Good Music 2025
sasakure. / Fumi Endo - Night Seen from a Gap in the Night
Fumi Endo is a remarkable young pianist within Tokyo's contemporary 'Onkyo'/'Ftarri' scene who plays with aesthetics drawing from jazz, classical and extreme minimalism.
Here she's paired with a painter whose contributions will only be noticed through faint squeaks and scrapes which occur deep in the background.
The music's gorgeous, as gorgeous as music could possibly be, I think. Faint melodies which may or may not come together into something larger - potentially just cascading notes like sparse rainfall.
However it's clearly detached from the random nature of rainfall, every note is carefully considered and expertly placed. The precision and patience here is very impressive, even decades after figures like Taku Sugimoto popularized these aesthetics.
It's music that will be rewarding and comforting whether placed in the background or given your full attention, and features beautiful compositional sensibilities that take several listens to reveal themselves.
For my personal favourite record of 2025, there's no contest. It's this.
As for
the 'Best Album Of The Year' in a broader and less personal sense, it
goes to Terre Thaemlitz's mix for Resident Advisor's '1000th mix'
celebration - the first new mix by beloved house artist Terre
Thaemlitz/DJ Sprinkles in over a decade.
Where most invited musicians were content to just submit an hour of fantastic music, Thaemlitz sets a higher bar - bravely submitting a track which fuses the DJ mix format with audio commentary relating to the current Palestinian genocide and its history.
The content is thoughtful and broad, juggling Palestinian and Israeli perspectives as well as the confused/shamefully-detached western gaze we should all be familiar with.
The heaviness of the content is unignorable. There's a rich and sympathetic beauty throughout, matched with a heartbreaking cynicism within - I'm sure every listener could have their own takeaway on where exactly on that spectrum the needle lands.
This is something everyone should hear. It's the greatest and most profound piece of political art since Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, probably.
Otherwise
I really enjoyed this 3+hr duet of two wild and crazy dudes running
around an empty room without instruments. On one hand it feels so
deliberately avant-garde to reduce improvisation this far down, but
there's a childish and playful quality that keeps the music warm and
joyous.
It's all about bodies, effort, creativity and exhaustion, all expressed very plainly - themes that anyone with a body should find relatable.
Eva Maria Houben, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen - a something in a winter's night
I've also
really enjoyed the recent collaborations between German Wandelweiser
composer Eva-Maria Houben and Finnish musician Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.
Houben plays the organ, Kervinen plays electronics. The result is a
rich, slow, pastoral ambient music, but it avoids the tacky clichés of
ambient music nicely. They've released six records of this in 2025 - all
free Bandcamp releases - and they're mostly all hits. The latest is my
favourite of the bunch.
Kevin Drumm - Sheer Hellish Miasma II
And I
hate to say it, but the best noise record of the year is in fact a
sequel to a legacy classic. 2002's Sheer Hellish Miasma is one of the
definitive American noise records, defining an aesthetic of pristine
snowstorm harshness met with meticulous mixing and contemporary sound
engineering. Now 23 years later, the storm is back and more brutal than
ever.
Spread across two long tracks, Sheer Hellish Miasma II features a neverending explosion of distortion and piercing electricity that is sure to leave you feeling like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
The original's a rightful classic, but this is even better.
Thank you for reading :)
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