Various Artists - Spiritual Jazz 8: Japan Parts I & II (Jazzman, 2018)

Gotta say, I didn't know there were 8 of these. I bought an LP called Spiritual Jazz back at Cheap Thrills in the day and thought that was the end of it. Turns out over the years Jazzman has been putting out a survey of spiritual jazz across the globe? I thought Japan would be a good country to jump back into the series on. It's a cool set, I'll let someone else argue over just how much of these are spiritual, but some killer cuts - Tadao Hayashi with an absolutely stomping rendition of "My Favorite Things", the queasy weirdness of Keitaro Miho's "Kikazaru", Takeo Moriyama combining traditional Japanese instrumentation with bebop on "East Plants" and the only artist I knew off the top of my head coming in, Masayuki Takayanagi's New Direction For the Arts' "Sun in the East". Good stuff.

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Playboi Carti - Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope, 2018)

Playboi Carti has never really been on my radar too much, but then Pfork gave this one a rave review, and I figured I was sleeping...but man, this album didn't do anything for me. Barely any song made any kind of impact. The production is interesting at times but Carti himself gets lost in both that and the whole mass of features all over the album. Nothing gelled for me, so I guess for me I wasn't missing much after all. Oh well.

Eartheater - IRISIRI (Pan, 2018)

Eartheater first came on my radar (and many others) with 2 Hausu Mountain tapes in 2015. She makes glitchy, disorienting music, combining electronics and synthesized percussion with voice, guitars and who knows what else. The whole thing is a confusing stew, kind of reminiscent of Inga Copeland but I would say even more detached from "song". Didn't do much for me.

Abstracter - Cinerous Incarnate (I, Voidhanger, 2018)

I was not aware of these guys, who formed in 2010 as a noise duo, and slowly evolved and added more members and turned into a kind of death/blackened doom metal project. They've got ties to other noise acts I don't know (Sutekh Hexen) and other industrial acts I don't know (Only Now). Quite a stew and the band pulls of something that sounds truly different. It's got a tentacle in each of the aforementioned genres but blends them really well. It's quite hard to pin them down in fact. Big, heavy riffs with a production level along the lines of a sludge/black metal record but sharp instrumentation and just a dirty atmosphere...ambient noise passages separate a couple tracks as a nice diversion...very cool

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