Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
In December, I wrote about my top ten albums from 2025. These offerings were genre-agnostic, and in most instances not given any written space in my monthlies. Presented here—in TLDR format for the sake of brevity—is the inverse, my ten favorite albums featured in 2025’s Far Out Sounds.
Balm by Ill Considered (New Soil)
Sysivalo by Ø (Sahko Recordings)
Plunge by Flur (Latency)
Sudden Fruit by Midori Hirano & COH (Ici d’ailleurs)
Grzyby by Błoto (Astigmatic Records)
Nuits de la Fondation Maeght by Sun Ra (Strut Records)
GOLLIWOG by billy woods (backwoodz studioz)
Lonely People with Power by Deafheaven (Roadrunner Records)
GNOSIS by RAVEN (Incienso)
The Way Out of Easy by Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet (International Anthem)
RESUMPTION OF SERVICE
You Want That Too! by Max Jaffe (Colorfield Records)
This record is bursting with so much spirit, so much pleasure in making sound that it seems to intentionally evade the cage of genre. Further, it feels like a totally natural, spontaneous result of like-minded collaborators.
Maybe that is the gift of being both percussionist and the artist whose name is on the sleeve. Max Jaffe is able to invite along various well-known collaborators from the Los Angeles music scene, and instead of instructing them to follow his lead, he seems to find a way to sneak his drums beneath their contributions. At least that is how it sounds to me—a collaborators-first approach to making a solo record. Not as counterintuitive as it might sound, as it seems to be just the ticket for taking his rhythmic expertise on a miniature tour across music history.
“Looking At The Inside of Your Eyelids” seems carved out of American jazz from the last 50+ years. It’s a kind of jazz-for-dummies formula: drums, piano, sax. While this piece in the middle of the record might be the most straightforward, it’s not unremarkable in its execution. If anything it’s a display of Jaffe’s own versatility as a percussionist. His stick work is just as comfortable front and center as on “S-NARE”, or acting as the sonic glue that keeps these myriad collaborators in the correct orbit (see “Pedro Point”).
As is becoming more common in our interconnected world, where music from all history and various places is instantly available, it’s exciting to hear the results of creators who are willing to fold some of these wider influences into their own work. Though a cohesive sound may often be sacrificed at the expense of such jubilant experiments, that is not the case here. It is through this same enthusiasm for music’s chameleonic nature that Jaffe has found just the right way for his essays into fresh territory to be the cohesion that binds these ten songs together.
of the Beginning by Anthony Child (Old Technology)
Anthony Child — better known by his moniker helming his techno works as Surgeon, tends to work under his own name when he is exploring territory that doesn’t contain a drum machine at its heart. While these projects usually operate as an offshoot from his usual concerns, he still brings the unique sense of rhythm and spatial manipulation that serves as the backbone of his sound.
The liner notes begin with a Humphrey Osmond quote: “We now have a chance to use our wonderful technology to help us find again some of those things which our metaphysical climate has taken away from us.” Reading on, “2025 was a difficult year for all of us. For me it was one of loss, breakdown, heartbreak, reflection and discovery. Music is my refuge, a safe place to bear my soul and try my best to examine my feelings about what it is to be human in this world—Beautifully Strange.” With this as thesis, we trod on through the dusk of a struggling spirit, a place of mired machines crawling toward a language of human understanding.
The songs on of the Beginning seem built upon the architecture of rumination, guided by a resilient curiosity that bears all the marks of 2025’s heavy hand. From beneath this darkness, Child relies on repetitious phrases to pace across the stereo field in meditative circularity. Pulling at the thread of an emotion, seeking the other end, side effects unspool. With each tug, another bit of sonic flotsam surfaces, undulating into view as patterns recur to bolster ever-compounding forms. This method makes itself felt across the entire record. The most prominent points of focus stay anchored at arm’s length, while various audible events beckon from the background. It seems to suggest the machinations of the world carrying on while the individual is trying to tend to the mind, to the spirit.
On “Are You Being Served?” rhythmic stabs flicker between the left and right channels, while a brassy lead wanders aimlessly, endlessly upward while moving downward in barber-pole fashion. Though the delay rewinds itself into ever shorter times, along with some arpeggiated crackles arriving near songs end, nothing bursts through these shapes to quench the unease. A final root note brings things to a close, not so much in resolution, but in what sounds like a resignation to this stubborn form. These thoughts, shelved for now.
In “Gloaming” a piano-like melody seems to keep losing track of itself. Notes will speed up, slow down, stumble, repeat. They will arrive at the ear half squashed or muffled, with an occasional bright idea piercing the murk. Elsewhere on the album, notes seem to arrive in reverse or they falter and fall. The record as a whole is not his most compelling work—what with all its ponderous retracing. However, it does operate precisely as advertised, offering the artist a place to deconstruct the soul in search of truth and understanding in this bizarre human experience.
<<Demystification>> // <<Forestscapes>> by Paul Riedl (Special Low Frequency)
While Blood Incantation delivers us to the darkest corners of our universe, here—the band’s lead singer/guitarist Paul Riedl, steers us towards a much brighter, gentler cosmos.
This record offers a warm refuge from the miasma of sorrow, cowardice, and misery that has come to define our lives under the Golden Void. It is a salve against the selfishness that drizzles down to us from the lowest souls whom fools have placed on high. A Reaganomics of our psychospiritual politics, where the scuttling of structure and order finds us combing the debris with our families and neighbors, desperately seeking answers on how best to divide a drizzle among parched souls.
With the patience of a lone gardener, Riedl allows his songs to move forward by the tiniest measures. Aimed toward the sun, a melody slowly sprouts from the expansive roots of a bass drone. “Into The Solar Prominence” arrives with a restrained pad, twinkling as if with predawn light. Shining reverberantly, shimmering upon subtle swells, the listener can soak in the magic radiating from this commonplace celestial miracle. In his steady and ministering hand, this feeling of familiarity, we are held fast in place as great rays dapple the landscape. As the center of the music wanders down the grand staff, the low end fully blooms forth suggesting the outer edge of that great gas giant peeking across the horizon.
The lower frequencies in these songs offer a greater sense of presence than a one note drone as they are slightly overdriven. This extra bit of drive imparts a life to the notes. The peach fuzz that protrudes from these tones serves as a foot in the door, allowing these low frequencies to push up into the mix, suggesting a cloud break where the warmth of the sun can peer through, twinkling across the frost’s languorous banishment, where sprouts bare themselves climbing from this frozen earth.
The album is a masterful blend of synthesis and intricate guitar work mixed so that each song feels like a unique stretch of one long journey. We find ourselves adrift among the stars, awakening in a springtime field, soothed by reveries where we can bask in memory or be lulled in the light of the ever-expanding universe, tethered to the umbilicus of our common humanity.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Collide by Leif(AD93)
II by Voices from The Lake (Spazio Disponibile)
Implosion by The Bug & Ghost Dubs (PRESSURE)