Foxy Digitalis
Brad Rose is a multi-disciplinary artist and dad based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He previously ran the Digitalis label from 2003 to 2015. He is the principal writer and editor-in-chief of Foxy Digitalis.
With 2022 looming on the horizon, Room 40 is starting the year off with two massive editions. First, the album+book from Mike Cooper, and also this recording and monograph from Steve Roden’s exceptional Oionos, created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade in Athens, Greece. Roden worked with Dimitris Pikionis’s Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis. His piece […]
I’m having an Alex Cunningham renaissance at the moment. Between the alien zones he and Mark Shippy explore on Ghost Note to the full-on macromeditations of As Slow as the Stream. Cunningham’s approach to the violin is so singular and striking that I started wondering where it all comes from. There are so many moments on these recent […]
Joel St. Julien is a Haitian-American multidisciplinary artist based out of San Francisco and his excellent new album, Empathy, is a light against the darkness. St. Julien creates vast worlds with sound, transporting listeners who give themselves over to his sonic concoctions and offering spaces to escape and explore. With Empathy, I was continually struck by how […]
Last Year’s J. Pavone String Ensemble album on Astral Spirits showed Pavone’s continued growth as a composer. With Lull, that potential comes into full view. To realize the vision of these pieces, she assembled an octet that includes the String Ensemble’s Abby Swidler on viola (Pavone also plays viola), violinists Aimée Niemann and Charlotte Munn-Wood, cellists […]
Mike Cooper’s new book and album, Oceans of Milk and Treacle, is a soundtrack for an otherwise silent film. “Tirta Gangga” finds Cooper’s moving guitar treatise situated above the canopy, singing a languid melody with the hypnotic insect chorus. Lamentations for something long lost permeate the slow-moving notes, Cooper guiding each shifting chord down the river […]
Worlds collide and break apart, forming new alien landforms in the aftermath once the smoke settles on Selvedge’s latest, Thresholds. Vast sonic expanses rise from ashen fields, marked by contemplative synth drones, desolate soundscapes, and an overarching theme of exploration. Housed in a fantastic cover, these songs are pervasive, finding unexpected ways to lodge themselves into the […]
Wendy Eisenberg says their new album, Bent Ring, is a meditation on work and love. Many of us have a complicated relationship with both as they push against each other and pull us apart emotionally and physically. Keeping a distance, trying to find the real amongst the many is an exhausting endeavor, but when those moments of serendipity […]
Once Yvette Janine Jackson’s “Test Flight No. 1” blasts off, there’s a mix of excitement and apprehension that’s impossible to dislodge. As a continuation of her masterpiece, “Destination Freedom,” the narrative is fraught, yet hopeful; the sonic passages offering succor in place of malice. Inspired by early 20th-century radio plays, theatrical sound design, and a deep […]
Claustrophobic cocoons emerge from dark grey landscapes as HEXA’s Material Interstices fixes its gaze toward the burning horizon. The duo of Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English is built from shaded contours and broken pieces, honed with intention into a desolate, solid mass. Material Interstices moves slow, as of dragging the weight of a thousand dead suns, making each scarred […]