So another Primavera Sound down and that means we are halfway through the year, which is insane. Of course with that and a few more trips here and there, I came back to a mountain of half-listened music. There’s quite a lot that I wanted to write about, but could only get through four because I don’t want to make this mail longer and overwhelm you sissies. Next one will come quicker than you can say Primavera!

Oh, and I wrote a review of Primavera Sound for Bant Mag. It’s in Turkish for the first time in a while and you know what: it felt good, maybe I should continue!

♩MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND & MERIDIAN BROS.: (Tropical, Cumbia, Experimental Electronics) — Ruido Tovar · 2026

If you’ve been following Undomondo for a minute, you know that I’m an unabashed fanboy of Eblis Álvarez & his Meridian Brothers since 2012 [Salsa Caliente]. On this album they are paying tribute to the late Rigo Tovar and the psychedelic Mexican cumbia era. Camilo Lara’s electronic tropicalism meets Álvarez’ eccentric humour to produce a genuinely fun Summer album. It surprisingly includes Beck as a guest on two tracks, which with the loosely-strung guitar riff makes it unmistakably Beck. I guess he was a fan this whole time too?

♩HANNAH PEEL & BEIBEI WANG: (Neoclassical, Electronic, World Percussion) — The Endless Dance · 2026

Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang met working on Manchester Collective’s NEON in 2023. The Endless Dance is a diverse collab between electronics and unconventional percussions; with glitches, looped vocals, samples, prepared piano drifting in and out. One of the most artistically curious albums I’ve listened to this year. Ranging from a proper Villalobos-style house to the word-salad electronic of the single “Awaken the Insects” Listen to this from head to toe, to get the breadth of it.

RIYL: Asa-Chang & Junray, DAT Politics, Jon Hassell

♩ALVARIUS B.: (Psychedelic Folk, Middle Eastern, Avant-Garde) — Malarial Dream · 2026

Alan Bishop: big brother of Sir Richard Bishop, 1/3 of Sun City Girls, founder of the mythical Sublime Frequencies label, and member of acts like Paris 1942 and Master Musicians of Bukkake.

After Hakim Bey, Muslimgauze, and Sun City Girls’ own Charles Gocher are all gone, he is indeed one of the last remaining avant-garde figures still getting nourished by, and adding to, the Middle Eastern tome of knowledge (without colonizing it).

Malarial Dream was recorded in the cradle at Cairo. Mostly instrumental and original compositions with two obscure covers, taking what could have been teethless ECM world-jazz into dark, smoky opium-den blues territory with the help of the usual suspects like Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi (from The Dwarves of East Agouza) and others. I find it closer to the spirit of Sun City Girls than some of his past work as Alvarius B.

Big Takeover Interview

RIYL: Xylouris White, Secret Chiefs 3, Land of Kush, Bill Laswell’s Hashisheen album.

♩IBRAHIM ALFA JNR.: (Techno, Broken Beat, Ambient) — Infinite Black Inside · 2026

I don’t exactly know at which point Ibrahim Alfa became Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. Was it perhaps his return to Brighton and sobriety in 2022 after a pulmonary embolism and two heart attacks?

I remember the early leftfield techno experimenter from my own early days in techno right around the end of the 90s, when he was releasing on Force Inc. et al - then the bible for us nerds. He was already quite leftfield back then which I guess sadly not helped his career.

However he seems to be reborn these days: getting a cover feature in The Wire, getting praises from The Guardian as British Techno’s great survivor and finally a good comeback. With Infinite Black Inside he once again surveys techno’s own distorted history with fractured pulses, and cybernetic synths printed over vanishing snapshots of jazz, funk, trip-hop, broken beat, dub and ambient, made with real proficiency, sitting at the exact edge of what techno is allowed to do. And thank god for that, because the world doesn’t need any more melodic techno (or hard techno for that matter).

Check “Marine” below which conveniently played on my headphones while I was in the airport last week and would be equally well as a heist-cutscene cue in a future Mission: Impossible, or some 90s Amiga cyberpunk adventure game like Another World.

The Guardian: Ibrahim Alfa Jr, British Techno’s great survivor.

In Sheep’s Clothing: In Conversation with techno visionary Ibrahim Alfa.

RIYL: Cristian Vogel, Justin Berkovi, Neil Landstrumm, L.I.E.S. Records.

♩DAMAGED BUG: (Psych-Rock, Lo-Fi, Experimental) — ZUZAX · 2026

Damaged Bug comes from the John Dwyer universe (Thee Oh Sees, Osees), so at this point you’re either a fan of Dwyer or you’ve already written him off. It’s their first release since 2020’s Bug On Yonkers an album of covers of Minneapolis lo-fi eccentric rock guitarist Michael Yonkers who just passed away this year, aged 78.

ZUZAX is built from seven years of orphaned unfinished tunes recorded between 2018 and 2025. Different than the modern-day OSEES (who also released a new album, which I haven't gotten around to listening to yet) weirder, smaller, more patient, like the mid-2000s iteration of OCS maybe?

📖 I saw this interesting take and a subsequent conference on the rise of ambient music over at one of my favourite mags: The Attic. I myself have been listening to more and more ambient/drone in the last decade, but I had never thought that I might have been overwhelmed by my internet consumption.

But what drove this massive shift? Did the music itself change, or did our collective nervous system simply demand a shelter from an increasingly overwhelming world?

The conference positions ambient music not just as an aesthetic preference, but as a global phenomenon, a trauma response, a mechanism of attention regulation, and a tool for sonic care.

I made a new playlist inspired by some latinx techno we listened to at the Plenitude stage at Primavera. There’s a healthy dose of dub techno, indeed I put two tracks from K Wata’s new album - which is something I rarely do -. Some material from Verraco, Nick León, DJ Python as the Latin techno inspiration. Gigi Masin’s new album which surprisingly has Detroit techno adjacent stuff with beats, and some other late night bangers from this and last year. It’s an upbeat playlist, feel free to dance to it!

Also on Apple Music

I have the new episode of my Radio Alhara show which I cheekily named Fifth World, after Hassell’s 4th World played out? It’s live tonight at 20:00 Barcelona time, or 21:00 Bethlehem time. You can stream it at Radio Alhara. For the first episode head over to Soundcloud, I will post this one tomorrow if you miss it.

📖 Over at RA I read a feature called No Music on a Dead Internet. There’s a lot going here about how digital media is getting lost via “atrophied archives and decaying UI”.

Which brought to mind The Vulture Mag article “The Feed is Fake”, this is the machinery behind the dead feed, the whole hubbub about fake fans and viral campaigns of acts like Geese and the PR agency Chaotic Good a few weeks ago. This is exactly because the platforms have so much power over what we listen to.

So is there a way to keep grassroots, indie and avantgarde music alive? or Is it too late to create a sustainable music industry? asks Resonate. Of course there are a lot of alternative takes because everybody is fed up with corpos and algos, but in this David vs Goliath situation, unfortunately the network effects are too powerful.

Here’s where the real numbers are: Indie faves Los Campesinos! has broken down their tour accounts: next time you think about the economics of tours and festivals: remember this.

One structural alternative to these as mentioned by the Mixcloud blog recently are community-owned venues. Another is this article about “how bands sleeping at venues to make tours work” (which admittedly sounds VERY SAD, but no it’s not like that.

Unfortunately the reality is that today “Musicians aren’t just expected to create content anymore, they’re expected to become content themselves.” and yes, it is a form of class war.

Anyway we might be swimming upstream, but at the same time the world is healing thanks to the young ‘uns.

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♩FATHER DIONYSIOS TABAKIS: (Microtonal, Byzantine, Drone) I ran to the Heat Crimes bandcamp so fast it hadn’t yet been uploaded by the label!.

Recorded by 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest Father Dionysios Tabakis serving at the Church of Panagitsa in Greece alone at home where he plays fretless guitar specifically for the microtonality of Byzantine chants.

On a dozen songs the Holy Father proves as fluidly adept at a range of traditional Byzantine instruments (qanun, oud, cümbüş, Politikon tanbur, yali tanbur, ney, zurna, clarinet, Politiki lyra, Pontic lyra, kabak kemane) as his signature fretless guitar, favoured for its ability to feel out microtones - semi or quarter-tone pitches - closest to the human voice. The result is a level of emotional expression and harmonic colour that often escapes western modes, transcending a range of Asia Minor and Mediterranean styles from maqam to Greek traditional and Byzantine music with a disciplined but rapturous sense of transcendence.

Sun City Girls/Sir Richard Bishop ritualism in the first half, and traversing in the 2nd to astonishing sorts of techno impressionism, as with the THX string shear and choral chant of ‘TECHNO σε ΜΟΝΑΣΤΗΡΙ’ and a whole new definition of trance-techno, thru to bits that sound like a Greek Enya.” Boomkat

It’s the second time in a row we have Greek melodies (check Greg Foat & Sokratis Votskos from the latest edition). I’ve been following the avant-garde Athens cassette label ever since the Eyad (Iraqi bass) and Aeson Zervas (Greek hauntology) releases of 2024, but this is as metal as something gets without being metal!

Strange soundscapes combining Orthodox Byzantine chanting, Ottoman court music maqams, ambient, doom metal, tech-trance and whatnot. Watch the father play.

♩PEKI MOMES: (Disco, Funk, Anatolian, Synth) Inject some Turkish city-pop into your day with Peki Momés, a Turkish artist living in Germany (who doesn’t these days) who accidentally started making music a few years ago and ended up with a fantastic album, thanks to producer Dustin Braun and their jazz musician friends.

They’ve managed to get modern soul and world disco, Anatolian funk and Japanese city pop in the same record and made it their own. There’s only one song in English but that shouldn’t make you skip the others even if you don’t get the lyrics. Bonus coincidence: her interview for Durum Records has a playlist featuring Andrew Wasylyk (which is coming up below).

♩ZOH AMBA: (Indie Rock, Blues, Folk) I wasn’t expecting to see “frequent-NYC-downtown-free jazz-sax-player” Zoh Amba to make a Courtney Barnett type indie rock on guitars, but hey I can’t complain! Eyes Full will be her Matador debut, recorded live with no overdubs, going back to guitar (her first instrument) and her hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. Features Jim White of Dirty Three on drums.

♩COCHEMEA: (Jazz, Latin, Afrobeat, Indigenous) Vol. III: Ancestros Futuros is the final chapter in the trilogy by Brooklyn-based saxophonist and flautist Cochemea Gastelum on Daptone Records. Cochemea has been on my radar since the start of his trilogy with All My Relations (2019). Percussion-driven, rooted in Indigenous jazz and funk; he has Yaqui and Mescalero Apache ancestry, so the cosmic & tribal vibes that you hear come from this heritage. The title track of Ancestros Futuros draws from a Yaqui midwife story about burying newborn navels in the ground so future generations would reclaim the land.

♩ANDREW WASYLYK: (Contemporary Classical, Ambient, Folktronica) Scottish multi-instrumentalist Andrew Wasylyk from Dundee did something different from his previous mostly instrumental and ambient albums and made songs and sent them to vocalists around the world this time. The cadre includes Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Saya Ueno of Tenniscoats, and my personal favourite Peter Brewis of Field Music. Out on Clay Pipe Music, also the single has a lovely pastoral video.

🎶 Terminal Optimism — Undomondo Playlist

🎶 I’ve concocted a new playlist for your listening pleasure. Hauntological electronic synth music, ambient, jazz and indie pop mixed into a calm spring playlist. With material from the new albums of Green-House, Andrew Wasylyk, a cheeky little experiment called Bach Jazz, Atabasca, Resavoir, Isabel Pine (from the last edition) and new indie pop albums from songwriters I love like Luke Temple and Carla dal Forno. This mood was partly set by some of the music my friend Ay Palas sent me, namely Enno Velthuys and Kim David Bots.

Listen on Apple Music

🎶 I chanced upon this mix by Mr Bongo artist Santa Leticia

Originally from Andalusia in the south of Spain and now based in Newcastle, UK, her sets are shaped by years of digging, collecting and travelling, with a deep love for soulful, rhythmic and psychedelic music from across the globe.

🎶 My dear friend Ece Özel has a new mix you should check out

The mix moves through different moods and textures, bringing together tracks like Strapontin’s alias Sam Media with the laid-back sensuality of A Matter of Sex, Audrey Danza’s Next Stop from her Proxima imprint, and the early 2000s rave energy of “After Dark” by Saeed & Palash.

📖 The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI (Scott Santens, Substack)

There’s a slight reference to Angine de Poitrine via them having played together for 20 years which the author thinks is a good example that this kind of music need time and support to flourish. But I shared it for this quote which draws a connection to the Irish grant for artists that we’ve talked about here before, and how the UK punk / Britpop scenes were supported by state funds for the unemployed, aka “The Dole”.

A huge amount of the best music ever made in the UK — The Clash, The Specials, UB40 (literally named after Unemployment Benefit, Form 40), Pulp, Oasis, and many more — was made by people who were, at the time, living on “the dole.” When Britain had a welfare system that gave artists a tiny floor of income and left them mostly alone to do their thing, Britain produced some of the most important popular music of the twentieth century. When that system was dismantled and means-tested and hoop-jumped and shamed out of existence, that pipeline dried up. The dole worked as a floor.

📖 Pyramids, Techno and Private Equity

I saw a few soul-sucking reels on Instagram from parties at Bali & Giza Pyramids, even influencers complaining about the prices and the quality of life in the backstage!. Then over at First Floor there was this timely April Clare Welsh’s article about how the Pyramids have become a Rave Backdrop in which she criticises the raves for the physical damage. I mean we should of course not call these things raves and call it what it is: a simulacrum, yet it shows the state of the electronic music scene now, and it showcases a problem that this No Tags article had outlined: the economic dynamics of festival promotion. San Francisco’s techno boom is a warning to the world.

Portola Festival is owned and operated by Goldenvoice, a once-independent LA promoter now subsumed under the umbrella of global entertainment mega-corp AEG. AEG is owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian and frequent donor to anti-queer causes, the Republican Party, and all that sort of thing. Some might call that disparity ironic, given that the history of dance music, particularly in America, is inseparable from queer identity and community, and for decades stood as a kind of resistance against homogeneity, a bulwark against assimilation into the status quo. That all seems beside the point, though, when a crowd of 20,000 people enjoying $18 vodka-sodas lose themselves to a DJ wearing a horse mask playing hardstyle remixes of pop songs. There’s nothing ironic about that. That’s as American as apple pie. No Tags

The world has been eaten by financialization and private equity. This is the #1 cause of economic distress everywhere in the world now, and if you still believe in capitalism, just watch these two videos.

Stay sane!

♩YARA ASMAR: (Experimental, Ambient, Tape Music) Beirut-based musician, puppeteer and visual artist Yara Asmar recorded this between New York and Beirut, built from metallophones, deconstructed toy pianos, homemade music boxes, and a personal archive of family recordings. The title “everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much” unfortunately isn't a metaphor: she's been recording everyone she loves out of fear of losing them.

“There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” a closer listen

This is one of the last recordings I have of my grandfather, telling me about how he accidentally recorded hours and hours of birdsong onto his reel-to-reel recorder. On my recorder, you’ll find hours and hours of conversations: My grandmother proudly telling me about how she scared off a man who was threatening her with a gun during the war, my grandfather telling me I could come by any time and pick any herbs from his garden, our first lunch after my grandfather’s funeral, the first time that house that had grown quiet was suddenly animated with laughter and song. They are files all labelled by date. January 1, 2025, midnight. An explosion of sound: Fireworks, screams, gunshots, laughter, sirens. Yara Asmar

Yara says "There is a betrayal to being alive because it means to have outlived." This feels much more urgent these days with a wild war in the Middle East, where lives of ordinary people in Palestine, Iran and Lebanon are being destroyed. Listen in one go. (Spotify)

♩JOSHUA IDEHEN: (Spoken Word, Experimental, Jazz) British-Nigerian spoken word artist Joshua Idehen has contributed poems to Mercury-nominated albums by The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet, and we’ve already spoken here about his breakthrough “Mum Does The Washing”, which opened the doors for him to play at Glastonbury and Later with Jools. “I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting” is similarly fantastic, and it features Shabaka on flute and saxophonist Pete Fraser. Rough Trade album of the month for March 2026. RIYL: Kae Tempest, British Spoken Word, Dubstep & Grime, Bass etc.

♩WARMTH: (Ambient, Dub, Drone) Before starting research I’d have guessed Warmth came from somewhere colder (like Ukraine) banking on former releases like 2025’s Revenant or the previous Retrospective material. Surprisingly Agustín Mena’s from a warm place, Valencia! Latitudes is ten deep dubby atmospheric tracks with warm bass and spacious echoes, without rhythm. Mastered by 12K’s Taylor Deupree. He also runs the Archives label (founded 2015, ambient/downtempo/dub techno) and records as SVLBRD.

♩ISABEL PINE: (Ambient, Modern Classical) Canadian violist and composer arrives with her debut for Chicago ambient legends Kranky. Recorded in and around a remote cabin in British Columbia, using viola, cello, violin, double bass, and field recordings, it evokes a similar calm and meditative mindset. Her first release after leaving orchestral work for solo composition. Foxy Digitalis has an interview.

♩MAI MAI MAI: (Experimental, Noise, Drone) Rome-based musician Toni Cutrone has been making experimental/drone work since 2012. Karakoz was recorded during a six-week residency in Ramallah and Bethlehem in early 2024, drawing on Palestinian traditional music and the Palestinian Sound Archive. Collaborators include Alabaster DePlume, Maya Al Khaldi and Ussama Abu Ali. Out on Maple Death (Bologna/London). He also runs the Boring Machines label.

💭 Readers of the newsletter would know about Liz Pelly, of course by now, but I didn’t know the other ones. The book is a transcription of the podcast, which is great because I have a hard time listening to podcasts, and the people and the topics they are covering are what I’ve always wanted to do as a zine! So I’m a bit jealous! Check their substack

💭 I’m thinking of attending the MICELI Festival in Barcelona in May, but can’t quite decide if I should go for the Hekla (whom I’ve written about) & Cole Pulice evening or the Megabasse & Holy Tongue evening :) I’d also like to catch Tristwch Y Fenywod (whom I’ve also written about), Abul Mogard and FujIIIIIta but I’m not sure if I can do them all. You shouldn’t miss it if you like avant-garde, ambient & electronic music and you are in Barcelona.

📖 California Mystic: Jeff Buckley and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Grammy-winning singer and composer Arooj Aftab explores the unexpected link between Jeff Buckley and Pakistani icon Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and how the Californian songwriter became a devoted student of Sufi Qawwali music. Unfortunately behind a paywall but it’s only $1 for digital.

📖 Günseli Yalçinkaya Thinks The Internet Has Gone Dark Mode

Obviously not part of our regular curriculum but I think Günseli is one of the finest thinkers of her generation, and this was a good read on the internet.

Günseli: I spend a lot of time writing, which is quite a solitary act. If you just sit alone writing forever, you’re going to have no ideas. The moments I feel the most inspired are when you go see a musician perform live, or you go to an art show. You see other people’s inner worlds manifested through the embodied experience of experiencing their inner worlds as they are trying to present them.

That opens you up to community and communality, which goes back to this idea of ritual. True inspiration can only come from these ritual forms. Social media has zapped us of that ritual.

🎶 Two more mixes I’ve enjoyed lately, especially Ogazón’s, wow she’s on top of her game, isn’t she!

Formerly known as Motor City Drum Ensemble, Danilo Plessow delivers his own special selection of disco and house.

Music and Capitalism

📖 Compare and contrast: Finland is another country offering artists the chance to slow down with no strings attached. Similar to how we covered Ireland last month.

Compare that to the Corporate Capitalism of the USA: Dada Drummer was there to protest for UMAW. 📖 The Dream of the 90s is dead at SXSW

📖 Music for Empty Rooms’ disappearing tracks of YouTube.

Connoisseurs of vintage oddities will know Music for Empty Rooms, the influential video channel on YouTube. A post last month explains why some songs disappeared, and it’s of course vulture capitalists (this time Virgin Music) trying to profit off his work. Dang, these people are really vampires, aren’t they?.

That’s all folks! Talk soon, and please share with your likeminded friends.

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This newsletter now reaches 1043 people. In the age of algorithmic delivery, and regarding the somewhat underground content, I think it’s not bad. I simply wonder when I see posts reaching thousands of readers (on x or instagram, which I can proudly say that I don’t have on my phone anymore since the start of the year) how massive the power of the algo / networks is. Anyway, I’ve got some great music lined up, and the reach of this depends on you guys sending it to your friends, if you like anything!

Onwards!

♩PUMA BLUE (Electro Pop, Trip-Hop): This was punted to me by my wife last month when my first instinct was to think it was a Khruangbin clone like Glass Beams or whatever. But of course I was wrong!

Puma Blue is dubby, almost trip-hoppy electronic pop, and it isn’t a band (at least in production from what I gather) but it was Jacob Allen‘s follow-up to Holy Waters built from tape loop sessions at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World Studios. He describes it as “the longest and heaviest thing I’ve ever put out” — smoky R&B vocals, indie-jazz guitar, lo-fi dub production, and a second half that gets noisy and disorderly. The title Croak Dream comes from a term for a type of prophetic dream of one’s own death, originated in Adventure Time, and more importantly the question of what to do with that information. The video to the title track is a doppelganger video game animated by an artist called Quill.

♩ELIJAH MINNELLI: (Dub, Reggae, Electronic) I heard of the Bristol-based DJ and producer thanks to a post by The Bug on bsky and of course with a pseudonym like this, I was bound to check it!

Operating inside a fictional English village called Breadminster with its own institutions and its own archive, Elijah takes folk songs and translates them into reggae with four dub remixes on the b-side for Perpetual Musket (one featuring the amazing Little Roy). 2025’s Clams As A Main Meal goes further. Rather than reworking existing material, he invents the archival source itself. Although it’s not one of the “invented” ones, I cannot stop listening to this Welsh(?) cover of Joan Baez’ Donna Donna, which itself is a cover of a song from a Yiddish play from the 40s.

♩HANIA RANI (OST, Ambient, Instrumental) Hania Rani’s original score for Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (which I haven’t watched) which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. And in turn, the classically trained Polish composer picked up the EFA Best Composer. Subtle and pensive neoclassical piano soundscapes, enriched by a reverb-drenched, jazz noir feeling. She composed the soundtrack from the script before the film was edited, yet the field recordings are taken from the actual building in Oslo where the film takes place. RIYL Goldmund, Library Tapes, Nils Frahm.

♩GREG FOAT & SOKRATIS VOTSKOS (Jazz, World): The prolific British jazz pianist Greg Foat teams up with the hitherto unknown to me Greek multi-instrumentalist Sokratis Votskos - who works the border between jazz and Greek and Eastern European folk. Accompanied by The Giorgos Pappas Trio with oud, bass & drums. Nine tracks of Greek folkloric jazz with field recordings throughout, and with titles like "In the Cave of Pythagoras" it does sound like a trip to Samos or Northern Greece.

♩MANJA RISTIĆ (Field Recordings, Ambient) I got this one from a bandcamp link I got from Manja herself on bsky. The Belgrade-born sound artist and violinist recorded this one during walks through Lisbon in April 2024, built from field recordings processed through the Deep Listening practice of the late composer Pauline Oliveros. Seven tracks, one incorporating an excerpt from António Caramelo’s public performance AIR PROTEST. Self-released.

👀 Something I’ve mentioned here on this newsletter before, Ireland’s basic income for the arts scheme has become permanent. In a world that has gone insane with soaring rent, exploitative capitalism, AI taking jobs, wars, religious fanaticism and madness galloping on all fours, kudos to Ireland (and Spain!) for trying to hold it together.

The scheme recouped more than its net cost of €72m through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other welfare payments, according to a government-commissioned cost-benefit analysis.

Peter Power, a member of the National Campaign for the Arts steering committee, said it was a real-world test of what happened when people were given stability instead of precarity. “Artists on the scheme spent more time creating and less time trapped in unrelated jobs just to survive, and many became better able to sustain themselves through their work alone,” he said. (The Guardian)

I mean it’s a rhetorical question, but could this be in any way related to the boom in Irish music? I’m following the wonderful Anois, Os Ard newsletter which focuses on Irish music, and I’m stunned by the talent (even excluding crowd favourites Kneecap, Fontaines DC. et al)

👀 Also this on the Independent Wuthering Heights is just another example of the poshification of the arts – does Ireland have the answer?

The creative sector cannot live by middle-class talent and ideas alone, and the arts employment market won’t solve the lack of access on its own.

First proper edition of the Terminal Optimism playlist with music I’ve listened to in the first two months of this year. New releases from UK bandleader and composer Shabaka (Sons of Kemet etc.), NYC rapper Roc Marciano, new material from veterans The Orb and UK’s SAULT alongside 2025’s second reissue of Green Cosmos material (lo-fi jazz noir) makes the first part a bit more soulful and noir, but the second half has more in that regard from Chilean sax player Melissa Aldana’s new album, one from an underrated Jobim classic from his later period (1987) that I can’t stop listening; modern gospel disco from Arp Frique, a piece from Coco Maria’s fantastic compilation Club Coco: New Dimensions in Latin Music, Sly & Robbie’s Make ‘Em Move from the anomalous 80s album Language Barrier, and we wrap up the dancy bits by going ambient with Hekla and Valentina Goncharova. As always, I think there’s a nice progression if you listen in this order but you can randomize it to your heart’s content.

Here it is in all its Apple Music glory too, unfortunately I still can’t embed it here as a player.

📖 Why Albums drop and movies launch (New Yorker).

A good essay explaining how digital streaming services are killing the album.

A key reason why it’s now more complicated to promote an album than, say, a theatrically released film, is the ephemeral, immaterial nature of contemporary music consumption. One no longer purchases an album—one purchases a subscription service that grants access to basically every album and song ever made. When a new album comes out, a representative single is featured on an editorial or algorithmicized playlist alongside a hundred other new songs. If a listener likes what she hears, she can further explore a record, then relegate personal favorites into her own customized playlist, turning the album into a menu instead of a meal.

The more that art exists only online, in the ether of the digital abyss, the less vital it starts to feel, and the more dispensable it becomes.

👀 Is this the best art direction / song + video of 2026? Is Richard Dawson the great British eccentric after Robert Wyatt?

🪦 RIP Éliane Radigue

As written eloquently by Drew Daniel of Matmos / Soft Pink Truth, the French electronic / ambient and musique concrète pioneer Éliane Radigue has passed away at the age of 94.

Born in Paris in 1932, Radigue learned piano as a child, but hearing the electroacoustic compositions of musique concrète godfather Pierre Schaeffer on the radio in the early 1950s unlocked something new, setting the course for her own studies in sound. After meeting Schaeffer by chance in the French capital, she worked an assistant for the composer.

“I was just cutting, splicing and editing tape,” she told the Guardian in a 2011 interview. “Of course, at that time the universe of electronic music was totally male, but I was pleased to do anything they asked of me.” The Guardian

Check her obits at The Guardian and The New York Times

🪦 RIP Willie Colón

Another one of the original salsa gang, the Puerto Rican trombonist and bandleader, the one and only Willie Colón has sadly passed away last month. He has an inimitable back catalogue but I’ve always loved one of their original team-ups with Hector Lavoe that I wanted to share.

Obituary at The Guardian.

Welcome to 2026’s first Mondo Times, there are some stuff I missed from 2025’s best of list, like Prolapse, and Icelandic theremin player Hekla, many things happening in the Sun Ra universe and a lot more to watch and read for everyone. Take your time to digest it, and leave a comment if you like any please. Onwards!

♩PROLAPSE: (Noise Rock / Hardcore) Leicester’s Prolapse return after a 26-year studio hiatus with “I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face”, sounding exactly like themselves, messy and confrontational. Double vocals from Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard over triple-guitar assault and motorik rhythms are just the right dose of anger we need these days.

♩HEKLA: (Ambient, Instrumental) Hekla Magnúsdóttir recorded her third album Turnar in a medieval French castle tower during an isolation period aimed at crafting what she calls “past-future music” - a suitably gothic premise for her heaviest and most gloomy album. The Reykjavik theremin specialist augments her virtuosic solo work with cello, voice, and the church organ of Kristján Hrannar. Might be the best use of theremin that I’ve ever heard.

“Hekla’s greatest triumph is her continued redefinition of the theremin. Long relegated to kitschy sci-fi films and Halloween specials, this versatile instrument has never quite reached its potential. By repositioning the theremin as the lead instrument within the orchestra, Hekla challenges prior assumptions and paves a path for its future use.” Review on A Closer Listen

♩MARSHALL ALLEN: (Jazz) Mr. Allen walked into a Philadelphia studio two days after his 100th birthday to record his debut solo album after nearly seven decades with the Sun Ra Arkestra as a sideman and then Arkestra leader since 1995. Allen finally decides to put his own name on a record and calls it “New Dawn”. What a statement!

The seven-track set also netted him two Guinness World Records - oldest debut album release and oldest album of new material, both previously held by Tony Bennett. Not that he cares!

Another Thought writes:

“The optimism of youth is often dismissed as naïve or misplaced. Cynicism, meanwhile, gets sold as realism. A better tomorrow is framed as unrealistic; you’re told to settle for something more attainable, like a “miserable tomorrow” instead of an “extinct tomorrow.” Add to that all the knowledge adulthood brings—the slow erosion of innocence—and hope can start to feel irresponsible. To have lived through all of that, to know all of that, and still choose hope anyway: that’s what feels genuinely inspiring.

Also, it’s very reassuring to see him still smoking a blunt / ciggy at his age ^^

👀 At the same time, two separate things related to Mr. Allen’s former boss, Sun Ra happened cosmically. PBS premiered Sun Ra: Do the Impossible on February 20th as part of the American Masters series, capturing his role as the godfather of Afrofuturism.

Meanwhile, a project I’m personally involved (albeit slightly), When There Is No Sun was finally announced by Omni Sound. Curated by my dear friend Ayşe Turan & Ricardo Villalobos and produced by the one and only Ahmet Uluğ, it features a diverse cadre of the electronic music elite like Underground Resistance, Calibre, Chez Damier, A Guy Called Gerald, SHE Spells Doom, and Barış K reworking material from the Arkestra’s Living Sky and Sun Ra‘s spoken-word album My Words Are Music.

👀 Did you get this audiovisual delicacy via your YT algo as well? KEXP just published Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine‘s full performance from Trans Musicales 2025. Reminded me of the husband & wife duo Vialka, a band I cherish dearly, sadly lost to the interwebs.

♩The hippest Turkish Diggin’ crew is here once again to go to the edge of the universe to bring you these Anatolian anomalies. Our friends at Zel Zele Records streamed it on their NTS show. Tracklist here on the NTS Page. You can stream it here on Soundcloud. Don’t miss!

👀 Remember the previous issue had another good mini documentary on Dub Techno by Voltage Labs, good going Voltage Labs!

👀 Another mini docu to watch if you have time is “The Drum Machine that Shaped Krautrock”, this was shared on bsky by Mixmaster Morris! Yeah, he’s active, go follow him.

♩After some years, I revived my ambient mix series, Ghost World, for a fourth edition. I don’t know if YouTube is the best place for this - I had generated some alien landscapes and wanted to make an accompanying video from them, but it took too much mental energy and I finally just put it online as is.

featuring sounds from: Billow Observatory, New Mexican Stargazers, Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet, Lena Platanos, Pan American, Night Foundation, Ezmeralda, Nour Sokhon, Doug Wieselman and others.

BTW, Is there a cheaper platform than Mixcloud / SoundCloud? I have a lot of history but I frankly don’t want to pay a monthly fee, because I’m not so active anymore, yet I want to keep the archives online. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.”

📖 Why No One Knows What’s Happening Tonight

This is a love letter to concert listings a la Timeout, which is very timely and needed these days, in a barrage of slop events, and lesser known artists struggling.

When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves.

📖 How algorithms and sameness fatigue are hollowing out electronic music. (Midnight Rebels)

Streaming platforms and social media incentivize artists to create music that avoids skips and goes viral, leading to homogenized “Spotify-core” tracks and prioritizing spectacle over substance. The result is a “genre-defying blend of mellow, mid-tempo, lo-fi” sludge designed to blend seamlessly into the background of your life. It is “wallpaper music” for the digital age, where a jarring key change or a dissonant texture is an economic liability.

Well according to the graph below, this applies to all music, but I guess with a lot of normies now listening to melodic techno / Anyma & Afterlife type EDM with visuals, electronic music is indeed the most affected.

It’s true that even without AI slop, business techno of today is indeed slop music, or electronic chowder, created by celebrity DJs, mega talent agencies, squeezing midrange DJs, producers and venues and turning nightlife into a Live Nation festival.

Platforms like Splice have democratized access to professional sounds, but at the cost of creative individualism. When thousands of producers drag-and-drop the same “KSHMR Vol. 3” snare or “Oliver” bass loop, the sonic palette of the entire industry begins to gray.

RIP

🪦 Sly Dunbar, a lifetime devotee to the drums and one half of the legendary producer duo Sly & Robbie, died in January at 73 years old. Did you know he took his nickname from his obsession with funk and soul? (after Sly Stone of Sly & the Family Stone who died last year as well). He worked with reggae royalty like Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, and Black Uhuru but with his partner Robbie (who has also passed away) he has crossed over and worked with megastars like Grace Jones, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Fugees, and No Doubt. He racked up 13 Grammy nominations, winning twice. Best obit with a lot of songs name-dropped at Wrongtom’s obituary for The Quietus. Also check The Guardian. The tune comes from an album that fellow music nerd Cem Kayıran of Bant Mag mentioned.

🪦 Ebo Taylor, the Ghanaian guitarist and composer also died last week just one month after his 90th birthday. He spent over six decades shaping Highlife and Afrobeat. You’d know about his famous hits like Heaven and Life and Death but did you know Taylor kept recording until 2025 when his final album dropped as part of the impeccable Jazz Is Dead series.

“Reflecting on his own influences, he told the BBC in 2014 that “with the advent of James Brown and funk music there was the opportunity to develop highlife music. Fela did a lot of work introducing the funk into the Yoruba music while comparatively I did almost the same thing in Ghana.” BBC

Thanks for reading! See you on a different addition to the content pile soon.

Here’s the way to do that: 10 Ways To Support Independent Music And Culture in 2026.

This is a playlist organized by texture rather than preference—starting in ambient, dub and electronic pop territory, moving through jazz and indie rock, making you dance a bit in the middle and landing somewhere in ambient again. There’s much to say about all the artists, but covering 120 artists is a mammoth task, so I didn’t do it.

We open with a tune from Adrian Sherwood's “The Collapse of Everything” and close with 34 minutes of Natural Information Society (gnawa inspired trance jazz). Four women bend pop early on: Jenny Hval, Eiko Ishibashi, Laura Groves, Lucrecia Dalt. Cochemea's "Otros Mundos" fits into the spiritual jazz revival that labels like International Anthem and Luaka Bop have championed. On the spiritual side, Charles Lloyd is 87 and still channeling.

There’s a guitar-forward stretch where LA Witch, Osees, Tropical Fuck Storm and Geese coexist. London jazz diaspora (Kokoroko, Joe Armon-Jones, Yazmin Lacey) meet ECM (Mathias Eick, Anouar Brahem). DjRUM makes atmospheric drum and bass / IDM while Roza Terenzi, Shanti Celeste and Nick Leon make you dance. There’s Sessa from São Paulo, Yagya from Reykjavík, Brìghde Chaimbeul from Scotland.

Yeah, a lot of things, just put it on and enjoy!

♩Same list on Apple Music. Unfortunately can’t embed it.

♩Listen to these albums from start to finish they utilize the album format very well.

♩Favorite metal albums of 2025

I keep this separate from the main list so you don’t freak out. As always, a lot of black/death metal.

My Top 5 are in order.

👀 Other EOY lists that made me discover stuff I missed.

Free Jazz Collective’s Top Albums of 2025.

My friend Corto Ramirez’s playlist. (Spotify)

De Selby’s list (Bsky)

First Floor’s Favorite Tracks of 2025.

Zensound’s The 25 Best Ambient Albums of 2025

Audiopile Records

♩Two mixes I played at the NYE dinner, first one was this rocksteady mix by DJ Karl (first time I’ve heard his name but he seems to be the real deal!) and the second is a Thai psych & molam mix by Diana Ratsamee.

2026

♩Ok, 2026. I’m going through a lot of stuff that I missed from other lists, and one of the compilations I have to mention is by the always on point Habibi Funk. A lot of great and lost songs from Libyan cassettes compiled here. Detailed writeup on The Quietus.

♩Coincidentally, there’s a new compilation on Beacon Sound called “Gaza is the Moral Compass” with artists such as Sary Moussa, Sam Shalabi, Raz Mesinai, Kareem Samara, foodman, Hüma Utku and others. Experimental, ambient, jazz etc. and liner notes by Radio AlHara’s Yousef Anastas.

"Remember that cultural work is not a neutral endeavour. In other words, we are all implicated in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, which is a struggle for everyone’s freedom. I invite you to question what this means and use Gaza as your compass."

👀 Ten years later, an oral history of David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’: Mark Guiliana, Donny McCaslin and Tony Visconti, talk about working on Bowie’s final testament “Blackstar”

👀 What is the artist to Fascism: Dada Drummer

There’s no room for art under Fascism. Kitsch and propaganda, yes. But the rest is Entartete Kunst, degenerate art.

👀 Why Innovation in So-Called Creative or Experimental Music is Frozen Solid:

If I played you some improvised music recordings from 1973 and 2025 it’s fairly likely you wouldn’t be able to tell which one was made when, especially if I tried to make the quality of the recordings sound the same.

Talk soon!

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♩WHITE MAGIC FOR LOVERS: (Psychedelia): When I first saw a reference to this album in my feed, I thought this was a new album by one of my favourites Mira Billotte aka White Magic. Although a bit let down to realize it wasn’t her, but I quickly came to my senses as I understand that once you have the White Magic behind your name, you can do no wrong. Debut album “The Book of Lies” from this Brighton-based duo (Anglo-American couple Alfie & Thomas White), delivers wistful vignettes of bubblegum psychedelic pop.

Review on The Quietus

♩LINDA MAY HAN OH: (Jazz) Aussie double bassist Linda May Han Oh’s trio album with Tyshawn Sorey on drums & Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet might be this year’s heavenly combo for the contemporary jazz world. — Linda Oh, a protégé of Dave Holland, and a frequent flyer on records by Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer, Pat Metheny et al. leads the trio here, next to her sideman from Vijay Iyer’s trio, Tyshawn Sorey on the drums. Although Akinmusire might seem like the star act, I think the amount of depth in Sorey’s drumming with his minimal setup is what sets this apart.

Tone Arm Interview

♩ANNA B SAVAGE (Folk, Singer-Songwriter): This one blew me away from the first note. Her voice has a staggering, haunting beauty, and her songs have an emotional depth that’s hard to match—perhaps save for artists like Laura Marling or Lankum (whose member Spud has produced the album). If you’ve been starting to get the blues like me these days, please listen to this in full (at least don’t skip the first three songs.)

👀 Anna B Savage playing songs from her new album live with her band.

👀 This video she recorded during the pandemic for Tiny Desk just brought tears to my eyes.

Quick question: Has anyone made the switch from Spotify to other DSPs? Has anyone just deliberately shut themselves out of the DSP game altogether? Are we in an echo chamber, slowly congratulating ourselves while the juggernauts keep rolling? (I think so)

♩MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER (Indie) : Well I’ve been listening to the two singles for quite a while, and finally French frontwoman Melody Prochet’s fourth album “Unclouded” is here. I’ll admit, I haven’t been able to listen to it fully after all this anticipation yet, but I’ll still share one of the singles with you, because I was hooked and I want you to be hooked as well. I think this is her strongest effort to date — partly thanks to Swedish wunderkind, Sven Wunder, who co-produced it. Also features her previous producer Leon Michels (El Michels Affair) on one song.

♩SVEN WUNDER (Cinematic, Beats, Orchestral): And if you didn’t have enough of him - I mean how can you? - Sven also had an album to his own name this September on Piano Piano Records. Put this on, don’t get distracted and listen from start to finish. Let his cinematic beats & strings take you away.

Also watch this short video my artist friend Ekin cooked for our Reverie for Two side-project. If you haven’t seen these before, watch them!

👀 RAVE SIMULACRA: I don’t like to share Instagram links, but I’ve noticed some creators simplifying topics I’d thought about before in short-form videos, much better than I’ve been able to put into words.

As you know it doesn’t take long for something nice to be instantly commercialized, bastardized and sold back to us by corporations these days, so I think raves had a similar trajectory, and now kids are unfortunately living through some corporate simulacra of it’s past glory.

📖 Punjabi Disco: Here’s a great rabbit hole if you have a bit of time. There’s a reissue of the iconic 1982 album Punjabi Disco on Naya Beat, which is the first ever “British Asian electronic dance album recorded and a true lost relic.” Read the history of artist Mohinder Kaur Bhamra to understand how the UK came up with these multitudes of style in the 80’s. Oh and it would make a great documentary.

“Part early acid house experiment, part north Indian tradition and part disco-funk, the record was a futuristic outlier”

Similar vibes from the same era:

♩After another rabbit hole I fell down while on a back and forth with Eray from Istanbul’s finest jazz magazine, Loft Caz. I made this Indian Classical Playlist on Youtube. Mainly for watching myself, but then it turned out nice and maybe some of you are interested. Some recent finds vs. some old faves. Feel free to take a journey to India, and my, I hope I can go to the Darbar Festival one day!

Artists featured: Kadri Gopalnath, Ranjani & Gayatri, Akbar Khamiso Khan, Dr. Jyotsa Srikanth, Uday Bhawalkar, Ustad Noor Baksh, Ashwini Bhide Deshpande.

📖 Thankfully the Spotify Wrapped season has passed, but this timely reminder by Liz Pelly stands:

“This year, as Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds again, I am struck by how the whole concept seems to discourage that critical practice for something more passive. It nudges listeners away from deep consideration and towards accepting a corporate-branded scorecard reflecting a very specific perspective on musical value. It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.

What is lost when we entrust Spotify’s systems of data collection and interpretation to do our year-end reflections for us?”

♩Talking Heads main man David Byrne made a Christmas mix for people who hate Christmas Music! I’m flattered to have been on the same wavelength with him all this time regarding the Xmas mixes I’ve been making. Unfortunately Substack doesn’t embed Mixcloud properly so I can’t embed it here, so I’m plugging my own mix instead:

♩David Byrne’s Christmas mix for people who hate Christmas Music

📖 Three coffee table books I’d have bought if I had spare money and I weren’t living like a medieval serf in some techno feudalists dream.

📚 Documenting the Dancehall by Major Lazer’s Walshy Fire.

Dancehall was born in Jamaica in the 1970s, but its rhythms have spread around the globe in the decades since, with energetic events taking place across Canada, the US, the UK, Japan and beyond. In “Art of Dancehall,” Walshy Fire and his community of archivists, experts and collectors trace the evolution of the culture, via the event posters that drew fans in as its sound traveled from Kingston to the world.

📚 Why Ambient by fellow Substack writer Dusty Henry.

“There are interviews with Laraaji and Suzanne Ciani, detours into dub reggae and blues, passages earnestly trying to understand “spa music,” and of course heavy dollops of Brian Eno.”

📚 Infinite Dreams : Iron Maiden - The Official Visual History

Celebrating 50 years of Iron Maiden, this incomparable visual book, featuring commentary by band members past and present, and never-before-seen photography from the Iron Maiden archives, chronicles the evolution of heavy metal’s most influential and enthralling band since 1975.

Maybe I’ll settle on this zine instead.

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Let’s start with these three fantastic albums.

♩PNEUMATIC TUBES: (Electronic/Hauntology/Psychedelia): Who else has been waiting for new material from Ghost Box-adjacent Pneumatic Tubes, after 2022’s debut “A Letter from Tree Tops”?.

“Runner’s High” consolidates Jesse Chandler’s journey from Midlake, and Mercury Rev sideman to visionary solo artist through American Kosmische, noir and neo-psychedelia. The album’s meditation on physical and mental clarity through long-distance running provides conceptual framework without constraining the music’s natural flow. Tracks like “Yellow Green and Gold” (featuring Meg Baird on back vocals) and the noir hit “Prospect Park in the Dark” demonstrate how Chandler’s flute and clarinet work can elevate electronic textures beyond mere nostalgia-baiting. (Like a lot of copy-paste vaporware). I’d listen to it in one go and better while jogging on a sunny day. I’m sure you’ll feel blissful.

Better review and back story on Caught by the River.
Interview on KLOF Mag.

♩ARMAND HAMMER & THE ALCHEMIST: (Hip-Hop/Jazzy/Cinematic): If you are an avid reader, you’d know that billy woods and E L U C I D and more than anything else together as their Armand Hammer alter ego are on top of my hip-hop world. I had some other albums lined up instead but once I saw this release with the reigning beatmaster “The Alchemist” I had to move it up. Has some wonderful features from other fave MCs like Quelle Chris, Pink Siifu & Earl Sweatshirt, but of course the main driver is the dark cinematic ambience and the dark sociopolitical poetry, a snapshot, if you will, of the late capitalist times. Listen to this in one go too, but here’s one of my favorites from this album, if you need a preview.

♩GASPAR LAWAL - (World/Jazz/Africa): This reissue from the always marvellous Strut Records, is Nigerian percussionist and sideman Gaspar Lawal’s 1980 debut, featuring handmade instruments and a lot of love. Just play it to your friends at a dinner party.

“Lawal’s style was forged through decades of high-level percussion work with the likes of Stephen Stills, Barbra Streisand, George Clinton & Funkadelic, Manfred Mann, Alexis Korner, Vangelis and Ginger Baker’s Air Force band.”

♩Undomondo’s Terminal Optimism: Kind reminder that I did an Apple Music / Spotify playlist which is quite jazzy/adjacent and I will replace this one in a bit with another playlist that I have already finished. Might be your last chance to check it out. Pneumatic Tubes, Mattias Uneback, Greg Foat, Kassa Overall, Sven Wunder, Matt Wilde and more..

Apple Music

Found two nice zines, Drug Music via Patrick Lyons on bsky

and EX! Zine via Blair Millen on bsky. I want to do a zine / label too, just don’t know how.

📖 The music industry is speed-running the same mistakes it made with streaming, but worse.

As a lifelong digital packrat since the late 90s, I’ve watched every “revolution” in music distribution turn into the same old extraction scheme. It’s no wonder I want all the major labels and the music business to burn to the ground.

If the avant-garde, the middle class, and the actual creatives aren’t eating, then royally fuck the suits, the streamers, the middlemen, and the major label artists on top.

“Private equity takeovers have loaded studios with debt, forcing them to crank out quick profits. Streaming services are throttling video quality, slapping on more ads and tripling subscription costs. Some UK households are now paying close to £700 a year.” Protein

📖 Now Warner has inked deals with Suno and Udio (following each other this week). Just read this to understand the future of music + labour, and what’s gonna happen soon via this detailed article. Warner does a deal with Suno & Udio (CDM)

It’s Lucy and the football time with the music industry. Having led artists into a complete disaster with streaming, they seem poised to do it again, on a grander scale, with generative AI. Warner has a deal with Suno today, following Udio earlier this week. Peace for our time.

It’s a normalized generative model built on artist work that goes uncredited, almost purpose built to produce the kind of slop in music that we’ve gotten in imagery.

You can see why, like streaming, this is anything but “democratizing” as a force. Big players, bigger deals, more big platforms forcing the larger industry down everyone’s throats.

📖 And if that’s not enough, Spotify acquired the WhoSampled database.

Peretsky sez “There is no fun data anymore, everything is surveillance capital. We heard you love ADIDAS by Korn, which was sampled by Killer Mike in 2003, did you know that you can get 20% off all white top sneakers at Target during the Black Friday Holiday Spectacular?”

📖 Meanwhile music industry insiders are allegedly running bot farms and burner pages to game TikTok algo? (via shesaid.so)

And simply, there are infinitely better models: like this study says which is a case for general UBI but WHAT DO I KNOW:

Artist cooperatives like Subvert offer alternatives to streaming giants. Cantilever curates which albums are even streamable per month. These could be great models—it’s just that most people don’t care enough and these companies don’t have the budget. The future looks bleak if we don’t take a stand. Soon enough we’ll all be listening to AI slop while artists are not making enough to eat. (which most already aren’t). But it’s better to hope, no?

Over on the touring side, things are similarly grim. Superstruct/KKR is now on the offensive (per the indispensable First Floor newsletter) via the well known “cancel culture” route. Yeah we heard it the first time, anyone still buying it these days?

Those thoughts were almost shockingly unfiltered, as this person—who is apparently based in Spain—categorized “what’s happened with the boycott of the festivals [as] pure harassment and digital bullying,” and something that created “an unnecessary tension to comply with the agenda of certain movements.”

Sorry it’s a bit extreme for you, but I just want you to remember one of the greatest slogans from May ‘68: “Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.” <3

One bright spot: Sziget founder has managed to get the festival back from these vulture capitalists.

Also worth noting: the biggest exploiter in the music biz, IYKYK.

There’s almost always a great use for any technology, and I’d like to leave you on a positive note with this obscure AI generated Ethiopian music/video?

If you think we need to battle with these capitalist pricks and you don’t want to be listening to AI slop soon, forward this to someone who needs to hear it. I try not to invade your mailboxes too much.

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As always, feel free to share it with like minded friends.

♩LUCRECIA DALT: (ELECTRONIC) An experimentalist I’ve loved since 2018’s Anticlines, -even to the point of inviting her over to an RBMF Istanbul event I was co-programming a few years later- probably has her most accessible album to date, pivoting more towards an art-pop style, perhaps partly because of the influence of co-producer David Sylvian. Determinedly alienating, but in ways that reward immensely, this is one of the best albums of 2025. In depth review on Pitchfork.

♩PREFACES: (INDIE POP/WORLD POP) A modern take on spy-jazz-lounge meets 70’s Italian soundtracks from Lebanon! Trio featuring Charif Megarbane (whose solo album on Habibi Funk you should check too, also part of Cosmic Analog Ensemble), RIYL: Sven Wunder et al. Simply too good to pass!

♩WEVIE STONDER: (ELECTRONIC/AVANTGARDE/PLUNDERPHONICS) I’ve been a massive fan of Wevie Stonder (get the name?) and their silly & witty 2000’s output. Do you remember Small People? Well I do! but frankly I haven’t realized that they hadn’t been putting out anything for a while until I read bossman Joe Muggs’s corner on Bandcamp Daily.

The Brighton collective had been missing for 15 years!.

Rest assured, 12 tracks of electronic nonsense is on display once again on Skam Records (home to early IDM from the likes of Autechre, Gescom, Boards of Canada etc.) incorporating spoken-word absurdism with electronic music and carpets? I guess dormancy, not constant productivity, might be the secret to maintaining artistic vitality and our algorithmic age?.

‘Carpet Squares’ pitches the old-skool groove of Mr Oizo against crunching industrial beats… while providing detached directions for carpet-laying amidst a looping reverb-heavy collage of commentary on carpet. But then the urgent wibbly wobbly ping-pong bloopery of ‘Vanja and Slavcho’ takes things to another level. There’s storytelling, there’s cheesy Japanese-influenced pop and a whole lot more, and it’s quite bewildering – but then, so is the stomping glam beat of ‘Tiktaalik’, which kicks in hard and with all apparent intention of bringing something serious… As if these guys have a serious bone in their collective bodies. Aural Aggravation

After all Carpet Squares are just like wall to wall carpets except the installation is far easier!

♩AZYMUTH: (JAZZ/FUNK) Brazil’s Acid Jazz & Jazz Funk staples Azymuth commemorate 50 years while mourning Ivan "Mamão" Conti's 2023 death. "Samba Pro Mamão" works as both tribute and proof of concept. The cosmic samba soul endures, even as its architects age and fade.

🪦 RIP: Hermeto Pascoal:

I’ve managed to be in the presence of the Brazilian mad genius/joker live last year (or the year before?) at the Barcelona Jazz Festival. David Mittleman aka Observations of Deviance on BSKY summarizes him perfectly:

There is no way to capture Pascoal’s true range in a few words, but suffice it to say that he is something like Sun Ra crossed with Frank Zappa crossed with every sort of Brazilian musical style crossed with Miles Davis, with whom he recorded on “Live-Evil.” David Mittleman on Doom and Gloom from the Tomb.

🪦 RIP: Optimo’s Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch

Glasgow’s own JD Twitch, one half of the longstanding DJ duo Optimo and a champion of Underground Music of all sorts has passed away after a brief fight with an untreatable brain tumour. I’ve linked below the most candid interview by Huntley + Palmers boss Andrew Thomson, however the Internet has been awash with praises and tributes from DJs and producers and listeners. I suggest you dive deep!.

Connections with Andrew Thomson

JD Twitch (Optimo)

I've been deeply saddened to hear about JD Twitch from Optimo aka Keith McIvor who has been diagnosed with an untreatable brain tumour. He's been a life long influence who has taught me so much about music and life itself. My own life would be vastly different were it not for the friendships and music he brought into it, not to mention his open-minded a…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · Connections

🪦 RIP: Eddie Palmieri

The Puerto Rican New Yorker Pianist, Eddie Palmieri, a pioneer of Salsa Music and Latin Jazz, has joined his brother the bandleader Charlie Palmieri, last month at the age of 88.

Due to his enthusiasm for modern jazz, Eddie’s playing was often unconventional, employing unorthodox patterns and percussive effects, all the while drawing on the rhythmic richness of Latin music.

(…)

In 1970 Eddie formed Harlem River Drive with brother Charlie. Recruiting top Latino musicians, and Black funk/soul musicians such as Bernard Purdie and Cornell Dupree, HRD’s eponymous 1971 album served up a hugely influential Latin/funk fusion – War, the great Los Angeles funk band, borrowed heavily from Harlem River Drive while acid jazz DJs would introduce the album to UK clubs in the 90s.

(The Guardian)

That’s all for this edition, hope you click at least a few links!

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♩BEN LAMAR GAY: (JAZZ, EXPERIMENTAL, USA) As you might have noticed, I’m a big fan of Chicago’s International Anthem. I hadn’t really gotten into cornetist and composer Ben Lamar Gay’s earlier albums that much for some reason, but I can easily say with this one I’m hooked. Mixing spiritual jazz with electronic experimentation, he has managed to weave together and make his own two different musical tradition.

♩THE NEW EVES: (POST-PUNK, AVANTGARDE) I had chilling Midsommar vibes through this very powerful photo and insta-clicked their upcoming album when I saw it on the Norman Records feed. Alexis Petridis at The Guardian had the same feeling too. Watch this Live from Green Man too.

♩FLORENCE ADOONI: (WORLD, AFRICA) I’ve heard of the Ghanian singer Florence Adooni thanks to the wonderful folks at Berlin’s Philophon Records sending me promos of her previous singles, incl. “Mam Pe'ela Su'ure” which is included here on her debut album. If you are well-versed in African sub-sub genres, the Kumasi based singer combines Fra Fra Gospel with high-life rhythms. The whole album is a good listen, but this 10-minute piece is really epic.

♩EDNA MARTINEZ Presents Picó: Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean: (LATIN, CUMBIA, PICO) This compilation by DJ Edna Martinez focuses on Picó, a Colombian sound system culture from the coastline, Cartagena & Barranquilla. These mobile discos have shaped Colombian-Caribbean culture and music for decades and Like their Jamaican counterparts, began in the ‘60s in predominantly Afro-Caribbean communities on the north east Colombian coast.

♩NEW SUMMER PLAYLIST: conjured as a very hot, cinematic, noir summer experience… Dub, deep hip-hop, soul & funk, nu disco, world music and more... Vintage material from Franco Micalizzi, Wilfred Luckie, Saint Paul Lara, Serge Gainsbourg (the namesake of the mix), Nikki Giovanni, Hank Levine as well as more recent stuff from Oracle Sisters, Jimi Tenor, Zelooperz, DARGZ, Sababa 5, Dog Unit, Little Simz..

♩ Postcards from L’Hotel Particulier on Apple Music.

♩ADRIAN YOUNGE: (JAZZ, SOUL, HIP-HOP, BRAZIL) Prolific LA artist and producer Adrian Younge, one half of Jazz is Dead records, has the final chapter to his psychedelic soul trilogy “Something about April”.

”A sonic world fueled by a 30-piece orchestra, analog synthesizers, breakbeats and Brazilian vocalists that carol psychedelic melodies in Portuguese. “Something About April III is the album I wanted to make when I created the first album in 2011. However, I didn’t have the musical knowhow and experience to create the sound that was buried deep in my soul. Essentially, SAA III is the album that has taken me fifteen years to uncover and fully realize. From a cratediggers’ perspective, it’s the album I’ve been diggin’ for in the deepest crates of my soul. A lost album I finally found. I hope this LP resonates with you as much as it has for me.”

It surely does! This is going to be a modern Brazilian classic!

♩The Sky Was A Mouth Again (CHARITY COMPILATION, EXPERIMENTAL): brings together experimental artists reimagining Richard Berry’s 1955 classic, "Louie Louie". All net proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and (UNRWA). Some of the artists included are White Magic, Lea Bertucci, Marja Nuut, Richard Dawson..

👀 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard become most high-profile band to pull music from Spotify.

I am not sure, this will amount to anything for the music juggernaut, but the Overton Window has opened. We need a little bit more courage from major artists. Also see Xiu Xiu:

👀 Spotify Has an AI music problem - but bots love it. (Wired)

Bots listening to music made by bots, what a wonderful world!

If a song is created by artificial intelligence and listened to by a bot, was it even heard at all? It’s a problem music-streaming companies now face as generative AI is rapidly making it easier for anyone to churn out songs with a few clicks, and then send bots to stream them for cash.

👀 How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene (Pitchfork)

The lack of vocals, which typically gives away robo fraudulence, make it easier to infiltrate; the music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening—vibe music before vibe became a buzzword—means people aren’t paying as much attention to what’s real and what’s not; the fixation on fantastical, Studio Ghibli–core visuals, which image generators can vomit up with ease. Take Mewy Cat Lofi’s “Relaxing Lofi for Study Time,” which lures passersby with adorable animations of Pusheen before, five hours into the 12-hour mix, they realize the same chord progression has seemingly repeated 100 times.

I’m enamored by the work of Kieran Press-Reynolds these days on his Rabbit Holed, his weekly corner on Pitchfork, he’s probably the hottest music writer this summer, writing on the minutiae of modern internet, talking about topics as wacky as Lo-fi Beats, City Pop and AI, Instagram Reels Music.. Read the equally wonderful First Floor Newsletter’s interview with him here.

Also read: Are the LO-FI beats you’re chilling to on Youtube actually made with AI?

🪦 RIP: Trailblazing Lebanese composer Ziad Rahbani dies aged 69.

Lebanese composer, pianist, playwright, and political commentator Ziad Rahbani (1956-2025) was the son of Fairouz, one of Arab world's most famous singers, and Assi Rahbani, one of the founders of modern Arabic music. Rahbani pioneered "Oriental jazz" by mixing traditional Arab musical styles with jazz and blues. A committed leftist and self-declared communist, his work became a voice of resistance that influenced younger generations and protest movements throughout the Arab world.

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Amidst a summer of turmoil, with artists speaking out against apartheid being cancelled and festivals being pressured by political groups, set to the tune of a scorching hot global warming Summer, we once again turn to music itself to soothe us.

♩JOSEPH ALLRED: (Folk, Americana): Old Time Fantasias (June 2025) by the Tennessee-based folk guitarist Joseph Allred, conjures exactly that, past lands and times unlived.

I found it significantly different than his past works which transformed his typically solo fingerpicking acoustic style into a layered orchestral experience. This one, Daji, in particular with Hans Chew’s piano entering around 2:30 mins, conjures an American 1930’s. Another standout for me is the Moon Dance, set to a digital drum beat, which comes from a parallel universe 80’s maybe?

♩BILLY WOODS: (Hip-Hop): I didn’t exactly know what a Golliwog is before I went in, but I’m now an expert in American racism and imperialism. You already know my position is that billy woods is a national & earth treasure. And Golliwog (May 2025) is another masterpiece marrying examining systemic racism and colonial violence.

The album's production roster includes The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P and more..

GOLLIWOG is a haunting collection that weaves horror, humor, surrealism and Afropessimism into a cinematic tapestry, aided and abetted by a murderer’s row of producers. African zombies, time traveling trap cars, malevolent ragdolls and a dying Frantz Fanon are just a few of the revelers in woods’ danse macabre.

♩Well after this track above I got obsessed with this Bruiser Wolf fella. If it weren’t enough that he has a unique flow that somehow resembles Busta and Snoop (maybe?), he physically looks like KRS-1, so what could go wrong?!?

Instant fave, and right after that I’ve started noticing him everywhere, like this feat. on Benny the Butcher’s new album.

♩MATTHEW HERBERT & MOMOKO GILL: (Electronic, Deep House) When I started listening to Clay (June 2025) I was teleported to 2021’s era defining (personally at least) “Bodily Functions”. Clay is Herbert's most accessible work in years, and vocalist/drummer Momoko Gill might be a fruitful partner similar to his previous collaborations with Dani Siciliano. Out on K7!

I guess you're sunrise at someone's sunset, maybe it's mine..
are we still laughing, but i'm not feeling it anymore
and i know i'm a means to you and that I won't pretend i'm just fine.
I'm not fine. this is the call before losing all control.

♩JAMES BLACKSHAW: (Folk, British, fingerpicking). Been a long time since I've heard anything new by fingerpicker James Blackshaw (actually I looked it up and it’s been 9 years!)
I don’t know what happened in the meantime, and boy I know how life goes by when you have a kid, let’s say. Anyway matching up his otherworldly past work, the album has three long pieces. RIYL Fahey, Basho, Takoma ofc. but has a "dare-I-say" British tinge?

♩TORTOISE - OGANESSON (SAUL WILLIAMS REMIX): (Spoken Word, Indie).
Timely words from Saul Williams on the remix EP of the first single from the upcoming Tortoise album.

"Shoot the messenger, deport the messenger, lock up the messenger. You have one saved message: nothing can save you"

Withhold your labor! Withhold your labor!
Engage your workers on your job, engage your neighbour
Bring production to a halt, stock market failure!”

Finally managed to make a new playlist, 20 songs, no genre focus, but a good flow from start to finish. Opening up with the amazing opener to Ben LaMar Gay’s fantastic new album and including but not limited to new material from Hedvig Mollestad, Grails, Tropical Fuck Storm, Little Simz, SHERELLE, Gwenno and some newly met artists like Jane Paknia, Abbey Masonbrink, Votia and more! Please listen from head to toe, and if you like it recommend to your friends, and delve deeper, these artists need your attention!

Terminal Optimism on Apple Music
(unfortunately still can’t embed Apple Music on Substack.)

Terminal Optimism on Spotify.

👀 RA asks, Is Open Ground the Best-Sounding New Club in the World? Thankfully, I’ve been to Wuppertal and the answer is yes! It’s sounding great, but don’t let that steal the limelight, because what’s more important is the way they operate, their business model “and their commitment to originality, independence and expanding horizons” which hopefully will be the model against an increasingly capitalist / private equity model that’s dominating the dance floors these days.

👀 Read this interview by In Sheep’s Clothing to get a better idea, and don’t forget the legendary Mark Ernestus behind the club and his Ndagga Rhythm Force has a new album out.

👀 I Enjoyed the angle this The Quietus essay approached the final Ozzy / Black Sabbath concert ever. I now realized it’s going to be released as a film in 2026.

"The most narratively apt aspect of Back To The Beginning was how it drew attention to bodies: Their limits, their potential and their ultimate decline."

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Of course I couldn’t keep my promise (to myself, not to you, dear readers, ‘cause I’m never sure if anyone is reading me at all). I can’t maintain a weekly/bi-weekly routine. The last two weeks were mainly Primavera Sound, Off Sonar and its collateral damage + family duties. And they were enough to have unfortunately stopped me from completing this one. So, some of the conversation around say Sonar might be dated now that it has concluded.

But conversely, and more importantly though, the conversation about Kneecap vs Israel (KKR, Superstruct, Business Techno, Capitalism) is still going on strong with Kneecap’s Mo Chara in court yesterday.

I don’t want to be a nuisance and I am pretty damn sure things will go back to business as the reach of capital and its financiers are too long, our attention spans are too low, and the normies are too uninformed, and there’s a vibe drought as Michelle Lhooq put it over at Rave New World.

Microplastics

When club culture sells out to private equity

KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity (PE) firms, is headquartered at 30 Hudson Yards, a skyscraper with a Family Guy underbite. The glass jaw that protrudes from the tower has hosted some less-than-knockout music—Edge, as the observation platform is called, has borne the weight …

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a year ago · 54 likes · Ray Philp

So please, please, protest major labels & agencies, superstar DJs and headline artists who are complicit in genocide or the death of festivals, because of their bottomline & conformity. Don’t go to copycat festivals who are owned by private equity, which are filled with the same mega DJs.

These are the greedy bastards who have taken away the soul of music for their profit for decades. Just look at their sorry fuckin’ faces, these fuckin’ suits!

💀 Here’s a thread if you’ve been living under a rock and didn’t know about Kneecap.
👀 And here’s the official trailer for the 2024 movie of the same name

What I’ve been listening to since the last newsletter.

♩MILKWEED: Remscéla (Trad. Folk, Ambient, Beats) : Milkweed’s music is like stumbling upon a haunted folk record, familiar yet eerily warped. For Remscéla, their latest album, they dove into the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Ireland’s answer to Game of Thrones. Their sound incorporates acoustic instrumentation, distorted tape noise, and spoken-word vocals, creating an eerie yet captivating dream-like atmosphere.

♩DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS (Neo Soul): A summery single from the velvet voice of Durand Jones, from their upcoming album Flowers.

♩MOOR MOTHER and SUMAC (Experimental, Jazz, Avantgarde) : MM and Sumac get together for some deconstructed hip-hop over extreme soundscapes?

♩ASA HORVITZ et al: A very special experimental electronic album. Read the liner notes : Part experimental opera, part neo-Medieval reverie, and part avant-pop song cycle...

♩This fiyah French Zouk version of ‘Another Day In Paradise’ edited by none other than UK's Psychemagik will destroy your dancefloors!

I think I have forgotten to mention this before, I had made a Japanese ambient/electronic focused playlist for a local Istanbul bar/music venue operated by my friends.

It’s been a while since I enjoyed a DJ set, let alone a Boiler Room. Italian maestro Donato Dozzy’s 5+ hour performance is one of the few instances where you should watch somebody spinning records. Carmen Villain’s HÖR set is another.

🪦 RIP Guy Klucevsek: Multi-Genre Accordion Virtuoso, Is Dead at 78

🪦 RIP Brian Wilson / The Beach Boys:

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys musician, songwriter and producer who created some of history’s most purely beautiful pop music, has died aged 82.

♩Twelve of Brian Wilson’s greatest songs – from surf to psychedelia and beyond

That’s it from me for now, but repeat after me one more time:

The money you spend attending festivals could be directly funding occupations & colonization, the construction of oil & gas pipelines & worse yet, the manufacture of weapons for war. send this to your friends who go to Boiler Room or fly to Europe for festivals. Make them aware of what they are actually supporting & funding.
#boilerroom #elrow #sonar #awakenings #mysteryland #fieldday #dgtl #snowbombing #parookaville

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Here’s what I’ve listened to in these last 2 weeks:

♩JENNY HVAL: (Indie Pop) Y’all know Jenny Hval’s one of my favourite artists in the world. The Norwegian indie-art-baroque singer-songwriter, a unique talent, graces the world contemporaine with another wonderful album, a testimony of our times. Please listen.

♩STANLEY COWELL: (Free Jazz, Cosmic Jazz). Recorded in 1974, a cosmic solo piano album blending jazz with classical, African, and Eastern influences. I hadn’t heard of him before, but he’s the co-founder of the coveted free jazz label Strata-East. First time on vinyl, and the piece names this week’s newsletter.

📖 COSMOS: One of the finest festivals of our times, Utrecht NL’s Le Guess Who has their brand new newsletter on Substack, with their first edition covering my home town Istanbul. Titled “I am Listening to Istanbul, My Eyes Closed”, named after a poem by Orhan Veli, a prominent poet from the early 20th century, they bring together an artist and a DIY community talking about the underground punk scene, the political turmoil, and how the DIY communities are flourishing in the oppressive Erdogan regime. GG LGW, now announce the lineup of this year please!

♩VIAGRA BOYS: (Punk) Sweden's premiere punk rock dadaists Viagra Boys are back in business. "I found a crouton underneath a futon, mama said I couldn't eat, cause all my teeth are gone!". Also watch Viagra Boys delivering the goods @Coachella 2025.

📖 Over at First Floor, Shawn Reynaldo has two timely pieces about the injection of capital into electronic music. First one was a criticism of this NY Times piece heralding that Dance Music was booming.

The second one published yesterday is a brave piece against Sónar or better yet its parent companies Superstruct Entertainment / KKR, a mammoth investment company, who has taken ahold of -wait for it- 80 festivals and brands (including Boiler Room, Field Day, Awakenings, DGTL and Mysteryland, Brunch Elektronik, elrow).

First Floor

The Cowardice of Sónar

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez is no one’s definition of a radical, yet during a session of parliament last Wednesday, he for the first time referred to Israel as a “genocidal state.” Three days later, his government’s culture minister, Ernest Urtasun…

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a year ago · 88 likes · Shawn Reynaldo

“Regardless of how one feels about what’s going on in Gaza and the larger question of Palestine, it seems clear that Sónar’s course of action is emblematic of a different problem, one that I do feel qualified to speak on: the endless intrusion of corporations and investment capital into culture.”

This is exactly the same problem re: Spotify/DSP’s algorithmic & capitalistic intrusion into the music scene, this is why all the dance music festivals have converged to the same melodic techno artists. To sell tickets to the lowest common denominator, the path of least resistance to sell festival tickets for billion dollar investment companies. This is the defining fight of 2020s for the future of music. Please read, inform your friends and possibly boycott these capitalist festivals.

♩GRAILS: 2025 has been good, with my A-tier bands releasing new material! Miracle Music sounds like the lost soundtrack to a X-Files season; having shed the earlier more guitar-based Stoner Rock sound for a psychedelic electronic sound (reminiscent of Lilacs & Champagne). I’ve just went through it in one take, and it’s a seamless cinematic journey. Have to listen to it in one go!

♩It seems Steve Albini’s estate has a closet sale every week. Via Pitchfork.

“Steve pursued many fields of interest, and most of them are represented somewhere in his collections,” reads the website’s description. “All items purchased are accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity from the collection’s administrator, Byron Coley, and the proceeds are directed towards Steve’s estate.

♩OK, it took me a while, but here's a new edition of my Terminal Optimism playlist, the culling of the last 2 months or so. Mostly 2025 material from El Leon Pardo, Jenny Hval, Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone, Immersion, Joseph Allred, Lael Neale, Ezra Furman, Zeloopers, Yagya, Snapped Ankles, DJRum, Matthew Herbert, Jabu, clipping and more..

2 hrs of ambient/folk/americana/hip-hop/electronic/indie for your listening pleasure.

♩Apple Music
♩If you haven't stopped using Spotify yet...

(Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t let us embed Apple Music)

♩I know I told you I’m trying to get rid of social media, but there’s always some great content to be found, and I can’t do it, unless we all do it.. Here’s producer Luxxury’s podcast with Diallo Riddle, this time focusing on the archaeology of the famous Dawn Penn song..

📖 Over at The Side People, one of my oldest contacts from the Music Internet of pre-social media days, Matt Merewitz has a long read derived from himself, the Confessions of a Jazz Snob; there are a lot of artist name drops here to check!

I was becoming the kind of snob who romanticized an era that likely never existed—a time when musical merit alone supposedly opened all doors. A purist fantasy. In truth, jazz has always been shaped by charisma, style, and myth-making.

♩Let’s end this edition with another (shame shame) Instagram goodie, some lovely footage of a noticably young Madlib & MF Doom.

As always, if you like what you hear, share it with like-minded friends.

♩SAAPATO: (Ambient, Electronic) Saapato explored decomposition in nature as a metaphor for this conceptual album with contributions from ambient royalty Laraaji, Loris S. Sarid, KMRU, Early Fern, Green-House and others. Decomposition's intricate network of factors involving many actors like fungi etc. are resembled here evolving the foundational "skeleton tracks" into a collective endeavor where the guest artists acted as symbolic "decomposers" to reshape them.

🪦 Legendary Jamaican reggae artist, Max Romeo has passed away on April 11, aged 80. I’m sure many of you know “Chase the Devil”, if only for the Prodigy sample. He was a pivotal figure and a vocal advocate for social justice. [The Guardian obituary]

+ Max Romeo - Wishing for Love
+ Max Romeo - Tacko

♩TOBACCO CITY (Americana, Alt-Country, Folk): Linnie Greene writing for Pitchfork says "Tobacco City’s version of America smells like diner grease and cheap weed, and it sounds like hope on minimum wage." Add to that slide guitar, road trips and shady motels.

♩IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT (Avantgarde Metal) : I'll be surprised if there's a better metal album then Goldstar this year. I think it is already a consensus album like last year's Blood Incantation - which was good, but not AS good-. IMHO.

♩Good chatter about AI algos, Streaming platforms etc. by The Guardian editor Laura Snapes and critic Alexis Petridis, if you need to read about it more to be convinced. One minute it’s “would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?”, the next humanity’s enslaved’: can anyone escape Spotify?

♩AI Music Invasion doubles on Deezer: Deezer launched a patented AI detection tool to filter out AI slop. I’m sure Spotify will buy Suno soon to serve you nonstop AI music.

♩DERYA YILDIRIM & GRUP ŞİMŞEK: (WORLD / ELECTRO POP / TURKISH): This version of the Turkish traditional song “Hop Bico” on Derya Yıldırım's newest has that harmonized vocals thing that make it irresistible for me!. Perfect for fans of Altin Gün & Turkish folk revival. Out on Big Crown.

♩ I've not been in front of the computer as much the last months, because I’ve been traveling and was meaning to remind you of this playlist that I started on Apple Music some time ago. It's focus is on "exotic covers from different geographies" e.g Dr. Lonnie Smith covering Sweet Dreams, Gabor Szabo's take on Paint it Black, John Tartaglia's Light My Fire, but also lesser known ones like Nomo covering Moondog's Bumbo, and Cyril Diaz Orchestra's Taboo, which lends the playlist its name.. Undomondo on Apple Music - Taboo

♩EIKO ISHIBASHI (INDIE POP, AVANT, JAPAN): Composer & multi-instrumentalist Eiko Ishibashi has established herself as a contemporary force composing for films (Evil does not exist / Drive my Car) as well as her own material. Antigone merges her cinematic style with darker lyrical themes like genocide, apocalypse contrasting the lusher musical arrangements.

Rave New World

CAN A NIGHTCLUB BE BOTH UNDERGROUND AND UPSCALE?

On a recent Sunday at twilight, I was lost in Singapore’s bustling business district, in search of a place to party. The city’s financial hub is one of the few neighborhoods where nightlife establishments are permitted to open late, so this was a familiar situation: many of my nights out here have begun by wandering around a maze of glossy skyscrapers and bank buildings, looking for signs of an alternative scene. This time, my destination was a club called…

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a year ago · 29 likes · Michelle Lhooq

CU Next week hopefully!

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We’ve been swimming uphill against a barrage of algorithmic offers, distractions, unsolicited messages, and memes we didn’t sign up for; far longer than we should have. It has costed us our skill to focus, and our intentionality in browsing.

Every day I have gaps that I lose the context of what I’m doing and/or feel some kind of creative paralysis; mostly hoarding data to browse at a later date which would never come; giving me anxiety and a feeling of incompleteness. All the while the techno-capitalism earns more and more…

Ed Zitron says:

My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness has become so profitable for so many companies.

Meta made $20.8 billion dollars of profit in its last reported quarterly earnings off the back of products that are bordering on non-functional, Microsoft made $24.11 billion in profit with an increasingly-deteriorating series of productivity products and cloud-based solutions that its customers hate, and Google made $26.5 billion in profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for stuff.

I admit I’ve been a hoarder all my digital life since the mid 90’s and my condition is nothing new; whether it’s downloading or streaming 1000+ albums a year, planning to watch/read/listen more than I could/should or bookmarking tabs about stuff that are tangential to my profession. But finally, I have decided to kick the habit, only to see that I’m having a hard time doing it.

I’m finally starting a digital declutter detox (for the lack of a better term) or a digital minimalism campaign inspired by Cal Newport’s book.

Effective immediately:

• I have started to quit all algorithmic social media, maybe except Bluesky for now. I know I’m at least 7 years too late.. Just as we collectively stopped using Facebook and nothing happened, I think it’s time to quit Instagram & that shithole called X altogether. I don’t think the mental cost I pay to share some stuff to friends & followers and reach a few more readers is worth it anymore.

• I will quit all WhatsApp groups which are at best a distraction with their constant chatter and memes. I’ll strive to bring intentionality in my communications with people and my data consumption.

• However, the most important for this newsletter and my profession is: I am stopping my subscription to Spotify; Spotify is cancer, and it should be gotten rid of. Daniel Ek, should be tarred and feathered and banished.

  

  • It's Time to Quit Spotify

  • The Ugly Truth about Spotify

  • Is there any escape from the Spotify Syndrome

  • Spotify is a Microcosm of Billionaire BS

• I will try to enforce my listening habits to albums only: Albums are indeed a superior way to connect with an artist, mood playlists/streaming/randomized collections are another late-capitalist distraction that results in the listener losing the context and get everything jumbled.

• I will simply choose to opt out, and I need to do it cold turkey because Cal Newport says:

“In my experience, gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well—the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started. I recommend instead a rapid transformation”

“The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism.

I know it will be hard at first, like quitting ciggies: “the compulsion to browse something is too strong to ignore.”

“Remarkably, we can be strongly motivated to seek information even when we know there is no way to use it to influence our future actions and outcomes – as if knowledge is a source of value in its own right.”

Ever wonder why you can’t resist pulling out your phone to look up something completely mundane? We’re information seeking creatures.

Of course, there’s no foreseeable winning condition in the short to mid term, as tech takes more space in our lives, smartphones, social media, AI and other forms of information systems will continue to dominate, but still as Jenny Odell writes in her fantastic book How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell:

“Thoreau’s ultimate hope was that if enough individual people decided at once to exercise their moral judgment instead of continuing to play the game, then the game might actually change for once.”

I will keep you posted about how this change goes…

PS: For the record, I will be moving my Undomondo playlist to Apple Music. My Spotify playlist has around 1300+ subscribers but as there’s no push function, I don’t really know if they are really listening. Still, I know everyone and their moms (and kids) are on Spotify and I’m sure I’ll have a hard time at first.

While I am not sure if any musical streaming service is ethical and/or beneficial to artists.. I need an outlet to share music! If anybody has a better idea, let me know. I’ll keep the Undomondo playlist syndicated to Spotify for the time being, until I get used to Apple Music.

Playlist moves to Apple Music and gets rebranded Undomondo’s Terminal Optimism.

2025’s first proper playlist and my debut on Apple Music, starts with Indie & Folktronica, from the likes of Tunng, Metal Bubble Trio, David Allred, Blue Lake; fantastic jazz releases from Okonski & New Jazz Undeground (a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s Maad City), Louis Moholo-Moholo and reissue of Green Cosmos’ Abendmusik (origins of Bohren & Der Club of Gore?), experimental stuff from Astrid Sonne, Milkweed, Laura Agnusdei, Ichiko Aoba, anarcho soul from Sunny War, UK post-punk from Minor Conflict, and finish with some electronic music & dance, from Lara Sarkissian, new album by Fantastic Twins, Pye Corner Audio, Villager and a reissue of the only solo album of Ramasindiran Somusundaram.

I’ve been listening to:

♩Cerebral post-punk from Bristol's Minor Conflict. First time I heard them, can't stop listening to their EP, now.

"Evolving the propulsive angular rhythms, distinctive call-and-response sprechgesang.. " ah so this is called sprechgesang, what an apt name.

♩I’ve watched this mind blowing footage of Pharoah Sanders performing Kazuko in an abandoned bridge around SF, 1982.

♩Ritualistic, Aztec new age, world music from Los Gigantes Dormidos. For fans of the late Jorge Reyes and Suso Sáiz.

”This music is the result of a friendship established in Mexico between Marius Houschyar, Fabio Levi, Mazatl Alvarez and Mich Rubio who came together in the gardens of Central Mexico for spiritual and sonic exploration. All songs were recorded outside at the ranch of Mazatls father in Michoacán and the magical garden of the wise Abuelos in Mexico State between cactus plants and gigantic trees.”

♩I’ve spent last week listening to Kid Creole And The Coconuts, their brand of the 80s where punk meets disco & the Caribbean dance are seriously what's missing from the sonic palette nowadays. Look at him go at a festival, 70+ years old. I’ve done a longer thread about him on bsky, if you wanna check.

♩Drone & Ambient all stars show up on Lawrence English’s new release “Even the Horizon knows its bounds”. Soak it up from head to toe, features Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson and Jim O’Rourke among others..

That’s it from me for now… If you read this transmission, comments are greatly appreciated. Let me know how you feel about the state of music & social media, and see if you can commit to some form of digital detox yourself.

I’ve been sick for what feels like the whole month and lacked energy to do anything. However, while sick, I had a practical revelation about something I knew theoretically: algorithmic browsing is an extremely lossy way (twitter, instagram, youtube etc.) to browse information online and it fries your brain!.

I decided to start an algo-less life while sick and had the gameplan set. Now that I’m better though, my brain is playing tricks on me saying it would not be practical to leave these services. Saying it’s just a silly cause, a pointless struggle, that it won’t matter, no one will care and I will be lost to history.

.. but I think this is the great catch 22 of late capitalism, that we can’t even dream of an alternative, and although we hate these “enshittified” services, we say to ourselves that we can’t live without them. This is the illusion they are selling us! I think the digital space is beyond salvageable at this point and that we’ll have to wean ourselves from the digital teat whether we like it or not, soon enough.

So, let’s live like the homeless as God intended and will make us soon!

The great contemporary internet thinker @being_on_line has published these rules for 2025. I will try to add two more rules: listen to albums from start to end because randomized music creates brain rot. And second, even if you keep one algorithmic feed, stop following any brand/major institution - however cool it might seem.

I will press on my digital exit and document how this goes on a separate newsletter which I’ll try to use as a diary. Ironically on social media to get some readers? :) Hope some of you guys can tag along, too!

Currently Listening:

♩UK folktronica band Tunng’s new one “Love you all over again” is the album of the month for me. We’ve been deprived of a Tunng album for 5 years, and frankly I was not sure if they still had it in them but there are quite a few strong tracks, and it has a certain charm and composure as an album, which is something rare in the era of singles.

♩I'll admit I realized I am quite late to Djrum while doing some R&D, The British artist is a quite established name in leftfield dance circles. Although this 2025 track is not groundbreaking per se for me, amidst 1000’s of boring tech / ethnic house derivatives every day, it's a fresh breath of cinematic electronica.

♩Our algorithmic / networked times bared open by Damon Locks’ spoken word/poetry. I was floored this morning while listening. Out on International Anthem and will be an album of the year contender.

I am not sure if I’ll be able manage the aforementioned algo-less challenge but one thing that has definitely got to go this year is Spotify. I don’t want to be hypocritical when I have been reading / writing about how much there’s to hate about Daniel Ek and Spotify, and still use it for publishing playlists. I will be switching to Apple Music ASAP, and will publish playlists there. I just need some time for the technicalities.

Reggie Watts is one of the artists that I saw leaving Spotify. This is exactly how I feel.

Spotify has built a platform that devalues art by turning music into a numbers game. It’s a giant corporation profiting off the blood, sweat, and creativity of artists while paying out fractions of pennies per stream.

I’m currently trying to take my music off Spotify. It’s not an easy decision because the system is designed to make artists feel like we have no choice. But we do.

📖 Exiting the Vampire Algorithm

Great article about the role of algos.

In music, the algorithm is responsible for a flattening of discovery, a horizontalization of possibility, a one-size-fits-all approach to curation.

To exit the algorithm—or to fend it off, at least—is to embrace the fact that music is a communal artform, created by humans for humans; that its fundamental purpose is to bring us together; and that its power is fully realized when we share it with one another.

📖 Does anyone care about music anymore

Another great read about music consumption as “part of a playlist culture, where songs are selected and consumed based on mood, activity or algorithmic recommendation”

As consumers, we may have more access to music than ever before, but the very nature of how we engage with it – through algorithms, streaming and the decline of live performances – raises concerns about whether we are truly valuing music as an art form or simply consuming it as background noise.

Yet there’s always this other angle, that makes me think that this is all futile and we are just beyond the point of saving ourselves from the capitalist system.

📖 Why Quitting Spotify Won't Help Indie Musicians

Furthermore, indie artists like​ me can't afford​ tо ignore and abandon Spotify,​ nо matter how much​ we despise it.​ If​ I want​ tо book​ a live gig,​ a promoter will check​ my streams first.​ If​ I want​ tо get label interest, A&R will glance​ at​ my numbers before deciding​ іf I'm relevant enough​ tо even respond to.

So yes, delete your Spotify listener accounts​ іf you feel like it. But know that Spotify​ іs only​ a symptom​ оf​ a much larger problem. Boycotting Spotify will not dismantle the machine. The machine will keep running.

📖 Over at Metalabel though, Yancey Stickler has a creative case of Stockholm Syndrome:

Promotion isn’t a chore. It’s a gift. A chance for us to celebrate the effort we and others put into our work. We shouldn’t shy away from it or treat it like a burden. Relish it as an opportunity to honor something we worked hard to make that we believe in.

I guess, marketers are gonna market, right?.. 🤷

UNDOMONDO DISCOVER WEEKLY

I made a new playlist called 25 overlooked/missing songs that could have made the best of 2024 list. Also archived the 2024 best of list here if you want to go back to it.

I’m sure everybody and their aunt knows about Doechii now after the Grammy’s, Ol Burger Beats makes jazzy beats has some good feats. of my fave rappers like Quelle Chris, Pink Siifu and billy woods; New album on the Jazz is Dead record label feat. Ebo Taylor, I loved the Israeli duo Winter Family, and now that I know their stance on Gaza, I love them even more, New Saagara album on the intersection of jazz and Indian classical, Early American electronic pioneer Jill Fraser, Welsh gothic avant wytch folk Tristwch Y Fenywod — The image generated comes from the name of the song featured meaning Green Flower, fingerpicking folk from Jacken Elswyth and much more!

♩I can’t say I understand much about the urban music phenomenon Baile Funk, but I think I have started to understand Dj Anderson do Paraiso, doing a very minimal version of baile funk. There’s something captivating in his tiny minimalist dance moves!.

“While Belo Horizonte’s funk scene is as raucous and lyrically scandalous as those in the larger cities, it has become defined by an almost elegant minimalism, sparser and more refined than the heavy distortion of Paulista bruxaria or Río’s more hip-hop-oriented sound.” Pitchfork

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I know lists are authoritarian and nobody cares about lists anymore, moreover content is dead and para-content is eating it alive. I know there’s no point in doing these rituals anymore. But, I’m turning 45 this year, and I still like to spend some time on them as a note to my future aging self, maybe? Thankfully, I actually only spent 1/10th of the time I used to spend doing these lists. Am I finally getting over my ADHD/OCD/perfectionism?

I checked a few well-known music media, and blog’s year-end lists. Like the past years, I saw that there was a consensus and I missed a lot of things, but I think this list has also gotten many things that others have missed! So, let this be a complementary list to what else you might have enjoyed from these other lists.

The list below is a testament to the album format. I know it’s dead as well in 2024, but some peeps went out and did it. And they did it good! They have managed to make their albums more coherent, with more than 1 stand out song/single, and I think they are more rewarding if listened to as an album.

Here’s my best of 2024 list.

• AceMo- Moblu (Self Released)

• Actress - Statik (Ninja Tune)

• Aluk Todolo - LUX (The Ajna Offensive)

• Amanda Whiting - The Liminality of Her (Jazzman Records)

• Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones - New Monuments (We Jazz)

• Arooj Aftab - Night Reign

• BEAK> - >>>> (Letter to Yu) (Invada Records)

• Bolis Pupul - Letter to Yu (DEEWEE)

• Blood Incantation - Absolute Everywhere (Century Media)

• Castle Rat - Into the Realm (King Volume Records)

• Charles Lloyd - The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (Blue Note Records)

• Chat Pile - Cool World (The Flenser)

• Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee (Self Released)

• Dina Ögon - Orion (Playground Music)

• The Cosmic Tones Research - All is Sound (Pyramid Records)

• Crumb - AMAMA (Crumb Records)

• Fat White Family - Forgiveness Is Yours (Domino)

• Geordie Greep - The New Sound (Rough Trade)

• Ghost Dubs - Damaged (Pressure)

• Hauntologist - Hollow (No Solace)

• Jaubi - A Sound Heart (Riaz Records)

• Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet - Les Alentours (Not Not Fun)

• Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)

• The Jesus Lizard - Rack (Touch and Go Records)

• Kali Malone - All Life Long (Ideal Recordings)

• Lankum - Live in Dublin (Rough Trade)

• Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat (Partisan Records)

• Lætitia Sadier - Rooting for Love (Drag City)

• The Lemon Twigs - A Dream is all we know (Captured Tracks)

• Melt-Banana - 3+5 (A-Zap Records)

• Mildlife - Chorus (HEAVENLY)

• Molly Lewis - On The Lips (Jagjaguwar)

• Nia Archives - Silence Is Loud (Hut Records)

• Normil Hawaiians - Empires into Sand (Upset The Rhythm)

• NxWorries - Why Lawd? (Stones Throw)

• Nubya Garcia - Odyssey (Concord Jazz)

• Oneida - Expensive Air (Joyful Noise Recordings)

• Pom Poko - Champion (Bella Union)

• Porcelain - Porcelain (Portrayal of Guilt Records)

• Raphael Rogiński - Žaltys (Unsound)

• Shellac - To All Trains (Touch and Go Records)

• Sprints - Letter To Self (Nice Swan Records)

• Straw Man Army - EARTHWORKS (D4MT Labs)

• Tierra Whack - World Wide Whack (Interscope Records)

• William Parker & Ellen Christi - Cereal Music (Centering Records)

  ---

♩I also made a 150-song playlist with 1 pick from each album/artist; I tried to group the songs roughly by genre, resetting with an ambient piece, but feel free to listen to them randomly. This year I opted to include metal in the playlist too. Before I thought it might be off-putting for some people, but I just don’t care anymore. If you don’t like something, skip it.

♩I had gradually scaled out of social media and algo-based feeds like Twitter/Instagram in general last year, and this year I’ll be looking to curb my consumption of other data forms, like YouTube videos. We’ve lost the ability to read/watch longer forms of content, and I just want to relearn it.

Here are two essays I’ve read recently that solidified my view.

Hot Takes

Don't let machines or the crowd decide your world

“All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.” —Pink Floyd…

Read more

2 years ago · 58 likes · 6 comments · Adam Singer

We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas. Remixes and memes abound, but almost no one shares anything weird, original or different. People wake up, perhaps with ambitions to make unique choices they believe are their own, only to find that the options have been filtered, curated, and ‘tailored to existing tastes’ by algorithms that claim to know them best.

♩Read Liz Pelly’s investigation into Spotify and realize how everything you enjoy is orchestrated for you behind your back. It embodies everything that sucks in society right now, and I just don’t want to be a part of it. The whole Spotify saga is too damning to turn a blind eye to, and hopefully I’ll ditch Spotify soon as well.

Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening.

According to Pelly, the focal points of PFC were “ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats.”

When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”

Pilgrims in the Machine

The Search for Stillness in a Mad, Mad World

In 1991, two hikers discovered a dead body while crossing a glacier in the Alps. The body turned out to be a man who lived over 5000 years ago. Researchers dubbed him Ötzi, but he’s also been called the Iceman, as his corpse had been encased in ice…

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2 years ago · 96 likes · 34 comments · Peco

Speed and overstimulation deform our perception of ourselves and the world, much as the ripples on a pond deform what might have otherwise been a mirrorlike reflection of the surrounding trees and sky.

In the engine of the modern monster, we see bits and pieces that flicker past on the ripples of the mirror. We see snippets and parts rather than wholes, and we function by grasping the bits we can see and get accustomed to a lopsided left-hemisphere perception of the world.

Let’s hope we can all have a calmer and slower 2025.

♩P.S. : My traditional end of year vintage/kitsch/camp/easy listening/exotica mixes are going to be online until the end of this month, too.. The New Years Mix came out especially good I think.. I’d play it on your cocktails, tea parties, dinners, if I were you!

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♩Straw Man Army: I can’t remember where I heard about them, it was perhaps on bsky, the network that I’m the most active nowadays.. This Anti-USA punk band is the most political band I’ve heard since Propaghandi/Bad Religion. Courageous lyrics, great vocal harmonies. Underrated! More detailed review on Post-Trash.

What does it take to get locked away?
Being poor in a public place?
In the shadows of self liberation
United States of Occupation

♩Elori Saxl's new full-length album Earth Focus consists of material Elori created to soundtrack the PBS show of the same name. How cool is that!

♩Kyle Shepherd has a wonderful cover of Massive Attack's Teardrop on his third album. #jazz

♩I was amused to read the "You" in Carly Simon's classic "You're so vain" is heavily contested and has an impressive drama behind it including Warren Beatty, James Taylor, Bowie, Cat Stevens, David Geffen and Dan Armstrong! Indulge! And I think I have already mentioned many times that I am enamoured by this video, everything, the times, the styles. It makes me so nostalgic and wholesome for the 80s.

♩I made a new Undomondo playlist, the last one before I can make a best of 2024 playlist.

Named Uninvited Guest after the opener by the legendary Jazz double bassist William Parker’s first Spoken Word album. I think it's got a good flow from Jazz (Immanuel Wilkins & Cecile McLorin Salvant, Eric Chenaux, Moses Sumney covering Sylvester's You Make me real) to indie rock from the likes of Squid, Immersion, Upupayama, and then to danceable/electronic stuff from Holy Tongue & Shackleton, new single from Yazmin Lacey, wild organic gqom sounds by Poland's Alameda 5, drum & bass (?) from Dungen.. check for yourself and enjoy!

📖 I’ve read this NY Times article about this iconic 1958 photo featuring the who’s who of jazz. Sadly only one artist is alive from this photo and it’s Sonny Rollins! .. If you want to see the details of the photo or see who the artists are, head to this earlier feature by The Guardian.

♩One of my 2021 faves, Swiss French band Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp has a new album on Bongo Joe, and it's fantastic, again! Avant art folk big brass band in French / English!

📖 I fell into a rabbit hole from John Cale to Brian Eno to Talking Heads and to Fela Kuti.
All roads lead to Fela!

”In May 1977, John Cale takes Brian Eno along with him to see Talking Heads support The Ramones at London’s Rock Garden. They all meet backstage, and Eno and David Byrne hit it off right away, agreeing to get together the next day at Eno’s flat to listen to music.”

On a different video Brian Eno talks about Fela Kuti’s influence on Talking Heads, which lead me to this brilliant full performance of Fela @ Berliner Jazztage from 1978.

♩Aeson Zervas: I was reading about Eyad’s album on the same label (Heat Crimes) on the boomkat newsletter, when I saw these short quips. "The Caretaker processing crates of rebetika instead of the usual ballroom dirges.","satisfying plunderphonic experiment, obscuring Greek folk at its most entrancing in a hypnogogic haze.” How could I have looked away.

♩I'll mention it again for new followers, I'm keeping my soundcloud online for a month or two.. These vintage Postcards series will give you a taste of the undomondo new year spirit of easy listening, exotica, lounge, Italian soundtracks, library music.. New Xmas & NYE mixes coming soon!

📖 Sadly, we have lost Zakir Hussain, the tabla player who might have made the rest of the world discover tabla..

Here’s an obit piece by The Guardian if you wanna read, here’s a great video from 2013, when they played as a trio with Charles Lloyd and a young Eric Harland. But the most amazing thing is his final transmission to the world, this brief encounter and fascination with trees and their change of color. Hope everyone’s final transmission will be as wise and chill..

And with that said, I’ll leave you be.

Happy Holidays, we see each other on the next edition which will have my best of 2024.

Hi all, here’s what happened since the last edition:

♩ Went to two shows this month! First was a long time fave, Mira Bilotte aka White Magic at a very intimate small room performance, the second was Arooj Aftab who has one of the best albums out this year. Both were fantastic!

♩ UK post-punk avandgarde collective Normil Hawaiians released their first new album in 40 years..

"... when it all goes wrong, just put the kettle on.
nothing we can't do. we are so strong.
oh life, oh love, the things that we have seen.
from a broken windscreen, we feel the breeze."

♩ NY free jazz titan William Parker has his first spoken word work a collaboration with producer and singer Ellen Christi. Has to be experienced in full! - the lost art of listening to complete albums. -

“… poetry and observations from a profound life devoted to the path of finding truth in beauty and speaking truth to power.”

♩ Listened to the new Dennis Bovell MBE compilation! What an opener!

“Dennis Bovell’s prolific and eclectic career encompasses a huge range of music: from dub poetry to lovers rock to post-punk to disco to pop and beyond. His production work encompasses such diverse figures as The Slits, I Roy, Maximum Joy, Fela Kuti, The Pop Group, Janet Kay, Saada Bonaire, Orange Juice, Golden Teacher, Steel Pulse and more.This compilation focuses on the period during and immediately after Bovell’s involvement with the Jah Sufferer Sound System, digging deep to find deep cuts and lesser known versions, mainly from 1976 - 1980”

♩New one out on Western Vinyl for Luke Temple (Here We go Magic) - one of this generation’s underrated singer-songwriters. He reworks “I Can Dream” a former song by one of his past monikers Art Feynman into a fuller technicolor psychedelic band-pop. I recommend both versions!

♩A haunting video to one of the most instantly striking songs I listened to this year from the lutenist Jozef van Wissem. An apt lament for all the wars and death going around the world.

📖 I read this Wonderful long form essay from the always brilliant Quietus editor John Doran that starts with AFX, Brain Dance & Cornwall and digresses into how the brain works on/off LSD and back.

"LSD was the perfect fuel for the domestic intronaut, the post club tripper, the rural raver, the dune dancer, and this is the basis for IDM’s partial Cornish roots."

"And let’s have it straight: the obstacles to access in electronic dance music had been higher elsewhere. It’s not like anyone could just wander into David Mancuso’s parties. Detroit’s original, foundational techno scene was itself exclusionary."

♩Got a new playlist on Spotify and soon on Apple Music hopefully! That took a long time!

The opener Bach piece was nicked from a Pitchfork feature about music that made Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Got some new folky singer songwriter material from Jessica Pratt, Laura Marling, Jonnine and Briana Marela.

Mid playlist pivot to a bit more funky stuff from Gitkin (Khruangbin-ish) & new album from Goat. Bala Desejo might be the new generation Tropicalistas, and member Dora Morelenbaum has a new album out!

Jazz from international jazz treasure Charles Lloyd, Jaubi with a Bollywood tinted noir movie for Mingus.

Finishing with this year’s best song? I mean if you haven’t watched the video please do. This song has gotten all the ideologies of the world under control, just like that!

📖 Quincy Jones passed away. New York Times obit. Vulture obit.

📖 Marcus Barnes wrote a personal memoir about Fabric’s 25th year over at his newsletter Music is the Answer.

📖 Over at Zen Sounds - Stephan Kunze made me love reading interviews again: Check out these recent ones with Bogdan Raczynski, Felicia, Sarah Davachi

📖 If you have time for another interview, Read this with one of my fave avant metal (?) bands Oranssi Pazuzu. Which I’ll be watching in December in Barcelona. Their new album is out and it is like an alien artifact, without being structurally progressive.

Talk soon!

♩Gradually warmed up and now completely stuck at this year’s album from Norwegian
4 piece math-pop outfit Pom Poko, which rightly gives me some Marnie Stern feels through its angular melodies and arrangements.

“Keep driving, try something, squeeze your foot, until you put a hold onto your youth, Champion!”

♩Beverly Glenn-Copeland is diagnosed with dementia, and this will be his last tour. So please if you have the chance, see a living spiritual new age prophet in person, who was once lost in time, and came in back just in time to give you this, and many others.

“This world is our combined imagination, your life a precious personal creation, “what have you learnt”? “what lessons earnt”? they say. Each of us to others is connected, if one of us is lost, we are all affected, how will you live, what will you give today, they beckon me. Come love can redeem, life is an art, you have a part, it’s yours to play. Come show us your dreams, life needs your hand, to do what you can, in your own way!”

♩Crash Course in Covers! : The original being one of my absolute disco-ish faves from the Talking Heads repertoire - and one track I play a lot when I’m DJing -, there was absolutely no way to for the Argentinian rock band El Mató a un Policía Motorizado, to come and make it theirs, yet that’s what they did!

Bonus: Compare an early Talking Heads live and watch David Byrne sing it recently, 30 years apart.

♩Panoptikon is a suite of vocal & electronic music composed by Maria W Horn for an installation in the disbanded Vita Duvan panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden.

The title Omnia Citra Mortem is a horrid legal term "Everything until death" which means the accused who did not confess their crime could not be sentenced to death, would be tortured until a confession was made.

♩Chantal Acda has a perfect soundtrack to process grief or a breakup. Jazzy but in the form of a folky outsider vocal pop featuring collossal jazz & avantgarde musicians like Bill Frisell, Colin Stetson, Shahzad Ismaily, Thomas Morgan, Eric Thielemans et al.

“Here we are we tried to talk, but the words come out so wrong..”

♩Someone on twitter just came up with and executed a great idea, a 24/7 Shazam machine in San Fran.

♩ Spotted another AI label in the wild, Temple of the Acid Fist, one more complete both in sound and in art direction. We are really in uncharted territories folks. Here’s their take on Psychedelic Afrorock, and the example below “Oghuz Khagan”, Turkish Psychedelic Rock.

♩Cindy Lee shares an official video for one of the many dazzling highlights from 2024's album of the year, Diamond Jubilee (which, by the way, is still available for free download on CL's geocities??!). (via Gorilla vs Bear), and if you haven’t still watched this wonderful live from the last newsletter, I don’t know how I can push you any forward in life.

♩Turned on to this dreamy, 60’s aesthetic visually and a sweet bossa groove by a close friend of mine, Alican Tezer of the Turkish psychedelic rock band Ayyuka & Berlin’s Tegel Boys while visiting him in Berlin.

♩One day after I saw a Jazz Kissa book on the coffee table of another friend, the Istanbul DJ Volkan Judocu, the instagram algo feeds me the Jazz Kissa account, sinister I know! (but thanks all-seeing-algo), and on that final note, here’s a photo of Murakami and his Tokyo jazz bar in the past.

“In 1974, long before his first novel, a young jazz-obsessed Haruki Murakami and his wife Yōko Takahashi opened a bar in Tokyo - neither had even graduated college yet.

The bar – named after their pet, Peter Cat – was a small basement space, where the couple cooked, cleaned, served drinks, hosted live musicians and played records, all day and into the night. Murakami would pull from his collection of then-3,000 records. A number that has reportedly ballooned to over 10,000.”

Adieu until next time!