May 24, 2025
There is so much music being released. All the time. I try to stay abreast of new developments, especially in music that relates to my job, which means listening to a lot of work from the more experimental end of the spectrum. At the same time, I appreciate many kinds of music and make an effort to stay open across genres. It’s kind of overwhelming. I hear plenty of stuff that is perfectly fine and interesting, but it’s rare that I feel a need to hear something more than once. The music that makes it to my occasional lists here is the stuff that I want to listen to multiple times. This is of course entirely subjective, and I have no desire to diminish the many other recordings that don’t make it to my lists; I trust they will make it to other lists, find their own audience.
If the first three months of this year seemed a bit sparse in terms of releases I was excited about, this quarter is proving to be so abundant that I am breaking it into monthly installments. This one covers April releases, with a few that I missed at the end of March. I’ve also stopped embedding the audio players for each album, as they cause the page to load more slowly. You can still hear the albums by clicking on the highlighted titles. As always, descriptive blurbs in quotation marks come from the artist’s own PR or other reviews, and the names of artists who live or have lived in the Pacific Northwest are in bold.
Dora Bleu, Periklis Tsoukalas, Cedrik Fermont - The Dream Border
"Dora Bleu's work is neither fully composed nor improvisational. The songs follow an inner sense of narrative time, and are simultaneously tonal and atonal. The guitar is sparse, tense, atmospheric, suggestive of without enacting melodies, sometimes droning or dissonant. The vocals contribute to uneven compositions filled with stark silences and bent notes. This album is a trio with Istanbul/Crete resident electric oud player Periklis Tsoukalas and Cedrik Fermont, a former student of electro-acoustic composer Annette Vande Gorne. An intense being of sound, tone, noise, music, and voice."
Chris Cochrane's Collapsible Shoulder Big Band - Live 2019: A Map of Books
"This recording is comprised of two concerts of the band recorded live at Roulette in 2019 and 2020, with a small amount of studio work to shore things up, but the atmosphere and energy of the band playing in the venue is captured. The recording consists primarily of original compositions by Chris Cochrane, and also cover tunes by Robert Pollard, Fred Frith, This Heat, and a bit of Erik Satie thrown in for good measure."
Michael Scott Dawson - Guitar, Solo (Canada)
"...he has crafted a tender and nostalgic body of ambient work anchored by frayed melodies, tape loops, and pastoral field recordings... Dawson returns with a beautiful solo record of ambient guitar and environmental sound."
Eliana Glass - E
"There’s no mistaking the sultry lilt of Eliana Glass—alternating between an offbeat, searching quality and her poignant, awe-inspiring range. Her piano playing also possesses this stirring push and pull between the otherworldly and painfully human—each melody its own unique, aching realm...Glass’ experimental, improvisational works evoke the sensual minimalism of Annette Peacock, the joyful mysteriousness of Carla Bley, and the wistful intimacy of Sibylle Baier. Her reverence for leftfield jazz and free improv greats is evident, but it’s always filtered through her signature nascent, naturalistic sound."
Michael Grigoni & Pan American - New World, Lonely Ride
"...a series of reflections on the zeitgeist of our present moment, the spirit of our age: the isolation and loneliness that continues to echo in the wake of the pandemic; the fractures that mar our political discourse; the uncertainty that has stamped itself on the future of democracy... Using instrumental voices and textures drawn from the traditional American forms of folk, country, bluegrass and blues, and informed with a modern sense of ambience and space, the sound is both contemporary and deeply rooted."
Hemphill Stringtet - Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill
"...a vibrant tribute to the late jazz composer and saxophonist Julius Hemphill (1938—1995). This string quartet, featuring violinists Curtis Stewart and Sam Bardfeld, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Tomeka Reid, reimagines Hemphill's compositions with a fresh chamber music perspective. Formed in 2022, the ensemble aims to amplify Hemphill's legacy as a pivotal Black American composer while infusing his blues-inflected jazz with improvisational flair rooted in African American traditions." (All About Jazz)
Salif Keita - So Kono (Mali)
"...the golden voice of Africa," reveals himself for the first time in a stripped-down acoustic format, reconnecting with his roots and his guitar, his long-time companion instrument. Recorded in the intimacy of his hotel room in Kyoto, So Kono captures the very essence of Salif Keita: a powerful voice, shaped by trials and travels, elevated by minimalist arrangements. Blending reimagined classics and new compositions, this album resonates as a sincere and timeless work, reaffirming why Salif Keita is considered one of the greatest living singers, across all cultures and continents."
Miłosz Kędra - their internal diapasons (Poland)
"His main field of work is the pipe organ. Through minimalist motifs, he has transported the instrument’s sound beyond the church space by synthetically processing its tones. The pipes that Kędra used to craft his own organ emulator...come from churches scattered across Greater Poland—some trimmed for a more presentable façade, others left to gather dust in parish houses until, stripped of purpose, they were cast away. Their first voices have faded, their inner resonance unsettled, yet with patience, one can teach them to sound again—to sing in their altered state, to be gently coaxed out of silence."
Kwashibu Area Band - Love Warrior's Anthem (Ghana)
"Exploring the introspective side of Highlife it reimagines its traditional roots with a heavy jazz influence and traces of reggae and dub. With intricate instrumental storytelling and versatile soundscapes, the record moves from danceable rhythms to ambient textures - a romantic fusion of global sounds for modern ears."
Annea Lockwood - On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance
"On Fractured Ground derives from material recorded with Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos... Working together in Belfast, [they] made extensive recordings of the city’s ‘peace lines’, the dozens of walls erected since the beginning of the Troubles in the late 1960s to separate Catholic and Protestant areas of the city... [they] focused not on the sound environment of the city, but on the walls themselves, playing them as gigantic resonant instruments, using their hands and objects such as stones and leaves. Skin Resonance is a collaboration with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson. Developed through conversations in which the two discussed the idea of ‘sonic attraction’, the piece focuses on Tomlinson’s relationship to the bass drum, reflecting on the complex web of connections embodied in this seemingly simple instrument, which is at once ‘animal, wood, and metal’."
David Margolin Lawson & David Merrill - Analogues
"They met while engineering sessions at the famed City Vox Studios in New York City and discovered that they both had a love for “mid-century” electronic music and composers like Morton Subotnick, Éliane Radigue, Edgard Varèse, Ilhan Mimaroğlu, Iannis Xenakis on one hand and Vangelis, Steve Reich, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre on the other. Analogues is an ‘existential travelogue’ to places surreal and imagined: five ‘sonic landscapes’ that explore our macro and microcosmic relationship to time and place."
Nicolás Melmann - Música Aperta (Argentina/Spain)
"...a fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds, rich in beautiful harmonies, where carefully soft elements interplay with delicate raspiness. Made up of three parts, the music unfolds slowly, immersing the listener in time. Música Aperta resonates with echoes of Satie, the meditative minimalism of Arvo Pärt, the roughness of Phill Niblock, and the nostalgic reflections of Richard Skelton."
Robert Millis - Interior Music
"It’s about the resonances inside of hollow wooden chambers (and hollow heads) like gramophones and talking machines, music boxes, instruments, metal containers, and resonant rooms. It’s about exploring tiny audio fragments—single notes, vinyl and shellac surface noise, recording mishaps and anomalies—and arranging them into something meaningful. It is about my own interior mishaps and anomalies and attempts to arrange THEM into something meaningful."
Gryphon Rue - I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water
"This record was recorded in High Falls, NY, harvested from the surrounding wildlife. There are birds and insects recorded on Cortes Island in British Columbia. This is a woodsy record. Odetta Hartman and I recorded her violin in the cabin on Cortes, where I was staying. There are also insects in Santa Rosa, CA, and humpback whales, provided by my father from a trip he took to Rurutu, Polynesia."
Araz Salek - Peripheries of Nahavand (Iran/Canada)
"...a stunning collection of modal music compositions inspired by Turkish and Arabic makam music with influences from the Iranian dastgāh tradition. The album is named after Nahavand, which is both a prominent makam in Turkish and Arabic music as well as a historic city in western Iran...”
Ursula Sereghy - Cordial (Czech Rep.)
"Sereghy’s music moves with no fixed center, shedding hierarchies and opening itself to the unknown. Sounds unravel and reform: fragments of voices, reshaped textures, the shimmer of manipulated recordings all bending into semi-familiar contours. In this space, harmony is not a destination but an unfolding process, a web of shifting connections rather than rigid form."
Web Web - Plexus Plexus (Germany)
"The German leftfield jazz outfit Web Web return with their sixth album in seven years and it’s a trippy, groove-heavy affair. As much Conny plank as Teo Macero, Plexus Plexus is a late night channeling of early ‘Electric Period’ Miles Davis, Afro-krautrock rhythms and a whole cupboard of spooky European soundtrack influences allied with a contemporary production twist..." (Truth & Lies)
Theresa Wong - Journey to the Cave of Guanyin
"The inspiration for these pieces comes from the Chinese folklore of Guanyin, a deity whose name translates to ‘the one who perceives all the sounds, or cries, of the world’. Also known as Guanshiyin 觀世音, she is the embodiment of infinite compassion... All the music is played on solo and multi-tracked acoustic cello. Many pieces are created around the repetition of simple phrases, like a sonic mantra repeated to focus and ease the mind. The cello is tuned down to a fundamental of A=216 Hertz, and the harmonies are composed in just intonation, a tuning system based on the natural overtones of resonating frequencies.”