#10 MILITARY POSITION Prisoner
From our despair, we can find our light. From our torment, we can find our bliss. From our incarceration, we can find our creative liberation. Harriet Morgan aka Military Position turned her pain into a mind-altering record entitled Prisoner. This journey into a sonic space of bleakness is uplifting. She manifested an audio universe of noise that is a looking-glass into a world of torture that she endured at the hands of her ex-partner. We want to welcome back the enigmatic label Handmade Birds who released Military Position’s Prisoner and Nothing Lasts Forever only available via underground distros from around the globe. I want to say thank you to the artist for creating sonic light out of abuse. Death to all abusers!
#9 UBOA Impossible Light
Imagine that inside of your mind was an abandoned building with nothing in it but the ghost of your past. Imagine if someone made a soundtrack to the desolate way you felt inside. Uboa’s The Origin of My Depression album is that soundtrack. More than just songs, this project is full of soundscapes that are many things, such as powerful, fragile, introspective, bleak, and uplifting. The song “Epilation Joy” is a sonic space where I feel safe to dream and not treat my inner thoughts mean. Uboa’s music does have the energy that gives the listener the tools to battle our negative self-talk. The Origin of My Depression is a record that is felt more than listened to and the experience will be different for everyone who experiences it. Plug yourself into “Please Don’t Leave Me” and your skin might get pulled off. Uboa has manifested a record that will never be fully understood years later. Uboa has manifested an audio journey to a place where many of us are too afraid to go. The anthem “An Angel of Great and Terrible Light” is a beacon of light for me and I love this tune!
#8 HIGH NOON KAHUNA This Place is Haunted
This band has created an outstanding Desert Rock Psychedelic album that will have you trippin’ balls with each listen because there are so many twists and turns. I love the way that they make me want to kiss the sky while staring at my favorite sunset! Big tunes like “Prehistoric Love Letter” remind me of when college radio in the 80s so that I could lose my shit to the new Meat Puppets or Camper Van Beethoven. I can’t help but smile as I listen to HIGH NOON KAHUNA’s sun-drenched songs like “Tumbleweeds Nightmare” because they fucking rock. What is evident about this band is that music comes from their hearts and doesn’t sound contrived at all. This Place Is Haunted is going to be on major rotation in HQ this summer. I want HIGH NOON KAHUNA to know that we have major respect for what they are doing, and to CRUCIAL BLAST, welcome back, the culture needed you!
#7 HOURS OF WORSHIP Death & Dying Vol. II
Death & Dying Vol II is where post punk meets avant garde. There’s a point in this record where I feel like I recognize the interplay of synths and vocals and percussion, but then it all is sucked into a doomy vortex of strange and wonderful sonic depression and I realize that HOURS OF WORSHIP has created an emotional masterpiece. Something I can cry to, not dance to. I have experienced my fair share of death and dying in my lifetime, and I’ve developed an intimate connection with the end of human life, and this record speaks to my messy, transformative, resilient struggle to grieve and grow.
#6 LOL.K climbing/holding/falling
I want to say thank you to LOL K for creating music that is so good for my mental health! climbing/holding/falling is a collection of off-kilter soundscapes that point me to my futuristic past. As I listen to their song “Luna,” I can’t help but think about my walks through Denmark Hill wondering if my life would ever be what it is today. LOL K’s music evolves with each experience, and it’s up to you, the listener, to discover what this project means on a personal level. Imagine if Terry Hall of the Specials and Fun Boy 3 decided to collaborate with Aphex Twin, guided by the 3rd eye vision of Roots Manuva, who is high on the secondhand smoke of the Wild Bunch. As an album goes, this band has conjured up an avant-garde classic that might only be understood in years to come. We asked the band to curate a playlist for us and from the music they picked, I can hear how their creative peers have impacted their creative vision.
#5 TRISTWCH Y FENYWOD Tristwch Y Fenywod
Tristwch Y Fenywod translates to Sadness of Women, and the ancient-meets-modern sounds on this record speak to a lived experience I feel in my bones. They sing in the Welsh language, a reminder of the pre-colonial past of so much of the so-called United Kingdom. I don’t understand it any better than I understood the Gaelic my grandma spoke, but I hear the burden of nurturing and sharing culture through generations of oppression and erasure and rewriting that every female on this planet carries in her DNA. Tristwch Y Fenywod is heavy, sorrowful, eerie, wrathful, and unassailable, an audio experience that will transport you to a place where you can see the full spectrum of time through the eyes of the universe.
#4 THE BUG Machine
When I say “industrial-strength doom-riff-dub,” you say THE BUG! I’m used to dub being a sound that uplifts me, and takes me out of harsh reality into some universal space. But The Bug makes dub that gets so deep and heavy it feels more like being crushed in the machinery of endless production and consumption. The bass is crushing, the electronics are droning, and all throughout his songs there are sounds that rain down on me like razorblades. This is dub that wants to push me and pummel me, come down on me like a sonic assault of my senses. With Machine, The Bug has made a heavy metal album that takes the genre name literally, as it pounds my skull like an automated sledgehammer.
#3 YATTA Palm Wine
YATTA has created an album that’s going to take me into 2025 with PMA! Their voice is hauntingly beautiful, and the way they layer it with electronics makes me envision nature reclaiming the cement structures our “civilization” will leave behind when it’s our time to fade away. Whoever survives will reconnect with our original purpose and create the kind of timeless symbiotic beauty Yatta has infused Palm Wine with. Palm wine is an intoxicant and a West African musical genre, and the name of this record speaks to the intoxicating layers of sound that Yatta has woven throughout their songs, riding rhythms and beats that underpin the history of human expression and the connection to an eternally patient creator. Thank you, Yatta, for making a record that reminds me of parts of us I love in a time where we’re all so obsessed with hating ourselves. “I like who I show you.”
#2 VANESSA BEDORET Eyes
I write this from a place of BLISS. I write this from a place of WONDERMENT. I write this from a place OF POSITIVE Self Talk. I write this from a place where Vanessa Bedoret’s new album Eyes has changed the way that I see myself in reality! Her hypnotic soundscapes will shapeshift inside your brainwaves to create these sonic cathedrals of pure amazement. As I listen to songs like “Choice” or “Ballad,” I reminisce about walking in Hampstead Heath looking to the sky knowing that right now will not last forever. Vanessa Bedoret’s music is for sure ethereal but it’s here where her power comes to life and becomes a looking glass into place we might now want to see. The BIG TUNE 1/2 starts with almost this industrial vibe before morphing into an anthem that is part apocalyptic humanoid looking at our place on earth through the creative vision of Vanessa. With each play, EYES will sound different to you because the sounds on this record will play off of whatever mood you are in! If the life we live is a movie, then Vanessa has created a soundtrack to many of our lives. Her music should not only be heard but it should also be felt. If I could curate a show in London, I would love to have Vanessa Bedoret, Space Afrika, Rainy Miller, and Spew. Before I let you go, you should know that Vanessa is one of the illest violinists on the planet! Oh yeah, the title EYES is sublime, and I can’t get enough of Vanessa’s voice!
#1 DIS FIG & THE BODY Orchards of a Futile Heaven
Pure Sonic Magic, Pure Sonic Freedom, Pure Sonic Abstraction — Orchards of a Futile Heaven by The Body and Dis Fig has taken over my world. This is the record I needed in my life, but never knew it until I heard it! As I listen to Dis Fig’s ethereal vocals levitate over “Dissent, Shame,” it makes me think about how I felt the first time I heard Bjork’s “Possibly Maybe.” I could sit here and say that this collection of songs is one of the best Avant Garde records of 2024, but in actuality, this is one of the best records of 2024, period. I love the way that Chip’s howls are used as an instrument. The title track has the sonic vibration to heal all of my inner wounds that have become a part of life as of late. I have always been a fan of all of these artists separately, but as a collective, they have manifested an album that will make all of their underground ancestors proud. The Body and Dig Fig is a good combination that only gets better with each listen. “Coils of Kaa” is a haunting, mesmerizing anthem that harnesses the creative power of all those involved and shows that they have united like Voltron for something beyond special. I can only hope that The Body & Dig Fig blesses Vancouver with a live show of Orchards of a Futile Heaven. I look forward to the day that we have this record on vinyl and I can blast while high on shrooms! Imagine if Nina Simone and Can decide to make Sonic Love Babies, the outcome just might sound like this album!
