I will probably never settle on whether I want to publish this recap article in December or January, but I have gone with the former this year in an effort to really take a break from the site for a few weeks this time. It’s been a wild year. Everything feels unstable, or at least unsettled. It was a year filled with surprising highs, plenty of lows, and the slow realization that nothing holds the way it used to. The ground shifted, and everyone I know felt it, even if we didn’t always name it.
I fully shifted my own creative works into making things within collapse, not about it. I’ve learned that it’s not just catastrophic, it’s cumulative. We’re all remaking our routines and revising our expectations. It’s political and ecological, obviously, but it’s also so intimate. I find it shows up in the heaviness of completing everyday tasks, and especially in the grief I carry for things that haven’t entirely disappeared, but I can tell they’re leaving. It’s a strange, weird time. (If you are interested in a recap of my various activities this year, I’ll be posting one on Patreon soon and will make it free/public. However, if you want to help Foxy Digitalis continue, please consider signing up, subscribing to The Jewel Garden, or giving via Ko-fi. It helps so, so much).
And somehow, in the middle of all this, there were moments of beauty and wonder. There were unexpected connections (big love to Micaela Tobin and Baseck). Realizations that maybe the old structures and systems falling apart mean we can finally take care of each other differently. I see it firsthand every month at Tulsa’s Really Really Free Market, building something that looks like mutual aid but feels like belonging. It’s in all these quiet ways people show up for each other that don’t require money or permission to exist. It’s in the art that comes into existence because it has to, not because anyone deemed that it fits into the same old frameworks.
In this in-between space, I have found so much in the music and art that surrounds me. I’ve been inspired and motivated in so many new ways, working quietly on a big project while still embracing opportunities for joy/fun/excitement/conjuring/idiocy (shout-outs to Charmaine Lee, Dorian Wood, and Carl Antonowicz). I’ve also had the great thrill of helping artists with producing and mastering, mentoring and writing. Get in touch if you’d like to work together.
Music has been essential to all of this. It hasn’t been about escape, really. It has worked as a companion, as proof that imagination persists even when everything else feels unstable. The albums that mattered most to me this year weren’t necessarily the loudest or most celebrated, but the ones that helped me stay present and reminded me that other people are building from fragments, too. This is art as survival strategy. Here’s what stuck with me throughout 2025.
Music that felt essential rather than optional (aka my 31 favorite records of 2025)
Snakeskin “We live in sand” (Beacon Sound/Ruptured)
Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal continue to build something singular and so, so special. Snakeskin might be my favorite group in the world, and We live in sand is, frankly, a masterpiece. I wrote this about “Blindsided” earlier this year:
“How to love in the face of this death?” Sabra serenades in the chorus, spelling out the album’s core theme. The combination of the propulsive, almost buoyant rhythm with Sabra’s lilting vocal melodies and Tabbal’s layered electronics is captivating, both exultant and ethereal. We won’t turn our heads even if we want to. It’s Snakeskin’s most devastating pop moment because it sounds like transcendence while chronicling entrapment. The song seeps into bloodstreams and refuses to let go, much like grief itself.
Charmaine Lee “Tulpa” (Kou)
Charmaine Lee has always made music that makes me gloriously uncomfortable. She’s a sonic contortionist twisting her voice into impossible shapes and tones. Tulpa is raucous and cathartic, a winding maze through feedback swashes, gurgling hellbroth, and the disgusting magic of being human. There’s nobody else like her. Charmaine was on Songs of Our Lives earlier this year.
ganavya “Nilam” (LEITER)
A spellbinding record. There is something so powerful in these gentle, sonic meditations. Ganavya’s voice glides across the soft cadences as part prayer, part reminder. Each phrase feels like it’s being offered rather than performed, creating space so listeners can settle into their own stillness. The production breathes with her, never imposing, always illuminating what’s already sacred in the room. A stunner.
Damon Locks “List of Demands” (International Anthem)
Damon Locks always delivers. On this text-based record, a different angle shines a new light. Locks builds rhythms from so many sources, including the voices themselves, layering things so that they become the pulse, the heartbeat, not just decoration. It’s a radical archival work, giving new life to forgotten voices as the driving force of something that feels so urgent and alive. Damon was on Songs of Our Lives earlier this year.
HXH Stark Phenomena (OFNOT)
From The Capsule Garden 4.5:
On Stark Phenomena, Chris Ryan Williams and Lester St. Louis craft forward-looking soundscapes, blending trumpet and cello explorations with rich electronic textures. Across three pieces, hopeful embers quietly glow. Bubbling basslines ripple through hollow spaces, giving Williams the freedom to explore vast night skies. Shapes shift from amorphous abstraction into a welcoming path, a way forward. St. Louis’s cello arrangements and Ayorinde E. Peebles’ monologue offer both comfort and provocation, transforming wistful echoes and casting light on a glowing road map. Williams and St. Louis move with intention and grace, their soundworlds carefully constructed yet always open to bloom. Unexpected moments find quiet resonance in reflection, leaning into mirror-like stillness and using its fuzzy cadence as a threshold into something new. Stark Phenomena is a journey of subtle beauty, clarity, and surprise.
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko “Гільдеґарда (Hildegard)” (Unsound)
From The Capsule Garden 4.9:
Hildegard is not a reconstruction of the past but a reflection shattered and reassembled under the pressure of war. Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko begin with Hildegard von Bingen’s visions and music, but what emerges is something far more raw and embodied. The voice carries both sacred intensity and folk resistance, rooted in the Ukrainian vocal tradition that has survived attempts at erasure. Modular drones swell and crack beneath it, not to support but to envelop, echoing both medieval sonorities and the physicality of trauma. The music stretches, slows, and expands until liturgy becomes landscape, and prayer becomes a survival instinct. Each tone holds a residue of violence and clarity, of sirens and stained glass. What remains is not comfort but presence, a way of staying alive inside the unbearable. Easily one of 2025’s best.
Nowhere Flower “Heat Dome” (Digital Regress)
Heat Dome is a lot of things all at once: elemental and surreal, tender and scorched. It’s a flickering, home-recorded constellation of guitar sketches, drum machines, flutes, synths, and layered vocal textures that drift more like overheard memories than structured songs. Her voice floats through it all like a melodic ghost, conveying emotion more than narrative as grief, motherhood, ecological anxiety, and strange joy move through the record in waves. The way it holds all of these things at once without falling apart or cracking up is remarkable (add in how totally listenable it is, I can’t stop returning to the world of Heat Dome). She did this great interview in Foxy Digitalis earlier this year.
Akira Umeda & Metal Preyers “Clube de Mariposa Mórbida” (Nyege Nyege)
Clube da Mariposa Mórbida is full of sonic rituals from across past and future times. It’s not so much music from another dimension as it is music from all dimensions. Rhythmic brutes melt into seismic wobbles and atmospheric ghost towns, all of it mixing into an enchanting mass of aural conjuring. Is it a dream? A nightmare? What it actually feels like to be alive? All of it, all at once.
A Magic Whistle “The Solar Cell” (Public Eyesore/Lampspeople Universal)
From a Foxy Digitalis interview with Andy Puls earlier in the year:
This isn’t music made in isolation from the world but in direct conversation with it. When spring storms roll through the Cascade Mountains, Puls feels his tiny structure might slide into the canyon below. When summer lightning splits the sky, he’s there recording, capturing not just sound but the electric tension of being at nature’s mercy. His homemade instruments, the motor-driven “Star Song” and the “Cascadian Sympathetic Steel” built from trees on his property, generate patterns that gather like morning mist, while wordless vocal harmonies anchor these shifting electronics in something unmistakably human. What emerges is music that mirrors the off-grid life Puls has built: responsive to forces beyond control, rooted in place, and shaped by the mountain itself.
Marta Forsberg “Archaeology of Intimacy” (Warm Winters Ltd.)
From a Foxy Digitalis interview with Forsberg earlier in the year:
Marta Forsberg’s Archaeology of Intimacy feels like discovering a secret room in a familiar house, intimate in ways that catch listeners off guard. What began as sketches with her voice serving merely as a compositional placeholder evolved into something more vulnerable and essential: seven experimental pop songs that orbit around Forsberg’s own unvarnished vocals, complete with breath and imperfection. The Swedish-Polish composer has crafted her most personal work yet, using a deliberately narrow palette of synthesizers and fretless bass to create music that sounds both ancient and futuristic, like folklore transmitted through machines. With the help of co-producer Ludwig Wandinger, Forsberg discovered that her own voice was actually at the core of this collection, leading her to embrace the sibilants and imperfections she’d previously hidden behind pitch manipulation and synthetic processing. The album represents a distillation of all her interests as a composer: her fascination with the human voice, her intuitive understanding of synthesis, and her ability to weave compositional discipline together with melodies that resonate at a cellular level.
Patrick Shiroishi “Forgetting is Violent” (American Dreams)
Every time I listen to Forgetting is Violent, I feel untethered. Patrick Shiroishi’s trajectory over the last few years is incredible. His saxophone becomes something beyond an instrument here, a vessel for grief and rage and memory. He refuses to stay quiet. The way he weaves his collaborators into these suites feels like necessity, each voice answering his call with their own kind of fire or stillness. This is music that somehow makes the unbearable weight of what should never be forgotten feel like communion. Patrick was on Songs of Our Lives again this year.
Lia Bertucci “The Oracle” (Cibachrome)
From The Capsule Garden 4.14:
On The Oracle, Lea Bertucci’s voice has legs. Flute incantations recorded in a cave in upstate New York are the beacon leading us into the guts of this special album. It’s whimsical and gnarly at the same time, and it has me totally hooked. Elegiac drones hover in the undercurrents, buoyed by dissolving field recordings and tape-rattled vocal spectacles, cadences melting into whirlpools where echoes come in all shapes and timbres from sharp to porous. This is resonance as a way of life, dizzying and textural, a gilded aural mirror reflecting anxieties and mythologies back at strange angles. It’s all so disorienting and riveting. If I could drown in these psychedelic sonics, I’d be happy.
Ryan Sawyer’s Shaker Ensemble “For Those Who Wish to Sing Will Always Find a Song” (Lobby Art)
This album grabbed me and kept hold of me like no other record in 2025. Its free-form structure moves like a shapeshifting sonic maze where every path leads to the end. Ghostly voices weave through intricate, enticing textures and resonating drones. There’s something I am so taken with in how it asks us to get lost, and let the sound work on in ways we didn’t know we needed. Exceptional. Ryan was on Songs of Our Lives earlier this year.
Chris Williams “Odu: Vibration II” (AKP Recordings)
This is such a beautiful album and an exceptional performance. Chris Williams has had an incredible year (he appears three times in this list of 31 albums!), and Odu: Vibration II is the pinnacle of it. This music finds beauty in pulling things apart, transcendence in the spaces between disparate strands. I find it moving and transportive in equal measure. An absolute triumph of a record. Chris was on Songs of Our Lives earlier this year.
gushes “Delicious Collision” (ptp)
Delicious Collision is audacious. Jennae Santos’ latest as gushes is maximalist and dramatic, but it’s technically wild and precise while being a whole hell of a lot of fun all at once. They conjure portals out of guitar loops and orchestral flourishes so each song feels like a ceremony we’re invited into rather than just witness. “Big Riff Energy” indeed.
Dao Strom “Tender Revolutions” (Beacon Sound)
This album almost breaks me every single time. It’s so beautiful, and, yes, tender. Here’s what I wrote about “China Girl” earlier this year:
Dao Strom’s “re-voicing” of David Bowie’s “China Girl” is the most striking moment on Tender Revolutions, where she confronts the song’s troubling legacy head-on by stepping directly into what she calls its “discomfiting silence at its center.” Rather than simply covering or critiquing Bowie’s problematic hit, Strom inhabits the space where an Asian woman’s actual voice and perspective should have existed all along. At the heart is Strom’s timeless guitar plucks and voice, pulled to the center and unobscured, while processed field recordings and synthetic noise attacks add darker textures that imbue the stark sonic landscape with life. By reclaiming the sonic territory and centering her own subjectivity, she transforms a song rooted in fetishization and Orientalist fantasy into something deeply personal and truthful. It’s a powerful act of sonic reclamation that builds a world centering her perspective rather than the Western male gaze, turning appropriation into agency and silence into song.
Paul Jebanasam “mātr” (Subtext)
We waited almost a decade for a new Paul Jebanasam album, but it was well worth it. mātr is simultaneously intimate and epic. Jebanasam’s melodies are timeless and feel huge, but across the record, it’s like he’s caught them in glass jars so we can hold them close and feel them like heartbeats.
Plume Girl “Unnameable Glory” (mappa)
From The Capsule Garden 4.11:
Sowmya Somanath builds cathedrals out of breath and memory, where Hindustani ragas weave through ambient drift and family laughter becomes melody. Her voice maps territories beyond words, moving from whisper to radiance while guitar arpeggios catch light like water, and synthesizers tremble on the edge of recognition. Each arrangement feels like dawn breaking over different landscapes simultaneously, collaging the domestic with the transcendent until a mother’s giggle and temple bells occupy the same sacred space. There’s a profound gentleness here that doesn’t shy away from complexity, where cultural inheritance and personal revolution exist without contradiction, where the act of listening becomes a form of prayer. Unnameable Glory dwells in the beautiful impossibility of trying to hold what can only be experienced, creating music that honors both the urge to capture wonder and the wisdom of letting it slip through our fingers. Moments of sparseness punctuate the lush arrangements like pauses between breaths, creating space for silence to speak its own language. This is sound as sanctuary, where the holy reveals itself not in grand gestures but in the iridescent ordinary, in the hush that settles when we stop trying to name what moves us and simply allow ourselves to be moved. The album becomes a quiet manifesto for presence, suggesting that perhaps the most revolutionary act is simply to exist with eyes wide open, meeting each moment without the armor of assumption.
Jeff Tobias “One Hundredfold Now in This Age” (Repeating Cloud)
Jeff Tobias’s latest album is full of conviction, promises, and a heavy dose of political realism. On top of that, there’s a timelessness to the sonic palette and underlying (or, more accurately, in our faces) message that this would have hit as hard in 1970 as it does in 2025. Tobias is the best kind of madman: Undaunted, focused maximalism, turning this energy into something meticulously crafted and ready to explode. This isn’t nihilism. This isn’t unfiltered rage. It’s solidarity that says the only way is through, and the work starts now. Here’s a great interview with Jeff in Foxy Digitalis earlier this year.
VP “Cosmosis” (Hospital Hill)
Cosmosis is immersive and challenging, but well worth the effort of digging into it all the way. Pham constructs environments where the familiar transforms into something unrecognizable, where ancient voices become speculative futures. These are sonic biomes to inhabit, intricate and alive, each detail containing whole galaxies of ideas about what sound can be and what it can reveal. What makes the album exceptional is how surprisingly moving it becomes, resonating with something deeper that speaks to our place among all these voices that have shaped the world alongside us.
History Dog “Root Systems” (Otherly Love)
History Dog is electric. This all-star cast of trumpeter Chris Williams, drummer Lesley Mok, bass guitarist Luke Stewart, and vocalist Shara Lunon scatter an array of sonic ashes back into the fire to birth something ritualistic and all-knowing. Visceral jazz motifs crumble under the weight of these expressions (this ain’t a jazz record), bleeding into frenetic noise marrow and the electronic scarring of yesterday’s trash. It’s all charred grooves and synthetic atmospheres of bleeding into a monument of magic. Totally spectacular.
Siavash Amini “Caligo” (Room 40)
Siavash Amini has been one of my favorite composers for many, many years. Caligo is based on two of the earliest piano recordings from Iran; Amini reimagines and reworks these pieces into something magical and horrific. Nightmares grind through stone and static, leading to elegiac soundscapes that feel like crumbled civilizations screaming their last breath. There is such a wide scope here that speaks to Amini’s abilities, and the way he maneuvers between and connects these varying modes, all pulled from such simple source material, is nothing short of exceptional.
MC Yallah & Debmaster “Gaudencia” (Hakuna Kulala)
This is one hell of a collaboration and perfect pairing. MC Yallah remains one of the best MCs on the planet. Her flow and delivery are precise and relentless, jumping between English, Luo, Luganda, and Kiswahili in a way that becomes her own, unique language. Debmaster’s beats are the perfect fodder, bending dimensions into each other, creating cascading texture dreams that give Yallah all she needs to fly. Resolute and prodigal.
Eyvind Kang “Riparian” (Kou)
From a Foxy Digitalis interview with Kang earlier in the year:
Riparian is his first solo instrumental album, and it arrives as something intimate and meditative, centered on the viola d’amore, an instrument with seven strings above and seven sympathetic strings below. Across two longform improvisations, Kang explores what he calls an “amphibious” approach: pizzicato-like particulate matter, the bow like flowing current, and somewhere between them, a hidden riverbed where one technique reveals itself inside the other. Recorded by Randall Dunn during the pandemic, the album captures Kang at a threshold where sound, ecology, and memory flow freely together, its unstruck resonant strings sounding what he describes as “a music of the spheres” that exists in the space between touch and body.
okkyung lee “just like any other day (어느날)” (Shelter Press)
I love it when one of my favorite composers does something totally unexpected. This music is so intimate and alive, radical in its unfettered approach, yet approachable with its whimsy and melodic care. (It’s also shocking to hear lee compose without the cello, but a testament to her skill and dedication as a composer that this works so well.) It may be an album for background listening, but these ten pieces carry real, lived-in gravity. A stunner.
Laura Cocks “FATHM” (Relative Pitch/Out of Your Head)
Few people in the world can do as much with a single instrument as Laura Cocks with a flute. They coax out textures that feel impossibly vast, turning breath into architecture, and silence into weight. In their hands, the flute becomes something both ancient and alien, tracing lines between memory and dissolution with a patience that feels almost ceremonial. Another all-timer.
Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone “◯” (Good Morning Tapes)
RIP Ariel Kalma. One of the greats. From The Capsule Garden 4.3:
In the music of dreams, possibility becomes tangible. Ariel Kalma and Asa Tone’s ◯ is divine; a liminal séance in search of aqueous lucidity. Synthesis flows through organic channels, forming a gentle sonic tide filled with dancing patterns and sun-kissed harmonies. Kalma threads woodwind spectrality through Asa Tone’s intricate aural machines, crafting a sense of weightless wonder, as if floating above a lush world and taking it all in at once. At its core, ◯ is a whimsical spectacle—bouncing pizzicatos, buoyant rhythms, chiming reverberations, and infectious melodies zigzag through vivid corridors of sound and feeling. Flute wisps become airborne figures drifting across tonic treetops, everything moving in unison yet at oblique angles. Each texture is rich with depth and character, heightening the pleasure of listening as these pieces unfold, sculpting sonic landscapes in real time. ◯ is pure magic.
Sean McCann “The Leopard” (Recital)
This album brings me such joy. There’s something so beautiful in seeing/hearing an artist that’s been part of my life for decades fully realize this part of their creative vision, I didn’t quite know they had. That’s The Leopard. I’ve known Sean’s work since around 2007, and since those early days, he’s had a distinctive approach and sound. This opera is a ride. Between the incredible sound design and sonic atmospheres, strange and beguiling dialogue, and excellent voice acting performances, it creates a world that feels both meticulously constructed and perpetually unraveling as it dissolves and reforms like a fever dream. One of the most unique records I’ve listened to in 2025.
Patricia Wolf “Hrafnamynd” (Balmat)
While Hrafnamynd is a soundtrack to Edward Pack Davee’s film of the same name, it’s also a beautiful album on its own. Lush synthscapes with a timeless melodic bend and enchanting sequences fuse together to create a living, breathing aural palette. Everything here is light as air, but the emotive currents flowing through the warm, welcoming soundworlds. Wolf never disappoints.
Light-Space Modulator “The Rising Wave” (AD 93)
This is such a dream collaboration between Marlene Ribeiro and Shackleton, two long-time favorites. Spacious, folk-inflected sonics are grounded by minimalist, dub-in-shadows rhythms that provide a platform for dreamy, slightly haunted electronics and, of course, Ribeiro’s captivating voice. There’s a ritual quality running through it all, each track feeling less like a song and more like a carefully constructed spell meant to rewire how we hear the world. So good.
Kevin Drumm “Sheer Hellish Miasma II” (Erstwhile)
The sequel we all were hoping for. Sheer Hellish Miasma II does exactly what I want it to do, pushing beyond the pain barrier into something else entirely. Full onslaught. Never stop.
Emotionally open music that balances vulnerability with gentle oddity. Radical softness as a deliberate choice.
Zachary Cale “Love’s Work” (Self-Released)
The air between strings becomes a hymnal of devotion.
claire rousay “a little death” (Thrill Jockey)
The tiniest moments loom large in the end, all refracted through a disorienting prism.
Dustin Wong “Gloria” (Hausu Mountain)
All the emotions in one place: sadness, joy, wonder, and gratitude spinning together like Gloria’s own loops.
M. Sage “Tender/Waiting” (RVNG Intl)
Peace is built from small bricks made from tenderness, patience, and grounded hope.
Music where playfulness and strangeness collide.
Takao “The End of the Brim” (EM)
Soft whimsy in broad strokes and intricate details. A fantasy world made from clouds and golden string.
Polypores “Cosmically A Shambles” (Crackedankles)
Bounce house exuberance swinging like free-falling patch cables at midnight.
Giant Claw “Decadent Stress Chamber” (Orange Milk)
Real ‘it’s-all-burning-down-so-might-as-well-speed-run-every-possible-feeling-in-40-minutes’ energy. Gloriously fun. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Music where heaviness transforms into catharsis and unexpected hope.
Aho Ssan & Resina “Ego Death” (Subtext)
Meticulous pathways carved from organic matter with synthetic tools spiraling into release.
Spiritual Exit “Fragment” (Debacle)
If the sun were any brighter, these purification rituals would become dust.
HHY & The Kampala Unit “Turbo Meltdown” (Nyege Nyege)
Rhythmic blasts and the sky breaks open for us all. Never stop moving.
Music that feels unstable, frenetic, fragile, or barely holding together.
S’inia “A Blind Water Whisper Sinking Into Ascension” (Nunc)
We all become ethereal water nymphs with operatic voices.
Cecilia Lopez & Wenchi Lazo “Desposable” (Tripticks Tapes)
Static personified. Electricity in flesh. Synapses ready to break.
Zeynep Toraman “a lifetime of annotations” (Sawyer Editions)
Each movement feels as though it might disintegrate into a cloud. Beautiful.
Albums deeply rooted in specific landscapes and environments.
Yui Onodera “Kiso Three Rivers” (Field)
Rivers that become more than rivers, carefully held.
Dania “Listless” (Somewhere Press)
The space after midnight becomes a world unto itself. Dark. Euphoric.
Weston Olencki “Broadsides” (Outside Time)
A travel diary. A documentation. A reckoning.
Albums that operate outside conventional structures and systems.
Babau “The Sludge of the Land” (Patience/Impatience)
Neon fun houses are a way of life in the purest form.
Cat Purse “She Has Candy” (SØVN)
The circus became living circuitry.
Robert Turman “A Day In The Life” (Hanson)
History repeating, a few short snippets at a time, feeling like the whole world stopped.
yaz lancaster “AFTER” (ptp)
It’s not what’s real; it’s how we remember it that sticks.
Music where sound becomes environment, texture, and space itself.
Yumiko Morioka & Takashi Kokubo “Gaiaphilia” (Métron)
If softness and whimsy were combined as a living prayer. Enchanting.
Alexandre Navarro “Les Toiles De Nuits” (Facade Electronics)
Emotive, micro worlds of electronic texture.
Ótal “Heyr” (Black Cat Enterprise)
A synthetic mental map pulls us deeper into a beautiful, blurred existence.
Field recordings revealing the hidden sonic life of built environments and human spaces.
Lia Kohl & Zander Raymond “In Transit” (unjenesaisquoi)
In between moments, to here, from there, as a piece of art.
Bryn Davis “Sometimes Things Change” (Edições CN)
Every day, the magic surrounds us; we just have to pay attention.
Works built from dialogue between human composers and non-human voices.
James P. Crutchfield, David D. Dunn, Alexandra M. Jurgens “Whales In Space” (Florilegia)
Conversations under the waves, imagination runs wild.
Julia Edith Rigby “Sea Cave Breathing I” (Self-Released)
An opera for a world ridding itself of us. A distillation of what stays behind.
Mariolina Zitta “Concert For Bats, Voices And Natural Sounds” (Black Sweat)
Human voices with frequencies beyond, with unexpected cadences.
Andrew Pekler “New Environments & Rhythm Studies” (Faitiche)
The smallest creatures carving out rhythmic codes. Fantastical and strange.
Drone music for immersion and losing yourself in tone.
Theodore Cale Schafer “Uncanny” (Self-Released)
Gleaming sounds that seem to go on forever until we become one.
Claire M Singer “Gleann Ciùin” (Touch)
Enduring moments become the seeds of radiating decay. Stunning.
Aleksandra Słyż “Tonarium Live” (Superpang)
Elegant horror into a sharpened prism, focusing every tone into a point.
Music designed as brief refuges or shelters within chaos.
Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka “Hiraeth” (Unsound)
If the world could be a playful dream…
Almost an Island s/t (Past Inside the Present)
Encased in sine waves that were kissed by the late summer sun.
Joshua Burkett & Lau Nau
The mystical forests are still alive even when we stopped looking.
String music (guitar, cello, piano) that maps emotional and physical geography through resonant strings.
Bill Orcutt “Another Perfect Day” (Palilalia)
Bill’s always there in crunch time, lighting up the sky.
Theresa Wong “Journey to the Cave of Guanyin” (Room 40)
A meditation within the guts of it all as things fall apart. Vulnerable and striking.
Caleb Flood “Hot Tub Music For Frogs” (Strange Mono)
If we stop moving, we probably won’t get up, and so we just keep going.
Sophie Agnel “Song” (Relative Pitch)
Cellular forms, massive galaxies, and everything in between.
Sound installations and spatial works translated into album form.
Ellen Fullman “Elemental View” (Room 40)
Resonant plucks bending in all directions until the existential becomes intrinsic.
Shawn Edward Hansen “Station To Station 1 – Sound Installation, White” (Self-Released)
Sometimes we hear colors. Sometimes we see sound.
Lastly, before I go, I have to mention Tusco Embassy. These lifers are still going with the most incredible releases this year, aka their Roulette series. Each of the records in this series plays a different song every time the needle drops, thanks to the way the record is cut. It’s wild (and didn’t make sense until Tusco sent me a couple, and I listened to them. It’s so wild and fun and exciting). Read Philip Sherburne’s interview with Nathan Bowers to learn a ton more, and watch out for a Roulette-style episode of Songs of Our Lives next year with him.
(Also, I’ve become obsessed with Burgan Triangle Tapes recently)
(My kid also got me pretty into K-Pop this year. Shout out SKZ)
(This is far too many words, but thank you to everyone who read this far)
