April 25, 2025
Late again. These are albums I’ve enjoyed that were released in January through March of this year. As usual, the names of artists who live or have lived in the Pacific Northwest are in bold. Blurbs in quotation marks were not written by me.
Maddie Ashman - otherworld (UK)
Totally delightful songs for microtonal classical guitar and voice. “When I was writing Otherworld, I was thinking of questions like what if the guitar could sing? Or speak? What if the guitar could express beyond its traditional limits? What if the voice was the 'instrument' rather than the guitar?”
Daniel Carter & Ayumi Ishito - Endless Season
Esteemed jazz veteran and master multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter teams up with young whippersnapper saxophonist and producer Ayumi Ishito for this interesting mash-up of jazz and electronic music. Loosely akin to that lovely Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders album from a few years back, but quite different as well – not nearly so ambient, a bit more challenging and crunchy. And that’s just fine.
Sarah Davachi - Basse Brevis
“Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to create music that is extremely precise, subtle and lively. But what is striking, and particularly evident in Basse Brevis, is that such an approach, both abstract and restrained, is nonetheless at times utterly poignant.”
Dead Bandit - Dead Bandit
“Capturing phantom drones behind dusty beats and haunted twangs, Ellis Swan and James Schimpl…put us out to pasture across broad sonic plains, drums flapping like loose fence panels in the prairie breeze and bass rumbling like distant thunder. [They] keep the strung out guitars at the front of what they do, whether playing a naked, desolate strum or running six strings through disruptive effects processing until they're barely recognisable…toys with post-rock complexity and matches it with the emotional weight of melodic simplicity, gentle grooves and conscious arrangements.”
Denley Gorfinkel Farrar - Vents
“Jim Denley's lungs and lips cut air across edges, generating tones – primordial fluting. He stops the end of his tubes to generate novel tones and to allow for pressure explosions and key flutters, mixing voice with this expression…The 'airdrums' are…invented by Dale Gorfinkel consisting of a latex membrane made from a large balloon stretched over the shell of a drum. It is part wind instrument, part percussion and is played by blowing lightly (and occasionally singing) into a tube which rests on the membrane…Peter Farrar performs with dry microporous ceramic tiles and stones immersed in tubs of water, orbeez (small, colorful, gel-like beads made of a special type of polymer that can absorb water and expand to many times their original size) and hot plates. Hydrophones and a directional mic amplify an extraordinary plenitude of polyphonic musicality where micro-dissipative structures—billowing bubbles—birth clicks, whistles, wheezes, cries, tones, long glissandi, and polyrhythmic sequences.”
more eaze & claire roussay - no floor
“The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute gestures and textural swells…rousay’s ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel. Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.”
Jeff Greinke - Late Rain
“Inspired to create a vibrantly energetic group sound, [Greinke] enlisted four exceptionally skilled, intuitive musicians out of the Seattle new music scene to take part in his sonic adventure…The rich variety of colors brought about by the electro-acoustic mix of sonorities blends seamlessly with Greinke’s otherworldly soundbeds…The sonic layers are arranged, sculpted and processed with meticulous care resulting in an album of organically composed, thoughtful music rich in depth, atmosphere, mystery, and wonder.”
Hekla - Turnar
“Now augmenting her virtuosic solo theremin work with cello, voice, and the sacred church organ of Icelandic master Kristján Hrannar, the evolution of Hekla’s unique magic summons new worlds with Turnar. The album was recorded partly in (and named after) a medieval castle tower in rural France, its ruinous black broken in spare beams of angelic stained-glass light…The record is an alternately beautiful and crushing space voyage into a glacial underworld cascading with phosphorescence and cave drip, conjuring ancient choral ritual just as readily as redolent sci-fi gloam.”
Anna Homler - Reverie
“Anna Homler sings in a language invented by her performance art persona Breadwoman…These songs were recorded over four days in April 2008, during which Anna was joined by some of the Seattle area's finest improvisers, most of whom she had not known previously.” I produced this album and played on two songs. It only took 17 years for it to be released. But it still sounds contemporary, connecting the dots between free improvisation and freak folk.
Lucy Liyou - Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name
Gorgeous, moving, intimate. “Always privy to how relationships are entangled with identity and self-love, she crafts electroacoustic collages and piano ballads that capture their labyrinthine nature and raw, emotional intensity…First written when she was nineteen, these tracks were initially rooted in a desire for acceptance—specifically from her parents—as a transgender woman. Now in her mid-twenties, she has little interest in such approval, instead evolving the songs to recount the intimacies of a romantic relationship whose end is imminent due to her partner’s move.” – Bomb Magazine
Macie Stewart - When the Distance Is Blue
“The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.”
Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes - Uhlmannn Johnson Wilkes
“…the trio explores a spacious lyrical curiosity that could be described as a jazz-informed take on progressive electro-acoustic chamber music…the album maintains a focus on beauty, melody, and movement as the pieces unfold, with the trio pushing their instruments and highly-dialed effects to sculpt otherworldly sounds with the collective sensibility of a rhythm section. The ethos of these instant compositions is arrangement-minded improvisation that showcases the mournful beauty of Uhlmann’s fingerpicked electric guitar, the hybrid rhythm-lead of Wilkes’ bass chording, and the textural harmonic worldbuilding of Johnson’s effect-laden alto saxophone.”