a listening diary in alphabetical order

12 track album

October 2025

Calling Kevin Drumm "prolific" feels insufficient to sum up the sheer volume of material he's released over the years, mostly self-published, often at a clip of a dozen or more recordings every year. Drumm has always been an iconoclast, rarely content to sit in one place musically for long, and since 2011 that restless spirit has been embodied in his release methodologies as well.

Here are 20 favorites (plus bonus picks) that I really loved from this year. My attention to music is admittedly pretty scattered and not especially deep in any one area these days, but these are s…

The London-based, Irish-born sound artist Áine O'Dwyer is very sensitive to the notion of place. Her music is always consciously embedded in its setting, in conversation with the environment around her. She has consistently explored interactions between sounds she produces, the contours of a particular location, and the external sounds that can be found there. Her two volumes of Music For Church Cleaners…

3 track album

The bagpipes have been especially constrained by culture and history, limiting the applications of this unique instrument to a pretty narrow range. Though important historically as a traditional and ceremonial instrument throughout much of western Europe, bagpipes have rarely seen much use outside of those contexts. Today, most people are familiar only with the shrill, martial sounds of modern Scottish Highland bagpipes as used in military rituals, or played at the funerals of police and soldiers.

9 track album

10 track album

13 track album

1 track album

7 track album

5 track album

186 track album

3 track album

YouTube video by Jagjaguwar