10. Rafael Toral – Traveling Light (Drag City)
Traveling Light picks up where last year’s revelatory Spectral Evolution left off, weaving together ambient music, jazz, homemade electronics, and field recordings to create something earthy and pastoral yet also otherworldly and abstract. This time, Rafael Toral leans even more heavily into jazz, drawing upon the Great American Songbook for raw materials to be spun into gossamer spiderwebs of anti-gravity pedal steel guitar, woozy, harmonious, and hypnotic drones.
Warm and inviting yet still unsettling at times, Traveling Light draws out the shadows and the light of standards like “Body and Soul”, “Solitude”, “My Funny Valentine”, and “God Bless the Child”, creating an ambient record with a warm, beating human heart. – J Simpson
9. Asa Horvitz / Carmen Quill / Ariadne Randall / Wayne Horvitz – GHOST (Celestial Excursions / Het HEM)
A highly conceptual, process-based album that combines themes of grief and loss with artificial intelligence, GHOST is the result of Asa Horvitz, grieving the 2017 loss of his father, looking for a musical language “to evoke our metaphysical and tangible experiences with loss and the weight of history that surrounds those who have passed on,” according to the press notes. Assembling a dataset of more than 150 pre-existing texts from throughout history that deal with grief, Asa Horvitz fed them through a custom Natural Language Processing AI system.
Compositions resulted from vocal improvisations featuring bassist and vocalist Carmen Quill, as well as Ariadne Randall and Bryan West on processing, synthesizers, and viola da gamba, and Horvitz’s uncle, pianist Wayne Horvitz. You’ll probably never hear anything like GHOST, and while it is undoubtedly an acquired taste, the honesty and fearlessness with which this project is approached is palpable, infectious, and appreciated and loved more with every listen. – Chris Ingalls
8. Kelly Moran – Don’t Trust Mirrors (Warp)
Last year’s exquisite Moves of the Field found Kelly Moran employing her impressive range of extended piano techniques to the realm of dance music, transforming her prepared piano into uncanny automata of perpetual motion and mechanical longing. This year’s Don’t Trust Mirrors inverts that principle, using the same tools and techniques to go inward. Sentimental, thoughtful, plaintive, longing, Moran’s piano becomes a music box, a time capsule, or a drifting fogbank, displaying a remarkable fusion of imagination and craft. – J Simpson
7. Mondo Lava – Utero Dei (Hausu Mountain)
Following Parrot Head Cartridge and Ogre Heights, James Ketchum and Leon Hu are back with Utero Dei, another journey into the world of loops, distortion, and wild stylistic jumps. Releasing music once again on the Chicago-based experimental imprint Hausu Mountain, the heads of that label describe James and Leon’s music much better than any mere music journalist can, referring to the new album as “beautifully fried excursions” and “humid rainforests of sound”.
There’s no shortage of cluttered, gleefully overstuffed collages to work with. “Golem Boogie” is a noisy funk workout, while the gurgling, rapid-fire bass line of “Decalcified Pineal Gland” seems to reach into the inner depths of hell. Part of the pleasure of Utero Dei is seeing where Mondo Lava will go next. It’s experimental, often abrasive stuff, but the journey includes many curious detours.
The fretless bass of “Venus of Willendorf” uses New Age as its sonic template. Meanwhile, “Brass Fields” revels in rainy field recordings under a simple, deliberately paced guitar/synth melody, only to fall apart and end up unfettered and cacophonous. Utero Dei is wild, often puzzling, but a whole lot of fun to get lost in. – Chris Ingalls
6. Anna von Hausswolff – ICONOCLASTS (Year 0001)
It feels unfair that critics and haters are often so quick to dismiss love songs, as if love, romance, relationships, and all the things that go with them aren’t among the most intense and impactful experiences we can have in life. That goes for the end of love, as well. Breakups aren’t just the end of a relationship. They’re a sort of death, a dissolution, an end to our lives as we know them up until that point.
In ICONOCLASTS, Swedish composer/singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolf gives love the respect it deserves. Employing her signature pipe organ sublimity along with 10 ton-beats and stratospheric vocals to truly bottle the wild conflagration that follows the end of a relationship and the rebirth that follows. – J Simpson
5. Dustin Wong – Gloria (Hausu Mountain)
For Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and guitarist Dustin Wong, recent albums such as Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu (2018) and Perpetual Morphosis (2023) saw him moving away from guitar loops to incorporate more synths and samples into the mix. In Gloria, Wong continues along that path, but the album’s contextual theme brings a more emotional pull to the music.
The record’s title refers to Gloria Violet Lee Wong, Dustin’s grandmother, who died last year, just shy of her 96th birthday, and is inspired specifically by a road trip Dustin took with Gloria down the American West Coast in 2023. Gloria is presented as a memorial to her storied life and a celebration of the warmth and kindness that characterized their close relationship.
Tracks range from the bouncy, jittery “Memories of Cordelia”, incorporating deft fingerpicking and woozy, tropical flights of fancy mixed in with the samples and percussive stomping, to the sparse, airy “Glass Beach”, and mini-vignettes like “Gloria & Backman on the Phone” and the rigid, robotic “Malcolm, Carey, Darrel, Andrea, Janice”. Gloria is adventurous, sonically unique, and a uniquely emotional tribute. – Chris Ingalls
4. The Necks – Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Disquiet is a misnomer. The 21st album from the Australian is very quiet indeed if we’re using the word to mean unassuming and unobtrusive. Unengaging it is not, though, even if it consists of four monolithic hour-long tracks. Lean in a little closer, and you’ll find an absolute riot of details: hypnotic motorik rhythms cruising frictionlessly beneath a cloudbank of Fender Rhodes and airy double bass.
Judging solely by the instrumentation, you’d think Disquiet is jazz, which it is, sort of… just don’t expect any chord changes, heads, tails, bodies, bridges, or otherwise. Instead, it sounds like Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis summoning some vast cosmic mechanoid to deliver us from evil. It’s one of the most spellbinding four-hour records ever laid to tape. – J Simpson
3. Pulse Emitter – Tide Pools (Hausu Mountain)
Pulse Emitter is the musical moniker of Daryl Groetsch, whose work with the synthesizer has embraced melodic synth music, organic ambient, relaxation, microtonal, and noise/drone, and while the most recent Pulse Emitter album, Dusk (2022), encompassed most of these subgenres, his new one, Tide Pools, is more of the same. Which is good news, because Groetsch absolutely excels at creating synth soundscapes that sound mind-bendingly wild, are massively melodic, and demand repeated listens.
In the opening track, the frantic, jittery “Energy Flying”, Groetsch immediately creates an atmosphere of futuristic hope. Things slow down on the more ruminative “So Many Leaves”, but none of the sleek sophistication or generally upbeat vibes are compromised. Despite the songs all seeming to embrace the same positive headspace, there’s plenty of variety and individuality.
“Chip Stacking” is positively playful: crystal clear melody lines that are rich and irresistible, often coming off as a soundtrack to the world’s most advanced video game. As Pulse Emitter, Daryl Groetsch excels at creating musical worlds that are always filled with optimism alongside a bold artistic spirit. – Chris Ingalls
2. Jamie Lidell & Luke Schneider – A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams (Northern Spy)
“A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Jamie Lidell explains on the Bandcamp page of A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams. “Specifically, in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approaching issues and working through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.”
Lidell uses modular synths, Fender Rhodes, tape effects, and percussion, and Luke Schneider employs interplanetary swaths of pedal steel to create a listening experience that can bolster a psychedelic trip or provide a pure, adventurous, and ambient sonic ride. These lush instrumental soundscapes can be easily described as “dreamlike”, as there’s always a sense of ethereal, semi-conscious bliss. By creating music with a specific, therapeutic purpose, the collective talents of Lidell and Schneider have delivered an otherworldly soundtrack to dreams—and the spaces between them. – Chris Ingalls
1. Swans – Birthing (Young God)
Has there ever been a band with a stranger trajectory than Swans? From the anarchic, post-metal noise terrorist roots in the 1980s to the sublime Gothic sound architects in the 1990s to out-and-out critical darlings in the 2010s. The fact that Michael Gira’s dense, relentless, existentialist noise symphonies would ever catch on outside of black box Goth clubs is strange enough. That they also enjoyed a moment as a viral phenomenon is either proof that the simulacrum is finally shutting down for good or that we’ve collectively lost our damn minds.
Either way, Birthing would deserve recognition for being the final installment of Swans’ legendary Big Band era alone. The fact that it’s as challenging, punishing, relentless, intoxicating, frightening, and exciting as any of their most challenging works earns it a place at the top of the list. – J Simpson