewitching—the kind of shadow-shrouded, vaguely terrifying, minor-key acoustic music practiced by people like King Dude and Emma Ruth Rundle. There are gentle nods to British psych folk (“Washed Away”) and PJ Harvey circa White Chalk (“Dew”). As the album’s title implies, it’s not a matter of if destruction will come, it’s when. White’s album is a soundtrack to the end.

-J. Edward Keyes

Back Catalog

Denmark Vessey & Scud One
Cult Classic

Long before a certain rapper used Jesus as big business, Denmark Vessey told the story of Dr. Yessev, a failed MC who becomes a cult leader to gain wealth and power. The fictional tale seemed absurd in 2013, but in light of recent events, perhaps Denmark—who rapped from Yessev’s imagined perspective—saw the future for one of hip-hop’s biggest stars. On Cult Classic, he was a trash-talking false prophet who shot dice with Creflo Dollar and drank Kool-Aid with religious leader Jim Jones. He was a bully and a con man who, according to album track “Do You Believe,” wanted you to “pull out that credit card” and buy into the faith he was selling. Through sarcastic storytelling and repurposed soul (courtesy of producer Scud One), Denmark unpacked Yessev’s slow demise, to the point where he wondered if the cult was worth it in the end. “They lie and they cheat,” he deadpans on “Deception,” “and they steal, and they think that shit trill?” Gather ‘round ye children, Denmark has a story to tell. How you pronounce “ye” is up to you.

-Marcus J. Moore

“Jubilee has been staying up all night since as long as anyone can remember.” 

These are the words that accompany the second album from Jessica Gentile, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based DJ and producer whose topsy-turvy body clock destined her for a career in the club. “I used to have an alias,” she says, laughing down the phone from her New York studio. “I was called 4AM Jess, because I used to text people at four in the morning like, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I had no concept of time at all.”

Jubilee’s night owlish tendencies go back to her early career in Miami’s late ‘90s rave scene, where the teenage Gentile discovered trance, techno and drum and bass in “grimy” warehouses outside the city. By the time she moved to New York in 2003, she’d picked the only logical career for her inverted circadian rhythms. The fledgling DJ made her name first with Flashing Lights, a party she threw with DJ Ayres and Fool’s Gold boss Nick Catchdubs, before joining Dre Skull’s dancehall crew Mixpak and turning her attention to production. Her 2016 debut album After Hours paid tribute to her decade-plus of late nights and early mornings on the dancefloor, with the irresistible “Wine Up“—a soca-tinged jam with vocals from Hoodcelebrityy—serving as the climax. 

Three years later, having travelled the world with her USB sticks, those early rave memories linger on in Jubilee’s follow-up album, Call For Location. Across the record, she conjures a landscape of bright lights and vivid colors, with salty air blowing through car windows and a vast sky burning orange and pink. Think of it as a shinier, juicier upgrade to After Hours—an extra dash of tequila in the margarita.

Jubilee’s musical world spins on the same axis still, tempering exuberant Caribbean rhythms and elements of classic Miami—the dizzy thrill of Latin freestyle, thudding 808 bass—with the grittier beats typical of New York club music and UK rave culture, a home away from home for the hard-touring DJ. The album’s glowing first half includes “Mami,” a collaboration with Dominican-born vocalist Maluca, which pairs a bumping dembow riddim with a trace of old school New York house. “Maluca is also a raver, so she understood it,” Jubilee says of her NYC cohort. “She’s extremely talented, she’s not new to this, and we’ve known each other for a long time, so it was really cool to make this ‘fuck off’ girl anthem with her.” Then there’s “Fulla Curve,” a gorgeous, chart-primed pop track with south London dancehall newcomer IQ. “He’s insanely talented,” she gushes. “He heard the track for the first time and boom – he ad libbed everything straight off.”

The album’s biggest surprise comes on “Shots,” a low-slung, subtly spooky collaboration with one of grime’s most in-demand talents: P Money. Teaming up with the London MC was a proud achievement for Jubilee, who’s been playing grime in her sets for over 15 years. “But like most rappers, he did not show up to the session,” she laughs. “I was not upset or surprised. Then two days later he was like, ‘Sorry I didn’t come, here you go,’ and he sent me a draft of the craziest song.”

Just as day turns to night, the album’s sexy and sultry first half is followed by a darker, smokier run of rave tracks, from the tunnelling trance of “Liquid Liner” to the grubby hardcore that cuts through “Disconnected”—echoes of those underage nights out. In those days, she remembers, “we would go to a house where the parents didn’t care what we did and just hang out. No one really drank, but we would smoke weed and listen to a Josh Wink mixtape until midnight. Then we would meet up at CVS, or whatever it was called then, and blast music in the parking lot and buy candy and Vicks Inhalers. Then we’d all drive to the rave. I would lock my shit in the truck and weave my car key into my shoelaces!” Those events would usually have a headliner playing trance or big beat, but Jubilee would often find herself in room two, absorbing drum and bass from the U.K.—a perfect complement to her Floridian taste for trunk-rattling bass. 

It wasn’t all sunshine and serotonin, though—young Jubilee was often on her own, and encountering all kinds of wrong’uns. “I was probably one of the only people at my school [raving], and the people I would meet were anywhere from 20 to 30—which is pretty weird because some of them would text me all the time,” she says. “I didn’t meet many quality human beings in the scene, which probably explains my loner-ness.” 

Perhaps the lingering intensity of those memories depends on this exact combination: mind-blowing wonderment shadowed by the threat of “dark vibes,” as she recalls. But while the free party days are long gone, she’s still the same “4AM Jess”— and Call For Location is an album for her people: the straight-through crew, the never-go-homers. It’s the soundtrack to a perfect, endless day, “from the beach to the rave – I think that’s basically what my whole life was. I like sunlight and islands and beaches, but I also like to stay up to five o’clock in the morning… and 10 o’clock in the morning sometimes,” she says with a sly laugh, “until I’m right back on the beach.”

-Chal Ravens

Avant-garde New York City musician and composer Arthur Russell, known to many as the mastermind behind Dinosaur L’s simmering underground disco gem “Go Bang,” died in 1992. However, Iowa Dream—which was compiled by Russell’s partner, Tom Lee, and Audika Records’ Steve Knutson—illustrates that his posthumous legacy is in very good hands. The album encompasses unfinished archival work (including some songs featuring contributions from New York musicians such as Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, and Jon Gibson) that was fleshed out and completed with great care by musician Peter Broderick.

Although Iowa Dream covers a lot of sonic ground—tender folk, minimalist chamber-pop, stark piano ballads, offbeat no wave—of particular note is a stunning full version of the rarity “You Did It Yourself,” which here is driven by burbling bass and feathery guitar jangle. Other songs are of a piece with Russell’s forward-thinking dance music (“I Kissed The Girl From Outer Space,” a gentle disco-pop song with corrugated guitars and perforated saxophone blips), and his meticulous orchestral compositions (“Just Regular People”). However, Iowa Dream‘s songs frequently make Russell’s voice a focal point, which illuminates the emotional depth to his songwriting. Throughout the spare “Wonder Boy,” he’s inquisitive and open-hearted; the horn-peppered “Come To Life” is introspective and wistful; and the easygoing, country-tinged heartbreaker “I Never Get Lonesome” finds him wrestling with the disorienting sensation of isolation. Iowa Dream puts forth a compelling argument that Russell is an even bigger influence on modern music—and more strains of modern music—than previously thought.

–Annie Zaleski

September 11, 2001 may be a hackneyed jumping-off point for personal biographical change, but it really was a pivotal day for avant-garde composer William Basinski. When he awoke that morning, broke and worrying about an eviction notice, he was all set to go interview for a job at the World Trade Center. Instead, he watched the towers collapse from his Brooklyn apartment. The music that he was working on that very day would become his breakthrough moment, too. The Disintegration Loops was a watershed release that captured the real-time decay of his old tape loops being digitized, subsequently taking new sonic forms while inadvertently soundtracking the horrors of 9/11 (photos he took from his apartment that day are the covers for each of the four volumes).

On paper, Basinski’s musical career had begun a few years before, in 1997, when he released his debut album Shortwavemusic. The record consisted of five recordings that melded tape loops and shortwave radio experimentation to form a potent, eerie, and elegiac take on ambient music. But those recordings had actually been made way back in 1982, and were part of an already extensive personal archive Basinski had built. Shortwavemusic laid an important foundation for his future endeavors and releases, as his archive became a unique, fertile and often transformative place to pluck music from, allowing him to explore themes of time and place.

Originally from Texas, where he featured in school jazz and marching bands before studying composition at Texas University, Basinski moved to New York in 1980 in the wake of the minimalism and downtown art scene boom. Emboldened by the adventurous work of John Cage, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno, he began to experiment more with his own music. He kicked around in a few bands (once opening for David Bowie playing sax in a rockabilly outfit called the Rockats) and produced a few others — including lending a helping hand with Anohni’s first demo — but his own music remained largely unheard and unknown.

Since the early 2000s, though, largely propelled by the success of The Disintegration Loops, which received Best New Music from Pitchfork in 2004 and which Basinski performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 11, 2011, he has remained a revered and prolific producer, releasing over 20 studio albums of both new and old material, positioning himself as a modern innovator in the world of experimental ambient music. Below, we highlight some key releases.

Shortwavemusic 

As a fan of Muzak (a consciously-generic form of background tunes associated with retail storefronts and elevator music) Basinski enjoyed experimenting with the sounds he found on radio stations playing the stuff. He would collect samples, slow them down, loop them and generally transform something that was created purely to be incidental into something that contained purpose.  “When you slowed it down, like looking into a microscope, there’s this huge well of melancholy there,” he would later say of his fondness for Muzak.

His debut release combined this “well of melancholy” from Muzak samples with hisses of shortwave radio. At the time, in 1982, he managed to pass on a cassette of this album to his idol Bowie but it would be 15 years before it was released as a vinyl-only pressing on German label Raster-Noton. The result is loosely ambient, but there’s a surface grain that comes from the shortwave tones that adds a prickliness and bite. The recordings never dissolve into easy listening territory; instead, Basinski allows these metamorphosed recordings to take new shape, tracing a journey from forgettable background noise to music that demands attention.

The Disintegration Loops 

A landmark release in so many ways—this was the four-album collection that propelled Basinski out of the shadows, taking him from a typical outsider oddball making tape loop experiments at home to a heavyweight in the world of underground music. While digitizing some old tape loops from the ‘80s, Basinski noticed the old tape was literally crumbling throughout the process; having sat in decay for years on end, his compositions were, at last, disintegrating in real time. This studio development drastically changed the tone and texture of what was being captured, allowing Basinski to exploring the duality and dichotomy of old music dying and new music being born from its demise.

Couple this with it being finished around the time of the September 11 attacks, with Basinski literally watching the buildings collapse and the aftermath follow while this music played, and you have the makings of something as poignant as it is inimitable. The music became something of a eulogy; with each of the four albums featuring photographs he took of the struck buildings from his rooftop. The music captures the essence of destruction, disintegration and despair on a deep-rooted and multifaceted level. It stands as a stirring metaphor for life and death, a recurring theme throughout the album’s nearly five-hour runtime . The breadth, depth and magnitude of the recordings allow for the kind of deep listening and introspective contemplation that can result in the listener feeling like they have also undergone profound change.

Variations for Piano and Tape 

Another archive release originally recorded in the early 1980s, this is some of Basinski’s most distinctly melodic work. The single track “Variation #9: Pantelleria” makes up the 44 minutes of this release, which is centered around a looped piano part. At some point during Basinski’s recording process, the loop slipped along the tape head, a mishap that imbued the resultant mix with numerous gaps, wonky pitch-shifts, and crying echoes courtesy of the copious tape bleed. Occasionally, the piano lines become submerged under the whirring drone of the tape machine as though they are slowly disappearing—a corpse drifting out to sea—but it remains gently omnipresent until the track’s final seconds. Variations’s use of sweet looping piano is arguably Basinski’s most obvious nod to Eno’s early ambient works.

92982 

Another collection of music recorded in 1982; this batch was released in 2009. Time, and what impact it has on the role, function, and presence of music, is obviously at the core of much of Basinski’s work. While this often results in the celebration of decay, loss and transformation in his pieces, it can also create an almost disturbing eternal quality to his work—something free of a time and place, an embrace of liminality. The way the slowly moving loops, drones and echoes unfurl here is almost aquatic in its flow, like gently rippling water lapping at the shore. This is music that moves constantly, prone to unpredictable tangents.

There’s often a palpable sense of emotion at the heart of Basinski’s work, a deep richness and warmth, and this feels plentiful here. It was created at the New York loft space Basinski lived in and called the Music Laboratories, and includes audio captures of that space—helicopters fly past the windows, and one can hear the churn and hustle of the streets. The album’s title, denoting the date of its creation, may seem clinical and precise, but the music contained within it is rich with ambiguity, mystery, and memory.

The River

Basinski himself describes this album on his Bandcamp page as being “my music of the spheres:” a reference to musica universalis, the ancient philosophical concept of the sun, moon and planets moving to form a type of harmonic, yet inaudible, music.  On a more practical level, these two 45-minute pieces are the result of Basinski trying to create his own version of a mellotron. He uses recordings of music, found sounds, and tape loops to act as keys to be triggered and played.

It’s a dense, immersive voyage that possesses both fragility and a booming, mildly frightening presence. Foghorn-like swells of sound blast over the hisses, echoes and loops like creatures appearing from the night. Despite Basinski’s experimentations with form and format, his work usually comes out feeling distinctly musical; while this release possesses many of those attributes, it’s one of the releases that often leans more towards cinematic sound design in its overall feel.

Melancholia

Initially released shortly after the success of The Disintegration Loops, Melancholia is yet another record culled from Basinski’s 1980s archive. Where the scope of The Disintegration Loops was spread out over four albums, this is a more streamlined and focused release. The 14 tracks play out like vignettes, with several tracks barely scraping past the one-minute mark. However, there’s density and span that may be seemingly lost on surface inspection. Each track contains delicate, tender micro-details informed by the album’s eponymous mood, namely the buried piano parts: tragic, beautiful melodies that sound like they are dissolving into another dimension.

A Shadow in Time 

This 2017 release is a distinctly new piece of work, and a two-part elegy. “For David Robert Jones” was written just weeks after David Bowie’s death, indicating how foundational he was to Basinski’s world. There are no covers here, no obvious nods—instead, it’s a soft, plaintive tape loop spliced together with ghostly sax parts. The opening track, composed on Basinski’s often-used Voyetra 8 synthesizer, was a far less immediate response; it took him a year to finish. It is also dedicated to a friend that took their own life. There are melancholic edges aplenty, but amid the mournful tones and sustained sobriety there’s a quietly stirring beauty that evokes hope as much as it does loss.

–Daniel Dylan Wray

Volume 1, the debut album from Chicago’s KVL—the trio of percussionist Quin Kirchner, keyboardist Daniel Van Duerm, and bassist Matthew Lux—is a thoughtful mix of ambient jazz that carefully unfolds through the layering of acoustic and electronic textures. It’s a cloudy, meditative record best suited for headphones, or for stereos in quiet rooms that encourage solitude.

At certain points, the music is barely there, almost fading into the background and becoming white noise. Silence is Volume 1’s main draw, and on “Peaceable,” Kirchner all but disappears, his faint drumming receding to guest Jaimie Branch’s soft trumpet wails. On her recent album, Fly or Die II, Branch emitted shrill tones to lament U.S. politics; here, she takes the steam out of her instrument to give “Peaceable” a sultry essence. Compare that with “Bladewalker,” the LP’s nervy 16-minute centerpiece: The band locks into a mesmerizing loop of bass, warped keys and muted drums, giving a sense of finality. Then the trio lunges forward—cymbals start crashing, and the synths grow darker and edgier until the song fades out. On an album full of lush tranquility, “Bladewalker” snaps you back to reality while foreshadowing KVL’s next move.

–Marcus J. Moore

It was the mid ’70s, and Issam Hajali’s world was changing quickly. Hajali was a 19-year-old on the rise: a singer and guitarist in the Beirut progressive rock band Rainbow Bridge, whose first record had charted in Lebanon. He was also a militant leftist who became ensnared in the Lebanese civil war that erupted a year later. By 1976, he had fled to Paris, destitute and unwelcome in his home country.

“It was very, very hard,” says Hajali today, speaking by phone from Beirut—where he is now a revered musician and songwriter, known throughout the Arab world. “Paris is very difficult for immigrants. It was a strange new environment…it’s very hard to adapt.”

The beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 was marked by idealism. Long-oppressed lower classes and religious sects (including the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then based in southern Lebanon) found strength in unity against the Western-backed Maronite (Christian) ruling class. In the summer of 1976, Syria invaded on the Maronites’ behalf. Thousands were killed; Beirut was devastated. To escape the danger, Hajali and his wife took flight first to Cyprus, then to Paris. Two years before, he had been a pop musician on the cusp of a breakthrough; now, Hajali was scrounging for work in factories, supermarkets, and anything else he could get. He was able to find housing in an immigrant community, one that turned out to be comprised mostly of musicians. A number of them were from Arab nations, which re-ignited not only his interest in playing, but in his own heritage.

“Coming into this new culture, from a war, I was asking so many questions of myself,” he says. “You ask yourself about your entire existence.” When he was living in Lebanon, he took the region’s musical traditions for granted, choosing instead to embrace the Western pop vanguard: Peter Green, Joni Mitchell, Weather Report. Now, he was re-experiencing his homeland’s music in a whole new context. “It made me look at my roots in a different way,” he says. “I started looking to traditional music, trying to understand more. I started remembering—and this made a rebirth.”

He poured himself into the music, playing with and learning from his new friends and spending his free time writing new music. The obsession gave him newfound purpose, but it cost him his marriage.

“I said to myself, ‘Why should I stay in Paris?’” Hajali recalls. “I had lost my wife, and [back home] I had to continue something I had started, see where society was going to. But at that same time, I had started preparing my recording.”

Hajali had saved enough money to spend a single day in the recording studio with some of his musician friends from France, Algeria, and Iran, whose names have been lost to time. He does, however, remember the name of Roger Fahr: a fellow Lebanese exile who had become a mentor to him.

They recorded each of the basic tracks (seven of them) in one take, then overdubbed the vocals along with the santur, a dulcimer-like Persian string instrument. The daylong session took place in either May or June 1977—he doesn’t remember precisely. The next day, he said goodbye to his friends, and headed back to Beirut, recordings in hand.

He would title the finished album Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard: “Journey to Another World.” Its meaning isn’t as straightforward as it seems. “‘Mouasalat’ has a very saturated meaning,” he explains. “It can mean a way to transport from one place to another; it can mean communication;  it can mean returning to the roots; it can mean to connect physically and emotionally with someone.”

The 75 or so cassettes he made of Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard mostly went to Hajali’s family, friends, and fellow musicians. They did, however, contain the seeds of his next project, Ferkat Al Ard (“Earth Band”), now regarded as a foundational Lebanese band of the civil war era. (The second of their three albums, 1979’s Oghneya, is highly sought after by record collectors.) He withdrew from political activism in 1980, instead pursuing a more personal musical vision; he remarried, had children and, in the early 1990s, earned a master’s degree in philosophy.

Today, Hajali runs a small jewelry shop in Beirut, bringing his guitar along. He hasn’t performed in years; his musical livelihood comes from selling his compositions to other artists.

In 2016, Jannis Stürtz, Arabic pop devotee and owner of the Berlin-based Habibi Funk Records, tracked Hajali down in Beirut. They talked about the musician’s life and career, and Hajali pulled out a CD-R of Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard that a friend had made for him. Stürtz loved it, and was fascinated to hear about its origins as a refuge from difficult times in exile.

“He said, ‘You still have the tape?’” Hajali recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, I think I have it.’ So we found the cassette, and we started from there.”

Though very much of its time, the music is startlingly fresh and visionary even 40 years later. It might not be enough to restart Hajali’s dormant performing career—“Take care of family, take care of shop, work on music,” he says. “That’s what I do.”—but Hajali reveals that he does have a new set of compositions in the works. “I have a big number of fine tunes—real good,” he says. “It’s almost 80 percent done.” The world may yet hear more from Issam Hajali.

-Michael J. West

Orindal Records has always been a family affair. After retiring his longtime project, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, in 2010, Owen Ashworth started the label with the sole intention of releasing his own material—homebrewed indie pop under the name Advance Base—as well as music from his brother Gordon. To this close-knit end, his self-created term “Orindal” refers to the California town where his parents grew up, just with another l tacked on. (“Almost everybody misspells it as ‘ordinal,’ because any self-respecting auto-correct will change it to the actual word.” he says. “About once a week I have to send an email to some editor or some publication just to tell them they spelled the name of the label wrong.”)

Ashworth’s initial intentions with Orindal may have been modest and insular, but his creative family kept expanding. The best-selling item in Orindal’s discography is Rooms With Walls and Windows, a vinyl compilation of his friend’s Julie Byrne’s early EPs. That release allowed him to invest in other artists he knew and believed in, and now, the label serves as an embassy for a network of distinct songwriters with a shared reverence for intimate, melancholy, home-recorded music. They may not share DNA, but they do share a common experience; almost everyone on the roster is someone Ashworth knows as a tourmate, peer, or friend, a mutual understanding which has, in turn, sustained the label’s familial origins. 

“I feel like Orindal has just attracted the right types of people, and it’s been a very supportive community,” he says. “All of the artists on the label, for the most part, are familiar with each other and have played shows [together]. And when I’ve started working with new artists, most of those have come to me from the other artists on the label: friends or referrals, things like that.”

Ashworth runs Orindal out of his Chicago home, where he lives with his wife and two kids. Aside from a couple distributors (including Mississippi Records, which his brother recently purchased and moved to Chicago) and some press agents and designers he works with on a for-hire basis, Ashworth handles all of the mailorder and day-to-day doings himself. Having spent many years on the beloved DIY label Tomlab, he decided that he knew enough about the procedure to cut out the middleman and do everything on his own. He was, and still is, particularly intrigued by the process of designing and manufacturing records. “That is really the focus of the label, the physical objects,” he says. “Nothing too exorbitant: [I] feel like the packaging has been pretty modest. But I try to make good quality, American-made goods that are affordable.”

He acknowledges the obvious precarity of releasing physical media in the age of streaming, and is fully aware that vinyl sales have slowed in the last couple years. Even with these setbacks, Orindal has continued to maintain a loyal following, and Ashworth vows to keep putting out new records as long as there’s a demand: “It feels like, as a business, it’s about as impractical an operation as someone could take on. But as an art project, it just has felt like a resounding success, and it’s been really rewarding to be able to keep doing this as long as I have been.”

A large part of Orindal’s appeal is that it does feel, in a way, utopian. Artists like Gia Margaret, Friendship, Claire Cronin, and Ashworth himself make incredibly personal music with a quiet, minimalist intensity. Those artists align more closely with traditional singer/songwriter music, but Orindal is also home to the experimental folk of Ruth Garbus, the atmospheric gloom of Boduf Songs, and the ambient jazz of Robert Stillman. Every artist offers something different, but all of the music is distinctly soft, tender, and thoughtful. In the fast-paced culture of our chaotic and noisy world, Orindal’s catalog feels like an escape. 

“I have noticed that in the current political climate, a lot of my friends who grew up on punk rock or louder, more abrasive music—their relationship with music has changed,” Ashworth says. “They’re really turning to music for comfort in a way that maybe they didn’t used to. I feel like there is a place right now for people who just need to find some solace and quiet peace with the music they’re listening to.” 

He says that that level of patience and respect has been present at the handful of Orindal showcases he’s put on over the years. “Some of the quietest audiences I’ve ever seen are the folks who show up for Orindal showcases,” he says. Considering Ashworth has been performing and listening to this type of music for over 20 years, that compliment carries a lot of weight. And he’s been ecstatic to see the people who show up will stay for the entire bill; indicating that they, too, recognize and appreciate the spiritual genealogy of Orindal.

“The best feeling is when I get an order and it’s someone ordering multiple titles from multiple artists,” he says. “And I feel like, ‘It’s working!’ There’s some kind of cross-pollination.”

-Eli Enis

Center image – The Depressick

Nearly 50 years (!) into its existence, metal has spread to almost every corner of the globe, with unique takes on generic conventions emerging from every corner. One such country with a rich metal history is Mexico, which has a particularly active black metal scene. Like many nascent metal scenes, it all started with tape trading: bands and fans eagerly consuming early demos of ‘80s bands like Frightful Cross, as well as ‘90s groups Avzhia, Ereshkigal, and Sargatanas. These days, most Mexican black metal bands hail from the north of the country, particularly Monterrey: “It’s colder there, so better for black metal,” jokes Pedro “Necros” Fratti, head of Detonation Distro and a walking encyclopedia of the Mexican scene.

From Evilheart in the deserts of the north to Hurakán in the southeast, Mexico’s black metal scene is wide-ranging. Remarkably, many of the old bands that started in the ‘80s and ‘90s, such as Black Torment, Buzrael, and Wintermoon, are still going strong, and there’s never been a dip in quality or quantity (as demonstrated by stellar ‘00s bands like Septrion and Black Hate). Mexico City and the aforementioned Monterrey, where titans like Black Empire and Buzrael cut their teeth, are the main hubs of activity. What’s more, new bands continue to keep bursting forth.

Here’s a small taste of what Mexico’s fertile black metal scene has to offer.

Warfield

Based in Mexico City, the members of Warfield boast long histories in other bands around the extreme metal field, but their debut, 2009’s Conquering the Black Horde, fully established them as a force in their own right. Their most recent album, 2016’s Hosco, showcases their brutal and punishing sound. The drumming is creative, such as on the thrashy opening for “Ascension” or the D-beat-driven “Panteónica,” and pairs well with noisy yet melodic riffs that sound as though they might have been recorded in the middle of a storm. The mix is well-balanced for the style of music—rough around the edges, but one is still able to clearly pick out what’s going on. It’s a step up in speed from the crawling Trivmvirat EP that preceded it, and much more interesting for it.

Just like in his time in previous acts, vocalist and guitarist Polo Hellfire is front and center. His vocals are textbook mid-level snarls that conjure the Scandinavian greats, delivering litanies to Satan and other dark texts. For a similar style, Alfa Eridano Akhernar also scratches that black/death itch.

Astral Rebirth

The ambient/depressive style of black metal has become ubiquitous in recent years, and Mexico is no exception. One of the better records to emerge comes courtesy of little-known duo Astral Rebirth, whose style gives nods to Xasthur and Paysage d’Hiver while still being clearly their own.

Surrendered to the Black Immensity, Astral Rebirth’s sole full-length, adds waves of dissonance and ambiance to hypnotic riffs. But there are plenty of subtle and unique characteristics that help the album stand apart from its contemporaries, such as the mournful guitar melodies on “In Eternal Black Shattered Illusions” that surface amid the molten riffage of the half-way mark. The record feels like a journey across open seas—something reflected in the artwork—as it moves logically through each lengthy track. The instrumental half of the duo, elusively named Oblivion, excels in maintaining a thread of familiarity despite varying the songwriting across the album’s hour. Meanwhile, his partner Aneurysm delivers impenetrable and murky vocals that sound as though, continuing with the nautical theme, they were recorded underwater.

Since Surrendered to the Black Immensity was released back in 2012, the band have disappeared from social media, but they leave this first-class album (and two previous releases) as their legacy.

Repvblika

While many bands in black metal stay firmly rooted within the genre’s original dimensions, Repvblika advance onwards into more interesting territory. Theirs is a modern take, full of belligerence. Their second album, The Insurgent, is a defiant statement that sees the band firing on all cylinders, whether at a mid-paced march or barreling through blast beats.

Most prominent on the record is Lugubrem’s charismatic and audacious vocal delivery. The lyrics themselves are driven by revolutionary political ideology that also mixes in hedonism and fatalism to captivating effect. On the instrumental side, there’s a satisfying amount of diversity: incessant groove on “WWV (World Wide Void),” needling guitar work on finale “Hyenas, Jackals, Vultures…”, and a ‘70s punk flavor to main single “The Black Condor of Death.” Elsewhere, the saxophone solo on “Destrvktivism” (courtesy of Shining’s Jørgen Munkeby) comes unexpectedly, yet somehow fits among the cacophony. The whole production is relentless, aided in part by Mick Kenney’s (Anaal Nathrakh) touch at the mixing desk. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then that Repvblika takee a bit of influence from Kenney’s group, particularly on the speedy “Snuff Democracy,” which is one of the more blistering tracks on the record.

The Insurgent ultimately delivers on its intentions and cements Repvblika’s place as one of the most interesting black metal bands to have emerged from Mexico in the last few years.

Phendrana

Down the progressive black metal line of thinking, 20-year-old Jorge Anuar Salum’s one-man project Phendrana is a recent highlight. The project was originally called Pakistuf, and was formed in memory of Salum’s grandfather, whose poetry formed the basis of some of his descendant’s lyrics. That project has since evolved considerably; Phendrana is an altogether upgraded beast, both in the songwriting and production, and its debut, Sanctum: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, is a masterclass in atmosphere from the self-taught multi-instrumentalist.

One-man black metal projects tend to focus intently on one instrument, but here, every element is well-balanced: the subtle technical noodling à la Opeth; the confident guest vocals of Vera Clinco (Locus Animæ); the gorgeous piano and acoustic work; the Agalloch-esque drumming. Also like Agalloch, Phendrana is driven by a love of nature and hatred of religion, and the lyrics reflect these topics in poetic fashion. Final track “Gjenganger” is a highlight, drawing from Scandinavian folklore as Salum screams “Inclement soul, you shall roam your weariness/You shall taste rebirth from the cup of despair,” while guest vocalist AraCoelium (The Genetist) wails operatically. It’s a potent ending to a varied record that shows that black metal’s newest generation has lots to offer.

The Depressick

One of the most common crossovers of black metal is with post-rock, the latter adding a sense of calm acceptance to the desolate misery of the former. A prime Mexican example of this are The Depressick, from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a densely-populated and historically impoverished suburb of Mexico City with considerable stigma attached to it. As they note on their Bandcamp page, the “negativity, misery, poverty, sickness and filth” of their environment contributes to their music’s bleakness.

The Depressick are unafraid to wear their influences on their sleeves: the soft piano echoes Lifelover at their finest; the twinkling guitar work and power chords is akin to Amesoeurs; the frantic, desperate vocals are reminiscent of Psychonaut 4. However, their music has evolved a lot across their discography, from the beaten and straightforward path of flipping between raw depressive black metal and post-rock on their earlier releases to a more successful merging of the two—along with a more prominent shoegaze influence. Take their two latest releases, both from this year. On the EP Disposable 1.10, they stretch out over languishing post-rock melodies. Solo piano piece “Vacant Place,” which closes things out, finishes with a spoken-word piece expressing hope—a break from their otherwise gloomy outlook. Meanwhile, Split with Russian duo Falskur Fugl contains much more concise tracks, and even a strangely upbeat vibe on “CH3CH2OH” (so named for the chemical compound for ethanol), contrasted with a harsh film sample addressing alcoholism.  The Depressick’s discography is well worth diving into for a dose of Mexican melancholy; similar groups to check out include Macuarro and Kill Yourself In Others.

Alpha Hydrae

Cranking speed up to 11 all the time is standard practice for black metal, but there’s more to the subgenre than caping for Satan at whiplash-inducing tempos. Alpha Hydrae (previously known as Opus Nocturne) fuse black and doom metal for an atmospheric experience on both their albums, drawing from the works of Milton, de Sade, and Lovecraft in their poetically grotesque lyrical content (“Impure miasma/ Exhaling lechery/ Dripping nectar from the gate of sin”).

Like many newer bands on the Mexican scene, Alpha Hydrae is the result of musicians who have already racked up experience in a host of other groups. As a result, the sound here arrives fully formed and polished—the melancholic keyboards and pristine clean guitars accent their heft, which draws from blackened trailblazers like Rotting Christ and Dimmu Borgir, doom institutions such as My Dying Bride, and parts of death metal à la Morbid Angel. Beyond that, the band pull out all the stops for an immersive listen, from Latin chants and obscure film samples to squealing guitar solos and stunning piano melodies.

Alpha Hydrae are an impressive project whose star is very much on the ascendant right now. Both albums cover a vast amount of ground and showcase a different side of black metal from the traditional Satan-baiting angle.

–Mark Angel Brandt

On UK producer Lara Rix-Martin’s second album as Meemo Comma, the English countryside comes alive. On Sleepmoss, Rix-Martin builds an ecosystem that connects field recordings with ambient textures and classical flourishes, making for music that is by turns stormy and serene. There’s some subtext to the music here: on Sleepmoss Rix-Martin has found “peace with mental health” and is “mindful of the beauty in death and endings,” as she explains in the album notes.

Sleepmoss captures the richness of its surroundings, finding inspiration in the rolling hills and luscious coastline of the UK’s South Downs—where Rix-Martin takes daily strolls with her dog. “Night Rain”’s eerie, bewitching drums underline an assortment of beastly howls and squeaks, while “Winter Sun” bursts with warm strings and spacey, Fourth World sounds á la Jon Hassell and Brian Eno. On “Meadhead,” Rix-Martin stretches her palette from the sky to the sea, pairing thunderous drum rolls with water-like tones. “This album is about the glory of solitude and the richness of romance that can be found in nature,” Rix-Martin writes. Sleepmoss is a dreamlike paean to green therapy—something we could all use a little more of.

-April Clare Welsh

Experimental Detroit singer and songwriter Kesswa’s journey to her debut EP, Soften, began with an interest in DJing. “I started getting into all the electronic music and techno in Detroit. Eventually, I started messing around with music production. But I wasn’t satisfied, because I always felt my tracks were missing vocals. I took a vocal lesson, and as soon as I started vocal lessons, things started moving quickly.”

As she developed her sound, Kesswa, born Kesiena Wanogho, started attending events around Detroit, meeting other artists in the area. One of those artists was the Mexico-based producer Askanse, who was spending time in the city. “Literally within minutes of meeting each other, we were on the same page musically,” recalls Kesswa. “Once we started jamming, recording, and making this music, I feel like we developed our own language.” 

Produced and recorded by Askanse (credited under his birth name Benjamin Hill), Soften is grounded in lush ambient sounds that transition smoothly to larger, percussive moments. Kesswa’s tracks move fluidly between alternative, R&B, house, and soul. Throughout the EP, Detroit harpist Ahya Simone adds graceful texture to each song’s chord structure. “Open,” the first song, starts slow, but builds momentum quickly. On “Contemplate,” Kesswa’s voice soars over a slow-burning techno shuffle, prolonged synth chords, and beautiful harp figures. “To Find,” is driven by a tantalizing call-and-response, and is a showcase for Kesswa’s stunning vocal range. At the end of the EP, “Open” returns; this time, the percussion is gone. Instead, Kesswa’s voice joins with strings and synths to create an ethereal melody.

Lyrically, Soften draws from different elements of Kesswa’s identity. “I knew that I wanted to commit myself to making something that was a full reflection of my inner world,” she says, “something that represented how I see myself, and what I wanted to be. A lot of times, my personality and the cultures I belong to feel disparate from each other,” she explains. “My parents came to the U.S. from Nigeria, so I definitely identify as Nigerian. But I’m also an African-American person. I have this culture at home that doesn’t always line up with what’s going on outside of it. At times, I don’t always feel particularly embraced or accepted in either.”

On Soften, Kesswa’s uses those disparate cultural influences to build her sound. “I was inspired by the song structure of traditional Nigerian music and Buddhist mantra,” she says. “I wrote each song as an affirmation to invoke the manifestation of my dreams of being an artist. The sequence of songs carries the listener through the experiences I had while creating Soften. “Open’ illuminates the grief and fear I felt while describing my longing for freedom and inspiration. ‘Contemplate’ describes the anxiety I felt and my decision to focus on enjoying the process. ‘To Find’ speaks to the manifestation of my literal dreams.”

And while Soften is still a week away from release, Kesswa is already plotting her next move. “I’m currently working on music with Shigeto,” she says. “He’s got a new album coming, and I’m a vocalist on it. I’m also in the process of putting together my album and really thinking about what that will sound like. I’m really looking forward to what’s next.” 

-Gus Navarro

The astronomical success of titles like Celeste, Dead Cells, and Untitled Goose Game, the prominence of DIY-enabling platforms like Steam and Kickstarter, the rise of streaming—if ever there existed such a thing as a golden era of indie gaming, we’re living smack-dab in the middle of it. Perhaps a little ironically, one of the key factors powering the furor lies not in games themselves, but their soundtracks; there’s Lena Raine’s rise to fame post-Celeste, and Toby Fox’s omnipresent Undertale score, which has appeared in nationally-televised wrestling events and highly-popular Nintendo Switch games. With every new indie darling comes the opportunity for a significant musical find, enjoyable to players and non-players alike.

That’s where Marc Junker comes in.

As the co-founder and driving force behind Yetee Records—a Chicago-based label specializing in physical reissues of new and rare video game soundtracks, as well as original material by video game-adjacent artists, himself included—he’s made it his mission to translate the magic of indie gaming into collectible media. Eye-catching releases include, but are not limited to, an Octodad picture disk branded with the titular mollusk’s goofy face, Jonathan Greer’s Owlboy score pressed to handsome white/blue vinyl, a plushie created in the likeness of nerdy a capella artist Smooth McGroove, a cassette from his “VGM vaporwave” project R23X, packaged alongside a limited-edition, vaporwave-inspired coffee; and more. And Junker never stops plotting; he’s eyeing mini-disks as the label’s next frontier, and dreams of releasing an album via Amiibo, Nintendo’s toys-to-life platform.

“One of the coolest things about Yetee is that, every day, we’re presented with a new game with sick art direction,” Junker explains over the phone from his home in Vancouver (he goes back and forth a lot). “You can have something that’s a really faithful NES re-creation, or you could have something that’s all-over-the-map maximalist, or you could have something with realistic 3D…You have these different blends of inspiration, so when we decide to press a soundtrack or album, we do vinyl and digital, but we’re also thinking, “Oh, this could be a cassette exclusive, or a mini-disk, or a coffee.”

Junkee fell in love with video game music the same way most thirtysomething nerds did: playing Super Mario RPG on the SNES for hours on end. “I think that, at a young age, playing a JRPG feels like reading a trilogy of thick novels, because you’re stumbling through it, and you’re listening to the music looping, which is not ever going to happen in a cartoon or film unless your DVD is skipping,” he says with a laugh. 

A lifelong musician reared by an audiophile household with esoteric tastes and high-tech listening equipment (“Growing up, we’d listen to live recordings of Mongolian throat singers”), he worked as a graphic designer and scorer throughout the aughts and early ’10s before landing a job at The Yetee, a video-game clothing and merchandise site known for its daily-rotating t-shirt selection (think Threadless, but geekier). Together with the company’s owners, Glen O’Neill and Mike Mancuso, he co-founded Yetee Records in 2014 as a way to live the dream of pressing music they loved, while simultaneously meeting customer demand.

Video game scores are, by most people’s standards, a form of background music; excepting titles like Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution, they exist to accentuate the action unfolding onscreen, not upstage it. As such, the whole concept of a video game music LP or cassette might scan as a paradox to some—but the way Junker sees things, the possibilities for enjoyment are multifold. “You’ve got the accompaniment to the game as a soundtrack; you’re listening to it and you’re like, I love this game, this is bringing me right back in there; the music stuck with me, and I want to re-listen to this. Then, you have this rich history of aural aesthetics, from Atari to classic Gameboy chiptune to Sega Genesis…so someone who is aware of that, or discovering it for the first time can enjoy it, even if they haven’t played the game in question.”

To that end, Junker adds, video games don’t just embody a form of entertainment, but a distinct cultural and musical language—a lexicon that’s sure to become more ubiquitous with time. “On some level, I see this stuff coming out—a video game, an animated TV show on Netflix—and I think, “Oh, that person also grew up watching Miyazaki and playing Final Fantasy, and now they’re sick at 3D rendering…we can do similar things in our own pool of talents, and what we’re working with,” he says excitedly. “We’re living in a great time for great stuff.”

-Zoe Camp