June 4, 2025
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 May releases. I’m not embedding the audio players for each album, as they cause the page to load more slowly. You can 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.
Ajítẹnà (Marco Scarassatti) - Notas de uma escuta ao longe (Brazil)
"This work emerges as a poetic construction of lived, intuited, and imagined spaces, shaped by listening, memory, documentation, archiving, and invention. It is a journey through the layers of listening, the ways of recording, and the attempt to create a listening situation based on sonic fragments gathered from real places, recordings of improvisations, and (re)visits to a repertoire of recordings found in my personal archives...From the raw recordings, hybrid landscapes emerge, where the lived and the imagined intertwine."
Heather Bentley - Chthonica
"Scored for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, PIXIE is an homage to Pamela Colman Smith (Pixie was her nickname), illustrator of the Ryder/Waite/Smith tarot deck. Completed in 1911, this deck is the most sold tarot deck in the US and is widely considered the benchmark for esoteric tarot art. For Nellie (2023) is a twenty minute piece in four movements for piano and string quartet, inspired by the setting of its premiere in August 2023: the Sarah P. Duke Gardens on the campus of Duke University.This garden was the work of Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869-1950) who was a pioneer in American landscape design."
Tanika Charles - Reasons to Stay (Canada)
Terrific neo-soul singer from Toronto, classic yet contemporary. (See also: Lady Wray) "By coming to terms with past trials and ensuing tribulations, Ms. Charles delivers a modern Soul classic. Playing like a series of intimate letters to members of her family, to herself and to the listener, Reasons To Stay is an examination of the skeletons dangling in the family closet, and the damaged relationships at the root of a woman’s journey to acceptance and self love."
Maria Gajraj - Exhale (Canada)
"...explores the intersection of minimalism and experimentalism within the realm of organ music. The album pushes the boundaries of traditional organ music, with transcriptions of minimalist piano works by women and non-binary composers; a commissioned piece, written in 2024 for the performer; as well as recorded improvisations by the performer on the medieval organetto, with electronics...The music in this project was inspired by nature, especially water, wind, and skies; and the organ is the ideal instrument to give homage to nature, with its pipes harnessing the very essence of wind, allowing the performer to create music that echoes the fluidity and breath of the natural world."
ganavya - Nilam
"NYC-born, Tamil Nadu-raised, ganavya moves as a sonic shapeshifter. A vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and unabashed wanderer, she wields a voice that's equal parts lullaby and lightning bolt, drawing from a deep well of spiritual blueprints passed through generations... ganavya's vocals, deeply personal and resonant, convey both stillness and movement, offering a quiet, tender expression of gratitude and connection."
Peter Garland - Plain Songs: Love Comes Quietly (after Robert Creeley)
"I wanted to write an organ piece that would be intimate and mostly quiet, emphasizing the nature of the organ as a wind instrument capable of long, sustaining tones. I wanted the musical textures to be open and transparent. I also had in mind smaller, historic organs and their music. It must also be mentioned that while I composed the music, Carson Cooman really created the sound of this piece, because I left almost all timbral and textural decisions up to him. Hence the composer-performer relationship was very collaborative."
Joy Guidry - Five Prayers
"This project came at a very tumultuous time in my life. While navigating one of the most challenging mental health episodes in my adult years, I began to pray in new ways. These prayers came in the form of sonic meditations and poetry, and they embraced more silence and solitude...I paired my bassoon with low grounding synths, warm electronic textures, Elizabeth Steiner’s grounding harp playing, and Diego Gaeta’s transportive synth playing that reflect my lived experience trying to navigate and thrive in this world fully and harmoniously while living with Bipolar Disorder type II...While working on this project, I was able to rediscover my voice again and relearn the roots of my artistry."
Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause - The Quiet Sun
"Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies and composer and bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause make music rooted in observation. Timbres across percussion and string instruments gradually meld into one; pitches gently float into consonance after bristling in dissonance."
Hyldýpi (Herbert Már Sigmundsson) - Heilun (Iceland)
"... a set of seven pieces that flow across 90 blissful minutes. Formed only with guitar and a modest selection of hardware, each movement is an improvisation born from a state of meditation."
JARR - Evangeline (UK)
"...built around slow and contemplative reverbed guitar loops, walls of ambient textures, delayed guitar melodies, minimal post-rock ambience and washes of distorted shoegazing drones."
Kid Smpl - Finding the Sky
"...examines themes of awe, wonder, exploration, and journey, and showcases Kid Smpl’s latest evolution in his atmospheric, drifting, hypnotic ambient world, distinguished by his intricate sound design and progressive, panoramic vision."
Kommun - Kalpa (Sweden)
"Kommun, led by Swedish guitarist Finn Loxbo, resides in the tension between the experience of circular time; an elongated now, and the expectations contained within our linear perception of time. The ensemble explores the tension between the individual’s own lines and the collective meaning-making. Every sound is equally important, concrete in itself, as much a building block as a decoration. The ensemble collectively improvises phrases that are formed together as a singular element. They are distributed across the ensemble’s instrumentation: acoustic steel-string guitar, piano, double bass, violin, cello and percussion. The phrases are born together and continue on a cyclic journey, folding into themselves. They are constantly moving but also going nowhere."
Tomo Nakaguchi - Out of the Blue (Japan)
"Ranging from serene ambient sounds to aggressive noise, the album takes listeners on an unpredictable sonic journey. With its rapid shifts and layered textures, each track feels like a rollercoaster ride through sound. The intricate layering of sounds creates a sense of floating through a cosmic expanse."
Robin Parmar - Aletheia (Ireland)
"A collection of mysterious post-industrial atmospheric drones & interstellar field recordings. This music was composed from fragments of memory: a piano abandoned underground, a guitar chord heard from the next room, wind through wire fencing on an Irish hilltop. We unforget such moments in order to forge relationships with the world."
Ken Pomeroy - Cruel Joke
I admittedly don't spend much time seeking out new Country music, but I'm always glad when something great slips through all the filters and finds me. This 22-year-old Cherokee singer-songwriter from Oklahoma has a gift for poetic storytelling and a voice that'll break you into pieces. The instrumentation is mostly minimal and atmospheric: acoustic guitar, pedal steel, a bit of cello, a snare played with brushes. When the rough edges do emerge, she has echoes of Jesse Sykes. A beautiful record. Expect to hear more from her.
somesurprises - Year Without Spring
This EP by these dreamy Seattle shoegazers follows on the heels of Perseids, their brilliant album from last spring. Can’t wait to hear what comes next.
Matthew Evan Taylor - Life Returns
"Written during the darkest days of the pandemic shutdown, Life Returns is Matthew Evan Taylor's ode to resilience and wonder... an aural meeting place for Jazz, Carnatic, and European Classical musicians, embracing principles from each to achieve an unforgettable performance. Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya [see above] and the rest of the RAJAS collective join Metropolis Ensemble to form an alchemical bond with composer and winds specialist Matthew Evan Taylor."
Yoga Nugraha Usmad - Gurnida (Indonesia/Germany)
"...an aqueous and archipelagic collection filled with ruminative pathos, ancient mythology, and carefully applied grit. Usmad began the creative process that yielded Gurnida at the once-sacred Boyong River in Yogyakarta, Java. 'A river that once carried myths, prayers, and daily rituals,' now a centre for aggressive and destructive sand-mining...Through looping bamboo flutes, reflective harmonics, undulating drones, and nocturne synthesis, the music of Gurnida speaks not only of physical loss but also of the fading spiritual and ecological bonds between humans and nature."
Melia Watras - The almond tree duos
"The almond tree duos is a work comprised of 18 pieces for violin and viola, with the title referencing the symbol of hope and new beginnings in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. Joined by violinists Tekla Cunningham, Rachel Lee Priday and Michael Jinsoo Lim, Watras displays her talents as a violist and as a composer with a finely-tuned ear for string-writing."