The first Capsule Garden of 2026, here we go! As we prepare for a potentially monster snowstorm this weekend in Tulsa, I’ve been listening to a lot of excellent tunes. I’ve also been mixing and mastering a lot of equally excellent tunes (if you would like me to master or mix your album, or help you with a project, GET IN TOUCH!). It’s been a good month so far, at least within these four walls.
Also, last week on The Jewel Garden, I released an incredible album of modular synthesis, sample manipulation, and general goodness from Brazilian composer, Luiz Ser Eu called Em agosto. I’ve been living deep in this one for a while, and I hope you all will check it out. (A quick reminder that everything on The Jewel Garden is now pay-what-you-can, and it all helps keep Foxy Digitalis chugging along. Subscribers get a ton of extra music, too!).
I also announced/started a new project called Morning Sounds that I am very excited about. Here’s a short description:
Morning Sounds is a free digital series by Brad Rose collecting unedited recordings of waking routines.
We’re all remaking our routines and revising expectations. Mornings are where that shows up intimately – in everyday tasks and tender moments. This is another way for us to listen to each other.
Everyone is invited.
I hope you’ll check it out.
Alright, enough of that – let’s get to the music.
Elvin Brandhi x Sara Persico SHEEN LURK (Superpang)
Facile romps and familiar sounds get ripped and shredded like long strands of neon ribbon across this live recording from Warsaw in 2024. Elvin Brandhi and Sara Persico create scarred and disfigured soundworlds on SHEEN LURK that live in a loop in my brain, surreal collisions where two galaxies smash into each other and form some diamond-crusted, weird third thing. Voices are scratched out with red x’s while synth tones try to tease out melodies but keep getting blurred into incandescent drones, a soundscape of an uncertain future. Dessicated rhythms veer between machine gun spectacle and overhead pummeling. There’s no time to rest. There’s no place to hide. SHEEN LURK is fucking incredible and unrelenting. Crucial listening, especially for anyone who needs brain surgery.
Kayla Painter Tectonic Particles (quiet details)
quiet details continues to present artists I know and love in new, surprising ways. Kayla Painter’s Tectonic Particles is a quiet, vulnerable space where small moments hold entire lifetimes. Dancing synth sequences are filtered and obscured behind semi-opaque veils, resonant textures building out the framework and giving the album a lived-in feel. It’s the aftermath of a dream, layered emotive horns calling us further out like sirens wrapped in warm tones. Gentle rhythms bounce us around, finding pleasure and joy in the smallest melodies and different tonal strata, each track a testament to how tiny processes create gigantic shifts. Beautiful. Memorable.
Dufourd & Demoulin Microchimères (three:four)
Microchimères dissects ambience and reforms it into flowing, gilded works where small moments of joy get playfully constructed. The combination of amorphous tones and expressive textures feels organic and lived-in, each piece bathing listeners in warmth that resonates on a deeply human level. Even in the most beautiful passages, there are scattered moments of fun and surprise, like stumbling upon something unexpected during a familiar walk. Melodies float in pastel expanses, drifting and intertwining with a quiet intimacy. The whole thing becomes more than the sum of its many parts, creating shelter in sound.
Laura Altman Holy Trinity (Relative Pitch)
Laura Altman’s Holy Trinity weaves melodic tinctures permeated with interesting sonic textures; her tone is solemn but like a warm blanket that continually covers the cracks and wraps itself around us. A voice emerges from shadows, barely there but glowing, creating soft environments and delicate echo chambers. The cadences are irregular and sometimes sharp, but the semblances of structure give the ghostly nature of this music something to dance around. Each piece feels like discovering something fragile that’s been waiting in the quiet all along.
Reversal Cell Duplexevere (Self-Released)
Duplexevere is a relentless pummeling, blackout guitar riffs intersecting at gross angles with synthetic grit and old-fashioned hollering. Dustin Charles spits fire while Daniel Sutliff plays puppet master, disintegrating prog motifs boiled into shredded, spewing sonic stew. Charred kaleidoscopes emerge as synthetic reverie, drum machine splatter, and endless furnace heat, leaving rarely a moment to take a breath. Blast first, obliterated after. Fuck yes.
Church Car Church of (Island House)
The opening stages of Church Of feel like I’m being sent cryptic messages in some kind of secret, disjointed aural code, and I love it. Glowing resonance becomes a fleeting drone, but then the precision comes in, first a flicker, and then a full mirage. Bass grooves underpin sharp guitar arrangements and jangly sonic clouds while haunted vocals rise and fall. Extended techniques become freeways, and the impossible seems locked in. Spoken word experimentations are another surprise, but the way the spinning voices are disorienting is somehow pleasing. Even in all the weirdness, especially in all the weirdness, I still want to find a way to dance. Church Car keeps us on our toes, and I am all for it. Killer.
Ian Wellman Particularly Dangerous Situation (Elevator Bath)
The hell of 2025’s California wildfires gets positioned within an emotive sonic framework on Ian Wellman’s Particularly Dangerous Situation, where landscapes become aural throughlines. Harrowing field recordings are sharp intersections cutting those maps into shreds. Drones stretch and grow like slow breaths, enveloping listeners in the surreal dichotomies of catastrophe and beauty, textured surfaces punctuating the resonant depths buried in ash. The restraint Wellman exercises makes the moments of intensity hit harder, each gust and crackle and distant roar a testament to what was lost. This is essential listening, not just as documentation but as a way to hold grief in sound.
Atte Elias Kantonen Cyan Music (OOH-sounds)
Atte Elias Kantonen’s Cyan Music suspends listeners inside glassine clouds. From there, dollops of pristine sound design feel like being held inside a crystal. The meticulous compositions carry surprising emotional timbre with hints of whimsy, clear yet punctuated by blurred synapses. There are dizzying moments where synths blitz and sputter into gilded saw waves, each track exploring how shimmer and sheen might translate into sound. It’s speculative and synaesthetic, building a world of coruscating materials that feel both tangible and impossibly otherworldly.
Biliana Voutchkova-Giorgos Varoutas Little Sae (underflowrecords)
Plucked strings are disjointed and strained on Little Sae, as though they’re asking to be broken into small pieces, and I am hypnotized by the repeating tones and textural shrapnel. Pieces of voice material scatter like seeds in the wind while intense sonic reckonings find their way to the surface, a back-and-forth motion adding to the dizzying aspects. Quiet, introspective moments heighten the intimate nature of the work; Biliana Voutchkova’s voice and violin are tactile and immediate. Giorgos Varoutas dissects and reconfigures these elements into something wild and captivating, so the boundaries between instrument and processed sound dissolve completely.
Jeph Jerman & Ted Byrnes Muir (tsss tapes)
This is such a great duo. Muir is as much about rhythm as it is texture, music that feels real. Metallic pings resonate against the air with almost a glow present in certain moments, the pop of strings with notes bent up and down weaving through layered percussive movements. Organic and free, a waterfall of percussion is met by intricate scratching and repetitive motions. Jeph Jerman and Ted Byrnes build something alive and breathing from everyday objects transformed into instruments.
