I don’t know how it’s almost October. Wild. Things have been busy out in Tulsa, and the next two months will offer no respite. It’s not a bad thing, of course, but it also seems like too many projects keep getting pushed off and pushed off (hence there being six weeks in between Capsule Garden columns). I still haven’t figured out how to better manage all of that (holler with any tips), but one way or another, things work out. Anyway, I’m trying to write a quick intro here at 7 AM, no coffee, haven’t exercised yet, so I don’t have much to say. Sometimes, it’s best to just be quiet and listen, anyway. A new Charlatan album was shared with Jewel Garden subscribers this week. Building Buildings returns next week. Get some Vitamin D.
Takao The End of the Brim (EM Records)
The End of the Brim is a whimsical fantasy that finds Takao stepping into new territory after seven years of careful cultivation. Lush arrangements frame the core emotional balance through plucked guitars, sophisticated melodies, and calming rhythms. Takao is a puppetmaster here, pulling us on strings through easily-accessed dream zones and vibrant visions, his keyboard work confident and fluttering. The vocal tracks are waypoints through this sonic journey, each vocalist crystallizing Takao’s chimeric constructions with a quixotic warmth, a full embrace of the album’s architecture. This feels like pop music glimpsed from the future, timeless yet thoroughly modern in its gentle sophistication. Highest recommendation.
Some combinations simply produce magic, and Zeena Parkins’s harp paired with William Winant’s tuned percussion is one. Certain moments feel like a sonic chase scene stripped back to skeletal foundations, with winding harp cascades wrapping around the resonating bells, all moving with a captivating cadence. Bowed tonescapes hum and whisper toward metallic thrums, and it adds hints of desolation within the whimsy. Pacing is important here. When the tempo slows, each note glows for a few extra breaths, and that space between is enticing and gives new resonant shapes time to form. This is music that pushes our thoughts to the edges, that challenges us to find beauty in unexpected convergences. Incredible.
Lagoss & Babau Splitting Hits For The Heat Damage (Sucata Tapes)
This Lagoss and Babau split on Sucata Tapes feels like stumbling across a broken transmitter in some post-apocalyptic wasteland. The album text alone – all that talk of makeshift swamp coolers and synthetic tobacco – sets the perfect tone for what’s coming through the speakers. Lagoss drops these Spanish-titled tracks that hit like heat mirages, while Babau stretches out into these longer zones that feel like watching storms roll in from miles away. The entire record has a grimy, sun-baked quality that reminds me why Sucata Tapes and Discrepant continue putting out the most interesting and fried electronic music around. Hell yes.
Reign of Ferns in the same room (Editions Glomar)
I keep overthinking this one, determined to figure out the secret codes Andrew Weathers and Ryan J Raffa have buried in these subterranean rhythmic hums. Feedback bleeds in the margins, a haunted ghost of sonic ecstasy now weighed down and soaking wet, carrying the residue of humid Texas evenings and Taipei mornings glimpsed through video calls. There is so much space within this music, even as it exists inside a mysterious, expansive room that somehow contains both artists despite the Pacific Ocean between them. Maybe that’s too meta, but in the same room is ancient and from the future, a transmission that makes physical distance irrelevant. It’s all relative.
Professor Girlfriend My Mother In Love (Neuma Records)
Anna Weesner’s (using the collaborative moniker Professor Girlfriend) My Mother in Love grows like something inevitable yet impossible to predict. Charlotte Mundy’s voice cascades between angelic delicacy and monstrous noise, and honestly, it’s kind of unreal how naturally she inhabits that range. The seventeen musicians don’t just accompany these ten reimagined pieces; they bathe them in textures that feel both meticulously crafted and accidentally discovered. What makes this collaboration so luminous and enchanting is its embrace of the uncertain. Born from canceled meetings and living room experiments, it becomes this love letter to how music seeps into the cracks of our most vulnerable moments. Art song bleeds into chamber pop. The walls between genres dissolve. We are transported to that liminal space where mothers sit motionless at kitchen tables while something transcendent unfolds in the silence.
Egyptian Cotton Arkestra Time & Place (Watch That Ends The Night)
These four musicians (Ari Swan, James Goddard, Lucas Huang, and Markus Lake) have unearthed a unique musical language collectively, blending mbira patterns and violin improvisations that feel both rooted in tradition and vividly current. Egyptian Cotton Arkestra carves out carefully constructed moments, starting with restrained, spacious drones that sometimes build into intense bursts. Basslines thrum effortlessly. Rhythms develop from air. The frenzy is always lurking. What makes Time & Place special is how it captures the unique closeness of live collaboration, showing that music thrives in spaces algorithms can’t imitate. It’s difficult to categorize. The quartet twists and spins, while varying elements of free jazz, spiritual jazz, or improvisation come and go, yet this shifting identity gives it a transcendent quality. Lean into the chaos, and it will set us free.
Statues in Fog s/t (Second Language Music)
Glen Johnson’s latest reverie breathes through bass-and-guitar intersections that throb and growl in the foundations, worming their way beneath the gauzy fantasy zones floating above. Chamber-adjacent songforms glide across simple pulses and neon dreams, each track a synthetic landscape where iridescence in flute patterns catches light that can’t quite be located. The eleven pieces bathe listeners in glassine tonal textures that speak of winters past, present, and future, where stochastic blastforms are muted and contained within Johnson’s pastoral plasticity. It’s like being submerged in a Cornell box made of sound, all romanticism and spectral beauty drifting through an electronic haze. This otherworldly collage transports anyone willing to surrender somewhere that exists only in the space between memory and dream.
Caleb Flood Hot Tub Music For Frogs (Strange Mono)
Hot Tub Music For Frogs opens with a radiant invitation into Flood’s intimate guitar world. Flood fuses diverging, stylistic rivers into his own guitar language, emotive and sharp at times, but always with an open seat available to sit in and take a breath. His fingerstyle approach carries the warmth of Appalachian tradition while branching into more experimental territory, each track feeling like a meditation carved from mountain air and Richmond heart. Mourning hides in the silence between notes, but Flood’s melodies always have an eye on the light peaking out from the horizon. The simple recording setup with Tyler Newbold captures something essential and unadorned, like conversations between old friends who understand each other’s silences as much as their words.
Believe Spirits Of The Dead Are Watching (Relative Pitch)
This one is wild except when it’s not, with Believe navigating the razor’s edge between explosive improvisation and delicate restraint. Frenetic, multi-staged runs zigzag through broken dreams and shattered sonic landscapes, the quartet dancing through controlled chaos, letting cathartic squalls fly before taking it all apart and tiptoeing across the skeletal remains. The sax feels alive, quizzical and pointed, with a rhythm section that fuses its own pointillistic shards into sharp-angled sprees that somehow never lose their sense of collective purpose. When Believe are relentless, we fly, but the secret is in the moments where we get to float, too, those breathless pauses where four minds become one before exploding back into beautiful, necessary noise.
