Foxy Digitalis
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. […]
Léna Bartels crafts sharp reflections, but houses them within warm, inviting sonic worlds on her new album, The Brightest Silver Fish. The Brooklyn-via-Portland songwriter operates in that tender space between feeling and thinking, where emotions become puzzles to solve rather than storms to weather. While Bartels might yearn for futures that will never be realized, […]
Brooklyn-based composer Kevin O’Connor has spent twenty years refining Talkdemonic’s approach to instrumental storytelling, but his sixth album Very Cool Yesterday feels like both a culmination and a complete reinvention. The release abandons the percussion that anchored earlier works like Beat Romantic and Mutiny Sunshine, trading rhythmic drive for synth-led atmospheres that carry the weight […]
Angela Winter crafts sonic koans for troubled times, and her latest album, Forbidden Questions in Space, unfolds like a memory through the psyche, accumulating layers of meaning the way sediment builds on a riverbed. These pieces crystallize around questions too large for ordinary thinking, wordless vocal improvisations that hover between drone and hymn, experimental collages […]