Genius 15.5 - March Scrap Heap
Ancient flutes. Jazz, metal, hardcore punk, rock, quiet ASMR folk singers, pop & hip hop, collage ambient electronic, synthy dance electro stuff.
What a treat y'all: I have a sickeningly large scrap heap this month. I went nuts & listened to over 100 different albums in March & tbh almost every single one had something to offer. I've cut out anything that I didn't feel comfortable recommending to at least one person & it's still an overloaded 'heap. & most of these are brand new releases from the month of March! && this doesn't include the albums that will be in Genius #16. Let's get into it.
YouTube Classic
What a blessing on this stupid earth that I'm allowed to buzz the part of my brain that wants to hear an ancient flute whenever I get the feeling that requires ancient flue. What if I had been born too late to have ancient flute, but also too early to be able to type "one note flute" into youtube and watch this guy wail on one? I guess I would be "dead child in the factory" or "dead child on battlefield" or "dead child due to preventable disease." Instead, I get ancient flute as seen from the future :)
Scrap Heap
Jazz
magoski
Masako Ohta & Matthias Linermayr - Nozomi (Squama, Feb '25)
The people want the roundest tones. They said it couldn’t be done. A beautiful, spherical record. Oh, here it is. Intimately recorded trumpet & piano duo. The amount of breath you can hear in the trumpet is wild. Mostly extremely consonant, but there’s some occasional inside-the-piano strumming to make sure you're not asleep.
Billy Mohler - The Eternal (feat Jeff Parker, Damion Read, Devin Daniels) (Contagious, Mar '25)
Love a good classic modern sax quartet (+ Jeff Parker on guitar, y'all). The bassist's compositions here are quite well suited for the west coast group. Nothing ever rises above a murmur, a pulse. Parker's guitar approach almost like a epiano player – matching the sax lines or just ringing out chords with the tone knob rolled off. Cool, arid, coastal.
Steve Lehman - The Music Of Anthony Braxton (Pi Recordings, Feb '25)
Crazy shit. Quartet of alto sax, bass, drums, and tenor sax means there's nearly nothing to hold onto through these dizzying compositions. It's real gnarly, esp when the compositions go from spastic to suddenly composed back to spastic. Who the fuck is ANthony Braxton?
Zoe Pia & Mats Gustafsson - RITE (Parco della Musica, Mar '25)
Clarinet & sax free improv duo, with some occasional percussion courtesy of puka shells (is that what I'm hearing?) & what we in the biz call "extended technique" (mashing on the valve so hard that it makes a clicking sound). Recommended if you like spit.
Møster! - Inner Earth (Hubro, 2014)
Kjetil Møster's sax playing is hot as hell & only gets more molten the deeper into the crater you go. Igneous shit. The only bummer about the 4 part conceptual composition about a dormant volcano erupting is that, by design, the first 3 parts are intentionally not as exciting as the finale.
Metal/noisy
Mark Barnes
Stormkeep - Tales of Othertime (Van, 2021)
Cheers to my buddy JL for the recommendation on this – if you are into 90s black metal but could take or leave buzzsaw guitar tones, have I got a Wizard-themed metal album rec for you. I've been spinning this all month, I love the entire Blood Incantation cinematic extended universe.
Qamat is-sa'atu - Unpronouncable (Detriti, 2018)
Fucking weird experimental industrial metal written for cassette tape. Moscow art duo drops punctuation marks of scuzzy ambient passages to sit in between tracks of heavily processed drum machines & shouted vocals. Truly obscure, arcane shit.
Al-Namrood - Enkar (Shaytan, 2017)
Illegal Saudi Arabian black metal – an anonymous band since the mere act of their releasing music is punishable by death. Sick as fuck. This is an older one & has more of a thrashy kind of vibe.
The Body & Intensive Care - Was I Good Enough? (Closed Casket, Mar '25)
Oof, The Body's depths of woe fits perfectly with Intensive Care's freezing industrial sound. How do they release album after album of this stuff and it ALWAYS hits?
Torture Chain - Wasting Syndrome (Darkest Heavy, 2016)
Stomach-churning black metal. Compositions shift & shuffle forward while the vocals never inch away from the most putrid possible delivery. Disgusting, intoxicating.
Hardcore
STORMO
Ostraca - Enemy (Skeletal Lightning, 2018)
Been wondering if I can still get down on some screamo – happy to report that this still hits. Good mix of chaotic, washy, lofi but you can still follow what's going on. Richmond is Screamo City, USA.
Storm{O} - Tagli/Talee (Prosthetic, Mar '25)
Frenetic Italian hardcore, not quite screamo & not quite powerviolence, but a secret third thing. Kind of an addicting listen. A little black metal goes a long way here. My only gripe: the last song features Holy Similaun on electronics & the whole record would have benefited from those glitchy sounds.
Bad Breeding - Blood Manifest (Standard Process, Mar '25)
It's good. Four songs in 9min, I'm pretty sure you have time to throw this one on and give a listen to these UK anarcho freaks.
Rock
redreds
Horsegirl - Phonetics On And On (Matador, Mar '25)
I like this album & the way that the young trio has found a twee Stereolab/Yo La Tengo thing to push on.. but it still sounds like a young band trying something out. Calling this shot right now: this record is good & worth checking out, but their next is going to be an all-timer.
Young Widows - Old Wounds (Temporary Residence, 2008)
Nice to know that we can listen to the weirdo noise rock bands that Daughters ripped off, without all of the allegations. Some really crazy mixing decisions on this one. Another shot call: I'm going to end up getting really into Young Widows in my 30s.
REM - Reveal (Warner, 2001)
I had no idea that REM was still good in the 2000s. Sure, not every song is a winner, but idk if you've been a band for 20 years and can still crank out tracks like "Imitation of Life" that's really something special. A lot of these songs have cool weird drum machine sounds & LL correctly pointed out that this could have been a blueprint album for Future Islands.
Quiet vocalists (is this a section header?)
Will Stratton
Will Stratton - Points of Origin (Bella Union, Mar '25)
Great alt-folk release from upstate NY singer/songwriter. Songs are full of character & characters – mostly Californians who rarely get a spot in the limelight: prisoners, forest firefighters, underclass workers – Fanon's wretched of the earth are all here in full force. The first person narrators all softly sing about the climate disaster that's here & the one to come.
Men I Trust - Equus Asinus (self-released, Mar '25)
Earthy & airy. Not a drop of water in this thing until maybe the second to last song. ASMR heaven.
cehryl - willow tree (more! there's more!) (Nettwerk, Mar '25)
Nice & soupy ASMR bedroom pop. Swirling acoustic guitars, leading tones & jazz progressions, nearly whispered sad lyrics. Egregious reverb.
sadie ibrahim - build me BACK UP (siren, Mar '25)
Glitchy guitars, sunny & reverb-drenched shoegaze vocals & some tortured drum breaks. It's a really good combo. This EP is full of vibes, excited for whenever ibrahim releases a full length.
Pop & Hip Hop
joanna_magenta
Panda Bear - Sinister Grift (Feb '24)
Sad days at the beach! Frowning on the sand, sunscreen stinging the eyes a little. Water smells hot for some reason.
TOKiMONSTA - Eternal Reverie (Art Jovem, Mar '25)
Bouncy pop with some high-charisma guest appearances, including some fun rappers & singers. I don't know if this was necessarily my thing, but I appreciate the work & the craft in putting something like this together. If you like Ableton envelope curves, it's all here.
HooksArthur - Hundred Hand Hooks (self-released, 2024)
Scruffy hip hop from outer Hudson Valley, has a distinctly 90s vibe. Songs are all short, rarely breaking the 2min mark. Woozy beats are overpowered by bass & Arthur's flow is spitty and dizzying. Good references, funny bars.
Lagertijeando - 7 Caminos (Wonderwheel, Mar '25)
Neat electro-Latin stuff from the Argentinian composer. A little bit too clean for my personal taste, but there are some cool dubby rhythms, psych rock textures, and lush instrumentation that spans both electronic & analog spheres.
Collage Electronic
The KLF - Chill Out (self-released, 1990)
Legendary sound collage ambient album – kinda like listening to just the abstract parts of a Pink Floyd album. The London duo's release is meant to depict or metaphorically describe a drive across the gulf from Texas to Florida (though neither had been to the deep south). Radio crackle with revival tent preachers, nature sounds, pedal steel, occasional percussion. Psychedelic and remarkable, especially forward-thinking when considering when it was released.
L'Ocelle Mare - Sans Chemin (Shelter Press, 2021)
Oooh bits and bobs bouncing about. Cheers to my Oh No Oh No bandmate Kevin for showing this to me. Each song is just named after the instruments that were recorded. Real "the electricity in your house wants to sing" vibe. Washy & shuffly.
Joni Void - Every Life Is A Light (Constellation, Mar '25)
Interesting and intimate sound collage electronic stuff, lots of pianos & muffled clangy percussion. Rides a nice line of abstraction, somewhere between ambient & narrative songwriting. Most songs feature wonderful guest vocalists, a nice listen, very much a Spring Is Here kind of record. "Lo fi ambient music to study/chill to"
Synth-based Electronic
Kim Hiorthøy - Ghost Note (blickwinkel, Mar '25)
Can an album be both soupy AND airy? Like listening to steam coming off a bowl of broth. No idea what instruments are recorded here, sounds like drums & woodwinds & synths? Some field recordings maybe? The liner notes make references to how distinctive & indistinct the instruments are. Glitchy & cool.
Whatever The Weather - Whatever The Weather II (Ghostly Int'l, Mar '25)
Mixed ambient styles, like a little buffet plate of sounds.Washy/swirly pads &textural field recordings, woozy live-tracked synth etudes, glitchy blips. Nice vibes, there's hot rice pilaf right next to a salad straight out of the crisper, good temperature contrast.
Yetsuby - 4EVA (Pink Oyster, Mar '25)
Cool poppy synth stuff – busy kick patterns, disembodied repitched vocals all split apart like atoms, clean synth tones. Each track has its own atmosphere, but it's too busy to be ambient music. I almost put this in the Pop section, but the lack of lead vocals on the songs is th
Barker - Utility (Osgot Ton, 2019)
Berghain DJ offers up a colorful electronic album. An arpeggiator workout routine for polysynths. Kinda dubby, kinda scrubby. Immediate rainbow. Maybe a little too squeaky clean – especially since sometimes you get a hint of grime and then wish that it would stick around.