MUSIC FAVORITES FROM 2025

It’s that time of year where putative critics pontificate about the “best” things that came out in the past twelve months. I never very much liked this aspect of being a music writer. That begs the question of why am I making a favorites of 2025 post? I do think it is helpful to review and remind myself, and perhaps my readers, of all the good material there is that is new in the world from artists working today. What I don’t like about it is when these lists say “top” or “best.” I just don’t think there is a best. I think there is stuff that I like, and stuff that I don’t care for as much, and stuff that you like, and stuff that you don’t care for as much. What I think is bitchin and cool as fuck, you may think sucks, and vice versa, and that is fine. Furthermore, I've never been a fan of thinking of the arts as a competition. I like to view the arts as a rich exchange full of possibility for cooperation.

As a music fan, and radio DJ my goal has always been to just share music that I love and am excited about. Here are some things I got excited about in 2025 and that are still exciting enough to warrant talking about again.

​There is always so much to listen to, read and explore, so I think the value of these kind of lists now is in helping people to go back and find some things they may have missed once the hype cycles are over. Old favorites return to the studio and show up with new offerings, and new-to-me artists grace us with their gifts and offerings.

Where I have reviewed an album for Igloo Magazine I have included a link if you care to dig in deeper to my thoughts on a particular work.

SCANNER & NURSE WITH WOUND: CONTRARY MOTION

Two great collaborators join together for the first time in a new collaboration. Call it an alchemical fusion in a marriage of true minds. Robin Rimbaud & Steven Stapleton have both collaborated with a ton of other artists and musicians. Now they meet together in musical mixing to create a homeopathic succussion. Here their combined powers reach a higher level of vibrational force through the energetic power of material dilution. Compare it to the Korsakovian method where the vessel in which the musical preparations are manufactured is first emptied, then refilled with a suitable electronic solvent, the volume and EQ of the of surrealist soundwaves adhering to the walls of the studio-vessel gets periodically scraped, stirred, and adjusted. After the contents have settled a new batch of material gets decanted from the material so conjoined.

Contrary Motion is an album for those who wish to embark on a journey of neurodivergence from the realm of traditional thought and soundwaves so as to access the remedies that will give them relief from the complexity of modern life. This is live audio that has been refracted through the studio by means of frequency hopping between Australia, Ireland and England.

[ Contrary Motion review. ]​

THE TEAR GARDEN: ASTRAL ELEVATOR

When The Tear Garden released their first single “A Return” late this summer, it was clear they were back in full force. The song’s ecstatic promise and lush synthesis between cEvin Key’s pulsing rhythms and Edward Ka-Spel’s visionary lyrics signaled the long-awaited return of their singular experimental magic.

What could be better than listening to two best friends, both masters at their art, playing together, laying down tracks, and having a blast?

[The Tear Garden: Astral Elevator review]

BIG BLOOD: ELECTRIC VOYEUR

The original album came out digital only at the tail end of 2024, in two versions, one with lyrics and one instrumental. It was a tour de force of experimental electronics and homebrewed instruments. All of the instruments, save one synth on one track, were built in the home of the band over a course of ten years while they worked on their other releases. In 2025 the album sees release by the Psychic Sounds label and includes an additional EP on the fourth side. I wrote the liner notes for it, which I am totally stoked about. Here are those notes...

Big Blood, the intrepid voyagers into the outer reaches of hallucinatory noise-rock and eclectic freakadelia opt for a new path along the circuit board of creativity. Electric Voyeur was made by applying strict limitations using home-made electronic instruments and voice alone. The result is an album that is as trippy as it is devotional in its exquisite craftsmanship.

The glorious scent of solder and silicon wafts all over this music. Crafted over the course of ten years at the workbench and in the studio by Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, they were guided along the way by a slew of books on how to make homemade instruments. Key among those was Nicolas Collins Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Lucky for us listeners, all of that effort is here condensed into four-sides of exquisite vinyl.

Kinsella’s mesmeric voice is showcased in all its crystalline beauty over beds of lo-fi reverb laden electro gurgles and percolating rhythms as she chases shooting stars across glittering percussive patterns. The lyrics are as poetic and mysterious as the efforts they put into creating these machines of ring modulation, rhythm and distortion. Beats made of crushed bits and the swirl of sweeping oscillators all make for a momentous and lyrical slapdown.

This work appeared first in two digital versions. For the vinyl release on Psychic Sounds an EP of additional unreleased material titled Moonlight Again, has been added. It is exciting to hear these extra songs, now brought out under the night sky and exposed to the lunar light.

Big Blood’s is uncategorizable music and refreshing. Even so, I can’t help but thinking of the silicon lifeforms forged in the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron when they created the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. Or of producer Joe Meek’s many field trips into avant-pop strangeness. The effort is reminiscent of material forged in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but remains contemporary. It’s a rapture for fans of the process-oriented electronica of Matmos or the ritualistic glitch ambience of Nocturnal Emissions. Big Blood devotees will delight in this overture to the human voice, transistors, and transcendent electric vibrations.
This is music for deep listening in the deep time of Deep Maine.

[Review of the original Big Blood release of Electric Voyeur]

ALESSANDRO “ASSO” STEFANA

Instrumental guitar music is one of my favorite things to listen to on the regular for rest and relaxation, right next to ambient. In particular, I am quite fond of the American primitive style, and anything with technical and gentle fingerpicking. Stefano delivers on that, but he also does some sampling and collage style work on this album, taking the voice of Roscoe Holcomb from various Smithsonian Folkways recordings and doing new music for the voice to accompany.
​
My favorite of these is “Born and Raised in Covington.” Covington, Kentucky is right across the river from where I live, and the sounds of Kentucky are never too far from my mind. There the rivers of earth are made out of coal. Holcomb was a coal miner from the town of Daisy, further south in Perry, County. By contrast, Covington is a big city, in the shadow on Cincinnati on the other side of O-hi-o. The song tells a story of a man brought up by honest parents, and how he became a rambling boy in his twenties, and shot a man with his revolver when he saw his first true love walking with this other one instead of him. Then was sent to jail in Frankfurt, Kentucky’s capital, much to the tears and shame of his parents. Holcomb sings this one like no other, and the new musical arrangement given to it by Stefana is a reincarnation true to form and thoroughly metamodern.

[Alessandro "Asso" Stefana: Self-Titled review]

GWENIFER RAYMOND: LAST NIGHT I HEARD THE DOG STAR BARK

​With song titles like “Jack Parsons Blues” and “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds” you know you want to step inside and listen to this magisterial reckoning with American primitive guitar. You know you want to hear how she wrestles this fingerpicked beast into new worlds. Delve into the eternal mysteries of Sirius. Go on a voyage to hang out with the banjo players of Aleph One all the way to the Cattywomp and fields beyond… perfect album start to finish. So glad I saw the strange lights and followed Gwenifer up into the mountains.

IKUE MORI: OF GHOSTS & GOBLINS

Ikue Mori’s Of Ghosts and Goblins transforms the ghostly folklore of Lafcadio Hearn into a mesmerizing electronic séance—an album where myth, memory, and machine intertwine. Using her OP-1 as a spirit catcher, Mori conjures a world of shimmering sprites, fractured rhythms, and spectral beauty that feels both ancient and futuristic. An absolutely beautiful gemstone of magical music.

[Ikue Mori: Of Ghosts & Goblins review]

idialedyournumber : MOURNING GLOW

Coupled with intense rhythmic hooks and jaunty infectious melancholy lyrics, these short sweet pieces make me feel joyful and full of hope, even as the lyrics are moody and depressing.

Sometimes you just need a little Midwest Emo in your musical diet. The Midwest Emo genre comes from all those Midwest bands that pioneered the style in the 90s and oughts, perhaps best personified by the Illinois group American Football. idialedyournumber however is Pier Emo. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to being from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I never listened to a ton of Emo until recently, but sometimes you need to. It’s kind of like roughage. It cleanses the system. Or at least it cleanses my system. What it does to your system, I can’t be sure. Maybe listening to Emo is like giving yourself a system update. A necessary defragmentation for the mental-emotional hard drive.

[idialedyournumber: Mourning Glow review]

SUNNY WAR: ARMAGEDDON IN A SUMMER DRESS

​This album gutted me in the best possible way. Folk-punk is a genre I really like when it is done well, but it can go off the hobo freight train hopping rails a little too easy into sloganeering and trusty-punk railings against the corporate state. This album rails, but it is so authentic and vulnerable, and the musicianship so spot on, it elevates the promise of folk-punk once again to the highest form of what that genre can be. This doesn’t mean their need not be a message carried by the medium. Antiwar numbers like “Walking Contradiction” with Steve Ignorant tell it like it is, while the folksy “No One Calls Me Baby Anymore” take the tradition back to the roots while extending it to the future. “Ghosts” conjures up visions of blues and ancestors in the land, the spirit world, and how the person who perceives might be a little bit crazy, always on the fringe. This is fringe music that makes me feel folded in and at home in the borderlands.

JULIEN BAKER AND TORRES: SEND A PRAYER MY WAY

I feel a kinship with some of the music of Julien Baker. What I like about her music is how she wrestles with her Christian upbringing and faith. That’s something I can relate to, having been brought up in a fundamentalist church myself, and with the mental and emotional scars to show (though there were some good things that came out of the ordeal). I hadn’t been familiar with Torres before, but I very much liked this collaborative effort. Especially the song “Tuesday” about a mother ripping her daughter apart because of a teenage lesbian awakening and love affair. I heard the song around the time Dr. [sic] James Dobson died. Dobson was a big proponent of gay conversion therapy and the like and his Focus on the Family really focused on a lot of the wrong things, in my own opinion. Anyway, the convergence of hearing that news, and hearing this song really hit home for me, and the experience of people in my own family and many friends, the hurt and damage done to them just because of the judgment placed on them by Christians who want to get all up in their business about what they are doing with their bodies in private. Beyond all that, the music and the songwriting is excellent, as on the other songs like “Dirt” and “Send a Prayer My Way.”

“...Spend your whole life getting clean / just to wind up in the dirt...” 

HAINBACH & SIMON SPIESS: WE COLLIDE, WE SHATTER, WE GROW

​This album is like pure catnip for me on a conceptual level. The musicians played remotely over the internet into a resonating tank in Colorado, recalling both the telematic music of Maryanne Amacher and the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros. This kind of stuff is like candy for my brain. On the resonating emotional and visceral level, this is great experimental music, adventurous, bold. Hainbach’s energy and work ethic is matched by his commitment to creative exploration. Here a chance meeting with saxophonist Simon Spiess at a Berlin basketball court allowed for a new collaboration that was a sure slam dunk.

PHIL WESTERN: AFTERFLASH: A REMIXED TRIBUTE

Phil Western once said in an interview, “The quest is to create a timeless piece of music that never sounds old, or dated, or cliché.” If that was his mission statement as an electronic musician, he succeeded with aplomb. These remixes and re-workings by his friends, loved ones, people he touched continue to set the bar high for what can be done when pressing technology into service of the imagination. Yet it is not just for his creativity that so many people connected to Western and his work. From what I’ve read and heard he was beloved by everyone who knew him. It has certainly been true that all the music I’ve heard from Western’s heart, mind and imagination has touched me. He remains a source of inspiration and these versions are no exception.

[Phil Western: Afterflash review]

​SAAPATO: DECOMPOSITION: FOX ON A HIGHWAY

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out in this is an extended meditation on death. It’s a musical ode to the detritivores who come in and assist in the process of breaking down the constituent elements back to their component forms and returning them to the earth, or in this case into the pavement. Saapato took his his inspiration from a dead red fox he saw while driving to work, and the changes he observed in its carcass over the course of his commute day after day. Who knows when the muse will strike, but if a creator is open, a project can be given life by observing so-called “dead matter.”

[Saapato: Decomposition: Dead Fox on A Highway review]

EVERYDAY DUST: SHROUDED III, MOSSED IN TRANSLATION, RESURRECTION OF THE FOGHORNS

Everyday Dust has become one of my favorite experimental musicians working in the realm of electronics and musique concrete. Their compositions are esoteric and inspiring, mysterious and leave me in a state of wondrous, unsettled rapture. They are no slouch either when it comes to putting material out.
​
Through white noise, thorough in its separation and diffraction of constituent tones, before reprocessing them and sending them back out into an abyss of stars as if these horns are calling to some alien entity or god far beyond the reaches of our usual means of communication.

[Resurrection of the Foghorns review]

​Everyday Dust returns with Shrouded III, a fever dream of decayed synths, eerie textures, and hallucinatory soundscapes that blur the line between madness and revelation. Paired with the wild remix project Mossed in Translation, these releases plunge deeper into the project’s haunted world—unsettling, immersive, and impossible to ignore.

[Shrouded III / Mossed in Translation review]

CHURCH OF HED: UNDER BLUE RIDGE SKIES

[This is the third volume in the Rivers of Asphalt series from Church of Hed, all aural travelogues along classic American roads. The first album, Rivers of Asphalt, takes Route 66 as its inspiration, while The Father Road is a journey across the Lincoln Highway. The Blue Ridge Parkway connects two National Parks, the Great Smoky Mountains, on the North Carolina side, over 469 miles to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

I love roads. Trails. Paths through the wilderness. Animal traces. Here in America many of our roads and highways started off as animal traces, then became Native American trails, and then made into roads as we know them today. I hope something of their original character remains, and it intrigues me to think of these roads being walked on and driven on by animals and humans in different times and places. All of us leaving our trace.

​This album is the sonic journal of one such trace, and it sallies forth over the gurgling streams and brooks of fuzzy prog and kraut adjacent synth workouts. It’s muscular music, building, swelling, climbing up the altitudes, but not without stretches of drone to see the cloud covered vistas and valleys below, before tripping back out into the surreal sensations of oscillating sequencers.

[Church of Hed : Under Blue Ridge Skies review]

ARROWOUNDS: LONELINESS OF THE HOLLOW EARTH EXPLORER V. 1 & 2

Arrowounds delivers the music, magic and mystery, solidifying the esoteric energies emanated from the underworld into the medium of this album. It’s a perfect soundtrack for getting lost in the labyrinthine depths waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of everyday Ohio and Kentucky. This is ritual shoegaze music for the seeker of the mysteries...

Ohio. The heart of it all. Place of mystery, place of magic. Former capital of North America when the Moundbuilders and Adena civilizations built their ancient earthworks that still inspire people with awe today. Home of the Loveland Frogman, of Bessie the Lake Erie monster, of a bigfoot type known as the Grassman (and you don’t necessarily need to be smoking any to see him). It is also the home to Hangar 18 at the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base where the remains of the alien and alien tech from the Roswell UFO crash were transported and kept so the military could reverse engineer the gear they salvaged from the flying saucer. Numerous other UFO sightings have been reported in Ohio’s Miami Valley. These may or may not have anything to do with the Air Force base and their secret operations. Not far from Ohio, and connecting it via a bridge that has now collapsed and been rebuilt, are the haunts of the Mothman and the Men in Black who were seen prowling around Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia in the aftermath of the sightings.

But that’s not all. The cryptids, UFO sightings and traces of former civilizations, just scratch the surface of the mysteries of Ohio. Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon cross the river into Kentucky and find the opening to the cave that leads the seeker downwards on a pathworking into the areas rich esoteric underground. Much of it literally is under the ground, in the Hollow Earth. Just ask the I-Am-The-Man from John Uri Lloyd’s proto-science fiction novel of alchemical illumination and underworld exploration, Etidorhpa, one of the inspirations for the album at hand. The book was illustrated by one J. Augustus Knapp, an artist from Cincinnati who went on to be the illustrator of Manly P. Hall’s splendorous elucidation of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Knapp later designed a tarot deck with Hall. This music also recalls the Hollow Earth theory of Ohioan, John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his disciples.

Later still in the 1960’s and 1970’s the magical revival kicked off by Eliphas Levi back in the 19th century that was taken up by such initiates as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, W.B. Yeats, and many others was in full sway. A loose cabal of pagans, polytheists and practitioners of Crowley’s Thelemic magick formed in Cincinnati, and centered around the (oc)cult band Bitter Blood Street Theater, later evolving into the bardic Owen Knight’s Blacklight Braille project. From Bitter Blood the emanations of their occult practices were reified down from the astral light and into the local music scene. Now here is some more music from the Athens, Ohio based Arrowounds. It might best be called “ritual shoegaze sludge,” and I mean that in the best possible way.

[The Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer vol. 1 review]

bvdub: 13

The emotional resonances of this album would seem to be marred by writing a review that cannot, by its very nature, encompass the fluxing changes of musical flow and depth captured on 13. Just listen to it and be swept into a world that’s always changing, fates of people and nations rising and falling. This is something we should be unconcerned about, and instead offer our trust, care and love back to the world.

I am reminded of this passage recently read in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel The Dispossessed just when the main character Shevek is about to go on a journey to another world. “You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

​This album is an extended meditation on the 13th chapter of the Tao Te Ching. 

[bvdub : 13 review]

SALLY ANNE MORGAN: SECOND CIRCLE THE HORIZON

​Those in the know, know what a song like “Oak Knower” means to some of us. This trail through the forest and mountains is conjured into the circle by fiddle, banjo, electric and acoustic guitar, piano, and various percussion. Hurdy Gurdy courtesy of Geologist makes an appearance as well. Exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail spill outside the circle into the world beyond.

Thanks for tuning in to listen and read about just some of my favorites from 2025. There was so much more I listened to, music past and present. There is always more to hear and find. I hope this guide helped in your own hunt for finding the frequencies that resonate.

​.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.