I can’t believe tomorrow is August. This summer has flown by, and though I’m certainly ready for the blazing Tulsa heat to subside, I’m also feeling a bit bummed. This was the first summer in a decade that my daughter did not go to any summer camps and was home with me all summer. We’ve had a blast, and though it impacted the amount of work I was hoping to do over the last few months, it has been so, so worth it. I’m really going to miss having her around every day. But the days crank forward all the same.
Last week, I released a new album on the excellent quiet details label. It’s called A Life We Once Lived and is something I’m immeasurably proud of. I have a lot to say about this record (there’s an interview in French over here), but it’s an early piece of a much larger project that has been incubating in the background this year (more on that soon). This is the deeper sonic reflection of the space my mind has been occupying for a while. As I wrote to Alex when I sent him the masters, “There are landscapes we never walk but still carry. Lives that linger just outside memory’s reach, shaping how we move through the world without ever fully revealing themselves.” The album is 50% through August 1st (Bandcamp Friday no less!), and I do hope you’ll check it out.
One last plug before I get into this mountain of music. With tomorrow being BC Friday, I humbly ask you to pick up something from The Jewel Garden. It’s been a slightly slower year with things (unless you subscribe (!!) – been several solo sub-only releases I’m stoked on), but that support helps keep this site humming. I so appreciate y’all!
Alright, some more considerations for your ears.
Jeff Fuccillo & Ayal Senior From 5pm to 5am (Medusa Editions)
Jeff Fuccillo and Ayal Senior’s From 5pm to 5am feels like it arrives through a crack in the atmosphere, threaded from ghost-notes, feedback traces, and embered breath. Guitars splinter and whisper, sometimes tangled in dissonance, sometimes brushing against something tender and ancient. The dual acoustic dialogue unfolds slowly, like a séance built from memory and intuition. It’s music that doesn’t hurry, that lets every tone hang until it forgets itself. There’s a kind of haunted generosity here, something introspective but never closed off. These pieces feel both far away and inside your chest at the same time.
Samara Lubelski V1/V2 (Daksina)
There’s a strange beauty in how V1 & V2 never tries to settle. It’s always shifting, reshaping itself mid-motion, like a structure built from vapor or mirrored wire. Samara Lubelski’s bowing feels like both a gesture and a removal, something drawn just long enough to dissolve. The music hums with tension, between delicacy and collapse, between motion and suspended time. It’s alien, yes, but grounded in sensation, like touching a surface that keeps slipping between states. This is sound on the edge of form, skating the thinnest, most resonant ice.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer Different Rooms (International Anthem)
Tactile and flickering at the edges, this music feels like memory folding in on itself, precise in one moment, blurred and drifting in the next. Built from field recordings, live fragments, and studio manipulations, it moves with a quiet, layered intimacy. Different Rooms emerges from that process with a sense of presence that is deeply felt but never overstated. Viola stacks dissolve into grainy textures, motifs return in altered forms, and the sounds of daily life seep through the seams. The collaboration with Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson brings a warmth that slips easily between composition and improvisation. Rather than reaching outward, the album stays close to the skin. It does not attempt to transport elsewhere, it settles fully into the present.
A Magic Whistle The Solar Cell (Public Eyesore/Lampspeople Universal)
The Solar Cell feels like it grew straight out of the forest floor. Andy Puls threads homemade electronics and acoustic fragments into a living system, with wordless vocals, stray guitar phrases, and the shimmering drone of Cascadian Sympathetic Steel moving like weather across a mountain ridge. There’s a grounded strangeness to it all, equal parts ritual and reverie. Recorded in an off-grid hut overlooking a creek, the album hums with the presence of its surroundings, not just as field recordings but as compositional logic. It’s folk music in the loosest, most generous sense, a song cycle tuned to trees, static, and solar light. Great cover art, too.
Bea Brennan Trances People Live (Old Technology)
Smudged at the edges but sharply intentional, Trances People Live feels like drawing with charcoal. Every sound is a mark that can be erased, layered, or left to crumble into something new. Bea Brennan works from a restricted tonal palette, yet the range is immense: tones flicker between suggestion and form, background and foreground trading places in slow, magnetic motion. There is a patience to the sequencing, but also a sly mischief in how elements shift just when they seem fully settled. Ambient, but with a rhythmic undertow. Minimal, but never empty. The music pulls focus without demanding it, like light catching uneven paper. It is less about resolution and more about holding a mood in place long enough to see what it becomes.
Omari Jazz Dream Child (Bonus Disc) (Eulipion Arts)
These pieces glow at the edges, like they’ve been handled gently for years and are only now surfacing. Dream Child (Bonus Disc) doesn’t interrupt the spell of the original; it deepens it, tracing soft arcs through softened memories and dream logic. Omari Jazz gathers loops, sketches, and ambient pulses that drift with their own internal rhythm, like a memory being replayed underwater. Beats rise and fall with familiar textures, dusty keys, distant chords, the flicker of static, but still feel touched by something otherworldly. Nothing rushes. It’s a quiet reverie, suspended in a kind of timelessness. There’s a kind of ambient residue here, the sound of something still unfolding even after it ends.
Thee Reps Cryptocartography (Gold Bolus)
Cryptocartography is all angles and intersections, full of rhythmic mazes and tightly wound repetition that never sits still. Thee Reps dial deeper into their strange, motoric vocabulary, blending post-punk chamber grooves with electric piano shimmer, synth grit, and strings that slice or spiral depending on the light. There’s something both exacting and ecstatic in how these pieces unfold, like dancing through a blueprint that redraws itself mid-step. The shift in instrumentation adds new texture without losing its core pulse, and each player carves out moments that feel both precise and alive. These tracks never meander, but they do transform, unraveling their own logic one knot at a time. It’s intricate music with a heartbeat, built to move bodies and maps alike.
Monika Pich Slowmotion (okla)
Structures dissolve and reform in unexpected ways, tilting forward and folding back without warning. Slowmotion doesn’t rush; it lingers, unfurls, and holds its tension without release. Monika Pich layers field recordings, low-frequency drift, and smudged instrumental textures into something tactile and slow-burning. Saxophone lines and archival strings surface like memories just out of reach, carrying both weight and blur. There is a quiet rigor here, a devotion to pacing and detail that never feels static. It is less about resolution than inhabiting the in-between, where presence stretches and perception softens. The result is a listening experience that feels suspended just outside of time, gently disoriented and quietly expansive.
Willow Skye-Biggs Elsewhere (Inner Islands)
Rooms that were never finished, each one lit by a different shade of absence, this is the territory Willow Skye-Biggs wanders across with Elsewhere. Grief is threaded into vapor trails and half-formed architectures, where tones dissolve into each other like shadows learning how to swim. The music doesn’t resolve, it lingers, hovering in air that’s too still, thick with unseen movement. Melodies stretch and curl like vines growing in reverse, toward the source instead of the light. It’s devotional music for a chapel with no floor, no walls, only echoes that haven’t decided what they belong to. A world built sideways, stitched together to keep the center from folding in.
Marc Merza, Ryan Beckemeyer Natural Atmosphere Above (Self-Released)
A line is drawn between presence and disappearance, one side humming with condensed possibility, the other slowly unraveling. Marc Merza’s compositions glow with intention, drones, and tonal fields thick with quiet force. Textures flicker and shift, animating the surface without disturbing its calm. Ryan Beckemeyer’s pieces move inward, sodden and dissolving, as if evaporating memory is being strained into something more solid. Natural Atmosphere Above doesn’t resolve so much as cohere, two distinct movements converging into a shared vocabulary of blurred outlines and subtle weight. A work that lingers in atmosphere rather than statement. Issued as an etched cassette with a newsprint and film zine of processed video stills, the format mirrors the tactile, contemplative nature of the sound itself.
Son of Buzzi Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan (Shrimper)
Ein Hase, Ein Phönix, Ein Schwan moves with the kind of patience that feels carved out of isolation. Son of Buzzi’s guitar playing is spare and resonant, every note shaped by the room it lands in, the quiet air of a hut in the Ticino Mountains pressing gently on the strings. There’s a sense of presence here, not just in the playing but in the way the sound absorbs the texture of place. Electronic elements arrive like distant signals, carefully arranged in collaboration with Michael Potter to extend the reach without disturbing the stillness. It’s music of slow transformations, where tone becomes terrain, and every gesture carries the weight of being alone but listening closely.
