Last year, when there was a deluge of personalised top 100 threads, I joined in with my top 100 releases of May 2023.
That thread took me four months to complete, so I can’t make it work as a recurring monthly series, but I enjoyed the chance to spotlight some music that otherwise would have gone even further under the radar.
This year I’ve continued to trawl new releases, listening to littlle other than music released in the current year, and I try to keep updating the new releases threads with what I’m enjoying but real life demands mean I’m often behind on those threads and rather than keep reviving weekly threads from earlier in the year, thought I would just make one thread where I could add recent releases that didn’t get a mention or much attention in the weekly churn.
This isn’t a ranked list like my previous thread, so isn’t leading anywhere, but going to start with a few releases from my backlog and if it seems like there is an audience for it then I will keep it as a rolling miscellany.
This EP is probably the release that pushed me into making this thread - highly enjoyable changa tuki bangers from MJ Nebreda, a singer/producer from Venezuela (now based in Miami) and Danny [also] From Miami, aka Danny Daze. The combination of top notch techno production with Latin American reggaeton-adjacent pop will make this the sound of the summer for me, at least until Limmy rolls Daft Punk out again.
Kenny Garrett is a 63-year old jazz saxophone player who has played with numerous jazz legends, including Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd. His latest album is a collaboration with a not rather less well known Russian-American electronic producer by the stage name of Svoy, and is quite an unusual fusion of jazz and electronica with mixed results, but I really enjoyed the highlights. The album’s opening notes sound like a SNES game, things go temporaily cheesey Euro-pop before settling into something that I just haven’t really heard much else like. Might not get a lot of replays but I definitely enjoyed it and not for novelty value alone.
AceMo is a prolific Brooklyn DJ/producer who has already put out two of the electronic albums of the year. Save The World already had a mention and some appreciation in the weekly releases threads, and a glowing Resident Advisor review, but I think this might end up my favourite of the two.
AceMo described this record as “an auditory depiction of an underwater being coming into / realizing self”. It definitely does have have something oceanic about it, with feelings of immense power, isolation and something almost otherworldly within some really quite moving ambient techno giving a very different vibe to the maximalist good-times house on Save The World.
Really interesting album this - it is part of a wider artistic project (including a 280 page art book) by the FLEE Project investigating the musical and social heritage of Ulyap, a small village in Russia. It begins with archive and live recordings of local music (largely accordion, harmonica and chant based) and ends with reimaginings of the music by contemporary artists including Valentina Goncharova, Minami Deutsch and Emanuelle Parrenin.
d. silvestre - O inimigo agora é outro, vol. 2
March 1, 2024
Something more abrasive now, this is an album I have kept coming back to this year because it’s just such an addictive onslaught. The genre is categorised on RYM as “Beat Bruxaria”, which is “São Paulo-originated Funk brasileiro with aggressive, distorted and high-pitched beats featuring minimalistic percussion and diversified sampling”. There’s not a lot in English about the artist or the album so will just leave it with a warning that there’s probably not much of a middle ground with this music, can see this music being an immediate turn-off for many people, it but hopefully I’m not alone in enjoying the oppressive power and anarchy of these rhythms.
This is a UK jazz release that went undeservedly low under the radar when it was released earlier this year. Hirst is a composer/singer with a great voice whose latest album, funded by PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music and the MOBO Help Musicians Fund, is testament to woman, motherhood and the musical heritage of West London. Echoes of Drum and Bass and trip hop bubble up often. The band behind her, led by bassist and long-time collaborator Daniel Casimir, are on point throughout. Great stuff.
This is an early version of one of the album highlights, recorded next to a river by just Casimir and Hirst. Think it comes to life more on the album but I enjoyed this too.
One of my favourite albums of the year so far. Abbé is a folk singer from France now living in England, and is a fixture in the West Country folk scene; she is performing at the opening ceremony for Glastonbury this year, and not for the first time. On this bilingual album she combines regional folk traditions from her home and adopted countries with a little jazz and swing, and the result is a really enjoyable and evocative listen.
Just put this on this morning and had to post it straight here so not too late for your May album of the month consideration, where it is definitely going to be in the running for me. Foundling are a Berlin-based quintet led by Canadian singer/bassist/harpist Erin Lang, with drums, synths, sax/flutes and miscellaneous percussion provided by her band who create “an intriguing mix of dream pop, junkyard minimalism and glittery ECM jazz, pitched somewhere between Julia Holter and David Sylvian” (The Guardian) whilst their own Bandcamp references exotica, Sade and Alice Coltrane.
Returning to the theme of the opening post (Latin bangers), this album from Argentinian-Spanish singer Nathy Peluso should appeal to fans of the poppier side of Rosalia’s music. Seems like she is massive in Spanish-speaking parts of the world, can only imagine the rest of us will be catching on shortly.
A French techno artist with a maternal instinct (her label is Mama told ya) great line in all-out bangers. I really enjoyed this album, from the aesthetic, which adds a motherly warmth to weird otherwordly biological horror imagery, to the dancefloor ready high intensity beats lifting from hard house, psy-trance, gabber.
