2024, My Favourite New Old Discoveries (part one)

40 new-to-me albums that made my year. in two parts. basically a Musicawi Silt megamix

Ciao.

Welcome fellow travellers, to the latest edition of my Musicawi Silt newsletter. Last week, I published my (new) albums of the year, and so I have to thank the litany of new subscribers who have come flooding in since. I look forward to alienating and annoying you with my deep, deep love of West African funk-rock and Burmese stereo music.

However, here on this newsletter, I do largely post about old music, real forgotten gems, and generally whatever I come across, as I trawl the cosmos for sounds that please me.

In the last post, I mentioned that according to RateYourMusic, I had listened to 750 new-to-me albums this year (I know! Insane! Like, 3 a day! This guy must not have a lot of friends!) and 150 of them were from 2024, so I think it stands to reason that the other 600 will feature some real gems.

Here, in a very loose order, are 40 albums I heard for the first time this year, with some info and a link to listen to them. (I prefer Bandcamp, at least for sharing with people, as I’d like all the millionaires that read this to support my favourite artists, but in some of these cases the releases are too obscure for the ‘camp.)

Consider this, like 40 little posts in one, as I take you through what has really made my life worth it over the last year. I must say, though, I will publish it in two lots, for all of our sanity. This is really quite an overwhelming amount of music.

If you like what you see below, please consider subscribing, or sending me recommendations of your own.

As we go from California, via Mali, Brasil, Lagos, and Azerbaijan, to New York - bon voyage.

1. Joanna Newsom - Ys (2005)

Until my 27th birthday, that was Jan 3rd, 2024, I had never heard a Joanna Newsom album. I don’t think any other first listens have been as influential as this one, which I listened to and fell instantly in love with on that day. It’s such an emotionally potent, dramatic, baroque listen, and the combination of Newsom’s harp and the swooning orchestral arrangements is absolutely heavenly. Her lyrics are vivid, moving visions and her voice is entrancing.

Possibly the best album I’ve ever heard, and I grieve the time where I had not heard this.

2. Milton Nascimento - Milagre dos peixes (1973)

He is just the G.O.A.T, isn’t he? I’m sure most readers have heard the classic album ‘Clube De Esquina’, that he made in 1971 with Lo Borges, but I think this is even better. A weirder, freakier, avantgarde reshaping of popular music, both Western and Brazilian, from Milton Nascimento. Unreal.

3. Ichiko Aoba - Windswept Adan (2020)

I heard this exquisite and swirling, pastoral chamber folk album in January last year, and it shook me to my core. Breathy and delicate, Aoba here writes a concept album about a fictional Utopia, a windswept, wild and beautiful place.

4. Gastr del Sol - Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (1994)

Sublime post-rock album, I first delved into this Jim O’Rourke project earlier in the year after reading about a reissue boxset they were putting out. It’s full of sketchy, jagged guitars – post-rock a la Slint, a deconstructing and restructuring of rock music by some recovering punx.

5. Dorothy Ashby - The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (1970)

As you can probably tell, it’s been a big year for me and the harp. This is a spiritual jazz fusion album from Ashby, who is perhaps more famous for ‘Afro Harping’, but is absolutely sublime here.

6. John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band (1970)

“They” will tell you that George Harrison or Paul McCartney had the best solo Beatles output. “They” will point to the crassness of ‘Imagine’, or ‘Merry Xmas War is Over’, and the brilliance of ‘Ram’ and ‘Isn’t It A Pity’. “They” are wrong. This is a raw, moving and emotional album, wherein Lennon confronts the grief of losing his mother at a formative age, and it really does just take my breath away. Even better is Yoko’s ‘Plastic Ono Band’ album from the same year, where Lennon invents no-wave guitar for a laugh, but I heard that before this year.

7. Long Fin Killie - Houdini (1995)

More post-rock! Scottish post-rock! This is a remarkable record, and the lyrical content is probably what tips it into brilliance for me. Luke Sutherland’s pearly voice paints a series of technicolour vignettes of the black, gay experience, atop cold, motorik, and weird guitar sounds – the 1990s was probably the high point for British guitar music in my opinion, and the fact that I keep coming across albums like this only cements that view.

8. Світлана Няньо (Svitlana Nianio) - Китиці (Kytytsi) (1999)

This is a really quite remarkable album. Ukrainian multi-instrumentalist Svitlana Nianio’s sound revolves around a lot of creaking, droning textures, as she weaves folksy masterpieces with her electric piano, flute, and spectacular voice. Dreamy, but not in a trite way. Deeply lonely music, that really struck a chord with me this year.

9. Clementinha de Jesus - Marinheiro só (1973)

Brazilian music has been big for me in 2024. An obsession starting a couple of years ago with Novos Baianos and Jorge Ben has catapulted into fully fledged obsession, and I listen to any and every Brazilian recommendation I get. This one comes from the height of MPB, and is an exercise in joyous rhythmic interplay – bossa nova guitars meet an off-beat maximal range of percussion to make something that sounds pretty radical despite its roots in the samba tradition.

9. Vanusa - Vanusa (1969)

Another Brazilian rec, but one that sounds markedly more Western. Vanusa, on her second self-titled album, forges an elaborate, baroque take on psychedelic pop music, a kind of knotty-haired wild-eyed go of Jefferson Airplane or maybe even The Monkees. It’s a bit easy-listening, but also funky as all hell, so I just really enjoyed it.

10. Rail Band - Buffet Hotel de la Gare Bamako (1973)

If you look in the right place, there’s a bunch of bands from Bamako, Mali, that, in the wake of the Fela Kuti shockwaves, forged a distinctly West African form of rock music that combined the gnostic propulsion of Afrobeat with harder guitar sounds, or freer melodic expressions. I’m talking Idrissa Soumauro, the Djata band, and these guys, The Rail Band, so called as they were the official orchestra of the state railway. Absolutely brilliant polyrhythmic rock music, that just winds on and on forever – I love it so much.

11. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats - Juju Music (1982)

A Nigerian album that is just of those records I decided was a five star affair midway through the first listen, it’s just so brilliantly creative. This was a big favourite of David Mancuso, the original genre-spanning tastemaking DJ of the Loft in 70s and 80s NYC, and about 10 seconds in you can see why – elements of funk, dub, jazz and polyrhythmic drumming make up ‘Juju Music’, something I cannot believe I went 27 years without hearing. Amazing.

12. Carissa’s Wierd - Songs About Leaving (2003)

This is some heavy stuff. This is break-up music, a soundtrack for your emotional apocalypse, deeply, cosmically sad music that isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a slowcore album, in the vain of Low or Duster, but what really strikes me about this is how clean everything sounds – yearning guitar lines, taut violins, crystal pianos - as it meanders through its catastrophically melancholic world. The short-lived Seattle group’s last album, and a really quite exhausting listen, but I can’t stop playing it.

13. Arthur Russell - Picture of Bunny Rabbit (2023)

Arthur Russell only released one full album under his own name in his lifetime, ‘World of Echo’, an abstract cello masterpiece that has really particularly resonated with me this year. Russell tragically passed away at the dawn of the 90s, but the last three decades have seen bucketloads of albums released from his archive, each one further cementing his reputation as one of experimental music’s great iconoclasts – the latest, ‘Picture of Bunny Rabbit’ sounds a lot like ‘World Of Echo’, but meanders even further into shapely abstraction. My friend Eden wrote a great piece about it here, and I’d recommend you read that while you listen to this fragmentary opus.

14. Toumani Diabaté With Ballaké Sissoko - New Ancient Strings (1999)

Another Malian album! This one a total vibe shift from the last. Diabaté and Sissoko are masterful players of the kora, the stringed instrument which the griots famously play, and on this album they build something truly spectacular together. Bright, glistening sonic palaces from the most minimal of ingredients, this one made me cry my eyes out when I heard it, and now, as I read that its a sequel to ‘Ancient Strings’, a collaboration by both artists’ fathers, I am crying again. It’s a beautiful world!

15. Juaneco y Su Combo - El gran cacique (1974)

Cumbia! Cumbia, Cumbia! This year, one of the big musics rocking the world of my little London flat has been the vast array of different styles of Cumbia that exist across South and Central America. My dusty personal taste means I probably love this the most, the Peruana style, which is a particularly heady psychedelick-garage-sounding version of Cumbia, and these guys are probably the best practitioners of it. It sounds like a boldly South American take on surf and garage rock, and I cannot imagine anyone listening to this without falling in love.

16. Tribo Massáhi - Estrelando embaixador (1972)

A brilliant album, another weird Brazilian classic that has sadly been lost to time. It sounds like the bastard son of ‘Bitches Brew’, a deeply weird samba take on jazz fusion, pulled along by brilliantly lively call-and-response chanting vocalists. One for the heads, here.

I hadn’t come across this anywhere in my deep dive into Brazil, and then heard about it on the fantastic Love Is The Message podcast, so feel like I should give a big shout out.

17. Rəhman Məmmədli - Azerbaijani Gitara volume 2 (2024)

One of my favourite kinds of music to stumble on is guitar virtuosos from wholly different musical traditions to my own. Məmmədli is a visionary axeman from the Central Asian state of Azerbaijan, and this comp from earlier this year compiles a bunch of amazing compositions from this moustachioed shredder – the things he does on a guitar … well … you will just have to listen to it. ‘Xal Qalmadi’ would make Jimi Hendrix throw up blood.

18. Traffic Sound - Virgin (1969)

Another Peruvian record here, but not a Cumbia in sight. Here, Traffic Sound make a very folksy, pretty prog rock album, which is just exquisitely done. I’m not a big prog-head, but this flutey beauty really pushed my buttons in all the right ways.

19. Ithaca - A Game for All Who Know (1973)

Another flute-laden prog album, this time only from Sussex. I think, like the Traffic Sound album above, though, that this will appeal to the non-prog heads among you too, as it does remind me of ornamental and whimsical folk music of Joanna Newsom and Vashti Bunyan more than it reminds me of beardy Zionists Pink Floyd. A gorgeous album, one for just lying back and slipping off into a daydream to.

You hear a lot of nonsense about punk needing to happen, as though very little happened in British rock between the Beatles ‘n’ Stones and The Sex Pistols, but with very little effort you can find dozens of albums that radiate Earthen creativity.

20. Paul Simon - Graceland (1986)

Cards on the table here, I didn't listen to this one in the first 27 years of my life because I simply assumed it would be rubbish. I have to stand corrected, I have opened my heart and find his songwriting joyful, and his love for worldwide regional musics – walking the tightrope between ‘appreciation’ and ‘appropriation’ – to lead to lovingly put together genre-fusions. Plus, I think ‘You Can Call Me Al’ is such a great pop song, and I have also become something of a Simon and Garfunkel head this year, off the back of listening to this album in full. You win, Herr Simon.

[you should pirate this one] [it’s been a while since I’ve openly advocated piracy, and this would be a great one to steal]

If you have reached this far, you have the patience of Tigran Petrosyan and the adventurous spirit of Mikhail Tal. Thank you for bearing with.

Join me in the near future, where I’ll be putting out the second half of this list, and please do tell all of your nerdy friends about this publication. Ciao.