F.Ampism

The Vertical Luminous

Mind and body, natural and synthetic become smudged and smeared in the latest from Brighton-based artist Paul Wilson

Throughout The Vertical Luminous, shimmering vignettes of celestial melodies morph into unexpected shapes without concern for the verse-chorus form. While retaining a semblance of what came before on 2017’s The Unstruck Sound Centre, Paul Wilson’s new LP as F.Ampism enters a new frontier of direct-to-ear fidelity for the Brighton-based artist’s solo work. The listener is routed through a sonic pipeline where the boundaries between the electronic and the organic have been smeared out of sight. Synthesizers and musique concrète form a symbiotic soundscape of collage and, through Wilson’s masterful mixing, a physical proximity to the sounds become nearly palpable, adding a…

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These are our favourite reissues, compilations, live albums, mixes, OSTs and etceteras of the last 12 months, as voted for by tQ staff, columnists and core writers

Looking at this year’s Reissues etc chart I was struck just how close in release date some of the records are to The Quietus’ founding in 2008. Our number one album came out just eight years before our official launch, the third only three years prior. You’ll have to read the damn chart below to find out which records I’m talking about, but safe to say these are among our core artists – note that my fingers trembled typing this – perhaps part of what has become a Quietus canon.When John and I started…

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Retails Drugs

Factory Reset

Jake Brooks’ third album in fifteen months speeds full-throttle into a messy digital future

Factory Reset by Retail Drugs

There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.

The album imagines a near-future where you can erase your past self. “Which I…

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Combine a day’s worth of DJs with the chance to enjoy Sri Lanka’s favourite snack, all for a good cause this Sunday at Big Chill Kings Cross

A group of British Sri Lankan creatives are holding a fundraising event to help the survivors of Cyclone Ditwah this Sunday 7 December, from 3pm to 11pm at Big Chill Kings Cross. The Mutton Roll Daytimer combines the island’s favourite snack or ‘short eat’, the iconic mutton roll – a delicious deep fried pancake roll filled with spiced mutton and potato (or veggie options of similar delicious provenance) with a day’s worth of DJ talent programmed by Niro, one of the event’s co-founders. He will be DJing alongside the likes of multi-genre experimentalist My Panda Shall…

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At a distance of 15 years, says Dan Franklin, it’s easier to sense the liberating power in CELESTE’s concoction of outlier forms of extreme metal and heavy music

Morte(s) Nee(s) by Celeste

CELESTE, Lyon’s avant-garde metallers, had an unexpected viral moment in November last year. Five women on a girl’s night out travelled from Liverpool to Birmingham for what they assumed was a gig by easygoing, Mercury-nominated singer Celeste. Instead they walked into The Asylum venue (surely a clue this wasn’t the gig they were looking for) after support band Grief Ritual (surely an even bigger clue) finished up, just before the headliners took to the stage and pummelled the sparsely attended audience into submission. 

Realising the group’s mistake, one sympathetic metalhead in…

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Kibrom Birhane

Lisané Bahir

Ethio-jazz meets modular synths on this thrilling record from the Ethiopia-born, LA-based musician

LISANÉ BAHIR ልሳነ ባሕር by Kibrom Birhane

The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.

Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané…

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From avant folk to post-post-club computer music, via several doses of Cornish soundsmithery and a tribute to former Tottenham defender Ledley King, Noel Gardner presents his 10 favourite releases from New Weird Britain in 2025, and rounds up 10 more that got away

Lavinia Blackwall

Not content to merely look back at the last 12 months of New Weird Britain’s musical content, fine as it’s been, this evening I’ve looked back eight years to the first of these year-ending listicle burbles I wrote, and each one after from 2018 to 2024. You can imagine how evocative a set of time capsules these all were! That’s right, not very. The repeat appearance of certain themes, credos and rhetorical devices in the introductions, as…

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Charles Hayward x Dälek

HAYWARDxDÄLEK

New Jersey rapper and South London drummer team up and tear it up over nine tracks of deep beats and mangled melodies

Back in 2023, From The Other (the creative bods behind Fat Out Fest) invited Charles Hayward and Will Brooks (AKA MC Dälek) to collaborate as part of their artist development programme Samarbeta. What started off as an improvised work, combining synth, drums, and samples, grew over the course of a week into a live performance with Brooks then taking the recordings back to his New Jersey studio to mix and add lyrics.

Deadverse Studio is the Garden State-based headquarters for Brooks’ main creative outlet – Dälek – a heavy as fuck hip-hop outfit that utilises walls of…

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Jakub Knera rounds off the year in Central and Eastern European music with a reflection on how the region’s complex ecosystem is reflected in its cultural output, and a selection of 2025’s key albums and reissues

The Cyclist Conspiracy

Sailing down the middle of the Danube, our guide points out that the largest parliament building in Europe is on our left. He says Hungary opened the first metro in Europe. Since the UK left the EU, he adds, we can now say that without hesitation.

We are at the Budapest Music Hub River Party. The event showcases music from Central and Eastern Europe, serving as an opportunity to meet and discuss perspectives on the music industry in the region. Earlier in the…

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JR Moores finds some comfort in his favourite psych and avant-rock albums of the year 

Orcutt Shelley Miller, photo by Rachel Lipsitz

Guy Williams is a righteously angry comedian from New Zealand. He punctuates his sets simply by highlighting something dreadful that has occurred recently. Then he will buckle his lanky frame and scream into the microphone. Those bits, regularly used as an unsubtle segue into Williams’ next topic, aren’t particularly side-splitting. They can, nevertheless, be very cathartic. “White supremacy is back. AAARGH!” That’s one example. Another: “The world is ending. AAARGH!” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

2025 has indeed been another period when it’s felt easy to get onboard with Williams’ pessimistic desperation.

Black Sabbath played their ever final concert and then…

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