Half Edge Records

Releases from the Half Edge label have, for me, produced several of the year's highlights. It's one of those labels with its own character, as if the artists that make up its roster both feed off and supplement that identity, both reinforcing it and adding to it.

I've featured the music of 2 Lost Souls a lot in my Dandelion Radio and FSK shows this year, a Manchester duo comprising Ian Moss and Paul Rosenfeld who offer the kind of dour and pertinent commentaries on modern existence that remind you that, while much of what's going on is pretty shit, the music it fertilizes can be pretty damn magical. Moss's delivery fluctuates from spoken word to something only vaguely melodic while Rosenfeld's music tumbles behind it. They exhibit a kind or ramshackle brilliance that's thankfully a million miles from the polished turds that litter so much of the music landscape.

Half Edge is also taking us through the back catalogue of the marvellous Moff Skellington, an artist whose music had gone under the radar for me and I'm more than grateful to them for placing him on it. Skellington - the pseudonym came to him while taking a shower and musing on the phrase 'moth skeleton' - is someone else whose musings on existence you don't realise you need until you discover them. I've taken to playing his tunes during my first coffee of the day, for some reason.

Against this backdrop of brilliance, it says much about the duo concerned that my favourite Half Edge release this far comes from Cracked Hands, whose Hard Bop EP I keep returning to for musical sustenance. Singer Ian Fourcandles lays wordplay-infused monologies across Paul J. Hartwig's 'sparse and jagged' (Fourcandles' words), instrumentation. It's not hard to figure out that Fourcandles is, of course, Moss from 2 Lost Souls: many of the same characteristics are there but, on these release it somehow all comes together to soundtrack my