Acid Test digs through Bandcamp’s unexplored corners, and these past 12 months have given us countless hidden gems, trippy delights, and deep zones. Below you’ll find some favorites featured in this column throughout the year. These albums seemed uninterested in being the best of anything—but the artists behind them gave us the best of themselves.
Natalia Beylis
Lost – For Annie
Cassette
One of the more deafening sounds to appear on any album this year are the footsteps that appear on Natalia Beylis’s “Lost – For Annie.†The track drifts from bright bird songs through industrial hell, before arriving at the sound of Beylis’s gentle crunching footsteps, walking through the clear-felled remains of a forest. The album focuses her ability to capture nature in the midst of devastation—a beetle’s journey across a log; a collage of voices fondly remembering what fireflies looked like—but expands that scope even further. The footsteps give way to electronically processed birdsongs and the sudden surprise of a choir, which Beylis pairs with an almost taxonomic B-side interviewing researchers at the ruins of an ancient human settlement. The sudden shift in focus is a reflective postscript, and together the two sides make up one of Beylis’ most powerful releases.
Gavin Vanaelst
Takeaway Loops
Cassette
Gavin Vanaelst’s miraculous Takeaway Loops spins pure gold from field recordings that capture an enormously stressful moment—the time Vanaelst spent waiting to pick up food orders working for a delivery app. He adds spare touches of keyboard and synth to some, creating a kind of imagined environmental music; tracks are named after food chains adding to the album’s weary yet tender aura. There is the Satiesque beauty of “Falafel King†and “Dunkin’ Donuts,†the jittery “Walk & Walk†and the eight-minute “Searching for Kentucky Fried Chicken at Wijnegem Shopping Center.†In capturing these moments, Vanaelst creates a one-of-kind album of fleeting beauty and grace.
Marcus Fjellström
The Last Sunset of The Year
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Marcus Fjellström’s posthumous masterpiece The Last Sunset of The Year transforms strings, from silvery violins to thick piano wire, into sprawling expanses of otherworldly sound. It’s hard not to think of the arctic—not only because this material was made for the 2018 historical-fiction miniseries The Terror, but also because of the way Fjellström’s shimmering, eerily beautiful sound treatments feel like instruments trapped in ice. Yet in hearing the material separated from its origins, the brilliance of Fjellström’s final work reveals its full shape. Spread across four multi-part movements, each becomes dotted by sonic landmarks in the form of seasick creaks, small yet heartrending melodies, and haunting piano lines blinking through a thick atmosphere. It is a phenomenal final statement arriving years after its completion and Fjellström’s death in 2017 that loses none of its mysterious and moving aura.
Maria Bertel & Nina Garcia
KNÆKKET SMIL
Vinyl LP
Maria Bertel and Nina Garcia make for a volcanic noise duo on the collaborative album KNÆKKET SMIL (aka Broken Smile). Bertel’s jagged guitar connects with Garcia’s processed trombone to create storms of feedback, sawing strings, and doom-laden brass. Yet for all its explosive moments, Bertel and Garcia craft spaces of immense quiet tension such as the ominous eight-minute “Inorganic Body.†KNÆKKET SMIL is a thrilling debut collaboration and hopefully not the pair’s last.
Torn Hawk
Trustfall
Cassette
2024 was an unbelievably prolific year for Luke Wyatt’s long-running project Torn Hawk.There was a 10-year anniversary reissue that expanded the classic Through Force of Will, weekly off-the-cuff releases that have spooled out like unruly VHS tape, and a whole new album thart’s due before New Year’s. But his best release of the year comes in the form of Trustfall, a waterfall of spoken-word surrealism that takes the shape of stand-up set without punchlines and vocal processing in the spirit of the mythic avant-garde prank caller Longmont Potion Castle. Wyatt is beginning to feel increasingly like a virtuoso in the ultra-specific art of the open-mic ramble—the story with no end, and the percussive vocal pop when standing too close to a mic. It reminded me of something Jenny Hval once told me about how she will often choose words more for their sound than their meaning. Even as Trustfall flickers between sense and sound, the intentionality and precision of Wyatt’s performance only becomes clearer.
Martina Berther, Bass Works & Vic Bang, Brass Woks
Vinyl LP, Hat, Vinyl
On the hypnotic Bass Works, Martina Berther methodically transforms her prepared Fender Jazzmaster into airy, evocative shapes. Each live-recorded vignette feels like slow-motion, with impeccable sleight of hand, as she produces another otherworldy sound from her bass. In what feels like a perfect tribute, Bass Works was later repurposed further by producer Vic Bang. Her version, dubbed Brass Woks, smashes Berther’s 12 spacious pieces together like an accordion to produce a pair of jittery club tracks. And together, these wildly different releases create an orbit that feels unlike anything else this year.
DJ VLK
Passion
Cassette
The plunderphonic dives of DJ VLK reach an unfathomable depth on Passion, a carefully sourced love letter to lost media stitched together from the late ‘90s paranormal soap opera Passions. Like a daytime equivalent of I Saw The TV Glow’s fictional Pink Opaque, VLK falls into the sounds and memories of watching Passions until they transform completely. Yet through this impressionistic, emotional sprawl, VLK seems to tap into a bleak reality of our current era—Passions ran for over two thousand episodes, and is now essentially lost media. Even searching for DVDs only brings up message boards about forgotten TV, or eBay sales of faded, autographed headshots at a reasonable rate. For a show I didn’t even think was even real at first, Passion reveals itself as both a sincere tribute and a gripping hauntological journey.
Phil Geraldi
AM/FM USA
Phil Geraldi’s AM/FM USA opens with a blitz of changing radio stations, like the dial is being turned in real-time. But it’s not long before the static softens, stretches, and expands into a panorama of silvery steel guitar, nature recordings, and garbled radio chatter. Geraldi crafts this piece with the gradients of a sunset, and keeps us in the moment for about as long as it takes to actually watch one. Stunning and transportive, AM/FM USA feels like a dream in which you get into an old car, turn the radio on, and ride down a lost memory of the open road.
C. Lavender
Rupture In The Eternal Realm
Compact Disc (CD)
On her third and best album, Rupture In The Eternal Realm, sound therapist and synthesist C. Lavender uses a heavy, often crushing palette to lift listeners high. Though she draws inspiration from Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices, Lavender adds her own arrangements of synths, percussion, and binaural tones while building off the quake-like shifts of the earlier Myth of Equilibrium. Massive tracks like “Melt Into Light†and “The Blue Expanse†reach a towering new scale, running into bright, blaring highlights like “A Billion Worlds†that make at sound as if the entire album is going to crack in half—but never quite does. Like a diamond forming under pressure, the music just gets denser and more brilliant.
Astrid Sonne
Great Doubt
Vinyl LP
Astrid Sonne’s third album feels like the culmination of the Copenhagen composer’s alien yet earthly music. The organic electroacoustic vignettes of Sonne’s 2018 debut Human Lines snapped between waterfalls of synth and strings as heavy as earthquakes, while the biggest surprise of 2021’s outside your lifetime, even with its spectral sounds and surreal 3D video game environments, were the a capella vocals on “Fields of Grass.†On Great Doubt, Sonne reveals the same sweeping and laser-focused dynamics as a singer and songwriter, bringing an arresting emotional directness that feels like it has always been there.
Marshall Stacks
Greatest Hits
Cassette
Like new age music if it was arranged by pro-wrestling entrance maestro Jim Johnston, Marshall Stacks’ Greatest Hits paints an entire disorienting spectrum of synth odysseys and riff-filled hard rock. By sequencing the project’s loose singles and EPs to always emphasize that strange balance, Greatest Hits can feel like two old cassette tapes that somehow melted together. From the guitar-ripping 13-minute opener “Snake Eyes†to the shimmering synthscape of its follow-up “Deep Yogurtâ€, Marshall Stacks blurs sounds that feel both incomprehensible and natural as it provides a new wormhole around every corner.
Universal Cell Unlock
Quasimodo The Street Sweeper
Vinyl LP
Universal Cell Unlock’s supremely eerie Quasimodo The Street Sweeper was born from a fascination with the shambling machines that give the record its title, and the music is primarily composed from their brushes. Composer Christopher Forgues gradually collected these metallic bristles—which look like they belong on Freddy Krueger’s glove—from the street after the machines’ pre-dawn sweeps and used them to build out this dark, unsettling sonic world. Forgues often utilizes handmade automated electronics to play the various scraps, which often bring to mind the tuned percussion of gamelan orchestras. The result is a vivid and chilling listen as we hear metal play metal and sink deeper into Quasimodo’s shadowy world.
