Electronic / Experimental
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Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.
There are collaborations that feel engineered, and then there are those that feel like summer sun’s warmth on a Sunday. Helado Tropical, the debut collaborative album from Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical, belongs to the latter, channeling that easy, sun-drenched tenderness into sound. It didn’t begin with a plan so much as a meeting: two artists orbiting similar questions around language, identity, and music, finally landing in the same room. What followed was less a traditional writing process than a shared unfolding – an instinctive, immersive exchange that stretched across geographies, time zones, and states of being. The duo first met in June 2024 in North Carolina, brought together by a mutual friend and a loose invitation to spend time in the studio. What might have been a brief session turned into something closer to a three-day sleepover – equal parts conversation, curiosity, and creative risk. Reyna Tropical, who often works within intimate, long-standing collaborations, arrived unsure of what it would mean to open their process to someone new. Helado Negro, long known for expanding the sonic and emotional language of Latin music, entered with a similar openness: no expectations, just a willingness to see what might emerge. What emerged was immediate, rather than easing into collaboration, the two found themselves propelled forward by it – building songs in real time, responding to each other’s instincts without over-explaining them. There was no rigid division of roles. One would begin an idea, the other would answer. A melody would suggest a rhythm; a rhythm would reshape a lyric. “There was never a moment where we felt super stuck,” Helado Negro recalls. “It was just like ‘ok what’s next?’ and even within the songs, trying to create these micro worlds – we just felt excited about each moment.” That sense of momentum became foundational to Helado Tropical, a nine-song project that feels both weightless and deeply rooted. Built from guitars, drum machines, and synthesizers, the album resists clean categorization. It lives somewhere between ambient and rhythmic, intimate and expansive; essentially, a sonic language of its own making, shaped as much by feeling as by form. If there is a unifying thread, it’s movement. The album was written across multiple locations – North Carolina, Portland, and the midwest – with both artists continuing to shape the songs in between sessions, sending ideas back and forth in a kind of long-distance dialogue. At times, the process resembled a “postal service” exchange, each artist adding layers in solitude before returning to build together again. The result is music that carries a sense of travel within it – not just physical, but emotional and spiritual. For Reyna Tropical, that movement became central to the project’s meaning. “You can really lose yourself in where you are and you can miss a lot of processing,” they say. “But I think that this particular album really was able to ground me in what movement means to me and just different characters that the range of movement, travel… environment – sun, wind, and water – has the potential to bring out.” The songs reflect that duality: they drift, swell, and shift, yet remain tethered to something steady beneath the surface. That balance is perhaps most evident in “Sensación,” a song that explores intimacy outside of traditional frameworks. Rooted in curiosity, it opens up a more expansive understanding of closeness – one that, yes, can exist between people but also within oneself, and in fleeting shared moments. There is a softness to it, but also a charge: like a storm forming quietly in the distance. Elsewhere, “Fluye” captures a different kind of release – an almost suspended state of awe, inspired in part by Reyna Tropical’s experience watching a sunrise stretch endlessly across a long-haul flight. It’s a song about surrendering to flow, awakening, and recognizing continuity and connection – even in moments of disorientation. And then there is “Tocando,” one of the album’s most visceral recordings. Built from a pre-existing beat Helado Negro introduced during their sessions, the track took shape after more than a day without sleep. Reyna Tropical recalls pacing, waiting for the lyrics to arrive, before finally delivering them in what they describe as an almost essay-like outpouring. The result is a song that holds tension and tenderness simultaneously: a meditation on relationships that feels both fragile and fraught, intimate yet edged with warning. That duality of softness and sharpness, as well as openness and resistance, runs throughout the album. It’s there in “Soledad,” the final track recorded, which came together in a single late-night session after the project was technically complete. What began as an improvisation on keys turned into something magnetic, keeping both artists back into creation. “[We] couldn’t leave the room,” Reyna Tropical says. The finished song retains that energy between them, and sense of flow coupled with immediacy, unfolding with minimal alteration from its original form. Across Helado Tropical, there is a noticeable absence of constraint: not just musically, but conceptually. Both artists share a long-standing resistance to the expectations often placed on Latin music: what it should sound like, how it should feel, what stories it should tell. As they do individually, these two artists create space for something more fluid and personal on this project. That freedom extends to the album’s emotional perspective. While many of the songs explore intimacy, they rarely function as direct dialogues between the two voices. Instead, they exist within a shared world where each artist expresses something individual and collective. “It’s not about us speaking to each other,” Helado Negro explains. “It’s about us existing in the same feeling.” What makes Helado Tropical particularly resonant is the sense of trust that underpins it. Trust in each other, of course, but also trust in instinct, in process, and the idea that not everything needs to be fully understood in the moment it’s created. Much of the album was written through improvisation, with meaning revealing itself only later, as the artists listened back and reflected. In that way, the project functions as both creation and documentation: a record of a specific time, place, and connection. Reyna Tropical describes it as a form of archiving – capturing not just songs, but the emotional and relational context in which they were made. “It was a lot of processing, a lot of transition” they say about where they were at personally. Ultimately, it was about understanding that “this is supposed to be released so we could keep going. I really feel like this album does that personally, and hopefully is able to hold that for other people too.” That forward motion propelled by release is felt in every part of the album. It hums beneath the surface of even its quietest moments, carrying a sense of continuation, and of something still unfolding. Ultimately, Helado Tropical encapsulates a moment of two artists meeting at the right moment, with the right openness, allowing something larger than either of them to take shape. It is spontaneous yet intentional, grounded yet expansive, deeply personal yet invitingly universal. And this convergence of forces is just the beginning.
Perhaps the most interesting PAN in a minute; ‘Lila’ is the label debut from Paris-based Algerian Mohamed Bourouissa, best known as a visual artist but now offering a glimpse into his musical practice for the first time, blending highly unusual ambient pulses with autotuned, low-lit vocals, recorded on the fly using a keyboard, mixer, microphone and effects. It runs like some lost 1980’s private press, tipped FFO early Yves Tumor, Yungwebster, Space Afrika, AYYA, Future, Kareem Lotfy. Bourouissa’s first solo album finds the 48 year old artist capturing the permeable membrane between Paris' various communities through a dream diary of hazed ambient reflections, cloud rap inversions and bass-heavy club malfunctions. It follows his work over decades incorporating music as a phantom thread of his practice in photography, sculpture, and video, and perfectly conveys a sense of longing and melancholy central to Arabic classical and pop songs mediated via an electronic hypermodernism . The album is an intimate, sometimes unsettling experience, aptly described as “hypnagogic” by PAN, as heard in its tendency to dreamlike slowness and the layered haze of FX and xenharmonic chords that shroud and wreath his melismatic woes. The dozen tracks play out through autotuned vocal plumes familiar from work by Ayshay, Rainy Miller or Future, crossed with the type of deep blooz oozing from that superb Taymour x Bareetlblad turn on the diy label earlier this year. Each track taps a different pole into the album's landscape, one beatless, and one filled with machinegun toms and explosive snares. The beatless tracks are peculiarly stirring and the heavier, noisier moments somehow vanish into the same aether. Bourouissa peppers the album with wild twists and turns, hitting a dark alley on the anxiety-inducing 'NMB' and descending corrugated steps to a members-only basement on 'MN'. The relief comes with the title track, a collaboration with Fanigliulo (aka Mushy) that's a tender, hopeful moment - a clouded love song that injects some hope into the darkness.
Tirez Tirez’s Story of the Year documents a key transitional period as bandleader Mikel Rouse moved from Kansas City’s underground scene to downtown New York. Formed in the mid-1970s, Tirez Tirez blended new wave, minimalism and experimental pop, earning early attention while opening for Talking Heads and gaining support from figures including David Byrne.Originally released on Les Disques du Crépuscule, Story of the Year combines earlier Tirez Tirez material with later sessions recorded in New York and Brussels. The album captures Rouse’s early system-based approach, using layered rhythms and phased repetition that would later inform his development of totalism. Positioned between post-punk and contemporary composition, it catches a band in transition and an artist on the verge of a new direction.
Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project.
Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams.
The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam".
The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression.
A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories.
The latest by iconic slowburn Australian duo HTRK is an elegant nine song suite of windswept emotion and heartbreak noir, crafted in skeletal arrangements of guitar, voice, metronomes, and FX. Inspired by a recent infatuation with “eerie and gothic country music,” Rhinestones moves from whispered lament to acoustic eulogy to downtempo vignettes, tracing muted embers of loss and lust through haunted city streets. Taking cues from the economy and brevity of western folk but skewed through a narcotic, nocturnal lens, the album maps enigmatic badlands of strung out beauty and lengthening shadows.
Nigel Yang cites friendship as a central muse, “particularly the forging of it, and its potential for new feelings of telepathy and trust.” Jonnine Standish’s wounded, alluring vocals echo similar mysteries of connection and unknown crossroads, poetic but direct, dream diaries faded with age and rain. The rhinestones of the title evoke the glittering plastic of cowboy glamor, yet “made precious somehow;” Standish cites as an example a baby blue star brooch from Texas, gifted to her “from a stoned friend on New Year’s Eve 10 years ago in Brighton – cheap keepsakes can be more valuable than diamonds.”
Even for a group as enduringly versatile as HTRK, Rhinestones is a revelation, condensing their lyrical alchemy to its simmering, magnetic essence. “Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings,” “Reverse Déjà vu,” and “Gilbert and George” in particular are masterpieces of drama, delivery, and distillation, dried flowers clouded by smoke, the candle’s flame flickering but unforgotten: “Some things are not like the others / Some friends are not like the others / did I ever say / did I ever say / did I ever say thank you?”
The second instalment of Chapter Music’s acclaimed Australian post-punk compilation series Can’t Stop It! is released on vinyl for the first time as a deluxe double album on September 4, 2026. The compilation was originally released on CD in 2007, and presents an incredible array of inventive and often previously unheard music from the period 1979-1984. Now Chapter Music updates the compilation with six never before reissued bonus tracks, new remastering by Mikey Young, plus new liner notes, photos and layout. This is a fantastically rich and dynamic time in Australian music history, a time when Australia stepped out of the shadows of overseas influence and asserted its own musical identity for perhaps the first time. Can’t Stop It! #2 features tracks that have now become touchstones in Australia's post-punk history, including Lamborghini by Severed Heads and proto Oz-rap classic Do the Job by Use No Hooks, plus early works by the likes of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard and Hunters & Collectors’ Mark Seymour. Bonus tracks include the astounding How by Brisbane's This Five Minutes, which pre-dates The Stone Roses' Fool's Gold by at least five years, the gorgeous Purple Hearts by Melbourne's mysterious Lachelle, and Tasmania's own performance punk Chainmale with his outlandish Freakout.
Assembling a 'Kwaidan'-style anthology from chewed scraps of noir, horror and dystopian sci-fi movies, billy woods chronicles Black American angst on 'GOLLIWOG', running circles around his peers and arriving on the AOTY for fans of Ka, EARL, Aesop Rock, Westside Gunn or Cannibal Ox. Featuring production from El-P, The Alchemist, DJ Haram, Saint Abdullah, Shabaka Hutchings and others.
The English language is violence, I hotwired it woods coolly quips on 'Jumpscare', tossing out run-on cadences to juggle polyrhythms between beatless double-bass and vaudeville Pan Sonic-esque electrical interferences. Within a track, he fully establishes the concept for 'GOLLIWOG', an album that surveys the full spectrum of horror, splicing together creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, industrial clanks, Herrmann-esque stabs and detuned pianos, maniacal screams and blood-curdling laughs to accompany knotty tales of corporeal terror. It's horrorcore in a sense, cobbling together its scenery with the same congealed raw materials as Necro or Prince Paul, but woods uses the schlocky formula to lighten his death blows, landing some of the deepest lyrical lacerations of his lengthy career so far; 'Dead Body Disposal' it ain't. "Daddy longlegs stride your home like Cecil Rhodes," he nicks, equating the fear of (harmless) spiders with the terror of a real-life boogeyman - the coloniser of Zimbabwe (where woods' father was born), no less. And the track ends with a seemingly throwaway vocal sample: "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome." A description of the titular character from American author Florence Kate Upton's 19th century children's book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg', it's actually a clue to unpicking the album's title. What's fear, exactly, ponders woods, and what's merely ideology? And how does all of this become entertainment, let alone throwaway cutesy fodder for kids?
American horror as a genre has long broadcast the innermost fears of a nation who wears its ideology so boldly that it almost vanishes. Way back in the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft's racism manifested in stories of an ancient evil lurking beneath the New World's disturbed earth; later on, in the wake of the contraceptive pill and the subsequent free love movement, promiscuity was met with death and mutilation in an endless slew of slasher movies; and during peak neoliberalism, a taste for "torture porn" offset the stasis of safe liberal suburbia. woods accepts the history of horror, and proposes a true Black American Gothic archetype; just like Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' bolted together familiar tropes to signal how psychologically traumatic the Black experience can be within manicured white confines, woods bundles various cultural spikes to fabricate a more dangerous lyrical weapon. On 'BLK ZMBY', the ubiquitous zombie myth - a Haitian folkloric invention that was famously repurposed by George Romero in the '60s as a critique of American capitalism - is used as packaging for a barrage of knowledge that wraps references to Fela, Dune and Usual Suspects in thorny post-colonial theory. In Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead', the Black lead character spends 90 minutes fighting off zombies only to be shot in cold blood by beer chugging rednecks; now, woods' Black zombies have taken over the asylum, ignoring accountability and poisoning the water supply while the third world's corpse is sucked dry. "Zombies go home to platters of prawn and escargot," woods says, not letting Biggie off the hook. "New mothers struggle while the zombies suckle like baby goats."
DJ Haram handles the production on 'All These Worlds are Yours', dilating Shabaka Hutchings' transcendent improvisations with damaged '50s b-movie oscillations, rasping amp distortions and microtonal drones. "Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my own home," woods recounts, accepting the day-to-day wartime horror-tainment we're fed on social media, 'Human Centipede'-style. "Trench fire, silent weapons, body horror, private booth," replies E L U C I D, woods' longtime Armand Hammer cohort. And woods coaxes out some of El-P's best production work in years on 'Corinthians', linking snippets of Lu Xun's 'Diary of a Madman' - that equates the Confucian ethical system with cannibalism - with the breakdown of late-stage Abrahamic morals that'll be closer to home for Anglophone listeners. "Best believe them crackers won't make it to Mars," he quips, double-underlining a verse that muddles St. Paul with Steven King, and Noah with the military industrial complex. By itemizing his own fears in a sequence of 'Cat's Eye'-style vignettes, woods launches hooks into the contemporary façade of terror-as-amusement, a fairground haunted house that's populated with very real demons. It's shockingly effective - the Pulitzer-ready rap album woods has been promising for aeons, and one of the very best things we've heard this year so far.
Recorded in 1997, upon The Shadow Ring’s return from their final US tour, Lighthouse captures the group at their most stripped-down and visionary. Graham Lambkin’s fractured texts conjure Folkestone’s haunted coastline—Vikings, the Morgawr, a fading Britain, the pull of the sea—under the sway of Alternative TV’s Vibing Up the Senile Man (Part One), the mechanical vernaculars of Robert Ashley and Mark Perry, and the deflated humor of Dad’s Army and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Originally issued in 1999 on Scott Foust’s Swill Radio, this lost masterpiece—a stark, lo-fi world of home recording and concrète capture—is once again available on vinyl. For fans of Alan Titchmarsh, David Croft, Harry Pussy, and Idea Fire Company.
Senor Coconut's cult classic ‘El Baile Aleman’—one of Atom TM's many aliases—is reissued on vinyl for the first time in 25 years. Born from the half-joking idea that “if you're going to cover Kraftwerk, do it with cha-cha-cha or death metal,” this work reconstructs Kraftwerk's electronic minimalism through tropical imagination. It presents an original sound where cha-cha-cha, mambo, and cumbia intertwine with glitch and breakbeats.
Rogue ragga and spiritual jazz-inflected D&B plucked from Muslimgauze’s endless treasure trove. Staalplaat’s 4th single of unreleased Bryn Jones tackle is one of the best yet, with both cuts feeling like golden era dj/ rupture is mid-blend on three decks. Sifted from one of his countless, unlabelled DATs sent to labels during his prolific run, likely dated to the mid-late ‘90s, the A-side works up a cold sweat of shivered digital noise and warped woodwind in a rudely loose but rictus NYC ragga-hop style, and the B-side fires off a class round of needlepoint steppas D&B going like Mutamassik mashed with Boymerang and Alice Coltrane, turntablist graffiti included.
In ancient times, when mist closed around a ship, the only way forward was to slow down and listen. Birds, breaking waves, fog bells, gongs, and horns became the new language of navigation, alongside depth soundings that sampled the seabed with a lead line and revealed its hidden shape. Technology has largely rendered those methods obsolete, but there is still something compelling about trading sight for sound and touch. That shift is at the heart of AEAEA's - the new duo of Patrick Higgins & Nicolás Jaar - debut album, Mist, an album that asks: how do you find your bearings when the world around you goes into a blur? The duo's genesis goes back to the 2019 Le Guess Who? festival, for which Higgins served as artist curator. Named after the hazy mythical terrain of oak and beech woodlands, the island and its encircling stories became a source of inspiration for both musicians, who have long favoured mixtures of ancient harmony and electronic experimentation. The album emerges from the pair's exploration of a new shared language, in which Higgins's guitar and percussion are routed live through Jaar's real-time effects chains, rendering sampling, dubbing and processing as musical instruments in their own right. Recorded over three years between Berlin and Higgins's studio in upstate New York, Mist folds the hazy, intuitive logic of processing chains and improvisation into the core of the composition. The record develops a series of melodic themes that emerge from Higgins's guitar and refract into a sea of electronics, percussion, and eventually a fuller ensemble of keyboards, organs, drums, and the cello improvisations of composer Judith Hamann. Acting as a grammar of suspended time, of harmonies that seem to drift in from adjacent rooms, of rhythms that establish themselves only to dissolve into texture, with the main melody that surfaces by the end of 'Respire' a recurring motif throughout the album. Mist's soundscapes are mournful, and slow, with notes often encircled in a blue-grey vapor. At times we perceive rays of distant light piercing through the blur but mostly, we hear echoes of distant shores whose rhythms might allow us to see without vision.
A few years ago, the saxophonist, keyboardist, synthesist and musical polymath Josh Johnson was still a fairly well-kept secret in the music world. He was constantly showing up alongside Jeff Parker, Marquis Hill, Jamire Williams, Carlos Niño, Makaya McCraven and others, but often in the shadows, always supporting.
Lately Johnson has been harder to miss. He has helped shape the sound of Parker’s renowned ETA IVtet; served as the producer of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-winning album, The Omnichord Real Book (2023); co-leads all-star creative ensembles like SML, the Openness Trio and a collective with Sam Wilkes and Gregory Uhlmann; and this year, as the producer of Flea’s Honora and the musical director of his band, appeared on The Tonight Show and NPR’s Tiny Desk. Still, Johnson has yet to bring his solo work fully into the spotlight.
On October 23, Animative, Johnson’s third album under his own name and his first for International Anthem/Nonesuch, arrives to turn up the wattage on his artistry. More than any release to date, Animative shows why musicians and a growing community of listeners know this Chicago native and longtime L.A. resident to be one of the most imaginative electroacoustic musicians today, not to mention one of the most stunningly versatile. On Animative, the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound Johnson has been developing — first with a full band on 2020’s Freedom Exercise, then on 2024’s immersive solo album, Unusual Object — comes together in a life-affirming LP of lowkey improvised brilliance and technological ambition.
Animative erases any distinction between being a jazz record led by a saxophone player and an experimental electronics record by a solo artist. Effects and digital overlays are at work in more ways than the ear can track, even when what you hear first is an unaltered saxophone sound. Meanwhile, undiluted improvised brilliance on the saxophone seeps in at unexpected moments. Johnson puts sophisticated technologies to work on nearly every track, often using the saxophone to control a sampler or a drum machine, triggering changes in a loop or an effect. But it’s always in service of a feeling — working to escape the trap of mastery. “I'm looking to make it feel more human,” Johnson says.
When running his alto sax through a harmonizer, Johnson is often varying and altering the intervals as he goes, so that the harmonies don’t just move in parallel lines or a single key, but curl and swarm. He also sometimes adjusts the effects on individual notes within the harmonized sound. Listeners to the recent, effects-laden, overdubbed saxophone experiments of Sam Gendel, another Los Angeles saxophonist-producer (including with Wilkes), will note the distinctiveness of Johnson’s approach. Fans of Lea Bertucci, Travis Laplante, and other experimental reed players pushing the structures of solo work will find a similarly rich complement in Johnson’s blend of looping, effects and sax improvisation.
Johnson’s reserved and thoughtful nature made the album’s title something of a puzzler to his friends. “I said the name to a few people, and they were like, ‘Animated is not how I would describe you,’” he laughs. “But I'm really thinking about it from the perspective of causing animation, giving spirit, or connecting with spirit.” He thinks often of the lessons of Wayne Shorter, one of his teachers, who instilled in him a sense of reverence for the mystical, and emphasized the musician’s duty to “conjure and transport.” And as he put together Animative, Johnson also had in mind the West African philosopher Maladoma Somay’s writings, and the “non-Western ways of thinking about time and being” they propose. He was inspired too by Italo Calvino’s inventive, often-dreamlike short fiction. “The way he uses the vehicle of short story is so gorgeous,” Johnson said. “It influences the way I write.”
Animative’s first track, “Idiophone,” which he’d been workshopping through multiple versions in concerts leading up to the recording session, fundamentally reimagines the saxophone’s musical identity. “I’m really interested in putting the saxophone in a different role besides soloist,” Johnson says. “The saxophone is also the drum. ‘Idiophone’ is me wanting to access the feeling of a percussion ensemble.”
On “Aughts Hymnal,” he manipulates the horn to sound more like an organ. On “Strays,” extending the influence of Billy Strayhorn in a futuristic direction, he allows some of the harmonies felt by the listener to remain unplayed. “If you were to go in and analyze it, all those pieces aren’t fully there. But your ear is filling it in, because the feeling is there,” he says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how, if I want them to be felt, that might mean making them less legible in a certain way, which actually puts the feeling first.”
While he has become deeply affiliated with the burgeoning L.A. jazz scene, Johnson still finds powerful inspiration in the legacy of his Chicago hometown. Of particular importance is the example set by Eddie Harris, who precedes him not only in the city’s saxophone lineage but also as a multi-instrumentalist, composer and 360-degree artistic thinker. “I’m inspired by him as a conceptualist, and somebody who navigates a lot of different spaces,” Johnson says. Among pianists, his pantheon is topped by another brilliant eccentric: Mal Waldron. “In music that is so often centering virtuosity,” Johnson says, Waldron demonstrated “a different way of existing.”
Like Harris, Johnson always leads with a strong musical concept, but he relies upon a collaborative community to execute it. The album’s personnel include Ben Lumsdaine on drums, Macie Stewart on violin, Marquis Hill on trumpet, and Paul Bryan on bass and co-producing the album with Johnson.
While working on “High Step,” a slightly churchy, slightly off-kilter groover, Johnson felt Meshell Ndegeocello’s bass would be a perfect fit. She performs as a guest on the track, occupying the bass chair — a supporting role she rarely plays.
“Mill” is a quieter tune that seems designed to warm up the memory banks—reminiscent of Aphex Twin or Joe Zawinul balladry, or more recently the work of Johnson’s frequent collaborator Jamire Williams—as a clean saxophone sound pairs with subtly processed lines in a mix of unison and harmony. Finally, the last note molders into silence.
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Johnson spent his earliest years in Maryland before his family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was young. He didn’t take to his piano lessons, finding that he was happier teaching himself. It was only after starting to play the saxophone at age eleven that he fell completely in love with music. Soon after, his parents bought him a stack of jazz records; the sound that caught his attention most was the saxophone of Lester Young.
“I was like, ‘This dude is talking to me,’” Johnson says. “That's what it felt like.” He was as fascinated by the intellect and swagger he heard inside Young’s playing as he was by the “vocal qualities” of the saxophone. “It can whisper, it can scream, it can be really textured. I was still playing piano and keyboards, but the saxophone was what captured me,” he says.
Johnson went on to earn a bachelor’s in music from Indiana University, making the nearly eight-hour round trip from Bloomington to Chicago on weekends to participate in his hometown jazz scene. After graduating, he spent a couple of years living and working in Chicago before attending grad school at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) in Los Angeles, studying under Shorter and Hancock.
He found himself surrounded by an L.A. jazz scene that was in bloom creatively and culturally. While Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin’s careers filled the foreground, a vast network of musicians was intermingling jazz, ambient, dance music, hip-hop, minimalism, and more at venues around town. Before long, Johnson was near the center of nearly all of it. He was energized by the exchange between different music scenes and artistic disciplines in those years, particularly on gigs he played with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Mark de Clive-Lowe, and Jamire Williams.
“There was a lot going on, and a lot of places to play, and a lot of cross-pollination all coming about very organically,” he remembered. “I think that really encouraged me, because there were all these people just finding different ways to combine a lot of their interests. There was room to make a path.” Originally expecting to return to Chicago or head to New York after the Monk Institute, Johnson chose to stay put. “Part of what kept me in L.A. is that I felt like, ‘I'm interested in all these different things. If I was to move to New York right now, I might need to spend a long time just following this one path of the saxophone lineage.’”
One of L.A.’s headiest spaces in those years was ETA, the Highland Park bar where Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet—which includes Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose—played weekly. “I guess it's like any sort of long-running gig in that it sort of takes on a life of its own,” Johnson says. “In those early days, there were a lot of different people who would come in there: other musicians, but also visual artists and painters, dancers, skateboarders from the various tributaries of Jeff’s world, stuff like that. There was this beautiful kind of overlap.”
In the past decade-plus, Johnson has become an essential collaborator to Carlos Niño, Nate Mercereau, Louis Cole, aja monet, Gregory Uhlmann, Anna Butterss, Matthew Stevens, and Sam Wilkes, among others.
When not playing in a group led by someone else, Johnson has often gravitated toward co-led ensembles like SML (with Butterss, Uhlmann, Jeremiah Chiu, and Booker Stardrum), the Openness Trio (with Mercereau and Niño), or his collaborative trio with Uhlmann and Wilkes.
Meanwhile, he also maintains a connection to the leading Chicago musicians of his generation, continuing to play in bands led by Marquis Hill, Makaya McCraven, and Joel Ross.
In addition to his jazz bona fides, Johnson’s musical versatility has been informed by an impressive resume of pop music work, including with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Chris Cohen, and Ezra Furman. Johnson served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022, in which time he directed a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he arranged fourteen of Bridges’ songs.
For Johnson, every collaboration is a chance to connect and extend his practice. Much of the spirit of Animative has been informed by lessons he gleaned from recent work with Ndegeocello in particular. “We all have certain assumptions that we come into writing or making music with. Working with her, some of those things were broken down for me immediately,” Johnson says. “It opened me up to not just consider more of what’s coming in externally, but to also let more of the variety that's inside of me come out.”
A few years ago, the saxophonist, keyboardist, synthesist and musical polymath Josh Johnson was still a fairly well-kept secret in the music world. He was constantly showing up alongside Jeff Parker, Marquis Hill, Jamire Williams, Carlos Niño, Makaya McCraven and others, but often in the shadows, always supporting.
Lately Johnson has been harder to miss. He has helped shape the sound of Parker’s renowned ETA IVtet; served as the producer of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-winning album, The Omnichord Real Book (2023); co-leads all-star creative ensembles like SML, the Openness Trio and a collective with Sam Wilkes and Gregory Uhlmann; and this year, as the producer of Flea’s Honora and the musical director of his band, appeared on The Tonight Show and NPR’s Tiny Desk. Still, Johnson has yet to bring his solo work fully into the spotlight.
On October 23, Animative, Johnson’s third album under his own name and his first for International Anthem/Nonesuch, arrives to turn up the wattage on his artistry. More than any release to date, Animative shows why musicians and a growing community of listeners know this Chicago native and longtime L.A. resident to be one of the most imaginative electroacoustic musicians today, not to mention one of the most stunningly versatile. On Animative, the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound Johnson has been developing — first with a full band on 2020’s Freedom Exercise, then on 2024’s immersive solo album, Unusual Object — comes together in a life-affirming LP of lowkey improvised brilliance and technological ambition.
Animative erases any distinction between being a jazz record led by a saxophone player and an experimental electronics record by a solo artist. Effects and digital overlays are at work in more ways than the ear can track, even when what you hear first is an unaltered saxophone sound. Meanwhile, undiluted improvised brilliance on the saxophone seeps in at unexpected moments. Johnson puts sophisticated technologies to work on nearly every track, often using the saxophone to control a sampler or a drum machine, triggering changes in a loop or an effect. But it’s always in service of a feeling — working to escape the trap of mastery. “I'm looking to make it feel more human,” Johnson says.
When running his alto sax through a harmonizer, Johnson is often varying and altering the intervals as he goes, so that the harmonies don’t just move in parallel lines or a single key, but curl and swarm. He also sometimes adjusts the effects on individual notes within the harmonized sound. Listeners to the recent, effects-laden, overdubbed saxophone experiments of Sam Gendel, another Los Angeles saxophonist-producer (including with Wilkes), will note the distinctiveness of Johnson’s approach. Fans of Lea Bertucci, Travis Laplante, and other experimental reed players pushing the structures of solo work will find a similarly rich complement in Johnson’s blend of looping, effects and sax improvisation.
Johnson’s reserved and thoughtful nature made the album’s title something of a puzzler to his friends. “I said the name to a few people, and they were like, ‘Animated is not how I would describe you,’” he laughs. “But I'm really thinking about it from the perspective of causing animation, giving spirit, or connecting with spirit.” He thinks often of the lessons of Wayne Shorter, one of his teachers, who instilled in him a sense of reverence for the mystical, and emphasized the musician’s duty to “conjure and transport.” And as he put together Animative, Johnson also had in mind the West African philosopher Maladoma Somay’s writings, and the “non-Western ways of thinking about time and being” they propose. He was inspired too by Italo Calvino’s inventive, often-dreamlike short fiction. “The way he uses the vehicle of short story is so gorgeous,” Johnson said. “It influences the way I write.”
Animative’s first track, “Idiophone,” which he’d been workshopping through multiple versions in concerts leading up to the recording session, fundamentally reimagines the saxophone’s musical identity. “I’m really interested in putting the saxophone in a different role besides soloist,” Johnson says. “The saxophone is also the drum. ‘Idiophone’ is me wanting to access the feeling of a percussion ensemble.”
On “Aughts Hymnal,” he manipulates the horn to sound more like an organ. On “Strays,” extending the influence of Billy Strayhorn in a futuristic direction, he allows some of the harmonies felt by the listener to remain unplayed. “If you were to go in and analyze it, all those pieces aren’t fully there. But your ear is filling it in, because the feeling is there,” he says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how, if I want them to be felt, that might mean making them less legible in a certain way, which actually puts the feeling first.”
While he has become deeply affiliated with the burgeoning L.A. jazz scene, Johnson still finds powerful inspiration in the legacy of his Chicago hometown. Of particular importance is the example set by Eddie Harris, who precedes him not only in the city’s saxophone lineage but also as a multi-instrumentalist, composer and 360-degree artistic thinker. “I’m inspired by him as a conceptualist, and somebody who navigates a lot of different spaces,” Johnson says. Among pianists, his pantheon is topped by another brilliant eccentric: Mal Waldron. “In music that is so often centering virtuosity,” Johnson says, Waldron demonstrated “a different way of existing.”
Like Harris, Johnson always leads with a strong musical concept, but he relies upon a collaborative community to execute it. The album’s personnel include Ben Lumsdaine on drums, Macie Stewart on violin, Marquis Hill on trumpet, and Paul Bryan on bass and co-producing the album with Johnson.
While working on “High Step,” a slightly churchy, slightly off-kilter groover, Johnson felt Meshell Ndegeocello’s bass would be a perfect fit. She performs as a guest on the track, occupying the bass chair — a supporting role she rarely plays.
“Mill” is a quieter tune that seems designed to warm up the memory banks—reminiscent of Aphex Twin or Joe Zawinul balladry, or more recently the work of Johnson’s frequent collaborator Jamire Williams—as a clean saxophone sound pairs with subtly processed lines in a mix of unison and harmony. Finally, the last note molders into silence.
/ / / /
Johnson spent his earliest years in Maryland before his family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was young. He didn’t take to his piano lessons, finding that he was happier teaching himself. It was only after starting to play the saxophone at age eleven that he fell completely in love with music. Soon after, his parents bought him a stack of jazz records; the sound that caught his attention most was the saxophone of Lester Young.
“I was like, ‘This dude is talking to me,’” Johnson says. “That's what it felt like.” He was as fascinated by the intellect and swagger he heard inside Young’s playing as he was by the “vocal qualities” of the saxophone. “It can whisper, it can scream, it can be really textured. I was still playing piano and keyboards, but the saxophone was what captured me,” he says.
Johnson went on to earn a bachelor’s in music from Indiana University, making the nearly eight-hour round trip from Bloomington to Chicago on weekends to participate in his hometown jazz scene. After graduating, he spent a couple of years living and working in Chicago before attending grad school at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) in Los Angeles, studying under Shorter and Hancock.
He found himself surrounded by an L.A. jazz scene that was in bloom creatively and culturally. While Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin’s careers filled the foreground, a vast network of musicians was intermingling jazz, ambient, dance music, hip-hop, minimalism, and more at venues around town. Before long, Johnson was near the center of nearly all of it. He was energized by the exchange between different music scenes and artistic disciplines in those years, particularly on gigs he played with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Mark de Clive-Lowe, and Jamire Williams.
“There was a lot going on, and a lot of places to play, and a lot of cross-pollination all coming about very organically,” he remembered. “I think that really encouraged me, because there were all these people just finding different ways to combine a lot of their interests. There was room to make a path.” Originally expecting to return to Chicago or head to New York after the Monk Institute, Johnson chose to stay put. “Part of what kept me in L.A. is that I felt like, ‘I'm interested in all these different things. If I was to move to New York right now, I might need to spend a long time just following this one path of the saxophone lineage.’”
One of L.A.’s headiest spaces in those years was ETA, the Highland Park bar where Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet—which includes Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose—played weekly. “I guess it's like any sort of long-running gig in that it sort of takes on a life of its own,” Johnson says. “In those early days, there were a lot of different people who would come in there: other musicians, but also visual artists and painters, dancers, skateboarders from the various tributaries of Jeff’s world, stuff like that. There was this beautiful kind of overlap.”
In the past decade-plus, Johnson has become an essential collaborator to Carlos Niño, Nate Mercereau, Louis Cole, aja monet, Gregory Uhlmann, Anna Butterss, Matthew Stevens, and Sam Wilkes, among others.
When not playing in a group led by someone else, Johnson has often gravitated toward co-led ensembles like SML (with Butterss, Uhlmann, Jeremiah Chiu, and Booker Stardrum), the Openness Trio (with Mercereau and Niño), or his collaborative trio with Uhlmann and Wilkes.
Meanwhile, he also maintains a connection to the leading Chicago musicians of his generation, continuing to play in bands led by Marquis Hill, Makaya McCraven, and Joel Ross.
In addition to his jazz bona fides, Johnson’s musical versatility has been informed by an impressive resume of pop music work, including with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Chris Cohen, and Ezra Furman. Johnson served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022, in which time he directed a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he arranged fourteen of Bridges’ songs.
For Johnson, every collaboration is a chance to connect and extend his practice. Much of the spirit of Animative has been informed by lessons he gleaned from recent work with Ndegeocello in particular. “We all have certain assumptions that we come into writing or making music with. Working with her, some of those things were broken down for me immediately,” Johnson says. “It opened me up to not just consider more of what’s coming in externally, but to also let more of the variety that's inside of me come out.”
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