It’s June, and summer break (for my kid) is in full swing. We’ve been prepping her room for painting this week, and planning a recording session for a project I’ll talk more about in the future. We also went to the Ren Faire last weekend and, as ever, it’s one of my favorite things to do every year. Even though the heat was gnarly, it was a blast. I made a bunch of field recordings, too, and am working on a piece/album/??? from those that I hope will be fun and joyful and a little silly (all things I want more of in my life).
Altar Eagle (Eden and I) released its first album since 2012. It’s called The Fence and is out now on The Jewel Garden. We performed this in April at the One.Aux festival, and it’s probably my favorite performance I’ve ever done. (The album is the studio version plus the live version). I can’t wait to come up with something for our next show in November. (Jewel Garden subscribers also got some new Ajilvsga this week!)
Anyway, I have been listening to a ton of new music, and there are about 30 more releases I’d like to write about, but I’m one person. So. I don’t know. I haven’t slept well all week, so this intro is becoming a fairly useless ramble. Let’s just get to the tunes, eh?
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Josephine Foster Adormidera (Eiderdown/Nyahh)
Nobody sings like Josephine Foster. Adormidera shows a new side of the singer, though, as she sings songs (in Spanish) by Victor Herrero, who accompanies her on Spanish guitar. Languid melodies float like dandelion seeds finding new homes in the warm embrace of a quiet sunset. Everything on Adormidera is gentle, from the muted timbre of Herrero’s nylon-string guitar to the soft edges in Foster’s vibrato. These songs are sanctuaries. Each measure holds ageless lullabies imbued with mutual adoration wrapped in gauzy song structures. Silhouettes emerge dancing from the tender plucks and muted toneworld, bringing dark enchantment to shadow, and affection to memory. An intimate devotion to friendship, cradling Foster’s voice until it dissolves, becoming something that exists in the air rather than a body.
Kaloja A Body of Water (Artetetra)
Kaloja (the duo of Jan Anderzén and Paul Wilson) doesn’t just take the wheels off; they melt them down, change the molecular composition of them, and turn them into dancing neon crystals. Futuristic whimsy takes the form of sprite colonies and glassine ecosystems interconnected by pristine timbres and synthetic tones. It’s like being inside a bouncy house where gravity is turned off, and I’m just bouncing from surface to surface in specific, intricate patterns. Major scales are gospel here. A certain choreography emerges as A Body of Water ricochets and skips forward, arpeggiations acting like Morse code for falling water droplets. From digital harmoniums and fake strings to an endless array of unreal textures, nothing sounds like any world I’ve inhabited. Momentum never relents, but it’s always gentle. Quick-paced sequences create a shifting focal point, and mixed with odd voice samples, the resulting disorientation just feels good. Kaloja makes music for alien civilizations.
Helga Myhr Slåttespel (Motvind)
Slåttespel lets us time travel. Helga Myhr was named the top Hardanger fiddle player in 2025’s Norwegian Folk Music and Dance championships, and now, with this record, we get to hear why. These traditional Norwegian folk songs are simultaneously new and familiar. My ancestry only has a thin line through Scandinavia, so I don’t actually know this music, but melodic threads and modalities are running through these songs that feel biologically ingrained. Myhr’s playing is warm, unhurried. She has played this music for most of her life, and with that, muscle memory turns into ancestral feeling. Playing three fiddles from 1898, 1915, and 1974 brings multiple generations into the room. Slåttespel is pulled from earth and ash, emotive to its core, and feels as alive here and now as it must have hundreds of years ago. Incredible. Highest possible recommendation.
Bagman Playgrounds (scatter archive)
Excellent group featuring Pat Thomas, Sture Ericson, and Raymond Strid blasting through aural constellations with sharp-angled jazz improv. Pointillistic piano motifs get sliced down further, a sonic mandoline in the form of Ericson’s woodwinds and Strid’s percussive exorcisms. Each detail, a metallic clink, a breathy skronk, homing in closer to the center of a riveting free music universe. Bagman romp across skittering rhythms broken apart by horn bellows and low-end piano bursts. It’s a gentle attack, sure, but Bagman is still going to ride these shadowy actions beyond any reasonable conclusion. This is music that feels itself and pushes further, whose players know when to go hard and know when to pull back and let small, deft movements tell a story in tonic dispatches. Clatters open up new wormholes for Thomas to build a new melody inside, a clap of reedy air filling the void left in the piano’s running wake. These three have ESP-level connections, always pulling in new directions, together, without hesitation. Really stellar tunes.
Saltpuppet Caravan (Window Sill)
Caravan is a living daydream from Brendan Principato and Connor Bush. Thirty-three songs tell a welcome, rambling story with a million tiny moments. Birds call to the footsteps in gravel underneath, held aloft by familiar, plucked guitar chords and airy voices. The incantations don’t say anything directly, but they wrap us in aural tenderness. Sharp angles cut through the gossamer ties, fusing psychedelic remnants with marching cadences and enthusiastic catharsis. Sprites and mystics dance through all the channels, even if the shadows in this music never fully disappear. Reflection comes in piano arrangements covered in snow, in quiet rainstorms. Saltpuppet move across the whole world. Rivers sing, guitars hum, glasses clink together in arrhythmic sequence, always under a canopy, always with sunlight in mind. Caravan gives us 33 reasons to stay lost.
Leonardo Amico Four Imaginary Holes (Self-Released)
I think about holes a lot (Carl and I have an entire performance art piece based around digging a hole that we will one day perform), so I was intrigued by Leonardo Amico’s description of Four Imaginary Holes. “Recently I found myself more and more interested in deliberate silences in my music.” Holes. On these four pieces, my ears search for what’s not there and, in doing so, discover rich, deliberate soundworlds where absence becomes a guiding light. Repetition carves out oscillation channels and memory banks. Tones illuminate the boundaries of emptiness, dancing like warning lights on an abandoned pit. Sometimes something exists without being able to see it, so we imagine something in the void. Amico seeds drones with drawn-out patterns, stretched to a breaking point where tension is a tool. Feedback hovers, a meditative surprise. A low bass resonance echoes in unknown circles, the connective tissue between distant absences. Excellent.
miska lamberg stillness in their isolation (Sawyer Spaces)
miska lamberg builds this oddly static and serene atmosphere from traffic recordings and air conditioning hum. “transportation” is wind-blown, constant. Blurred frequencies become more than just white noise, they shapeshift into imagined forms and subdued, meditative howls. The banal sources disappear, leaving barely an outline on this new, hovering soundscape. With “ventilation,” tonal elements, though subtle, emerge from the fuzz. It draws me in, like I want to physically lean closer to the speakers to make out all the blurred details obscured by the inert haze. I don’t feel like getting lost or even exploring these ghost landscapes, I just want to be inside.
Windkraft To Old Adventures (Island House)
Diagonally-opposed timbres from flutes and synth are an uneasy playground on Windkraft’s To Old Adventures. Introspective moments, held by drawn-out breaths and resonant drones, fold in on themselves, building an insular, welcoming soundworld. This is music built on tension that never actually feels tense. Arpeggiations branch outward like an intricate root system. Flickering melodies build a synthetic floor beneath flute notes that rise and curl. In other places, the wind instruments turn note sequences into choppy rhythms where the synths take the lead. Movement is in the connective tissue of To Old Adventures. A sense of restlessness shows up in the layers, and even though that never quite resolves, it just keeps moving, always finding the next place to be.
Michael Krassner & John Dieterich bullish(ish) (Moone)
Krassner and Dietrich bring this dusty old carnival back to life on bullish(ish). Antique fuzz blues grow out of muted guitar tones and little scratches of wisdom. Buoyant leads search the airspace around these quizzical jams, moving through the crumbly wreckage with direction. The title track is an interconnected series of circus romps, hollow chord progressions, and sharp frequencies. The duo has their own electro-acoustic glossolalia that creates a mold for old laments that hold together just long enough to be heard one last time. On the flipside, Krassner and Dietrich write the carnival’s requiem. Once-gilded sorrows bleed out in emotive synth drones and violin incantations (from Laraine Kaizer-Viazovtsev); grandeur and weakness are in equal measure. bullish(ish) is decrepit and alive.
murmer mill:liminal (Deep Mapping)
Textures crafted from field recordings are the invitation into mill:liminal. Distant birds and hydrophone recordings, mechanical resonance and diaphanous hums connect to sketch aural blueprints of this unseen Estonian papermill. Machines are in constant motion, but human presence is almost non-existent. This tension flows through the extended tone stretches and subtle movements of mill:liminal. murmer couples these ideas through drone compositions and blurred melodic choices. In that space, apprehension spikes; there is no shelter here. Dark currents run through this work as contemplative, emotional weather, a looming, unwanted awareness coloring each note, each pattern. Even with the nature and aqueous soundbanks, there is little light. Is this about a single Estonian mill or actually about ourselves?
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