#388

Elza Soares - The Woman at the End of the World (Mais Um Discos)



Over a variety of shattered sonic backcloths veined with electronics, Soares’s voice strains beyond breaking in songs of political injustice and social violence. It is a vital, fearful sound. — Francis Gooding

#387

Puce Mary - The Spiral (Posh Isolation)



Still building with the same base materials as industrial music and its descendants, Puce Mary applies an adroit sense of feng shui to the factory floors she envisions. — Tristan Bath

#386

eMMplekz - Rook to TN34 (Mordant Music)



What brings “Gloomy Leper Techno” to life, coupled to Nick Edwards aka Ekoplekz’s nodding dog electro beats, is the repeated use Hicks makes of “cheers mate bye”, transforming the ubiquitous smartphone sign off into a sustained declaration of resentment. — Ken Hollings

#385

David Bowie - Blackstar (ISO/RCA)



Its collage of jazz, electronica and an off-beat driven percussion is one that is continually spooled out and reined in by an infinitely flexible song structure, something that’s so typically Bowie at his most inventive. — Louise Gray

#384

Roscoe Mitchell - Sustain and Run (Selo Sesc)



He’s developed an approach to circular breathing every bit as innovative and demanding as Evan Parker’s. At the age of 75, he’s still extending himself, as evinced by these pieces for soprano and sopranino recorded live in 2013. — Daniel Spicer

#383

The Sprawl - EP1 (Death of Rave)



A three-way partnership between Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise, the group first convened in 2015 to play an improvised set at Berlin festival CTM, but have since mutated into a studio unit creating an organic electronic music that defies any easy categorisation. — Louis Pattison

2015

Wire 15 (3)
Rie Nakajima - Four Forms (Consumer Waste)
Heather Leigh - Nightingale (Golden Lab) +#371
Runhild Gammelsaeter & Lasse Marhaug - Quantum Entanglement (Utech)
Björk - Vulnicura (One Little Indian)
Beatriz Ferreyra - GRM Works (GRM)
Tyondai Braxton - HIVE1 (Nonesuch)
Alessandra Eramo - Roars Bangs Booms (Corvo) +#375
André O. Möller & Hans Eberhard Maldfeld - In Memory of James Tenney (Edition Wandelweiser)
Eva-Maria Houben - Air: Works for Flutes and Organ (Edition Wandelweiser) +#376
Alternative TV - Opposing Forces (Public Domain)
Malcolm Goldstein - Full Circle Sounding (Kye)
Amir ElSaffar - Crisis (Pi Recordings)
Mario Diaz de Leon - The Soul is the Arena (Denovali)
The Necks - Vertigo (ReR Megacorp)
Harry Bertoia - Sonambient (Important)

record of the year
André O. Möller & Hans Eberhard Maldfeld - In Memory of James Tenney (Edition Wandelweiser)

#382

Harry Bertoia - Sonambient (Important)



Bertoia’s eureka moment of discovery led inexorably towards two decades of increasingly ambitious and ornate metal sculptures designed specifically as sound-generating art objects: massed ranks of suspended and overhanging metal rods with which anyone, musically trained or not, could create sound by pushing or nudging them into action. — Philip Clark

#381

The Necks - Vertigo (ReR Megacorp)



The Glenn Gould of jam bands, theirs is not, in fact, the pristine impetuous utterance authentically preserved in its wondrous singularity, but something far more tailored and honed, edited and overdubbed. — Robert Barry

#380

Mario Diaz de Leon - The Soul is the Arena (Denovali)



[T]his Minnesota born composer grew up listening to hardcore punk, then graduated to immersion in industrial noise, free improvisation and the scored scintillations and collisions of Scelsi and Xenakis. — Julian Cowley

#379

Amir ElSaffar - Crisis (Pi Recordings)



ElSaffar’s solution is to play within all three parts of the Venn diagram of jazz, Arabic music and what they have in common, and he manoeuvres within this territory without imposing a hierarchy that turns one element into an exotic seasoning of another. — Bill Meyer