MUSIC
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Jo Johnson (erstwhile member of ‘90s riot grrrl legends Huggy Bear) launches her Silver Threads imprint with a double album of bittersweet transmissions of ribboning arps and iridescent greyscale atmospheres conjuring comparisons to Barker, the pastoral kosmiche ends of Border Community or Craven Faults.
"This double album is the inaugural release on Jo Johnson’s Silver Threads label and compiles her ‘slow album’ – work created and shared (in a limited way) in real time from January until June, in response to “bleak and often distressing times”. Alongside each of the five album tracks compiled on CD 1, Jo created Remnants, reworks and original tracks from “discarded audio and coincidental field recordings” that were shared exclusively with her Bandcamp subscribers and these seven tracks are compiled on the second CD.
Alterations Volume One was album of the week in Moonbuilding. In Futurism Restated, Philip Sherburne said it was, “A coherent and enveloping piece of work in which melodic motifs unfold against an ever-changing landscape of pads, drones, and arpeggios. It moves like a slow, broad river throwing off sparks at sunrise.” Electronic Sound said it was “spellbinding” and “never less than mesmerising” in the October issue and will feature an interview with Jo in the December 2025 issue. Surgeon said, “Beautiful restraint and Galactic emotions.” He called the final track, Unpicking, a “masterpiece”."
Hun Hun are 2 young brothers from Bruxelles who are doing a very special music in an ethno-shamanic-tribal vibe pretty cinematographic. With this first opus, an album of 10 tracks, they bring us on a journey into deep, dark and mysterious atmospheres with natural backgrounds from the forest, beautiful vocals, singular percussions, and rhythms that would easily fit for intro sets at Boccacio in 1988. This album could have been easily released on Crammed Disc in the 80’s, but it has a modern touch from today that makes it a proper gem for Macadam Mambo.
Anyone fascinated by Debit or Elysia Crampton’s Chuquimamani-Condori investigation of South American folk heritages or even The Haxan Cloak are advised to check Nervio Cosmico’s electro-acoustic spirit quest, notably recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios.
““Singing Vessels” draws inspiration from the sonorities and aesthetics of Amazonian medicine ceremonies and traditional Andean music. At its heart is a collection of clay whistles from ancient South America, whose timbres conjure the vibrant soundworld of the Andes. The piece also incorporates shamanic instruments from the Amazon, such as the shacapa — a bundle of dry leaves whose rustling produces a deep, soothing texture with remarkable sensory resonance.
Interwoven with generative electronics, live looping and synthesisers, these organic timbres create evolving psychoacoustic spaces where the mystery of nature meets inner realms of perception and consciousness. The piece unfolds as a ceremonial passage through a shamanic ritual: beginning in a dense jungle of sounding entities, rising into moments of cathartic purging, dissolving into states of blessing and communion, and finally returning to the here and now with renewed awareness.
Nervio Cosmico is an electroacoustic experimental duo based in Bristol, formed by Chilean composer Daniel Linker and Italian sound artist Matteo Amadio. Blending acoustic instruments from ancient South American shamanic traditions with live looping, generative sound design, and live electronics, they craft sonic journeys that explore perception, consciousness, and a spiritual connection with nature.”
"Eau" is the lovely new album from aus, the solo project of Tokyo-born composer and producer Yasuhiko Fukuzono, who has gained attention, in Japan and overseas, for his thoughtfully paced and sensitively skillful music as well as his intriguing sound design for exhibitions and experimental cinema. Having worked primarily with keyboards and electronic sound up to this point, "Eau" is a slight yet fascinating shift for aus; the album, while still primarily an electronic work, revolves around the sonic world of a stringed acoustic sound source, the koto, that most characteristically Japanese of musical instruments. The very accomplished Eden Okuno provides the delicate-yet-rich koto sounds on offer here; Fukuzono, in the liner notes, acknowledges the importance of Okuno’s artistry to the project.
The compositions on the album are designed to balance the sound of the koto, with its subtly variable attack and flickering resonance, with the timbre of other instruments. The delicate decay and metrical flexibility of the koto is enveloped by sustained synthesizer sounds and contrapuntally constructed piano melodies, creating a flowing ambience with absorbing undercurrents, a languid and liquid quality that reveals the suitability of the title.
Avid fans of contemporary Japanese music might hear the influence of pioneering works such as the the 1979 Hiroshi Yoshimura composition “Clouds for Alma", realized by koto player Tadao Sawai, and the 1993 album "Koto Vortex I: Works by Hiroshi Yoshimura" which featured performances of Yoshimura's works by the Japanese koto quartet Koto Vortex. These works attempted to remove the koto from its traditional context and place it within the context of ambient and techno. "Eau" is available on CD/LP/cassette/digital, with E/J liner notes by aus. "Eau" is the first collaborative release by EM Records and FLAU, the label run by Yasuhiko Fukuzono (aus).
Ambre Ciel is a composer and singer who hails from Montreal, Canada and is a purveyor of dreamy, expansive, spacious music that draws influence from contemporary classical influenced artists, as well as the impressionist world and American minimalists.
Ambre who sings in both English and her native French, hails from a family of singers and artists, “I started my journey learning violin at six and began experimenting with pedal effects and looping melodies later on”. University followed with a focus on composition and recording. “That’s when I started exploring composing and songwriting more deeply—both the world of sounds in itself and songs built mostly with layers of violin and voice. It was also during this time that I returned to my ‘first’ instrument, the piano, which opened more harmonic possibilities.”
Her debut album still, there is the sea, represents a beginning, a first and imperfect attempt to create this other world that was living in her mind. She has crafted a beautifully refined album making a lot of space for strings arrangements and other acoustic instruments, as well as her own beautiful voice.
Chihei Hatakeyama: electric guitar and sound effects
Shun Ishiwaka: drums and percussion, piano on ‘M6’
Cecilia Bignall: Cello on ‘M3’
Composed by Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka
‘M3’ composed by Chihei Hatakeyama, Shun Ishiwaka and Cecilia Bignall
The distinctive sound of Linus is born from a delicate balance between folk, jazz, minimalism, chamber music and free improvisation. Starting as a duo, Ruben Machtelinckx and Thomas Jillings have always tried to infuse their compositions, which tend towards poetry and simplicity, with the ungraspable spirit of true open-minded improvisation. In the search of new stories to tell, it therefore did not come as a surprise that they chose to expand their palette by including both an eclectic mix of instruments (from banjo and Hardanger fiddle to electronics and an orchestral bass drum) and a range of collaborations with some unique voices in the world of improvised music. Showing much affinity for the thriving Norwegian scene, they collaborated with the likes of Nils Økland, Ingar Zach, Christian Wallumrød and Øyvind Skarbø, as well as Jakob Bro, Frederik Leroux and Niels Van Heertum.
On Light as Never, the second album by this constellation and the fifth by Linus overall, one no longer hears a meeting of different worlds, but rather the creation of a new one. A world where the blending of Scandinavian fiddle-tunes, abstract electronic soundscapes, meditatively repeating melodies and jazz-inspired free improv is no longer an experiment, but simply a state of mind. From the joyful interplay of Playful to the serenity of Ostinato, the microtonal alientation of Affirms Nothing to the wide-eyed energy of Conway, the almost bluesy warmth of Light as Never to the cold emptiness of Echo, nothing about these connections feels contrived. They simply represent a new outlook on improvised music.
Returning to Thrill Jockey, claire rousay completes her long-in-the-making ambient Americana trilogy, cutting cinematic, processed drones with diaristic environmental recordings and fuzzy home recordings with hi-fi granulations.
In 2020, rousay released 'a heavenly touch', following it just a year later with 'a softer focus', her breakthrough record and still the high point in her canon. Now she concludes the trilogy with a more considered threequel, a record that follows the general outline of its predecessors but refines it at every turn. And the process of recording it was important for rousay, who'd swerved towards pop with 2024's 'sentiment'. With that in mind, 'a little death' is a return to what rousay describes as her "core solo practice," blending live instrumentation with sounds recorded from her life outside the studio.
If you've heard its predecessors, the record won't surprise you aesthetically, but it's tighter and more confident in the way it presents itself. rousay's blend of tape recordings, processed drones and found sounds is more subtle this time around, and significantly more nuanced. When she uses tape, it's with purpose - listen to how the crumbling guitar riffs fall off the chorus of crickets on 'night one', or the layers of strings interact on the hauntingly beautiful 'conditional love'. She's back.
Recorded in sessions spanning eighteen months, Magnificent Little Dudes Vol.1 is full of obscure beats and samples, ethereal droning synth lines, and drumming that lifts and drive the record into new territory. The duo are also joined by Japanese guest vocal performer Hatis Noit (Erased Tapes) in the penultimate track “M4”, which his released today as the first single.
“M4” perfectly exemplifies the album’s atmospheric and subtly intricate makeup, combining
mellifluous guitar lines with memory-evoking, slaloming electronics, while Ishiwaka’s drums ruminate in the background of the track and Noit’s otherworldly vocals add an element of wistful drama.
Speaking on the recording process, Hatakeyama says “No overdubbing was done. I like the 70's style of recording and wanted to give it an old-time jazz feel.” Speaking about his influences when writing the album, he goes on to say “It may not sound like much, but it's free jazz, spiritual jazz. I love Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. Conceptually, we didn’t prepare anything in advance, but chose to take inspiration from the place, the studio, the venue, the weather, the temperature of the day, and so on – the album is full of short improvisations. I love Les Rallizes Dénudés, Keiji Haino, and My Bloody Valentine as well, so that's where a lot the guitar-based influence comes from”
Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for acoustic, song-adjacent instrumental music: folk in spirit, post-rock in method, and timeless in tone.
Two decades later, Pullman return with III, an album forged in friendship and resilience. In 2021, Barnes went public with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s at age 54. Even as his condition progressed, he and Brown began working almost daily, often remotely, with a wide circle of collaborators from Barnes’s musical past. What began as a single contribution for a compilation gradually blossomed into a full Pullman record, completed between 2021 and 2023. Edited and mixed by Brown, with early input from Barnes, III carries forward the group’s signature intimacy and space while embodying the spirit of community that has always defined their work. Both a continuation of Pullman’s singular aesthetic and a testament to the sustaining power of music, III drifts with the quiet weight of memory, persistence, and grace.
Mount Athos, known as the «Holy Mountain,» is a monastic peninsula in northeastern Greece, central to Eastern Orthodox monasticism for over a millennium. Its twenty monasteries house around 2,000 monks dedicated to prayer and worship, which songs have echoed across the Aegean Sea for centuries, heard only by visiting pilgrims, isolated from conventional time and global events. After several years of research, and several visits to the retired community, we are happy to present our new project «Athos : Echoes from the Holy Mountain» dedicated to this liturgic music and repertoire that seems to be evolving outside the usual boundaries of time and space. Rooted in Byzantine chant, this a cappella tradition essential to monastic life featuring intricate yet serene melodies designed to facilitate prayer and contemplation, using a system of modes and scales to create a meditative atmosphere.
Trans-disciplinary, this effort of documentation also comprehends an artistic re-interpretation aspect inviting contemporary Greek and foreign artists to reflect on the subject. A musical compilation which captures original field recordings from the 1960s and from today capturing the essence of liturgical music on Mount Athos, but also new compositions inspired by them by artists such as Holy Tongue (UK), Jay Glass Dubs (GR), Prins Emanuel & Inre Kresten Grupp (SWE), Jimi Tenor (FI), Gilb’r (FR), Daniel Paleodimos (GR), Esma & Murat Ertel (TUR) and Organza Ray (GR/US).
A trilingual book in English, Greek and French, featuring essays, articles, photographs and artistic comissions reflecting around the theme giving a voice to contributors such as , Stratos Kalafatis, Theodore Psychoyos, Tefra90, Father Damaskinos Ulkinuora, Prof. Thomas Apostolopoulos, Makar Tereshin, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Michelangelo Paganopoulos and Alberto Cameroni. The release of the book and the record will be followed by a cycle of exhibitions and conferences, deploying FLEE’s year-long research on Mount Athos, as well as its numerous commissioned artworks.
This record brings together four original works commissioned for the exhibition Afrosonica – Soundscapes, presented at the MEG (Museum of Ethnography in Geneva) in 2025. Blending sound art with reflections on the democratization of museum collections, this recording project explores connections: between past and present, between archives and living practices, between sonic materials, collective imaginaries, and diasporic trajectories.
The artists — KMRU, Midori Takada, Yara Mekawei, and Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) — reactivate objects, voices, and gestures. Through listening to their creations, they weave links between buried memories and contemporary realities, between spiritualities, struggles, identity reinventions, and the poetry of sound.
This record brings together four original works commissioned for the exhibition Afrosonica – Soundscapes, presented at the MEG (Museum of Ethnography in Geneva) in 2025. Blending sound art with reflections on the democratization of museum collections, this recording project explores connections: between past and present, between archives and living practices, between sonic materials, collective imaginaries, and diasporic trajectories.
The artists — KMRU, Midori Takada, Yara Mekawei, and Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) — reactivate objects, voices, and gestures. Through listening to their creations, they weave links between buried memories and contemporary realities, between spiritualities, struggles, identity reinventions, and the poetry of sound.
Words Were Coming Out Our Ears
Recorded at the legendary Atlantis Studio in Stockholm, Words Were Coming Out Our Ears captures a unique musical encounter in the moment. Pianist Johan Graden, bassists Vilhelm Bromander and Pär Ola Landin, and drummer Nils Agnas entered the studio without a fixed plan – the music emerged organically through improvisation and attentive interplay.
What sets this album apart is the instrumentation. With two double bass players, the music gains an unusual depth and weight, where the bass not only supports the harmony but also takes on melodic and textural roles. This is no traditional piano trio – rather, it's an ensemble where roles shift constantly, and the sonic landscape is shaped by sensitivity and openness.
One track features additional layers of sound with guest musicians Katarina Agnas on contrabassoon and Emil Strandberg on trumpet.
With Words Were Coming Out Our Ears, the ambition is to create a cohesive sonic identity – to allow each piece to take its own shape while still belonging to a unified whole. The music invites deep listening, guided by intuition and presence in the moment.
-Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy-, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s -Live at the Lighthouse-, Miles Davis' -In Person Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco- & -Black Beauty-, & John Coltrane's -Live in Seattle-.
While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras —dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone— suffuse the proceedings. Listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously & not, “we sound like the Byrds” (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it).
A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly & fluently in & out of lead & supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they’ve established in Parker’s -The New Breed- project, Parker & Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead & support. Their sampled & looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered & alive, adding depth & texture & pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker’s beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums & shakers —as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming— bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness & humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground & lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow & clip, loop & repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony & intuition, deep focus & freedom.
For all its varied sonic personality, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- scans immediately & unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker‘s unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant & disciplined in execution, Parker’s music has an earned respect for itself & for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods & shapes of heart & mind will find utility & hope in a music that combines the autonomy & the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance & in staying power.
On the personal tip, this was always my favorite gig to hit, a lifeline of the eremite records Santa Barbara years. Mondays southbound on the 101, driving away from tasks & screens & illness, an hour later ordering a double tequila neat at the bar with the band three feet away, knowing i was in good hands, knowing it would be back around on another Monday. To encounter life at scales beyond the human body is the collective dance of music & the beholding of its beauty, together. —Michael Ehlers & Zac Brenner
Pressed on premium audiophile-quality 120 gram vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Joe Lizzi, Triple Point Records, Queens, NY. First eremite edition of 1799 copies. First 400 direct order LPs come with eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Alan Sherry, Siwa Studios, northern New Mexico. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our EU partner, Aguirre records, Belgium.
Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoise guitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe.
Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert.
Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side.
He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation.
Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional.
Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar.
The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken.
Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays.
Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room. --Daneil Felsenthal, Pitchfork, 8.4 Best New Music
Turn to Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and you’re in another world. Recorded live (it’s apparently Parker’s first live record) between 2019 and 2021 at a bar in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood that’s named for the principal setting of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest(and Parker’s ETA 4tet named, in turn, for the room). As producer Michael Ehlers points out in a press sheet, It is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” Mondays… will include all the things that free improvisation leaves out, modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded.
It’s a kind of perfect opposite of Eastside Romp – clear tunes rarely define a piece, there’s no solo order, actually few solos, no formal beginnings or endings – instead substituting the extended jam for the tight knit composition. It’s a two-LP set, each side an excerpt from a long collective improvisation, a kind of electronic jazz version of hypnotic minimalism with Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson both employing loops to build up interlocking rhythmic patterns and a kind of floating, layered timelessness, while bassist Anna Butterss and drummer/ percussionist Jay Bellerose lay down pliable fundamentals.
Often and delightfully, it answers this listener’s specific auditory needs, a bright shifting soundscape that can begin in mid-phrase and eventually fade away, not beginning, not ending, like Heaven’s Muzak or the abstract decorative art of the Alhambra. It can sound at times like, fifty years on, Grant Green has added his clear lines to the kind of work that over 50 years ago filtered from Terry Riley to musicians from jazz, rock and minimalism. Though the tunes are described as excerpts, we often have what seem to be beginnings, the faint sound of background conversation and noise ceding to the music in the first few seconds, but the “beginnings” sound tentative, like proposals or suggestions. The most explicit tune here is the slow, loping line passed back and forth between Parker and Johnson that initiates Side C, 2019 May-05-19, the earliest recording here.
The music is a constant that doesn’t mind omitting its beginnings and ends, but it’s also, in the same way, an organism, a kind of music that many of us are always inside and that is always inside us. All kinds of music stimulate us in all kinds of ways, but for this listener, Jeff Parker’s ETA Quartet happily raises a fundamental question: what is comfort music, what are its components, and could there be a universal comfort music? Or is comfort music a universal element in what we may listen for in sound? Modality, rhythmic and melodic figures/motifs, drone, compound relationships and, too, a shifting mosaic that cannot be encapsulated? The thing is, any music we seek out is, in our seeking, a comfort, whether it’s a need for structures so complex that we might lose ourselves in mapping them, or music so random, we are freed of all specificity, but something that may have healing properties.
This is not just bar music, but music for a bar named for art that further echoes in the band’s abbreviated name. Socialization is enshrined here. There’s another crucial fiction, too, maybe closer, The Scope, the bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 with its “strictly electronic music policy”. Consider, too, the social roots reverberating in the distant musical ancestry, that Riley session with John Cale, Church of Anthrax, among many … or the healing music of the Gnawa … or the Master Musicians of Jajouka with Ornette Coleman on Dancing in Your Head. And that which is most “natural” to us in the early decades of the 21st century? … Jamming, looping, drones…So perhaps an ideal musical state might be a regular Monday night session with guitar, saxophone, loops, bass and drums…the guitarist and saxophonist using loops, expanding the palette and multiplying the reach of time, repeating oneself with the possibility of mutation or constancy. In some long ago, perfect insight into a burgeoning age of filming and recording, Jay Gatsby remarked, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”
We might even repeat the present or the future. --Stuart Broomer,
With his 2006 masterpiece debut album Burial and his 2007 second album Untrue, which earned him the highest praise as “the most important electronic music work of the century,” Burial has established two monumental achievements. Despite his identity and background remaining unknown, he has captivated many music fans and influenced numerous artists. He has also generated significant buzz through split works with Thom Yorke and Four Tet, as well as collaborations with Massive Attack, continuing to captivate people across eras and genres as one of the most important musicians of our time. Now, he releases his latest single!
studio mule is proud to announce the latest release from one of japan’s most respected producers and musicians, kuniyuki takahashi.
this new single was created with the atmosphere of our listening bar studio mule in mind, and showcases kuniyuki’s unmatched ability to bridge dance music with sophisticated musical expression.
the a-side, “open window,” is a modern classical piece inspired by the light and breeze flowing into his sapporo studio—an uplifting, deeply moving composition. on the b-side, “tobira” offers a dreamlike journey of ethnic new-age jazz, evoking the sensation of stepping into a new world.
kuniyuki is a rare artist who has continued to push boundaries across genres, and this release is no exception—a future classic in the making. the artwork has been designed by yoshirotten, a leading figure in tokyo’s contemporary art scene.
with this release, studio mule delivers an inspired response to the timeless legacy of ecm, while continuing to explore new musical horizons.
Shadowing the swarming, boiling liminality of 'Croon Harvest' and 'Sub', 'The Vestige' unbalances Italian electroacoustic veteran Guisseppe Ielasi's subtle guitarwork with Manchester-based composer Jack Sheen's phantasmic post-'Automatic Writing' room tones and temporal irregularities.
Good one, this. It doesn't work on paper; the two artists' methodologies diverge significantly, with the Italian guitarist working in a more isolated fashion, while Sheen is best known for his ensemble work. But they're both drawn to sounds and forms that drift just out of focus - "mysterious, liminal musical material" in Sheen's own words - and that's the starting point for 'The Vestige'. They began by shuttling recorded material back and forth, Sheen using acoustic stems from his recent projects and Ielasi dubbing sketches with his guitar, and then polished up the ideas at Ielesi's studio in Monza, just outside of Milan. And there's an intentionality to this material that followers of either artists will recognize. Engineering the material so it's almost unrecognizable, the duo create a sequence of thirteen untitled tracks that represent the purity and allure of sound itself. Attempting to imagine this sonic liminality - a sound that's between realms, not quite music, not quite noise, not quite acoustic, not quite electronic - they blur the spectrum, creating a depth of field that's constantly captivating.
And although the album won't surprise anyone who spent time poring over 'Croon Harvest', the inclusion of Ielesi's delicate instrumentation widens the material and crumples some of its textures. On 'V7', we can hear those same Sheen-patented steam hisses and boiling whistles, but 'V9' sounds like that baton's been passed to Ielesi when his string-powered microsounds get treated with the same lopsided EQ processes. Both artists manage to mold their sources into impressions, where the texture of the sounds is more important than the aesthetic character. Just clap yr ears around the gamelan-like mid-range guitar twangs on 'V11', or the decaying brass that animates 'V12'. If you're fascinated by sound's plasticity, this one's for you.
