2025 Top Ten(-ish) List

I’ve also provided Bandcamp links wherever possible:

Alex Marsh, Trellis. Didn't see this album discussed too much this year, but according to my music player "play count" stats, it was the release I played more than any other, and that doesn't surprise me—it was an album I found myself reaching for any time I had a long morning to unfurl in. The first track is called "Sunroom Oracle," and that title sums up the airy, relaxed, yet somehow still magical vibe that governs these tracks. Marsh is perhaps better known as an electronic musician, Soda Lite, with whom I was not familiar. The Slow Music Movement, however, who introduced me to Marsh, does a fine job of describing the arc of his transition as he changes monikers and modes—moving from New-Age-Revival-ish electronics to Spiritual-Jazz-Revival-ish acoustics. To quote:

This new LP sees him descend from the new age stratosphere for a somewhat more grounded release, his usual wispy, well-meaning electronica part exchanged for the more gravity-beholden autoharp, upright piano and vintage Yamaha keyboard [...] Mainly due to the autoharp, this release heads to more familiar spiritual realms with a vibe not unlike Alice Coltrane’s less rhythmic seventies output, the collage of short transcendental expressions from the core instruments expertly woven into an enlightening sonic path [...] There is an improvisatory feel to the recording, as if a double-dosed jazz trio had eschewed ego and were on a minimal mission to convert the non-believers.

Consider me well-converted here.

Ben LaMar Gay, Yowzers. Chicago cornetist Gay has been described as a "musical folklorist," and while this album is not "retro" or "traditionalist" in its orientation—it feels extremely up-to-the-minute—it also gains much of its power by mining rich lines of Black heritage music. The blues are here, and jazz, of course—Gay is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, one of Chicago's most stalwart jazz organizations—but Yowzers also avails itself of forms less commonly drawn into the avant-garde like gospel (including choir), and low-register vocal genres like the spiritual and the worksong. The result is a startling, relentlessly inventive, genre-spanning, indeed folkloric album. I went to a Chicago park in the final days of summer to watch a free concert where Gay and his quartet performed most of this, and it was maybe the most thrilling live music I saw all year (and there was some tough competition). Yowzers was released on International Anthem, one of the best labels going at the moment: they focus on genre-spanning work such as this, and their string of strong 2025 releases make for some good "honorable mentions" here, including the first Chicago Underground Duo release in eleven years (Hyperglyph) and the first Tortoise record in nine years (Touch). Different Rooms, from Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, is terrific too, and I've heard good things about How You Been, by the SML quintet—honestly, I'm convinced that you could probably make a respectable 2025 top ten from this label alone.

claire rousay, [various]. rousay is best known as an ambient artist, conjuring the usual billowing clouds of sound but with a special knack for coalescing those clouds around knots of particularity: passages of beautiful acoustic instrumentation, AutoTuned vocals, or field recordings, often of speech (snippets of everyday conversation, confessions from various voices, text-to-voice transcription of phone messages). On last year's sentiment, rousay alloyed this sound with more traditional songcraft, shifting modes into what she somewhat cheekily termed "emo-ambient," a maneuver which seemed to divide listeners (personally, I liked it). The emo side is less on display in her 2025 output, but the ambient sides shines as finely as ever. Although there was no single new rousay album that stood out to me in the way that sentiment did, she warrants inclusion here for the sheer breadth of this year's releases, which included both strong solo work (notably a little death) and a rich variety of collaborative work, including full-length collaborations with Gretchen Korsmo (quilted lament) and more eaze (no floor), plus a one-track collaboration with William Tyler, who also had a remarkable year, more on which below. I could stand to see a full-length rousay/Tyler collaboration—come on 2026, make it happen.

Horse Lords / Arnold Dreyblatt, Extended Field. Horse Lords have been making knotty, propulsive, nontraditionally tuned, difficult-to-classify instrumentals since 2012—so I was pleased to see them pair up with minimalist elder Arnold Dreyblatt, who has been making knotty, propulsive, nontraditionally tuned, difficult-to-classify instrumentals since 1982 [!] (often under the banner of the "Orchestra of Excited Strings," designating an ongoing ensemble comprised of Dreyblatt and a shifting range of collaborators). Dreyblatt releases material only sporadically—he also has an active career working and teaching in media and installation arts—and most of the recent Dreyblatt releases have been archival in nature (see Star Trap, released 2020, gathering material from the 1990s, or Duo Geloso, released 2022, which documents a 1987 concert with Paul Panhuysen). I'm glad that vital older material is being well-preserved, but I can't deny that I got a jolt of excitement to see Dreyblatt releasing brand-new, uncompromising material with a younger generation of equally uncompromising musicians. (I'd somehow missed that there was a new Orchestra of Excited Strings album in 2023, featuring Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger and Joachim Schütz as the ensemble members, which I will have to check out soon.)

Kali Malone and Drew McDowell, Magnetism. Sticking with non-traditional tunings for a moment, we have this album of disorienting electronic intonations and atmospheres. Immediately and enduringly captivating: a drone release which stands far above the pack. The label that released this, Ideologic Organ, had some other strong releases this year, so for another grouping of "honorable mentions" please consider Nina Garcia's Bye Bye Bird, which finds surprising new approaches to noise guitar, and Lucy Railton's solo cello album Blue Veil (some of you may be familiar with Railton's cello work from Malone's massive triple album Does Spring Hide Its Joy, my 2023 album of the year).

M. Sage, Tender / Wading. When thinking back on what I've been listening to in the 2020s, I have to give Matt Sage a lot of credit: he has probably influenced my listening tastes more than any other single human in the past half-decade. I stumbled upon the Fuubutsushi "remote quartet" (Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi) in the pandemic year of 2021 and promptly began using that quartet as a point from which to explore outward, investigating the solo work of the individual performers, then widening the spiral to look into the work of their various collaborators, and eventually working my way through most of the catalog of Sage's Cached.Media project, a "farm to table intermedia platform and publishing outlet based on the Colorado Front Range," which longtime readers may recall that I have written about in this newsletter before. Taken collectively, all of that is a vast repository of material—more than enough to spend half a decade exploring—but this release represents a lovely deep draught from the central wellspring. Gentle without being mushy, calming without being treacly: delicate, carefully considered music that speaks to both the head and the heart. Honorable mentions: Chamber Music for Lawn Mowers, Sage's witty, summery collaboration with Lieven Martens, built around, you guessed it, field recordings of lawn mowers, inspired partly by Sage's teenage memories of putting in ear plugs and humming along to a riding mower and partly by Sage's partner's propensity for putting on YouTube videos of tractors to use as background noise while working. If you like thinking critically about lawn mowing, as I do, this album also contains, in Sage's own words, "some big post-colonial and ecological ideas." Also along the Fuubutsushi axis in 2025 we have Patrick Shiroishi's Forgetting is Violent, an ambitious, important album, though one that I wasn't able to spend enough time with this year to form coherent thoughts about—other than to say that it's clearly worth more time than I gave it. I'll pick up with it in 2026.

Rafael Toral, Traveling Light. Rafael Toral has made some of my all-time favorite guitar-based ambient albums, but most of them date back thirty years or more—1994's Sound Mind Sound Body, 1995's Wave Field, 2001's Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. He never stopped putting out releases, but in those intervening years he took a detour away from the guitar and spent time doggedly attempting to produce a space-themed "post-free-jazz electronic music," building his own quixotic improvisational electronic instruments, releasing albums that were easy to admire for their focus and oddity but maybe a little harder to genuinely, uh, vibe with. Slowly—beginning with 2017's Jupiter and Beyond—he began to re-integrate the guitar to his deeply transformed improvisational practice. I kept an eye of some of what was going on—Jupiter and Beyond is pretty compelling—but I was not at all expecting to see this re-integration flower into career-best work with his latest pair of albums, last year's marvelous Spectral Evolution and now this, its companion release, an album of ingeniously reinvented jazz standards [!]. This perhaps represents, at long last, the full realization of the chromatic, post-jazz, lush electronic improvisational music that Toral has been dedicatedly pursuing for decades. A triumph by any measure.

William Tyler, Time Indefinite. Tyler has a pedigree that includes time spent in interesting indie bands in the late 90s (Lambchop, Silver Jews) and, from there, nearly two decades honing a language of solo guitar, beginning with 2008's Deseret Canyon. I'd admired Tyler's work, which balanced a vague debt to John Fahey with some more ambient or atmospheric leanings—generally speaking, my kind of thing—but I was unprepared to find him making breathtakingly inventing music this year, well and truly bursting beyond the limits of the box that I may have formely put him in. While still recognizably a "guitar" record, this release draws on noise, drone, loops, and lo-fidelity tape techniques to create a harrowing atmosphere of anxiety, sorrow, and depression—ultimately yielding to a mood of weathered hope. Honorable mention: 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, an equally boundary-stretching collaboration between Tyler and Kieran Hebden (of Four Tet). Together with Time Indefinite these two releases reflect an enormous blossoming, documenting, in the most revelatory way, how refining an artistic vocabulary and expanding that vocabulary don't need to be mutually exclusive endeavors.

[various artists], The Bottle Tapes. As a young man living in Chicago in the early Aughts, I spent countless evenings at the Empty Bottle, a storied venue known for its adventurous music programming. (I also came to recognize the figure of Malachi Ritscher, an indefatigable sound engineer who recorded over four thousand Chicago-area concerts around that same time period.) At least some of the shows I attended back then were part of The Jazz & Improvised Music Series, a weekly series organized by writer/curator John Corbett and saxophonist/MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Ken Vandermark, which put on over 500 shows during its impressive run, most of which were recorded by Ritscher. The Bottle carries on, and still programs adventurous music—I saw Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano play there as a duo earlier this year—but many other elements of that early-Aughts scene are long gone: the Jazz & Improvised Music Series ceased programming in 2005, and Malachi Ritscher took his own life in an act of anti-war protest in 2006. Thankfully, Ritscher's recordings have been carefully preserved by the good people at Chicago's Creative Audio Archive, but aside from a few recordings made available for streaming, the mass of it—over 40 linear feet, I'm told—is available for listening by appointment only. However, John Corbett still works as a curator—along with Jim Dempsey, he now runs the gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, which also runs a terrific record label with an archival bent. And so conditions eventually proved fortuitous for this release, a staggering six-disc set of Jazz and Improvised Music Series highlights, curated (and annotated) by Corbett, featuring countless jazz stalwarts (Vandermark, Peter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, Fred Anderson, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Joe McPhee, Steve Lacy) and some unexpected sonic adventurers (Thurston Moore, Kevin Drumm, Jim O'Rourke). Ultimately what you get is a titanic trove of music that could easily have been lost, and although most of it is 20 years old, all of it remains tremendously vital, and you could easily spend the next 20 years just appreciating what's here. Honorable mention: the Corbett vs Dempsey label isn't only archival: they release new material too, including the self-titled debut of incredible quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, featuring Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet, electronics, and voice, Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Mariam Rezaei on turntables, and Lukas Koenig on drums, amplified cymbal and bass synth. "Integrating noise, jazz, electronic music, and pure mania," this is an invigorating blast to the sensorium.