Naturally, the focus is on guitar, both electric and acoustic, but Anderson also plays some other stringed instruments (e.g., the tres cubano) as well as keyboards and accordion and is joined on several tracks by Gisela Rodríguez-Fernández on violin and viola. The sound is clear and spacious, with from one to three instruments on each track. The well-written liner notes provide detailed documentation of both the sources and Anderson’s approach to adapting them for Western instruments.

The album opens with a drone played on accordion followed by a flurry of acoustic hammer-ons and pull-offs; this tune, named “Quodlibet” in the original source after a Central Asian genre (with a Latin name), combines three distinct melodies from distinct traditions, all in less than three minutes. As Anderson observes in the liner notes, on this and other tracks, it was necessary to adapt the microtones of the original compositions for instruments (guitars and keyboards) that are restricted to semitones; a comparison with the original demonstrates the effectiveness of Anderson’s approach as well as the beauty and allure of the tradition.

Similarly, “Taqsim for Guitar” involves the adaptation of a Western instrument — the violin —  widely used in modern Arab music because of its ability to produce microtones (there being, of course, no frets). Anderson’s performance of this lovely Syrian composition captures its stateliness, with cascades of notes and bent strings punctuated by slight pauses. “Rabāba,” by contrast, is built from three tracks (electric guitar and traditional Cuban and Mexican stringed instruments) that combine to recreate the driving repetition that characterizes the original solo piece on the instrument for which it is named.

Other pieces make use of electric piano to create drones over which the melodies dance. “Pair of Duduk” is characterized by a gentle rise in pitch, while “Rop Koh” immediately reveals its Southeast Asian origins (Cambodia) without descending into exoticism, especially with the pedal steel recreating the feel of a bowed instrument. A very simple, trance-inducing Vietnamese melody played entirely on electric piano (“Whistle Song”) closes out the set.

Rodríguez-Fernández’s contributions on violin and viola enliven “Sarvi Simin” and “Zar.” As a result of the aforementioned adaptability of the bowed instruments, these tracks are the most non-Western-sounding in the set. Their inclusion also contributes variety to the overall sound of the album.

Among the most ambitious projects in Anderson’s ambitious catalog, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music Vol. 1 is a major achievement in terms of scholarship and bringing these fascinating and compelling pieces of music to a broad audience, in like manner as Harry Smith’s anthology helped popularize U.S. folk music. It is also a pleasure to listen to and a demonstration of Anderson’s understated mastery of the guitar. Hopefully, other volumes will follow.

Christian Carey 

John Luther Adams —  Horizon (Cold Blue)

Julianne Barwick & Mary Lattimore —  Tragic Magic (InFiné)

Sean Shibe —  Vesper (Pentatone)

Caroline Davis —  Fallows (Ropeadope)

Setting —  s/t (Thrill Jockey)

Craig Taborn —  Dream Archives (ECM)

Heinz Holliger —  con slancio (ECM)

Marisa Anderson —  The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music (Thrill Jockey)

Wendy Eisenberg —  s/t (Joyful Noise)

Robert Humber —  Into air (Redshift)

Tim Clarke

Cancer House — The Moth (Motion Ward)

Lyke Rayne — The Time Will Sort Ye Out (Slow Spell)

Jana Horn — s/t (No Quarter)

Aldous Harding — Train on the Island (4AD)

Dry Cleaning — Secret Love (4AD)

Setting — s/t (Thrill Jockey)

Greg Weeks — If the Sun Dies (Language of Stone)

Prism Shores — Softest Attack (Meritorio / Having Fun)

Ana Roxanne — Poem 1 (kranky)

Shaking Hand — s/t (Melodic)

Bryon Hayes

Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti —  Almost Waking (Unheard of Hope)

Damaged Bug —  ZUZAX (DEATHGOD CORP)

Winged Wheel —  Desert So Green (12XU)

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore —  Tragic Magic (InFiné)

The Sleeves —  s/t (12XU)

Setting — s/t (Thrill Jockey)

Prism Shores —  Softest Attack (Having Fun)

Dialect —  Full Serpent (RVNG Intl.)

Osees —  OFF COURSE (DEATHGOD CORP)

Kelley Stoltz —  If You Don't Know Me, Buy Now! (Dandy Boy) 

Alex Johnson

Kurt Vile — Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me (Verve Forecast)

R.E. Seraphin — Tiny Shapes/A Room Forever (Take A Turn)

Emily Robb — Soundtrack to The Space Between Attack and Decay (Petty Bunco)

Bill Callahan — My Days Of 58 (Drag City)

Ratboys — Singin’ to an Empty Chair (New West)

Sleaford Mods — The Demise of Planet X (Rough Trade)

Olivia Rodrigo — you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love (Geffen)

Jennifer Kelly

Kelley Stoltz — If You Don’t Know Me, Buy Now! (Dandy Boy)

Juliana Barwick & Mary Lattimore — Tragic Magic (InFiné) 

Twisted Teens — Blame the Clown (Chain Smoking) 

Kevin Morby — Little Wide Open (Dead Oceans) 

Lupo Citta — Inverno (12XU) 

Jim Marks 

Marisa Anderson — The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music (Thrill Jockey)

Chad Fowler & Matt Lavelle Quartet — Whirlpool (Mahakala)

Matt Geary — Owl’s Lament (Scissor Tail)

Jarboe — Sightings (Consouling Sounds)

Magic Tuber Stringband — Heavy Water (Thrill Jockey)

Mahan Mirarab & Kian Soltani & Lars Danielsson & Golnar Shahyar — Unspoken (ACT)

The Peace of Wild Things — s/t (Porta Jazz)

Souled American — Sanctions (Jealous Butcher)

Thiago Susán — Con Este Ukulele (self-released)

John Zorn (performed by Julian Lage & Gyan Riley) — Seven Sonnets (Tzadik)

Ian Mathers

Angine de Poitrine — Vol. II (Spectacles Bonzaï)

bobbie — Lessons (Orindal)

Charli xcx — Wuthering Heights (Atlantic)

Excepter — Displacer (Excepter Records)

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore — Tragic Magic (InFiné)

Mandy, Indiana — URGH (Sacred Bones)

Status: Expunged — 2am Tim’s Rip (self released)

Tacoma Park — Baltimore (Centripetal Force)

underscores — U (Mom + Pop)

Whitelands — Sunlight Echoes (Sonic Cathedral)

Bill Meyer

Marisa Anderson — The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music (Thrill Jockey) 

Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie EXTENDED — Live At Moldejazz (Sonic Transmissions) 

The Handover — New Old Medicine (Sublime Frequencies) 

Magic Tuber Stringband — Heavy Water (Thrill Jockey) 

David Watson / Bill Nace — On Bats (Amish) 

Various Artists — Indian Talking Machine II (Sublime Frequencies)  

Jonathan Shaw

Bill Callahan — My Days of 58 (Drag City)

Cronies — Demo (Ragdoll)

Eddy Current Suppression Ring — In Light of Recent Events (Self-released)

Mylingar — Út (Amor Fati)

Prayer Position — Devotion (Phage)

Consistent with the focus of most of the volumes in the IA series, most of the tunes are played on acoustic guitars. The more traditional takes on Irish chestnuts include Junior Brother’s “Lark in the Morning,” Mark McKowski and Jerome McGlynn’s “The Blackbird,” and Caoimhe Hopkinson’s “Jamieson’s Favorite,” which recall the work of artists such as Davey Graham and Duck Baker on releases by the Kicking Mule label in the 1970s. Nugent’s snail’s pace version of the (possibly) O’Carolan composition “I Am Asleep And Do Not Wake Me” cleverly mirrors the title. Sidestepping the traditional material, Aonghus McEvoy turns in an unexpected and inspired solo acoustic take on Jimmy Guiffre’s “Cry, Want.”

Several of the contributors present their own compositions. “Inside Out” by Damien O’Neill, a veteran of The Undertones and That Petrol Emotion, is a lovely, if not identifiably Irish, tune sweetened with subtle electric guitar and percussion behind the acoustic. More Irishy is NC Lawlor’s “Laurie Rose,” featuring elegant hammer-ons and pull-offs and plenty of space between the notes. Brendan Jenkinson’s “Paris Blues,” with an insistent thumbed bass, is the most Tacoma-style track in the question.

Bracketing the acoustic tracks are David Murphy’s pedal steel reading of the centuries-old jig “March of the King of Laois,” which bridges Cork and ambient Nashville, and Sean Carpio’s original composition “Labour of Love,” also played on an electric guitar (standard rather than pedal steel).

This is a lovely album, its only drawback being its brief running time of barely 30 minutes. In a land as musically rich and diverse as Ireland, there are obviously more guitarists who could have been included (such as, for example, John McGrath, whose work has been reviewed in Dusted). In any case, the latest IA is another must-have for devotees of the always-evolving genre of Takoma-school guitar (and further proof that the “American Primitive” designation for the genre is overly parochial).

The focus here is on the six-string. “Knife Thrower,” “Cannoneer,” “Devshirme,” and “Get On The Horses” are fast-paced, featuring clusters of notes and heavy thumb work that branch into elegant runs of hammer-ons and pull-offs. The latter tune is especially engaging, with a driving minor-ish feel and stops and starts tracing an epic journey in just over three minutes. Opener “Resurrection,” the one tune featuring overdubbing, unites driving banjo with earthy guitar in a way that is particularly evocative of Bachman.

The latter half of the recording rounds the set out with more meditative tunes such as “Golden Jelzen”—the one appearance of a 12-string guitar — “To Philip,” and the lilting “Stabilitas Loci.” Šimanský’s mastery of the slide is in evidence here, as is his ability to command hold the listener’s attention at slower tempos.

The “Overseas Edition” volume of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem series of Takoma-school guitarists from a few years back demonstrated that players all over the world — including Šimanský on one track as part of a duo — have continued to find inspiration in an approach to the instrument that originated in the U.S. some 65 years ago. On What Do You Mean even more so than on his previous releases, Šimanský shows that he belongs in the company of the U.S. players who inspired him as well as non-U.S. contemporaries such as D.C Cross and Sebastian Bischoff (Son of Buzzi) who have embraced this demanding style.

The opening track pairs an uneasy droning fiddle with a highly processed recording of a midcentury folksong lamenting the displacement of the town of Ellenton, SC to make way for the Savannah River nuclear complex, which, in the 1990s, after decades in operation, was identified as a Superfund site. The sense of unease continues in “Marker of a Drowning,” featuring Evan Morgan’s spidery fingerpicking, which commemorates the deaths of a young couple in the river in the late 19th century, perhaps a reminder of an earlier time when the river was a threat to people instead of the other way around. In “Sound of a Million Stars,” inspired by an experimental film about another nuclear site gone awry (Fukushima), the field recordings mesh with the stringed instruments in a dense and aggressive mat of sound. A particularly stark presentation of the antithesis between nature and culture is the juxtaposition of field recordings of woodpeckers and gunfire, the former apparently responding to the latter in a track named after the birds. Pared back to fiddle, banjo (and perhaps guitar), the eerie “Scintillation” refers to technology used to measure radiation. Morgan’s guitar drives “Blooms in the Rapids,” which refers to a rare lily endangered by the ecological degradation of the Savannah River.

The more bucolic and wistful feel of “Tribute to the Angels” and “Where the Place Becomes Forgetting,” the latter with field recordings from a pond tainted with radioactivity and chemicals, suggests the possibility of appreciating the fleeting and fragile beauty of compromised ecosystems. On “Wintering Grounds,” keening fiddle, rustling guitar, and thunking banjo combine to pay homage the countless birds that have been passing through the Savannah River corridor for millennia, with the pace picking up in the middle like wings taking flight.

The rather gentle closing tracks, “Soft and Pliable” and “Dog-Headed Man,” hide melodies beneath scraping fiddle strings, otherworldly slide, banjo harmonics, and loops and field recordings. In fact, there seems to be a kind progression over the course of the album from alarm and indignation to resignation and appreciation of the persistence of nature amid the devastation, with an inflection point between “Woodpeckers” and “Scintillation.”

Mention should be made of the lineup: Werner and Morgan have previously brought other musicians into the recording studio and on the road with them, but Heavy Water marks the debut of the band as trio, with the addition of Mike DeVito as a full member on upright bass and, less frequently, banjo and fiddle; he also contributes the composition “Dog-Headed Man.” DeVito was part of the team that recorded the band’s previous release (Needlefall, 2004), and here he is completely integrated into the original duo. In keeping with the band’s project of redefining the traditional string band for the 21st century, he tends to prefer pizzicato pulses and arco drones to the one-five and walking basslines associated with this kind of music.

Heavy Water is, then, a spring and summer record with a powerful message about the inexorability of both natural processes and the forces unleashed by the human drive to dominate nature and other people. Kudos to Magic Tuber Stringband for consistently engaging both the head and the heart with their music.

Damian Anache — Lento, en un jardin reticular (Inkilino)

Damian Anache’s explores the tension between composition and improvisation. Working from a minimal palette of drone, voice, click and buzz, Anache conjures his music from the very atoms of sound. His real time manipulations involve the play of these elements creating fluctuations and juxtapositions that move between near silence and crescendos that scratch the air and seem to fold in upon themselves. Anache has an uncanny ability to untether his sounds from reality and as he molds his material, patterns take form. The simple contrast of the glacial timbre at the core of “La Llanura de las esferas” with its spectral echo creates flickers as the friction of the drones creates heat. He begins “Obvio y obtuso” with a disembodied choir which dissolves to what sounds like vocal clicks testing a rhythm over a wounded calliope, the choral sounds return, diced, denatured and reduced to uncanny emanations beyond language. An often perplexing but totally enthralling listen.

Andrew Forell

Billow Observatory — The Glass Curtain (Felte)

The duo of Jason Kolb (Auburn Lull) and Jonas Munk (Manual) have been collaborating for nearly 20 years now, but their music remains largely the same: glacial ambient, patiently constructed out of gently lapping pedaled tones, with textural embellishments that offer some welcome grit. In my Dusted review of their last release, 2022’s Stareside, I summarized its appeal thus: “hazily drifting ambient immersion, peppered with enough rhythmic momentum to prevent the music from drifting off into the aether”. In contrast, The Glass Curtain is a beatless experience, leaving the listener unmoored and floating. “Systol Nightshade” threads the sound of rainfall into the mix, but the majority of the album sounds abstract and free of reference. It’s a translucent, radiant space, but a little lacking in personality.

Tim Clarke

Ethel Cain — Perverts (Daughters of Cain)

There are all sorts of reasons Hayden Anhedönia might have called her 90-minute follow up to 2022’s cultishly adored Preacher’s Daughter an EP; artistic expression, expectation management (especially since Perverts is not actually the second instalment in the promised trilogy of Ethel Cain LPs), rent-lowering gunshots, an honestly pretty funny joke. But none of the explanations detract from the quality of the pestering drones and wracked ambience found on these nine tracks. The more song-esque efforts (“Punish,” “Vacillator,” even the closing 11:32 of “Amber Waves” with Midwife’s Madeline Johnston on guitar) sound like that first album stretched out like taffy and left to wither in the sun. The more abstracted material (“Pulldrone,” “Housofpsychoticwomn,” “Thatorchia”) is possibly even stronger, equally beautiful and harrowing; despite the extended lengths, it never wears out its welcome. The next actual Ethel Cain album, August’s Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, justly has a lot of expectations and anticipation swirling around it. But for a certain kind of listener, Perverts might remain the high water mark of her work to date.

Ian Mathers

Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz — Técnicas de Morte (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Brazilian death punks Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz present Técnicas de Morte, a full LP of reverb-soaked, sorta-old skool hardcore tunes. Check out “Pregos Podres,” for example, and you’ll find yourself pulling up a stool in a dusty, crepuscular club on the other side of the River Styx and clinking highball glasses with John Stabb and Pig Champion. Check out the tape’s next track, “Nada,” and you’ll be bumping and grooving with the ghosts of Olho Seco and Discharge (at that latter band’s 1981 peak). That’s not to suggest that Clan Dos Mortos Cicatriz is intrinsically backward looking or bound by cynical logics of pastiche. The songs are too energetic, the riffs are too fast and nasty. They might have a morbid interest in technologies of death, but they’ll be on the user’s end of the apparatus. Y’all better turn it up and then light out for the horizon — the psychopomp has a “Pacto Diabólico” for you to sign.

Jonathan Shaw

Decrepisy — Deific Mourning (Carbonized)

A death/doom band that’s extra heavy on the doomy ponderousness, Decrepisy makes music that moves with grotesque deliberation. Kyle House’s bass is a massive presence, and Daniel Butler, House’s old bandmate in crusty Bay Area monstrosity Acephalix, does his inimitably awful thing on Deific Mourning, grunting and groaning and being generally disgusting. But Jonathan Quintana’s guitar is the revelatory presence here, quivering and then pummeling, a weirdo performance that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole. The band’s hulking, lumpish mode is enveloping in complementary fashion — you can just about feel the peristalsis, pushing you farther down into the moist, viscid dark. Check out the record’s second half, especially “Severed Ephemerality” and “Afterhours.” Yuck, dudes. Someone better get a bucket.

Jonathan Shaw

Dikeman / Hong / Lumley Warelis — Old Adam on Turtle Island (Relative Pitch)

The album’s title references a collision of creation myths, and the music involves both creation and re-creations. Expatriate American saxophonist John Dikeman’s music with Cactus Truck and Universal Indians exemplified his roots in free jazz fundamentals, but he’s also worked productively outside those boundaries, as in the dream team combo that drummer Sun-Mi Hong brought to Jazzfest Berlin in 2024. This concert recording is the first to present his work as a composer, and we might one day look back on it as a tentative first step, since the sequence of themes work as focusing tools for some excellent blowing over Hong and bassist Aaron Lumley’s surges and retreats. The most significant compositional decision was actually one of casting; pianist Marta Warelis simultaneously inhabits the music and operates outside of it, adding levels of commentary and enhancement.

Bill Meyer

ELKA BONG — Alpha Bete (Self-Release)

Elka Bong builds intricate puzzle palaces out of the tiniest pieces of digital sound, manipulating squeaks and blots and hisses and blurts to create ever changing unreal landscapes. Here in conjunction with bassist, improviser and here, knob twister, David Menestres, the duo of Al Margolis and Walter Wright are intent and serious, even at play, in four ten-minute episodes. “Reversal of the Overheated” is antic and unsettled, wrapping clinks of percussion and tootles of some sort of melodic instrument in static-buzzing clouds. “Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol” sputters and shrieks and corrodes inside your ears. A sound like sticks on clamped bells and altered voices provide some reality-grounding, but you are purposely directed away, towards the abstract dance of noisy sputter. “Keeping Up with the Jonses” inserts a vibrating, horror movie keyboard into its digital chatter and backtalk. And “The Scent of Time” waxes lyrical, with wiggling tendrils of synthesizer that gesture towards melodic solace, only to shrink back into themselves and curdle. Not an easy listen, but there are rewards for perseverance.

Jennifer Kelly

Good Sad Happy Bad — All Kinds of Days (Textile)

When Micachu and the Shapes morphed into Good Sad Happy Bad, they shed the nervous, jittery energy that drove their previous incarnation away from easy categorization. Their music retained enough of the weirdness that aligned the band with Animal Collective and similar kooky sonic wizards, but Mica Levi and their comrades let songwriting and hooks rise to the top of their unique brew. They also bathed their music with a sense of dreaminess. All Kinds of Days, the sophomore effort from Good Sad Happy Bad, continues this trend toward the calm. The songs reveal themselves with an effortless charm, bouncing along with traces of dub and jazz. Human experience drives the lyrical content, which is delivered by each of the four band members. This shift toward existential awareness is a mirror that Levi and the band use to encapsulate life’s turning points in song. In their hands, turmoil and grace intertwine, revealing a pleasant listening experience. 

Bryon Hayes

Hearts & Minds — Illuminescence (Astral Spirits)

While the name of this trio implies plurality, a fundamental unity sustains Hearts & Minds. Bass clarinetist Jason Stein and electric keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo have been friends since sixth grade and have maintained a playing partnership since reuniting in Chicago in 2004. Completed since 2016 by drummer Chad Taylor, H&M uses compositions by both founders and similarly oriented collective improvisations as frameworks for pithy dust-ups between charged textures, sophisticated melodic progressions and confidently refracted grooves. Giallorenzo’s synthesizer and electric piano confer a kind of retro-futurist glow that is nicely balanced by the other members’ caffeinated restlessness.

Bill Meyer

Hieroglyphic Being — Dance Music 4 Bad People (Smalltown Supersound)

Jamal Moss’s music harks back to the sweat of clubs, secret if not entirely hidden. For those seeking a different kind of charged musical experience. Physical yes, rife with carnal possibility yes, but with an edge of darkness and complexity. As Hieroglyphic Being, Moss creates sacred hallows of celebration. He imparts knowledge and demands respect for the sharing of his learning. You can dance, you will dance, but on his terms and with ears and hearts open. Scaled large but intimate, Moss goes for the slinky and insinuating, filled with ancestral whispers, cosmic exhortations, an insistence on freedom of expression as resistance. Tracks come at you from unexpected angles, the titles offering clues; “Reality is not what It seems,” “The Art of Living A Meaningless Life,” “Awakening from A Dream State.” Atop shifting beats, the bass lines are funk driven and psychedelic, cosmic synths hang and glide. Seeped in a heady erotic fug, Dance Music 4 Bad People, is house music’s secular version of spiritual jazz.

Andrew Forell

Russ Lossing Trio — Moon Inhabitants (Sunnyside)

The Russ Lossing Trio’s chosen challenge is to see how much freedom can be found within a structure, and then to see what can be made with it. Pianist Lossing, bassist Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Billy Mintz operate happily within a jazz piano trio idiom that has endured for decades, and if you chose not to pay attention to what they’re doing on this disc, it could easily serve as background fare for people who prefer their jazz served with a steak and a cocktail. But even a cursory listen reveals a wealth of quite surprise. The material encompasses Harold Arlen, Ornette Coleman and Piotr Tchaikovsky, as well as a few Lossing originals. All of it is negotiated with respect for each piece’s structural challenges as well as a readiness to go quietly airborne at any moment, lifted up by the rhythm section’s push-pull and the pianist’s knack for resolving dense improvisational forays with an updraft of melody. Full disclosure — not so long ago I wrote liner notes for one of Lossing’s solo recordings on another label.

Bill Meyer

Pedro Silveira — Costeiro (self-released)

Pedro Silveira is a Brazilian guitarist who, on his second release, focuses on the ukulele. The way he plays it, the instrument, often associated with camp and silliness, sounds so full that it can easily be mistaken for a nylon string guitar. He is joined on Costeiro by Marcelo Muller, whose upright bass balances the high pitch of the ukulele, and the tasteful percussion of Marco Lobo. The performances and Silveira’s compositions recall classic recordings by the likes of Luiz Bonfá and Baden Powell. It’s unclear whether overdubbing was involved, but a video shows his formidable technique on what appears to be a tenor ukulele. Light and breezy, this Latin jazz release is a great spring soundtrack.

Jim Marks

Southern Avenue — Family (Alligator)

This Memphis soul quartet mines powerful traditions like electric blues, soul and gospel, with ebullient, harmonized choruses, coruscating guitar licks and a way of leaning on a vamp until it’s nailed to the ground. “Upside” is maybe the best of the lot, driving hard but with a southern saunter, wheeling around the corners with Stax organs squealing. Tierinii Jackson commands the forefront with her church-grown, blues-burnt vocal style, the notes tumbling out of her in flowery elaborations. She’s got all the tools — the belt, the grunt, the growl, the melismatic embellishment, the righteous payoff—but it wouldn’t work without the smoking band, or the chorus of backing singers who bat back every phrase to her with joy and certainty. Good stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Tàrrega 91 — Ckaos Total (La Vida Es un Mus)

You have to give props to Tàrrega 91 for the band’s single-minded purpose: relentless d-beat that documents a 1991 uprising in the Spanish town of Tàrrega that resulted in the arrest and detention of over 80 people. The Catalonian band keeps things aesthetically lean and mean, playing a variety of anarcho-punk that hasn’t changed much at all since Crass and Discharge broke the form open and continental bands like the Wretched, Negazione and Kangrena started making 7” records. One might object: history has ground onward with its own variety of relentlessness, so are these throwback sounds really what we need in 2025? The flip response will note that fascism is back, as if Franco never left. For certain, the fascists’ bullshit populism has renewed energy, and their cynical claims of fighting for the working class are even more repulsive. Maybe a shot of reliably disruptive sonic violence is just what’s required. Punks not dead, your head is.

Jonathan Shaw

Ultisol — Precession of the Equinox (Island House)

Ultisol is the alter-ego of Georgian fingerpicker Daniel Lamb, a guitarist heavily influenced by Takoma School players, especially Fahey. But this latest full length expands the artist’s scope with thoughtful, wide-ranging arrangements, fleshed out by likeminded musicians, including pedal steel player JP Bohannon, the harpist Megan Searl, the bass player Kevin Scott and percussionist/producer Dale Eisinger. As a results, cuts like “Intermittance” starts small and grows to something epic, while “Configuration” weaves smoke wreathes of pedal steel tone and ruminative bass around a pensive guitar clangor that might remind you of Loren Mazzacane Connors. Opener “Endless” sets the tone putting radiant acoustic and tone-shifting pedal steel in front of the sound of wind and surf, like you went to heaven and there’s a beach there.

Jennifer Kelly

Dustin Wong — Gloria (Hausu Mountain)

LA based guitarist and composer Dustin Wong memorializes his late grandmother Gloria on his latest album. Based on a road trip through California the pair took in 2023, Gloria is framed as both travelog and requiem in which Wong celebrates his grandmother’s life and captures the warmth of their relationship. Wong plays live over loops of treated guitar and effects, his often-wordless vocals and percussive effects provide a sense the places they visited, the people they encountered. Echoes of their separate and joint memories feel ever present. From the clip clop rhythm and Hawaiian lap steel of “Memories of Cordelia” to the pointillist syncopation of “Glass Beach,” Wong traverses styles to present nuanced evocations of his memories and his grandmother’s upbringing and life in the church. The album closes with two versions of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” In Wong’s interpretation of the hymn “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” his reverbed voice soars over a minimal guitar pattern in the first, whilst the second is a stately, heartfelt coda to a wonderfully evocative tribute.

Andrew Forell

You Ishihara — Passivité (Black Editions)

Black Editions continues to mine a treasure trove of Japanese underground music, exposing the eclecticism that bubbled under the surface of the country’s scene. Typically focusing on ferocious psych rock and experimental sounds, with this release they’ve uncovered something gentler. Passivité was the debut release from White Heaven frontman You Ishihara, a moody collection of sultry blues tunes. Surprisingly mellow for fans of his main outfit’s psychedelic garage rock sound, the skeletal songs unfurl like whisps of smoke in a crowded room. This is a solo album in name, but not in execution. Bandmate Michio Kurihara joins Ishihara on guitar, and members of Fushitsusha and Acid Mothers Temple appear on those tracks where he wanted to incorporate a full band feel. It’s the languorous and introspective songs that truly shine, with Ishihara coming across as a lonesome singer-songwriter spilling his melancholy to a rapt audience. Passivité is a unique entry in the Black Editions canon, an enjoyable document from the mellower side of Japanese psychedelia.

In the visual arts, a diptych is an image consisting of two parts, such as two panels connected by a hinge. Here, the six tracks form three pairs in the playing order, as indicated by the titles: “Positive”/“Negative,” “Resist”/“Coalesce” and “Scrambled”/“Over Easy.” “Positive” leads things off with a clarion call from the trumpet and builds steadily, with all four musicians bouncing off each other in a manner reminiscent of an early Ornette Coleman quartet track. “Negative,” on the other hand, starts with tight interplay between trumpet and sax and takes a more leisurely and fragmented approach supported by Fraser’s work on the cymbals and atmospheric arco from Downing and, in an interesting twist, slows to a dirge halfway through.

“Resist” also starts with a clarion call from the trumpet, this time accompanied by some martial snare and resolute plucks of the bass and goes out in a blaze of improvisational glory. “Coalesce,” as might be expected given the title, is gentler, with an almost post-bop feel.

The last diptych begins with a groan of arco bass introducing “Scrambled,” and the notional eggs simmer through the piece until it closes with another arco groan. “Over Easy” incorporates brief solos from Fraser and Downing and builds to a dizzying and highly satisfying climax to the recording as a whole.

As on all of the quartet’s recordings, the complexity of the compositions is infused with a sense of play and discovery. While all of the musicians naturally play with other groups, they never sound better than they do in this quartet. West, Downing, and Fraser know just how to bring Allemano’s compositions to life and give them the feel of standards from an alternative jazz universe. Diptychs demonstrates the inexhaustible potential of the chordless quartet and the boundless imagination of one of the best composers in jazz today.