Non-sensical, un-user friendly, at times half finished. Camper Van Beethoven’s second album II & III saw the folk-punk of the band’s debut LP morphing into an even wider array of stylistic influences and (un)ironic contradictions, all rolled up into a coherently incoherent collection of some of the band’s most defining songs.
Originally released in 1986, the follow up to Telephone Free Landslide Victory did much to develop an already iconoclastic Camper Van Beethoven idiom. II & III ranges from alt-country ballads (“Sad Lovers’ Waltz”) to call-backs to the European folk instrumentals of their earlier work (“No Krugerrands For David”, “4 Year Plan”). Also featured is the band’s bluegrass-Americana take on Sonic Youth’s “I Love Her All the Time”…
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Currently on the piano faculty as Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Bard College, Franco-Irish pianist Isabelle O’Connell has worked with a who’s-who of contemporary composers, from Missy Mazzoli and Julia Wolfe to John Adams and Donnacha Dennehy. Her unwavering commitment to new music is upheld on Cocteau in its premiere of Irish composer Rhona Clarke’s 2022 titular work; it also, however, documents a particularly fertile period in twentieth-century French culture in presenting material by contemporaries of Cocteau (1889-1963). Pieces by Satie, Stravinsky, and Les Six members Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre appear alongside Clarke’s twenty-six-minute work, making…
…for a supremely rewarding presentation.
The word ‘immersive’ can be overdone or feel forced when applied to artistic endeavours, be it a theatrical performance, an exhibition or indeed an album. Yet, it feels like the natural descriptor for Partisan Ship, the latest offering from LA born, Brooklyn-based pianist, composer and bandleader Phillip Golub.
Golub has become an essential artist for fans of experimental avant-garde jazz. He has collaborated with other contemporary visionaries such as Vijay Iyer and is currently on a particularly prolific run – having released two records in 2025.
With Partisan Ship, which can loosely be seen as a concept album about a sea voyage – Golub continues his exploration of unusual microtonal scales. This time he performs with…
…Music of the Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings from an Imagined Future is the brainchild of drummer-composer Will Glaser, who has assembled a wide array of experimental musicians to help him execute his vision. There’s pretty much everything here, from ambience to industrial music, free improv to early 20th-century jazz. The idea is that such musicians have lived through a climactic event that has wiped away all reference points, and are recreating music from scratch, a metaphor for rebuilding a fractured society.
The very first sounds are like a Geiger counter and a human playing on found containers before breaking into an array of junk drums: just what one might expect for the re-origins of music. Isn’t this how our primitive ancestors started?
With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward.
Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are…
The Spatulas’ Miranda Soileau-Pratt has long been a favorite among Dusted’s rock contingent, whether exploring the “entropic blues” with Nowhere Flower’s Lila Jarzombek or working out an earthy, buzzing, fuzzing full band sound in Beehive Mind and The March Chant EP. In her latest incarnation, she has surrounded herself with an all-new band, which includes Luke Einsiedler, ex of Arvid Noe and (New England) Patriots; Elijah Bodish of Mordecai and the drummer Greg Witz of Invisible Rays and Strange Passage. The result is a fuller, richer, more explosive sound, especially in the guitars where Soileau-Pratt and Einsiedler find a raucous, slashing concord.
Soileau-Pratt sings, as always, with a little wobble, the waver in her voice conveying…
Where has Ecca Vandal been? Nine years have passed since NME labelled the artist’s self-titled album “one of the year’s brightest debuts” for the way she attacked storming guitar riffs as easily as punchy synth beats. Much like Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes or Nova Twins, Vandal juggled her fiery punk spirit with plenty of vocal dexterity, earning support slots with Incubus and Queens of the Stone Age. But after the pandemic interrupted her momentum, she didn’t come racing out of the blocks to chase after it.
Vandal refused to rush her second album. Carefully crafted in producer Richie Buxton’s bedroom in Melbourne – the city where she grew up after moving from South Africa as a child – she hit reset, bided her time and named…
It’s only been three years since Feeble Little Horse last released an album—2023’s excellent, blown-out Girl With Fish—but between the canceled tour, a standalone single, and sporadic activity online since then, it feels like the wait has been far longer. Alas, that ends very soon; Feeble Little Horse are releasing their new album, Bitknot. The band hasn’t shared any further information about the LP, so this comes very close to qualifying for “surprise release” status.
Feeble Little Horse embrace the D.I.Y. nature of the Pittsburgh music scene, from the gauzy, more immediate sound of their live performances to the extra attention they pay and the flourishes they add to their recorded output. They were formed in 2021 by guitarists Sebastian Kinsler…
Les Claypool has been a busy man to start 2026, with an upcoming nationwide tour, releasing a new double album with The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a new EP with Primus, and now comes another release, Return of the Live Frogs: Volume 1.
Back in 2023, Les donned his Colonel persona again to revamp his Fearless Flying frog Brigade for an amazing tour. This release is a reminder of that magic.
The FFFB for this live offering is Sean Ono Lennon (aka Captain Shiner on guitar), Harry Waters (keys), Mike Dillon (percussion), Skerik (sax), and Paulo Baldi (drums) as the band stretches out and gets loose on four original songs. Each track allows for ample individual solos as the players take their turn in the spotlight.
Les Claypool is one of the most creative eccentrics of the modern era, and his latest album under The Claypool Lennon Delirium moniker – The Great Parrot-Ox and The Golden Egg of Empathy – does much to cement that status. It’s arguably the spaciest album of his career, and perhaps the best of his collaborations with Sean Ono Lennon.
After a bonkers “Pro-Log,” the proceedings start in earnest with “W.A.P.” (no relation to Cardi B). Claypool’s melodic bass lines soar over a percussive racket, an impressive and powerful contrast. A spacey organ comes into the mix before Lennon intones his pop lullaby. Lennon’s tune is no more impressive than those written by his father’s overrated band The Beatles, but – thanks to Claypool’s spectacular arsenal…
Can & Irmin Schmidt – »Replay« 1968-2026 (15 Gems and Rarities Compiled Exclusively for Mojo) (2026)
As the last surviving core member of krautrock outliers Can and curator of their still potent musical legacy, Irmin Schmidt has hand-selected a CD of riches and rarities from the band’s vast archives exclusively for MOJO.
In the pantheon of great musical cults, few are more potent and enduring than Can. An avant-garde groove machine. A radical rethink of what a rock band could be. A group of fiercely independent talents who could switch from expansive psychedelic jams to magically skewed pop music on a whim. Holger Czukay. Jaki Liebezeit. Michael Karoli. Irmin Schmidt. Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki.
…Replay 1968-2026 brings together riches and rarities from the band’s life and afterlife.
Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail…
With a discography approaching 200 releases, it might be tempting to imagine saxophonist Ivo Perelman as a kind of jazz gunfighter, in the lineage of Charlie Parker or Coleman Hawkins, stepping into one cutting contest after another. But that image misses the mark. Perelman’s recordings are rarely about competition. Instead, they are grounded in creation, collaboration and deep musical partnership. The closest he comes to that rough-and-tumble spirit is in his long-running exchanges with pianist Matthew Shipp, where the intensity of their rapport can resemble a friendly but fierce sparring match.
With Trifecta, Perelman presents three studio sessions, each pairing him with a different guitarist: Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp and Joe Morris.
Ava Mendoza is simply one of the best guitarists around today. She has played with a murderer’s row of improvisers and experimentalists over the last 20 years, across styles incorporating rock, blues, jazz, bluegrass, metal, and the avant-garde.
…Alive Alone, Alive Together collects Mendoza’s recent live recordings from four different events. Half are duets with drummer Hamid Drake from the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, while the rest are solo performances from the US and Italy. Despite what might be thought of as a limited sound palette, there is little repetition throughout the album.
‘Sun Gun’ is one of the duets, with Mendoza picking distorted lines in a heavy blues style accompanied by Drake’s nonstop barrages.
In one sense, this 8-track collaboration between Pulitzer prize-winning composer-vocalist Caroline Shaw and Grammy award-winning cellist-composer Andrew Yee is a snapshot of a friendship.
The title – Or, the Whale – comes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and in particular from director Wu Tsang’s 2022 silent film version for which Shaw and Yee provided the score. A condensed suite combines cello, electronics and ethereal vocals in a haunting, folk-infused evocation of the novel, whale song and all.
Much here is similarly imaginative. Yee’s uplifting ‘The Trees of Green-Wood’ channels Meredith Monk as Shaw sings a catalogue of trees organised by diameter of trunk: the greater the girth, the louder the music.
Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing. Could it be a hymn or a prayer? Performed in Occitan, the message may not be entirely clear to the listener, although there’s no denying the impact every syllable makes on the ear.
As a rule, Flame Folclòre seems to defy genres: only time will tell, but Cocanha’s third record could be a harbinger of other minority-language rock albums to come. The record arrives following the news of Moya Brennan’s death. While it…
Lowertown’s Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg almost didn’t survive themselves. After signing to Dirty Hit as teens, they were strapped into the up-and-comer indie rock grind, touring and churning out EPs and an eventual debut album, I Love to Lie, in 2022. The problem wasn’t that they drifted apart, but rather that they got too close. Co-dependently close. After a four-year “break” (three, if you’re counting the Skin of My Teeth EP), Osby and Weinberg have re-emerged with Ugly Duckling Union, their long-awaited sophomore record. Back in Weinberg’s basement, where they cut the earliest Lowertown tracks, the pair return to their blunt yet lyrical writing and unraveling song structures. The result comes with a little more grit and a little less studio polish, which is perfect…
For more than 3 decades, David Eugene Edwards has carved out a singular path through American music. First with the gothic folk urgency of 16 Horsepower, then with the devotional intensity of Wovenhand, and more recently through the stripped-down landscape of his solo work.
…The booming bass voice of David Eugene Edwards is imposing to begin with. Now imagine how it sounds when he’s singing Latin. That’s what he’s doing at various points in Mercurial Silence, an album that continues the shift that started with 2023’s Hyacinth, drifting away from deeply haunting (and haunted) Appalachian barnstormers and toward the modern era — employing drum machines and electronics but still managing to make them sound like they’ve…