A reflective mix shaped by grief, place, and attentive listening, linking Angie QQ’s Taroko National Park meditation to the field-recording ethos behind Sounds of Taiwan. A few weeks […]
Reflections: Our Favorite Personal Discoveries of 2025
One final list to close out the year… Our personal favorite discoveries of 2025.
We don’t often share our faces here at In Sheep’s Clothing. Whether it’s due to some innate generational trait, or a certain media shyness, we tend to prefer letting the music speak for itself without getting too much in the way. That being said, In Sheep’s Clothing is no faceless organization, and we take pride in the close-knit collective of music lovers that we’ve assembled here in Los Angeles that are involved in the sharing, curating, and selecting of music for In Sheep’s Clothing.
For our final list of the year, each member of our little music collective has shared one of their personal favorite discoveries of the year. We’ve also included a photo along with each pick (wow) !!!
“I saw a record on the wall at a local shop near my house that I wasn’t familiar with and asked the dude working behind the counter to tell me about it. He said, I haven’t seen this album in the wild since I bought it when it first came out in 1987. The only album ever released by This Scarlet Train from Falkirk, Scotland. In what information I could find, it seems that there were a handful of gigs played mainly around Falkirk and Edinburgh before the band broke up. Fimbria is just over 18 minutes of ahead of its time songs.” – Bryan
“After becoming a dedicated listener of Fellini’s first four records, recorded from the mid ’80’s to 1990, I discovered this project formed in 1992 by a few of Fellini’s original members. The recordings were finally released as a self titled CD in 2002, after years of being unable to find a label to put them out. I was happy to discover it for myself this year. To me, this album sounds like a perfect continuation of the band’s original vision, a fifth hidden amazing Fellini album, and I have had it on repeat all year.” – Cate
“Before I finalize a purchase on Discogs, I like to peruse the cheap CDs to see if it’s worth adding something to the basket. I came across Myths of the Near Future’s Part Three by Mo Boma this way, first noticing that it was released by the label Extreme, which I knew of from their string of Muslimgauze records in the 90s. Since purchasing the CD, it has lived in my car all year, often sound-tracking sunset traffic jams on the 101. The music here exists in a sonic realm not dissimilar to a Bill Laswell Production or a Michael Mann film, that digi-noir feel that local heroes Total Blue have been tapping into. Standout tunes such as the funky fourth world “Memories of the Space Age” and the jazzy tribal opener “Water Baka” make this one worth investigating.” – John
“Locust’s 1997 downtempo masterpiece Morning Light came into my ears this year the way a new car does. Once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. I first discovered it on an excellent playlist friends Jessica and Matt made for Jessica’s recent tour. Coincidentally, I found my sought-after physical copy while we were all digging together in Vegas soon after. Not long after that, Locust was billed for a reunion show here in LA that I was bummed to miss. Thankfully, R&S/Apollo have announced a repress for 2026 to bring those prices down.” – Jonny
“Looking back on 2025, I can easily say that the biggest change in my listening habits was a newfound obsession with salsa, cumbia, and other Latin genres. Living in Los Angeles for the past 10+ years, these sounds have always played in the background, but I had never really taken the time to properly listen… That changed last year as I started to learn more about cumbia from my friend Daniel Rincón (NAP), dig for salsa and Latin jazz from Osmar Romero of El Marchante, and encounter the vibrant community of music lovers surrounding Grant C. Dull and his ZZK Records. It’s hard to pick a single discovery, but one track that I’ve listened to endlessly this year is “El Torbellino” by Juan Carlos Alfonso Y Su Dan Den. Released in 1990, the track is a slower Cuban salsa (I’m sure there’s a specific term for this, but I’m not quite there yet), and features atmospheric synthesizers in a few key parts of the song that give it a kind of breezy, mystical feeling. Shoutout to Brother Dan (Terrestrial Funk) for this one!” – Phil
“I’ve always been a sucker for loungey chill-out music—it’s a comforting genre for me. After mainlining Six Feet Under this year and hearing one of my favorite Starseeds tracks, “Parallel Life,” in the pilot, it sent me back into their catalog and down a nostalgic ’90s rabbit hole of similar tunes. It also feels like a really nice extension of their previous record, opening up into a dreamy, hazy soundscape that’s easy to sink into.” – Radha
“Go Kurosawa is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and co-founder of the independent label Guruguru Brain, best known as the drummer and vocalist of Kikagaku Moyo. After more than a decade rooted in collaboration, soft shakes marks a clear shift. It is his first solo album, made entirely alone and without a plan, shaped during a period of personal and geographic transition, as he and his partner stood on the verge of moving from the Netherlands to Japan.
The opening track, Moon, Please, makes clear how fully Kurosawa inhabits his realm. It starts as a rhythmic sprint, horns and synths stacked atop his steady percussion, before easing into a dub-tinged dance. Elsewhere, Jungle Cooking locks into a skewed boom-bap pulse, with strummed electric guitar and a buoyant bass line, off-kilter horn figures darting playfully around the beat. In the release notes, he says he hopes the record offers listeners a place to drift and return. “I wish people would travel somewhere else through music. You float around, lose track of time, and when the record ends, you feel the soft comfort of coming home again.” soft shakes carries that intention, a self-made album shaped by curiosity and quiet freedom.” – Randall
“When I stumbled upon Catalan composer Pep Llopis’ 1987 album Poiemusia: La Nau dels Argonautes earlier this year, it clarified something I’d long suspected. I love the intersection of spoken poetry and experimental music, a practice that runs through favorites like Laurie Anderson and Gil Scott-Heron. Llopis’ record inhabits a distinctly theatrical universe, built on disarming vulnerability and emotional abandon that never tips into indulgence. Instead, those qualities refract into a prismatic, almost enchanted orchestral soundscape.” – Tana
