This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors: Words By Shoaib, Neil G, and Irfan Ayaan.
As always, our Between The Cracks feature brings together six releases that find artists operating outside the spotlight, pushing boundaries, blending styles, and creating music that keeps you guessing, drawing from everywhere while belonging nowhere in particular. On offer today, you’ll find new releases from Holy Tongue, Mali Obomsawin, Ben Vida, Yayoba, and more. Dig in, press play, and discover something that we find pretty special. Sometimes the most rewarding music is found between the cracks. If you find an album you adore, consider snagging a copy. Supporting artists and labels never goes out of style!
Albums
Holy Tongue – Basilikum
Tape heads hiss before any rhythm takes shape. Recorded between isolated retreats in the Swiss Alps and Al Wootton’s London facility, Basilikum treats dub not as a nostalgic museum piece, but as an aggressive live scalpel. Holy Tongue, the power trio uniting percussionist Valentina Magaletti, producer Wootton, and bassist Susumu Mukai, dismantles post-punk orthodoxy by fusing prepared metal percussion, vintage rhythm boxes, and hands-on mixing-desk mutilation into raw, hypnotic physical rituals. Guest vocalist Dali de Saint Paul turns the low end into an uneasy panic room. Her clipped, multilingual spoken incantations cut across ‘Coca’, sparring against Mukai’s distorted bass guitar and Magaletti’s skittering snare rolls like a tense back-alley standoff. That kinetic urgency curdles into nocturnal dread on ‘Bloom in D Minor’. Sub-bass shakes the floorboards. Wootton slams open the console’s feedback loops, letting Saint Paul’s fractured French phrases drown beneath cavernous spring reverbs and ghostly tape flutter. As the trio stretches out, endurance becomes genuine transcendence. Centerpiece ‘Orange 28′ rides a ten-minute motorik strut that nods directly to 1980s On-U Sound and 23 Skidoo, sustaining unbearable pressure through micro-tonal bass modulations rather than calculated beat drops. On ‘Vuoto 25’, Wootton’s clarinet slivers through the mix while Magaletti’s swinging, syncopated drumming is slowly swallowed by huge tape echoes. The track then strips itself back to reveal a driving, bare-bones 4/4 rhythm-box groove. Elsewhere, ‘ROSEROOT’, the shortest piece, serves as a quick palate cleanser—a fleeting micro-improvisation that bridges the album’s rhythmic weight into its final stretch. Sprawling finale ‘Nature’ drifts toward kosmische horizon lines. Across nine patience-testing minutes, crashing acoustic cymbals and Popol Vuh-style synths slowly dissolve until only raw mountain air and quiet tape echo remain. No digital smoothing survives this desk. Basilikum captures three singular improvisers operating at the outer limits of sound system culture. – WBS
Ben Vida – Oblivion Seekers
Oblivion Seekers continues Ben Vida‘s project of treating language itself as musical material. Across four long pieces, neutral‑toned spoken duets thread everyday phrases and farmed snippets into intricate rhythmic lattices. The text comes from overheard speech, book fragments, and impressions of records, so the lyrics feel like a diary of how language passes through a life rather than a single story. Voices from Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson join Vida’s own, merging into a fluid meta‑voice that slips across gender, accent, and diction. On Be Yr Own Abyss and New Distortion Properties, cadences create internal grooves that instruments only lightly underline. Oblivion Seekers and Unmake A World feel like mantras that never return to an obvious starting point, letting meaning and sound sit side by side. The album’s linguistic world suggests thoughts half‑formed and continually re‑shaped, as if speech itself were searching for a way out. – IA
Mali Obomsawin – Automatic
Following her acclaimed 2022 debut Sweet Tooth, Abenaki bassist Mali Obomsawin returns with a fierce compositional doctrine rooted in her Odanak First Nation community. Her intention was blunt: to make a record institutions couldn’t own. No corporate compromise. By splicing repatriated 1950s Dartmouth tape reels of Abenaki ancestors directly into jagged avant-garde grooves, she pulls sacred oral heritage away from institutional vaults back into living hands. The album opens with ‘Nawa‘, a short invocation, featuring faint electronic hums and fragmented archival voices from turntablist Andrew Broder. Recordings of the Abenaki language from the mid-1900s drift into echo before settling into a contemporary focus, crossing a threshold as though the ancestors have been welcomed into the room. Title track ‘Automatic’ ignites this mission immediately. Raw trance. Spurred by Moroccan Gnawa rhythms and Pharoah Sanders, the piece rides Magdalena Abrego‘s spiraling guitar ostinato as the sampled voice of ancestor Malian Obomsawin cuts through roaring brass and Zack O’Farrill‘s battering drums. On ‘Triage’, atmospheric dread takes over. Pure horror. Confronting the 1605 English kidnapping of five Abenaki men off Maine’s coast, Obomsawin drags abrasive bowed bass drones beneath Taylor Ho Bynum‘s wailing cornet to summon historical reckoning. ‘Moi, quand j’y suis’ flips French-Abenaki folk into razor-sharp punk-funk. It bites. Obomsawin spits defiant bilingual lyrics over Allison Burik‘s snarling bass clarinet, Broder’s turntables, and no-wave saxophone skronk that refuses easy genre categorisation. Named after the relative whose voice anchors the title track, ‘Malian‘ is the album’s ancestral centrepiece. Broder’s turntables scratch and stretch old reel-to-reel fragments, while Ho Bynum’s cornet and Adam O’Farrill’s trumpet answer, mimic, and clash with the archival speech in a striking piece of experimental free music. Automatic treats ancestral memory as an active weapon of Indigenous sovereignty, cementing Obomsawin as one of modern jazz’s most necessary visionary voices. – WBS
Yayoba – Matkat
Listening to Matkat feels like inspecting an unlabelled canister of alien soil recovered from a remote Finnish bog. Named after the Finnish term for journeys or hallucinatory trips, this fourteen-track suite marks the second full-length collaboration between British tape collagist Paul Wilson (f.ampism), Finnish free-folk veteran Jani Hirvonen (Uton), and German sound designer Johannes Schebler (Baldruin). Nothing follows standard ambient logic. Instead, the trio fuses modular electronics, organic woodwinds, and crackling reel-to-reel tape loops into a hallucinatory cabinet of fourth-world curiosities that defies easy earthly classification. Acoustic instruments and circuit processing constantly bleed together across these miniatures. Early highlight ‘Luminous Figure’ hovers like a nocturnal apparition, smearing metallic reed drones across contact-mic scrapes and quiet room hiss before melting into the submerged chimes and bubbling tape delays of ‘Transparent Waves’. Gravity dissolves completely. That sensation deepens on ‘Almost Weightless’, where bowed metals and drifting electronic textures hang suspended in dead space, completely stripped of percussion, downbeats, or conventional harmonic resolution. Elsewhere, tactile rhythmic friction jolts the record into strange life. Driven by dry wooden clicks and wobbling synth ostinatos, ‘Spectrolite Dance Hub’ conjures an extraterrestrial bazaar carved from dark Finnish gemstones, pairing playful syncopation with eerie psycho-acoustic trickery. That alien restlessness settles. On ‘Outsider Heart’, a wheezing toy organ unspools a quiet, solitary melody that grounds their cosmic explorations in an unexpected moment of genuine domestic tenderness. Mastered by Jared Carrigan, Matkat is a quiet, singular triumph. It proves that these miniature sounds can summon infinite worlds without raising their voice. – WBS
L’Rain – fata morgana
The album fata morgana feels exactly like its namesake: beautiful, shimmering, and impossible to hold in one shape or form. L’Rain blends together gospel, slow jams, dancehall, tape collage, and metallic distortion into music that constantly slips between intimacy and unease. It doesn’t take long to get hooked on this album; the meditative second track, with time, is as Apple Music describes it: a “hurricane interrupted by sunshine”. The song blue carries a soft emotional glow, while the track borderline feels suspended inside uncertainty; separately, the powerful song church of no one closes the record with a strange spiritual weight. Elsewhere, ‘Elmyra’ is one of the album’s purest bursts of joy, lifted by the distinct textures of pan pipes and the restless, shape‑shifting woodwinds from collaborator Ben Chapoteau‑Katz. The track rises slowly, then opens into a lush, celebratory avant‑pop clearing that feels like stepping into sunlight after a long shadow. The abrasive ‘soulless cycle‘ lands like a death metal bolt out of the blue. Taja Cheek, as writer and composer of fata morgana, turns self-doubt and alienation into something textured rather than defeated. The album makes you feel as though you’re wandering through a dream where every familiar room keeps changing, yet somehow becomes more revealing and personal each time. – NG
Amanda Gardier – Björk, Reimagined
Amanda Gardier‘s new album takes Björk’s songbook and filters it through a contemporary post‑bop lens, trading vocals for alto sax lines that trace the contours of the influential Icelandic legend’s familiar melodies. With former Bad Plus drummer Dave King (that’s us sold), guitarist Charlie Ballantine, and bassist Jesse Wittman along for the trip, the quartet builds arrangements that feel like little conversations: elastic, rhythmically alert, and careful not to overstate the source material. I say careful, because their take on ‘Bachelorette’ is just a bit too careful and lands a little too politely; you can hear the potential for chaos, but they never quite let it loose. A wilder, more experimental approach would’ve been killer; still, it’s a minor gripe not worth dwelling on. Overall, the quartet treats Björk’s tunes as frameworks for interplay, letting motifs run free and reassemble in new shapes. Their jazz take on Björk’s ‘Pagen Poetry‘ and ‘Pluto‘ is a cool detour, gently ripping apart the originals with improvisational heat and care, but with a fearlessness and shape‑shifting energy that turns both tracks into something fresh. It’s a lovely, interesting set that stands on its own even if you don’t know the originals (I’m sure you probably do). Enjoy. – CFS
