Dec. 24, 2025
Wrapping up the year’s listening with some music I’ve heard and enjoyed since October. My final post for the year! It’s been interesting but a lot to keep up with, and I may need to modify my listening habits in 2026. As usual, the descriptive blurbs in quotes are lifted directly from the artist’s or label’s notes (sometimes edited by me), comments not in quotes are my own, and artist names in bold either currently live or have lived in the Pacific Northwest. Stay tuned for my year-end Favorites lists, coming soon. Phew!
Balkan Dub System - Balkan Dub System (Croatia)
“Born at the crossroads of East & West - where cultures collide and Dub finds a new voice, Balkan Dub System is a project started by Ognjen Zecevic (Egoless) exploring the unity between dub, Balkan, Middle Eastern traditional music & instruments such as Turkish saz, Iranian santur, Armenian duduk, bendir drums etc. alongside ney & kaval flutes (played by Roko Margeta) and other instruments such as acoustic drums, bass, guitar, brass section (trombone, trumpet, saxophone), cello, accordion etc...”
Sonya Belaya - Dacha
“A six-song cycle rooted in themes of loss, cultural memory, and resilience from this New York-based pianist, vocalist, and composer. Drawing from Soviet feminist poetry, bard traditions, and Eastern European folk songs, the project examines personal and ancestral grief against the backdrop of diasporic experience.”
Ben Bennett - Answers
“As a percussionist, Ben has a lithe touch, moving seamlessly between sticks and his bare hands. Like Toshi Makihara and Sean Meehan, Ben is concerned with friction, yet his work is closer in spirit to Kieran Daly’s slowly unfolding monophonic MIDI investigations, which balance formal rigor, a cultivated openness to “dumbness,” and an abstract connection to the jazz tradition. “
Philip Blackburn - Another Intensity
“An expansive exploration of the natural world as a living, breathing concert hall. It is an invitation to listen to the organic stillness within motion, stasis and flux, and the contemplation of fleeting phenomena. In short, a sonic weather system of the mind. The six works on Another Intensity share a sense of nature’s grand procession, revealing moments of wonder in the spaces between events. It discovers life in the cracks of perception. The album transports listeners to resonant caves, dense rainforests, and soundscapes of distant memory—journeying through both real and imagined places.”
Bill Brennan & Andy McNeil - Dreaming in Gamelan (Canada)
“A collaboration between two Canadian multi-instrumentalist/composers blending elements of West Javanese gamelan music with contemporary electronic ambient styles.”
Brown Calvin - colors for closed eyes
“Some watery colors that root me into ground / scatter me into aether.” This Portland artist creates electronic keyboard-based music that I guess I’d call “ambient” for lack of a better word, in the way that someone like Roedelius is ambient. Plenty going on here to hold my attention.
Alabaster DePlume - To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 (IA11 Edition)
Reissue of a 2020 release, fleshed out with a couple of bonus tracks. “A collection of Mancunian poet, singer, saxophonist and composer Alabaster DePlume’s simple and serenely intimate wordless adventures in melodic ennui.”
Pablo Diserens - Ebbing Ice Lines
“Assembled entirely of field recordings made by Diserens on three trips to the Low Arctic – twice to Iceland and once on a self-guided residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Finland, on the border with Sweden and Norway. Avian vocalizations, anthropogenic drones, geothermal pipelines, natural resonances, ice symphonies, geological shifts and volcanic eruptions are all characters in the drama of Diserens’ compositions, which like much of their previous work, leans into the smallest details of sound to provide connection and transmission across multiple species, scales and subjectivities. Not beholden to its melting edge or calving frontier, Diserens heads for the interior to hold a stethoscope to the glacier’s gurgling guts. We feel its metabolism rise and fall, its arteries flow and its lungs exhale.”
Erika Dohi - Myth of Tomorrow
“A representation of Dohi’s artistic growth and exploration, seamlessly combining elements from dance, jazz, ambient, and classical composition to create transcendent, otherworldly soundscapes. Inspired by Taro Okamoto’s striking mural of the Hiroshima bombing by the same name, Myth of Tomorrow merges historical trauma with Dohi’s own personal upheaval in 2020. Expanding her already eclectic sonic palette, Myth of Tomorrow incorporates traditional Japanese instruments, the iconic Fairlight CMI synthesizer, and her own mesmeric singing.”
Mario Layne Fabrizio - kostochki
A different kind of chamber music – loose, mercurial, rough around the edges, with influences ranging from Feldman and Rudhyar to Braxton and the AACM. Not sure as to the ratio of composed to improvised but it probably doesn't matter. An excellent surprise!
Ellen Fullman & the Living Earth Show - Elemental View
“A work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere.”
Wayne Horvitz - Music for Ten Musicians
“After an initial piano introduction, the piece is structured around 11 composed themes, bridged by 10 interstitial movements. Each of these movements features an improvised soloist. Two more players then enter to make a trio. The dynamic range is almost entirely between pianissimo and mezzo piano, with few exceptions. I was looking to create a formal structure that made deliberate contrasts between composed and improvised sections, featured each of the 10 musicians, and maintained one essential mood throughout. All the composed music is connected to one intervallic motif.”
Brian House - Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World
“Even though you can’t hear it, infrasound fills the air. If humans could perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic sources from across the planet would be part of the quotidian soundscape of our lives. I made this recording in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. I sped it up by a factor of 60: 24 hours becomes 24 minutes, raising the pitch by almost six octaves and making infrasound audible. Since ordinary microphones cannot pick up frequencies this low, I constructed infrasonic “macrophones” [that] bring large sounds with long wavelengths into our perceptual range.”
Peter Knight - For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name (Australia)
“This is music inspired by the water and the wind. By the tattoo of the insects’ beating wings and the soughing of the wattle in the sea breeze. By the dull roll of the surf and the rhythm of my breath against the pad of my feet as I walk along the sandy, leaf-littered path through the scrub to the beach. The fingers of the fire-blackened dead banksias clawing the vicious blue. Somewhere, a peal of laughter is torn from its source and flies for a moment on the thermals rising from the baking sand.”
Madala Kunene & Sibusile Xaba - kwaNTU (South Africa)
“Bringing together the elder statesman of the Zulu guitar Madala Kunene and internationally acclaimed Sibusile Xaba, kwaNTU pulls two generations of South African guitar mastery into a single point of focus. Under-represented on recordings outside of South Africa, Madala Kunene (b. 1951), the ‘King of the Zulu Guitar’, is revered as the greatest living master of the Zulu guitar tradition. Sibusile Xaba has garnered international acclaim for his unique voice and virtuoso guitar stylings, which bring together multiple South African guitar lineages in an original, spiritualised fusion.”
Mike Majkowski - TIde (Germany)
“At the edge of a bay, with the water moving incrementally and steadily away from the shore, in an ebb current, change is rarely perceived in real time, even upon constant observation. Very slowly, things become revealed in the sand. In Tide, the sounds gently edge away from each other, progressively stretching, gradually finding more space to resonate and hang in the air. Similar to the perspective at the edge of the bay, new sonic aspects are slowly revealed here, and changes are sometimes perceived only in hindsight.”
Kelsey Mines & Erin Rogers - Scratching at the Surface
“This collection of striking vignettes [for contrabass and saxophones] dives deep into sonic exploration, weaving together powerful low-end resonance and shimmering high tones. Inspired by the sea’s raw energy and quiet beauty, Rogers and Mines craft a mesmerizing soundscape of undulating rhythms, bold textures, and immersive mystery.”
Antonina Nowacka - Lamunan
Originally released in 2020, this is a re-issue. “Forged alone in a cave on the island of Java, and recorded in a fortress in Poland, Lamunan is an intimate exploration of a mysterious darkness and the earliest of musical forms. Hours spent in the dizzying darkness and echoes of Seplawan Cave produced a series of unaccompanied vocal motifs. Moans, chants, hums, and wordless cries met with the multi-million year-old facades of the stone walls. The freely flowing compositions seem forged from the same natural material as that stone, carved into shape by nothing but water, time, and solitude. Upon returning to Poland, Nowacka recorded with Rafal Smoliński in the cave-like sonic conditions of the Modlin Fortress some 50km north of Warsaw. The intimate and surreal sound of the cave is recreated, Nowacka overlapping multiple vocal lines to create delicately interwoven chamber choral pieces, musically minimalist and emotionally maximalist.”
Scott Ordway & Lorelei Ensemble - North Woods
“A four movement work written for the treble voice choir Lorelei Ensemble in 2014, North Woods understands the forest as a border between the known and the unknown, an inspiration for us to imagine beyond our current limits of understanding.”
Anna Pidgorna - Invented Folksongs (Canada)
“Folk music'is an interesting piece of terminology because of how slippery it can be. The debut full-length of greater Vancouver-based composer and vocalist Anna Pidgorna probes this contradiction through the lens of her Ukrainian heritage. Pidgorna has long incorporated musical elements that reflect her ancestry in her concert works but since visiting and studying traditional music in Ukraine, her work has aimed for a more embodied understanding of these traditions. Especially since these trips ignited her interest in singing her own work. Pidgorna has ultimately found a deeply personal approach to vocalization, drawing on Ukrainian folk, but pushing these gestures past their traditional origins, while blending them with classical and contemporary singing techniques.”
Massimo Silverio - Surtùm (Italy)
“Silverio is one of the most distinctive names in the new Italian music scene, carving out a niche within the independent landscape with his unconventional idea of songwriting — influenced by the folklore of Carnia, electronic textures, and a highly personal approach to songwriting. Surtùm is a journey of peace and grace, a slow descent into the dark nature of humankind, an album through which Massimo Silverio seeks to exorcise the dark times of violence and hatred we are living in. Surtùm is a Friulian term that can be translated as swamp or marshy meadow. In the specific context of this album, Surtùm is understood and imagined as a place where songs and prayers are deposited.”
SML - How You Been
“SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Their second album finds the supergroup of prolific composer/producers pushing ever further into the hyperrealist, collectivist approach to music creation nascently explored on their debut. As SML has evolved and spread out in space-time, their fluencies, both as an improvising unit in performance and as a production team in the studio, have sharpened. At inception the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons like Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, and electric Miles Davis, as well as assorted genre touchpoints like Afrobeat, kosmiche, proto-techno and new-jazz. With How You Been their work manages to both collapse and explode such derivatives…”
Gregg Skloff - Concentrixities
Down in Astoria, Oregon there's a guy with an acoustic bass and a bunch of pedals making dreamy dronescapes that I can easily evaporate into.
Talk Show (Steph Richards & Qasim Naqvi) - Miss America
“Talk Show is a new duo collaboration featuring Steph Richards on trumpets and resonating surfaces and Qasim Naqvi on drums, almglocken bells and modular synthesizer. The album was recorded live, with Qasim crafting real-time electronics and drum set work, and Steph using trumpets and resonating percussion to summon sympathetic vibrations and otherworldly sounds through timpani, snare and water. The trumpet sounds electronically processed, though every sound is acoustic. Both artists wanted to retain the live nature of their process, so what you hear is virtually untouched.”