Ok, this is it! The last bunch of reviews of albums released in 2025! Or at least of albums released in 2025, of which I own a physical copy. And this copy has already arrived! Because there are still a couple of late ones, overdue to the usual pressing plant problems... Well, but you get the idea!
And hey! Finally it's a WV Sorcerer Productions special again!
JAYDAWN & WUKIR SURYADI - Pucung, Pangkur Jeung Hujan Bedog (Sanguine vinyl LP) (2025)
"This album is not a soundtrack. It is a piece borrowed from the city wounds. Each track an echo of a shattered home. Each sound a ghost of a market razed."
Undoubtly "Songs of Death, Retreat, and Rain of Machetes" is an album dedicated to the great global war of our times - the perversly rich against the 99+ percent of the rest of the world's population, focussing on one battleground, the radical gentrification of the megapolis of Badung in Java, Indonesia.
Local producer Jaydawn teamed up with Wukir Suryadi, the instrumental half of the Experimental duo Senyawa to create an intensly pulsating clash of hard-hitting beats, samples, field recordings, Ambient and Industrial sounds. Weaponizing old and new culture and subculture against the crushing capitalist powers that be, the duo unleashes a flaming firestorm of explosive Trip Hop that flies by much faster than the forty minutes it appearantly actually lasts.
Few albums of 2025 feel more energetic and boldly in your face than this urgent and passionate collaboration. The artwork and presentation couldn't be better - a close to perfect record.
WUKIR SURYADI - Nginguk & Sopo Ingsun (CD) (2019/2025)
Very different to the urban sound of his work with Jaydawn, here's also a new solo release by Wukir Suryadi, which feels much more spiritual and elemental.
Presented as a CD in a seven inch sleeve "Nginguk & Ingsun" combines a 2018 live performance previously released on cassette with several new recordings from 2023.
Once again it's fascinating how many variations of droning and dripping, textural and percussive sounds between wind and water, aerial flute and metallic clank, synth and guitar Suryadi extracts from his self-built instruments, and what an equally wide range of gripping atmospheric arrangements he puts together with them. This is highly immerse Experimental music mastery!
SUNDIALLL - HUB (CD) (2025)
Sundialll is the Taiwanese-Javanese duo of singer / experimental sound artist Alica Han and producer / electronic artist Rama Saputra, extended to a live quartet with drummer / percussionist Dutch E Germ and guitar player / wind instrumentalist Hong-Yu Chen.
In January 2024, together with several dancers, they performed a fictional ritual of guidance through urban life in eight improvised movements, recorded on this album. It's a fascinating clash of past, present and future, in which sophisticated traditional rhythms collide with droning electronic sounds, where mystical Avantgarde vocalizations fly over Ambient glitches, while clarinets and Chinese flutes rise from a background of Noise and snarling synth basslines.
All in all this a well-produced exciting live album with a fascinating richness of sonic textures, defying categorization somewhere between the musical equivalents of man and machine, human nature and civilization.
ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI / LI JIANHONG 李劍鴻 / TORTURING NURSE - Noise In Shadow City (CD) (2025)
The third and final of the CDs in 7" packaging here is without a doubt the most extreme one. It's a 2009 live performance of Polish composer and experimental musician Zbigniew Karkowski, who was specialized in computer-based radical sounds, with Chinese guitarist Li Jianhong and Harsh Noise project Torturing Nurse.
The result is three-quarters of an hour of unbroken - who would have thought? - Harsh Noise. Even though constantly shifting layers of sound provide the listener some room for exploration, this room is still a claustrophobic chamber filled with dystopian Industrial nightmares. Absolute cryptonite for the this is not music anymore crowd. Demanding, exhausting, yes. But somehow... you know. How to explain horse racing to a shellfish? When you know you know.
This "Noise In Shadow City" is not for every day, not for every mood, but if you expose yourself to it at the right time it's some pretty awesome sick shit.
李帶菓 LI DAIGUO - 笑功 Xiao Gong (CD) (2021)
For the sake of completeness here's also one release, which is already a couple of years older. On this golden CD (packed very similar to
the CD edition of Otay:onii's "Ming Ming" WV Sorcerer Productions introduces us to the American-Chinese/Taiwanese Experimental musician
Li Daiguo.
In ten tracks adding up to one hour total playing time he's using various obscure analogue synths and noise boxes with names likes
Cacophonous II,
Double Knot or
Mengqi's Eggsmash, percussions, a variety of European and Chinese classical instruments from strings and clarinet to Eastern lutes, flutes and zithers, but also the African mbira. And not to forget: just
random things.
The result is an interesting kaleidoscope of also seemingly
random things. "Xiao Gong" feels like moving through landscapes and cities, and just taking in the varying environments, mentally translating them into music. And while the totality of impressions we're taking in is staggering, it all happens at a mostly rather slow pace, which allows every element to breathe. You won't necessarily understand every single thing happening here, but it's actually still pretty easy to follow the overall flow on this journey through worlds and times.
SUM OF R - Spectral (Ghost Amber vinyl LP) (2025)
I've already talked about five albums far from mainstream appeal, so one could think I'd be sufficently warmed up to write about any kind of experimental stuff. But now
this. After the last time I saw
Sum Of R live
at A Colossal Weekend 2023 I said that
"I still don't exactly understand what this special brand of Doom is and what it wants, but for sure it was something and I would watch it again."My confusion is still strong, but at least I'm not solely depending on my memory of a live show of the Swiss-Finnish trio now, but can listen to "Spectral" while I'm writing this. It doesn't help to answer even fragments of the question
Why? - but at least I can confidently say that this music is horrifying and heavy, sick and twisted, dreamy and traumatic, hypnotizing and disturbing, Kraut und Rüben, Black Death and foul rebirth.
Sum Of R 's combination of Avantgarde, Doom and Drone Metal, electronics, effects, samples and Psychedelic Rock with vocal performances from ethereal to excessively extreme draws parallels to
Oranssi Pazuzu and the intentional blatancy of
Igorrr - and especially when it dips into Oriental sounds it feels like a hellish mirror of the works of
Wyatt E.. "Spectral" however finds its very own, perfectly executed yet deeply disturbing flavour of uncategorizable madness.
Whatever that nightmarish hellspawn on the great cover artwork is - it matches the brilliant content.
