This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors: Words By Shoaib, Neil G, Gavin Senaratne and Irfan Ayaan.
Each week at Twistedsoul, we showcase the finest new releases from across the globe. We scour Between The Cracks to bring you notable releases that might have flown under your radar. This week, we’re highlighting new releases from Tamar Osborn, Angles 4, Sissi Rada, Glass Triangle and more. Lend an ear to the music, and if it strikes a chord, show some love by supporting the artists and labels.
Albums
Tamar Osborn – Varier: Berlin
Renowned for leading modal outfit Collocutor, woodwind player Tamar Osborn steps out under her own name on Varier: Berlin. Recorded over two unrehearsed days at Brewery Studios, this first chapter (Varier: London arrives next year) of a transatlantic diptych channels raw grief into collective ceremony, guided by five primal cues: heart, gut, trance, raw, and space. Opener ‘Heartbeat No1 (Berlin)’ begins in low, patient breaths. Pure atmosphere. Rosa Brunello’s electric bass sets a deep earthen pulse while percussionists Bex Burch, Dudú Kouate, and Maurizio Ravalico stir circular polyrhythms that lock around Osborn’s heavy baritone sax and Regis Molina’s soaring flute. ‘Trance (Berlin)’ ratchets up hypnotic friction. Maurice Louca peppers the air with prepared guitar scrapes and buzzing electronics. Nothing sits still. Percussive cross-rhythms gather speed beneath soaring modal woodwinds, locking the room into a feverish, shared trance that refuses easy resolution. Lead single ‘Raw (Berlin)’ strips away all armor. Raw catharsis. Sparked by looped Nigerian udu drums at home, the piece turns visceral as Brunello’s fuzz bass churns beneath aching reeds. Osborn and Molina trade bruised counter-melodies until heavy physical exhaustion finally yields to restorative calm. By treating free improvisation as communal medicine rather than academic showmanship, Varier: Berlin achieves a rare emotional weight. Osborn surrenders completely to shared instinct. Unflinching, deeply moving communal work. – WBS
Angles 4 – Angles 4
Angles 4 is a brand‑new discovery for me, and if this latest album is any indication, I’ve got a whole world to catch up on. It’s that good, the kind of record that makes you wonder how the hell I ever missed them. With Ingebrigt Håker Flaten driving a raw, low-end double bass, Mattias Ståhl bringing the vibes, Kjell Nordeson keeping the drums tense and restless, and bandleader Martin Küchen cutting through with colourful, melodic sax notes, the quartet moves with a volatile energy. Nothing feels over-polished; it’s all grit, impulse, and collision, and that’s exactly what makes the music hit so hard for me. Küchen describes his Angles project as “an ever-evolving investigative process.” He treats music like a probe into raw emotion and stark contrasts, pulling listeners toward both beauty and unease. His work carries socio‑political weight, from the brutality of war to speculative, transhumanist futures, using art as a spark for critical thinking. Start with ‘Satan in Plain Clothes’; it’s the clearest window into the quartet’s full range, a slow reveal of everything they can summon: mood, movement, tension, release. By the time it lands, you want to hit repeat and start all over again. All told, this is a fierce, heavy‑grooving statement: four tunes packed with ideas, fire, and spirit, hitting hard. – CFS
Sissi Rada – Serious Songs
Serious Songs finds Sissi Rada reimagining Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge as modern electroacoustic art songs. The harp takes over the piano’s role, becoming both pulse and emotional compass, while electronics gently disturb the surface. The original nineteenth‑century texts circle desire, mortality, grief, and biblical meditations on finitude, and Rada treats those lyrical themes as living material rather than museum pieces. Her voice moves freely around the lines, sometimes elongating syllables into near‑wordless shapes, sometimes pressing closer to Romantic intensity. On the Wesendonck side, love and longing feel suspended between ecstasy and resignation. On the Brahms side, meditations on death and scripture become sombre but strangely lucid reflections. Throughout, she listens for the moment where love, loss, and transcendence blur together, turning canonical serious songs into intimate, quietly radical lieder for the present. – IA
Patrick Shiroishi & Jason Nazary – here i am no i
Created in the shadow of unimaginable loss, saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and drummer Jason Nazary‘s here i am no i transforms grief into a deeply personal piece of electro-acoustic improvisation. Dedicated to their late friend and collaborator Jaimie Branch, the seven-track album expands the traditional saxophone-and-drums format with electronics, effects and voice. Shiroishi originally sent Nazary seven tracks, with Nazary recording his response as one continuous set while still processing Branch’s death. The result has the momentum of a live performance, even as layers of tenor saxophone, percussion and electronics continually alter the space around the musicians. Opener ‘self portrait against blue‘ establishes the album’s searching mood, but things become increasingly abstract from there. ‘dots‘ and ‘endless skyway‘ are particularly striking, using repetition, electronics and shifting saxophone textures to make the acoustic and processed elements almost inseparable. The eight-minute closer ‘approach of the horizon‘ finally offers something resembling resolution after the turbulence that precedes it. here i am no i is not conventional memorial music. It refuses easy catharsis, instead capturing grief as something fragmented, restless and difficult to articulate. The result is an intimate yet challenging record where every strange texture seems connected to the music’s emotional necessity. – GS
Glass Triangle – 3 X 1
Glass Triangle‘s 3 X 1 captures a vivid studio meeting of improvisational voices, where texture, space, and momentum unfold in real time. The trio of Zeena Parkins (electric harp), Mette Rasmussen (sax), and Ryan Sawyer (percussion) moves fluidly between delicate passages and dense, kinetic interplay, revealing a deep sensitivity to collective sound. Their music thrives on close listening and spontaneous response, letting each gesture reshape the performance’s direction. The result is a recording that feels both exploratory and focused, drawing the listener in. This is their third album, and it deserves to be heard. Oh, and play it as loud as possible. – CFS
EP
Guido Spannocchi – Addendum
This compact four-track offering is utterly gorgeous. Vienna-born, London-based saxophonist Guido Spannocchi follows April’s Kammermusik (see review here) with Addendum, four pieces recorded at the same sessions. The quartet plays without drums: long-time collaborator Danny Keane (check out his new album) on cello, Andrea Di Biase on bass, and Philharmonia Orchestra principal percussionist James Larter on vibraphone and tubular bells. The music still grooves, moving between jazz, contemporary chamber music and exotica, and both records draw on the Vienna childhood Spannocchi spent surrounded by classical music and on the cosmopolitan sound of his working life in London, shaped by touring that has taken him from Ronnie Scott’s to Senegal, Tokyo, Brazil and South Africa. Where Kammermusik reworked Schoenberg on ‘Pensées / Meditations‘, Addendum turns to Shostakovich — ‘Shostakovich on the Beach‘ is loosely based on the Waltz No. 2, with hints of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. A gorgeous listening experience. – NG
