365 Days of Inter-Dimensional Music

Wrapping up the year in righteous jammage with a focus on fresh, relatively underexposed sounds

In 2024 I purchased or somehow otherwise acquired almost 400 new albums, EPs, and singles. 370 of those pieces of music came from Bandcamp, a music retailer that pretends to be a music magazine, but is really an online store that used to be cool and nice except corporations are never actually cool and nice: They’re amoral corporations and even if you like what they’re doing today all of them will eventually sell out to larger corporations and fire all the unionized employees if it means they can acquire a little more wealth along the way. But in an era where music is dominated by drone warfare investment firms masquerading as streaming music services that have made it much more difficult for musicians to make any money at all – as documented more eloquently elsewhere, in 2024 Spotify stopped paying already meager $0.003/stream royalties to artists with fewer than 1,000 plays – a store like Bandcamp that encourages people to pay artists a couple of bucks minus processing fees etc for their work is now as good as most people can imagine it could ever get.

ID Music: Bandcamp Sunday November 2023

I try to avoid social media – I am too old and I am not good at it – except for when I need to promote one of my projects to the philistines who have not yet subscribed to this good newsletter. Or when I am bored or depressed and interested in becoming less bored at the expense of becoming more depressed. But for all of its false promises, Bandcamp’s extremely limited social dimension means it’s one of the only social medias that still feels good to me. Though if you want occasional sad-posting or cat pictures, you can find me on Blue Sky or my only slightly less inactive IG account. But you’ll get a faster response here!

One thing that was floating around the socials last week - possibly in commemoration of the annual Spotify surveillance report on its users’ listening habits that people share on social media to help advertise Spotify? - was a post about how a person asked a musician where they could purchase their music, and the musician was very surprised at the concept that someone would be willing to pay for their work, and had no e-commerce URL to offer up. And so in the spirit of the people who are self-righteously yet inconsequentially posting their Tidal end-of-year data summaries, I’m doing a quick overview of a dozen or so things that I acquired on Bandcamp.

It’s cool if you want to feel better about yourself for using Tidal or whatever instead of Spotify, but as one person put it on r/Tidal a year ago, “According to Producerhive's calculations Tidal pays most, but to be honest, all this means that artists receive two peanuts instead of one peanut.” If you want to help artists to purchase three or more peanuts, buy things directly from them: Abstaining from Spotify as an individual doesn’t do much. After all, Neil Young himself left the service but it didn’t make much difference so he came back. I don’t feel guilty about streaming Cinderella’s “Gypsy Road” on my partner’s account, just depressed.

If you do feel guilty but you don’t know what to do with MP3s anymore, you can subscribe to this newsletter as most of the $1000 or so that I bring in annually from 30 or so paid subs (literal angels, you mob!) goes into acquiring tunes for my hard drives and the FM airwaves.

It’s surely a privilege to be able to spend money on music, but the aggressive devaluation of music by Spotify and their cohort can also make the the proclamation “I bought a lot of music this year” feel like a self-own. Especially when we’re still paying down debt acquired for unexpected repairs on the 2012 Subaru or the very scary ER visit that insurance deemed unnecessary or the MRI that my doctor ordered that insurance neglected to cover since everything down in my guts is apparently fine. Also since it’s January and our deductible has reset, I’m back to $100-300 visits to the CVS pharmacy each month to pay for my lifelong T1 diabetes hobby. I believe the word you’re looking for is “patron of the arts.”

Going through the 365-ish pieces of music that I purchased or otherwise acquired on Bandcamp in 2024 is exciting because when I am stoned and up late and I find things for less than five bucks I sometimes buy them, forget about it, and then lose them in the 2TB digital library of music that will probably get thrown in the trash when I die. Although to be fair, a lot of the CDs I stockpiled over the course of the ‘90s and ‘00s are already landfilled because I get too confused trying to sell them on Discogs. Maybe we shouldn’t think of supporting artists as a financial investment? Maybe cultural production shouldn’t be fully dependent on profit margins?

Too late!

There are very few people who will think that my favorite pieces of music are among “the best” releases of 2024 – as usual, I invested in a lot of spacey contemporary reggae and dub along with inscrutable death metal demos and several vaporwavvvy Fleetwood Mac covers and at least one questionable Grateful Dead mash-up for a mix that I made to score a friend’s “medicine journey” – so rather than pretend that I have any sense of significant trends in music beyond what I observe from the weird little East Central Indiana Rust Belt soundsystem bubble that I inhabit with my wife and two cats, I am going to give you a list of some things that I liked in 2024 that appear in fewer than 100 other collections on Bandcamp. If there are still things where I’m literally the only person who bought the music, please go buy a copy for yourself for $1 so I don’t feel like a stalker.

Capsule reviews below, or click on the big image to browse the 2300 (!?) titles available in the Inter-Dimensional Music Bandcamp Library.

The 370 Bandcamp aquistions made between January 1, 2024 and January 1, 2025

Various Artists
Boomarm Nation Family Album 2024 (Boomarm Nation)

Boomarm Nation was new to me in 2024, but their polyglot dub transmissions are easily recognizable as part of a spiritual diaspora stretching back 400 years. For the purpose of situating their soundsystem in the era of commodified iration, it’s an aesthetic that harks back to the liberation technology incubated in the Black Ark, transmuted in the early ‘80s by On-U Sound, and carried through the ‘90s by the illbient junglists at Wordsound, dreadlocked desert ravers, and the irie industrial artists on compilations like 1995’s Macro Dub Infection. The signal seemed lost when trip-hop tried to segregate the riddim from voicing; or when the term “dubstep” was rendered meaningless, applied to artists as diametrically opposed as deadmau5 and 5hackl3ton. But with the return of these Boomarm compilations – they’d been on pause since 2018 – we once again have access to fresh tunes from the missing channel, ranging from bass-forward PNW polyrhythms and proselytizing from chillout tent griots, to post-nyabinghi abstractions and nuevo new age rollers and steppas from beyond the ultraworld.

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Sundials & Don Fe
River (Woodland Records)

The Paradox Musicians
Blue (Junior Wize Production)

If ‘90s-style chillout tent dub is your thing like it is my thing and you have access to a proper soundsystem then we should be in touch because I am acquiring a lot of these Mixmaster Morris-sey [loud boooing and simultaneous clicking of unsubscribe buttons] jams and I would love nothing more than to play them for people hanging out somewhere on a Sunday afternoon. “River” is a three-part flute-forward digi-dub symphony from “dub for social change” label Woodland Records¹. Meanwhile, “Blue” from The Paradox Musicians is a lovely sort of Balearic guitar dub from Japan that brings to mind aquatic and astral livities such as “Beau Mot Plage” and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. All relayed over a backdrop of easygoing nyabinghi drumming and Jamaican field recordings compiled by fellow ID Music alum Akinsanya. Eventually I’m gonna get bored by ambient music worn out by metal and just listen to stuff like this.

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N1_Sound
Mantras (Spiritual World)

As I mentioned above, I really really love the zone where industrial and dub overlap, possibly the result of getting turned on to King Tubby and Throbbing Gristle at the same time in high school. This was the early ’90s in Central Indiana so both forms of rhythmic psychedelia were equally inscrutable, and there was really only one older guy in the local hXc scene who was enough of a head that he could sort of explain to me what all these musicians were doing. He was a Deadhed as well, so I totally had a confusing adolescent crush-not-crush on this beautiful long-haired and very funny person who smelled like weed (though I didn’t know that was what weed smelled like yet). In other words, transmissions like N1_Sound’s waka-waka-guitar and congas tribute to Cabaret Voltaire’s most dubwise meditations bring back really pleasant Midwestern teenage daydreams. Also! Another nice thing about Bandcamp is when you run across the user profiles of artists that you like and find new things based on what they’re listening to, so credit to Al Wootton – a remarkable producer of contemporary “psych industrial dub ritualism” who will be well-familiar to regular listeners of our airwaves – for unknowingly boosting this on to my TL.

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Jayve Montgomery
some folks’ heaven

In an auspicious intersection with concepts found in both Zen and Rastafarianism, Tennessee-based artist Jayve Montgomery presents a improvisational saxophone meditation on finding heaven in the present moment, a brief opportunity to pause and take a break from self-improvement. He continues: “the concept of 'heaven later' has always bothered me, as have the concepts of white heaven. and segregated heaven. in my forever endeavor to ween humanity from promises of a life one can never experience as we know experience, i present these sound works to stimulate earthly thinking. 10 minutes to meditate on heaven now.”

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Willow Skye-Biggs
Dreams in Suspension (Inner Islands)

Willow Skye-Biggs music is one big reason why Inter-Dimensional Music exists. It feels corny to put it this way, but along with fellow “New Weird Utah” travelers (see also Seven Feathers Rainwater, Silver Antlers, and Wyld Wyzyrdz) Biggs’ Stag Hare project made sounds that – when I first encountered them on audioblogs like Weed Temple and Microphones in the Trees in the late ‘00s – I’d been waiting my whole life to hear. Stag Hare’s music hybridized the dank and dubby drone of Not Not Fun with the sometimes sinister ambient drift encountered in the Emeralds extended universe. Albums like 2011’s Spirit Canoes offered a sublime blend of organic and silicate percussion and chanting: the fecund nyabinghi float of Ras Michael emerging from the high desert sandstorm of David Crosby’s mescaline meltdowns.

“So much of ambient music can be about a passive listening experience, which is intriguing, but I have always been interested in engaging the genre as a very deliberate and active experience,” Biggs writes of this foray into mostly beatless ambience under her own name. “It is, to me, an exercise in focusing on a particular moment and tracing that moment consciously, which creates temporal contrasts, shadows and reflections – in that way seeing the world in a new way, being more aware of the present and more aware of what does and does not exist here.”

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Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd
Unforgiving Heatwaves of Psychosis and Deforestation (Vigor Deconstruct)

Ostensibly an outgrowth of the black metal biome, Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd is making some of the strangest music I’ve heard in a long time. The only artists I can think to compare them to are both purveyors of similarly unclassifiable heavy psychedelia rooted in naturalistic kvlt abstraction. The first is Markov Saroka, who records stomach-churning metal and depressive atmospheric psychedelia as Tchornobog and Drown, and is credited with mandolin and production here. And then there’s the Brazilian artist Caio Lemos who records long-form rainforest folk-metal under the names Kaatayra and Bríi, among others aliases.

For those keeping track of such things, Unforgiving Heatwaves of Psychosis and Deforestation marks the onset of a new song cycle from Lightning Ridge, Australia’s top-ranking apocalypse audio ecologists. It follows such classics as Ecological Grief - Relentless Visions of Fire and Aridification and Deadly Floods of Hurricana Humiliate our Higher Grounds. To fall back on a tired but nevertheless accurate cliche: the album titles are a good suggestion of what the music sounds like, with their latest featuring more mandolin than you might expect. They recently opened pre-orders for the next album – the aptly titled Rotting Crowns of Failed Emperors Burn Atop Mountains of Smoke and Greed - with a portion of the proceeds going to Pasadena Humane Society “as they support animals displaced and burned by the ongoing wildfire infernos raging in Eaton, California.”

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Sarine
Vento Febril

Oh hey while we’re talking about Brazil . . . I’m unaware of any new jams from DFKDS (tafka DEAFKIDS) outside of live shows since their excellent 2023 Ritos do Colapso collection, which still gets heavy airplay on the home soundsystem along with their 2020 collaboration with ex-Sepulturan Iggor Cavalera. However! DFKD drummer Marian Sarine released several variations on psicodelia transcendental percussiva under his given name this year. This EP features hypnotic sounds inspired by Nigerien-Ghanaian organist Mamman Sani Abdoulaye and the early ‘80s “Sabar grooves” and “Mbalax musings” of Gambian acid rockers Guelewar.

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Leslie Keffer
Sanctuary (Coherent States)

Leslie Keffer + Nyoka Shoje
Bayou Version (Shield Maiden)

One of the pleasures of making ID Music for almost fifteen years² is in discovering new music, but it’s also deeply satisfying to follow the careers of a handful of artists as their sounds evolve into fascinating new forms. Along with Al Cisneros, Carlos Niño, Shackleton, Shabaka Hutchings, Krallice, Nihiloxica, Liz Harris, NKISI, timber rattle, Sunn, Azu Tiwaline, Tzompantli, Primitive Man, et al we find Ohio-based polymath Leslie Keffer. I’m waaay late to her sprawling solo discography, which seems to begin in 2003, and has taken multiple side-trips into power electronics, white noise, and something one reviewer refers to as “waves of junk filtered radio wash and siren chants” over the last two decades. Also worth digging into scores of collaborations with artists ranging from Thurston Moore to Unicorn Hard-On.

Of her 2024 releases that I’ve been able to spend time with, Sanctuary and Bayou Version are most helpful in demonstrating her aesthetic range. Sanctuary is in a similar vein as the 2022 albums Aethereal and Perceive. Where those sibling LPs were Keffer’s attempt to "capture the feelings I became aware of after having spiritual experiences, and interpret them through music" in a series of graceful ambient compositions based in large part on her own vocals, Sanctuary is both “an immersive ode to Nature in all her enigmatic and tempestuous forms” and a tribute to fellow buckeye Albert Ayler's seminal 1970 free jazz masterwork, Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe. While Keffer’s catalog makes it clear that she is capable of summoning a righteous cacophony worthy of Ayler and his cohort, here she manages to channel sonic healing into a form that isn’t far removed from Boards of Canada’s bucolic electronics.

Meanwhile, Bayou Version is pure naturewave drift, a self-described “mystical” collaboration with Louisiana-based artist Nyoke Shoje. More specifically, it’s beatless ambience “oriented toward nature and the sounds of dusk and twilight.” It reminds me of Julianna Barwick’s like-minded celebration of Louisiana flora, as well as Keffer’s 2022 Horror Pilation series of ambient albums with Arvo Zylo as Blood Rhythms. That six album sequence of highly-textured and deeply visceral vocal drones is intimately naturalistic, internal field recordings from the human circulatory system, and an appropriate soundtrack for many Basking in Gravity sessions. Her collaborator’s music is entirely new to me – when people in the noise underground describe an artist as “elusive” you can trust that they’re under the radar – but Shoje has a similar range as Keffer, moving from harsh noise to the endless soothers found below on the “24/7 Healing Stream Archive”:

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MIL KDU DES
GXH (Ingrown Records)

Before we leave the underground noise zone, I would like to draw your attention to our dinner preparation soundtrack from a couple weeks ago, which is intended as an alternate soundtrack to the 1971 kaiju film Godzilla Vs. Hedorah. The film is described by critic Steve Macfarlane in the liner notes as one of the “most novel in the Godzilla canon,” a conflict between the iconic kaiju and Hedorah, a smog monster that is “less the traditional diamond-encrusted invader from outer space than a sprawling manifestation of industrial Japanese growth after World War II, a red-eyed effigy in sludge.” Meanwhile another critic more well-traveled than I in the cassette tape freak scene describes MIL KDU DES latest as “a sprawling beast that vacillates between minimalist cosmic post-freakout comedowns and maximalist tribal funk jamz.” I’m not sure yet where this blends into an ID Music broadcast, but it was great for bopping around the kitchen chopping up mushrooms and dolloping spicy chili oil into steaming bowls of fully-loaded ramen!

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Häxa Komät
Negative Dream Body Transference (Unity Temple)

I can't accurately talk about a lot of the music I've encountered while getting lost in the world of contemporary hardcore – second wave crasher crust?! – but am confident saying that the complementary anti-fascist ambient music happening alongside it is excellent. How’s that for a segue into ID Music’s first full-on dive into proper modern hXc?

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DECLARATION
what is the reason for tomorrow? (Full Force Hardcore Destruction)

One of the only releases on this list that didn’t hit in 2024, DECLARATION makes the cut because a) what is the reason for tomorrow? is such a great album title, and b) they share members with SIAL, one of my favorite bands that I’ve encountered on this survey but who have a considerable following already. Like SIAL and like a surprising number of other modern hardcore bands (see also Yellowcake, Kriegshög, et al), I catch a Hawkwind-ish psychedelic edge to their walloping deluge of infuriated D-beat. As the charmingly enthusiastic writer at the still-alive-and-kicking and refreshingly ad-free Maximum Rocknroll website puts it, “I urge you to keep checking out the Singaporean/Malaysian punk scene, it is full of delight.” Agree!

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Svaveldioxid
Fr​ä​mmande Samtid Skr​ä​mmande Framtid

In my late 2024 rediscovery of hardcore, most of the roads I traveled led to music made by young(er than me) people inspired by grotty ‘90s käng-punk bands from Sweden or histrionic ‘90s Japanese punk/metal “crasher crust” like Framtid, who are conveniently name-checked in the title of Swedish D-beat acolytes Svaveldioxid’s latest blackened crust crusher.

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Atomic Prey
Atomic Prey (Iron Lung Records)

It is also not super surprising that Portland, OR remains an epicenter of hardcore and underground punk. I’m still figuring out how to write about this sort of music and this newsletter is already super long so I’ll go with the label’s description for Atomic Prey’s debut, which has been the soundtrack to afternoon walks through a wintry Rust Belt mix of freezing rain and short-lived snowflakes: “. . . a total psychedelic d-beat smasher that amplifies the overstimulation, disorientation and emotional extremity of modern life - a debilitating HELL. Fourteen feedback soaked minutes of inspired, hard-hitting noisepunk tackling years of chronic illness, death, demons, poverty, PTSD and inherited ancestral anxiety.” Sometimes you wanna assuage the emotional extremity of modern life with balmy ambient soothers, and other times you wanna retaliate with your own version of debilitating hell sounds.

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Haruspex Chants
Demo MMXXIV (Rotted Life)

In order to appease the two or three of you who follow along because of a genuine interest in the aforementioned inscrutable death metal demos, I will close out with a “lightless descent into suffocating death metal and funeral doom” from Cincinnati’s Haruspex Codex Chants.

If you don’t enjoy death metal, it’s probably not going to win you over! But if you dig slow grimy death metal that sounds old and wet and weird with plenty of tolling bells, phlegmy roared vocals, cryptical chanting, copious pinch harmonics, and the sort of New Age-y keyboard intros and outros that mean you can actually blend it together with New Age music for an understandably unpopular yet surprising persistent community radio art project, this will likely be relevant to your interests.

Thank you as always for reading along, streaming the mixes on your afternoon walks, ignoring the music and looking for info on the next yoga session (stay tuned), lurking anonymously, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (!), or smashing that unsubscribe if these monthly-ish dispatches are starting to chafe.

blessing up and blessing down,
DC

P.S.

Isolation Drills
The Way to Ruriden (The Mutual Appreciation Society)

I don’t seek out promos often because community radio is not a super powerful pitch when it comes to exposure and I feel weird asking people to send me things for free, especially if I don’t get around to playing them out! But it is deeply satisfying when musicians who’ve caught the show seek me out to submit music for consideration. Indianapolis’ Isolation Drills is one such example, and while I haven’t yet found a place to mix them into the FM flow, their heavyweight drone-into-shoegaze post-metal has been a welcome companion on grim wintertime drives through the denuded industrial agricultural wasteland of the Midwest. They’re also on my mind as part of the lineup with Emma Ruth Rundel, Converge, and Bongripper for Naptown’s kinda incredible-looking 2025 Post Festival. Shout out to local woodworker and crisis precipitator neil still online for the heads up!

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1. This label appears to be based in Croatia and I love a lot of what they do but it is always very depressing to me when the only outgoing link from a spartan Bandcamp profile goes to a Facebook page that I can’t read because I don’t have a FB account. I wish more people would just set up old-timey blogs or static web pages instead of reg-walling their communication on the worst website of all time but alas . . . there are only so many clouds that old men such as I have time to yell at.

2. As with the statement “I bought a lot of music this year,” the declaration that I’ve spent 15 years creating a community radio art project that remains deeply obscure is a source of pride and/or shame depending on how well the re-uptake of dopamine is being inhibited.