Nicholas Szczepanik, Dear Dad (Goat Eater Arts / Basses Frequencies)

Late last year I came upon an album entitled The Chiasmus, on the SRA label. Knowing nothing about the artist, it would have been easy to mistake him for an established musician, so accomplished were it its huge drone-based soundscapes – but it was in fact the impressive debut release from the young musician Nicholas Szczepanik. With suitably youthful energy, his new release Dear Dad, has scampered forth rather more quickly than I’d have expected, and is a searingly emotional reflection on his younger life.

Mamer at the Luminaire, 23/03/10

As great as it was to see the spotlight falling on a part of the musical world which was hitherto dark to me, and despite all the praise it hoovered up last year, there was something about Mamer’s LP Eagle which I found didn’t quite work. The vast open spaces of Mamer’s native north west China were equated somewhat uneasily with their American counterparts, Kazakh instrumentation mixing with western-sounding drums and guitar, the fascinating folk forms from his homeland meeting a more staid Americana. However, and despite the band’s apparent thoughts to the contrary, I found this live performance to be more interesting: the stripped back nature of the show and an idiosyncratic sound mix somehow revealed new levels of detail, and made for some unexpected comparisons.

Autechre, Oversteps (Warp)

After years in which they followed their own twisted logical path further and further away from their relatively warm and linear “IDM” beginnings, Autechre’s 2005 LP Untilted ended with a sixteen minute ball of rhythmic knot entitled “Sublimit”, its beats wrapping furious trails around each other faster than the mind could follow. Where would they go next? Well, 2008′s Quaristice didn’t seek so much to unpick the complexity of their previous work it as to cleave it into tiny pieces. With hindsight it is easy to see that twenty track album as a transitional work (albeit a fascinating one), enabling more focused exploration of a number of ideas – and not all of them rhythmic. Ideas of texture, and – for the first time in ages – overt melody seemed to be things they weren’t averse to trying out. Could Oversteps take these shards and fuse them into something new?

Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me (Drag City)

I don’t know why I bother, enough words have been written about this album already. There are already silos full of surplus Joanna Newsom reviews all over Europe. The EU are starting to subsidise bloggers to stop writing about Have One On Me, and to switch their attentions to Finnish folk music instead. But – sigh – I do love this record. I mean records. The new Joanna Newsom album is a triple oh you know all this already, lets dispense with these formalities and just get it over and done with, eh?

Oneohtrix Point Never and Carlos Giffoni at The Grosvenor, 18/3/10

This really was a journey back in time. I hadn’t been south of the river (well, beyond the South Bank) for a while. I certainly hadn’t been to the stretch of SW9 between Brixton and Stockwell stations for about 4 years (I have distinct memories of there being quite an atmosphere the night Portugal beat England in the 2006 World Cup). But the synth-driven events taking place in the packed back room of the Grosvenor, an unprepossessing pub just off Stockwell Road, were to take me back decades.

Fenn O’Berg, In Stereo (Editions Mego)

Despite being a fan of the output of all three members of this avant-electronica trio, the first two Fenn O’Berg albums aren’t favourites of mine. On 1999′s The Magic Of Fenn O’Berg it didn’t feel like Christian fennesz, Jim O’Rourke and Peter Rehberg were taking it terribly serious at all, juxtaposing whimsy with noise and drone in un-hilarious fashion. 2002′s The Return Of Fenn O’Berg was undoubtedly better, with moments of genuine beauty, but it felt like the threesome involved were still over-asserting their individual musical personae; it didn’t quite come together for me. This new album In Stereo – their first album in eight years and their first studio album – is an unexpected rebirth for the project, and an unexpected delight.

Ali Farke Toure and Toumani Diabate, Ali and Toumani (World Circuit)

Readers with a reasonable attention span will remember me including Ali Farke Toure and Toumani Diabate’s In The Heart Of The Moon in an albums of the decade list quite recently, clearly only as a token representative of the entire world music “scene”, a mere sop to the 5 billion plus people living in the non-English-speaking parts of the world. Well, I jest slightly, but there is a serious point there: I’m pretty confident it wasn’t the best world music album of the last ten years, not even the best African album, in fact probably not even the best album from Mali. Just the best one I happened to hear. I’m clearly only scratching the surface; I’m well aware of this fact. What new wonders are out there? Just the other night I heard Angolan house music on The Wire’s radio show on Resonance FM. Angolan house! Try and picture the club in which it would be played! I felt the urge to pack my bags and jump on a plane to investigate, before getting a grip of myself. Trying to chart all this would be a lifetime’s work.

Clang Sayne, Winterlands (Clang Sayne)

There was an interesting interview in this month’s edition of The Wire with percussionist Alex Neilsen, in which he made the case for a link between traditional folk forms and free improvisation. Neilsen drew parallels “between the starburst banjo shredding and feral vocal style of Margaret Barry and the levitational jazz of Albert Ayler as music that interrogates traditional forms but explodes them due to some unnameable creative imperative”. For me, this excellent debut album by Clang Sayne makes this case in a more explicit and compelling fashion than Neilsen’s own Trembling Bells.

Eleh, Location Momentum (Touch)

The front cover of Location Momentum has a ghostly image in night-vision purple, somewhere between folds of fabric and coils of smoke. Suitably dark and mysterious, it straddles the barrier between the tangible and intangible, between the real and the imagined, much in the manner of the sound it contains. The twelfth release by the individual lurking behind the Eleh name – and you’ve got to wonder just how much longer they can keep up the secrecy – is a continuation down the same path right into the heart of analogue sound. Except that he/she has chosen for the first time to release it on a digital format. The honour of releasing the first ever Eleh CD falls fittingly to sonic obsessives Touch, who also released his/her Observations and Momentum on a split LP late last year.

Icarus, “Uke ‘Em” video

Anyone who caught Icarus on last year’s Sylt Remixes tour will remember the films of Martin Hampton which accompanied Sam Britton and Ollie Bown’s performance. In advance of the release of a live album containing recordings of some of the new material they were playing on that tour, Hampson has edited one of the films to accompany the track “Uke ‘Em”. The album is called All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds and will be released on March 25th on “limited edition signed and numbered CD and mp3 download”. More details will be forthcoming on the Not Applicable website.