While it didn’t end up in my Best Albums of 2024, one of the releases that almost made it into the list was Mahōgakkō by Japanese musician Hakushi Hasegawa [長谷川白紙]. It’s an insanely, gleefully over-the-top cavalcade of pure pop extroversion, exhausting yet irresistible, mind-melting in its complete stylistic and artistic …

The assorted members of Australian experimental group Ektoise are involved in a plethora of other musical outlets, one of which is Subsea, the solo project of Jim Grundy. Untitled V is an album released in 2017, and while the title suggests otherwise, doesn’t appear to be the fifth in a …

One of the most exciting – and, typically, underappreciated – pop acts of the 2010s was Man Without Country, the welsh duo of Tomas Greenhalf and Ryan James. Beginning in 2011, they released a series of truly outstanding singles – including King Complex, Inflammable Heart, Puppets, Migrating Clay Pigeon, Closet …

An interesting album that came out quite late last year is San Servolo Registri Festival Concert, featuring assorted organ-based electroacoustic works performed by Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua. It’s a curious mixture of music, yet while the pieces demonstrate a certain amount of diversity, several of them share aspects in …

The most immersive Icelandic music i’ve encountered is by Þóranna Björnsdóttir, whose collaborative work LUCID blew my mind a few years back (becoming by Best Album of 2019), and who has consistently captivated me on the various occasions i’ve heard her performing live. Released in 2022, Þyrpingar [convergences – the …

It’s January, when we take time to recover from the repercussions of our festive financial shenanigans, and i once again turn my attention to some of the best music available that doesn’t require – but no doubt deserves, if you can – any kind of payment. i originally cottoned on …

And finally we reach the zenith, the apex of this year’s best albums, each and every one of them a bewilderment of shock, awe and wonder.

It was 16 years ago that my first Best Albums of the Year list was published, and for most of the years since there have been 40 entries on the list. However, there were many times when recommending 40 as genuinely ‘best’ felt like a struggle, and a few years …

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Behind the final door on this year’s Advent Calendar is a short but exciting work by one of England’s more curiously neglected composers, Hugh Wood. The Variations for Orchestra began life 30 years ago, apparently composed over a three-year period from 1994 to 1997. That seems a surprisingly …

Everybody needs more Galina Ustvolskaya in their life. Especially at this time of year, which so easily and so unthinkingly tends to the traditional, the saccharine and the stupid. i’ve explored Ustvolskaya’s bracingly refreshing, invariably mesmerising music on several occasions, including her first and third symphonies. i remarked before about …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is an ambitious work by arguably Iceland’s most exciting and radically forward-looking composer of recent years, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Ecognosis was composed in 2021, a work for bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and various transduced tam-tams. It was intended to be premièred at the Dark …

On 3 December i explored a performance of Giacinto Scelsi‘s enigmatic late piece Maknongan on electronics. This second performance, which comes from the same concert, uses the kannel – the Estonian folk zither – performed by Anna-Liisa Eller with a mixture of fingers and ebow.

i’ve always felt surprised that Aphex Twin‘s music can be transferred from its original electronic form into instrumental configurations. The proof that it can has been demonstrated several times, ever since Philip Glass’ masterful orchestration of Icct Hedral way back in 1995, and in previous Advent Calendars i’ve discussed arrangements …

In 1997, British musician Janek Schaefer created an instrument he named the ‘tri-phonic turntable’, a pimped-up record deck featuring a trio of tone arms and the ability to play fast and loose with rotation direction and speed. That same year, he gave a performance at the Urban Salon in London …

As i’ve often remarked here (usually in connection with yet another Proms commission) i’m not a fan of contemporary works that seek to ‘respond’ to earlier music. It’s a lazy commissioning approach, usually producing dismal musical results, with the only successes emanating from composers who aren’t particularly fussed about how …

Today’s Advent Calendar piece, Static by Finnish composer Otto Iivari, is technically an audiovisual work. On the two occasions i experienced it, the electronics were presented in conjunction with a tiny TV on a table, displaying a mixture of static and several clear bands that made for a curious relationship …

There are times when it can feel like all contemporary music is split down the middle, with half the composers concerned with frantic activity and movement, and the other half obsessed with the opposite, stillness and immobility. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s more than a little truth to it, and …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a quick bit of fun from British composer Sasha Scott. In 2019, Scott won the Senior category in the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition with a four-minute orchestral-electronic hybrid titled Humans May Not Apply. It’s a work that both pits the acoustic …

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the shortest works i’ve ever written about. Circumdederunt… in memoriam Rita Wagner by György Kurtág commemorates the Hungarian pianist who died in 2021. Back in 2019, my esteemed blogospherical colleague David Nice mentioned that, after attending a masterclass with Wagner, he had “probably …

One of the most incredible – and entirely unexpected – performances i’ve heard this year took place in Tartu University Museum in April, at a recital given by Estonian duo Anna-Liisa Eller and Taavi Kerikmäe. These two, in their combinations of kannel, keyboard instruments and electronics, exploring both contemporary and …