The music of 3Phaz wobbles in Bristolian ways and hits hard like a Berliner, but is actually firmly rooted in Cairo's mahraganat scene. Following the already overwhelming debut from 2020, »Ends Meet« is the album on which the anonymous producer has found a sonically powerful synthesis of global influences and regional colour. Raw and rugged as well as polished and smart, these seven tracks open up many frames of reference in a short time and also perspectives for the future.

No best of list without International Anthem; the Chicago label remains the go-to place for the best that jazz has to offer today. Asher Gamedze's second album »Turbulence And Pulse« undoubtedly fits that description. This spiritual jazz noticeably derives from South Africa; it's just that the earth has a different colour here. Not only is Gamedze's work on the drums outstanding, but the other musicians on the album are in the same league as the greats; Buddy Wells on saxophone, for example, is simply magnificent. 

Bendik Giske's own body has always played a central role in his circular saxophone playing. It demands full commitment when the sax is made to sing with a continuous stream of air, the throat microphone eavesdrops on the intimate voice, while two extra microphones on the fingers make the percussive closing of the keys audible. With his fourth album, the Norwegian musician and performer now fully arrives at himself. Where he opened up and treaded spaces on 2021's album "Cracks", his new album, simply titled "Bendik Giske", is up close and personal. It seems to oscillate around Giske, interweaving with his body, making contact, reflecting on himself in all his facets and ultimately dreaming of new possibilities.

Over three solo albums, Daniel Blumberg has written many broken songs, but with his fourth he has destroyed his songwriting itself. »GUT« is a literally visceral album on which the music itself becomes a foreign body. Blumberg still sings his choruses while it drones and rattles in the background. But he does so almost dutifully, especially when he reminds himself of his actual job near the end of the record: »Daniel, keep on singing!«. Whether he will do that or not, we’ll figure out on the next record. Until then, »GUT« remains his most radical album.

Pascal Pinkert likes to hammer on sheets of metal and let the synthesizer pipe to the max. With De Ambassade, the Dutch musician and producer has written »The Fool« as a manifesto for our times: in a frenzy between apocalypse and escapism. Rooted in Amsterdam's DIY scene, Pinkert once again straddles genres. Deadly serious and cinematically beautiful, the album oozes ambivalence: Armed with corset and harness, the sombre audience whoops as the band recounts tales of the last man.

2023 was supposed to be the year for De La Soul, with their entire back catalogue finally becoming available on all streaming portals. But then, on 13 February, the tragic news of David »Trugoy the Dove« Jolicoeur's sudden death broke, plunging the entire hip-hop family into a deep state of shock. So it is bittersweet to hear Dave's voice on one of the streaming services or on vinyl, as all of De La Soul's albums from the 90s and early Noughties have finally been re-released. To symbolise this, we have chosen »Stakes Is High« for our review, the secret fan favourite from 1996, whose title track seems more appropriate than ever even more than 25 years later. #DaveForever 

Tartelet seems to have finally made its pivot in the direction of indulgent electronica during the first half of this year and ... Well, that's a Good Thing™ for sure. Besides Glenn Astro's fake mixtape »Nothing Is Real«, it was especially »Birds (In My Mind Anyway)« by Doc Sleep that stuck out. Her belated debut also marked a new beginning for the Jacktone co-founder, who constructed her own sound from scratch again and perhaps found her definitive sound: warm, tender, and still idiosyncratic.

Egisto Macci is probably best known as a member of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, to whose credit the legendary album »The Feed-back« can be attributed among others. As a solo artist, the musician, who died in 2022, wrote the scores for dozens of feature films and hundreds and hundreds of TV documentaries and shows. In 1979 he embarked on a trip to Asia, at least musically. Simply dubbed »Asia«, the LP was never released on vinyl until Cinedelic released it as a record this year. So, no doubt some people are now talking about appropriation. However, »Asia« is more of a tribute than anything else: Macci draws on flutes, marimbas, celestas and a host of other instruments alluding to India, Japan or Korea - weaving hypnotic, shimmering instrumental pieces with tremulous percussion that frighten package tourists and evoke the spirit of a sword-and-sandal movie rather than a tea ceremony.

For »You Look So Serious«, Florian TM Zeisig Basinski’d an old Enya album, and yeah, on paper or on screen that will perhaps read like the most terrible idea since the Shitty Flute hype of yesteryear. But it also sounds exactly like a worn-out new-age vocal tape from 1988 is bound to sound when it's taken apart and put together again: Like the beauty found in mourning that Grouper or Leyland James Kirby have been so able to capture with their music, like a nostalgia for Hauntology, and absolutely high on visions of the future that never came to pass. In short, it’s a marvellous thing.

The needle placed haphazardly on the record: »There is so much shit in the world, is good, bad, mad, sad, ugly, happy, but I just love beauty«. At this point, I briefly consider pronouncing the review finished. In reality, everything has already been said. Not only about the music, but also about the present, and also about myself, somehow. It gives me the creeps, in a good way. The person behind »The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth« is also someone who goes by the name of Headache. Origin, age, ethnicity, appearance, beliefs: unknown. Vegyn from PLZ Make It Ruins is also involved. Or so it is said. The music is straight out of 1999, Mo' Wax, Boards Of Canada, Air. In the background, a stream of consciousness, wrapped up in catchy slogans that you want to graffiti on walls, tattoo on your skin or write in your yearbook. I'm pretty sure at any moment some guy is going to tell me to put some sunscreen on. But that moment doesn't come. Instead: »Make some noise right now for the voices in your head«. 

Al Wooton and Valentina Magaletti continue to work at chordal speed under the name of Holy Tongue and, after three fantastic EPs, immediately follow up with another inspired album. »Deliverance And Spiritual Warfare« not only sounds like a combative hotstepper in the title, but dub in all its forms of the last five decades runs as a leitmotif through the album that still achieves to sound extremely contemporary. It is remarkable how stringent it is. ESG fun stands on equal footing with basic channel seriousness and traditional echo chamber madness. 

Whether Dean Blunt is a member of Honour or not has still not been ultimately established, but it would be the final accolade. Following the first volume, which we previously reviewed somewhat hysterically here, the second volume of »Hbk« has now been released on vinyl as well, an ambient trap sonata with hallucinatory vocal contributions, upbeat triplets and Just Blaze horns. Possibly the album of the year. 

The first Japan Blues album still holds me spellbound; every time I listen to it, it's different. After listening to »Meets The Dengie Hundred« eight times, it's clear that album number two will also remain incredible, literally. In particular the 20-minute B-side sounds like nothing I've ever heard before, even though the individual elements can be clearly named. Hit of the decade, probably.   

This is the penultimate Dean Blunt teaser for today, I promise. A few weeks ago, another of Joanne Robertson's modest collections of sketches was released via AD93. »Blue Car« is little more than voice and guitar and disarmingly transparent. Anyone who still has space on their shelves between Grouper, Maxine Funke and Jonnine will know what to do. 

Improvisations with guitars and effects machines from the Basque Country: Friends Joseba Agirrezabalaga & Mikel Vega play their way from drones to fingerpicking and back again on »Lepok«, somehow creating a basic vibe made up of post-rock and blues. The earth is parched dry under the sun on this one, the dissonance is as great as the harmony, one craves for a cold beer in some godforsaken landscape. 

Three years after his excellent »Liquid«, Josiah Steinbrick has released a new album. »For Anyone That Knows You« features mostly piano, and that's often all that's needed to express biting melancholy, fleeting hours, irretrievable moments. Every now and then the divine saxophone appears, making »For Anyone That Knows You« one of the most beautiful albums of the first half of the year. 

Post-rock from Bristol in 1995, now finally re-released as a deluxe double LP and an absolute must-have. Movietone's self-titled début displays the ravishing pissed-offness of Algebra Suicide, a weariness, a whateverness that, as of today, somehow no longer exists. You don’t have enough strength to sing, and it's raining too much to make getting out of bed worth it. Great coolness tinged with universal sadness and occasional bursts of noise, oh England, where hast thou gone? 

Meanwhile, Maxime Denuc's formula for »Night Horn« is gimmicky but undeniable. Trance and rave melodies via pipe organ, Barker via Kali Malone, an idea as simple as it is dangerous. Denuc almost consistently manages to capture the cheesy Ibiza harmonies with a statesmanlike gravitas in such a way that »Nachthorn« doesn't feel like a calculated TikTok stunt, even though conceptually, there's so much meta rubbish lying around here that it should all fail as crashingly in reality as »Everything Everywhere All At Once«.

On Split, the two producers Nick Léon, who finally put himself on the dance music map with last year's smash hit »Xtasis«, and DJ Python, whose list of great deeds would go beyond the capacity of this piece, share an EP that is far removed from the four-to-the-floor scheme. Their summit meeting was a great success: Léon delivers his upbeat drum rolls on the first two tracks, while DJ Python counters them with psychotic hi-hat thunder and fear-inducing synths on »I'm Tired«. 

Operating Theatre is an almost forgotten group of performers led by the Irish eccentric Roger Doyle. The All City sub-label Allchival released a compilation of the single albums »Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth« (1979) and »Rapid Eye Movements« (1981) this year. With his electro-acoustic experiments on »Oizzo No« (1975) and »Thalia« (1979), Roger Doyle had already gone a step further than most. On »Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth« he discovered sampling and drum machines, giving himself at least a five-year head start on music history. This is the first time a Fairlight CMI sampler was used in an Irish studio and is said to have attracted the interest of Bono Vox. You just learned something! »Rapid Eye Movements« delivers a little more of the musique concrétè madness we know from his earlier records, and not a jot worse. 

With »Fade Into You«, Romance translates Fassbinder's »The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant« into a glittering, kitschy soundtrack of transience that sounds like a dramatic mix of David Lynch, 90s R&B and Burial. The Cindy works by Palmbomen II immediately come to mind. There's enough nostalgia on this one to almost give you the feeling that Tumblr is peaking and that the Internet is still a pretty good place. What year is it? 2012? 

Roxane Métayer works with many small things to create integrated wholes. Violin, woodwinds, effects and her voice are used in pieces in which sounds seem to float freely in space. What draws them together and makes them vibrate with each other are the guiding ideas of the French composer-performer, who alternately takes folk, minimal music, Fourth World borrowings or electro-acoustic music as her compositional starting point. Her journeys seem predetermined, but only Métayer knows in which direction she is taking the music. Those who follow her are in for a plethora of surprises.

Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood were romantically and creatively involved for roughly half a century. This album, dedicated to the late Anderson, is probably the only logical coda to their relationship. The centrepiece is »Conversations«, comprising recordings of their very first phone conversations, edited in a way that it almost exclusively features their laughter. What they are laughing about is never really clear, but it becomes palpable why they do it: captured here is the excitement of young love. As if that weren’t enough, the album is rounded off by one solo piece each.

»Moon Set, Moon Rise« feels like a Meitei record without the beats or a The Caretaker album at the wrong (or right) speed respectively—like a faded memory of a desperate night with Alice Coltrane's music. It offers everything both neo-classical and jazz have always promised you but, for various reasons, never could deliver. A piano, a cello, two »old souls«, as Salenta Baisden and Topu Lyo call themselves: This simple equation results in music that has become pure atmosphere. A vibe. A feeling that was born out of itself. »Moon Set, Moon Rise« is an album for eternity, ephemeral as cigarette smoke at an open window.

One of the best loved practices in music journalism is to announce albums of the year when they are just two months old. Sam Goku's »The Things We See When We Look Closer« is a candidate that might have elicited dozens of reactions like this. And rightly so, in this case, for the Munich-based producer has succeeded in piecing together a vivid world of techno, ambient and house over the course of eleven tracks. You can even clearly hear his passion for video games as he cruises along »Lotus Drive«. 

Piano again, again the cello from Arthur Russell.  On »Sweet Harmony«, the TLF Trio finds the magic formula made up of unapologetically neoclassical harmony addiction and a detached minimalist jazz coolness that makes this album endlessly re-listenable.  

The name of the game is to be alert. Violence, rebellion, fear, adrenaline. Six years on from his superb début »Invincible East«, Tzusing continues to tear up the streets with »Green Hat«. Hardgroove techno with a dystopian vibe forms the core around which Tzusing builds a framework of industrial and EBM that will raise your pulse and freeze your blood at the same time. Something wants to take over here and it is definitely not good. 

For years, upsammy's work has been concerned with the fertile contrast between the artificial and the organic, the man-made and the natural, the gurgling and the rustling. This practice works best on »Germ In A Population Of Buildings«. On this occasion Thorsing allows her tracks, which oscillate between bass music, techno and ambient, to speak not only metaphorically, but quite truthfully, thus immeasurably increasing the alienation effect inherent in her music.