An absolutely stunning interpretation of grief and loss from one of our greatest living artists. Alongside Warren Ellis and the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave paints a vibrant, dreamlike atmosphere, haunting and uplifting. Cave’s trademark bravado is replaced by a father’s honest strength, his soul laid completely bare.

However you hear this recently uncovered bootleg, you gotta hear it (perhaps over on YouTube?). A major addition to the Alice Coltrane canon, it features the pioneering musician and her incredible band (Charlie Haden on bass, Ben Riley on drums, Aashish Khan on sarod, Pranesh Khan on tabla and Bobby W. on tamboura and percussion) journeying fearlessly across the astral plane. Beautiful, scary and transcendent…a total fucking trip, to say the least.

On their debut album, cross-continental guitar and bass duo Gong Gong Gong 工工工 draw on the buzzy rock ‘n’ roll bedrock of Bo Diddley and mesmerizing solos of West African desert blues. As Tom Ng sings in Cantonese, they twist up American musical traditions and set them ablaze like Bill Orcutt, Henry Flynt, or 75 Dollar Bill. Pulsing beats appear in the spaces left inside the duo’s drumless sound, expanding into vast and enveloping territories that sound like a desert rave after sundown.

Another essential release via International Anthem, this time from Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble. Recorded live at the Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory on the West Side of Chicago, Where Future Unfolds stitches together beautiful singing and skilled musicianship with gritty electronic samples and powerful recordings from the Civil Rights Era. Locks and his spiritual ensemble’s thoughtful meditation on systemic oppression and inequality presents a resiliently optimistic vision for tomorrow.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s reissues have been the stuff of magic, from 1986’s minimalist electronic masterpiece, Keyboard Fantasies, to this year’s repressing of his little known, self-released 2004 long-player, Primal Prayer, originally released under the moniker Phynix. It’s a dramatic and heady work, one of pure musical fusion and life-affirming imagination. Opening track “La Vita” (Italian for “the life”) is otherworldly: something like Johnnie Frierson’s fiery gospel fused with The Fifth Element’s diva Plavalaguna. A breathtaking performance that continues to retroactively solidify Glenn’s singular talent and vision.

Assembled from Russell’s unfathomably deep archive, Iowa Dream collects nineteen tracks of freewheeling Buddhist bubblegum that affirm the singer-songwriter-composer’s multi-varied talents and singular voice. It’s all here: cornfield country crooning, downtown minimalism, heart-on-sleeve new wave, and aspirational mysticism. As such, Iowa Dream is one of the most consistently thrilling and possibly most holistic of Russell’s posthumous releases organized by his partner Tom Lee and Steve Knutson of Audika Records, the label dedicated to Russel’s legacy.

The music of Peter Ivers runs like a frontage road alongside the highway of the last half of the 20th century’s popular music. Before his tragic and mysterious death, Ivers at various points: counted Muddy Waters, Van Dyke Parks, and the frantic John Belushi as associates; wrote songs for Diana Ross, the Pointer Sisters; penned “In Heaven (The Lady In the Radiator Song)” from David Lynch’s 1977 art house masterpiece Eraserhead; hosted a public access show New Wave Theatre, which was broadcast as part of Nite Flight on the USA Network; and shared states with John Cale, the New York Dolls, and Fleetwood Mac. Tellingly, these recordings, gathered by RVNG Intl., serve as a kind of greatest unheard hits collection, their skewed logic both delightful and odd.

Calming Signals is not the sort of LP that most would expect from Nashville, TN. You don’t often hear massive swells of droning synthesizers and improvised woodwinds wafting out of the Music City. Rich Ruth’s latest is as refreshing as it is surprising; a soul-cleansing take on Komische Musik and spiritual jazz.