ALSO RELEASED

Horse Lords

★★★★

As It Happened

RVNG INTL. DL/LP

The Baltimoreformed quartet’s rigorous and vigorous attack on musical norms continues apace with this rethink of the live album: a radicallyedited collage of 2022 and 2023 European shows. As with 2022’s ace Comradely Objects, though, the theorising is comprehensively overwhelmed by the ecstatic vibes of the music, as math-rock, avant-jazz, minimalist composition and much more are reconstituted into party jams.

Phill Niblock/ Anna Clementi/ Thomas Stern

★★★ Zound Delta 2

KARL. CD/DL/LP

When the minimalist composer Phill Niblock died in January, obits tended to focus on his imposing monolithic drones. This first posthumous release, though – performed by Italian-Swedish singer Clementi and ex-Crime And The City Solution bassist Stern – works on a microbial scale, as multiple agonised vocals, tiny sonic adjustments and various unidentifiable squelches accrue into a mass hum with the eerie potency of ancient Tibetan ritual.

Mind Over Mirrors

★★★★

Particles, Peds & Pores

BANDCAMP. DL

Jaime Fennelly has been busy recently as one-third of Appalachian kosmische champs Setting, but here he’s back in solo synth-jockey mode with the first Mind Over Mirrors album in six years. It’s a good one, too, packed with vibrational lunar ragas in the zone between Tangerine Dream and Bitchin Bajas. Serene drones in excelsis, then, but try Suprachiasmatic for an accelerated route to transcendence.

Magic Tuber Stringband

★★★★ Needlefall

THRILL JOCKEY. DL/LP

The North Carolinan duo of Courtney Werner and Evan Morgan, meanwhile, fit into a more orthodox Appalachian tradition of guitar, banjo and fiddle-driven folk music. But as on 2023’s great Tarantism, they stray easily towards wilder realms, into improvised music that evokes the landscape as well as the culture of their region and which sounds, occasionally (cf The Hermit’s Passage), like a deep backwoods AMM. JM