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March is Womens History Month
Episode 781 is the first episode of Womens History Month for 2026 and features all music by women.
New music from Carla dal Forno, Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou, Loraine James, Dumama, Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske, Magi Merlin, Annie Hogan, Honey Dijon, Colleen, and Wet Leg, plus music from the vaults by Anne Clark and Nina Nastasia.
Sunset on the Hudson photo by Maggie.
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This “ambient transsexual” homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (“his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background”) was inspired by the eleven months spent in Iowa after “avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains.” Unsurprisingly, that move was a bit of a culture shock, as OHYUNG traded raves and Brooklyn nightlife for “prairie sunsets, transgender care bans, all-ages hardcore shows, screaming hog farms, corn reaching for the heavens, tornado sirens, big beautiful skies, the world’s largest truckstop, and a brutal winter,” but she also notes that Iowa gave us Arthur Russell, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Transcendental Meditation as well. Fittingly, the album mirrors that unique mixture of beauty and menace and shares Springsteen’s own pared-to-the-bone starkness, which is quite an unexpected and haunting reinvention in the wake of 2025’s stellar pop-minded opus You Are Always On My Mind yet remains every bit as compelling (if not more so).
Self-Released
In a roundabout way, it seems like OHYUNG could not have made Iowa without making a “pop” album first, as it got her thinking about what remains “when she removes the scaffolding” and “grinds up the bones of the song.” Notably, she did not treat that as a purely rhetorical question and concluded that the answer was “ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, and late-night gloom.” To my ears, it seems like OHYUNG used that as the starting point of Iowa, then built upwards from there using a palette of “mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads.”
The premise of this quixotic tour de force admittedly sounds like a joke that went waaay too far, which certainly explains why Bill Orcutt agreed to release it on Palilalia before ever hearing a single note, as his own A Mechanical Joey occupies similarly improbable and seemingly deranged terrain. As Philip Sherburne sagely observes in his album notes, "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all." In reality, however, Autechre Guitar is the end result of a multi-decade labor of love for Parish, as he has made a career out of challenging and unexpected covers and his wife is quite a big fan of Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s singularly inscrutable, obtuse, and time-bending techno mutations. Consequently, making an album like this one has probably always been Parish’s inexorable destiny.
Palilalia
Before the album was released, I was predictably quite curious about how the hell Parish was going to pull off such a feat, yet I was also mystified about why he would even want to attempt such a thing in the first place (aside from the sheer challenge of it). Notably, Parish has covered electronic artists before, but Repertoire’s cover of Aphex Twin's “Avril 14th” notably singled out one of the most nakedly beautiful and melodic pieces in Richard James’ oeuvre and Autechre are definitely not an act that I associate with timeless melodies. Parish would certainly beg to differ, however, as Autechre’s melodies are the heart of this album (though few will be surprised that he chose to focus primarily on their comparatively accessible early ’90s work like Incunabula, Amber, and Tri-Repetae).
This latest transmission from the Opalio brothers is the result of a major creative breakthrough of sorts, as they recently had the epiphany that their signature “spontaneous composition” process could also work in reverse as well. Always metaphysically minded, the Opalios realized that infinity itself was passing through their compositions, as the revelation that they could now play with time in either direction was both creatively liberating and also kind of heavy in a Zen/cosmic sense (“a flux with no beginning and no end, apparently always the same yet always different, that flows in an eternal becoming”). In less mind-expanding terms, that means that this album’s two longform pieces were created by subtracting layers from a spontaneous composition that had already reached “the apogee of the real-time creation.” The effect of that temporal sorcery is impressively dramatic, however, as IN∞FI∞NI∞TO captures MCIAA at their most hypnotically minimal and hallucinatory peak.
The heart of this album is essentially just two deceptively simple motifs: a murmuring backwards pulse and and a sliding and fluttering tone that leaves smeared and pulsing after-images in its wake. The combined effect is quite an evocative one, however, as it feels like I am sitting on a desolate alien beach watching a swirl of psychotropic seagulls swooping and diving as waves rhythmically roll in from the sea.
I had admittedly become a bit numb to this prolific Kenyan producer’s steady stream of ambient releases in the years since he first burst onto the scene with 2020’s Peel, but this second Editions Mego album is one hell of a stunner. Fittingly, Kin first began to take shape in 2021 when KMRU discussed his vision for Peel’s sequel with label head Peter Rehberg, but that particular vision was unsurprisingly put on ice with Rehberg’s untimely passing. After about a year, however, KMRU gradually returned to that material and a rather different and noisier vision began to take shape instead. Partially inspired by distorted guitar sounds of KMRU’s youth, the viscerally snarling and smoldering Kin sounds like one of his stronger ambient albums was doused with gas and set ablaze. Fittingly, that vision is reminiscent of some of the best bits of Pita’s Get Out and Rehberg’s former bandmate Christian Fennesz turns up to the party as well, which makes Kin feel like both KMRU’s finest album to date and an improbable late-period return to Editions Mego’s golden age.
The opening “With Trees Where We Can See” provides a fairly representative (if condensed) introduction to Kin’s pleasures, as a thick and viscous-sounding synth motif languorously loops while a crackling and sizzling veil of distortion steadily intensifies. While that is hardly groundbreaking territory in the “power ambient” realm, KMRU’s approach is a bit more layered and mysterious than most, as a whistling and howling melody gradually starts to emerge from the sea of noise. While that particular piece clocks in at a mere three minutes in length, the overall trend throughout the album is that the longer pieces tend to undergo the most magical and sublime transformations (though the 20-minute closer “By Absence” is a more improvisatory and bird song-enhanced exception to that rule).
This latest album from Christian Schoppik feels like a bit of a curious outlier or comparatively modest release in the wake of last year’s stellar Unterhaltungen Mit Larven Und Überresten, but it is a characteristically fascinating one nonetheless. Schoppik’s collaborator this time around is Matthias Kremsreiter, who debuts his new Roudi Vagou alias but normally records as alibikonkret. While the two artists certainly share a fondness for dark psychedelia and haunted atmospheres, Taghelle Nacht (Daylight Night) feels like a completely new vision that suggests a Bavarian twist on Grey Gardens experienced from the perspective of a ghost and DJed by The Caretaker’s haunted Victrola: a slow-motion drift through the moldering, dust-covered ruins of a once-opulent seaside mansion in which vivid memories of the past continually bleed into the present in subtly unsettling and hallucinatory fashion.
As befits an album with such a mysterious and elusive vision, Taghelle Nacht is divided into two halves (like a split release) with Roudi Vagou credited with the first eight pieces and Läuten der Seele with the rest, but the differences between the two artists are so blurry that they are largely irrelevant. The reason for that is two-fold, as the album feels like a series of impressionistic vignettes shaped from the same small palette of samples and instruments and the more melodic bits tend to flicker and vanish like phantoms (“snatches of song drift by like dreamlike fragments, and achingly tender flourishes fleetingly appear and retreat”).
This mesmerizing opus from NYC-based composer Irisarri first began its life with a chance meeting at MUTEK in Mexico City, as a conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp regarding how technology shapes perception led to an invitation to a collaborative residency at Uncloud (located in a former psychiatric prison in Utrecht). Appropriately, that original topic relates closely to the album’s overarching concept, as Points of Inaccessibility reflects the pervasive isolation and alienation that has resulted from living illusory digital lives (“we inhabit spaces saturated with signals, yet the possibility of genuine contact becomes increasingly remote”). Schilp’s visual research also played a significant role in the album’s shape, as Irisarri’s sounds were processed through “custom point-cloud software patch that produced images in continuous flux” in which “visuals flickered, dissolved and reformed like memories that resist coherence, functioning as a digital Rorschach that reflected the observer’s own perception.” The music achieves a very similar end, as warm and beautiful forms endlessly blossom and dissolve in a roiling ocean of static.
Notably, Schilp’s own process required “a continuous stream of sound in real time,” so Irisarri’s initial recordings at Uncloud were mostly of bowed guitar drones processed through various pedals and looping systems. Admittedly, that approach sounds like business-as-usual for Irisarri, but the album continued to evolve further once he returned to his home studio, as he fleshed out the original recordings with synth, Moog bass, and strings while remaining as faithful as possible to the original performances.
Infrasound, or frequencies of sound that exist beyond the range of human hearing, are omnipresent but cannot be heard, nor recorded using traditional equipment. Captured over a period of 24 hours in Amherst, Massachusetts (coincidentally, a town adjacent to mine, and that I drive through multiple times per week), Brian House captured infrasound via custom built macrophones, speeding the recordings up 60 times to render them into the range of human hearing. The outcome is an expansive, at times terrifying, pair of compositions that are as sonically enjoyable as they are scientifically fascinating.
With the sides split between day and night, the differences are audible dependent on the time of recording. The day side (6AM through 6PM) leads in with silence that is soon blended with distant, heavy rumbling and other low frequency, submerged like sounds. Slow passages of sound whiff over like clouds, offsetting unconventional echoing sounds. Through the 24 minutes of the piece, House captures higher frequency tones, indistinct rattling, and guttural textures. The overall structure is a consistent one, however, even with all of these disparate layers mixed with a strong compositional structure.
This genre-blurring Dutch quartet describes their sound as a “joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs,” but the way those influences are juggled and balanced has been in a continual state of flux since the band’s earliest singles. That stylistic volatility seems to be by design, however, as co-founder/drummer Kees Berkers notes that the band’s name differs from Yin Yang in that it alludes to “two negative forces that cannot reach a common ground” and that the band’s mission is about “finding a balance in the unbalanced.” Unsurprisingly, that approach has resulted in a bit of hit-or-miss discography over the years, but Yīn Yīn can be a hell of a great band when all of their colliding influences come together just right. In this case, the band’s unbalanced balance most often sounds like an excellent surf guitarist backed by a solid disco rhythm section and it characteristically yields yet another handful of fun and eclectic singles.
Amusingly, Berkers notes that a formative event in this project’s history was the discovery of “a couple of compilation albums of psychedelic ‘60s and ‘70s guitar music from Southeast Asia” which led them to “YouTube channels where we couldn't read anything because everything was in Thai letters or in Chinese symbols– and that felt like we found the treasure!” Predictably, I was sucked down a very similar rabbit hole myself many years ago by Soundway’s The Sound of Siam compilation and I am struck by the Ouroboros-like cycle of influences on display here: so much great music came out of Southeast Asia and Africa in the ‘60s and ‘70s because traditional music collided with an influx of Western pop influences and enterprising artists eagerly borrowed and assimilated all of the hip new sounds that they could find.
Ian Wellman chose a distinctive and fitting title for his first vinyl LP, given the context in which it was composed. Recorded during the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in California, which engulfed huge stretches of the state in early 2025. Focused on capturing the Santa Ana winds that spread the fires (I’m trying to not make a Steely Dan reference here) and helped them to last for nearly a month, Particularly Dangerous Situation (named for an unprecedented weather forecast in the area) is simultaneously an audio document as it is a narrative composition, it is a captivating, but harrowing work to say the least.
The basic structure of the album features Wellman alternating between treated tapes and beautiful tones, and roaring recordings of wind, segued together into what feels more like two side-long compositions. Fittingly, the opening "Intro" captures a blast of winds resembling pure white noise, with an occasional crackling sound that hints at the destruction in the distance. The roar fades into "Particularly Dangerous Situation" as a somber, sustained tone that heralds the bleakness of the event. The melancholy sound is blended with the blast of winds, with the musical passages eventually disrupted by a heavy amount of distortion.
I first encountered Los Angeles-based composer Daniel Lea through L A N D’s excellent Anoxia album back in 2015, but he has become considerably more prolific in recent years after launching his own Vast Habitat imprint. This first collaboration with London-based violinist/cellist Jamie Michael McCarthy has apparently been a decade in the making and borrows both its title and some of its ingenious inspiration from an eye test chart that McCarthy found on the street. On its face, the resultant album has the shapeshifting moods and immersive spell of an art-damaged science fiction score, but immersive headphone listening reveals a considerably deeper and more compelling vision lurking within. Part of that is due to Lea’s considerable sound design talents and inventive assimilation of influences ranging from austere dub techno to avant-garde piano composers and contemporary electronic heavy hitters like Ben Frost and Tim Hecker, but the unusual structural dynamics of these pieces are quite unique and mirror the shifting depth of field that one might get from experimenting with different lenses.
The opening “H L A O T“ provides an especially illustrative introduction to the duo’s slowly blossoming vision, as it deceptively opens with deep dark ambient exhalations before some smearing and curdled higher frequencies unexpectedly give way to a series of lingering, murkily dissonant piano arpeggios. From there, the piece gradually develops into a sort of slow-motion and noirish strain of piano jazz ravaged by snarling and roiling eruptions of Hecker-esque distortion. That unsurprisingly proves to be quite an effective combination, but the piece’s best moments do not happen until after the structure completely collapses and distends to leave behind only heaving seismic rumbles, scrabbling string noise, crackling distortion, and deep and rolling bass throbs.
The Weightless Sea is the fourth album from the duo of multiinstrumentalists Eric Hardiman (Rambutan, Sky Furrows, Century Plants) and Michael Kiefer (More Klementines). They continue their journey through the vastness of space (or in this case the depth of the ocean) with their guitar/bass/electronics/drum approach, , coupling solid rhythmic elements with more improvised sounding guitar and electronics makes for an amazingly fascinating record.
Twin Lakes/Feeding Tube/Cardinal Fuzz
Opener "Materialized" sets the stage perfectly with Kiefer’s metronomic, steady drumming and Hardiman taking double duty with an anchoring bass line that occasionally comes to the forefront and layers of fuzzy, overdriven guitar. The drumming is switched up throughout and while the song has a steady flow to it, never becoming too repetitive. The other shorter (meaning less than five minutes) song on here, "Sleepwalker," is the perfect counterpart. A relatively basic melody, albeit a memorable one, drives the song into what hints at the best of 1970s rock music without ever sounding too similar or trite.
