Museum Musica

Germany / 1969 / Sound Collage, Ambient This is what happens when you let the founder of Can learn about tape loops, a revolutionary idea in musique concrète begun in the 1940s, introduce this same disciple of Stockhausen to a painter and then give them both access to a radio, magnetic tape, and scissors.

USA / 2025 / Dance-Pop, Electropop Like TayTay, Gaga has gone through “eras”, and so it’s no surprise 17 years into Gaga’s career that she would start to think about revisiting and blending together those past forays into sounds and genres. This is one of those albums that starts with a clear statement. Oh, this is what I’m gonna hear, is what the listeners realizes as he’s blasted with Gaga in…

USA / 1971 / Spiritual Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz Are you enjoying your astral projection? Comfortable? Good. Now get your face blasted off by the Horns of Chaos! I’m not saying anything new about this classic Sanders album at this point, but for anyone who doesn’t want to go read a bunch of longwinded reviews or listen to lying-ass AI, here’s what’s what: we all know what a magnificent run of…

USA / 2017 / Avant-Garde Jazz Why not both? She flew and died. Girlbossed too close to the drugs. This is her debut, but you can hear the writing on the score. Living too large, blowing too hard, music with a mission, ready to set the world on fire.

Estonia / 2017 / Estonian Folk As linguistic-minority female-led folk music, this kind of vocal- and kannel-led expression fascinates me, the original compositions herein drawing upon regilaul chants (the epic poetry of Estonia) to evoke sylvan feelings and provoke concern for environmental destruction and the depopulation of rural areas as recent demographic shifts pose an existential threat to…

Italy / 2025 / Avant-Folk, Chamber Folk There’s a certain kind of artist who will intentionally bend off-key notes once in a while, just to see if you’re listening. This is that kind of music. Imagine entering a chrysalis not to evolve as the caterpillar does into the butterfly but to “devolve”, not to become lesser but to shed yourself of all the complications and regrets clinging to you. This…

Jamaica, India, UK / 1969 / Post-Bop This so-called British jazz recording has a little bit of something for everyone: alto saxophonist from Jamaica, guitarist from India, female jazz vocals for those who like that sort of thing (I certainly do!), and killer support from British musicians who fill out this quartet. Jamaica? India? 1969? Ain’t no way anyone is letting this one go without harping…

USA / 1975 / Spiritual Jazz, Post-Bop, Free Jazz Lures the listener in with the mild, keeps him here for the wild, with the final track, “Soul Brother”, being the culmination of everything Hannibal wants to say about Malcolm X with his trumpet. My goodness… talk about using an instrument as a second voice! This cat’s got it. I also find it strange and exciting how Hannibal put down the trumpet…

Belgium / 2024 / Chamber Pop, Art Pop For a pop band, eight members is a lot, but mòs ensemble is just that: an ensemble, not a pop band, which means they approach the whole process of creating and playing music differently. Fresh, playful, unpredictable. These are the words that come to mind when listening to this little gem. And, of course, mellow. The vocal harmonies are gorgeous and magical,…

USA / 2007 / Experimental Rock, Avant-Prog Before Halvorson was a MacArthur Fellow, before she wowed us at NPR’s tiny desk, before she pissed off my friend for making the shittiest guitar music known to man, the eminent guitarist and weird vocalist was part of a duo (guitar and drums) that quickly expanded into a trio. Halvorson is known for her angular, atonal guitar work, and this album, in…

USA / 2022 (1965) / Singer-Songwriter, Contemporary Folk Every music nerd’s dream. The artist, the demo, what Reed did, how he did it, and how it was found. I’m just going to briefly retell the story that has been printed in various music rags already. When Lou Reed died in 2013, they were cleaning out / cataloging the detritus of his life when they came across a sealed package. The address was…

USA / 1987 / Experimental Rock These cats are weird. Just… weird. Going to Arkansas to get control? Then taking an elevator to the Moon. Who knew that southern rock had such a strange underground scene! I both hate and love the name “Throndossull”. Who or what is a “throndossull”? It just sounds dirty the way Hampton sings it. This dude seriously doesn’t give a single fuck, singing off-key…

France / 2022 / Neofolk This is nowhere near as wild as her next album, but it’s still a damn great debut from a fearless vocalist, still very much in my wheelhouse of freaky foreign female folk. First of all, the album title: it’s referring to the transmigration of the soul, or, in a simpler term, reincarnation. This music, straight from the high heart of Auvergne, is a meditation upon the…

Norway / 2023 / Avant-Folk, Sound Collage Apneseth and Ratkje met on the opening day of a five-day music festival, and sparks immediately flew. They had an impromptu concert right there on the spot, and like others before them who were confident in their craft and in their expressive powers, they took that improvisation into the studio, reworked their magic in a more controlled setting, and…

Brazil / 1981 / Contemporary Folk, MPB What I love about this album is its unconventionality for the early 1980s, especially because it was a time of tight corporate control over music. This isn’t the album that led me to the Vanguarda paulista movement (an experimental, avant-garde approach to making music by artists without major record deals), but its eventual inclusion in my collection was a…

France / 2026 / Polifonia occitana The duo is back, once again mixing their own compositions in with snippets and passages from the traditional folk of the region, that region being southern France, where the dying Occitan language is now spoken by only 600,000 people, most of whom are elderly. These ladies lend their magic to preserving the language and culture as best they can, also lending…

USA / 2012 / Appalachian Folk, Old-Time When it comes to making an album like this–stepping away from original songs to delve into trad folk–the magic comes in song selection and arrangement. The field is wide open, which means one might be paralyzed by choice, but this duo does an excellent job at choosing a dozen songs that, through instrument choice and passionate delivery, evoke that…