Foxy Digitalis
This sounds harsh, but I mean it as the utmost compliment: I sometimes can’t tell if ANSWERS is idiotic or genius, and frankly, that tension is what keeps me captivated (and truthfully, it’s much closer to the latter). Ben Bennett makes music that refuses to behave. His new album, ANSWERS, mostly left me with questions. […]
Thomas Kotcheff and Bryan Curt Kostors didn’t set out to reinvent Cage and Feldman so much as they wanted to uncover what was already humming beneath the surface. Their new album, Between Systems, takes early piano works from the 1950s and processes them through modular synths and live electronics, but the result never feels like […]
A Hat Upon the Bed is something rare: an album that doesn’t flinch from the parts of grief we’re usually told to move past. Charlie Kaplan spent a decade processing the loss of his father, and these songs map that terrain with unsparing honesty. These songs dig into sadness, despair, and the second-order tremors that […]
Zachary Cale has been quietly building intricate worlds with his fingerstyle guitar for years now, but on Love’s Work, his first fully instrumental album, those worlds expand into something more patient and exploratory. Without the anchor of his distinctive vocals, the music moves with a different kind of confidence. The melodies reveal themselves slowly, like […]
Ted Hearne makes music that refuses to comfort us. His new album, Farming, created with the choir The Crossing, exists in that exact moment when the pastoral dream reveals itself as a sales pitch. This is music wary of the narratives technology tells about itself, and suspicious of the smooth surfaces big tech uses to […]
Alice Cohen has manifested throughout alternative music history in improbable ways, from MTV-era new wave with The Vels to Michael Stipe-produced grunge to 2000s hypnagogic pop. Her latest album, Archaeology, might be her most revealing work yet, which feels almost paradoxical given its prominent use of instrumental tracks. The record seeps through the accumulated layers […]
Marta Forsberg’s Archaeology of Intimacy feels like discovering a secret room in a familiar house, intimate in ways that catch listeners off guard. What began as sketches with her voice serving merely as a compositional placeholder evolved into something more vulnerable and essential: seven experimental pop songs that orbit around Forsberg’s own unvarnished vocals, complete […]
On Happiness Is Found In The Soul’s Immortality, Tbilisi’s Gvantsa Narim captures grief within sonic resonance. These eight pieces are emotionally potent and absorbing, written and recorded using her late father’s piano in what feels like music pulled from elsewhere, Narim becoming a conduit to another plane. Quiet moments sharpen the melodic edges, giving Happiness […]
There’s something magnetic about watching two artists discover each other in real time, especially when their instruments seem to speak the same mysterious language from the very first note. Matthew Ryals has spent years cultivating an unusual relationship with his modular synthesizer, coaxing sounds from electronic circuits that breathe like wood and resonate like metal. […]