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While there were some terrific albums put out in the first quarter of 2023 (see here for my list), the period between April and June has seen a ton of amazing stuff released! Here goes.

Colin Stetson – When we were that what wept for the sea It’s such a relief to hear another proper album from saxophone experimentalist Colin Stetson, after a run of high-profile but oddly muted film soundtracks. This album is rammed with Stetson’s trademark button-clicks, intakes of breath and throat-mic groans, plus Scottish smallpipes by Brìghde Chaimbeul and affecting spoken-word passages.

Romance & Dean Hurley – River of Dreams The masters of hauntological pop team up with Twin Peaks sound designer Dean Hurley once again, following their Celine Dion-inspired Once Upon a Time and a lesser album themed around Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant. This one’s solid, creepy gold.

Horse Lords – Live in Leipzig Absolutely storming skronky math-post-rock, like Battles battling Beefheart. I would have loved to have seen this show.

Benefits – Nails This Teesside punk band features two of my cousins in its lineup, so I’m biased – but honestly, Benefits are vital in today’s bland indie landscape, and I feel strongly that their politics and anger are true and admirable. This album is as good a reflection of the state of the nation in Britain (i.e. fucked) as you’ll find anywhere.

Hannah Peel / Manchester Collective – Neon There’s more than a touch of Steve Reich’s obsessive repetitions in this short set, and that’s no bad thing. Over 12 minutes it hits that sweet spot between beautiful and maddening.

Herman Dune – The Portable Herman Dune, Vol.3 This final album of rerecorded favourites doesn’t disappoint. David Ivar Herman Dune’s voice is far more raw now, making the oddest moments of these perfect indie-pop songs poignant.

J. Albert – config Excellent dub techno. Last.fm tells me this is one of my most-listened albums this year, which is weird. I’ve been using it as a background to writing, and the time just slips away when you’re in the zone.

Bana Haffar – intimaa’ Their 2019 recording Genera – Live at AB Salon, Brussels is a favourite of mine, and while this doesn’t quite match up, its scratchy, heavenly drones come close.

Lau Nau – 5 × 4 This hazy synth pop doesn’t quite hit the heights of Lau Nau’s HEM. Någonstans soundtrack from 2015, an album still on rotation in my office – but it’s still wonderful.

Alpha Maid & Mica Levi – spresso Oh wow I love this. Alpha Maid has been one to watch since her 2019 and 2021 EPs, and now she teams up with the best soundtrack composer of this century? For a punk garage jam? This EP may be less than 8 minutes long, but stick it on repeat a few dozen times like I do.

Annea Lockwood / Ruth Anderson – Téte-a-téte This one took a few listens to bed in, and the behind-the-scenes story about Lockwood’s tribute to the late Anderson gives it additional power. It may be a demanding, avant-garde experiment, but it’s filled with love.

Afrorack – The Afrorack Absolutely nuts Ugandan synth grooves made using wonky homemade equipment.

Baxter Dury – I Thought I Was Better Than You This witty album seems deeply personal, primarily about his Blockhead father Ian and Baxter’s own self-loathing of being a ‘Prisoner, famous parents, assisted recognition’ whose benefits seem to amount to nothing: ‘But you don’t sound like you / You sound just like him’. But Baxter’s a star in his own right.

Miaux / Lieven Martens – The Pels Organ and Hemony Carillon This is simply outstanding. Even its origins are strange, being the soundtrack to the unveiling of a woven tapestry in the city hall of Hoogstraten, Belgium. The first side, featuring Miaux’s pipe organ compositions, is as magisterial as Sarah Davachi’s release and yet as intimate as Badalamenti. The second side is weirder, featuring field recordings of birdsong and muted traffic. It’s an essential album, I think.

Jam City – Jam City Presents EFM More half-remembered, hauntological not-really-80s pop from the best in the business.

Wild Up – Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? More wonderful interpretations of the great composer’s work by California ensemble Wild Up.

Boris & Uniform – Bright New Disease Are they mocking Metallica at times? I think so. But there’s wit here, and variety, and good humour, and stompingly excellent speed metal.

Bruce Falkian – Bruce Falkian Honestly, I don’t know what this is, or who they are. They’re from France, I think. And I think it’s sort of pop music. It’s funny and odd.

Bendik Giske – Bendik Giske I feel slightly spoiled after the triumphant return of Colin Stetson, and now this. Bendik Giske’s saxophone work features many of the same close-miked technique, and it is very, very good.

Arthur Russell – Picture of Bunny Rabbit These previously-unreleased tracks from the mid-80s World of Echo sessions are as wonderful as you’d hope, particularly the title track and the final messed-up wonkiness wonderfulness on this album.

Rrose – Please Touch So good! Techno to drive fast to – or to write car chases to.

Werner Dafeldecker & Valerio Tricoli – Der Krater The oddest, spaciest double-bass drones imaginable.

Ergo Phizmiz – Angelbread Another triumphant return! When he turns his mind to skewed pop (as on my favourite album of 2010, Things To Do And Make), Ergo Phizmiz is simply unbeatable. He tosses off incredible lyrics that recall The Cleaners from Venus (‘You can feel like Ken Russell / In my Catholic bathroom’) or Hefner or The Wave Pictures at their finest (‘I stayed at the table and put a coaster / Over your wine so flies couldn’t get in’). And ‘Day of the Baboon’ is a genuinely excellent pop song in defiance of Phizmiz’s sometimes self-defeating attitude to writing and recording.

Philip Jeck & Chris Watson – Oxmardyke Affecting and frequently terrifying, Chris Watson’s field recordings of a Yorkshire railway crossing become something far stranger and more illuminating when treated by the late Philip Jeck. An aural, modern-day version of Dickens’ ‘The Signal-Man’.

Who says ‘best of’ lists have to be restricted to the end of the year? Here are my favourite new album releases of the first quarter of 2023, for those who might be interested.

Kali Malone – Does Spring Hide Its Joy Three hours of amazing drone work from prolific organist Kali Malone, featuring Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley and cellist Lucy Railton.

Tongue Depressor – Bones For Time Ambient drones that sound like the steady breathing of a sleeping giant.

Atom TM – Nacht Intense, moody, minimal techno. (Ideal as background music for writing tense scenes!)

Adela Mede – Szabadság Difficult-to-describe Slovakian almost-pop with beats and field recordings and disorientation.

Bianca Scout – The Heart of the Anchoress More off-kilter beats, and actual vocals, though they’re hazy enough to register only as whispers.

Cisser Mæhl – Innemuseum Listening to vocals while writing or reading works fine for me if I can’t understand the words, and these Danish lullabies put me in the zone immediately.

The Necks – Travel Head-bobbing groove repetition courtesy of Australian’s finest avant-garde jazz trio.

теплота – Skynned Totally nuts jazz-inflected techno that makes a neat partner to the Necks album.

Honour – HBK Vol 1 – Na God Is it an original album? A mixtape? I’ve no idea, but it’s barking mad, and the most fun I’ve had with a hip hop release for ages.

Tresa Leigh – I Remember Rerelease EP of 1970s lo-fi, heartrending songs by a Georgia teenager who, I presume, never quite made it, but should have.

Herman Dune – The Portable Herman Dune, Vol.2 Still my favourite indie band after all these years. These beautiful, stripped-down performances of past triumphs make me fall in love with them all over again. And there’s a third volume still to come!

Adrian Sherwood Presents: Dub No Frontiers An absolute relevation of a compilation: female reggae artists from around the world, singing in Hindi, Romani, Arabic and other languages.

Modern composition / minimalism / drone

California collective Wild Up’s performances of Julius Eastman’s works (Vol. 1: Femenine / Vol. 2: Joy Boy) were two of my favourite albums of 2022, and continue to surprise me each time I relisten. Oren Ambarchi provided two excellent albums this year, both of which build directly on the intense, repetitions of his other recent releases. Ghosted is inflected with Mingus-esque bass grooves, whereas Shebang is lighter and more slippery; both are as wonderful as you might expect from Ambarchi, who rarely puts a foot wrong. Opening Performance Orchestra’s version of Phill Niblock’s Four Walls Full Of Sound is the most engrossing, enveloping drone imaginable. Equally maddening (in the best possible way) is Reich/Richter by Steve Reich, an absorbing soundtrack to Gerhard Richter’s abstract film Moving Picture (946-3). After a run of soundtrack work that doesn’t stand up well without visuals, Colin Stetson released Chimæra I, a chilly drone that features little of his ultra-physical saxophone performances of the past, but is no lesser for it. Anna von Hausswolff’s towering Live at Montreux Jazz Festival is similarly grand, with staggering vocal performances. Sow Your Gold In The White Foliated Earth by DEATHPROD deployed odd instruments designed by experimental composer Harry Partch to great effect. In Promise & Illusion, Ecka Mordecai reaches almost the same heights with her voice. Laura Cannell had a great year, with her folk-drone EP We Long to be Haunted my favourite, closely followed by the lighter but eerier Antiphony of the Trees. Living Torch by Kali Malone is another long drone that ranges from barely-there to punched-in-the-chest. Sarah Davachi continued her wonderful work with the restrained Two Sisters.

Weird / electronica

The most remarkable electronic album I heard this year was I was born by the sea by Hull-based artist Richie Culver, featuring upsettingly jarring, glitchy electronica underpinning dour Sleaford Mods-esque state-of-the-nation pronouncements like ‘There’s more mobility scooter repair shops and bookies than there are bookshops.’  I had no less than three minimal techno releases by Deepchord on regular rotation this year, my favourite of which were the EP Functional Extraits 1 and album Functional Designs. Another act to secure more than one slot on this list is Romance, whose haunting collaboration with Twin Peaks sound designer Dean Hurley, In Every Dream Home a Heartache, is wonderful – but not as wonderful as Once Upon a Time, a vaporwave oddity stretching Celine Dion vocals beyond breaking point. Mattering and Meaning by Dan Nicholls is a superficially beautiful collection of piano loops and field recordings that becomes stranger the more you listen. I loved the ambient soundscapes Nachthorn by Maxime Denuc and the more jittery Koko maailma by Olli Aarni. Finally, I don’t know how to describe Context by Lasse Marhaug, other than it’s as dark and compelling as the entrance to a train tunnel or a looming storm cloud.                         

Indie / rock / vocal

The Ruby Cord by Richard Dawson (or ‘Richard Dawson of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’, as the album cover emphasises) is a towering success, building on previous albums Peasant and 2020. He’s become by far my favourite vocal artist, and no matter how sweet some of his material becomes, his experimental, bloody-minded attitude shines through. Herman Dune brought the nostalgia with reworkings of favourite songs on The Portable Herman Dune. Horse Lords proved themselves reliable Beefheartians with the wonderful Comradely Objects. My favourite rock albums were Most Normal by Gilla Band and Super Champion by Otoboke Beaver, which drove my kids wild. My favourite calm albums were Gravskrift by Vessel, Ghosts by Haress, Optimism by Jana Horn and the sweet indie debut caroline by caroline.

Wild beats

I somehow missed Native Soul last year, but their 2021 release of South African amapiano house tracks, Teenage Dreams, has been on constant rotation whenever I’m driving alone. In 2022 they produced Native Roots, a more minor album featuring guest vocals, but great fun all the same. Twenty-One Sabar Rhythms is a terrific collection of precisely what it promises, from The Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family. Finally, I’m not connoisseur of house music, but Decius Vol. I by Decius & Lias Saoudi strikes me as the best sort imaginable.

Compilations

There were some terrific compilations this year! My favourite was perhaps Music from Saharan WhatsApp (Sahel Sounds), which contains the most incredible grooves imaginable. The unlikeliest collection I loved was V4 Visions: Of Love & Androids (Numero Group), featuring 90s pop and R&B tunes that sound like hits from a parallel dimension. Very different but similarly out-there was the dark and strange Síntomas de techno – Ondas electrónicas subterráneas desde Perú (1985-1991) (Buh). I loved the uplifting Soul Jazz Records Presents Studio One Music Lab (Soul Jazz), and the first and third volumes of I Had the Craziest Dream: Modern Jazz and Hard-Bop in Post War London (Death Is Not the End). More conventional (for me) delights were found in the drone wash of Hallow Ground presents: Epiphanies (Hallow Ground). Some of the strangest and most exciting compilations I heard this year were Luke Schneider Presents… Imaginational Anthem, Vol. XI : Chrome Universal – A Survey of Modern Pedal Steel (Tompkins Square), the bizarre-but-calm Thorn Valley (World of Echo) and the completely unclassifiable Elsewhere VXIII (Rocket Recordings), which ought to be unlistenable given its breadth of artists, sounds and languages, but which comes across as the most coherent mixtape you’ve ever been gifted.

Reissues

The biggest reissue release this year was the Super Deluxe edition of Revolver by The Beatles. The mournful demo of Yellow Submarine alone is worth the price of admission. Almost as exciting is the bumper ‘Farewell Horizontal’ edition of my favourite Pavement album, Terror Twilight, and a remastered version of often-overlooked electronica favourite Body Riddle by Clark. The smoky trip-hop Glass Lit Dream by Dawuna is my favourite 2021 release that I missed last year, though its reappearance in 2022 barely counts as a reissue. I played previously-hard-to-come-by Mother Is The Milky Way by Broadcast endlessly, along with the beautiful calmnesses of Tan-Tan Therapy by Tenniscoats and Sings Reign Rebuilder by Set Fire To Flames and the wonderful Peel Sessions by Movietone, and a brilliant album and band I’d never encountered before, Hydroplane by Hydroplane. The funkiest reissues I came across were Air Volta by Volta Jazz, Heart of the Congos by The Congos, Vol. 1 by Orchestre Les Volcans du Benin and the treasure trove of Charles Stepney demos, Step on Step. One of the most exciting discoveries was the Trunk release of the soundtrack to the 1976 TV show Children of the Stones, by Sidney Sager and the Ambrosian Singers.                      

I always look forward to compiling lists at the end of each year, taking stock of my favourite releases. Today I asked myself: Why wait? The fact that we’ve just passed the summer solstice makes this seem a reasonable enough moment to sum up my favourite albums of the first half of the year.

Modern composition

The most thrilling releases I’ve heard so far this year are California collective Wild Up’s treatments of the works of misunderstood but recently re-evaluated genius composer Julius Eastman. Vol. 1: Femenine is livelier than any other version of this incredible minimalist piece I’ve heard, and Vol. 2: Joy Boy (featuring pieces never performed before) is a revelation, culminating in a version of ‘Stay On It’ more frenzied and lunatic than ever before. Not only is this a huge recommendation, the collective has pledged that another five volumes are in the works! In comparison, Spiralis Aurea by Stefano Pilia is a far more soothing experience, but wonderful all the same. Ghosted, a spiky and playful piece by one of my favourite modern artists, Oren Ambarchi, continues his run of stellar albums.

Drone

The pipe-organ-heavy, doom-metal-without-metal, Kate Bush-esque Live at Montreux Jazz Festival is gloriously sludgy yet uplifting, and puts Anna von Hausswolff high on my list of live acts to see one day. Lucrecia Dalt’s gloomy original soundtrack for The Seed (a film I haven’t seen) is varied and, while drawing on familiar horror tropes, nevertheless satisfyingly original. The new version of Phill Niblock’s Four Walls Full Of Sound by Opening Performance Orchestra is almost as arresting as the Wild Up pieces, though you have to pick the right moment to expose yourself to such a wall of sound, and the same applies to Alvin Lucier and Jordan Dykstra’s extended-drone album Out Of Our Hands. The self-titled album by mysterious collective The pale faced family on the hill, featuring Oliver Coates, is aloof, but very good and often very surprising.

Weird / electronica

Mattering and Meaning by Dan Nicholls squelches loops of piano with field recordings, producing a mush of unclassifiable sound, and provides a great background to thought. Mux by drummer Julian Sartorius is more palatable than his recent collaboration with Matthew Herbert, yet his jittery pieces sound more electronic than ‘real’, but that’s no complaint.

Indie / rock / vocal

Actually, You Can proves that Deerhoof still actually can, and ‘Plant Thief’ has become one of my favourite Deerhoof tracks. The Voltarol Years by Half Man Half Biscuit is reliably good, and made me snort with laughter. Movietone’s collected Peel Sessions reveals a band that perhaps ought to have been bigger and more loved. Optimism by Jana Horn provides the low-key beauty missing from Aldous Harding’s most recent release; listening to this album is like falling asleep against the trunk of a tree in dappled sunlight.

Compilations / reissues

V4 Visions: Of Love & Androids is another superb compilation from Numero Group, featuring ‘lost’ tracks from a UK label that between 1990 and 1994 clashed American and Jamaican sounds with some pretty astounding results. Hallow Ground presents: Epiphanies is far slower affair featuring drones and tones, though often majestic. I Had the Craziest Dream: Modern Jazz and Hard-Bop in Post War London, Vol. 1 from Death Is Not The End is an amazing collection of exactly what the title describes, and almost all tracks are infectious fun. (Volume 2 didn’t quite live up to the first, though.) My favourite compilation so far this year is Music from Saharan WhatsApp from Sahel Sounds, certainly the most eye-opening release I’ve heard for months, and foot-tappingly catchy too.