Foxy Digitalis
Em Spel is the solo project of Chicago-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Hospelhorn (who is also a flutist in the incredible Ensemble Dal Niente). She covers a lot of fertile ground on her forthcoming album The Carillon Towers. “Overstory,” the first single, uses looping arrangements that grow and shift in surprising ways while still hanging onto a […]
The opening track on Robert Takahashi Crouch’s last album, Jubilee, is the 19-minute “A Ritual,” culled from a longer, two-hour improvisational piece. For Ritual Variations, out on May 6 via Room40, he commissioned seven friends and artists to use the original two-hour recording as source material for further investigations and contemplations on the intimate nature of the music. The […]
Danilo Betti gets into a lot of different zones on April Clocks’ newest, It Takes Time. From proto-electro bangers and expansive, lilting ambiance to the drifting, minimal soundscapes on “The Gentle/I’d Rather Be Dreaming.” Quiet pulses push the swirling electronics into a free-flowing river that can’t let up the momentum even if it tried. Betti layers […]
The disorienting intensity popping across the spatial plane on Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci’s “Gasps and Spasms,” the opening track from their forthcoming collaborative debut, Murmurations, is all-encompassing. Sputtering woodwinds crackle to life, growling beneath a wall of electronic debris. Tape detritus fizzles in the open spaces, opening cracks for Bertucci’s voice to twist itself into […]
Time stands still on the utterly beguiling first missive from Eucalyptus’s forthcoming album, Moves. Led by saxophonist and composer Brodie West, the Toronto octet sends out a personal and introspective rumination on “Dust in the Wind.” Joined by a host of stellar musicians including trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, bassist Michael Smith, and newly-joined guitarist Kurt Newman, Eucalyptus […]
The forthcoming Black Lives: From Generation to Generation double LP/CD compilation is full of eye-opening gems. Featuring the likes of Cheick Tidiane Seck, Oliver Lake, Alicia Hall Moran, Stephanie McKay, Marvin Sewell, and so many more (including a Malian choir composed of girls 7 to 13 years of age!), the range and depth of music is inspiring. Black […]
American guitarist and composer, as well as Mobius Trio founding member, Robert Nance makes a heavy impact in a shade under 90 seconds with an interpretation of Schoenberg’s “Sech Kleine Klavierstücke – vi. Sehr langsam.” This is music with a view. Nance balances intimate, engaging guitar passages with the allure of empty space to create […]
The forest is aglow with bountiful arpeggios on the second single from Marcel Sletten’s forthcoming double album, Irish Words and a Bottle of Myrrh. “Sassafras” rises in pointed succession, the sun’s neon arc following a preplanned succession of aerial points. Warm synth pads move with purpose even with a softness around the edges. Plans always go […]
Malcolm Pardon’s 2021 debut, Hello Death, was a memorable eulogy for past lives and forgotten dreams. His compositions held their power in the pensive arrangements built from quiet, considered sequences. As he readies Death Revisited, a collection of remixes from his Roll the Dice comrade, Peder Mannerfelt, plus Regis, Klara Lewis, and here, Penelope Trappes, the world […]