10. Ezra Feinberg – Soft Power
Feinberg emerged about 20 years ago as the leading member of a San Francisco psych rock band called Citay. He has since moved to upstate New York (to practise psychoanalysis), and his albums now seem to explore music traditionally described as “psychedelic” (stoner rock, krautrock, lysergic folk, acid house and so on). But, crucially, Feinberg subtracts all the “rock” elements: the drums, the distortion, the dissonance. So we get the playful minimalism of Pose Beams; the hypnotic kosmiche rock of The Big Clock; the shimmering ambient house of There Was Somebody There – all wonderfully therapeutic pieces that are part of a beatific song cycle. Read the full review
9. Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion – Rectangles and Circumstance
In which the Pulitzer prize-winning composer sings new songs inspired by 19th-century poets. Silently Invisibly (after William Blake) is accompanied by a disorientating clockwork beat; Emily Dickinson’s I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain is transformed into a jerky piece of junkyard hip-hop called Like a Drum; Christina Rossetti’s When I Am Dead My Dearest provides the basis for the fidgety electronica of Sing On; a traditional Scottish verse called The Parting Glass is accompanied by a quiet riot of bowed wine glasses and clattering tumblers. Best of all might be the mesmeric and ghostly version of a Schubert lied that ends the LP. Read the full review
8. Astrid Sonne – Great Doubt Edits
This Danish viola player, singer and producer released Great Doubt in February, mixing her experimental odysseys with some gloriously twitchy and unhinged R&B beats. In September came this LP of edits and remixes. Smerz takes Say You Love Me into heavy dub territory, all twitchy, one-drop drums and Auto-Tuned vocals; the delicate, fugue-like baroque synths of Staying Here are transformed by Je3 into a piece of rave; Do You Wanna (Have a Baby) is taken in another direction, its thumpy drums removed until it’s turned into a gentle meditation; while Blood Orange takes Give My All into a similarly spartan setting.
7. Laura Misch – Sample the Earth
In 2023, the London saxophonist, singer and producer Misch released her first full-length album Sample the Sky, a piece of burbling electronica and beats, inspired by the interlinked nature of the ecosystem. The follow-up is a complete and almost unrecognisable reworking of that album as Misch plays live in the studio with a largely acoustic band. She’s turned it into an intense and stately piece of chamber music – almost baroque in places – and a much more melancholic sonic exploration of the natural world, most of it centred on Marysia Osu’s florid harp flourishes and Emma Barnaby’s cello drones.
6. David Crowell – Point/Cloud
Minimalism, by its very nature, can often be robotic, repetitive and melodically stilted. But, in the hands of the New York multi-instrumentalist David Crowell, it can be a wonderfully rich and harmonically complex form that’s full of joy and colour. Crowell, best known for playing sax and guitars for the likes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, here delegates the playing to others. The 15-minute opener is a piece of junkyard minimalism featuring Sandbox Percussion; the 10-minute closer features the cellist and singer Iva Casián-Lakoš accompanied by woozy electronic drones; on other tracks guitarist Daniel Lippel creates an audacious kind of baroque flamenco. Read the full review
5. Carlos Nino & Friends – Placenta
There is something almost wilfully formless and chaotic about this album, in which the Los Angeles-based percussionist draws together a diverse group of collaborators from wildly different areas of the LA musical world – André 3000, Sam Gendel, Nate Mercereau, Laraaji, Surya Botofasina, Adam Rudolph, Photay – and accompanies them in various ad hoc configurations. Some start off sounding like impromptu jam sessions in a junkyard, others like random and scribbly musical sketches played on knackered synthesisers, but all start to take on hypnotic dimensions as they proceed. The effect is gloriously disorientating.
4. Daniel Inzani – Selected Worlds
A triple album could be seen as a monumental act of hubris by this self-taught pianist and composer, but Inzani’s two-hour epic is a triumph. The three discs are very different – the first, Form, features formal chamber compositions, including a string quartet in four movements; the second, Lore, features a series of dramatic soundtrack-like pieces for an extended orchestral ensemble; the third, Play, moves into the world of contemporary jazz. What could be a series of pastiches instead takes form as a unified series of suites, each with a strong sense of narrative cohesion and musical clarity. Read the full review
3. Michelle Moeller – Late Morning
American musician Moeller is a classically trained pianist who, while studying under Zeena Parkins, became obsessed with analogue synth technology. In order to “turn off her piano player brain” and avoid playing a synth as she would a normal piano, she uses non-keyboard interfaces to generate sounds – warped, ethereal, space-age noises – that she manipulates in real time. This album contains intriguing experiments in minimalism, texture and drone, but Moeller also integrates this with her classical background, with improvised meditations and solos for piano, prepared piano and flute that are so heavily mutilated with effects that they sound as though they’re melting. Read the full review
2. Nala Sinephro – Endlessness
On her second album, this London-based Belgian musician switches between pedal harp, piano and synths throughout a dreamy, 10-part suite, featuring top UK jazz performers including Nubya Garcia, James Mollison, Sheila Maurice-Grey and Lyle Barton. But, even more so than her 2021 debut Space 1.8, Sinephro moves beyond spiritual jazz into space-age electronica and ambient music, mixing Alice Coltrane and Throbbing Gristle with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It inspired a different but equally wonderful performance at the Barbican last October, which would make a magnificent live album in its own right. Read the full review
1. Damian Dalla Torre – I Can Feel My Dreams
Damian Dalla Torre is an Italian saxophonist based in Leipzig, who collaborated with some of London’s top jazz musicians for 2022 debut album Happy Floating. For its follow-up, he decided to explore a completely different world of music, inspired by field recordings of the natural world made while working as an artist in residence at a music school in Chile. There’s very little jazz here, and barely any saxophone – instead he and an international cast create nine shimmering, dream-like meditations, drawing comparisons with Windham Hill-style New Age music, the ambient Fourth World music of Jon Hassell, and Floating Points’ Mercury prize-shortlisted collaboration with Pharoah Sanders.
