This may well be the last Capsule Garden for 2025, as I want to finish a year-in-review article before taking a break at the end of December. But no worries, it will return in 2026. A lot of personal housekeeping ahead, so if you are uninterested in my work, The Jewel Garden, etc., feel free to skip down to the reviews.
There’s a new Wet Bear release in the Jewel Garden Singles Club on Friday called “The Deflating.” It’s fun and weird, vaguely rhythmic, but generally just a trip. So that will be a whole $2, but everything else at The Jewel Garden this weekend will be pay-what-you-can. (I might have a new subscriber-only release up my sleeve next week, too). I am ever grateful for the support (and think the music is quite good – ha!)
I am also so thrilled about pre-orders for my latest solo endeavor on the legendary Room 40, The Sound Leaves, being up (the album releases in February). This is an incredibly important project to me, first conceived in 2022 and brought to life in Tulsa at Philbrook Museum in late 2023. This album takes the original composition from the installation and pairs it with a second piece written using the field recordings/source material called “In Collapse.” It’s a track that really encapsulates the transition point of my practice to accepting (and embracing) that we are living in a time of collapse, and finding ways to dream about what comes next while still sitting in the grief of it all.
Lastly, there is a second run of my solo album, A Life We Once Lived, now available from the great quiet details.
Thanks as always for the continued support (mad love to my Patreon members & Jewel Garden subscribers, and everyone who has thrown a few bucks FD’s way via Ko-fi. It not only means a lot, it helps so much to keep the site plowing forward).
Pat Thomas HIKMAH (TAO Forms)
Pat Thomas is one of my favorite musicians on the planet, someone whose new work always requires investigation. HIKMAH delivers sparse piano meditations coming in at sharp, sometimes impossible angles. Each piece is underpinned by a real, invigorating rhythm that grounds the mystery and mysticism Thomas conjures from the keys. What makes this music transcendent is how composition becomes foundation while improvisation reaches for something beyond language, beyond conventional structure. The combination of delicacy and might in Thomas’s playing is incredible, utterly captivating, each note arriving with the weight of devotion and the lightness of pure discovery. I can’t recommend this enough.
NKISI Anomaly Index (Nyege Nyege)
NKISI asks: What if the Earth’s core was alive and mad as hell, and these recordings were the proof? Anomaly Index takes ancient rituals and flings them into the far future with blast furnace precision, rhythms that howl and feel organic and alive even as they emerge from century-old cylinders and electronic scorch. This is spatial sonic madness that moves from hypnotic to transcendent, voices escaping from the abyss with melodic fury, immersive bass mayhem so heavy it seems tangible. Each side is a wild journey, almost narrative in its charred form, turning what was once considered archival error into something that sounds like the blueprint for a future we’re still trying to catch up to. Nyege Nyege can do no wrong, it seems.
Lea Bertucci The Oracle (Cibachrome Editions)
On The Oracle, Lea Bertucci’s voice has legs. Flute incantations recorded in a cave in upstate New York are the beacon leading us into the guts of this special album. It’s whimsical and gnarly at the same time, and it has me totally hooked. Elegiac drones hover in the undercurrents, buoyed by dissolving field recordings and tape-rattled vocal spectacles, cadences melting into whirlpools where echoes come in all shapes and timbres from sharp to porous. This is resonance as a way of life, dizzying and textural, a gilded aural mirror reflecting anxieties and mythologies back at strange angles. It’s all so disorienting and riveting. If I could drown in these psychedelic sonics, I’d be happy.
Merma Suelo siento (L_KW)
Merma Suelo’s siento builds an elegant, mournful soundworld inward from the margins. This is an incredibly vulnerable record where ASMR-like qualities heighten the intimacy. Hearing the details of Trejo’s voice echo in stereo is intense but kind of magic, a vocal hex conjuring something ancient. I love the use of dripping water samples to build out the cadence, loose rhythms that pulse with midnight ambiance. This is sonic transformation etched with emotion, music that transports us into somewhere between what’s imagined and real, sculpting beauty from disintegration. What makes siento essential is how it refuses to separate the living from the decomposed, treating both as states constantly reshaping into each other.
Carlos Giffoni & Joachim Nordwall New Music (DMR)
Giffoni and Nordwall craft slow, cryptic cadences that crawl forward as though the ground itself is fuel, each pulse reanimating ground-down electronics into shaped sequences charged with electricity. The abrasion here becomes sonic reverie, dark and captivating melodic patterns stretched to a breaking point where tension lives permanently. Drones levitate even as they warn of future demise, abstract rhythms grinding against themselves until something like beauty emerges from the friction. What makes New Music great is how it refuses to settle, how it bathes you in textures that feel both mechanical and strangely alive, like watching dust particles organize themselves into architecture under some invisible force.
Norman W Long Scenes of Contestation…And the Expanded (Amalgam)
Norman W. Long captures air that holds echoes, where insects sound like buzzing electricity against aqueous electronics that draw from dub’s architecture of loss and regeneration. Field recordings capture a world speaking and changing course, where percussion is sculpted to the point it sounds like water. These patterns are like ghosts of propulsive rhythms that refuse to stay silent. Sonic textures tell stories and contain shards of history in every crackling breath, grounded in Black ecological practice and the understanding that rupture always contains the seeds of repair. Long’s work stands apart in the way it treats field recordings as documents of displacement, survival, and transformation. This is contestation made audible, where gentrification’s violence meets the infinite possibilities buried in sound, waiting to regenerate into something new.
Maria Valencia, Matt Moran, Brandon Lopez Tarabita Espiral (Relative Pitch)
I almost think I’m disassociating during certain moments in the depths of Tarabita Espiral. It’s wild how dissonance begins to conjure alien harmonies, like music cutting through time and space. Valencia’s clarinet lets out a visceral cry while Lopez winds maze-like, guttural explorations into the space opened by the resonance from Moran’s vibraphone. This is a rich, textured sonic landscape where minimalist, intricate passages squeak with tiny lives hidden in tiny sounds. Furious saxophone runs bleed melody from their veins, both delicate and raging in the same breath. What makes this trio essential is how they refuse traditional roles, interrogating rather than simply playing. They sculpt something that feels both confrontational and deeply attuned to frequencies most music never reaches. Crucial listening.
Arcibanda New Item (Artetetra)
Arcibanda delivers glassine weirdness that builds clear architecture and fourth-world world memorybanks across New Item. As always, Artetetra puts music into the world that is experimental and fun. It’s a joy to get lost in this bouncy-house-esque sonic environment where synths pulse and whirr, shaping whimsical shapes from thin air. Rhythmic pomp dances with an exotic twang, and the duo shoves melodies in every corner, sometimes sliced to bits, other times floating through neon skies. Moments of melodrama are distilled into strange toneworlds full of cosmic goop. There’s a tactile quality to the electronics that makes listening so pleasurable. What makes New Item essential is how Chiurazzi and Silalahi never let the spectacle overwhelm the song form, each chopped and rearranged piece feeling like an ode to fictional terrains that somehow feel like home.
Hiele Emo Inhaler (Stroom)
Hiele’s Emo Inhaler conjures video game folklore in the form of MIDI harps and pure, whimsical melodies. It’s spellbinding and oddly timeless. Clodagh Kinsella’s voice is captivating when it appears, feeling as though it was borne from the soil as she whispers invocations shared with ghosts. Emo Inhaler covers a lot of ground, from small songs that feel like memory shards recently unearthed, still dusty and fragile, to fractured hymns where multilayered sonics create living, breathing drones with shades of dissonance searching for harmony. Twinkle rhythms bring back the whimsy from the shaded corridors Emo Inhaler also inhabits, sweet moments intertwined with shadows. There’s a looseness here that doesn’t just work, it feels good, each off-key vignette balancing between light and sinister in ways that never announce themselves but still land hard.
Cloud Management Invisible Salad (Abstrakce)
Cloud Management’s Invisible Salad delivers blurred and shaded rhythmic fantasies, abstract and minimal but still approachable. These are dub-inflected spaces navigating black light maze runs, chopped and reconfigured like the pieces of a skeleton recontextualized and amplified. The sonic wizardry here comes from how this trio bounces between the mechanical and the organic while morphing into some third thing. Highlights are in the details, these motorik undertones meeting electronic dub in ways that feel both alive in the moment and carefully sculpted. Invisible Salad exists in that rare zone where jam session energy and studio precision become indistinguishable from each other, where we can’t tell what was planned and what emerged from the ether. I love the cover, too – really adds to the whole album’s vibe.
