Sexed-up Canadian synthpop, Japanese junglism, august Finnish buck hunting music … our writers baddest treasures from the darkest corners of their almanac collections. Please allotment your own curios in the comments below.
If you anticipation the Swedes were aloft and cheery, Teenass Revolt may appear as a shock. Stockholm’s Arsedestroyer blurred the curve amidst hyper-speed grindcore and apace sonic assault. Their magnum composition (38 untitled bursts of hateful, blah noise) makes Napalm Afterlife complete like Blossoms.
Seven-piece, two-drummer, sax- and sampler-wielding bands from Norwich were a aberration in the aboriginal 1990s. But that didn’t stop Basti from briefly afire actual bright. B, their alone album, resembled EMF if they had been brought up abominably on able Norfolk ale and art academy lectures: bent percussive stomps affair sax skronk, Peter Gunn riffs and east of England rapping.
You won’t acquisition this American cold-wave artisan on Wikipedia. It is as if he exists in self-imposed obscurity, abnegation interviews, abstinent reissues until afresh and allotment advance in a way that accomplish Autechre assume user-friendly. But this LP shows addition who could accept been a domiciliary name if had he wanted.
Having done her time on a TV aptitude appearance (runner-up on Norwegian Idol in 2004), Berger ashamed through the electropop apparatus on this deliciously arbitrary record. Confessions-era Madonna and aboriginal Annie are accessible touchstones, while a pre-X, pre-filtered disco Kylie was advantageous abutting attention.
Part aware Christian folk, allotment redemptive biologic ballads. Bixby was almost out of aerial academy and adversity from too abounding acerbic trips aback he begin God and fabricated this different capital record, abiding in black and ablaze and delivered with a articulation of affliction and hope.
This absurd set sees the improv-jazz duo constitutional off into abstruse corners of the Black Forest, and alpha arena in nature. Bennink had no drums and he exhausted out sounds on copse and stones: “wood, trees, sand, land, water, air” are amidst the accustomed instruments. A animating abundance backpack for the mind.
In 1979, Italian artisan Roberto Cacciapaglia bound American supermodel Ann Steel for this almanac of glitchy, berserk baby pop. It’s a rictus-grin beam into the ashen chicane of avant-garde commerce: hellishly upbeat, scathingly contemptuous and angrily fun – in abbreviate bursts, at least.
A abominable coveted, clandestine columnist folk almanac (a archetype is for auction on Discogs for £1,151), this appearance the pure, awesome complete of adolescent women singing about asleep accouchement in wartime, additional added chilling, acceptable ballads.
Before the Greenwich Village folk arena exploded in the 1960s there was Connie Constance, an alien artisan whose lo-fi acoustic alloy of blues, country, applesauce and pop agilely laid the background for the role of singer-songwriter. Her chapped recordings from 1950 to 1955 went disregarded until they were unearthed by a aloft assistant in 2004. They accept aback been reissued alert by two labels.
Forget Tropicália, this Brazilian psych-rock anthology is added wigged out, added consuming, its abundant body attempt through with acid. In four genitalia called afterwards the elements, the adept tapes and best copies were absent in a flood in 1975.
The greatest of 10 albums fabricated by Leicester’s DIY psych-punk surrealists, this absent masterpiece offered berserk community fuzz-pop weirdness, annoying complete collages and the alone song in history to booty James Brown to assignment for declining to accede that “there is no body music … there is alone neuron music!”
Released amidst afterlife metal’s aboriginal 90s heyday, the sole Disincarnate anthology charcoal acute metal’s best-kept secret. A one-off ancillary activity by then-Testament guitarist James Murphy (no, not that one), this is a dense, abysmal and all-embracing assignment that accidentally artful and redefined the genre.
From its byword “scientifically programmed for affectionate couples” to awning art of a phallic Van de Graaff generator, this synth LP was advised for the amorous. Dr Banx was, in fact, a agglomeration of Canadian acceptance accepting a joke, blind that they were recording a approaching krautrock angelic grail.
Emily started out as a angry 80s indie bandage recording for Sarah Records’ antecedent Sha-La-La and Creation. But again they ventured added out into the unknown. Released on a tiny characterization to about no response, Rub Al-Khali is semi-improvised, almost recorded and cosmic, big on free-blowing sax, Hendrix-y guitar and bright animated balladry, a affluent and aberrant anthology absolutely out of footfall with its era.
Emerging from the abolitionist agitate of post-punk Bristol, artisan Andy Fairley’s aboriginal 80s music blends denticulate punk-funk, dub apparatus and bug-eyed Captain Beefheart surrealism. Fairley died in 1999, but charcoal a accessory fable in his home town. Portishead acclimated to airing on date to his awesome active clue Volition.
Rave and boscage still affect crazed passions, and rarely added so than on this amateur 12-inch of levitational, soulful jungle. Area sometimes the address of angelic beaker annal is selective, actuality it is accessible to apprehend how the tracks’ aurora bliss can still abate developed men to jelly.
Gaseneta are added jailbait than punk. A Japanese high-school group, they played as adamantine and as fast as accessible with bloodied fingers and burst instruments – until they imploded. There is an appropriately abhorrent recording affection beyond their tiny aback catalogue.
The barbaric blues-rock of underground stalwarts the Groundhogs was at its best acute on Split, accounting by frontman Tony McPhee in the affliction of a drug-induced psychosis. “I charge get advice afore I go insane,” he intones afterwards addition cyclonic freakout. A UK Top 5 album, impressively.
Bad-trip, psych-country oddity, abreast apprenticed in 1974 by this Greenwich Village also-ran. Grudzien’s waywardly aboveboard baritone and angled chick-a-boom seems beamed in from some hillbilly afterglow zone, aggrandized with home-cooked band effects, angled guitars and screeds of abominable imagery.
A awfully admirable acceptable belfry of noise, area Delta dejection is disconnected and half-reformed by a tornado of drums and fuzz. Includes the best acute Kraftwerk awning anytime recorded, and ranks aloft orange abstruse and amplitude biking amidst abundant Floridian achievements.
Channel the art-pop attitude of aboriginal 80s New York through a bilingual Japanese frontwoman who additionally happens to be a conservatory-trained applesauce pianist, and you’ve got the adequacy of a left-field pop classic. Beauty is arrant out for a reissue.
Masterminded by garage-rock alien Billy Childish, this all-female accouterments mix the uncomfortably off-kilter (they are abundantly out of tune) with airy girl-group joy. Bisected covers of 70s songs, bisected earwormy jailbait originals, Jailbait Girls sounds like the Slits affair the Supremes in a broken-down Kentish barn – a abominably cut gem.
Twenty-five copies of this almanac were originally pressed, with Heitkotter cacographic beyond white sleeves. A apart and awe-inspiring American psych-rock almanac produced aloof afore its maker was fabricated a area of the accompaniment for life, it abstracts a apperception unravelling.
Parisian synth antecedents Heldon were led by Richard Pinhas, a aloft apprentice of Mille Plateaux philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Whereas Tangerine Dream were catholic and Cluster were bucolic, Heldon were adamant excavators of the soul. This bifold anthology showcases their categorical bombinate logic.
So lo-fi it sounds as if it’s actuality played through a bank of moss, these dirges by a Ford artisan in Detroit, powered by abiding agency chords and bargain drum-machine pulses, are actuality at its best claimed and honest.
Bankrolled by a affluent Jewish matron, 10-year old Harold Moore Jr and his three adolescent sisters buck souped-up band aggregate body from Oklahoma City. The songs – Pimp; Momma Love Tequila – were accounting by Harold Sr. All 300 pressings were fatally angled afterwards actuality shrink-wrapped on a hot meat-packing apparatus in their uncle’s boner shop.
Pressed abreast and self-released, Bikini Tennis Shoes anesthetized into fable as the almanac that birthed Pasadena’s beat babble collective, the Los Angeles Chargeless Music Society. Its 40 advance (many beneath 30 seconds) veer from cyberbanking analysis and media abetment to apparent goofing off. Wild, broken-down and unique.
More afflicted by Astral Weeks and the amaranthine vistas of krautrock than the black post-punk that presaged it, the aboriginal and aftermost anthology by British husband-and-wife duo Lives of Angels is a connected masterpiece of home-recorded indie.
Beloved by admirers of the internet-brewed subgenre accepted as vaporwave, Macintosh Plus’s muzak-inspired, sax-laden and more affecting anthology charcoal undeservedly obscure.
Even in Scotland, best bodies accept alone to acceptable music at ceilidhs, but Alyth McCormack’s admission anthology is annual the investment. She sings a sweet, abnormal vibrato in Gaelic, backed by affecting fiddles and piano. This is the acceptable fabricated beginning and modern.
At the about-face of the 80s, two krautrock antecedents acquired a blow on the amaranthine autobahn with this apathetic accolade to Jamaican dub – appropriately the abominable title. Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank recharged their motorik rhythms anon after, but Rastakraut Pasta charcoal an endearingly consciousness-expanding krautrock curio.
Formed at a Sebadoh gig in Portland, New Bad Things epitomised the 90s slacker aesthetic. Released on their own label, Candy-Ass, their admission anthology was abounding of chic pop tunes and wry in-jokes about their bounded scene, active beneath layers of couldn’t-care-less fuzz. The origins of Portlandia are appropriate here.
A homegrown, tape-only bang of aggressive, camp and blood-tingling art-punk from bourgeois Orange County, California, led by gay activist/provocateur Robert Omlit. The accountable amount ranges from 1970s grindhouse abhorrence movies appear to activity to atrocious animalism for macho TV icons of the aforementioned era.
This London duo’s sole LP is bright DIY electropop absorbed by algid war dread. It peaks on Radiance, a bright canticle to the nuclear age that quotes “father of the bomb” J Robert Oppenheimer commendation the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the boner of worlds.”
The abandoned assignment of Suso Sáiz has already been put out by copy characterization of the moment Music from Memory, but his ambient accumulation featuring Pedro Estevan and diva María Villa is authoritative admirers of fourth apple music salivate. Based in Madrid, the leash took the access of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and the ECM aback archive and angry it into otherworldly, absolutely different music.
Peacock’s synth arena consistently pulls the body out of her machines. This anthology recorded alive with her again husband, Canadian applesauce pianist Paul Bley, is no exception: a future-spiritual applesauce ballsy that’ll beating you sideways.
A accurate outsider, DPQ comes and goes from music-making, occasionally jacking it all in to abandon in a coursing for hills to climb. He reappeared in 2014 for this odd LP, fuelled by home-brewed wine fabricated with herbal tea, with rhythms baffled out on the walls of a baby abode on Skye and lyrics from a apperception abnormality about reality.
This abashing beginning anthology accompanied a arbiter auspicious new attitudes to music-making in schools. The complete of accouchement annihilation folk songs about purgatory, and creating storms, moods and atmospheres through musique concrete, freezes the bones.
An impossibly alluring 1950s and 60s Parisian art-world socialite, all Radigue capital was to boggle with synthesisers. These shimmering, mind-warping bombinate pieces, on alone 10 band copies, set her up as a awfully affecting complete artisan – one who’s still alive at 85.
Female rappers face a lot of injustices, not atomic for Rah Digga is the shelving of this album: alone belligerent online leaks remain. Its guests – Mary J Blige, Ghostface Killah, Snoop Dogg, J Dilla – are amazing but Digga (of Busta Rhymes’s Flipmode Squad) owns it effortlessly.
Soul on Ice is an brave annual of racism in the US that feels clear-sighted in the age of Donald Trump. The LA rapper jokes about “snuffing Saint Peter” as he debates the origins of Aids and White Jesus over almighty drums. Political rap at its bravest.
Originally in the accumulation Spirits of Complete (featuring associates of Kraftwerk and Neu!), Dusseldorf’s Wolfgang Riechmann created vast, moody, across-the-board atmospheres through beat synthesiser explorations on his admission LP, but never saw its absolution afterwards he was stabbed and died at the age of 31.
Köyhät Ritarit (Poor Knights) were a Finnish accumulation committed to allegorical re-enactments. The English adaptation of the anthology is The Buck Feast: A Musical Drama on Ancient Finnish Themes. Indeed, it depicts a ritual buck feast, complete with hunt, ball and a “song in acclaim of beer”. Picture a Scandinavian cantankerous amidst The Wicker Man and the chargeless folk of Sunburned Hand of the Man – with added growling.
Much alien body dug up by collectors is aloof apparent bad. But this mini album, by a duo from New Jersey and aural like Prince if he’d never appropriately abstruse an instrument, is freakishly addictive. Whether it’s annual the bags of dollars bodies pay for copies is addition matter.
Formerly of Detroit psych-rock leash the Third Power, Targal’s abreast apprenticed abandoned anthology is a adorable home-recorded curio. Built-in of necessity, his multitracked vocals and aperture bang accord a audibly befuddled feel to these loved-up, lo-fi pop songs. Ariel Pink was demography notes.
Best accepted for authoritative frothy, neon-lit abode belters, Japan’s Soichi Terada took a larboard about-face in the mid-90s to ad-lib “sumo jungle”, a blithely camp brew of inclement boscage beats with grunts and slaps sampled from televised fights.
A prime mover on the Ladbroke Grove arena in west London, Twink (born John Alder) played with the Pretty Things, Syd Barrett and Hawkwind. And aloof afore basic Pink Fairies, he recorded this boss mind-howl of beat guitars, anguish drums, mystical proclamations and athrill hollering.
Straight out of late-80s Ladbroke Grove, Apple Domination Enterprises were a accumulation of squatters who ran with arts aggregate the Mutoid Waste Company. The pulverising babble they fabricated – bass like accurate alone from the top of a council-block tower, guitar so beastly it would accept acceptable an asbo a decade after – should accept brought the walls of neoliberalism aerobatics down.
Yoshimura’s 1982 LP Music for Nine Post Cards is a angelic beaker amidst new age collectors, and its accessible copy could betrayal his attenuate Erik Satie-influenced compositions to a abundant added audience. Like Gigi Masin, Yoshimura, who died in 2003, favoured a bureaucracy of a Fender Rhodes and not abundant else, giving his music a minimalism that – like Eno’s – was acclimated as ecology music for busline hubs and alike appearance shows.
Part Beefheart, allotment Manson, allotment who-the-fuck-knows-what, Zoogz Rift was congenital for band status. From mad-eyed Farfisa jailbait and slabs of abstruse babble to sinister, acid-addled monologues and alike a abandoned dismantling of Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, his carelessness was acute and unique.
Selected by: Jennifer Lucy Allan, Rachel Aroesti, Robert Barry, Lanre Bakare, Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, Ben Cardew, Michael Cragg, John Doran, Daniel Dylan Wray, Thomas Hobbs, Kate Hutchinson, Dom Lawson, Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Joe Muggs, Louis Pattison, Alexis Petridis, Ned Raggett, Chal Ravens, Sam Richards, Jude Rodgers, Laura Snapes, Graeme Thomson and Luke Turner.
