Podcast Episodes 731 & 732 are now live
Fix your hearts or die.
Episode 731 features new music from Bob Mould, Tim Hecker, Miki Berenyi Trio, Mess Esque, Mark McGuire, Whatever The Weather, Pavel Milyakov & Lucas Dupuy, Karen y los Remedios, Peter Rehberg, Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers, Modus Pitch, Jules Reidy, serpentwithfeet,and Laibach.
Episode 732 has General Magic, Throwing Muses, Midori Hirano & Brueder Selke, Eiko Ishibashi, Violeta Parra, Dub Syndicate, They., Spinnen, Lawrence English, Myriad Myriads, Lambrini Girls, Jandek, Rose City Band, and David Lynch & Alan Splet.
Cherry pie at Twede's Cafe photo by Jon.
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This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.
This delightful end-of-year surprise is the culmination of a decade-long project in which Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin devoted themselves to building (and learning to play) their own homemade electronic instruments. In keeping with the homespun/primitive electronics nature of the project, the duo largely avoided using the internet as a resource and instead consulted books and other instrument builders for guidance and inspiration (though some exceptions were admittedly made). That purist approach extends to the recordings as well, as the duo constrained themselves to only Kinsella's voice and their self-built instruments for every song except for one very catchy exception ("For Real," which features some synth from guest Chris Livengood). Unsurprisingly, the end result of that approach is a bit of a significant stylistic detour for the band, blurring together the wonky, eclectic charm of Silver Apples with an impressionist strain of siren song psychedelia.
A bit less than a year since his last album, This is Broken, Matt Weston presents a double album in his idiosyncratic style that draws from a seemingly infinite number of styles and genres. He still solidifies it into a coherent whole, however. Communism has Appeared on the Scene draws heavily from geographic spaces and their effects on sound, most apparent through his greater implementation of field recording elements. With that said, it is another excellent, hyper-kinetic outburst of sounds that are at times confusing and disorienting but always make sense in the end.
For over three decades, the Red Hot Organization has been raising money and awareness for AIDS and public health, launching with Red Hot + Blue: a tribute to Cole Porter through fashion, art, and a compilation album of 20 acts. Since then, the organization has continued to issue numerous collections with albums dedicated to dance music, country music, "alt-rock," hip-hop/rap, electronic, jazz, Latin, and Brazilian, with tributes to Gershwin, Bach, Fela Kuti, Duke Ellington, and Arthur Russell. Over the last year the library grew to include four releases of music in tribute to Sun Ra. TRAИƧA, the latest, is a sweeping, kaleidoscopic celebration of trans identity and creativity. It is a six-LP boxed set with 46 tracks across a wide array of genres. The album champions trans rights while showcasing a staggering range of artistic collaboration. Featuring artists like Alan Sparhawk (Low), ANOHNI, Mary Lattimore, and Niecy Blues, the project highlights the profound contributions of independent label talent alongside some mainstream heavy hitters such as Sade, Jeff Tweedy, Andre 3000, and Sam Smith, while delivering a heartfelt statement of inclusion and community.
Cate Brooks’ Prismatics exists like a perfect anomaly: a portal to the golden age of kosmische music, crafted with such precision it begs disbelief that it emerged in 2024. The album pulses with Berlin School psychedelia, yet feels utterly alive, tethered neither to strict homage nor modern artifice. When my husband asked, “What year did this come out?” I couldn’t blame him for his suspicion—Brooks nails not just the mood but the tactile essence of the era. Analog synths hum and ripple like forgotten transmissions from the ‘70s, while sequencers unfurl intricate patterns that seem to loop endlessly into space.
One thing that I particularly love about Christian Fennesz is that he only seems to surface with a new solo album when he has undergone some sort of significant creative breakthrough and has a fresh new vision to share. In recent years, those masterworks have settled into a reliable rhythm of roughly one every five years and Mosaic is the latest installment in that incredible run. Notably, Fennesz did not have clear vision when he began work on these pieces, but instead devoted himself to assembling the album piece by piece every single day until "the full picture" was revealed and the vision felt complete. Interestingly, the album is described as an echo of Venice in which the passing time has made "the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme," but it feels more like a descendant of Endless Summer to me. In this instance, however, the shimmering, sun-dappled beauty of the beach feels like a bleary and elusive memory of a past summer fitfully darkened by glimpses of a weightier melancholy. That said, the beach vibes prove to be impressively tenacious, so Mosaic feels more like the bittersweet final days of a summer on the seaside than it does a rueful reflection on happier past days.
I never know quite what to expect when a new release from the Mouse on Mars camp surfaces, but their unwavering commitment to both derangement and bold artistic choices has certainly kept me curious enough to remain a fan despite the occasional frustrating or disappointing misfire along the way. This one (very much not a misfire) is both an archival release and an unofficial score to Werner Herzog’s unconventional 1971 mirage documentary Fata Morgana. The film itself has a notoriously rocky history, as Herzog and his crew were imprisoned and beaten in Cameroon in the wake of a coup (and Herzog himself almost died) and the finished film was apparently greeted with hostility "almost everywhere." Fortunately, It eventually gained a following who appreciated its more psychedelic elements and Mouse on Mars chose to perform a live score in real-time for it at a 2007 Italian film festival. Fittingly, it turned out that the film festival had not actually been able to clear the rights, so this endearingly wild vision has been tragically languishing in the vaults until now. While I am not normally a fan of soundtracks and scores decontextualized from their visual accompaniment, Herzog Sessions is a rare exception and easily features some of Mouse on Mars’ most fun and exciting work.
A Rift in the Horizon’s Wall features Paris based composer and current INA-GRM director François Bonnet (as Kassel Jaeger) creating a single work (split across two sides of vinyl) within in a very specific, contextual framework. Recorded at Epsilon Spires, a former Baptist church turned cultural space/venue in Brattleboro, Vermont, and using the church’s 1903 pipe organ as the foundational instrument, Bonnet adds other instrumentation in addition to utilizing the natural acoustics of the space in which it was recorded. The final product is a sweeping, heavily varied piece that conveys the history from which it was created, and also Bonnet’s compositional touch in a colossal, expansive work.
Not far-removed time wise from his double bill of Don’t Ever Let Me Know and Images from last year, Colin Andrew Sheffield has created a succinct, 20-ish minute work in 2024 (in addition to a collaborative tape with Andrew Anderson). It shares qualities with his two 2023 records but is clearly a stand-alone project. Constructed from a similar approach to those previous works—namely utilizing commercially available soundtrack recordings—Moments Lost, itself a soundtrack to a short film by Sheffield of recycled footage, taps into that same sense of familiar and mystery, with passages of what may or may not be cinematic drama peeking through.
This album has been a long time coming, as Blackshaw has mostly been on an extended hiatus from performing and recording since 2016, as the eternal instability and financial stresses of life as a musician nudged him towards a life in the food scene instead. Eventually, however, his creative urges began stirring once more and he announced his return to music in 2019, but his plans took some serious hits from the pandemic, the deaths of a close friend and a beloved dog, and a broken shoulder along the way. Thankfully, he persevered regardless and Unraveling In Your Hands marks the first new James Blackshaw album since 2015’s Summoning Suns and it is a damn good one too. In fact, Blackshaw almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all, as these three pieces are as compositionally ambitious, virtuosic, and deliciously compelling as ever. While the centerpiece here is ostensibly the nearly 27-minute tour de force of the title piece, it is actually a shorter collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson that steals the show for me. 
