Nate Mercereau – Excellent Traveler (Third Man)
Excellent Traveler is Nate Mercereau’s latest instrumental epic and his first for Jack White’s Third Man Records. While Joy Techniques saw Mercereau bend his guitar into sounds that sounded like synthesizers but ultimately blurred textural boundaries, Excellent Traveler is the result of years of patience, having learned that music can take on heretofore unimagined forms. Unsurprisingly, his profile has been boosted as of late following his playing with OutKast‘s André 3000 on his daring New Blue Sun project from 2023 and the tour that’s stretched well into 2024.
“The process of making New Blue Sun was, and continues to be, an incredible space for me to explore — it’s always – go further and further,” Mercereau beams. “It is truly awesome, and I give a lot of credit to that environment for allowing ideas to take shape and expand from.” – Evan Sawdey
MIZU – Forest Scenes (NNA Tapes)
Juilliard-trained cellist-turned-experimental sound deconstructionist MIZU employs “hyperreal” field recordings throughout her sophomore album Forest Scenes. But where ambient and ambient-adjacent forms of music often convey stillness, MIZU’s work nearly bursts with activity. At times, Forest Scenes mimics the clamor of nature waking up to the start of the day (or night) — birds, insects, breezes, and creaking wood all feature prominently throughout.
At other times, though, MIZU captures the cold, mechanized grinding of modernity. She blends both modes in ingenious ways, the richness of her sonic constructions as mesmerizing as it is detailed. With Forest Scenes, MIZU stakes out bold, new ground for both the cello and electronic/electro-acoustic music. You probably haven’t heard the cello quite like this before, and MIZU’s ingenuity on the instrument is nothing less than a marvel. – Saby Reyes-Kulkarni
MONO – Oath (Temporary Residence)
Steve Albini helmed the boards for much of MONO’s work, including their new LP, Oath. As a consequence, listening to this new release conjures an unanticipated sense of melancholy, especially given the title theme of faith and commitment that organizes the affecting instrumental tracks at hand. The idea behind Oath appears to be personal commitment and the connections we make with other people. One can understand this record as MONO reaffirming its devotion to a certain style and to its audience. Yet the unexpected passing of Albini makes this theme even more poignant. This isn’t a lachrymose LP – “Hear the Wind Sing”, “We All Shine On”, and the title track are all passionately uplifting – though it comes close in this recent, unforeseen context. With mixed, bittersweet feelings, you listen with a smile and a lump in your throat. – Christopher J. Lee
Passepartout Duo – Argot (Independent)
Nicoletta Favari and percussionist Christopher Salvito, known collectively as Passepartout Duo, thrive on creating works derived from unique instruments and processes. Their previous full-length releases derived from original concepts translating into music that excites, inspires, and transcends. It’s experimental in the truest sense of the word but is also truly enjoyable and oddly melodic. For their latest, Argot, the concept might be complex to get a handle on, but the results are deeply satisfying.
Described on Bandcamp as “a deep investigation on how we communicate and collaborate with electronic devices… a reinterpretation of the synthesizer as an intelligent talking machine”, each of the songs on Argot feature a mirroring of mystical electronic textures traced onto the surface of traditional acoustic instruments. Conceived as a studio album during a residency at the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm using the famous Serge modular synthesizer from the 1970s, Argot introduces the synth as a co-writer, making the songs often feel discovered rather than composed. – Chris Ingalls
Claire Rousay – Sentiment (Thrill Jockey)
On previous albums like Everything Perfect Is Already Here (2022) and A Softer Focus (2021), Claire Rousay embraced ambient music and field recordings, turning activities as mundane as a trip to a local farmer’s market into a compelling experimental audio experience. On her latest LP, there’s more of a singer-songwriter vibe, albeit one that still leans on these ambient stylings to bolster the songs, especially since the subject matter tends to be personal loss and sadness. Sentiment is a profoundly melancholic work suffused with a gentle beauty in the emotions Rousay expresses in the lyrics and the ambient delights that the music provides. The outcome is partially surprising, given the context of Rousay’s previous efforts, but a warm, welcome surprise. – Chris Ingalls
Shabazz Palaces – Exotic Birds of Prey (Sub Pop)
One clue to understanding Shabazz Palaces‘ new release, Exotic Birds of Prey, comes in the liner notes written by Ishmael Butler, the rap auteur behind the feted Afrofuturist project. An unnamed narrator asks an unnamed audience, “What will you do when the robots don’t recognize your face?” These notes take the form of a short story set in the near future, involving a woman driving home at night with sheets of rain coming down. In a metafictional move, she is listening to Exotic Birds of Prey. Upon arrival at her gated community home, she cannot enter due to her face being unrecognizable by a security sensor. The story ends with a flock of birds taking flight. – Christopher J. Lee
Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion – Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch)
Caroline Shaw’s Rectangles and Circumstance has a slightly harsher edge than the earthier, more ambient Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, and the textures and complexity of this new album often result in an experience that begs for repeated listens. Sō Percussion – consisting of Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Silwinski, and Jason Treuting – assisted Shaw with much of the lyric preparation and melodic groundwork beforehand. Many of the songs began with instrumental pieces or fragments provided by Cha-Beach or Treuting.
Despite the eras in which this lyric inspiration originated, Rectangles and Circumstance conveys a contemporary musical feel without ever really seeming overly anachronistic. The industrial backdrop of the title track greets the listener with musical complexity nicely complemented by Caroline Shaw’s gorgeous alto. – Chris Ingalls
Mark Trecka – The Bloom of Performance (Beacon Sound)
Mark Trecka is the type of experimental artist who has successfully attempted a number of different styles of execution and has always managed to remain fresh and exciting. His early work with Pillars and Tongues was partly inspired by the spiritual jazz of artists like Pharoah Sanders. His two previous solo albums, Acknowledgment and Implication, see him experimenting with voice, piano, and tape loops. Now, with The Bloom of Performance, Trecka has embraced a somewhat “full band” sound that results in a more dense, downbeat type of art-punk that recalls earlier artists and eras but is still very much forward-thinking.
There is a 1970s/1980s post-punk aura around The Bloom of Performance – David Bowie‘s Berlin trilogy comes to mind, as does Scott Walker‘s more experimental late period – but these are mainly surface comparisons that dissipate slightly as the listener becomes more involved in the songs and sees them for what they are – the work of an artist who is forging a unique path. – Chris Ingalls
Trees Speak – Timefold (Soul Jazz)
More than a few descriptions of this Arizona-based, analog-ish, synth-obsessed band’s music reference similarities running from the vague, inaccurate catchall, “Krautrock”, to Italian horror or John Carpenter film soundtracks, Giorgio Moroder‘s desolate synth-scapes or private press ambient and New Age. If you know some or all of these styles or players, the first seconds of Timefold, Trees Speak‘s sixth Soul Jazz-released LP’s opening title track, conjures Moroder, Tangerine Dream, and perhaps Ariel Kalma in equal measure. It’s impossible not to hear these influences. One assumes Trees Speak, which revolves around the duo of Damian Diaz and Daniel Martin Diaz, are well aware of the comparisons and hear them as compliments.
If so much of their output seems to wink at the once-radical electronic experiments from Germany or Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps Trees Speak’s role is to allow all those sounds a safe space to reverberate and mutate indefinitely so they can diligently sculpt them into their own mini-movies. – Bruce Miller
We Are Winter’s Blue and Radiant Children – No More Apocalypse Father (Constellation)
Based on the evidence of their first record together, one can hope that We Are Winter’s Blue and Radiant Children will be more than a one-off whimsical side-project. Featuring Mathieu Ball of multi-Polaris Music Prize nominated metal group Big Brave, Constellation-mainstay Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed, Mt. Zion, along with Patch One (aka Peter Swegart) and Jonathan Downs — both of the long-defunct Ada — the group’s first album, No More Apocalypse Father, was recorded in just a few days between 21-24 August last year.
Living life, finding moments of calm, while disasters too many to mention unfurl just beyond the window frame, at a little distance across town, or many miles out of sight but not out of mind, We Are Winter’s Blue and Radiant Children have conjured a haunting and concise impression of what so much of our anxious reality looks like now. We almost know too much; the entirety of a world’s awfulness poured out via media, social media, and internet machines into a constant deluge that overwhelms the human mind. What’s most absorbing is that No More Apocalypse Father can tackle such weighty themes and still be a beautiful listen from start to finish. – Nick Soulsby
Luke Wyland – Kuma Cove (Balmat)
Luke Wyland is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, performer, and arts organizer based in Portland, Oregon. He has always been fascinated with coves, referring to them on his Bandcamp page as “magnetic”. He added, “The way they cradle one from the overwhelming enormity of the ocean beyond, muting a primordial fear. I experience these improvisations as ecosystems I’m able to inhabit for stretches of time, embodying the particular rhythms and sensorial textures within each.”
Wyland’s latest album, Kuma Cove, is named after a location on the Oregon coast he and his wife visit annually. It was created in his studio in the woods by the Sandy River in Corbett, Oregon. This proximity to nature and relative isolation may have been a primary catalyst for Wyland’s creation of soundscapes that are deeply felt and wonderfully uncluttered. – Chris Ingalls