Many ambient albums have been released this year, but »Other Rooms« is the best. Belgian musician Adriaan de Roover pushes open the doors to seven very different rooms, opening them just a crack each time, allowing us a brief 30-minute glimpse into worlds that are a Zen garden, an art gallery, the ruins of a collapsed warehouse of rusty steel and broken glass, and a street market in India. A door is locked, with a club behind it. You stand in front of it, feel the vibe, anticipate the bass.

Adrianne Lenker could probably set the instructions on a bottle of painkillers to music and it would still break your heart. The themes on Bright Future are drawn from life in a different way – Lenker recalls her childhood dog and the disappointments of love as if reading from her diary. And although there's talk of a certain »sadness as a gift«, it's that very sadness that provides comfort when the world feels a little too heavy again.

Composer and pianist Alain Goraguer achieved immortality with the heavily sampled soundtrack to "La Planète Sauvage" (aka "Fantastic Planet"). "Rare Soundtracks & Lost Tapes (1973-1984)" features two previously unavailable scores by the Frenchman: This is orchestral music that doesn't need to be laid on thick. With guitars, flutes and strings, and the constant repetition and variation of the main themes, Goraguer creates an atmosphere that hovers between melancholy and psychedelia.

Although saxophonist Amalie Dahl is Danish, she founded her band Dafnie in the Trondheim scene and now lives in Oslo, so she sees herself primarily as part of Norwegian contemporary jazz. With their second album, the quintet have truly finally earned the topographical seal of quality. With its cinematic scope, at times restrained, moving and infused with ambient sounds, at times with screeching brass and furious rhythms, "Står op med solen" questions the familiar and the ordinary in the best Trondheim tradition, without ever becoming didactic.

Brazilian pianist Amaro Freitas has already made a name for himself as a virtuoso who is both sensitive and polyrhythmically explosive. On his new album 'Y'Y' he draws inspiration from the Amazon rainforest. Which he explores in very different ways. One way is through a specially prepared piano, rustling percussion and bird flutes. The other leads him to softer tones and illustrious guests such as guitarist Jeff Parker, harpist Brandee Younger and drummer Hamid Drake.

Kirk Degiorgio is so criminally underrated, we’re warming up to the idea of capital punishment. A singular voice in Britain’s response to the Detroit Techno sound, his productions under the As One moniker are as essential as it gets. The “Reflections” album was produced between 1993 and 1994 in London after the “Artificial Intelligence” changed everything and shares some similarities with the emerging IDM sound, but is also marked by the focused yet hazy warmth that Carl Craig would only master in 1997—and thus three years later. Its 30th anniversary edition, released via Lapsus, underscores just how timeless this record has remained. Kristoffer Cornils

"Lives Outgrown" is Beth Gibbons' first solo album. (Thirty years after her band Portishead's first hit.) Over the course of ten songs, Gibbons grounds her voice in a heavy, yet unflustered, mostly organic sound. Great moments of catharsis are largely absent, but the album as a whole cleanses the soul of both the artist and the listener. A beautifully emotional album for intoxicated people.

This compilation, clocking in at over 30 songs and nearly 90 minutes, throws you headfirst into the gloriously eccentric and intimate chamber folk of the three-piece band led by Svitlana Nianio, whose solo work was recently been given the reissue treatment over on Shukai. With her almost operatic vocals and the strings and keyboards of her two colleagues, she gave the Ukrainian underground a stunningly cool and droning left-field pop sound in just a few years in the early 1990s.

In these days when everyone is complaining about ADHD techno, Donato Dozzy is back in vogue, but as a champion of the opposite approach; his tracks are built with patience, the right amount of chill and, most importantly, good taste. That's exactly what happens on "Magda". Here Dozzy expertly revisits the classic techno recipe: intensity through relentless repetition, tension through subtle shifts. Psychedelia, kitsch and a touch of elegance – Dozzy still manages to blend them all perfectly.

Forget Future & Metro Boomin, Earl and Al are the real dream team for those who puff tobacco in Birkenstocks instead of vaping clouds in Air Force Ones. The best double act in rap, no question. They've already dropped a couple of tracks together, the latest being the timeless "Lye", the perfect soundtrack for letting the smoke blow in the wind while you cruise. Now they've blessed us with a shared album. "Voir Dire" serves up a solid 30 minutes of the tried and tested formula: Alchemist's slow, sample-heavy beats and Earl Sweatshirt's complex, grumpy rhymes.

Hot take slash magical wishful thinking alert: What if Eiko Ishibashi will be to 2020s soundtracks what Mica Levi (“Under the Skin”) and Jóhann Jóhannsson (“Arival,” among others) were to those of the 2010s? A kind of Hans Zimmer antidote who finds new and exciting ways of complementing and commenting on movies other than making the synth go BBRRRRROOOOAAAAAAAAAWWWWWW? After “Drive My Car,” “Evil Does Not Exist” is Ishibashi’s second score that achieves this with feverish, post-rocky jazz vibes and some wonderfully weird string work—cinematic stuff through and through, even without the accompanying images. Kristoffer Cornils

Get ready for some seriously dreamy home recordings on Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru's new album "Souvenirs". It's a super intimate affair from the Ethiopian pianist and composer, who has never sung on any of her albums before. Musically, "Souvenirs" is also a very different story: you can hear the birds chirping outside the window, and the creak of the very distinctive piano stool makes you feel like you're literally sitting next to the artist.

Bands that come back for another go often have the support of their fans. But they don't always find their former greatness. Gastr del Sol fortunately didn't have this problem with their latest album "We Have Dozens Of Titles". The material they have used is from the nineties, unreleased, recorded live or from rarer EPs. And it's all great. In retrospect, you might regret that David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke ended their project so early. But they've made up for it in spades.

Gordan blurs epochs and genres. They combine traditional Serbian singing with abrasive Noise and hypnotic beats. Sometimes the trio is playful like Širom, sometimes broken like Lankum, sometimes fascinated by militarism like Laibach. Sometimes they mourn avalanche fatalities, sometimes they praise Nikola Tesla, sometimes they call for war in the border region of the Habsburg empire. A highlight for those wishing to be transfixed by a past that never was.

Hani Mojtahedy masters her voice with breathtaking virtuosity, gliding effortlessly between crystal-clear soprano and deep, artful vibrato. She sings in both Persian and Kurdish, reflecting her roots in the Kurdish region between Iran and Iraq. The melodic sounds of the sitar, the emotional vocals and the rhythmic percussion merge into a powerful, mystical unity. "Hjirok" touches the soul and carries you away into a fascinating soundscape that is equally characterised by tradition and innovation.

Julia Holter can be a lot of things on "Something In The Room She Moves". She can be loud or quiet, sometimes dark, sometimes sweet, sometimes minimalist, sometimes opulent. The Los Angeles songwriter's sixth album bounces between synth and jazz, field recordings and choral arrangements, dreamy pop and avant-garde. "Something In the Room She Moves" is one of those albums that needs and demands a lot of attention — and it deserves it.

At the age of 71, Kim Gordon crashes into the present with "The Collective" as if she were at the beginning of her Sonic Youth career. Gordon says "Bye Bye" at the beginning of the album, but what she means is an end to the straightness of history. The madness of the present becomes the motif that winds its way through eleven tracks, sublimating the Zeitgeist into psychedelic mantras. Only one thing is true for Gordon: there is no more truth. But as long as there is music, there is at least the possibility of shattering reality.

Minimal music, Drone, Art Rock, Shoegaze, World music – those genres wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Never mind Fluxus or light-based art. The impact the couple had on the history of art since the second half of the 20th century can hardly be overstated. On »Dream House 78'17"«, they proof why. Their compositions can easily hold its own compared to most recent exploits in Drone or minimal music.

Expansive pads, a pulsating bassline and soft keys flood the four tracks on this EP, which oscillate between emotive dancefloor melodies and introspection. Lawrence, a pioneer of ambient techno from Hamburg, is behind these beautiful productions. There is nothing crazy about it, nothing strikingly new, and yet this work, called "Gravity Hill", is so touching.

"Something here isn’t right" were his first words, a little later he sits crying in a Burger King. Pigbaby have followed up an incredible EP with an incredible album that is every bit as urgent and expressive as their debut. "I don't care if anyone listens to this shit once you do" captures with simple precision the big city experience of culturally interested young adults with mental health problems over the last 30 years: love dries up, the days are grey, nothing really works, the flat is run down, there's no money. And yet you stay, failing again and again.

In the beginning there was the guitar. Then came whining generators and feedback, and the "Space Program": Rafael Toral, as a musician at that time, made a radical break and put his main instrument aside. For years. In the interim, he combined the drone approaches of his early days with the electronic punk events of his later years. On 'Spectral Evolution' he does it with majestic composure and a palette of sounds that can even evoke thoughts of birds. A true comeback – not that he was ever gone.

Form follows function was the maxim of the Bauhaus in the 1920s. An idea that found its echo in the music of the late seventies and early eighties. There's a reason why a band in Britain called themselves Bauhaus. In Japan at the same time there was the R.N.A. Organism. A trio whose members called themselves 0123, Chance and Zero and who composed songs like "Weimar 22" and "Matrix". Their album "R.N.A.O meets P.O.P.O.", released in 1980 on Vanity Records in Japan, was unavailable for a long time, but has now been remastered from the original tapes by Stephan Mathieu and released on Mesh-Key Records. The music is new wave, undercooled and sketchy, sometimes dubby like on "Yes, Every Africa Must Be Free Eternally", then with the attitude of The Fall and actually the voice of Mark E. Smith on "Say It Loud, I'm Dilettante, I'm Proud". Music that doesn't want to prove anything. There is hardly any of that left today.

With "Interior" Rosa Anschütz builds her own piece of musical security: a small cave in which vulnerability echoes through the vaults as an ode to transience. As much as we sometimes long for yesterday, Anschütz shows us how to console ourselves with tomorrow. On her third solo album, the Berlin-based artist dips aphorisms into deep pools of sound, filling the interior with bittersweet melancholy: between the tracks, the seconds melt away.

Perhaps it was the five-year hiatus during which Q pursued a semi-professional golf career or cheered on his daughter from the sidelines as a 'football dad'. But rarely has ScHoolboy Q sounded as free as he does on "Blue Lips". Compared to the uninspired previous album ("CrasH Talk"), the sound is much more layered, sometimes collage-like. Aggressive trap rollercoasters are followed by tracks with soft soul and jazz influences. This is incredibly captivating and keeps the listener glued to Q's blue lips, especially on haunting key tracks like "Blueslides" or "Cooties".

The prodigy of "new" British jazz has hung up his saxophone to concentrate on traditional Asian and South American wood and bamboo flutes. "Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace" is a collection of mysterious, playful meditations that shed new light on Shabaka Hutchings' creative power and spiritual jazz in general. Among the many guests: André 3000, who recently released his own flute album "New Blue Sun".

World of Echo arbeitet auch in diesem Jahr systematisch an der Aufarbeitung der Musik von The Cat's Miaow und den Bands aus ihrem Umfeld (Hydroplane, The Shapiros und viele mehr). Allen gemeinsam ist, dass sie in den Neunzigern von Melbourne aus Songs auf Kassette aufgenommen haben, meist im kleinen Rahmen, einfach und pur. »Skipping Stones« versammelt 35 Songs von The Cat's Miaow aus den Jahren 1992 und 1993, allesamt kleine Hits.

In the early 2000s, Japanese artist Tujiko Noriko combined avant-garde electro-pop with crunchy electronica. At the time, some people wouldn't have been ashamed to call it indie electronica. The milestone of that period, "From Tokyo To Naiagara", released on vinyl for the first time this year, mocks any comparison to Björk with its wonderfully quirky pop question marks. The way she teases out the most beautiful melodies from the side with and showers them with quirky noise still deserves applause 20 years later.

Shoegaze guitar riffs, some sub bass and hurried, muffled vocals are enough to create a haunting atmosphere. "It Means A Lot" by Ulla & Ultrafog is reminiscent of a surreal summer dream where the sun's rays penetrate the canopy of trees. Infused with a mixture of indifference and effortless sovereignty, It Means A Lot paves the way for a new kind of intimate music that couldn't be more versatile in its minimalist facets.

Guys, die große Afrika-Müdigkeit (musically) ist überwunden! Nachdem der Markt für ein paar Jahre übersättigt war, hat das Herz wieder Platz für unwiderstehliche Grooves vom Mutter-Kontinent. Die schon so mitreißend betitelte Compilation »Congo Funk! Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River« stürmt diesen Platz im Nu. Vier Seiten, nur Killer, die beste Alternative zu Deutschland.