Patrick Clarke’s guide to the best in strange, left-field and underground traditional music returns, with reviews of 10 essential new releases that take in everything from Irish fairy forts to Japanese rivers, strange parallel worlds and stark protest songs

This is the fifth edition of Radical Traditional, my column exploring experimental, left-field and forward-thinking takes on traditional music from across the planet. It also marks the project’s first full trip around the sun, in which time it’s been pleasing to see that the kind of music it was established to cover continues to sprawl into new directions.

The anniversary also marks a change in the way the column’s being presented this time around. As regular readers will know, Radical Traditional has usually…

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Various Artists

The Alien Territory Archives: A Collection of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music from 1970s San Diego

Featuring music by Pauline Oliveros, Harry Partch, Diamanda Galás, David Dunn and others, this compilation of experiments from 1970s Southern California is an essential collection, finds Antonio Poscic

The Alien Territory Archives: A Collection of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music from 1970s San Diego by Nyahh Records

Journalists, musicologists, and historians alike are quite fond of the concept of the music scene. Scenes are a helpful prop, a methodical way of connecting artists’ individual stories into remarkable overarching narratives. But the process of envisioning an artistic milieu implies a degree of apophenia, of establishing relevant connections even when, in truth, they might be tentative or…

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SHAPE+ artist Polje is among the acts on the bill for the Dnipro-based event later this month

Photo by Yunona Prud

Ukraine’s Construction Festival has shared the lineup for its 2025 edition, taking place later this month.

Based in Dnipro, the festival of contemporary art and experimental music aims to highlight the work of a number of Ukrainian figures. Among them this year is Odesa-raised artist Polje, the moniker of Viktor Konstantinov, who features on 2025’s SHAPE+ roster of artists. The self-taught musician blends elements of krautrock, jazz, hip hop, ambient, post-punk and other genres in his work, while his instruments include groovebox, sampler, synthesisers, guitars, clarinet, vocals, field recordings and fragments of audiobooks.

Also listed to play are several other Ukrainian artists, such…

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The residency, a collaboration between Warp Records and studio space Providenza, will finish with the three artists recording a joint composition

Loraine James, Puce Mary and Kelman Duran are taking part in an artist residency project in rural Corsica.

The week-long project, dubbed The Providenza Ensemble, is a collaboration between Warp Records and studio space Providenza. It will finish with the three artists recording a joint composition on site, which will later be performed at this year’s Unsound in Kraków with Sinfonietta Cracovia, and also released as an EP.

The residency will encourage the three artists to combine their respective crafts with classical music techniques. Manchester Collective founder Rakhi Singh will take part in workshops exploring how string instruments can be seamlessly…

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The post-rock band’s discography has been taken down from Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, and is soon to be fully removed from Apple Music also

Godspeed You! Black Emperor have pulled their music from a number of streaming services.

Almost the entirety of the band’s discography has been removed from Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music. Their two albums for Kranky – 1998’s F# A# ∞ and 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven – are still up on Apple Music, but a representative for the label has told Pitchfork that they are in the process of being taken down.

“Kranky has always granted artists control over how their music is presented and disseminated,” a representative for Kranky said of the band’s decision to remove their music from…

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As she releases a new deluxe edition of Like A Ribbon, one of the year’s finest albums, boundary-pushing East London rapper, producer and poet John Glacier speaks to Claire Biddles about childhood poems about the failure of humanity, the enduring influence of her native Hackney, disability, self-advocacy, grime and more

John Glacier at MoMa PS1, photo by Ayanna Allen

Rapper, poet and producer John Glacier’s music is something like her pseudonym: an enigmatic blend of the everyday and the ethereal. Her debut studio album Like A Ribbon sets her lyrical musings on freedom, selfhood and growing up in Hackney to a restless swirl of post punk, UK hip hop and avant-garde composition. “To me, my music sounds otherworldly,” John offers, speaking over…

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Often derided, morris dancing contains a radical and transgressive power that should be celebrated, argues Patrick Clarke

Boss Morris perform at Weird Walk’s Samhain Ritual in October 2024. Photo by Anete Lapsa

Cecil Sharp spent the Christmas of 1899 unwell. Recuperating in a cottage on the outskirts of Oxford, the mental fug of the lingering illness must have intensified the strangeness of what he saw through the window: a procession of eight men, each carrying white handkerchiefs and coloured sticks, dressed all in white but decorated with colourful ribbons and pads of bells strapped to their shins. They lined up in two lines of three, and then a man dressed as a fool stepped up behind them. A concertina player launching into…

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Mondo Lava

Utero Dei

Cassette fuzz and future folk get blended with sci-fi jazz and Afro-Latin devotional grooves in a wild Burroughsian cut-up

Utero Dei by Mondo Lava

The current retrowave, spanning 8-bit microcomputers, cassette mulch and lo-fi outsider pop occasionally provokes the idea that even supposedly obsolete technologies still hold unexplored potential.Listeners drawn to the creative possibilities within outdated formats might discover in Utero Dei a rich, underappreciated document. After eleven years and five albums, the duo known as Mondo Lava continue to construct one of the most distinctive psychedelic soundworlds in the lo-fi underground.

Rather than present a tidy tracklist, Utero Dei unfolds like a topographic map. Guitars and keyboards saturate until they resemble synthesizers, evoking a degraded fidelity that mirrors the…

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It’s comprised of six priority actions that the organisation says will safeguard a struggling sector

The Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) has launched a new initiative designed to revitalise and futureproof Scotland’s struggling night-time economy

.The Northern Lights manifesto, the NTIA says, is based around a number of “ambitious, urgent and actionable” recommendation that will “safeguard and transform” the sector. According to NTIA figures, the night-time economy generates £43.5 billion for the UK overall, while in Scotland specifically, it supports more than 137,000 jobs across over 12,600 businesses.

The NTIA has stressed that the sector is a vital asset to Scotland economically, culturally and socially, but points out that it is at serious risk due to various economic factors. Among these are numerous regulatory…

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Panopticon

Laurentian Blue / Songs of Hiraeth

Austin Lunn splits the folk and metal sides of his project into twin albums – with mixed results

Laurentian Blue by Panopticon

Songs Of Hiraeth by Panopticon

Since 2007, Austin Lunn’s much-praised atmospheric black metal project Panopticon has plied its trade in searing meditations on everything from environmentalism, to the Appalachian coal mining industry and Native American oppression. Successfully realising a unique blend of folk, bluegrass, country and black metal, 2012 to 2015 saw Panopticon release a hat-trick of stellar albums in the form of Kentucky, Roads to the North and Autumn Eternal. These well-rendered conceptual statements brought the project high critical acclaim outside the black metal underground.

This year sees Lunn disentangling the folk and black metal elements of…

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