DeForrest Brown Jr. on the Best Music of 2024

RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (PTP)

Curated by GENG, founder of PTP (aka Purple Tape Pedigree aka Power Through People aka Protect the Peace), this digital/CD compilation and collective petition against Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza brings together approximately a hundred independent musicians and spoken-word artists. Each contribution is a statement of support and of intent, like a sonic signature—subverting traditional recorded music release strategies in favor of a direct-to-consumer mutual aid approach.
DJ STINGRAY, INDUSTRY 4.0 (TRESOR RECORDS GMBH); HOWARD THOMAS AKA H-FUSION, SKIN BREAKER (SOUND SIGNATURE); GERALD CLEAVER, THE PROCESS (POSITIVE ELEVATION/577 RECORDS)

Techno is music that sounds like technology. These three albums reengineer incidental sounds produced within their respective digital-and-analog audio workstations into watery hydrologic sonifications; the results seem locked into grooves misaligned with either standardized commercial music or contemporary reappropriated underground music culture. A synaptic surge of artifactual modal intelligence informs DJ Stingray’s near-visual futurhythmic technology music; meanwhile, auto mechanic turned musician Howard Thomas and jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver undertake diagnostic explorations of their respective skill sets to ignite new possibilities for Detroit’s brand of techno-vernacular expressionism.
NALA SINEPHRO, ENDLESSNESS (WARP)

Contemporary studio jazz gets uplifted into radiophonic listening music on London-based, Brussels-raised Nala Sinephro’s second album, Endlessness. An ensemble of accomplished musicians in their own right—including saxophonists Nubya Garcia and James Mollison of Ezra Collective and drummer Morgan Simpson (formerly of Black Midi)—is led by Sinephro’s lyrical Moog synthesizer tones into a free-form journey built on a single arpeggiated motif. These modes of performing and listening add a novel musicality that’s often missing from electronic sound, while also making the abstraction of bleeps, bloops, and beats scalable to new listeners and music aficionados alike.
THREE HANDS OF DOOM (NYEGE NYEGE TAPES)

Ugandan drummer Omutaba joined Berlin-based musicians Shackleton and Scotch Rolex on this follow-up to the duo’s 2023 album Death by Tickling. Their energized advancement of psychoacoustic dub twists traditional hand-played rhythms with extensive studio dubmorphological mixing techniques. Across four tracks, the trio unleash high-octane beats against field recordings for an electroacoustic sound that bursts with creative energy, suggesting an axis of twenty-first-century electronic music from continental Africa, Britain, and Japan, centered in a Berlin studio.
KMRU, LAMIN FOFANA, JESSICA EKOMANE, NYOKABI KARIŨKI, AND AHO SSAN, TEMPORARY STORED II (OFNOT)

Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist who in 2022 broadened his explorations of institutional recording devices and the mechanical reproduction of acoustic environments with his hauntological piece Temporary Stored, which received an honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica 2023 in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category. For his collaborative follow-up Temporary Stored II, KMRU gathered a cohort of sound experimentalists of African origin to further excavate the auditory residue of the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. In listening back to colonial recordings, they find “fragile vessels carrying fragments of practices and embodied knowledges,” as curator Bhavisha Panchia writes in the album’s liner notes.
VARIOUS ARTISTS, CYBERNETICS, OR GHOSTS? (SUBTEXT RECORDINGS AND PUBLISHING)

In the new book and digital album Cybernetics, or Ghosts? Stories from Myth to AI,British Nigerian author and artist Michael Salu gathers a cohort of accomplished diasporic writers to revisit “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Italo Calvino’s 1967 lecture on the possibility of writing machines. This combinatory project of text and music coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the Subtext imprint while also serving as the label’s third venture into book publishing. Science fiction and twentieth-century atonal electronic compositions inhabit a resonant “subtextual” space that elevates the discursivity of the anthology’s speculative and automated storytelling. The words and sounds within and surrounding Cybernetics, or Ghosts? set out to understand the purpose of literary and musical discourse in a cybernated world system.
DJ N**** FOX, CHÁ PRETO (PRÍNCIPE); NUNO BEATS, SAI DO CORAÇÃO (PRÍNCIPE); NÍDIA & VALENTINA, ESTRADAS (LATENCY); DJ LYCOX, GUETTO STAR(PRÍNCIPE)

These four albums reimagine Angolan kuduro and batida as a novel Afro-Portuguese diasporic folk music that reflects the complex histories of a country rent by civil war from 1975 through 2002, as well as ongoing dialogues surrounding identity and migration. Founded in the early 2010s, Príncipe is a Lisbon-based record label supporting an emergent cultural expression that serves as a means of processing a collective memory of trauma, displacement, alienation, and self-renewal in the Portuguese urban landscape and abroad.
BERGSONIST, AS IF REALITY AND MAGHREB (SELF-RELEASED)

On the self-released albums As If Reality and Maghreb, Moroccan-born, New York City–based DJ and producer Bergsonist speculates on the consistency of reality within an Arab Pan-African worldview. As her moniker suggests, Bergsonist—real name Selwa Abd—draws inspiration from the philosopher of duration Henri Bergson. She sees her experiments with computer music and ethno-futuristic electronica as metaphors for the tension between reality and expectation in a socially mediated and militaristically fractured global village.
SOTE, MINISTRY OF TALL TALES (SVBKVLT)

Sote’s Ministry of Tall Tales intertwines the traditional acoustic instrumentation of his Persian heritage with influences from electronic dance music and academic sound studies. His sculptural approach to electronic composition is avant-garde, resembling earlier experiments in recording and the reproduction of audio objects in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the pieces’ content is topical: Tracks such as “Kangaroo Court” and “Reign of Insanity” are cerebral auditory experiences that call into question the legitimacy of international courts and diplomacy in a crisis of global incivility.
PAT THOMAS, THE SOLAR MODEL OF IBN AL-SHATIR (OTOROKU) AND THIS IS TRICK STEP (577 RECORDS)

English pianist Pat Thomas has earned a reputation as an undersung legend of late-twentieth-century jazz and contemporary advanced electronic music. Two of his recent studio albums follow in the footsteps of a 2022 reissue of his lost classic New Jazz Jungle: Remembering (1997) by splitting the difference between acoustic and electronic improvisation via the deconstruction and recapitulation of genre tropes. This Is Trick Step is a granular dissection of breakbeat volumetrics that asks listeners to “imagine an alternative universe where J Dilla and Morton Feldman collaborate,” as Thomas says. The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir employs the piano’s mechanics of chromatic keys in lockstep with magnetic strings and hammers to investigate the augmented, double harmonic scales and applied philosophies of the Arabic world—xenharmonic innovations beyond the Eurological model of programmatic music circumscribed by notation and recitation.

MUSIC

RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (PTP)

DJ STINGRAY, INDUSTRY 4.0 (TRESOR RECORDS GMBH); HOWARD THOMAS AKA H-FUSION, SKIN BREAKER (SOUND SIGNATURE); GERALD CLEAVER, THE PROCESS (POSITIVE ELEVATION/577 RECORDS)

NALA SINEPHRO, ENDLESSNESS (WARP)

THREE HANDS OF DOOM (NYEGE NYEGE TAPES)

KMRU, LAMIN FOFANA, JESSICA EKOMANE, NYOKABI KARIŨKI, AND AHO SSAN, TEMPORARY STORED II (OFNOT)

VARIOUS ARTISTS, CYBERNETICS, OR GHOSTS? (SUBTEXT RECORDINGS AND PUBLISHING)

DJ N**** FOX, CHÁ PRETO (PRÍNCIPE); NUNO BEATS, SAI DO CORAÇÃO (PRÍNCIPE); NÍDIA & VALENTINA, ESTRADAS (LATENCY); DJ LYCOX, GUETTO STAR(PRÍNCIPE)

BERGSONIST, AS IF REALITY AND MAGHREB (SELF-RELEASED)

SOTE, MINISTRY OF TALL TALES (SVBKVLT)

PAT THOMAS, THE SOLAR MODEL OF IBN AL-SHATIR (OTOROKU) AND THIS IS TRICK STEP (577 RECORDS)

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