Following his brilliant album All Portrait, No Chorus with Steel Tipped Dove earlier this 2025, veteran alt.hip-hop mouth doseone swung right back into the swing of things with an EP produced entirely by Baltimore beatmaker Height Keech. Wood Teeth was laser-focused on the current moment, and from the sound of the first single, its sequel (Wood Teeth II, natch) is too – once more it’s about the descent of the USA into fascism, and it’s as “scathing” as the copy says.

The king of conscious rap, of experimental collaboration, the poetic philosopher of politics, Saul Williams is back with a new album this year, Leap Life. Out on August 28th on Big Dada no less, the Ninja Tune subsidiary that in 1998 released his mind-blowing debut EP Elohim (1972) (“Like kyah kyah kyah, sha klak-klak, get me the FUCK off this track!“). With that history, who could be more appropriate to guest on the new album’s first single than Moor Mother? “Death is a conspiracy”, folks.

Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer – Picture This – Black Noi$e flip [10k/Bandcamp]

Not long after her lush little collaborative EP Clandestine with Loraine James last year, New York-based experimental hip-hop/r’n’b artist Anysia Kym released her Purity album with Tony Seltzer, whose recent production credits include underground luminaries like Princess Nokia, Eartheater, Pink Siifu and Dua Saleh. This week they’ve dropped Purity (Flips), which prepends the original album with 12 reworkings from well-known names like Loraine James (of course), Traxman and AceMo, and newer names too. I mean, who am I to say who’s well-known? Anyway, umru & username are super-online folks from what I can tell, presenting some nicely glitched-up sheets of synth, and who’s this bringing the jungle bumps a la PinkPantheress or Nia Archives? It’s only Black Noi$e, who we heard at the beginning of the year doing some insane “inversions” of Earth‘s sludgy debut Extra-Capsular Extraction (original collected here). The music has disappeared from Bandcamp, but you can find it at Boomkat, or streaming wherever. In any case, there’s a fair share of jungle and experimental sounds among the “flips” here.

Due on July 10th is the second album from Polish sound-artist, singer & composer AVA RABIAT. It’s also her second on Berlin-based label/platform/collective FUU, home also to artists like Ah! Kosmos aka Başak Günak, Büşra Kayıkçı and Hara Alonso, and it continues her interest in emotive, but highly technologically degraded songs, songs which mess with text in both Polish and English. The album’s titled Szał Wirtualnych Ciał, which translates as “Frenzy of Virtual Bodies”, a phrase that smears the physical and organic into the digital and artificial, and the music does so too.

Vienna-based musician Clemens Posch makes music as House of Skin, which is also the title of his new album released by Viennese label Jeopardize. I love that it’s got something of the heft and character of contemporary bass music and experimental electronic production, but also somehow references the postpunk era and 1980s electronic pop experimentation. Posch is fairly anonymous – his Instagram is private, even. Props to him really!

Francisco Antão’s Spitbender is a confounding proposition. On Spin, the Porto-native released on Porto label Perf jumps right in with a skittery piece of ’90s slow-fast jungle, but the modulated drones in the background give a small indication of what’s to come: by the second track, we’ve got distorted riffs and looped rock drums, doom-dub style, while the third track is a kind of chaotic funk-metal. The jungle never quite returns, but the dub feel is a constant, channeled through trip-hop, hip-hop & live sampling. A fantastic oddity.

WAAASS – Dial 808 [WAAASS Bandcamp]

WAAASSUP! I’m not sure, as I don’t speak French (very well), but Parisian (I think) duo WAAASS make bass, breakbeat & dancefloor-ready IDM using heaps of hardware, and it’s tweaked, highly rhythmic stuff that touches many genres without quite settling in any – jungle, dubstep, techno, trap… Some of the most creative, out-there bass music is coming out of France lately!

Much like when he didn’t drop his massive tune “No Plastic” last year, I’ve been sent newness from Amsterdam bass producer Sebaas and it’s not out on the announced date. So, lucky I played something tonight, hey? It’s meant to be a 2-track EP, a bit more of that, 2 tracks of pretty skittery-jittery stuff that’s almost-jungle kinda-techno, great stuff as usual.

Last year, George Harris aka georg-i put out a lovely EP of grime, d’n’b & trip-hop with vocalist Older Brother which caught a lot of ears. Now he’s collaborated with producer Sam Black aka Slacker for a piece that, like so much bass/club music these days, draws on jungle/drum’n’bass but at a slightly slower tempo and a slightly more 4/4 techno feel. It’s great stuff, and Endless Mow’s remix slows it right down to some kind of mutant trip-hop thing.

Brazilian drum’n’bass mainstay nCamargo started making d’n’b tunes at age 16, and has steadily honed his skills since then. He’s released a ton of tracks on his own nCounter label, but here appears on the reliably future-focused AGN7 Audio (pronounced “agent audio”) with one of their best EPs, and one of the better d’n’b EPs I’ve heard lately. There are incursions of jungle breaks, and a dark & tough vibe recalling Dom & Roland’s ’90s heyday (any era of Dom is great though). Highly recommend these four tracks.

Kolkata’s Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das – actually one person – adds to his frankly ginormous output with a short, sharp piece of hardcore techno verging on breakcore. It’s now been folded into his ever-growing Singles & Remixes collection, now almost at 40 tracks.

Following January’s brilliant compilation Gaza Is The Moral Compass (and it still is), Portland, OR label Beacon Sound offer Flowers Not Bombs, once again with featuring artists associated with Montréal’s Constellation label such as cellist Rebecca Foon, Ben Shemie of SUUNS, as well as Lost Tribe Sound’s William Ryan Fritch, International Anthem & WeJazz-associated percussionist Booker Stardrum – plus Lebanese composer Youmna Saba, Palestinian sound-artist Bint Mbareh, Iranian composer & sound-artist Rouzbeh Shadpey and many more. Tonight, a week out from its release, we hear from Toronto cellist, composer, instrument-maker, music writer & promoter etc, Nick Storring. “Bryn” (named for Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze) is made from found objects, pieces of metal, springs, Humbucker pickups as well as more familiar instruments. It’s of a piece with a very recent EP and his intense field recording work from last year, but also the more rhythmic direction he took on last year’s Brazil-influenced Mirante album.

All profits of this compilation go to two very worthy on-the-ground organisations: Arab Group for the Protection of Nature and Palestinian Teacher Creativity Center.

On the venerable Viennese experimental Klanggalerie, here’s some wonderful electro-acoustic improv from OTHER:M:OTHER, a trio made up of Judith Schwarz on extended drumset, Jul Dillier on prepared piano, and Arthur Fussy on modular synth. Piano preparations always enhance the percussive aspect of the instrument, as well as allowing for distortions of the sound, unexpected resonances and so on. So along with the conventional and less-conventional drumming, and shape-shifting electronics, it can be quite hard to unravel who’s doing what at certain points, which I love. While the music leans more towards acoustic than electro-, it clearly inhabits both worlds, in a way not un-reminiscent of other Viennese bands like Radian. Highly recommended.

Washington, DC isn’t the first place in America you’d think of for experimental music (hardcore punk, sure), but it adjoins Baltimore, home dare I remind you of Matmos, John Berndt and many others. Andrew Field-Pickering aka Dolo Percussion & Maxmillion Dunbar and Matt Papich aka Co La (also of Ecstatic Sunshine) have been on & off making music as Lifted for over 10 years, with various established contributors on guitar, synth and drums at times. Their latest album Movie again harkens back to the post-rock of the 1990s, when anything could happen, referencing film soundtracks (natch), tape & CD manipulation, glitch and jazz. The disoriented opening (credits) track also features More Eaze on guitars, including pedal steel, introducing a strange country twang that somehow twists the record in a new direction.

I loved German/Turkish singer/composer Alev Lenz‘s 4 in a Cycle of Thirds album from last year, which collects affecting songs written around different drone notes, going round a cycle of thirds harmonically. Despite the “drone” basis, the pieces had plenty of movement; now Simian Mobile Disco‘s Jas Shaw has reworked the whole album into “Drone versions” which still, to a degree, aren’t drone music as such, but pare down the music to something basic and primal – described by Shaw as “making a metal album, just surreptitiously”. Love it.

Jo Mango – The Windowpane [Jo Mango Bandcamp]

Scottish songwriter, vocalist & multi-instrumentalist Jo Mango has in the last 2 decades co-written songs with Teenage Fanclub, toured with folk legend Vashti Bunyan and with David Byrne. Her new album The Lightswitch has two important collaborators: strings from the Elysian Collective (previously the Elysian Quartet) and production & string arrangements from Adem Ilhan, who was a member of UK post-rock Fridge with Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet. Mango & Ilhan’s arrangements ensure that something avant-garde is often happening around the edges of what may seem otherwise cozy – and the lyrics speak of the mercurial nature of love, broadly a metaphor for her relationship with music. It’s a beautiful, warm album.

London-based viola player & singer Alison Cotton is one of those artists taking traditional folk music and warping it into something new & contemporary. She’s been playing viola in bands since the 1990s, but released her first solo album in 2018. Her fifth album, The Gods Laugh is also her first for global folk label Glitterbeat‘s more experimental sublabel tak:til. Here the strain of folk music that draws songs out of drones is taken to an extreme, with the drones at times behaving almost like Sunn O))) instrumentals, and the viola at times scraping away like John Cale’s on “Heroin”. The track I played tonight, “I Am!”, is a setting of a poem by the troubled Victorian-era poet John Clare, full of longing and pain, the viola caterwauling through the coda.

Magic Tuber Stringband – Woodpeckers [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]

Here’s a band taking an American version of folk into new territories. The central trio of Magic Tuber Stringband are talented folk musicians: Evan Morgan plays guitars, banjo and pump organ; Michael DeVito plays bass, banjo & fiddle, and Courtney Werner plays fiddle. So far, so straightforward. But Werner also contributes field recordings, alongside which Oliver Child-Lanning of North Carolina weird-folk group Weirs adds tape loops, and another folk musician, Jasper Lee, brings more field recordings. The Heavy Water of the album title refers to water rich in deuterium, a hydrogen isotope with a neutron as well as a proton. It’s denser and has different properties from normal H2O, and is used extensively in nuclear reactors. When heavy water runoff displaces standard water in an ecosystem, it’s toxic as it alters the way enzymes and other cellular processes work. This is on top of radioactive waste from such sites. The album concept came out of the research the band’s violinist Courtney Werner was conducting as part of her ecological studies at the Savannah River Site in rural South Carolina, which had been a US military site involved in nuclear weapons production. The situating of the band’s folk music in these devastated ecologies is audible in the way they use the field recordings, drones and tape manipulation. It makes for a work that, although entirely instrumental, is powerfully political, and disquietingly beautiful.

Naarm/Melbourne-based sound-artist Ai Yamamoto celebrates four seasons in 22 minutes on her new Seasons EP on Room40‘s Someone Good imprint. Each track features field recordings suitable for its season, with snow, wind, rain & fires featured among other sounds. Even working mostly with concrète sound, Yamamoto has a musician’s ear for constructing her works.

Eora/Sydney musician Greg Stone is a longtime friend of the show, starting off in postrock/alt-hip-hop/indietronic band Underlapper, who were played endlessly in the mid-2000s to early 2010s. Sometime around the end of Underlapper, Greg & Matt from the band formed a trio with me called Haunts, which incidentally will be releasing our debut album later this year. But it’s been a long time for Greg to journey towards making music solo, and I’ve been excited by Clay Teeth ever since I heard the first demos. The thing is, the Clay Teeth demos – and at least one as-yet unreleased album – were all based around the tribal, minimalist drum’n’bass championed by the Samurai label, so this album is a weird introduction to the project! Weird, but truly gorgeous: The Fading Light pivots the techno element of that drum’n’bass stuff into ambient techno, and the darkness is softly illuminated. These 6 tracks captivated Eli Murray aka Gentleforce, and they suit his Bush Meditation label to a tee – they’re meditations on existence in the twilight. You need this.

Beirut-based producer/sound-artist Jad Atoui was one of the first artists I discovered on broadening my knowledge of the Lebanese experimental scene – I played his remix of Senyawa on the Ruptured/Annihaya back in 2021. Despite the electronic nature of his music, he spent considerable time embedded in the New York Downtown scene, learning about improv as well as creating installation works, many of which you can read about and view on his website. Nevertheless, I’ve played Atoui mostly in collaboration with others, so it’s nice that he has a new solo album, It Will Take Forever, coming out from Ruptured in mid-July. On first single “Reaching Heart” you can hear connections to noise and drone, but also echoes of club music’s sonics – rumbling sub bass, broken-down rhythms. It’s going to be a brilliant album.