The Worst of 2025

Don’t worry about the best of 2025, let’s concentrate on making 2026 better, and some minimal jazz, “Afro Mingei” grooves, desert blues and polyrhythmic outer dimensional sonics will help.

I’m having trouble keeping up with the present and too busy worrying about the future to look back in the rear view mirror at 2025 for a musical review, especially as large chunks of its music passed me by, and I’m sort of OK with that.

Apart from the unfailing joy my daughter, aka Crazy Daisy aka Crazy D (her hip hop name) gave me, the second half of this year has been a shit show. December in particular resembled a Turkish soap opera with me as its unwitting star. For my own sanity legal counsel has finally and necessarily been sought, as I seek rationality, sanity, clarity, certainty, and probably a few other words ending in “ty” in 2026.

But back to the music. If you know where to look there has never been a bad year for music, although genres certainly have their ups and downs and 2025 was no different. We’re still living in a golden age of fusion, not just electroacoustic but intercontinental with all sorts of genre fluidity evolving, a timely reminder to those rolling back DEI initiatives that only zebras are black and white.

Any review of 2025, however cursory, that doesn’t mention the alarming profusion of AI slop in most areas of our online existence is remiss, and this year was undoubtedly the year that AI music bloomed into a blooming nuisance, further warping the already misshapen modern music industry.

Suno and Udio led the way by convincing the musical inept that their typing skills made them music creatives, not to mention encouraging the better organised early adopters to start gaming the streaming system; AI Music Prompt Designer is now officially a job title, and some labels are actually hiring.

As these services’ AI models were illegally and indiscriminately scraped from everything that came before - both good and bad, so their music mostly sounds like photocopies that were made whilst the low ink sign was flashing. But things move fast these days, and a new industry has sprung up to make these Frankenstein tunes sound better and help defeat the frantic mole whacking of the AI music detectors. Sadly, and lets be honest, a lot of listeners can’t tell the difference and don’t even care.

Estimates say that AI music now accounts for 38% of all music uploaded, making the good stuff even harder to find and further diluting the royalty pool for genuine artists. It’s never been easier to be an independent musician, unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly hard to make it work in any other way than as a cool hobby.

Rather amusingly, to me anyway, the most commercial and already generic genres are currently the most affected, and I’m hoping that this might encourage some sort of alternative music reaction, as musicians and producers realise that you can’t out-copy the VC backed professional copy cats. Ironically this tsunami of slop is also flooding some of the perpetrating broligarch’s own platforms, making them even less desirable places to hang out and potentially hastening their demise. Well, I live in hope, and flickering thoughts like that are a welcome light in dark times, and I certainly need a few spare candles in my backpack.

If you need some extra hope and motivation too, then this call to cultural and social insurrection from veteran music and Substack scribe Joe Muggs might just convince you.“ BIG things are born in little spaces”, something that might dawn on the major labels in a few years once their multi-pronged attack on the independent sector has left very little standing and their A&R departments can’t find anyone to sign, but by then perhaps Universal Records will just be Lucian Grainge looking out over a cubicle filled office of music prompt designers and rubbing his hands at his minimal outgoings.

So let’s create and hunker down in our little spaces, in all their shapes and forms. Spaces that we own, maintain and shape; spaces where magic does and will happen, and which will support us in our times of need, unlike BIG everything and their sociopathic CEOs. Big food is feeding us crap, big tech are busy destroying democracy and social discourse and big oil are still busy destroying our life support system. Don’t buy into the inevitability and “progress” arguments, the only thing currently progressing is wealth inequality, social dysfunction, the Anthropocene and autocracy.

We’re in all sorts of trouble, but your hands are on your wallet and mouse, so vote with your note(s), support your local spaces, places and faces even if it costs you a bit extra, and don’t forget to invest some time and energy as well, the effort will ripple out, inspire others and make a difference. So don’t worry about the best of 2025, let’s concentrate on making 2026 better.

Hopefully these releases will help get you off to a good start, and if you need something more palliative then head over to TSMM’s playlists where you’ll find the Slow Ambient and The New Age of New Age selections particularly soothing and hangover friendly.

Onwards and upwards.

Jahn Neu - Flowers To Go (Self Release)

Jahn Neu is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and serious trumpet player based in Prague, Czechia who’s been releasing some great, forward looking, sofa suitable jazz for the last five years. He’s also been garnering praise in the local scene for his lyrical playing that he likes to melt into sparse, atmospheric soundscapes, aided by effects and granular synthesis. He’s got a vibe, and I like it.

The sounds of a piano get this album started, seeding a sense of melancholy that is unbothered by what sounds like the tick of a grandfather clock in a musty room and an angular bass loop which provide vague percussive support for Neu’s bittersweet horn. “Dance With Me” is more of a nu-jazz smoocher, its gentle beats swaying rather than gyrating, a well weighted frame for the warmer, more animated trumpet chatter.

“Back to the Moon” serenades a lonely astronaut, and paves the way for two similarly sparse bass and trumpet duets that extend the navel gazing, before this talented one man band mimics a quartet knocking out a jazz hop instrumental. “Birthday” closes proceedings, seemingly more worried about being a year closer to its expiration date rather than celebrating life but, as with the rest of this introspective album, it does so in a thoughtful and most listenable manner.

Takuro Okada - Konoma (Temporal Drift)

Takuro Okada sneaks into the newsletter for the second time in a few months, and rightly so. He grew up in Fussa, home of the Yokota U.S. Air Force base, where he honed his guitar chops and soaked up US musical culture. You might remember The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line, which dug deep into his personal archive of whimsical, experimental ambient guitar recordings? If not then get with the program.

His early grounding in American music left Okada wrestling with the question: how can a Japanese musician honour the music of African Americans without simply borrowing it? The solution it turned out was the idea of “Afro Mingei” a term coined by Theaster Gates, which draws parallels between Black aesthetics and Japanese folk craft, and this album is Okada using those echoes, which are still reverberating across cultures and time, as a spirit guide. And boy does it work.

Calling upon a crack crew of musicians he’s composed six originals and two covers that dig deep into bygone and contemporary American and Japanese fusion, and he’s gone deep. “Mahidere Birhan” opens the album and smartly lays down some Ethio-Jazz roots to nourish the album - East and West are united, and sound all the better for it. Next up “Sunrise” gives spiritual jazz a rustic Japanese folkloric infusion whilst whispering a call for peace and love. Yes please.

Jan Garbarkek’s “Nefertite“ gets covered next. I don’t know the original, and with 3.5 hours to midnight on the 31st, I don’t have time to check, but this easy grooving cover is smooth jazz with cosmic depth and far-out moments. Don’t get comfortable though, “Galaxy” is going to give you a future jazz beats jolt. Traditionalist don’t despair though “November Owens Valley”, “Portrait of Yanagi” and “Love” reset the album to its spiritual jazz tuning and are all consummately crafted. There’s a pleasant sting in the tale though, as those spiritual jazz vibes are fused onto some low end rumbling golden age hip hop beats. I know I said I wouldn’t look back, but…. Late contender for jazz album of the year?

Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko - When The Word was Song (No Format!)

Piers Faccini is a British-Italian singer songwriter and guitarist, and Ballaké Sissoko is a kora player from a renowned griot family with a fondness for jazz and classical collaborations. They’ve been hanging out for twenty years now, and it’s surprising that they’ve only got the well received Our Calling album to show for it.

When The Word was Song is a four track follow up to the album and it continues to build bridges between the traditional sounds of West Africa and various strains of Western folk music. The roots of the blues has been well explored in recent years but worthy additions to the canon are always welcome and the EP starts with the laidback, just perfect fusion of Kora and Americana; Faccini looking to the US’ deep south for vocal inspiration.

Thankfully they continue in that vein with, “When the Word Was Song” - recorded whilst on tour, and the gently stomping “Harbour” - from the original album sessions, both of which join the dots between continents and centuries. The EP closer “Melancholy”, oddly the sweetest of the four cuts, sees the boys go in a cello assisted folk direction, but if you check their LP, and you should, then you know that’s how they role.

NIIKKOLAHS - True Science (Diskotopia)

I can’t remember how I stumbled on this release, I sometimes have a feeling that higher forces usher some of them to me, or perhaps I’m making my own luck by searching for music rather than sitting in a pub? Either way I give praise.

I have no idea who NIIKKOLAHS is apart from the fact that they appear to be based in Tokyo and this is their sophomore release, hot on the heels of their debut EP from March of last year (don’t forget it’s 2026 now). The liner notes don’t give much away either, but words like “polyrhythmic percussion, dub-indebted basslines, outer-dimension sonics, naturalist funk, tangible and etheric sound creation, missives into consciousness, altered states and latent Earth energies” crop up all over the release notes, just in case I needed any further persuasion, which I didn’t.

The album is all those things and more. Ritualistic percussion for all your little space ceremonial needs is at its core, wrapped up in all sorts of machine made atmospherics that strive to bridge the gaps between corporeal, intangible, surreal and parallel dimensional, and it’s working. At the moment only a lone spirit voice (and three monthly listeners on Spotify) has found the portal and crossed between worlds, floating spectrally through the rhythmic soundscapes, surveying the mess just over the sonic horizon and wondering where to start. But for now they’re just enjoying the music; another little seed has been sown and the Fourth World’s disenfranchised now have another soundtrack.

Don’t Forget TSMM’s Playlists and Podcast.

From ambient sound baths and wellness imbuing new age vibes to underground house via jazz, neoclassical, folk, dub and more, the twenty one TSMM playlists and podcast cover a lot of ground, and are updated regularly.

They’re available on Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, Youtube Music, Youtube, Deezer, Soundcloud and Spotify (if you don’t worry about them not paying most of the artists on the playlists).