These albums share a common thread: drawing on tradition – whether folk, classical or guitar-based– and transforming it into a language of contemporary, often ritualistic and deeply emotional expression. This is a showcase of music that does not so much tell stories as create experiences – suspended between meditation, experimentation, and intense emotion.
WHITNEY JOHNSON, LIA KOHL, MACIE STEWART — Body Sound
(International Anthem)
Recipe for a Boiled Egg by Macie Stewart and Lia Kohl is one of the best I’ve heard in recent years. Now they’ve joined forces with a third violinist, Whitney Johnson, and are taking this music to a whole new level. It’s not necessarily improvisation, spontaneity, or ecstatic sound-making. The trio plays meditative, moving (sometimes deeply moving, as in ‘dawn | pulse’) music that flows harmoniously and features unique textures. At times, the strings can sound percussive (laundry | blood), yet they often resemble drone-like textures in the vein of Stars of the Lid. Added to this are seductive, monotonous, and wailing vocalizations, and in a few moments tape loops, emphasizing in this emotionally poignant music the passing of time, beauty, and imperfection. We are listening to music that is poignantly sad, at times meditative, stretched out horizontally, allowing us to enter this world instantly, where the smoothness of the strings contrasts with the harshness of the tape-processed parts. This is music composed with vigilance and sensitivity, resulting in what is, for the moment, the most beautiful album of the year.
BILL ORCUTT — Music in Continuous Motion
(Palialia)
It’s easy to get lost almost immediately in Bill Orcutt’s vast discography, but the key thing is that this American guitarist never stops recording, and his albums continue to captivate with their virtuosity and verve, but above all with their ideas. His latest album is, in a sense, a continuation of ‘Music for Four Guitars’, recorded four years ago and later transcribed for the outstanding quartet Four Guitars Live. This year’s album is once again a multi-track journey, on which Orcutt layers further lines onto the instrumental parts, creating peculiar, polyphonic, and pulsating compositions. Mostly short and neatly presenting ideas, yet at the same time ecstatic in their own way, looped endlessly, personally inducing in me an indescribable state of euphoria, a kind of rapture. It is delightful that such an experienced musician can coax such fascinating and captivating tones and textures from his instrument, demonstrating brilliance and endless ingenuity.
STINE JANVIN & MARTIN JOH — Or Gare – funeral procession music from Ryfylke, Norway
(Krets / Futura Resistenza)
Stine Janvin and Morten Joh’s album ‘Or Gare’ is a raw, hypnotic interpretation of Norwegian funeral songs, blending folk tradition with subtle electronics. This is not music ‘about’ mourning, but rather a contemporary tool for it – a form of ritual that unfolds between the community and silence. The artists are part of a movement of musicians drawing on folklore to create quasi-liturgical experiences, akin to works such as Jacaszek’s “Treny” or Bell Witch’s “Mirror Reaper”. The starting point is the tradition of liksong – songs that accompany funeral processions and lead the deceased to the afterlife. Janvin and Joh treat it as archaeological material: they do not reconstruct it faithfully, but rather extract and reinterpret it, giving it a contemporary, almost spiritual form. The result is music suspended between presence and distance, an experience to be lived rather than merely listened to.
DOBRAWA CZOCHER — State of Matter
(130701 / Fat Cat)
There have not been many cellists who have ventured beyond the confines of classical music – one of the most distinctive is the Icelandic Hildur Guðnadóttir, responsible, among other things, for the score to the film “Joker”, for which she won an Oscar. Hailing from the Baltic coast, Dobrawa Czocher, who took her first steps in music school alongside Hania Rani (and later collaborated with her numerous times), creates dark music tinged with a cool sea breeze. The bowing here is at times jagged, at others stretched out in time like drone-like trails. Czocher adds allure to her vocalizations, which give the compositions space without losing their cinematic drama. There is no overcomplicated exploration of the instrument here – instead, there is a coherent vision of how a solo might sound: on the one hand lyrical, on the other dignified and poignant.
More: https://mintmagazine.pl/artykuly/10-najlepszych-plyt-na-wiosne-2026
SABA ALIZADEH — Rituals of The Last Dawn
(KarlRecords)
I watch what is happening in Iran, and the music of Saba Alizadeh, a virtuoso on the kamancheh and a leading figure in contemporary Iranian music, strikes me as the perfect soundtrack. This is already his fourth album, on which he combines Persian tradition with avant-garde experimentation in a penetrating and non-obvious way, creating pieces that bridge the past and the present, accompanied by guitarists Pietro Caramelli and Liew Niyomkarm on pedal steel. The folk-inspired sound in First Ritual begins with isolated, staccato notes that later thicken and grow. The music, however, does not explode; rather, it resonates gently, filling the space with reverberations intertwining with electronics, sounding hypnotic and meditative. The strokes on the kamancheh strings are seductive and soaring; the electronic backdrop enhances their raw resonance, and the whole seems like a drawn-out, never-ending epic, as nostalgic and sad as it is reflective. Alizadeh masterfully draws on folklore, setting it within a context of electronics, sonic distortions, and the construction of multi-layered worlds, thereby creating a story rooted in the past yet thoroughly contemporary, resonating with emotion.
IZTOK KOREN & RAPHAEL ROGIŃSKI — Nocturnal Consolations
(Instant Classic)
This is a meeting of two outstanding instrumentalists on the trails of Central and Eastern Europe. Raphael Rogiński helped shape the new wave of Jewish music two decades ago, later playing works by Coltrane, amongst others, whilst Iztok Koren is a member of the excellent Slovenian trio Širom. Together, they seek out archaic sources of sound and the sounds of the future – creating a dense, shifting polyphony using prepared guitar, banjo, gimbri and gongs, treating music as a space for dialogue – both acoustic and conceptual. Drawing on the traditions of many cultures, they construct a universal soundscape for the contemporary listener. As Rogiński puts it, this is a “Byzantine-steppe tale” – a contemporary story relating to today’s perspective on folklore. Though rooted in a specific geographical latitude, it does not refer directly to particular traditions – rather, it searches intently to create its own.
More: https://mintmagazine.pl/artykuly/10-najlepszych-plyt-na-wiosne-2026
TURNER WILLIAMS JR — Vipérine
(mistralph0ne)
I witnessed the wonders Turner Williams Jr. performed on the shahi baaja (an electrified version of the bulbul tarang, an Indian zither, to which typewriter keys have been added, pressing two strings to alter the pitch) during Le Guess Who 2022. This uniquely looking and sounding instrument allows him to paint a rather broad palette of possibilities. On Vipérine, the first album released on his own label, mistralph0ne, he immerses himself in American primitivism; explores vibrant, reverberant sounds; and evokes the possibilities of the pedal steel guitar. Somewhere amidst all this, a folk influence shines through, an attempt to create his own distinct aesthetic, at times based on improvisation and at others on more compact structures. The musician paints a broad spectrum of colors, at times more rhythmic and pulsating, at others blurred and dreamlike, as the closing title track demonstrates perfectly. This is an album that draws on various traditions, yet simultaneously creates its own, somewhat outsider-like sound, lost in reverbs and loops, brilliantly grounded in a reverberant string sound that takes on various forms.
TOMASZ CHYŁA QUINTET — It’s not a Fake, It’s a Replica
(Alpaka)
Tomasz Chyła and his quintet have been drawing attention to their work and musical vision ever since their magnificent 2017 debut “Eternal Entropy”. A multi-genre and broad-ranging approach to music is one thing; the violinist leading the ensemble and frequently straying far from the jazz idiom is another. Over the course of nearly a decade, both the violinist’s horizons have broadened, and the line-up has changed, and his latest, fifth album can be placed somewhere between heavy progressive and stoner rock influences, and on the other hand, even more pronounced fascinations with the work of Zbigniew Seifert, here heavily amplified. The violin definitely takes the lead, closely followed by Krzysztof Hadrych’s guitar, which distinctly marks the rock-metal heaviness of the tracks. The thing is, however, that against the backdrop of riffs and a dense rhythm section, TCQ does not lose its folk lightness, brilliantly counterpointed by Emil Miszek on the trumpet. And although this jazz-rock and heaviness seem to attract the most attention, the most interesting moments occur at the juncture, when the wall of sound from the amplifiers is balanced by show-stopping parts on both the violin and the trumpet.
NEUROSIS — An Undying Love For A Burning World
(Neurot)
Neurosis, even if they’ve had their weaker moments, have always maintained a high standard, despite the rift left by Scott Kelly’s departure. Now, Aaron Turner (known from ISIS and Sumac) has joined the line-up as a vocalist and guitarist, helping to shape the band’s new sound alongside Steve Von Till.
On “Blind”, you can hear the band experimenting with form — Turner’s double-tracked parts are juxtaposed with Von Till’s clean vocals, creating a multi-layered tension. Noah Landis’s modular synthesizers also play a significant role, not only adding color but also breaking up the tracks’ drama. The best example is “Mirror Deep” — a composition so varied that it could serve as a showcase for the entire album: from dense riffs at the start, through electronic textures and subtle guitar parts, to a fast-paced, intense second section, finally closing with the opening motif. This album is a bit like the scream in “We Are Torn Wide Open”, after which the subsequent tracks grapple with the darkness of the present day — a burden that Neurosis have for years been able to transform into something mesmerizing and poignant, and here they do so brilliantly.
