Foxy Digitalis
I’m immediately struck by the lightness that permeates this collaboration between the legendary Daniel Carter and fantastic guitarist, Jessica Ackerley. Friendship: Lucid Shared Dreams and Time Travel is a mouthful, but the real focus is on friendship. Throughout the album’s eight tracks, the duo celebrates their camaraderie and the communal spirit that flows between their respective practices. The […]
On a day when one of the most blatant attacks on women’s bodily autonomy goes into effect in Texas, spending time with an album called Lost Futures feels cryptic. Guitar heroes Marisa Anderson and William Tyler have an uncanny ability to saturate their playing with an impossible range of emotions and difficult ideas. Lost Futures […]
Everything disintegrates eventually. Whether it sinks back into the soil or eviscerates itself into ephemera, sucked back into the open air, permanence isn’t real. Across more than two hours, Bellerue and a crew consisting of some of the foremost artists in the avant garde and free improvisation world ratchet up a bevy of combustible tensions, […]
Guitar, or in this case bass, tone is one of many things I obsess over, but it’s been even more at the forefront of my mind in recent months. While I usually think of Thom Nguyen as a drummer (his incredible SIGE album from earlier this year is the main culprit), Imago Ossuary is a full-body experience. Percussive elements […]
Absolute stillness is one of the creepiest feelings. The air grows stale, each tiny sound in the distance echoes across the empty space, a dagger in the dark. Universal Building Supply captures this ghostly lull and channels it into a captivating sonic dossier about spirits inhabiting specific locations and the way those spaces ultimately become wreckage. Recorded […]
Some things simply make sense. A Tap On The Shoulder is the second collaborative effort from David Grubbs and Ryley Walker this year (the first being the excellent Fight or Flight Simulator on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku label) and it ravages the frame, causing this skeletal house of cards we’re juggling to fall to pieces. In the spaces left, Grubbs […]
Astral Editions continues spreading its wings in bizarre, wonderful directions. Orquesta del Tiempo Perdido, the sprawling, large-scale project from Jeroen Kimman, fuses countless styles and ideas into a sound that is unrecognizable in many ways, but familiar at its core. Elements of free jazz and improvisation certainly creep in, but the abundant influence of ‘60s […]
Dax Pierson first turned up on my radar because of his collaborative album with Robert Horton. I worked a lot with Horton during the Digitalis years, but remember being bowled over by Pierson’s approach and contributions on those recordings. I sadly lost track of his work shortly after, but when his official debut record, Nerve Bumps (A Queer […]
These past couple of weeks have been rough, and in times like these, I am ever thankful for sound practitioners like Andrea Cortez. Her music is healing and transcendent, grounded by the circles of nature and adrift within an inspiring cosmic flow. Cortez uses a bright palette of harp, singing bowls, and chimes along with […]