The Wire's Releases of the Year 2023

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

In the wake of their acclaimed comeback album 'Figures' (2020), Aksak Maboul took a playful sideways step to create this total work, a 63-minute, continuous suite of fifteen pieces, which could be described as an experimental audio play. The thread running through 'Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)' is Véronique Vincent’s text, an enigmatic philosophical-poetical tale unfolding through monologues and dialogues, spoken and sung by a series of characters, played by Alig Fodder, Laetitia Sadier, Audrey & Benjamin from Aquaserge, Don The Tiger, Blaine L. Reininger, and the members of Aksak Maboul’s current live band: Faustine Hollander, Lucien Fraipont & Erik Heestermans. The music was written & arranged by Marc Hollander and features his characteristic genre-hopping tendencies: strands of electronica, pop, jazz, collage, techno, ambient, improv, krautrock, contemporary classical & systems music are merrily woven together, in the inimitable Aksak Maboul style. The album’s subtitle, 'Songspiel', highlights its theatrical/musical aspect: the work pays oblique homage to the those experimental radio plays that once emerged from the creative workshops of the BBC, the RTF and the RAI, and especially to those German Hörspiels which, at their best, might combine spoken word, instrumental or electronic music, songs and sonic research. Une aventure de VV also modestly alludes to certain stage works written by adventurous composers during the first half of the 20th century, which embraced singing, spoken dialogues and elements inspired by popular music. Those composers sometimes invented genre names to describe their pieces: fantaisie lyrique, mimodrama, or... songspiel).

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

There’s a haunting intensity and rare poetic beauty about Ryuichi Sakamoto’s blend of ambient sounds, stripped down to the bare essentials of melody and rhythm. And for all its simplicity, this is an album that is profoundly moving. His dozen pieces, created spontaneously in March 2021 during the early stages of convalescence from major cancer surgery, speak of life’s fragility and of music’s power to comfort, console, even to heal. It feels almost intrusive at first to listen to what originated as private musical thoughts, conceived on synthesizer and piano out of an innate need for the presence of pure, unadorned sounds. Sakamoto’s choice of 12 favorite sketches, each named for its date of composition, charts the stages of his recovery, from pieces infused with his labored breathing to a sublime final sequence of impressionistic miniatures.

The irony of Chicago composer/clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid’s vastly ambitious song-suite is that it’s as much a requiem for the rustic character of traditional jazz as it is a celebration of how that rusticism might still apply to modern life. Or as Dawid incants near the end of the suite itself, “The death of jazz is the first fake cry of the salvation of the Negro through the birth of a new way of life.” And yet through this heady idea comes a sound whose mix of ragtime (“OFFERTURIUM-HOSTIAS-Humility”), Black spirituals (“KYRIE ELEISON- Lawd Hav’ Merci”), free jazz (“LUX AETERNA – Eternal Light,” which features the Sun Ra Arkestra’s Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott), and quasi-Baroque liturgical music (“INTROIT- Joy n’ Suff’rin”) feels both radical and deferential, primitive and conceptual—roots not as a settled concept but something alive and ever-changing.

Composer, clarinetist, singer and educator Angel Bat Dawid announces the release of a new work, Requiem For Jazz. A 12-movement suite composed, arranged, and inspired in part by dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s 1959 film The Cry of Jazz, the album is a wide-ranging treatise on the African American story from one of its most astute narrators. Itself an incisive critique of racial politics in the USA, The Cry of Jazz draws formal comparisons between the structure of jazz music and the African American experience - as one of freedom and restraint, of joy and suffering - that manifests in the triumph of spirit over the crushing prejudice of daily life. Cutting together archive reels from Black neighborhoods in Chicago with live performance footage from Sun Ra and his Arkestra among others, the film remains a radical and prescient evocation of Black pride and its roots in the history of jazz, from spirituals to blues and beyond. As South African writer Nombuso Mathibela captures in the album’s liner notes: [Music is our weapon of struggle] that radiantly holds our positive aspiration, group pride and determination as Black people. Sonics! our beautiful fire that gave light to the world. And a world that gave us blues. The blues that gave us Black in jazz Drawing a through line to today’s vibrant avant-garde, Angel Bat Dawid’s Requiem For Jazz picks up the liberation work laid out by Bland’s film, taking the message of joy and suffering within the Black classical tradition into a contemporary setting. Music from the project was originally premiered at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago in 2019, where Angel conducted a multigenerational fifteen-piece instrumental ensemble of Black musicians from across Chicago’s creative community, alongside a four-person choir (featuring singers from Black Monument Ensemble) as well as dancers and visual artists. Recordings from the performance were then mixed and post-produced by Angel, who added interludes, vocals and additional sounds. As well as transcribing a piece from the film, Requiem For Jazz also alludes to The Cry of Jazz through contributions from the Sun Ra Arkestra’s Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott on the album’s final movement, which were recorded remotely at the historic Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Philadelphia in late 2020. “I want us to have this very wonderful conversation that Ed Bland started over 50 years ago and I want to continue the conversation; because this is a loving conversation that we need to have with each other” - Angel Bat Dawid, Feb 2023

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

LA-based, Dallas-raised artist Liv.e, announces her sophomore album 'Girl In The Half Pearl' due February 10th via In Real Life. 'Girl In The Half Pearl' seizes on both the creative and personal liberation Liv.e has experienced in the time since her 2020 debut album 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'. The album's 17 tracks are a document of self-examination, as she works through realizations prompted by grief and grapples with the dynamics of her role in the relationships in her life. Building upon the foundation she laid with CWTTY, 'Girl In The Half Pearl' bares her process of growth, forgiveness and reclamation of her sense of womanhood across an immersive soundscape. The album's artistic shifts developed during her time experimenting with live performance in London earlier this year while under residency at London's Laylow. The 24-year-old artist first garnered attention with her 2017 EP, FRANK, and 2018's Hoopdreams EP. Over the past year, Liv.e shared the standalone Mndsgn-produced single "Bout It," along with a COLORS performance and released 'CWTTY+', the deluxe version of her 2020 critically-acclaimed debut album. She's since performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae. Liv.e's unique sensibilities have also caught the eye of the fashion world, marked by an appearance in a Miu Miu ad campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon. Most recently, she was featured on the new Mount Kimbie single titled "a deities encore."

More than 25 years into their existence, Animal Collective is riding the momentum of 2022’s rejuvenating *Time Skiffs*, marking the quickest turnaround of new material since their ultra-prolific 2000s streak. There’s flickers of prior Animal Collective eras to be found here beyond the material’s direct connection to *Time Skiffs*, as many of these songs were written and workshopped during that album’s recording. Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox’s splashy drums recall the darkly shaded ecstasy of 2005’s *Feels*, while the proggy electricity that runs through these nine songs is not unlike the stridency of *Centipede Hz* from 2012. But despite these callbacks to the past, *Isn’t It Now?* feels like new territory for the ever-evolving Animal Collective once again, further cementing them as one of the century’s most iconoclastic and singular indie acts. Whereas its predecessor was the first time Lennox, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, Dave “Avey Tare” Portner, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb put together an album remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, *Isn’t It Now?* marks a return to traditional studio confines for Animal Collective—and the result is a rich and lived-in feel that sounds as if you’re sitting in on a celestial jam session. The swirling epic centerpiece “Defeat”—at nearly 22 minutes, the longest song the group’s put forth on a proper record—builds to an all-in-it chorus before dissolving into a lovely morass of rumbling bass and Portner’s echo-laden vocals. Of course, the left turns are in abundance as well: Witness the thumping “All the Clubs Are Broken,” which sounds like their own take on MGMT’s paranoid psych-pop, or the squeals of classic guitar near the end of the nine-minute shape-shifter “Magicians From Baltimore.”

Everything is the same except for the name says Lawrence – a new name for a new time. A new band too. A better equipped model for today’s hazardous roadways. After taking a step on the journey to January (‘Relative Poverty’ 10”, BFI Film, gigs) Mozart Estate will release their huge new album ‘Pop-Up! Ker- Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping’. Wow that’s some title – and it rhymes! Featuring 16 tracks Lawrence has moved away from the idea of Mozart as a B-side band and has created a full- blown full-length pop masterpiece. There’s ‘Relative Poverty’ and ‘Record Store Day’; already well-known and established, while new tunes ‘I’m Gonna Wiggle’, ‘I Wanna Murder You’, ‘Vanilla Gorilla’ and ‘Doin’ The Brickwall Crawl’ will soon be just as popular with Mozart fans. This compelling relevant collection resonates with potent ammunition, firing straight into the heart of the new year. And there will be plenty of chances to see the band live as they are touring for the next 12 months. From winter shows to summer festivals and European club dates, to various arena supports around the country.

“Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels” is a concept album born of the idea of merging singer/songwriter Mayssa Jallad’s two vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. Written in collaboration with producer Fadi Tabbal, the music builds upon Tabbal’s spatial approach to sound and Jallad’s research on Beirut’s Hotel District. The album is a reference to Jallad’s Historic Preservation master's thesis, in which she detailed the history of the “Battle of the Hotels”, a 5-months battle that took place in Beirut at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, from October 22nd, 1975 to March 29th, 1976. Jallad saw architecture as a main protagonist of the battle, as she discovered it was the first high rise urban battle in the world. The close of the battle resulted in the 15-year Green Line, an urban rift which split Beirut into “East and West”, restricting movement and communication and creating a violent divide that still resonates today. The album comprises two parts. Part A: Dahaliz, is a stroll in the city, where Jallad tries (and fails) to follow an old map. Musician Youmna Saba is a companion in this journey of remembering the once winding corridors (“Dahaliz”) of the city, destroyed by new developments since the 1960s. Empty skyscrapers propel her onto a past filled with the violence of snipers, and a present filled with the glamorous injustice of empty luxury real estate endorsed by powerful warlords-turned-politicians. In Part B: Maaraka, Jallad inhabits the building of the Battle of the Hotels, as its events unfold. She calls the fighting militias the Blues and Reds, respectively the Lebanese Front (Christian Nationalists) and the Lebanese National Movement (Pro-Palestinian leftists), leveling the playing field, and drawing a map of the battle through songwriting. Sary Moussa produces the conclusion of the battle in “Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29)”, which ends with the ultimate severance of the city of Beirut. The music caters to post-war youth who have never been taught this difficult history. Once we consider the “Battle of the Hotels” as our common heritage, it provides an opportunity to teach the value of civil peace. It is also a call to protest for the renewal, rather than the recycling of the political class that has once destroyed the country and holds us, to this day, hostage of its violence. "There’s a stoic determination in the purposeful acoustic guitar strums that hold the fractured sonic architecture of Mayssa Jallad’s “Markaz Azraq (December 6)” together. Her words carry the weight of a thousand suns. Still, her delivery is plaintive and unafraid as she tells the story of a nameless man who lost both sons during the Battle of the Hotels. Once the instrumental palette expands, the warm glow from Fadi Tabbal’s synth personifies the steely perseverance needed in the face of such destruction." - Foxy Digitalis, February 2023

Part of why it feels strange calling The Necks “jazz” is that they’ve always put individual expression second to the dynamic of the group. Collecting four 20-minute improvisations used to open practice sessions, *Travel* is a great introduction both in its digestibility (typical Necks albums are usually a single track running about an hour long) and in how it captures the band’s peculiar, meditative intensity, which can range from churchlike (“Bloodstream”) to threatening and noir (“Signal”). That the other two tracks draw their names from active verbs—“Forming” and “Imprinting”—tells you where the Australian group’s collective head is at: process, process, process.

Geoff Dyer’s Book ‘Working the Room’ "(The Necks) are sometimes categorised as a jazz trio - which is fine as long as this is immediately qualified by adding that they've completely re-conceived the idea of the jazz trio." _ _ __|_|__|_|__ _|____________|__ |o o o o o o o o / ~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~ Travel, the 19th studio album by Australian improvisational trio The Necks, documents their recent practice of starting each day in the studio with a 20-minute trio improvisation. The recordings offer some of their most ecstatic and captivating music cut to tape. As bassist Lloyd Swanton puts it: “It’s a really nice communal activity to bring us together in focus each day, and some lovely music has resulted from it.” Although a straight “live” improvisation has never been recorded in the studio by the band, these tracks (save for some light overdubs and post-production) feel closest to their 30 years of celebrated live performances. In 2017 Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label released the band’s lauded Unfold, which first offered up this uncharacteristic studio work: four sub-20-minute pieces - instead of the typical 60+ minute arc for which the band is known - along with an obfuscated track list which leaves play order to the listener’s hand. The album quickly sold out, and persists as a treasure in collections or as a high-priced ‘Want’ on Discogs. Travel marks a return to this double-LP format, offered in a beautiful gatefold package that features photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and impeccable mastering by Doug Henderson.

*Digital download includes pdf booklet of Jorge Velez illustrations (available exclusively via Bandcamp)* “I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.” The New Age traveller lifestyle may have ultimately eluded Holden, as by the time he was old enough to actually go to raves the UK’s infamous Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 had long since clamped down on the traveller free party circuit, and instead in 1999, when he was just nineteen years old, he fell into a professional career in the more commercialised end of dance music after an early 12” ('Horizons') was picked up by a Sony Music-backed trance imprint. But here and now, with this latest album offering that tops off a musical career spanning over twenty years, Holden is seeking to recapture that feeling of hope, freedom and possibility (both musical and otherwise) that characterised those venerated earliest days of dance music, when the boundaries of the distinct genres as we now know them had yet to crystallise, and a starry-eyed teenage Holden was still dreaming in the bedroom of his Leicestershire village. Standing in contrast to the expanded band and live take recordings of its predecessor 'The Animal Spirits' (“Dramatic, colourful and Holden’s fullest-sounding work yet” 9/10 Loud And Quiet), Holden’s fourth solo artist album is more of a continuous sound collage, artfully juxtaposing audio worlds in his own inimitable manner, with a respectful hat tip to the pastoral classics of his early nineties youth (notable mentions to The KLF’s timeless 'Chill Out', and the sprawling radio soundscapes of Future Sound of London). But where his first wave forebears pilfered freely from the history of recorded music to date, Holden’s sample sources are custom generated, drawn from recordings of his own performances on the modular synth, keyboard, organ and piano plus the lesser explored drones of his childhood violin, cut-up bass guitar, overblown recorder, all manner of percussive trinkets and the serendipity of the odd field recording, as well as guest contributions from various members of the wider Animal Spirits live family: long-time touring companion drummer Tom Page, tabla-championing percussionist Camilo Tirado, multi-instrumentalist for hire Marcus Hamblett (here, on double bass and guitar) and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (on loan from Xam Duo and Virginia Wing). Some of the references here undeniably draw from the past: 'Trust Your Feet' is dominated by the most unashamedly ravey stabs Holden has ever played, yet by the end has seamlessly unfurled into a hand-drum-and-flute campfire singalong, whilst the more Balearic 'Common Land'’s pairing of percussive bird samples with the evocative reverberating saxophone of Christopher Duffin casts it as a distant cousin of 808 State’s 'Pacific State'. But this anything goes approach also welcomes contributions from the left of field: the bold piano flourishes and trembling violin which emerge seamlessly in the middle of jolly Sabres of Paradise-esque tabla jamboree 'Contains Multitudes'; an unexpected dalliance with the slap bass on the fantasy alliance between John Cale and Simple Minds that is the audacious 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form'; the overblown recorder that heralds beatific mellotron, squealing synths and soaring guitars on ceremonial march in the style of Popol Vuh 'The Answer Is Yes'; and to close proceedings, the expressive pitched tabla motifs which punctuate melancholy outro 'You Can Never Go Back', as played by Camilo Tirado. Holden is an artist who has traditionally found it difficult to settle, no sooner finding himself momentarily aligned with one musical milieu before he is off onto the next thing. But 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities' also seems to represent a coming-to-terms with his own musical past, with subtle nods and callbacks to notable moments in Holden’s twenty year long sonic history: the undulating dancefloor melancholy of 'In The End You’ll Know' and the spiralling kinetic pixie arpeggios and hazy vocals of 'Trust Your Feet' and 'Continuous Revolution' awaken the distant memory of his erstwhile career as an international DJ and remixer to the stars, whilst the driving synth and drum, pagan thud, synthesized strings and woozy shimmering nostalgia of his landmark 'The Inheritors' era (Resident Advisor ‘Album of the Year’) remains omnipresent ('Continuous Revolution', 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form', 'The Answer Is Yes', 'Infinite Fadeout'), albeit with a somewhat lighter and brighter sheen. “It’s full of things I’ve come to terms with – I’ve always hated the call of a woodpigeon, synonymous with unending suburban weekend boredom for me, but they’re in there ['Four Ways Down The Valley']. Or, despite learning both piano and violin I never used either on my records, ashamed of my playing and turned off by their connotations but I’m happy they’re both in there too ['Contains Multitudes']. And for a while in the mid 2010s I couldn’t hear dance music anymore, a single kick drum had me lunging for the skip button, but I’ve found my way back to that – reclaiming the bits I liked (the hypnotism, the utopianism, the wide ranging cross cultural freedom) and leaving behind what I don’t need.” And as if to prove he means business, after a prolonged absence of almost ten years Holden has recently dipped his toe back into the remixing culture where he built his name, with XAM Duo (Sonic Cathedral), GoGo Penguin (Blue Note) and Lost Souls of Saturn (R&S) the latest blessed recipients of a Holden rework. The hefty album title ('Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities') meanwhile is suitably suggestive of the utopian sense of hope, freedom and transformative potential that resonated throughout early rave culture, but it was actually discovered scrawled in Holden’s own notebook after a long night of delirious hyper-focussed coding, as a message to his future self. Holden is a long-time advocate of Cycling74’s Max/MSP programming language, and most recently he has used it to build an ambitious custom modular sequencing and synthesis environment to facilitate his live performances, which he also (in keeping with his collectivist impulses) plans to make available to other budding music makers via his website. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever,” he explains. “It’s the system, the rules, the limits, the relationships contained in it, and it could’ve turned out so many other ways. If a song had only two midi controls to play the whole thing you could map it to a walk around a 2D map, but a real song is a journey in some kind of high dimensional space, and also the knowledge of all the other journeys it could’ve been. Probably a metaphor for life, I dunno.” 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities' will be released via Holden’s own proudly DIY Border Community label on 31st March 2023, on double vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming. For the album’s distinctive hand drawn artwork and accompanying twelve page comic booklet insert, Holden called upon Amsterdam-based illustrator and musician Jorge Velez to help flesh out the visual component of the immersive fantasy world that is conjured up in 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities'. The result is a twelve panel storyboard (one per track) documenting the rave rituals of an alternative reality populated by magical creatures, which owes much to the pair’s shared love of the soothing retro-futurist colour palettes of the late and truly great French cartoonist Moebius (included in pdf form exclusively with Bandcamp downloads).