2019 was a year of looking forward for many artists, but brand-new music wasn’t the only thing dominating my listening these past eleven months. From reprints of old, hard-to-find albums to collections of tracks that hadn’t previously been available at all, here are my favorite archival releases from this year.
Velo Misere – Retrospectiva de la Fatalidad (Death Kvlt Productions, Mar 1)
The Compendio de Trágicos Presagios demo (2017) and Genealogía del Eterno Desasosiega EP (2018) respectively occupy the two sides of Spanish black metal collective’s first vinyl release, a dirt-caked and shadow-drenched odyssey into lush, atmospheric soundscapes of pain, grief, and harrowing beauty. The production is murky and swirling yet never sacrifices the force of the vicious percussive onslaughts, the labyrinthine riffs, the agonized, raw inflections of the shrieks and howls. Retrospectiva de la Fatalidad feels at once fresh and out of time, a dark artifact found in the earth upon which small spots of lights begin to appear when you look at it for long enough.
Chamber – Ripping / Pulling / Tearing (Pure Noise, Jul 17)
2019 was a year in which many promising hardcore bands were picked up by larger labels, and we saw plenty of faithful discography collections released for bands like SeeYouSpaceCowboy…, Year of the Knife, Fawn Limbs, and others. My clear favorite of these, however, is Chamber’s Ripping / Pulling / Tearing on Pure Noise, which is comprised of songs from the Nashville quintet’s only two releases (Final Shape / In Search of Truth and Hatred Softly Spoken) along with the brand new “Replacing Every Weakness.” This latter track is a succinct masterpiece of modern metallic hardcore, with well-penned lyrical anguish howling over razor sharp wah stabs, low end churns, and one of the catchiest and most brutal breakdowns of the whole decade.
Katalin Ladik – Phonopoetics (Alga Marghen, Jul 19)
This wonderful LP release by Alga Marghen collects eight sound pieces by Hungarian multidisciplinary artist Katalin Ladik, a visionary creative whose work nonetheless remains largely unheard by not only the general public, but also the sympathetic ears of avant-garde listeners. Ladik’s compositions and improvisations make use of a wide variety of sound sources, from the nocturnal industrial ambience of “Reflection 7 / Reflexió 7” to the layered, spectral, vocal-only performances of “Ufo-Nopoetica” and “Lament / Sirató,” but at its heart Phonopoetics represents Ladik’s development of a poetic language that incorporates more than just speech; her poetry is all-inclusive, indiscriminate, a sublime and revolutionary dialect that draws its power from the fluid ease of gesture.
Various Artists – Towards a Total Poetry (Recital, Sep 6)
Possibly Recital’s most fascinating release even in such a formidable year, Towards a Total Poetry collects ten vocal pieces, sound poems, and radio plays by four titans of the 1980 Los Angeles text-sound scene (Paul Vangelisti, Adriano Spatola, F. Tiziano, Julien Blaine). Guttural, salivary utterances imitate surgical amputations; cardinal directions argue over a game of cards; a choral ensemble sing the “M” entries in the phone book. It’s hard to tell what’s more disorienting, the structure of the LP as a whole or the pieces themselves. Housed in a fittingly unassuming jacket with a 12 page booklet containing notes and essays by the artists, it’s definitely a document to get your hands on.
The Sawtooth Grin – Cuddlemonster reissue (Wax Vessel, Oct 4)
Ambitious Chicago passion project Wax Vessel really put its nose to the grindstone in its inaugural year of operation, releasing beloved classics of the 2000’s math/death/grind-core scene on gorgeous colored vinyl with reimagined cover artwork. So many of my personal favorites were blessed with the WV treatment in 2019 (Robinson, The Heartland, Destroyer Destroyer), but I choose to include Cuddlemonster because its reissue significantly changed my opinion of it—after only having heard low quality, compression-marred digital rips it’s truly an amazing experience to hear it now, in all of its deranged remastered glory.
Noise Not Music 