It’s been over a month since the last Capsule Garden. I didn’t expect it to be that long in between, but October was such a busy month that, in hindsight, I shouldn’t be surprised.
On the 13th, Charmaine Lee’s tour rolled into town. We brought Godseye (Eden Hemming, Nathan Young, and me) back for the first time in 15 years to perform. Warren Realrider joined us this go around, and it was fucking excellent. We performed poems by Alejandra Pizarnik and Elizabeth Bishop. I’m not sure if this will be a one-time thing or not, but it was a glorious night.
This past weekend, Micaela Tobin and I brought Dorian Wood to town. We performed as a quartet – Dorian, Micaela, Baseck, and myself – on Dia de los Muertos. I’m still feeling a bit from the night because it was something else. It went a lot of places, got super psychedelic, stretched dimensions, etc. I’m not even sure. The recording sounds great, but doesn’t do it justice. I feel incredibly privileged to play music and make things with such an amazing set of artists. Long may it continue.
So, that put some Foxy Digitalis stuff on the back burner (though I will say it’s been a great month of interviews and Songs of Our Lives episodes!).
With Bandcamp Friday approaching, a quick little reminder of some recent things I’ve been a part of/released:
A collaborative album with Carlos Ferreira on Sonic Dialogue.
A new Boneset album made for an installation at The Bird House that sadly got postponed due to weather on The Jewel Garden (subscribe today!).
And tomorrow, the next installment in Baseck and my Bliss Garden series.
Crystal Peñalosa Ayuyu Cave (Soap Library)
Crystal Peñalosa’s Ayuyu Cave probes questions of heritage and belonging through custom-built sound generators where electricity thrums and bursts across broken conduits, building to rhythmic cascades. Electronics feel like molten lava come to life, textures arriving from all angles. Crystalline expressions and unexpected chord progressions melt into something immersive and inward-facing. The album grapples with diasporic identity and the complexities of heritage across distance. Fragments of family voices weave through the void, singing back through abstraction, while Peñalosa examines how transness and queerness intersect with cultural reclamation, seeking ways to honor lineage without turning it into artifact. Emotive and powerful, the music works against forces larger than any individual, asking whether we’re shaped more by internal truth or external origin and answering that both forces are inseparable. Incredible. One of my favorite albums this year.
Arash Akbari nāsūr (Owl Totem)
nāsūr bathes in the restless hours between midnight and dawn, where wind-shorn drones sound like disintegration itself, bass strings rattling to unearth a scorched, ancient growl. Akbari weaves in surprising melodic passages, whether riding a gentle heartbeat or taking extended forms beneath waves of distortion, offering moments of light and floating tonescapes that puncture the darkness. Furious sonic walls bleed dissonance from every tiny crack, coalescing into a mountain of engaging disharmony that pulls listeners directly into the psyche of insomnia. By the time the pale morning arrives, the album has guided its travelers through internal unrest into something like acceptance —a mute equilibrium where the storm has passed but the wound remains open. Fantastic.
Tyler Holmes Patience (Ratskin)
I love the soundworlds Tyler Holmes constructs, and Patience is no different, building ghost landscapes shaded by loose rhythms, blurred melodies, and a sense of restlessness that refuses to settle. Holmes’s voice is always a beacon, breaking through musical intricacies and static. At the same time, synth passages carry genuine weight, arpeggios piecing together shattered memories like scars arranged in sequence to tell a story. All the different timbres and textures Holmes layers create such a deep, rich narrative where forlorn memories fade and resurface, trapped like bottled specters suddenly shattered. The album grapples with our place in an apathetic universe that somehow still allows us to exist, violence and horror devoid of malice haunting these serene, agonizing, destroyed sonic worlds.
Lorna Dune Sequential Dreaming (Mystery Circles)
Lorna Dune etches rhythmic architecture into the heart of Sequential Dreaming with melodic arpeggiations and minimalist beat structures that feel both meditative and propulsive. Luminous electronic sequences create messages in code, neon-hued sonic vessels that guide us through imagined landscapes where countless timbres and textures blur the line between organic and synthetic. Lilting ambient drones wrap our synapses in gossamer threads, and dreamworlds are immersive here, inviting listeners into a space between ambient meditation and subtle dance impulse. Sometimes I want to dance, sometimes I want to float away on these lithe aural drifts, and Dune makes room for both. The album reflects on our evolving relationship with nature and machines, philosophical and biological patterns woven into zen-like arpeggios and earthy polyrhythms that feel essential. Awesome cover art, too.
} } } } { { { { little chaos little order (Self-Released)
Thailand-based musician } } } } { { { { (aka Navvelaa Sukhakomkham) creates a wild and frenetic sound world on little chaos little order, landscapes filled with jagged edges and synthetic hues. Sharp timbres rise from metallic resonance, harsh frequencies emerging from rich soil before melting into air. Vocal incantations swim through echoes, at times feeling ancient and futuristic simultaneously. Haze-filled expanses become a playground for stoic drones and interesting melodic articulations, bizarre passages that exist outside ordinary perception. The album weaves aesthetics that both collide and harmonize, dense sonic atmospheres where thresholds blur between the physical, the interior, and the digital field. A surprising and unexpected release.
Beau Devereaux Filling Our Hearts With Clouds (Dark Spring Press)
Filling Our Hearts With Clouds pairs Beau Devereaux’s black and white photography with soundscapes where crackling textures pockmark the surface in quiet moments. Synth swells rise and fall like breath. Melodies search for clear skies in shrouded darkness, imbued with a sense of gloom and wonder, rattling electronics fizzing like timbral wire, while voice samples are chopped and scattered, bare remnants of memories lost. Birdsong gets blurred and swallowed by melancholy chord progressions that feel like dusty ghost ballads constructed from crumbling tape loops, some moments as quiet as whispers. The project meditates on the celestial sphere, ambient exultations reaching for the language of clouds across both image and sound.
John Thayer Winds Gate (Aural Canyon)
John Thayer’s Winds Gate captures soaring synthscapes tinged with melancholy, each track unfolding like a wistful sonic motif along the Hudson River’s edge. Field recordings don’t simply add texture and depth here; they build out the emotional landscape, rushing water and forest transmissions becoming as essential as the synth work itself. The album is deeply introspective, allowing listeners to reckon with the grandeur of the natural world and the peculiar loneliness it can invoke. Thayer creates music that resonates both emotionally and spiritually, a clearheaded technical marvel that grapples with what it means to watch a river flow by.
Yamil Rezc Orgrinder (Facade Electronics)
Yamil Rezc’s Orgrinder feels like starlight or glass geodes distilled into sonic form. A longform, 40-minute piece that dissolves into itself before reforming into another extended exhalation, it emerges from processed field recordings of barrel organs across Mexico City. Crystal melodies and exploratory sequences are glassine with rough edges, while blurred and muted percussion almost forms swells. The piece honors a fading tradition while pushing it into experimental territory, ancient mechanical instruments offering new colors through digital synthesis and revealing hidden textures within the organ grinder’s song. Mesmerizing and immersive. Facade Electronics has become one of my favorite labels around this year.
John Butcher & Angharad Davies Two Seasons (Weight of Wax)
Violin and saxophone duets emerge from small cracks in the surface of the earth on Two Seasons, Angharad Davies and John Butcher entwining two quite different sonic fields with methodic precision. There’s something organic about their tonal excursions, fleeting moments captured and flickering spectacles drawn out into breath and fracture. Extended techniques hang in dead air, wondering if they should fall apart, each musician listening so intently that silence becomes as vital as sound. The duo creates intimate sonic exchanges where a single note or gesture can redirect an entire passage, a testament to years of crossing paths and understanding each other’s musical language.
