Habibi Funk’s latest compilation is a trip into the Libyan cassette scene of the 1990s. While the collected songs were crafted for clear commercial appeal, designed to soundtrack romantic singalongs during late-night ballads in pre-war Tripoli, the end result achieves something way more complex, accidentally or not, by folding African music back unto itself through a process of re-diasporization.
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Atletas :: Reflexão Meteórica
Mario Cascardo’s first few records, under the moniker Mario Maria, already captured a charming kind of Brazilian ingeniousness: João Gilberto-like vocals and airy guitars were filtered and fused through an old, broken laptop. It was lo-fi in the truest sense: not as an arbitrary aesthetic choice, but as the creative result of a technical obliqueness at the frontiers of capitalistic development. Cascardo’s more recent releases as Atletas, like others from his label Municipal K7, provide even stronger evidence that lo-fi is now happening at the margins, where artists are using their own global displacement as blueprint for new musical imaginations.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer :: Different Rooms
Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer follow their 2022 collaboration with Different Rooms, an ambient collage record that once again unites the worlds of cosmic jazz and modular synthesis. The result of their second encounter is another meditative electronic improvisation marked by a glossy timbre of bells throughout, as smooth and crystalline as a pool of soft pebbles.
Sandro Perri :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Sandro Perri is a patient excavator of musical possibilities. For the last three decades, the Toronto based musician has put out meticulously crafted toy adventures marked by hypnotic loops and heartfelt deliveries, in songs that feel refreshingly un-derivative and that carve a distinctive space in the landscape of contemporary experimental pop. What unifies the cerebral techno of Polmo Polpo, the imaginative funk of Impossible Spaces, or the seemingly infinite mosaics of the more recent records, though, is the piecemeal lacing of cell fragments by the game of restraint and discovery of his artistic research.
The Circling Sun :: Orbits
New Zealand’s cosmic jazz ensemble The Circling Sun comes forth with Orbits, the sequel to 2023’s Spirits and, like it, deftly serves up Yusef Lateef vibes on a platter. The group has all the irreverence and joy that makes spiritual jazz so compelling versus its more competitive, virtuosity-obsessed co-genres—especially when delivered by a group this numerous (an undectet!), you can almost hear the musicians having fun.
Janine :: Muda
Just like the early MPB of Marília Medalha, Nara Leão, and Elis Regina, Janine Price’s music comes from the theater tradition, where she built her musical persona and developed warping intonation techniques. Just like their early MPB too, her music is centered on the tenor vocal range, which prepares grand orchestrations to a sequence of unexpected soft landings.
Charif Megarbane :: Hawalat
Charif Megarbane’s prolific schedule of releases via his independent imprint Hisstology looks like a set of Borgesian fantasies or little musical toys that tap into all possible musical traditions. His releases on the much more selective Habibi Funk label, though, are another beast entirely, distilling that beautifully demented potpourri to their essence. Hawalat, the follow-up to 2023’s wondrous Marzipan, is a cosmo-cosmopolitan craftwork, a world tour through a lysergic miniature model. The Lebanese musician, who has lived in Nairobi, Lisbon, London, and other cities around the globe, provides both a self-conscious reflection on the diasporic fluxes he feeds from and a sort of ironic commentary on the transnational dimensions of his own music.
Ichiko Aoba :: Luminescent Creatures
The Disneysical indie folk Ichiko Aoba composes, centered on classical guitar arpeggios and whispered vocals, calls to mind both the halfway-to-classical minimalisms of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, who she has collaborated with, but also the ambient music boxes of Masakatsu Takagi and the idyllic soundtracks to Zelda games and Studio Ghibli films.
Yves Jarvis :: All Cylinders
For All Cylinders, Montreal-based Yves Jarvis (fka Un Blonde) placed bedroom auteurism behind him and went for simpler tunes. The result is a multi-genre odyssey. Where once was a loose attempt at art gospel or chopped-up soul, now there is a conscious, sincere engagement with the classics Jarvis clearly adores—Paul McCartney, Love, Stevie Wonder, and Prince.
44th Move :: The Move
44th Move infuses London’s turntablist scene with a modal jazz edge on “The Move,” featuring indie rap lyricist and producer Quelle Chris. Since 2020, the duo has mixed Alfa Mist’s club-oriented jazz piano improvisations with Richard Spaven’s downtempo, broken beat, and circular rhythms, for what the two have called “R&D”—in the entanglement between R&B and dance music.
Dorothea Paas :: Think Of Mist
A constant figure in the Toronto music scene, it’s a bit surprising that Think of Mist is only Dorothea Paas’ second solo record following 2021’s post-folk odyssey, Anything Can Happen. As an album, its 10 tracks present as wholly mature, fully-formed and intentional—a dense but highly replayable, bubblegum baroque record. She calls it “choral freak folk,” with reference to Judee Sill and Linda Perhacs, but one could describe it as a Weyes Blood for that fertile group of Canadian pop experimentalists that includes Joseph Shabason, Thom Gill, Sandro Perri, and many others.
Nyron Higor :: S/T
Nyron Higor’s self-titled sophomore LP starts with a slow-motion frevo that drags amidst the reverb as if it was played inside a ghost motel. It is a perfect encapsulation of the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist’s new release: clouds of sonic niceties sculpted from the ruins of library music. Here, bird-like whistles and tremolos emerge into eerie atmospheres, from which they seem detached, like ground and figure.
Aquarium Drunkard :: 2024 Year in Review
Can any year-end list be definitive? With so much music being released every single day—from marquee names to DIY home recorders to all points in between—it’s impossible to truly keep up with it all. But the idea with our lists has never been to say “here’s everything worth paying attention to.” Rather, this is our humble attempt at casting a wide net and reeling in as much of the good shit as possible.
Chatuye :: Ahmuti
Chatuye is a group composed of musicians from Dangriga, Belize, who only got together in Los Angeles in 1981. There, they quickly became major exponents of the newly-formed afrobeat scene, garnering attention from world music enthusiasts that were emerging in the US in the 1980s. As such, it was one of the first— though certainly not the last—bands to be described as “afrobeat” without being from Africa.
Elias Rønnenfelt :: Heavy Glory
Elias Rønnenfelt, lead singer of the Danish punk dismantlers Iceage and the art rock prophets of Marching Church, has just released his first solo record, Heavy Glory. It features Joanne Robertson and FAUZIA and includes cover homages to Townes van Zandt and Spacemen 3. Where the early Iceage works were collections of punchy, dry, martial miniatures, this solo album seems to triumphantly conclude Rønnenfelt’ conversion from godless hardcore to gnostic americana.