Lee “Scratch” Perry & Mouse on Mars – Yayaya [Domino/Bandcamp]

Any collaboration with dub originator Lee “Scratch” Perry is going to come with a story – and especially one that happened very shortly before he passed away. When it’s the legendary German electronic duo Mouse on Mars, that goes double – and story there is, which you can read at this album’s own dedicated website. MoM have always skated the boundary between cerebrally exploratory and crowd-pleasingly accessible, and they’ve swum from bloopy electronica to postrock, punk to techno. On Spatial, No Problem. they’ve comfortably found a place that incorporates the sounds and signifiers of roots reggae and dub with their own electronic tendencies. There are great horn arrangements, dub effects, and a lot of Scratchian vocals, both general chatter and songs. By all accounts, Perry brought objects, sounds and lots of ideas to the sessions, and it does sound like a collaboration and not just Perry’s distinctive voice slapped on to the band’s tracks. Honestly, it’s the most engaging thing I’ve heard from Mouse on Mars in ages, and while there have been at least four releases I’ve heard claiming to be Lee Perry’s last recordings, if this is the one, it’s a perfectly zany and delightful way to sign off!

Sandy Chamoun – Shahed شاهد [Ruptured/Bandcamp]

Beirut’s Sandy Chamoun is a founding member of the great Lebanese supergroup SANAM, whose second album Sametou Sawtan سمعت صوتاً was released on Montréal’s Constellation Records last year to great acclaim, and the experimental trio Ghadr. In both groups, Chamoun often uses lyrics from Arabic poets and folk songs, but on her new album Sawt El Doumouh صوت الدموع (The Sound of Tears), her own lyrics write of the experience of living during the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (neither of which have in any sense ended – don’t turn your eyes away). Despite the sound of tears, Chamoun’s album imagines ways to find light & hope, and you can hear that in the way her voice rises over heavy percussion and electronics. Beautiful.

Jungstötter – Elastic (Avenue) [Unguarded/Unguarded Bandcamp/Jungstötter Bandcamp]

Fabian Altstötter’s solo project Jungstötter began with 2019’s Love Is, but I only came across him with the incredible One Star album in 2023. Alstötter’s vocal delivery recalls the likes of David Sylvian and Scott Walker, richly sung and emotive, with production that can also be seen to call back to those artists’ dedication to experimention. A lot of this new album is very sparse, but there is electronic processing undercutting the organic sounds, there are field recordings floating through, and some angular sounds on guitar and electronics. It’s quite beautiful, as is his earlier work, very much worth following up.

BAG – Floor Phlegm Hue [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]

UK’s Phantom Limb is a very gregarious label (among other things), supporting experimental music of all colours. London duo (or is it trio?) BAG combine the hallucinatory spoken word of Canadian artist/poet Jody DeSchutter and the swooping, grinding electronics of Daniel Allison, joined by “auxiliary member” Angèle David-Guillou (French composer and longtime member of the much-missed Piano Magic) on various instruments. The drums of Iggor Cavalera (ex-Sepultura drummer and one half of PETBRICK) feature all over the record, which was produced by his wife, the multi-talented Laima Leyton. Frequently intense & unpredictable, this album’s a real trip. BAG join a strange cohort of spoken word-driven bands of late, such as Dry Cleaning and Egg Meat, doing extremely odd things with the use of non-melodic voice, or not usually melodic. I’m not sure there’s anything in common between groups like these either, except that they don’t have much in common with much else out there. A good way to be.

Naná Rizinni – Under the Quiet [Naná Rizinni Bandcamp]

São Paulo drummer & composer Naná Rizinni bases herself in London now, and has released a number of solo albums and collaborations. Her new album Epiblast was written & co-produced with saxophonist Mark Cake, whose multitracked horns are all over the record. Despite Rizinni’s Brazilian origins & jazz training, her brilliant & very versatile drumming is often led into experimental electronics and synths, approaching almost postrock, minimalist composition and more. Don’t miss it!

US label Ohm Resistance, run by Kurt Gluck aka Submerged, has released heaps of heavy drum’n’bass, breakcore, dub(step), industrial-tinged beats of all sorts, for well over 2 decades. Some 18 years ago, they released a 12″ drum’n’bass compilation called Disciples of the Unreal, and for no reason other than that they can, they’ve now released a sequel, Disciples of the Unreal II, which happens to be twice as long. This is very much the heavier end of the drum’n’bass spectrum, with plenty of bass weight and rhythmic interplay, but how can you go past Big Flowdan‘s flow on a collaboration with Ukrainian d’n’bers Medium & Italian heavy dub don SIMM aka Eraldo Bernocchi, here as Kurt Gluck’s own Submerged VIP. Not-so simple stuff!

Moscow-based Armenian musician Lusia Kazaryan-Topchyan is Margenrot, whose earlier solo releases sat in a kind of illbient, industrial dub & ’80s electronic space. On her new album Antuni she draws from the music of her Armenian roots, combining choral & liturgical samples, field recordings, and fractured breakbeats. From glitched beats to glitched orchestras, the album even finds room for an unexpected song of sorts, as it explores the nature of home & identity (“Antuni” means “homeless” in Armenian). Beautifully done.

US drummer & percussionist Jon Mueller has a broad remit, having worked with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon in Volcano Choir, made postrock with Chris Rosenau in Pele and Collections of Colonies of Bees, and collaborated with countless experimental musicians including Aaron Turner of ISIS, SUMAC etc. A few weeks ago he launched a new project called FRIEND LESS with the EP Energy Rippers, the two tracks of which smash out powerful breakbeats from overdriven drums. But FRIEND LESS isn’t friendless, and its second release is a pair of remixes on Logic of Relics. Mueller invited Ken Brown (aka Bundy K Brown of Tortoise, sometimes known as the Cheech Wizard etc) and James Plotkin (of Khanate, O.L.D and countless others) to add their treatments to the two tracks. Both are awesome, but Brown’s is almost 17 minutes long, so we heard PLotkin’s 9 minutes, which sounds as close to his incredible Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher as he’s gotten in 2+ decades.

Cinna Peyghamy – Glass Teeth 94 [Other People/Bandcamp]

I first discovered Iranian-French percussionist Cinna Peyghamy through his two appearances on Azu Tiwaline‘s Magnetic Service EP on Livity Sound. Peyghamy has never been to Iran, but was fascinated in Persian music, and specifically the tombak – a goblet drum central to Persian music. As a sound designer & producer (and programmer), he was immediately interested in how to connected the very physical sound of the instrument with modular synthesis and processing. Now Nicolas Jaar’s Other People has released Peyghamy’s most fully-realised take on this music, straightforwardly titled Music For Tombak & Synth. And the excitement of listening to this music comes from the way Peyghamy makes his nimble drumming on this very expressive instrument interact with dub effects and programmed synths. The amount of wonderful, forward-thinking music being made these days by musicians with roots in West Asia and North Africa is an antidote to the appropriation, orientalism and even well-meaning ethnomusicology of western music’s interactions with cultures beyond its borders.

Across releases on RuptureLDN, Livity Sound, Ilian Tape and more, Joe Baker aka Forest Drive West has shown himself equal to the specifics of jungle, drum’n’bass and techno – but more to the point, in the decade or so since he began, he’s found ways to set drum’n’bass & techno in conversation with each other. And yeah, lots of people are doing this in different ways, but Baker just knows deeply the nod & sway, the flutter and leech and bubble of dub techno vs d’n’b vs jungle, and when he melds them together, they’re just one thing – all things all at once. It’s like a magic trick, but you know… for the dancefloor. Or your headphones.

OK, but then what of K Wata? Unlike the more jittery dub techno of the likes of Paperclip Minimiser or Hoavi, where IDM or hints at jungle flitter around, K Wata’s take is pitch-perfect for the Vladislav Delay or Pole crew. That’s not to say this is a throwback at all, though – it’s informed by current bass music in subtle ways, and the sound design is next level. There’s so much detail to be heard here, whether in the spatial dubbiness or the glitchy samples. Oh – and tonight’s selection, “Radio Embrace”, does insert syncopations and skittery delays which hint handily at something drum’n’bassy going on in the next room.

There’s nothing approaching jungle or dub techno on the latest album from Leverton Fox, but one third of the group – Isambard Khroustaliov aka Sam Britton – is half of the beloved Icarus, whose first two albums are little-known gems of mid-’90s Photek-style d’n’b. (Icarus’ other half, Ollie Bown, lives in Sydney and is a member of my still-active band Tangents). Leverton Fox is a long-running project with London jazz & improv mainstay Alex Bonney on trumpet & electronics and the highly talented Tim Giles on drums & electronics. Leverton Fox doesn’t sound much like jazz either, most of the time, but listen & you’ll find yourself lost in a parallel dimension where the musical rules are subtly out of whack, and probably the rules of physics too. New album Eternal Gong Bath of the Sunbed Mind, apart from being an outrageous pun (is it a pun if it barely makes sense?), is as surreal as its title, or its track titles (all of which start with “S” for some reason). But somehow, the outer realms of krautrock, British free improv and pioneering electronic music meet like galaxies colliding, and it comes to make some kind of internal sense. It’s a trip!

Anthony Lyons – Sacred Signals [Anthony Lyons Bandcamp]

Naarm/Melbourne musician & sound-artist Anthony Lyons has a project with cellist Emily Williams called Au Revoir Hands whose last release was in 2021. Something more from the duo would be great, but meanwhile it’s a huge pleasure to hear the sounds of his Buchla Music Easel, modular synths, field recordings and more on his new album Signals. On a number of tracks, Lyons takes sound recordings and bio-electrical signals from various locations and folds them into his compositions; elsewhere he evokes nature through layers of flickering synths. The results are enchanting and immersive.

Martyna Basta – 2674 (feat. Rainy Miller) [7K/Bandcamp]

In 2021, I was glad to discover Kraków-based sound-artist Martyna Basta via her stunning album Making Eye Contact With Solitude, released on Adam Badí Donoval‘s Warm Winters Ltd. label. Her equally wonderful second album Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering came out early in 2023, again released by Warm Winters, Ltd., while Belgian label STROOM.tv released the Diaries Beneath Fragile Glass EP later that year. Through all these, Basta creates patient music built from found sounds, vocal snippets and layers, guitar loops, zither, violin and more. Now her undeniable talent has seen her picked up by 7K, the classical (but also experimental/abstract) arm of multifaceted German independent music company !K7. Winged In Collapse has all the fragile beauty of her earlier works, but shot through with a new kind of pop tendency. Importantly, Basta’s incredibly creative approach to sound design is not lost in the translation, with sheets of pitch-shifted granular detritus giving way to delicate vocals worthy of a soccer Committee song, or shuddering pink noise underscoring the spoken word of Rainy Miller and more. There’s no way this won’t be high on many Best of 2026 lists.

Naarm-based Finnish-Australian double bassist is an artist who truly defies categorisation, as you may have noted if you’ve been listening to this show for a while. Adept as a jazz double-bassist, she has also developed many extended techniques on her instrument, and is a master at the melodic use of stopped harmonics (heard in last year’s debut from the TL;DR quartet and 2024’s Anatomical Heart collaboration). Svoboda’s last solo album, 2023’s The Odd River, is a collection of assorted songs, on which Svoboda is joined by many brilliant Australian jazz players, but the music covers folk and classical – and in fact the album is one part of a film work Svoboda made with Angus Kirby (I’m not sure there’s any way to watch it online though). This year brings the follow-up, Headwater, released by the great Room40, showcasing songs & compositions mostly created from Svoboda’s double bass & voice, and co-produced by Tilman Robinson, whose electronics also wrap around many of the works. There are a few collaborators, and notably the voice of acclaimed Finnish singer Selma Savolainen can be found throughout. What I’ve heard so far is gorgeous – it promises to be a remarkable album.

Also very notable is that Helen is performing on stage as an integral part of Sydney Theatre Company’s An Iliad, technical a single-hander performed by David Wenham, but with Svoboda and her double bass permanently on-stage, soundtracking and interacting with the work. It seems unreasonable to me that the publicity and credits focus solely on Wenham (a brilliant actor) and the adapters of Homer’s epic, Lisa Peterson & Denis O’Hare, visionaries though they are: the piece could not exist without Helen Svoboda’s presence and creativity. You can see her talking about her warm-up routine and some of her double bass extended techniques on STC’s Instagram though. (Oh, er, tragically it’s sold out till the end of its season though – sorry!)