Art via Evan Solano
Chris Robinson is going to be MC Hammer Meets Vampire for Halloween.
The end of the year and its corresponding flood of obligatory “Best Of” lists is always a helpful time for readers to learn about music they missed, forgot about, or reevaluate records they initially reacted to as “meh.”
These lists are particularly valuable for musicians who don’t receive much press–although with music journalism’s death rattles growing louder every year, most music that deserves coverage goes unnoted–and is especially so for avant garde music.
So now it’s my turn to get in the year-end list game and give some love to avant garde jazz(ish) albums. I make no claim to these being the best and I did not rank them. Aside from the obvious requirement that the album has to kill, there are only three rules for making this list:
1. It must be in the jazz, improvisation, and adjacent universe. Otherwise I’d have a tough time figuring out how to rationalize including Fatboi Sharif’s Goth Girl on the Enterprise, Raven Chacon’s latest noise/electronic collaboration, and post-minimalism from Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on the same list as a bunch of weird jazz(ish) records.
2. Except for one or two exceptions, the music has to sound like nothing I’ve quite heard before. If it sounds like Pharoah Sanders could have recorded in 1967 and there’s no new wrinkle to it, it’s not avant garde.
3. No more than one album per artist or per label so that I can spread the love.
Here, in the order that I’ve listened to them the most, are my favorite ten boundary-pushing gems from 2025.
As a connoisseur of the absurd, The Gate’s Almost Live—released on digital download and cassette accompanied by a zine and YouTube documentary—is one of my favorite three albums of the year, in any genre. Almost Live starts off with The Gate playing as a moderately weird tuba (Dan Peck), bass (Tom Blancarte), and drums (Brian Osborne) trio that uses a traditional free jazz recipe of a horn player blowing over a bass player’s fevered strumming or bowing and a drummer doing their best Animal impersonation.
Things quickly become warped. Peck runs his tuba through a tangle of effects to unleash a monstrous morass of growls and horrifying yelps. It could be the soundtrack of a giant metal scrap pile slowly on its way to finding the spark of life. Throw in stretches that I swear contain samples stolen from my circuit-bent Barbie keyboard, a few moments of the Dune soundtrack if reimagined by Pharmakon, and some modular synth bleep bloops, and Almost Live becomes one of the wilder things I’ve ever heard. It’s a nonstop thirty-five minute slab of what the fuck was that?
The cassette’s b-side contains a bonus: a remix even more bent than the original. More of everything. More doom, more distortion, more metal, more glitched-out insurrectionary Sega Genesises (Genesii?) demanding their inalienable rights. And the cover art is gravy: The Gate blatantly copped the classical music label Deutsche Grammophon’s iconic logo and album design and crudely photoshopped an alien monster head over the face of a nameless violinist. Demented perfection.
Recommended if you like: feral robots; Sunn O))) but with a tuba; mild intellectual property theft
For the last thirty-ish years, Marshall Allen has led the Sun Ra Arkestra, which he has been a part of for most of his life. As a centenarian, he may not be up for international touring anymore, but his presence is felt whenever he takes the stage and through the legacy he has built both with the Arkestra and on his own. Recorded between 2022 and 2024, Live in Philadelphia was released this May on Allen’s 101st birthday. While New Dawn—released this February—may get the headlines for being Allen’s first album as a solo artist, Live in Philadelphia is by far the most exciting, experimental, and interplanetary of the two.
Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep helped organize the project, bringing on board, among others, the eminent bassist William Parker, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, drummer Chad Taylor, Wolf Eyes, a batá drum ensemble, and members from Yo La Tengo, Irreversible Entanglements, and The War on Drugs. The album contains 16 tracks, each with varied personnel and each finding a different sound and vibe. The range is wide: jumping swing, pulsing minimalistic crunchy synths, grinding slowcore, harsh electronics, burning post-bebop with a heavily delayed trumpet and brash tenor saxophone, spoken word over violin and percussion, 50s UFO synth swirls, Allen soloing to a driving fuzzed-out rock beat. Despite the variety, it’s all in the Allen/Sun Ra universe—new combinations of sounds and tones, poetry, the acoustic and the electric, the diasporic and the cosmic.
It’s the history, spirit, and promise of Black music—what Amiri Baraka called “the changing same.” What has been, of course, but more importantly, what is and what could be. On the first track Allen recites a Sun Ra lyric: “If we came from nowhere here, why can’t we go somewhere, there?” A good question.
RIYL: travelling the spaceways; imagining things otherwise; four generations of cosmic dreamers
Anthony Braxton, who turned 80 this year, is one of the great avatars of avant-garde music in American history. A composer, philosopher, and virtuoso performer on just about every woodwind instrument, Braxton has touched nearly all corners of the experimental musical world: unruly operas, cheeky marches for wind ensemble, electronics, a composition for an army of tubas, a piece to be played simultaneously by two orchestras located on different planets, and even one where the performer uses an amplified shovel to move a pile of coal. At the same time he’s made numerous albums of jazz standards dedicated to figures like Charlie Parker. Given his enormous stature and endless output, it’s only fitting that several ensembles have made albums of his music.
Saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman is the latest to pay tribute to the master. Lehman and his band—tenor saxophonist Mark Turner (who is one of the unlikeliest saxophonists I would have thought to appear on a Braxton repertoire album), bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Damion Reid—charge through seven Braxton compositions, Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle, Tinkle,” and two Lehman originals. Recorded live in Los Angeles, this album hits from the first downbeat and keeps on hitting like Hagler and Hearns.
The quirky “34a”—a fast waltz if you could call it a waltz—opens the album with angular lines and skip-step stops and starts. Brewer and Reid thump through “23c” as the saxophonists strut and snarl. “23b + 23g” finds the saxophonists trying to nimbly outsprint each other. Lehman and Turner close proceedings with an abstract Braxtonian duo interpretation of Monk’s classic that transforms into a hard swinging quartet version. An album worthy of its inspiration.
RIYL: gateway drugs; thoroughbreds that jump straight out of the gate; a good hit of unexpected static electricity
When I bought this on LP I didn’t even know if I liked the music, at all. I had stumbled on it while browsing the Constellation Records Bandcamp page and I just knew everything about the album spoke to me—the strange title and band name, the compelling artwork. The Dwarfs of East Agouza (Sam Shalabi, electric guitar; Maruice Louca, keyboards, beats, electronics; and Alan Bishop, alto sax, acoustic guitar, vocals) play a strange amalgamation of electronica, psychedelic avant rock, and jazz fusion—kind of. The scales, rhythms, and percussion give the whole album a Middle Eastern flavor.
“Swollen Thankles” and “Saber Tooth Millipede” (the song titles are their own trip) are both built on circular, disjointed grooves. Shalabi’s over-caffeinated guitar is spikey and angular. The “beats” that Louca is credited with must be the various tablas and other hand drums that appear throughout. The trio’s defiance of convention and original mix of inspirations and sounds makes Sasquatch Landslide an irresistible listen that confounds me in a new way every time I listen to it.
RIYL: taking a shot of liquor of unknown origins and hoping for the best; watching Anthony Bourdain get lost in the bazaars of Tangiers
Classically trained cellist Lori Goldston’s numerous credits include work with Nirvana and drone metal innovators Earth. On her Bandcamp page she describes herself as “rigorously de-trained” and possessing a “restless, semi-feral spirit.” This semi-feral spirit runs throughout her latest solo album, which she recorded in one continuous take. With just her cello and a distortion pedal, Goldston laid down a heavy seventy-plus minute drone that is as crunchy and fuzzed-out as it is wide open and inviting. Her unceasing and enormous sound shifts as she changes and bends notes, switches between playing single and multiple strings, and lets the distortion twist her rich cello into a deep throated yowling beast. I first played this on my shitty computer speakers at medium volume. Even then it was enough to shake the walls.
RIYL: pushing the needle into the red; testing the structural integrity of your apartment
Bassist Thomas Morgan’s Around You Is a Forest is a captivating meeting between machine and man. Morgan, who has been interested in computers and coding since he was a child, used coding languages to create a new virtual instrument in the Supercollider software—an open source program that electronic and computer music composers, including Anthony Braxton, have been using for decades.
For people with serious coding chops, Supercollider provides endless sonic possibilities. Morgan calls the instrument WOODS, which sounds like an acoustic plucked string instrument that lies sonically somewhere between the harp, ngoni, kora, and koto. It almost sounds natural, but the complexity and rapidity of the lines it plays suggest its full potential may lie just beyond human capability. While WOODS improvised, Morgan reacted to it and edited its code in real time. After editing and finishing the individual WOODS tracks Morgan invited several musicians ranging from avant garde legend Henry Threadgill to more mainstream jazz rising stars to record a duet with the material. In a minimalist fashion, WOODS tends to repeat and mutate short phrases over time, which gives its human partners a somewhat predictable grounding or familiarity to play with.
The nine tracks vary greatly. Synthesist and pianist Craig Taborn took WOODS into the world of Blade Runner, while drummer Gerald Cleaver had a spacious and open ended discussion with the instrument. Alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s overdubbed mix of bird calls and balladic melodies wound their ways in and out of WOODS’s attempts to run him down. Electronic and computer music can often be cold and impersonal. Not here. WOODS doesn’t necessarily “sound” electronic and it wouldn’t surprise me if people assumed a person was playing it. On Frisell’s duet I sometimes lose track of what/who is doing what. The programming of WOODS is a triumph on its own. That Morgan was able to use it so musically and his collaborators could play along with it to create distinct and inventive works make Around You Is a Forest all the more special.
RIYL: embracing the more-than-human; the idea of coding but having someone else do it
Recorded at the 1981 Jazzfestival Zurich and available now for the first time, Irène’s Hot Four is a summit meeting between four distinguished free jazz heads of state. A lot of European free jazz might get a bad rep, although sometimes deservedly so, for a “grip it and rip it” approach where the band dials up the wailing, bashing, and banging to 11 and keeps it there. Swiss pianist Irene Schweitzer, Dutch drummer Han Bennink, German saxophonist Rüdiger Carl, and South African by way of England bassist Johnny Dyani take a different approach.
Over three long romping tracks and a spirited encore, the quartet creates new scenes and vignettes each with their own story. There might be a duet between Carl and Bennink that quickly moves into a wild manic ride with just the rhythm section. Or Schweitzer, who passed away last year, might play the inside of the piano. Sure there’s some bombast and wild abandon, but there’s playful absurdity, melodicism, and moments of quiet as well. Carl swaps out his saxophone for accordion here and there to change the entire group sound, often leading into good natured parody and farce.
Twisted oom-pah bass and polka? Yes please. Bennink can be the world’s loudest or softest drummer, and there isn’t anything he won’t try to get away with. The voice on the megaphone on “All Inclusive”—that’s his. There is a sense of joy throughout the concert, as the Hot Four never seem to run out of ideas or the technique, energy, and musicianship to pull them off. Every moment is fresh and inspired. To me, this set demonstrates the height of free improvisation—European or otherwise.
RIYL: All-Star games; a shit-hot good time
So a poet reading their work accompanied by a jazz musician, maybe a cheesy saxophonist or some Beatnik hipster on a set of bongos, is a terrible cliche. But there’s a great tradition of poets and musicians hooking up to create something special. Revision is one of those something specials. It features Brandon Lopez, who is one of the great young bass players, and MacArthur genius Fred Moten, who in addition to being a poet is one of today’s eminent philosophers and critics. Moten is at home explaining Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment as he is writing about contemporary art or Curtis Mayfield.
I have the same experience listening to Moten’s poetry as I do listening to billy woods. His work is immediately heavy and affecting. I get some references, I know that I miss others, and I just want to hear it again and again until I start to put my own picture of the sound and words together. Moten is an astonishing reader of his work. He has a soft, careful, and deliberate delivery. The rhythm of his words and lines is inherently musical. He speaks to the Black experience, music, colonialism and slavery, love, thought, dance, prayer—the contractions, pains, and pleasures of what it means to be alive. He is both vernacular and intellectual, erudite and on occasion, crude. The penultimate track, “#11” is a stunning swirl of words and bass, multiple meanings and multiple utterances, linguistic misdirection and redirection. Meanwhile, Lopez’s accompaniment is just right. Whether turning his bass into a hand drum, strumming chords, or letting individual notes linger, he provides a strong foundation for Moten’s words. Together, Lopez and Moten have made an album—also in the way that billy woods does—that is almost impossible to not keep going back to.
RIYL: the mystery and magic of language; figuring out how the pieces go together
Disquiet is the 20th album from the legendary Australian trio The Necks. Pianist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton, and drummer Tony Buck have been making nearly uncategorizable music together since 1987. One of the trio’s signatures is its open ended, long form improvisations. On this album the band goes long. Really long. Like three discs that run over three hours long. Each of the first two discs is a single track while the third is split into two cuts.
The Necks’ music is generally long, slow, and if not quiet, then subtle, as it evolves over geologic time. Disc one (“Rapid Eye Movement”) is full of shimmering and repeating organ drone tones. Bass notes and light cymbal crashes ring out in a reverberating sky and then repeat again, and again, somehow staying weightlessly aloft. Disc two (“Ghost Net”) starts faster, louder, and thicker than the rest of the album The busy polyrhythmic drums work against the piano and bass to create slight tension.
As time goes on that tension is worked out as Abrahams’s organ and piano take a dominant role that converts Buck from the band’s provocateur to its engine. Disc three’s “Causeway” begins with quiet ambience and by the middle it is about as full throttle as The Necks get, with Abrahams going full church organ playing over Buck’s pulsing drums. “Warm Running Sunlight” sounds just like its name. The Necks have a great ability to alter the listener’s perception of time, sound, and space. While the band’s indebtedness to the minimalism of people like Terry Riley or Harold Budd’s ambient compositions is apparent, its music is wholly original. Disquiet is as good an album as any to get into The Necks.
RIYL: turning off the world; melting into the couch
The label Balance Point Acoustics has a high enough batting average that each year several of its releases could be up for consideration for many people’s year end list. Recorded in 2004, Wheat Fields of Kleylehof happens to be my favorite recording from the label’s batch of 2025 albums. The since deceased alto saxophonist Marco Eneidi was joined by trumpeter Darren Johnston, guitarist John Finkbeiner, bassist Damon Smith, and drummer Vijay Anderson. The Eneidi Quintet’s vocabulary is steeped in the languages of people like Ornette Coleman and Eneidi’s huge alto saxophone growls and yawps come straight from Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler. What makes this recording special is the energy and commitment with which the group plays. These traits are evident in “Part 1” and “Part 4,” each of which snap and crackle with electricity while having that loose exuberance that Ornette pioneered. The quintet demonstrates the breadth of its vocabulary in other ways. “Part 2” is based on a long drone that Eneidi lets sit for quite some time before jumping in with wails and fractured cries.
A common aesthetic approach across many of Balance Point Acoustics releases is an embrace of soft and quiet utterances that are just loud enough to be heard. Here the quintet looks for the fissures and the in between spaces to place a chirp, a squeak, a muted trumpet gurgle, or a pulsing and firm but barely there bass line. Aside from the spirited and impeccable ensemble playing, what comes through most in this album is Eneidi’s raw charisma as a player as well as the sadness that he, along with the more recently deceased Finkbeiner, are both no longer with us.
RIYL: building on what came before; tributes to lost friends
Also worthy: Fieldwork, Thereupon; Brandon Lopez, Nada Sagrada; Elias Stemseder/Christian Lillinger, Umbra III; Myra Melford/Michael Formanek/Ches Smith, Splash; Peter Evans’s Being and Becoming, Ars Ludica; Tomas Fujiwara, Dream Up; Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño and Friends at TreePeople; WRENS, Half of What You See; Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts
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