Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
We return to having a guest on the podcast this week.
David J. Haskins has a new book and album due out on June 6th. Rhapsody, Threnody & Prayer is a new book of poetry published by Fonograph Media while The Mother Tree album will be released on LP and download through Erototox Decodings.
David discusses the new music, the book of poetry, his last book, Who Killed Mister Moonlight, as well as time in Love and Rockets and Bauhaus.
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Scott Morgan has been quietly and steadily releasing beautifully crafted and fog-veiled grayscale ambient-dub excursions for over a quarter century now so I was not expecting a huge creative leap forward this deep into the game, but Lake Fire may very well be the strongest loscil album of his career. Morgan’s breakthrough doesn’t sound like it came easily though, as this album was assembled from the reworked ruins of an aborted suite for electronics and ensemble (though one brooding and blackened piece from that suite (“Ash Clouds”) did manage to survive the culling). Notably, literal ash clouds were quite a significant inspiration this time around, as Lake Fire is something of an impressionistic road trip diary from a drive through the mountains of British Columbia while sky-blackening wildfires raged in the distance. In fact, the album cover is an actual photo of those smoke-obscured mountains that Morgan himself took from a rowboat on a lake.
Obviously, veiled & water-adjacent melancholy is nothing new for Morgan, but he brings a fresh intensity and an ingenious new approach to rhythm to his usual vision on pieces like the brilliant opener “Arrhythmia.” The insistent pulse of skipping loops suggests a malfunctioning amusement park wave machine that is furiously churning out waves of killer dub-techno fragments while its overworked pressure valves rhythmically vent bursts of steam. In fact, one of my favorite facets of this album is how masterfully Morgan creates rhythms with an unconventional palette of hisses, throbs, and subtle metallic textures rather than anything resembling a kick drum or cymbals.
It has been almost an entire decade since this project (or any project at all, really) last surfaced from dub-techno visionary Mark Ernestus, but I can think of few other artists who have played a more significant role in shaping my taste despite that lengthy hiatus (Rhythm & Sound, Chain Reaction, Maurizio, Basic Channel, and Hard Wax all loom quite large in my life). Notably, however, Ernestus’ previous mbalax-inspired recordings with Senegalese vocalist Mbene Diatta Seck and the Jeri-Jeri ensemble did not grab me as much as his other work, as it often seemed like Jeri-Jeri would have been just as compelling without his production expertise (albeit a bit less tight, crisply produced, and bass heavy). I like those earlier releases, of course, but they felt like a sharpening of an existing aesthetic rather than a fresh revelation. That said, Ndagga Rhythm Force is allegedly an absolutely killer live act, so maybe I would have been more enthusiastic in my appreciation if I had managed to catch them. In any case, I am definitely more enthusiastic now, as Ernestus’ vision has evolved considerably since 2016 and the first half of Khadim is on another level altogether.
The big difference is that Ernestus and his collaborators have ditched their guitars and it now seems like these pieces were collaboratively built from the ground up rather than being a mere remixed version of Jeri-Jeri. While I have no idea if that is what actually happened, these new pieces have been distilled to an aggressively minimal palette of only vibrantly rolling and clattering sabar drum rhythms, Mbene Diatta Seck’s soulful and dubbed-up devotional vocals, and subtle, well-placed electronic enhancements from Ernestus. The most perfectly distilled and executed example of this new vision is “Dieuw Bakhul,” as Seck’s ghostly vocals share “a Wolof tale of treachery” over a lurching rhythm gorgeously enhanced by Ernestus’ frayed and stormy dub-techno chords.
This release is (correctly) billed as the debut solo album from this Polish composer & multi-instrumentalist, but Markowska previously surfaced back in 2024 with a similarly fine EP (Thrills) and has recorded music for various art installations and soundtracks over the years. Given that this is a Miasmah release, the prevailing mood is often a bit of a dark and wintry one, but Markowska’s vision is otherwise quite distinct from most of her labelmates. While the main thread here can be roughly classified as “haunted Eastern European folk music,” Markowska’s darker “early music” inspirations are nicely balanced by ambient warmth, avant-garde techniques, and admirably exacting attention to the more subtle pleasures of texture and sound design.
The piece that first drew me to this album is admittedly a bit of an outlier, as “Train ride home” is a gorgeously rippling (if somber) zither reverie over a sensuous and increasingly prominent backdrop of bowed string drones. My favorite bit is the way the chiming notes of the central zither melody leave behind a lingering haze of ghostly harmonies, which is a cool trick that surfaces throughout the album in varying forms. Amusingly, part of me thinks “Train ride home” overstays its welcome a bit in devoting 7+ minutes to a single theme, but another part of me thinks that the sharpness of the zither attack, the subtle variations in the melody, and the glacially shifting harmonies of the lingering afterimages would be a killer start to a much longer durational piece.
It took six years, but Maria Somerville is finally back with another album, her first for the iconic 4AD. That is certainly a fitting home for Somerville, as Luster’s best moments favorably recall the label’s Ivo Watts-Russell golden age. In fact, the album description specifically (and aptly) invokes the lush romanticism of Ivo’s own shapeshifting This Mortal Coil project as a key reference point, but the resemblance is not exactly a stylistic one. Instead, Luster feels more like the kind of album that would have resulted if Julee Cruise had been backed by a revolving cast of ringers from classic 4AD acts like Cocteau Twins. I suppose Somerville’s greatest song (2019’s “Dreaming”) already evoked 4AD luminaries Tarnation quite beautifully, but Luster is considerably more “dreampop” in focus than its illustrious predecessor All My People.
While I do appreciate the many cool influences on display that one would rightfully expect from an artist with a long-running NTS show, Somerville’s greater allure lies in her knack for crafting absolutely gorgeous singles and Luster features quite an impressive run of them. For me, the heart of the album is the one-two punch of “Projections” and “Garden.” Notably, the two pieces are quite similar in a complementary way: the former beautifully marries sensuously breathy vocals with a slow-motion guitar chug and a killer chorus hook, while the latter ascends to dreampop heaven with a more muscular, bass-driven groove and a beautifully understated maelstrom of swooning shoegaze guitar magic.
This is both the inaugural release for Becker’s Clunk label and his first new album in nearly a decade, but it stylistically picks up roughly where his brilliantly demented Traditional Music of Notional Species series left off (grotesquely gnarled and squirming synth hallucinations beamed in from an alien jungle). Intended as a “labyrinthine four-chapter pseudo-musical that reflects the flustering absurdity of the current era,” The Incident feels like the fruit of a Lovecraftian scenario in which Becker is plagued by recurring nightmares of an otherworldly city populated by slime-covered and tentacled horrors and wakes up each morning with a fresh batch of disturbing field recordings documenting his extradimensional travels.
Characteristically, the primary allure here is that Becker conjured up some truly ungodly sounds, as it sounds like he circuit-bent a modular synth to make everything sound as viscerally slithering, gibbering, and gelatinous as possible. Notably, he also happens to be one of the greatest mastering engineers on the planet, which further helped shape this album into an immersive headphone mindfuck par excellence. That said, there has also been some compelling evolution since Notional Species II, as Becker now seems to play with spatial dynamics a bit more and also seems to have picked up a fresh gamelan influence. The more gamelan-inspired pieces all fall on the second half of the album (“stunde null,” “sāʿatu alṣṣufri,” and a “puttering purgation”) and every single one is a highlight evocative of a remote, ruined, and overgrown jungle temple where something ineffably ghastly and otherworldly has just been summoned.
On its face, this smoldering debut from NYC-based jazz chanteuse Eliana Glass seems like quite an inspired outlier for the historically avant garde-minded Shelter Press, as the smoky, sensuous minimalism of these depressive torch songs resembles absolutely nothing else previously released on the label. I certainly cannot fault their instincts, however, as the allure of E is immediately obvious from the first notes. To my ears, these darkly beautiful piano and voice performances evoke the chills-down-my-spine intensity of the late, great Patty Waters (minus the more harrowing and extreme bits), but Glass’s vision was more explicitly inspired by Carla Bley, Annette Peacock, and Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (all of whom are covered here).
There are also some unexpectedly leftfield details revealed in the album’s description, such as a fondness for vintage analog effects, subtly hallucinatory contributions from her brother (sound artist Costa Colachis Glass), a piece inspired by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, and the involvement of Francis Harris (one half of deep house duo Frank & Tony). Notably, the Agnes Denes piece (“Human Dust”) is one of the album’s two stone-cold masterpieces, as Glass’s languorous reading of a matter-of-fact post-mortem accounting of an artist’s life is a powerfully haunting and darkly funny meditation on mortality (“achieved 1/10,000 of his dreams,” “was misunderstand 3800 times when it mattered,” “was loved by 17 people including his parents,” etc.).
This latest release from Emily Cross’s long-running solo project is an absolute stunner that beautifully marries the intensity of prime Nina Nastasia with art-damaged slowcore melancholy and further ices that wonderful cake with viscerally wild eruptions of experimentalism. Fittingly, the album’s backstory is similarly colorful and compelling, as Cross has been working as a death doula in Dorset, England (her usual collaborator/Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski remains back in Texas) and a label interested in the album’s demos encouraged her to “push her imagination to the limits.”
Cross gamely embraced that challenge and summoned an international cast of musicians for a two-week recording session in Germany. Unfortunately, the label’s enthusiasm unexpectedly dissipated and Cross was left with an uncharacteristically expensive album, disappearing collaborators, a mountain of isolated recordings, and no label, but the passions of Marcin Sulewski, Seth Manchester, and Ba Da Bing’s Ben Goldberg eventually helped shape that would-be disaster into a finished masterpiece. In fact, the transformation of these songs amusingly reminds me of the moment in The Wizard of Oz in which an already great black and white film suddenly blossomed into gloriously vivid technicolor.
This collaboration between Seth Horvitz’s Rrose alter ego & the Munich-based Lindsey Wang is a marriage made in heaven, as Wang’s dancefloor-driven beat mastery brings a sensuous physicality to Rrose’s lysergic forays into psychoacoustic phenomena. While I am quite fond of the opening “Ellipses,” it is almost instantly eclipsed by the three-song run of sleekly futuristic mindbombs that begins with “Stretcher,” which has the feel of an out-of-control train barreling through a series of violent electromagnetic squalls.
There is plenty to love in the details as well, such as the endlessly morphing and lurching machine rhythm, the viscerally sharp cymbals, and the flanging acid-inspired bass patterns. Later, “Haima” revisits similar terrain with equally brilliant results, as it deceptively opens with a groove that sounds like the foundation for a brilliant Carter Tutti Void track, but intensifying waves of distortion suck it through a dimensional portal around the halfway point to transform it into an unstoppably heaving, throbbing, and burrowing juggernaut of sci-fi-damaged psychotropic brilliance. I especially loved how the disjointed panning percussion of the piece’s first half suddenly seemed amazing once a missing layer was dropped into place that made everything instantly feel like an integral part of a coherent whole.
This aptly named second album from Loraine James’ more ambient/impressionistic side is a bit warmer and less beat-driven than its predecessor, resembling an unearthed classic from the late ‘90s/early 2000s golden age of glitch-worshipping innovators like Oval and Jim O’Rourke and their more melody-centered peers like Telefon Tel Aviv. Fittingly, Josh Eustis was again involved on the mastering end, but there are also some interesting ironies as well, as these pieces are all named after rather chilly temperatures and James’ throwback to the early days of the laptop IDM era is actually deliberately hardware-focused.
More specifically, James tried to limit her gear to synths and pedals and kept overdubbing to a minimum. That spontaneous, in-the-moment approach composition, coupled with a fondness for using recorded sounds and voices from her surroundings, imbue the album with an endearing and tenderly diaristic feel. Some of the found sounds give these pieces an evocative sense of place, suggesting the echoing interior of a train station or the shouts of an epic snowball fight unfolding just outside James’ studio, but there are also some fun curveballs thrown into the mix, like the trippy collision of buzzes, James’ own pitch-shifted voice, and a stammering acoustic guitar motif at the end of “12°C” or the wonky, chopped-up arcade sounds in “15°C.”
Unexpectedly, my favorite piece is the brief interlude “23°C (Intermittent Sunshine),” which is an absolutely sublime bliss-fest of gorgeously smeary overlapping melodies, but “18°C” is yet another improbably beautiful stunner that recalls the best bits of Oval’s lush, dreamily skipping chords and loscil’s blearily hazy dubscapes. That said, the real magic of this album transcends easily graspable elements like songcraft, cool arrangements, or well-chosen influences, as the most transfixing moments tend to be crafted from billowing, dreamlike chords so achingly beautiful that I want to live inside them forever.
This sixth album from Chicago’s finest Factory Records-inspired post-punk trio features a significantly altered line-up, as founding member Jonathan van Herik is back in the fold once again (replacing long-time bassist Alianna Kalaba). On paper, that means that FACS now shares exactly the same line-up as the late, great Disappears, but with a bit of a fresh twist, as van Herik has now switched to guitar and frontman Brian Case has switched to bass. Notably, Wish Defense was also Steve Albini’s engineering swan song, which is fitting given that this album absolutely rules.
The same could be said of several other FACS/Disappears releases, of course, but the new guitar/bass configuration brings more melodic bass-driven riffage than previous albums and van Herik’s arty, minimalist guitarwork is every bit as inspired as Case’s own. The result is an album that seems to seamlessly blend the sexed-up deadpan cool of prime Girls Against Boys with the taut muscularity of Fugazi’s rhythm section and the seasick, tremolo-warped guitars of My Bloody Valentine. Choice influences aside, however, FACS embrace an aggressively, pared-to-the-bone style of minimalism that is uniquely their own, which gives van Herik’s alternately smeared, chiming, creaking, percussive, and slashing guitar sounds plenty of room to breathe.
For me, “Sometimes Only” captures the trio at the peak of their powers, as the dragging throb of Case’s thick, distorted bass buzz provides a perfect counterweight for a couple of forays into proggier/spacier terrain, but the title piece’s explosive chorus makes it a lock for the album’s strongest single. While not every piece hits the mark quite as convincingly as those two, the entire album is packed with passages in which every single member of the band is doing something so extremely cool that it makes FACS seem like the best goddamn rock band on the planet regardless of whether or not they actually manage to stick the landing.
In 40 years of creating music, Edward Ka-Spel and Legendary Pink Dots have rarely sounded so perfectly in tune with the world they’ve long warned us about. So Lonely in Heaven isn’t just another album; it feels like an artifact for our time, a mirror held up to the fragile, dystopian reality we’ve stumbled into. The Dots’ vision—once surreal, exaggerated, otherworldly—now feels disturbingly prescient. What was once a world imagined through their “Terminal Kaleidoscope” has merged with the one we live in. Maybe it was always this bad, and Ka-Spel has been trying to show us all along.
This is a heavy album—not just in tone, but in its emotional resonance. The question of whether we missed the point of life on Earth looms large. Did we abandon the imperfect connections that give us meaning to chase a perfect yet sterile paradise? The machine that Ka-Spel describes in the Bandcamp notes embodies this disconnection. It knows us, replicates us, promises perfection, but leaves us hollow and alone. In So Lonely in Heaven, Ka-Spel’s lyrics and the band’s haunting arrangements explore the cracks in that illusion, asking whether we need life’s imperfections—its traumas, its fragility—to truly live.
